Philo

The Birth of TragedySummaryArtistic creation depends on a tension between two opposing forces, which Nietzsche terms the “Apollonian” and the “Dionysian.” Apollo is the Greek god of light and reason, and Nietzsche identifies the Apollonian as a life- and form-giving force, characterized by measured restraint and detachment, which reinforces a strong sense of self. Dionysus is the Greek god of wine and music, and Nietzsche identifies the Dionysian as a frenzy of self-forgetting in which the self gives way to a primal unity where individuals are at one with others and with nature. Both the Apollonian and the Dionysian are necessary in the creation of art. Without the Apollonian, the Dionysian lacks the form and structure to make a coherent piece of art, and without the Dionysian, the Apollonian lacks the necessary vitality and passion. Although they are diametrically opposed, they are also intimately intertwined.Nietzsche suggests that the people of ancient Greece were unusually sensitive and susceptible to suffering and that they refined the Apollonian aspect of their nature to ward off suffering. The primal unity of the Dionysian brings us into direct apprehension of the suffering that lies at the heart of all life. By contrast, the Apollonian is associated with images and dreams, and hence with appearances. Greek art is so beautiful precisely because the Greeks relied on the appearances generated by images and dreams to shield themselves from the reality of suffering. The early, Doric period of Greek art is dull and prim because the Apollonian influence too heavily outweighs the Dionysian.The Greek tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, which Nietzsche considers to be among humankind’s greatest accomplishments, achieve their sublime effects by taming Dionysian passions by means of the Apollonian. Greek tragedy evolved out of religious rituals featuring a chorus of singers and dancers, and it achieved its distinctive shape when two or more actors stood apart from the chorus as tragic actors. The chorus of a Greek tragedy is not the “ideal spectator,” as some scholars believe, but rather the

representation of the primal unity achieved through the Dionysian. By witnessing the fall of a tragic hero, we witness the death of the individual, who is absorbed back into the Dionysian primal unity. Because the Apollonian impulses of the Greek tragedians give form to the Dionysian rituals of music and dance, the death of the hero is not a negative, destructive act but rather a positive, creative affirmation of life through art.Unfortunately, the golden age of Greek tragedy lasted less than a century and was brought to an end by the combined influence of Euripides and Socrates. Euripides shuns both the primal unity induced by the Dionysian and the dreamlike state induced by the Apollonian, and instead he turns the Greek stage into a platform for morality and rationality. Rather than present tragic heroes, Euripides gives his characters all the foibles of ordinary human beings. In all these respects, Nietzsche sees Socrates’ influence on Euripides. Socrates effectively invented Western rationality, insisting that there must be reasons to justify everything. He interpreted instinct as a lack of insight and wrongdoing as a lack of knowledge. By making the world seem knowable and all truths justifiable, Socrates gave birth to the scientific worldview. Under Socrates’ influence, Greek tragedy was converted into rational conversation, which finds its fullest expression in Plato’s dialogues.The modern world has inherited Socrates’ rationalistic stance at the expense of losing the artistic impulses related to the Apollonian and the Dionysian. We now see knowledge as worth pursuing for its own sake and believe that all truths can be discovered and explained with enough insight. In essence, the modern, Socratic, rational, scientific worldview treats the world as something under the command of reason rather than something greater than what our rational powers can comprehend. We inhabit a world dominated by words and logic, which can only see the surfaces of things, while shunning the tragic world of music and drama, which cuts to the heart of things. Nietzsche distinguishes three kinds of culture: the Alexandrian, or

Socratic; the Hellenic, or artistic; and the Buddhist, or tragic. We belong to an Alexandrian culture that’s bound for self-destruction.The only way to rescue modern culture from self-destruction is to resuscitate the spirit of tragedy. Nietzsche sees hope in the figure of Richard Wagner, who is the first modern composer to create music that expresses the deepest urges of the human will, unlike most contemporary opera, which reflects the smallness of the modern mind. Wagner’s music was anticipated by Arthur Schopenhauer, who saw music as a universal language that makes sense of experience at a more primary level than concepts, and Immanuel Kant, whose philosophy exposes the limitations of Socratic reasoning. Not coincidentally, Wagner, Schopenhauer, and Kant are all German, and Nietzsche looks to German culture to create a new golden age.We have no direct understanding of myth anymore, but we always mediate the power of myth through various rationalistic concepts, such as morality, justice, and history. So far, the tremendous influence of Greek culture has done very little to shift our own culture’s opposition to art because we tend to interpret the Greeks according to our own standards and read tragedies as expressions of moral, rational forces rather than expressions of the mythic forces of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Myth gives us a sense of wonder and a fullness of life that our present culture lacks. Nietzsche urges a return to our deeper selves, which are entwined in myth, music, and tragedy.AnalysisNietzsche’s concept of the Dionysian, which he refines and alters over the course of his career, stands as a pointed counterbalance to the thoroughgoing rationality that is so prominent in most philosophy. In most scholarly investigations, the importance of truth and knowledge are taken as givens, and thinkers trouble themselves only over questions of how best to achieve truth and knowledge. By contrast, Nietzsche questions where this drive for truth and knowledge come from and answers that they are products of a particular, Socratic view of the world. Deeper than this

