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7
IV On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense1
1 Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that
universe
which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems,
there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That
was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of"world history," but
nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few
breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had
to die. 1 -One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would
not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and
transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks
within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist.
And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have
happened. For this intellect has ne__ :dditional mission which
ould lead it be ond an life. Rather, it iSliuf~rn!!,aiid only
its pos-sessor an getter takes it so so emn y-as though the world's
axis turned within it. But if we could communicate with the gnat,
we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same
solemnity,3 that he feels the flying center of the universe within
himself. There is nothing so reprehensible and unimportant in
nature that it would not im-mediately swell up like a balloon at
the slightest puff of this power of knowing. And just as every
porter wants to have an admirer, so even the proudest of men, the
philosopher, supposes that he sees on all sides the eyes of the
universe telescopically focused upon his action and thought.
It is remarkable that this was brought about by the.intellect,
which was certainly allotted to these most unfortunate, delicate,
and ephemeral beings merely as a device for detainin~ them a minute
within existence.
A more literal, though less English, translation of Ubn-
Wahrhtit und Lii.ge im aussermoralischen Sinne might be "On Truth
and Lie in the Extramoral Sense." For a discussion of the relation
between the relatively polished and finished sections of this essay
and other material translated in this volume, see the
"Intro-duction" and "Note on the Texts."
2Cf. the very similar passage in the antepenultimate paragraph
of PW. 3Pathos.
79
In Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth: Selections from
Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870s (Humanity Books, 1993
[1873])
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8
So Philosophy and Truth
For without this addition they would have every reason to flee
this exis-tence as quickly as Lessing's son.4 The pride connected
with knowing and sensing lies like a blinding fog over the eyes and
senses of men, thus deceiving them concerning the value of
existence. For this pride contains within itself the most
flattering estimation of the value of knowing. De-ception is the
most general effect of such pride, but even its most particu-lar
effects contain within themselves something of the same deceitful
character.
v As a me(lps for the preserving of the individual, the
intellect unfolds ~ its princi\J!8powers in dissimulation, which is
the means by which
weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves-since they
have been denied the chance to wage the battle for existence with
horns or with the sharp teeth of beasts of prey. This art of
dissimulation reaches its peak in man. Deception, flattering,
lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front,
living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind
convention, p,laying a role for others and for oneself-in short, a
continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity-is so
much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing
which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for
truth could have arisen among them. They are deeply immersed in
illusions and in dream images; their eyes merely glide over the
surface of things and see "forms." Their senses nowhere lead to
truth; on the contrary, they are content to receive stimuli and, as
it were, to engage in a groping game on the backs of things.
Moreover, man permits himself to be deceived in his dreams every
night of his life. 5 His moral sentiment does not even make an
attempt to prevent this, whereas there are sup-posed to be men who
have stopped snoring through sheer will power. What does man
actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive
himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case? Does
nature not conceal most things from him--even concerning his own
body-in order to confine and lock him within a proud, dece_ptive
con-sQ_ousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow
of the blOOd stream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers! She
threw away the key. And woe to that fatal curiosity which might one
day have the power to peer out and down through a crack in the
chamber of consciousness and then suspect that man is sustained in
the indifference of his ignorance by that which is pitiless,
greedy, insatiable, and murderous-as if hanging in dreams on the
back of a tiger.6 Given this situation, where in the world could
the drive for truth have come from?
4 A reference to the offspring of Lessing and Eva Konig, who
died on the day of his birth.
~cr. P, 10. 8 Cf. the very similar passage in the penultimale
paragraph of PW.
ON TRUTH AND LIES IN A NONMORAL SENSE
Insofar as the individual wants to maintain himself against
other indi-viduals, he will under natural circumstances employ the
intellect mainly for ___ ~i_ssimulation. But at the same time, from
boredom and necessity~ man wishes to exist socially and with the
herd; therefore, he needs to make peace and strives accordingly to
banish from his world at least the most flagrant bellum omni contra
omnes. 7 This peace treaty brings in its wake something which
appears to be the first step toward acquiring that puzzling truth
drive: to wit, that which shall count as "truth" from Offill ~s
established. That is to ~;:;Tto-;mly valid andbinding designa-tion
is invented for things, and this l~slation of langufl_ge likewise
estab-lishes the first laws of truth. For the contrast between
truth and lie arises here for the first time. The liar is a person
who uses the valid designa-tions, the words, in order to make
something which is unreal appear to be real. He says, for example,
"I am rich," when the proper designation for his condition would be
"poor." He misuses fixed conventions by means of arbitrary
substitutions or even reversals of names. If he does this in a
selfish and moreover harmful manner, society will cease to trust
him and will thereby exclude him. What men avoid by excluding the
liar is not so much being defrauded as it is being harmed by means
of fraud. Thus, even at this stage, what they Hate IS bastcaffYnot
deception itself, but rather the unpleasant, hated consequences of
certain sorts of decep-tion. It is in a similarly restricted sense
that man now wants nothing but truth: he desires the pleasant,
life-preserving consequences of truth.J:k. is indifferent toward
..pure knowledge which has no consequences; to-ward those truths
which are possibly harmful and destructive he is even hostilely
inclined. And besides, what about these linguistic conventions
themselves? Are they perhaps products of knowledge, that is, of the
sense of truth? Are designations congruent with things? Is language
the ?dequate expression of all realities? -
It is only by means of forgetfuln~ss that man can ever reach the
point of fancying himself to possess a "truth" of the grade just
indicated. If he will not be satisfied with truth in the form of
tautology, 8 that is to say, if he will not be content with empty
husks, then he will always exchange truths for illusions. What is a
word? It is the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus. But the further
inference from the nerve stimulus to a cause outside of us is
already the result of a false and unjustifiable application of the
principle of sufficient reason.9 If truth alone had been the
decid-ing factor in the genesis of language, and if the standpoint
of certainty
7"War of each against all."
8See P, 150. 9 Note that Nietzsche is here engaged in an
implicit critique of Schopenhauer,
who had been guilty of precisely this misapplication of the
principle of sufficient reason in his first book, The Fourfold Root
of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. It is
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9
Philosophy and Truth
had been decisive for designations, then how could we still dare
to say "the stone is hard," as if "hard" were something otherwise
familiar to us, and not merely a totally subjective stimulation! We
separate things ac-cording to gender, designating the tree as
masculine and the plant as feminine. What arbitrary assignmentsl 10
How far this oversteps the ca-nons of certainty! We speak of a
"snake": this designation touches only upon its ability to twist
itself and could therefore also fit a worm.'' What arbitrary
differentiations! What one-sided preferences, first for this, then
for that property of a thing! The various languages placed side by
side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a
question of adequate ex ressio_!l_L_9~wise, there would not be so
many lan-guages.12 Th "thin in it~which is precise~y w~at the pu~e
tru~h, apart from any o 1ts consequences, would be) is hkew1se
somethmg qmte incomprehensible to the creator of language and
something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only
designates the re~_tj()ns _of __ things to men, and for expressing
these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors. 13 To begin
with, a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: 14 first
metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second
metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one
sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one.
One can imagine a man who is totally deaf and has never had a
sensation of sound and music. Perhaps such a person will gaze with
astonishment at Chladni's sound figures; 15 perhaps he will
discover their causes in the vibrations of the string and will now
swear that he must know what men mean by "sound." It is this way
with all of us concerning language: we
quite wrong to think that Nietzsche was ever wholly uncritical
of Schopenhauer's philosophy (see, for example, the little essay,
Kritik der Schopenhauerischen Philosophie from 1867, in MA, I, pp.
392-401).
10welche willkiirlichen Obertragungen. The specific sense of
this passage depends upon the fact that all ordinary nouns in the
German language are assigned a gender: the tree is der Baum; the
plant is die Pjlanze. This assignment of an original sexual
property to all things is the "transference" in question. On the
translation of the key term Obertragung, see the "Introduction" and
P, n. 83.
''This passage depends upon the etymological relation between
the German words Schlange (snake) and schlingen (to wind or twist),
both of which are related to the old High German slango.
12 What Nietzsche is rejecting here is the theory that there is
a sort of"naturally appropriate" connection between certain words
(or sounds) and things. Such a theory is defended by Socrates in
Plato's Cratylus. ..
130n the significance of "metaphor" (which is closely related to
Ubertragung) for Nietzsche's theories of language and knowledge,
see the "Introduction."
14Ein Nervenreiz, zuerst iibertragen in ein Bild. The "image" in
this case is the visual image, what we "see." Regarding the term
Bild, seeP, n. 2.
"SeeP, n. 55.
l I
I l t t ';
ON TRUTH AND LIES IN A NONMORAL SENSE
believe that we know something about the things themselves when
we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess
nothing but metaphors for things-metaphors which correspond in no
way to the original entities. 16 In the same way that the sound
appears as a sand figure, so the mysterious X of the thing in
itself first appears as a nerve stimulus, then as an image, and
finally as a sound. Thus the genesis of language does not proceed
logically in any case, and all the material within and with which
the man of truth, the scientist, and the philosopher later work and
build, if not derived from never-never land,17 is at least not
derived from the essence of things.
In particular, let us further consider the formation of
concepts. Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar
as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and
entirely individual original experience to which it owes its
origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it
simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar
cases-which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal
and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the
equa-tion of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is
never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the
concept "leaf' is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual
differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This
awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exists in
nature the "leaf': the original model according to which all the
leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and
painted-but by incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned
out to be a correct, trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the
original model. We call a person "honest," and then we ask "why has
he behaved so honestly today?" Our usual answer is, "on account of
his honesty." Honesty! This in turn means that the leaf is the
cause of the leaves. We know nothing whatsoever about an essential
quality called "honesty"; but we do know of countless
individualized and consequently unequal actions which we equate by
omitting the aspects in which they are unequal and which we now
designate as "honest" actions. Finally we formulate from them a
qunlitas occulta 18 which has the name "honesty." We obtain the
concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is indi-vidual and
actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts,
and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains
inaccessible and undefinable for us. For even our contrast between
indi-vidual and species is something anthropomorphic and does not
originate in the essence of things; although we should not presume
to claim that this contrast does not correspond to the essence of
things: that would of
16W esenheiten. 11Wolkenkukuksheim: literally,
"cloud-cuckoo-land." 18
"0ccult quality."
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10
Philosophy and Truth
course be a dogmatic assertion and, as such, would be just as
indemon-strable as its opposite. 19
What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and
anthropomoiE_hisms: in short, a sum of human relations which
have
.,.been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred,
and embe~lished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to
be fixed, canom-cal, and binding. Truths are illusions which we
have forgotten are illu-sions; they are metaphors that have become
worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have
lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer
as coins.
We still do not yet know where the drive for truth comes from.
For so far we have heard only of the duty which society imposes in
order to exist: to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors.
Thus, to express it morally, this is the duty to lie according to a
fixed convention, to lie with the herd and in a manner binding upon
everyone. Now man of course forgets that this is the way things
stand for him. Thus he lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously
and in accordance with habits which are centuries' old; and
precisely by means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness he
arrives at his sense of truth. From the sense that one is obliged
to designate one thing as "red," another as "cold," and a thi~~ as
"mute," there arises a moral impulse in regard to truth. The
venerability, reliability, and l!!i!ity of truth is something which
a person demonstrates for himself from the contrast with the liar,
whom no one trusts and everyone excludes. As a "rational" being, he
now places his behavior under the control of abstractions. He will
no longer tolerate being car-ried away by sudden impressions, by
intuitions. First he universalizes all these impressions into less
colorful, cooler concepts, so that ~e can ~ntrust the guidance of
his life and conduct to them. E~eryt~~ng which distinguishes man
from the animals depends upon th_s ab1hty t? vol-atilize perceptual
metaphors20 in a schema, and thus to d1ssolve an Image into a
concept. For something is possible in the realm of t~ese schemata
which could never be achieved with the vivid first impressiOns: the
con-struction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees,
the crea-tion of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations,
and clearly marked boundaries-a new world, one which now confronts
that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more
universal, better known, and more human than the immediately
perceived world, and thus as the regulative and im rat" wQrld.
Whereas each perceptual metaphor 1s m IVI ual and without equals
and is therefore able to elude
'9 Nietzsche criticizes Kant on just this score in P, 84.
20die anschaulichen Metaphem. Regarding the translation of
Anschauung, seeP, n. 82. The adjective anschaulich has the
additional sense of "vivid"-as in the next sentence ("vivid first
impressions").
'
t 1
t
l
t
I .
1 f
( i
...
f
ON TRUTH AND LIES IN A NONMORAL SENSE
all classification, the great edifice of concepts displays the
rigid regularity of a Roman columbariumzt and exhales in logic that
strength and cool-ness which is characteristic of mathematics.
Anyone who has felt this cool breath (of logic] will hardly believe
that even the concept-which is as bony, foursquare, and
transposable as a die-is nevertheless merely the residue of a
metaphor, and that the illusion which is involved in the artistic
transference of a nerve stimulus into images is, if not the mother,
then the grandmother of every single concept. 22 But in this
conceptual c~ap game "truth" means using every die in the
desig~ated manner, c~unt~ng its spots..-accurately, fashioning the
right categones, and never v10latmg the order of caste and class
rank. Just as the Romans and Etruscans cut up the heavens with
rigid mathematical lines and confined a god within each of the
spaces thereby delimited, as within a templum, 23 so every people
has a similarly mathematically divided conceptual heaven above
themselves and henceforth thinks that truth demands that each
concep-tual god be sought only within his oum sphere. Here one may
~ert~i_nly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who
succeeds m p1hng up an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon
an unstable founda-tion, and, as it were, on running water. Of
course, in order to be sup-ported by such a foundation, his
construction must be like_o_n~ structed of ~iders' webs: delicate
enough to be carried along br the
-;aves, strong enough not to be blown apart by every wind. As a
gem us of construction man raises himself far above the bee in the
following way: whereas the bee builds with wax that he gathers from
nature, man builds with the far more delicate conceptual material
whis.Q_.he first has tQ, mam::.Tactw=efrom himseiL In this he is
greatly to be admired, but not on account of his drive for truth or
for pure knowledge of things. When someone hides something behind a
bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as
well, there is not much t? praise _in such seeking and finding. Yet
this is how matters stand regardmg seek_n_g and finding "truth"
within the realm of reason. If I make up the defimuon of a mammal,
and then, after inspecting a camel, declare "look, a mam-mal," I
have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth
of limited value. That is to say, it is a thoroughly
anthropomorphic truth which contains not a single point which would
be "true in itself' or really and universally valid apart from man.
At bottom, what the investigator of such truths is seeking is only
the metamorphosis of the world into
21 A columbarium is a vault with niches for funeral urns
containing the ashes of cremated bodies.
22 I.e. concepts are derived from images, which are, in turn,
derived from nerve stimuli.
23A delimited space restricted to a particular purpose,
especially a religiously sanctified area.
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11
86 Philosophy and Truth
man. He strives to understand the world as something analogous
to man, and at best he achieves by his struggles the feeling of
assimilation. Simi-lar to the way in which astrologers considered
the stars to be in man's service and connected with his happiness
and sorrow, such an inves-tigator considers the entire universe in
connection with man: 24 the entire universe as the infinitely
fractured echo of one original sound-man; the entire universe as
the infinitely multiplied copy of one original picture-man His
method is to treat man as the measure of all things, but in doing
so he again proceeds from the error of believing that he has these
things [which he intends to measure] immediately bt;fore him as
mere objects. He forgets that the original perceptual metaphors are
metaphors and takes them to be the things thems~
Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live
with any repose, security, and consistency: only by means of the
petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally
streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery
liquid, only in the invincible faith that this sun, this window,
this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that
he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with
any repose, security, and consistency. 25 If but for an instant he
could escape from the prison walls of this faith, his "self
consciousness" would be immediately destroyed. It is even a
difficult thing for him to admit to himself that the insect or the
bird perceives an entirely different world from the one that man
does, and that the ques-tion of which of these perceptions of the
world is the more correct one is quite meaningless. for this would
have to have been decided previously in accordance with the
criterion of the correct perception, which means, in accordance
with a criterion which is not available. But in any case it
seems
__!Q_rJ1_e that_"the C~_!Tect_p~_~c~pt_i?_!_l_"-which would
me2'1 "the adequate expression of an object in the subject"-is a
contradictory impossibility. 26 For between two absolutely
different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no
causality, no correctness, and no expression; there is, at most, an
aesthetic relation: 27 I mean, a suggestive transference, a
stammering translation into a completely foreign tongue-for which
there is required, in any case, a freely inventive intermediate
sphere and mediating force. "Apearance" is a word that contains
many temptations, which is why I avoid it as much as possible. _for
it is not true that the essence of things "appears" in the
empirical world. A painter without na;;-ds who wished to express in
song the picture before his mind would,
cr. P, 105 and 15L '"See P, rL 68. 2';em undrnprurhsvollrs
Urulin~;. See P, n. 95.
21ein ii\lhrtisrhes Verhaltm. A more literaltranslation of
Vnhaltm is "behavior," "auitude," or perhaps "disposition."
I t I
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ON TRUTH AND LIES IN A NoNMORAL SENSE
by means of this substitution of spheres, still reveal more
about the essence of things than does the empirical world. Even the
relationship of a nerve stimulus to the generated image is not a
necessary one. But when the same image has been generated millions
of times and has been handed down for many generations and finally
appears on the same occasion every time for all mankind, then it
acquires at last the same meaning for men it would have if it were
the sole necessary image and if the relationship of the original
nerve stimulus to the generated image were a strictly causal one.
In the same manner, an eternally repeated dream would certainly be
felt and judged to be reality. But the harden-ing and congealing of
a metaphor guarantees absolutely nothing con-cer~ing its necessity
and exclusive justification.
Every person who is familiar with such considerations has no
doubt felt a deep mistrust of all idealism of this sort: just as
often as he has quite clearly convinced himself of the eternal
consistency, omnipresence, and infallibility of the laws of nature.
He has concluded that so far as we can penetrate
here-fro-m-illetdescopic heights to the microscopic
depths-everything is secure, complete, infinite, regular, and
without any gaps. Science will be able to dig successfully in this
shaft forever, and all the things that are discovered will
harmonize with and not contradict each other. How little does this
resemble a product of the imagination, for if it were such, there
should be some place where the illusion and unreality can be
divined. Against this, the following must be said: if each of us
had a different kind of sense perception-if we could only perceive
things now as a bird, now as a worm, now as a plant, or if one of
us saw a stimulus as red, another as blue, while a third even heard
the same stimulus as a sound-then no one would speak of such a
regularity of nature, rather, nature would be grasped only as a
creation which is subjec-tive in the highest degree. After all,
what is a law of nature as such for us? We are not acquainted with
it in itself, but only with its effects, which means in its
relation to other laws of nature-which, in turn, are known to us
only as sums of relations. Therefore all these relations always
refer again to others and are thoroughly incomprehensible to us in
their es-sence. All that we actually know about these laws of
nature is wh~ _ourselves bring to them-time and space, and
therefore relatiOiYS"htps of succession and number. But everything
marvelous about the laws of nature, everything that quite
astonishes us therein and seems to demand our explanation,
everything that might lead us to distrust idealism: all this is
completely and solely contained within the mathematical strictness
and inviolability of our representations of time and space. But we
pro-duce these representations in and from ourselves with the same
necessity with which the spider spins. If we are forced to
comprehend all things only under these forms, then it ceases to be
amazing that in all things we actually comprehend nothing but these
forms. For they must all bear
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12
Philosophy and Truth
within themselves the laws of number, and it is precisely number
which is most astonishing in things. 28 All that conformity to law,
which impresses us so much in the movement of the stars and in
chemical processes, coincides at bottom with those properties which
we bring to things. Thus it is we who impress ourselves in this
way. In conjunction with this, it of course follows that the
artistic process of metaphor formation with which every sensation
begins in us already presupposes these forms and thus occurs within
them. The only way in which the ~sjkility of sub- ']_ sequently
constructing a new conceptual edifi~e from11 ~etaphors them-selves
can be explained is by the firm persistence of these original
forms. That is to say, this conceptual edifice is an imitation of
temporal, spatial, and numerical relationships in the domain of
metaphor. 29
2 We have seen how it is originally language which works on the
con-
struction of concepts, a labor taken over in later ages by
science. 30 Just as the bee simultaneously constructs cells and
fills them with honey, so '!) science works unceasingly on this
great columbarium of conce ts the graveyard of perceptions. It is
always building new, higher stories and shoring up, cleaning, and
renovating the old cells; above all, it takes pains to fill up this
monstrously towering framework and to arrange therein the entire
empirical world, which is to say, the anthropomorphic world.
Whereas the man of action binds his life to reason and its
con-cepts so that he will not be swept away and lost, the
scientific investigator builds his hut right next to the tower of
science so that he will be able to work on it and to find shelter
for himself beneath those bulwarks which presently exist. And he
requires shelter, for there are frightful powers which continuously
break in upon him, powers which oppose ~i
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13
go Philosophy and Truth
m;llTing that master of deception, the intellect, is free;. it
is released from its former slavery and celebrates its Saturnalia.
It is never more luxuriant, richer, prouder, more clever and more
daring. With creative pleasure it throws metaphors into confusion
and displaces the boundary stones of abstractions, so that, for
example, it designates the stream as "the moving path which carries
man where be would otherwise walk." The intellect bas now thrown
the token of bondage from itself. At other times it endeavors, with
gloomy officiousness, to show the way and to demonstrate the tools
to a poor individual who covets existence; it is like a servant who
goes in search of booty and prey for his master. But now it bas
become the master and it dares to wipe from its face the expression
of indigence. In comparison with its previous conduct, everything
that it now does bears the mark of dissimulation,33 just as that
previous conduct did of distortion. 34 The free intellect copies
human life, but it considers this life to be something good and
seems to be quite satisfied with it. That immense framework and
planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life
long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and
toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And
when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion,
and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most
alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that
it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will
now be guided by intui-tions rather than by concepts. There is no
regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of
ghostly schemata, the land of abstrac-tions. There exists no word
for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he
speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard-of combinations
of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old
conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the
impression of the powerful present intuition.
There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man
stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with
scorn for abstrac-tion. The latter is just as irrational as the
former is inartistic. They both A desire to rule over life: the
former, by knowing how to meet his princip)1 f/ ~ needs by means of
foresight, prudence, and regularity; the latter, by disregarding
these needs and, as an "overjoyed hero," counting as real only that
life which has been disguised as illusion and beauty. Whenever, as
was perhaps the case in ancient Greece, the intuitive man handles
his weapons more authoritatively and victoriously than his
opponent, then, under favorable circumstances, a culture can take
shape and art's mas-tery over life can be established. All the
manifestations of such a life will be accompanied by this
dissimulation, this disavowal of indigence, this
33V erstellung. 34V erurrung.
I
l \
\
\
ON TRUTH AND LIES IN A NONMORAL SENSE
glitter of metaphorical intuitions, and, in general, this
immediacy of deception: neither the house, nor the gait, nor the
clothes, nor the day jugs give evidence of having been invented
because of a pressing need. It seems as if they were all intended
to express an exalted happiness, an Olympian cloudlessness, and, as
it were, a playing with seriousness. The man who is guided by
concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding
off misfortune, without ever gaining any happiness for himself from
these abstractions. And while he aims for the greatest possible
freedom from pain, the intuitive man, standing in the midst of a
culture, already reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually
inflow-ing illumination, cheer, and redemption-in addition to
obtaining a de-fense against misfortune. To be sure, he suffers
more intensely, when he suffers; he even suffers more frequently,
since he does not understand how to learn from experience and keeps
falling over and over again into the same ditch. He is then just as
irrational in sorrow as he is in happi-ness: he cries aloud and
will not be consoled. How differently the stoical man who learns
from experience and governs himself by concepts is affected by the
same misfortunes! This man, who at other times seeks nothing but
sincerity, truth, freedom from deception, and protection against
ensnaring surprise attacks, now executes a masterpiece of
decep-tion: he executes his masterpiece of deception in misfortune,
as the other type of man executes his in times of happiness. He
wears no quivering and changeable human face, but, as it were, a
mask with dig-nified, symmetrical features. He does not cry; he
does not even alter his voice. When a real storm cloud thunders
above him, he wraps himself in his cloak, and with slow steps he
walks from beneath it.
3
* *
*
Sketch of Additional Sections 35
Description of the chaotic confusion characteristic of a
mythical age. The oriental. Philosophy's beginnings as the director
of cults and myths: it organizes the unity of religion.
4 T.he beginnings of an 1romc attitude toward religion. The
new
emergence of philosophy.
3" All the following notes were added by Nietzsche himself to
von Gersdorffs
fair copy of sections I and 2.
-
44 GENEALOGY OF MORALS
That lambs dislike great birds of prey does not seem strange:
only it gives no ground for reproaching these birds of prey for
bear-ing off little Jambs. And if the lambs say among themselves:
"these birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of
prey, but
FIRST ESSAY, SECTION 13 4S
rather its opposite, a lamb-would he not be good?" there is no
reason to find fault with this institution of an ideal, except
perhaps that the birds of prey might view it a little ironically
and say: "we don't dislike them at all, these good little Iambs; we
even love them: nothing is more tasty than a tender lamb."
To demand of strength that it should not express itself as
strength, that it should not be a desire to overcome, a desire to
throw down, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and
resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd as to demand of
weak-ness that it should express itself as strength. A quantum of
force is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, effect-more, it is
nothing other than precisely this very driving, willing, effecting,
and only owing to the seduction of language (and of the fundamental
errors of reason that are petrified in it) which conceives and
misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes
effects, by a "subject," can it appear otherwise. For just as the
popular mind separates the lightning from its flash and takes the
latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called
lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from
expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum
behind the strong man, which was tree to express strength or not to
do so. But there is no such sub-stratum; there is no "being" behind
doing, effecting, becoming; "the doer" is merely a fiction added to
the deed-the deed is every-thing. The popular mind in fact doubles
the deed; when it sees the lightning flash, it is the deed of a
deed: it posits the same event first as cause and then a second
time as its effect. Scientists do no better when they say "force
moves," "force causes," and the like-all its coolness, its freedom
from emotion notwithstanding, our en-tire science still lies under
the misleading influence of Iangoage and has not disposed of that
little changeling, the "subject" (the atom, for example, is such a
changeling, as is the Kantian "thing-in-itself'); no wonder if the
submerged, darkly glowering emotions of vengefulness and hatred
exploit this belief for their own ends and in fact maintain no
belief more ardently than the belief that the strong man is free to
be weak and the bird of prey to be a Iamb-for thus they gain the
right to make the bird of prey accountable for being a bird of
prey.
14
Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann
(Vintage, 1989 [1887])
-
46 GENEALOGY OF :MORALS
When the oppressed, downtrodden, outraged exhort one an-other
with the vengeful cunning of impotence: "let us be different from
the evil, namely good! And be is good who does not outrage, who
harms nobody, who does not attack, who does not requite, who leaves
revenge to God, who keeps himself hidden as we do, who avoids evil
and desires little from life, like us, the patient, bum-ble, and
just"-this, listened to calmly and without previous bias, really
amounts to no more than: "we weak ones are, after ali, weak; it
would be good if we did nothing for which we are not strong
enough"; hut this dry matter of fact, this prudence of the lowest
order which even insects possess (posing as dead, when in great
danger, so as not to do "too much"), bas, thanks to the counterfeit
and self-deception of impotence, clad itself in the ostentatious
garb of the virtue of quiet, calm resignation, just as if the
weakness of the weak-that is to say, their essence, their effects,
their sole ineluc-table, irremovable reality-were a voluntary
achievement, willed, chosen, a deed, a meritorious act. This type
of man needs to be-lieve in a neutral independent "subject,"
prompted by an instinct for self-preservation and self-affirmation
in which every lie is sanc-tified. The subject (or, to use a more
popular expression, the soul) has perhaps been believed in hitherto
more firmly than anything else on earth because it makes possible
to the majority of mortals, the weak and oppressed of every kind,
the sublime self-deception that interprets weakness as freedom, and
their being thus-and-thus as a merit.
FIRST ESSAY, SECTION 14 47
15
-
16
ECCE HOMO
How One Becomes What One Is
Preface
1
j: Seeing that before long I must confront humanity with the
most dif-ficult demand ever made of it, rt seems indispensable to
me to say who I am. Really, one should know it, for I have not left
myself ''without testimony." But the disproportion between the
greatness of my task and the smallness of my contemporaries has
found ex-pression in the fact that one has neither heard nor even
seen me. I live on my own credit; it is perhaps a mere prejudice
that I live.
' it,_
I only need to speak with one of the "educated" who come to the
Upper Engadine' for the summer, and I am convinced that I do not
live.
Under these circumstances I have a duty against which my habits,
even more the pride of my instincts, revolt at bottom-namely, to
say: Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not
mistake me for someone else.
2
I am, for example, by no means a bogey, or a moralistic
mon-ster-! am actually the very opposite of the type of man who so
far has been revered as virtuous. Between ourselves, it seems to me
that precisely this is part of my pride. I am a disciple of the
philos-opher Dionysus; I should prefer to be even a satyr to being
a saint. But one should really read this essay. Perhaps I have
succeeded; perhaps this essay had no other meaning than to give
expression to this contrast in a cheerful and philanthropic
manner,
The last thing I should promise would be to "improve" man-kind.2
No new idols are erected by me; let the old ones learn what
1 The Alpine valley in Switzerland where Nietzsche spent almost
every sum-mer from 1879 to 1888. !i: Cf. the chapter "The
Improvers' of Mankind" in Twilight of the Idols.
.j
,:!
'!
-
17
218 ECCE HOMO
feet of clay mean. Overthrowing idols (my word for "i~eals")that
comes closer to being part of my craft. One has depnved real-ity of
its value, its meaning, its truthfulness, to precisely the extent
to which one has mendaciously invented an ideal world.
The "true world" and the "apparent world"-that means: the
mendaciously invented world and reality.
The lie of the ideal has so far been the curse on reality; on
account of it, mankind itself has become mendacious and false down
to its most fundamental instincts-to the point of worship-ping the
opposite values of those which alone would guarantee its health,
its future, the lofty right to its future.
3
Those who can breathe the air of my writings know that it is an
air of the heights, a strong air. One must be made :or. it.
Oth~rwise there is no small danger that one may catch cold m It.
The tee is near, the solitude tremendous-but how calmly all things
lie in the light! How freely one breathes! How much one feels
beneath oneself!
Philosophy, as I have so far understood and lived it, means
living voluntarily among ice and high mountains-se~king out
everything strange and questionable in existe~ce, everyt?Jng ~o far
placed under a ban by morality. Long expenence, acqmred m the
course of such wanderings in what is forbidden, taught me to
re-gard the causes that so far have prompted morali~ing and
idea~izing in a very different light from what may seem deSirable:
the hrdden history of the philosophers, the psychology of the great
names,
=m~b~ . How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does
It
dare? More and more that became for me the real measure of
value. Error (faith in the ideal) is not blindness, error is
cow-ardice.
Every attainment, every step forward in knowledge, _tollo":s
from courage, from hardness against oneself, from cleanlmess m
relation to oneself.
I do not refute ideals, I merely put on gloves before them
NIETZSCHEs PREFACE 219
Nitimur in vetitum ... in this sigu my philqsophy will triumph
one day, for what one has forbidden so far as a matter of principle
has always been-truth alone.
4
Among my writings my Zarathustra stands to my mind by it-self.
With that I have given mankind the greatest present that has ever
been made to it so far. This book, with a voice bridging
centu-ries, is not only the highest book there is, the book that is
truly characterized by the air of the heights-the whole fact of man
lies beneath it at a tremendous distance--it is also the deepest,
born out of the innermost wealth of truth, an inexhaustible well to
which no pail descends without coming up again filled with gold and
goodness. Here no "prophet" is speaking, none of those gruesome
hy?r!ds of sickness and will to power whom people call founders of
rehgtons. Above all, one must hear aright the tone that comes from
this mouth, the halcyon tone, lest one should do wretched injustice
to the meaning of its wisdom.
"It is the stillest words that bring on the storm. Thoughts that
come on doves' feet guide the world." 4
The figs are falling from the trees; they are good and sweet;
and, as they fall, their red skin bursts. I am a north wind to ripe
figs.
Thus, like figs, these teachings fall to you, my friends: now
consume their juice and their sweet meat. It is fall around us, aud
pure sky and afternoon.
It is no fanatic that speaks here; this is npt "preaching"; no
faith is demanded here: from an infinite abun~ance of light and
depth of happiness falls drop upon drop, word upon word: the tempo
of these speeches is a tender adagio. Such things reach only
8 "We strive for the forbidden .. : Ovid, A mores, III, 4, b.
Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, section 227. 4 Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
Second Part, Jast chapter: T~e Portable Nietzsche tr. Walter
Kaufmann (New York, Viking, 1954), p. 258. ' ts Ibid., second
chapter.
-
18
:no ECCE HOMO
the most select. It is a privilege without equal to be a
listener here. Nobody is free to have ears for Zarathustra.
Is not Zarathustra in view of all this a seducer?- But what does
he himself say, as he returns again for the first time to his
solitude? Precisely the opposite of everything that any "sage," ..
saint," "world~redeerner," or any other decadent would say in such
a case.- Not only does he speak differently, he also is
differ-ent.-
Now I go alone, my disciples, You, too, go now, alone. Thus I
want it.
Go away from me and resist Zarathustra! And even bet ter: be
ashamed of him! Perhaps he deceived you.
The man of knowledge must not only love his enemies, he must
also be able to hate his friends.
One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a
pupil. And why do you not want to pluck at my wreath?
You revere me; but what if your reverence tumbles one day?
Beware lest a statue slay you.
You say that you believe in Zarathustra? But what mat-ters
Zarathustra? You are my believers-but what matter all
believers?
You had not yet sought yourselves; and you found me. Thus do all
believers; therefore all faith amounts to so little.
Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you
have all denied me will I return to you.
Friedrich Nietzsche
6Jbid . First Part, last chapter.
On this perfect day, when everything is ripening and not only
the grape turns brown, the eye ofithe sun just fell upon my life:
!looked back, I looked forward, and never saw so many and such good
things at once. It was not for nothing that I buried my
forty-fourth year today; I had the right to bury it; whatever was
life in it has been saved, is immortal. The first book of the
Revaluation of All Values,' the Songs of Zarathustra,O the Twilight
of the idols, my attempt to philosophize with a hammer"-all
presents of this year, indeed of its last quarter! How
. could I jail to. be grateful to my whole:life?-and so I tell
my life to myself.
1 The Antichrist. Published, after Nietzsche's collapse, under
the title Dionysus Dithyrambs. in the same volume with Zarathuslra
IV. , 8 This image is explained in the preface of Twilight: " ...
idols. which are here touched with a hammer as Wlth a tuning
fork."
-
19
Why 1 Am So Wise
1
The good fortune of my existence, its uniqueness perhaps, lies
in its fatality: I am, to express it in the form of a riddle,
already d~ad as my father, while as my mother I am still living
.and becommg old. This dual descent, as it were, both from the
htghest and the lowest rung on the ladder of life, at the same time
a decadent and a beginning-this, if anything, explains that
neutrality, :hat freedom from all partiality in relation to the
total problem of !tfe, that per-haps distinguishes me. I have a
subtler sense o~ smell for th~ stgns of ascent and decline than any
other human bemg before me, I am the teacher par excellence for
this-I know both, I am both.
My father died at the age of thirty-six: he was delicate, kind,
and morbid, as a being that is destined merely to pass by-:-mor~ a
gracious memory of life than life itself. In the same year .m
w?tch
. his life went downward, mine, too, went downward: at
thtrty-stx, I reached the lowest point of my vitality-! still
lived, but without being able to see three steps ahead. Then-it was
18?9-I retir~d from my professorship at Basel, spent the ?ummer m
~t. Mo':tz like a shadow and the next winter, than whtch not one m
my life has been poo;er in sunshine, in Naumburg as a sh~~ow. This
w~ my minimum: the Wanderer and His Shadow ongmated at thiS time.
Doubtless, I then knew about shadows. .
The following winter, my first one in Genoa, that swee~emng and
spiritualization which is almost inseparably connected wtth an
extreme poverty of blood and muscle, produced The Dawn. '!~e
perfect brightness and cheerfuln~ss, ~ven exuberance of the. spmt,
reflected in this work, is compatible m my case not only wtth the
most profound physiological weakness, but even with an excess of
pain. in the midst of the to~ents that g~ with a?. uninterrupted
three-day migraine, accompamed by labonous vomttmg of phlegm, I
possessed a dialectician's clarity par excellence and thought
WHY t AM SO WISB 223
through with very cold blood matters for w~ich under healthier
circumstances I am not mountain-climber, npt subtle, not cold
enough. My readers know perhaps in what way I consider dialectic as
a symptom of decadence; for example in the most famous case, the
case of Socrates.
All pathological disturbances of the intelject, even that
half-numb state that follows fever, have remained entirely foreign
to me to this day; and I had to do research to find ou\ about their
nature and frequency. My blood moves slowly. Nobody has ever
discov-ered any fever in me. A physician who treated me for some
time as if my nerves were sick finally said: "It's not your nerves,
it is rather I that am nervous." There is altogether no sign !,Of
any local degen-eration; no organically conditioned stomach
complaint, however profound the weakness of my gastric system Ipay
be as a conse-quence of over-all exhaustion. My eye trouble, too,
though at times dangerously close to blindness, is only a
cons~quence and not a cause: with every increase in vitality my
ability to see has also increased again.
A long, all too long, series of years signifies recovery for me;
unfortunately it also signifies relapse, decay, the periodicity of
a kind of decadence. Need I say after all this that in questions of
decadence I am experienced? I have spelled :them forward and
backward. Even that filigree art of grasping and comprehending in
general, those fingers for nuances, that psycl\ology of "looking
around the corner," and whatever else is characteristic of me, was
learned only then, is the true present of those days in which
every-thing in me became subtler-observation itself as well as all
organs of observation. Looking from the perspective of the sick
toward healthier concepts and values and, conversely, looking again
from the fullness and self-assurance of a rich life down into the
secret work of the instinct of decadence-in this I h~ve had the
longest training, my truest experience; if in anything, r became
master in this. Now I know how, have the know-how, to reverse
perspec-tives: the first reason why a "revaluation of values" is
perhaps possible for me alone.
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20
224 ECCE HOMO
Apart from the fact that I am a decadent, I am also the
oppo-site. My proof for this is, among other things, that I have
always instinctively chosen the right means against wretched
states; while the decadent typically chooses means that are
disadvantageous for him. As summa summarum.' I was healthy; as an
angle, as a spe-cialty, I was a decadent. The energy to choose
absolute solitude and leave the life to which I had become
accustomed; the insistence on not allowing myself any longer to be
cared for, waited on, and doctored-that betrayed an absolute
instinctive certainty about what was needed above all at that time.
I took myself in hand, I made myself healthy again: the condition
for this-every physiolo-gist would admit that-is that one be
healthy at bottom. A ;ypi-cally morbid being cannot become healthy,
much less make Itself healthy. For a typically healthy person,
conversely, being sick can even become an energetic stimulus for
life, for living more. This, in fact, is bow that long period of
sickness appears to me now: as it were, I discovered life anew,
including myself; I tasted all good and even little things, as
others cannot easily taste them-I turned my wilt to health, to
life, into a philosophy.
For it should be noted: it was during the years of my lowest
vitality that I ceased to be a pessimist; the instinct of
self-restora-tion forbade me a philosophy of poverty and
discouragement
What is it, fundamentally, that allows us to recognize who has
turned out well? That a well-turned-out person pleases our senses,
that he is carved from wood that is hard, delicate, and at the same
time smells good. He bas a taste only for what is good for him; his
pleasure, his delight cease where the measure of what is good fur
him is transgressed. He guesses what remedies avail against what is
harmful; he exploits bad accidents to his advantage; what does not
kill him makes him stronger. Instinctively, he collects from
every-thing he sees, bears, lives through, his sum: he is a
principle of selection, he discards much. He is always in his own
company, t Over~all. ct. Twilight, Chapter I, section 8 (Portable
Nietzsche, p. 467).
WHY I AM SO WlSB 2.25
whether he associates with books, human beings, or landscapes:
he honors by choosing, by admitting, by trusting.[ He reacts slowly
to all kinds of stimuli, with that slowness which long caution and
deliberate pride have bred in him: he examines the stimulus that
approaches him, he is far from meeting it halfway. He believes
neither in "misfortune" nor in "guilt": he comes to terms with
him-self, with others; he knows how to forget-be is strong enough;
hence everything must turn out for his best.
Well then, I am the opposite of a decadent, for I have just
described myself.
3
This dual series of experiences, this acces~ to apparently sepa
rate worlds, is repeated in my nature in every respect: I am a
Dop-pelglinger, I have a "second" face in addition to the first.
And per-haps also a third.
Even by virtue of my descent, I am grantee:! an eye beyond all
merely local, merely nationally conditioned perspectives; it is not
difficult for me to be a "good European." On the other hand, I am
perhaps more German than present-day Germans, mere citizens of the
German Reich, could possibly be-l, the last anti-political German.
And yet my ancestors were Polish ; noblemen: I have many racial
instincts in my body from that sourCe-who knows? In the end perhaps
even the liberum veto.t
When I consider how often I am address~d as a Pole when I
travel, even by Poles themselves, and bow rarely I am taken for a
German, it might seem that I have been merely externally sprinkled
with what is German. Yet my mother, Franziska Oehler, is at any
r~te something very German; ditto, my grandmother on my father's
Side, Erdmuthe Krause. The latter lived all her youth in the middle
1 U~rest!;icted veto-ne of the traditional privileges of the
members of the PohshDtet.
. Durin~ the Nazi period, one of Nietzsche's relatives, Max
Oehler, a re~ed maJor, ~e~t to great Jen~ths to prove that;'
Nietzsche had been ractaUy pure: Ntetzscbes angebltche polnische
Herkunft" (N's alleged Polish descent) in Ostdeutsche Monatshefte,
18 0938), 679-82, and Nietzsches Ahnentafe/ (N"s pedigree), Weimar,
1938.
-
21
226 lBCCB HOMO
of good old Weimar, not without some connection with the circle
of Goethe. Her brother, the professor of theology Krause in
Konigs-berg, was called to Weimar as general superintendent after
Herder's death. It is not impossible that her mother, my
great-grandmother, is mentioned in the diary of the young Goethe
under the name of "Muthgen." Her second marriage was with the
super-intendent Nietzsche in Eilenburg; and in the great war year
of 1813, on the day that Napoleon entered Eilenburg with his
general staff, on the tenth of October, she gave birth. As a Saxon,
she was a great admirer of Napoleon; it could be that I still am,
too. My father, born in 1813, died in 1849. Before be accepted the
pastor's position in the parish of Roc ken, not far from LUtzen, be
liv~d for a few years in the castle of Altenburg and taught the
four pnncesses there. His pupils are now the Queen of Hanover, the
Grand Duch-ess Constantine, the Grand Duchess of Altenburg, and the
Princess Therese of Saxe-Altenburg. He was full of deep reverence
for the Prussian king Frederick William IV, from whom he had also
re-ceived his pastoral position; the events of 1848 grieved him
beyond all measure. I myself, born on the birthday of the above
named king, on the fifteenth of October, received, as fitting, the
Hohenzol-lern name Friedrich Wilhelm. There was at least one
advantage to the choice of this day: my birthday was a holiday
throughout my childhood.
I consider it a great privilege to have had such a father: it
even seems to me that this explains whatever else I have of
privi-leges-not including life, the great Yes to life. Above all,
that it requires no resolve on my part, but merely biding my time,
to enter quite involuntarily into a world of lofty and delicate
things: I am at home there, my inmost passion becomes free only
there. That I have almost paid with my life for this privilege is
certainly no un-fair trade.
In order to understand anything at all of my Zarathustra one
must perhaps be similarly conditioned as I am-with one foot be-yond
life.
WHY I AM SO WlSB 227
4
I have never understood the art of predispbsing people against
me-this, too, I owe to my incomparable father-even when it seemed
highly desirable to me. However un1Christian this may seem, I am
not even predisposed against myself. You can turn my life this way
and that, you will rarely find traces, and actnally only once, that
anybody felt ill will toward me--but perhaps rather too many traces
of good will.
Even my experiences with people with whom everybody bas bad
experiences bear witness, without exceptiqn, in their favor: I tame
every bear, I make even buffoons bebave,themselves. During the
seven years that I taught Greek in the senior class in the
Piida-gogium in Basel, I never had occasion to punish anyone; the
laziest boys worked hard. I am always equal to accidents; I have to
be unprepared to be master of myself. Let the instrument be what it
may, let it be as out of tnne as only the ins(rument "man" can
be--I should have to be sick if I should not succeed in getting out
of it something worth bearing. And how often have I been told by
the "instruments" themselves that they bad nev~r heard themselves
like that.- Most beautifully perhaps by Heinrich von Stein, 1 who
died so unpardonably young. Once, after be bad courteously
re-quested permission, he appeared for three days in Sils Maria,
ex-plaining to everybody that he had not come to see the Engadine.
This excellent human being, who had walked into the Wagnerian
morass with all the impetuous simplicity of a Prussian Junker (and
in addition even into that of Diihring! ), acted during these three
days like one transformed by a tempest of freedom, like one who has
suddenly been lifted to his own height and acquired wings. I always
said to him that this was due to the gm?d air up here, that this
happened to everybody, that one was not for nothing six thou-sand
feet above Bayreuth 3-but he would not believe me.
1 For Nietzsche's relation to this young man, see my note on the
"Aftersong" that concludes Beyond Good and Evil (New York, Vintage
Books, 1966). 2 See my note in Genealogy II, section 11. a The
capital of the Wagner cult. Stein admired Wagner as well as
Nietzsche.
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22
228 ECCE HOMO
If, in spite of that, some small and great misdemeanors have
been committed against me, "the will" cannot be blamed for this,
least of all any ill will: sooner could I complain, as I have
already suggested, of the good will that has done no small mischief
in my life. My experiences entitle me to be quite generally
suspicious of the so-called "selfless" drives, of all "neighbor
love" that is ready to give advice and go into action. It always
seems a weakness to me, a particular case of being incapable of
resisting stimuli: pity is considered a virtue only among
decadents. I reproach those who are full of pity for easily losing
a sense of shame, of respect, of sensi-tivity for distances; before
you know it, pity begins to smell of the mob and becomes scarcely
distinguishable from bad manners-and sometimes pitying hands can
interfere in a downright destructive manner in a great destiny, in
the growing solitude of one wounded, in a privileged right to heavy
guilt.
The overcoming of pity I count among the noble virtues: as
"Zarathustra's temptation" I invented a situation in which a great
cry of distress reaches him, as pity tries to attack him like a
final sin that would entice him away from himself. To remain the
mas-ter at this point, to keep the eminence of one's task undefiled
by the many lower and more myopic impulses that are at work in
so-called selfless actions, that is the test, perhaps the ultimate
test, which a Zarathustra must pass-his real proof of strength.
s
At another point as well, I am merely my father once more and,
as it were, his continued life after an all-too-early death. Like
everyone who has never lived among his equals and who finds the
concept of "retaliation" as inaccessible as, say, the concept of
"equal rights," I forbid myself all countermeasures, all protective
measures, and, as is only fair, also any defense, any
"justification," in cases when some small or very great folly is
perpetrated against me. My kind of retaliation consists in
following up the stupidity as fast as possible with some good
sense: that way one may actually
ZorathustrtziV, Chapter 2.
WHY I AM SO WISE 229
catch up with it.' Metaphorically speaking, I send a box of
confec-tions to get rid of a painful story.
One needs only to do me some wrong, I "repay" it-you may be sure
of that: soon I find an opportunity for expressing my grati-tude to
the "evil-doer" (at times even for his evil deed)--or to ask him
for something, which can be more obliging than giving
some-thing.
It also seems to me that the rudest word, the rudest letter are
still more benign, more decent than silence. Those who remain
si-lent are almost always lacking in delicacy and courtesy of the
heart. Silence is an objection; swallowing things leads of
necessity to a bad character-it even upsets the stomach. All who
remain silent are dyspeptic.
You see, I don't want rudeness to be underestimated: it is by
far the most humane form of contradiction and, in the midst of
effeminacy, one of our foremost virtues.
If one is rich enough for this, it is even a good fortune to be
in the wrong. A god who would come to earth must not do anything
except wrong: not to take the punishment upon oneself but the
guilt would be divine;2
6 Freedom from ressentiment, enlightenment about ressenti-
ment-who knows how much I am ultimately indebted, in this
re-spect also, to my protracted sickness! This problem is far from
simple: one must have experienced it from strength as well as from
weakness. If anything at all must be adduced against being sick and
being weak, it is that man's really remedial instinct, his fighting
1 Cf. the chapter "On The Adder's Bite" in Zarathustra I: "Jf you
have an enemy, do not requite him evil with good, for that would
put him to shame. Rather prove that he did you some good. And
rather be angry than put to shame . ... " 2 Cf. ibid., "Would that
you might invent for me the love that bears not only all punishment
but also aU guilt!" This theme is developed in Sartre's Flies. For
Nietzsche's immense influence on The Flies, see my article on
"Nietzsche Between Homer and Sartre" in Revue internationale de
philosophie, 1964.
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23
!-.
230 ECCE HOMO
instinct' wears out. One cannot get rid of anything, one cannot
get over anything, one cannot repel anything-everything hurts. Men
and things obtrude too closely; experiences strike one too deeply;
memory becomes a festering wound. Sickness itself is a kind of
ressentiment.
Against all this the sick person has only one great remedy [
call it Russian fatalism, that fatalism without revolt which is
exem-plified by a Russian soldier who, finding a campaign too
strenuous, finally lies down in the snow. No longer to accept
anything at all. no longer to take anything, no longer to absorb
anything-to cease reacting altogether.
This fatalism is not always merely the courage to die; it can
also preserve life under the most perilous conditions by reducing
the metabolism, slowing it down, as a kind of will to hibernate.
Carrying this logic a few steps further, we arrive at the fakir who
sleeps for weeks in a grave.
Because one would use oneself up too quickly if one reacted in
any way, one does not react at all any more: this is the logic.
Nothing burns one up faster than the affects of ressenfiment.
Anger, pathological vulnerability, impotent lust for revenge,
thirst for revenge, poison-mixing in any sense--no reaction could
be more disadvantageous for the exhausted: such affects involve a
rapid consumption of nervous energy, a pathological increase of
harmful excretions-for example, of the gall bladder into the
stom-ach. Ressentiment is what is forbidden par excellence for the
sick -it is their specific evil-unfortunately also their most
natural in-clination.
This was comprehended by that profound physiologist, the Buddha.
His "religion" should rather be called a kind of hygiene, lest it
be confused with such pitiable phenomena as Christianity: its
effectiveness was made conditional on the victory over
ressenti-ment. To liberate the soul from this is the first step
toward recov-ery. "Not by enmity is enmity ended; by friendliness
enmity is ended": these words stand at the beginning of the
doctrine of the
1 Wehr~ und Waffen~Instinkt (emphasized in the original) alludes
to Luther's famous hymn, "A mighty fortress is our God, a good
defense and weapons [ein' gute Wehr und Waffen]."
WHY 1 AM SO WISE 231
Buddha? It is not morality that speaks thus; thus speaks
physiol-Qgy.
Born of weakness, ressentiment is most harmful for the weak
themselves. Conversely, given a rich nature, it is a superfluous
feel-ing; mastering this feeling is virtually what proves riches.
Whoever knows how seriously my philosophy has pursued the fight
against 1engefulness and rancor, even mto the doctrine of "free
will" -the fight against Christianity is merely a special case of
this-will understand why I am making such a point of my own
behavior, my instinctive sureness in practice. During periods of
decadence I for-bade myself such feelings as harmful; as soon as my
vitality was rich and proud enough again, I forbade myself such
feelings as beneath me. I displayed the "Russian fatalism" I
mentioned by tenaciously clinging for years to all but intolerable
situations, places, apartments, and society, merely because they
happened to be given by accident: it was better than changing them,
than feeling that they could be changed-than rebelling against
them.
Any attempt to disturb me in this fatalism, to awaken me by
force, used to annoy me mortally-and it actually was mortally
dangerous every time.
Accepting oneself as if fated, not wishing oneself "different"
-that is in such cases great reason itself.
7
War' is another matter. I am warlike by nature. Attacking is one
of my instincts. Being able to be an enemy, being an enemy-perhaps
that presupposes a strong nature; in any case, it belongs to every
strong nature. It needs objects of resistance; hence it looks
2 Cf .. The Dhammapada, tr. Max: MUller: "Hatred does not cease
by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love" (Chapter !). Given
the original context, Nietzsche's comments are not at all
far~fetched. s Cf. Twilight, "The Four Great Errors,'' section 7
(Portable Nietzsche, pp. 499ff.). Nietzsche's attack on
Christianity cannot be understood apart from the point made in the
sentence above. 1 This section throws a great deal of light on some
of Nietzsche's other writ ings-especially the chapter "On War and
Warriors" in Zarathustra I. Cf. also below, "Human, All-Too-Human,"
section 1, and "Dawn,'' section 1.
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24
232 ECCE HOMO
for what resists: the aggressive pathos belongs just as
necessarily to strength as vengefulness and rancor belong to
weakness. Woman, for example, is vengeful: that is due to her
weakness, as much as is her susceptibility to the distress of
others.
The strength of those who attack can be measured in a way by the
opposition they require: every growth is indicated by the search
for a mighty opponent-or problem; for a warlike philosopher
challenges problems, too, to single combat. The task is not simply
to master what happens to resist, but what requires us to stake all
our strength, suppleness, and fighting skill-opponents that are our
equals.
Equality before the enemy: the first presupposition of an
hon-est duel. Where one feels contempt, one canMt wage war; where
one commands, where one sees something beneath oneself, one has no
business waging war.
My practice of war can be summed up in four propositions. First:
I only attack causes that are victorious; I may even wait until
they become victorious. 2
Second: I only attack causes against which I would not find
allies, so that I stand alone-so that I compromise.myself alone.-!
have never taken a step publicly that did not compromise me: that
is my criterion of doing right.
Third: I never attack persons; I merely avail myself of the
person as of a strong magnifying glass that allows one to make
visible a general but creeping and elusive calamity. Thus I
attacked David Strauss--more precisely, the success of a senile
book with the "cultured" people in Germany: I caught this culture
in the act.
Thus I attacked Wagner-more precisely, the falseness, the
half-couth instincts of our "culture" which mistakes the subtle for
the rich, and the late for the great.
Fourth: I only attack things when every personal quarrel is
excluded, when any background of bad experiences is lacking. On the
contrary, attack is in my case a proof of good will, sometimes
2- Nietzsche's first great polemic was directed against the
tremendous success of David Friedrich Strauss' book, The Old Falth
and The New, and he broke with Wagner only after Wagner had
returned to Germany and lri umphed in Bayreuth.
WHY t AM SO WISE 233
e~en of gratitude. I honor, I distinguish by associating my name
wtth that of a cause or a person: pro or con-that makes no
differ-ence to me at this point. When I wage war against
Christianity I am entitled to this because I have never experienced
misfortunes and frustrations from that quarter-the most serious
Christians have always been well disposed toward me. I myself, an
opponent of Christianity de rigueur,S am far from blaming
individuals for the calamity of millennia.
8
May I still venture to sketch one final trait of my nature that
causes me no little difficulties in my contacts with other men? My
instinct for cleanliness is characterized by a perfectly uncanny
sen-sitivity so that the proximity or-what am I saying?-the inmost
parts, the "entrails" of every soul are physiologically perceived
by me-smelled.
This sensitivity furnishes me with psychological antennae with
which I feel and get a hold of every secret: the abundant hidden
dirt at the bottom of many a character-perhaps the result of bad
blood, but glossed over by education--enters my consciousness
al-most at the first contact. If my observation has not deceived
me, such characters who offend my sense of cleanliness also sense
from their side the reserve of my disgust-and this does not make
them smell any better.
As bas always been my wont--extreme cleanliness in relation to
me is the presupposition of my existence; I perish under unclean
conditions--! constantly swim and bathe and splash, as it were, in
water-in some perfectly transparent and resplendent element.
~ence association with people imposes no mean test on my
pa-tience: my humanity does not consist in feeling with men how
they are, but in enduring that I feel with them.t
My humanity is a constant self-overcoming. But I need
solitude-which is to say, recovery, return to my-
self, the breath of a free, light, playful air. s In accordance
with good manners. 1 Nietzsches critique of pity should be
considered in this light
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25
2.34 ECCE HOMO
My whole Zarathustra is a dithyramb on solitude or, if I have
been understood, on cleanliness.-Fortunately not on pure
fool-ishness?- Those who have eyes for colors will compare it to a
diamond.- Nausea over man, over the "rabble," was always my
greatest danger.- Do you want to hear ihe words in which
Zara-thustra speaks of the redemption from nausea?
What was it that happened to me? How did I redeem my-self from
nausea? Who rejuvenated my sight? How did I fly to the height where
no more rabble sits by the well? Was it my nausea itself that
created wings for me and water-divining pow-ers? Verily, I had to
fly to the highest spheres that I might find ihe fount of pleasure
again.
Oh, I found it, my brothers! Here, in the highest spheres the
fount of pleasure wells up for me! And here is a life of which the
rabble does not drink.
You flow for me almost too violently, fountain of pleas-ure. And
often you empty the cup again by wanting to fill it. And I must
still learn to approach you more modestly: all too violently my
heart still flows toward you-my heart, upon which my summer burns,
short, hot, melancholy, overbliss-ful: how my summer heart craves
your coolness!
Gone is the hesitant gloom of my spring! Gone the snow-flakes of
my malice in June! Summer have I become en-tirely, and summer noon!
A summer in the highest spheres with cold wells and blissful
silence: oh, come, my friends, that ihe silence may become still
more blissful!
For this is our height and our home: we live here too high and
steep for all the unclean and their thirst. Cast your pure eyes
into the well of my pleasure, friends! How should that make it
muddy? It shall laugh back at you in its own purity.
On the tree, Future, we build our nest; and in our solitude
eagles shall bring us nourishment in their beaks. Verily, no
nourishment that the unclean might share: they would think
2 Wagner himself had characterized his Parsifal as the pure
fool. B This long passage is quoted from the chapter "On The Rabble
.. in Zara-thustra II. But in Zarathustra, Nietzsche had .. the
malice of my snowflakes in Sunel"
WHY 1 AM SO WISE Z35
ee~l were devouring fire, and they would burn their mouths en y,
we k~ep no homes here for the unclean: our leasur~
would be an Ice cave to. their bodies and their spirits. p b ~nd
we want t~ hve over them like strong winds, neigh-;rs ': the
eagles, ?eighbors of ihe snow, neighbors of the sun:
us hve strong wmds. And like a wind I yet want to blow amf tohn?
th~~ one day, and with my spirit take away the breath o eir spmt:
thus my future wills it.
':erily, a stron? wind is Zarathustra for all who are low; and
this counsel I give to all his enemies and all who spit and spew:
Beware of spitting against the wind! . . .