impulse for truth is the Dionysian impulse to give free rein to the passions and to lose oneself in ecstatic frenzy. We cannot properly appreciate or criticize the Dionysian from within a tradition of rationality because the Dionysian stands outside rationality. As much as the civilized world may wish to deny it, the Dionysian is the source of our myths, our passions, and our instincts, none of which are bounded by reason. While the civilizing force of the Apollonian is an essential counterbalance—contrary to some stereotypes of Nietzsche, he is firmly against the complete abandonment of reason and civilization—Nietzsche warns that we lose the deepest and richest aspects of our nature if we reject the Dionysian forces within us.For Nietzsche, art is not just a form of human activity but is rather the highest expression of the human spirit. The thrust of the book is well expressed in what is perhaps its most famous line, near the end of section 5: “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.” One of Nietzsche’s concerns in The Birth of Tragedy is to address the question of the best stance to take toward existence and the world. He criticizes his own age (though his words apply equally to the present day) for being overly rationalistic, for assuming that it is best to treat existence and the world primarily as objects of knowledge. For Nietzsche, this stance makes life meaningless because knowledge and rationality in themselves do nothing to justify existence and the world. Life finds meaning, according to Nietzsche, only through art. Art, music, and tragedy in particular bring us to a deeper level of experience than philosophy and rationality. Existence and the world become meaningful not as objects of knowledge but as artistic experiences. According to Nietzsche, art does not find a role in the larger context of life, but rather life takes on meaning and significance only as it is expressed in art.By attacking Socrates, Nietzsche effectively attacks the entire tradition of Western philosophy. While a significant group of Greek philosophers predate Socrates, philosophy generally identifies its start as a distinctive discipline in

Socrates’ method of doubt, dialogue, and rational inquiry. While Nietzsche acknowledges that Socrates gave birth to a new and distinctive tradition, he is more interested in the tradition that Socrates managed to replace. Greek tragedy as Nietzsche understands it cannot coexist in a world of Socratic rationality. Tragedy gains its strength from exposing the depths that lie beneath our rational surface, whereas Socrates insists that we become fully human only by becoming fully rational. From Socrates onward, philosophy has been the pursuit of wisdom by rational methods. In suggesting that rational methods cannot reach to the depths of human experience, Nietzsche suggests that philosophy is a shallow pursuit. True wisdom is not the kind that can be processed by the thinking mind, according to Nietzsche. We find true wisdom in the Dionysian dissolution of the self that we find in tragedy, myth, and music.Nietzsche wrote The Birth of Tragedy at a time when he was most heavily under Wagner’s influence. Nietzsche had met Wagner as a young man and was deeply honored when Wagner chose to befriend him. Wagner impressed his own views on life and art on Nietzsche, and The Birth of Tragedy is, in many ways, a philosophical justification for the work Wagner was carrying out in his operas. Over the course of the 1870s, however, Nietzsche became increasingly disillusioned with Wagner, and his mature works, starting with Human, All-Too-Human, show Nietzsche finding his own distinctive voice, free from Wagner’s influence. In particular, Nietzsche became disgusted with Wagner’s shallow pro-German nationalism and his anti-Semitism. In contrast to Nietzsche’s later biting attacks on nationalism, The Birth of Tragedy bears Wagner’s influence in its pride in German culture and its hope that a purified German culture can rescue European civilization from the deadening influence of Socratic rationalism.

Beyond Good and EvilSummaryNietzsche opens with the provocative question, “Supposing truth is a woman—what then?” Then truth would need to be

cajoled and flattered, not pursued with the tactless dogmatism of most philosophers. While philosophy must overcome its dogmatic thinking, it has at least provided our culture with the tension to spring forward into something new and better. Nietzsche catalogs a number of the dogmatisms inherent in philosophy, such as the separation of ideas into binary opposites like truth and falsehood; “immediate certainties,” like Descartes’ certainty that he is thinking; and the idea of free will. Philosophy is interested in giving us insight not into truth but into the minds of the different philosophers. Everything is governed by a will to power, and in philosophy, we see great minds trying to impose their will on the world by persuading others to see the world as they see it.The will to power is the fundamental drive in the universe. Behind truth, thought, and morality lie drives and passions that we try to mask behind a veneer of calm objectivity. What we call truth, for instance, is just the expression of our will to power, where we declare our particular perspective on reality to be objectively and universally true. Ultimately, all reality is best understood in terms of competing wills. Nietzsche praises “free spirits” who struggle to free themselves from the prejudices of others and to question their own assumptions. In particular, they will look beneath the “moral” worldview that examines people’s motives and perceive instead the “extra-moral” worldview that examines the unconscious drives that determine our expressed motives.Nietzsche characterizes his age as atheistic but religious. He identifies the religious spirit with a willingness to sacrifice, to assert one’s power by submitting oneself to torture. In primitive societies, people sacrificed others, whereas the people of more advanced cultures sacrificed themselves through self-denial. The Christians went one step further in sacrificing God himself. While Europe is still nominally Christian, Nietzsche suggests that its faith in God has been replaced by a faith in science. He warns that this faith in science leads to nihilism and that we must find something more spiritually affirming.

Nietzsche traces our spiritual decline to the rise of Christianity, which he calls the “slave revolt in morality.” Because most people are unable to handle the darker aspects of their natures, and we would be less safe if all people gave free rein to the violence and sensuality within them, Christianity declares that only meekness and timidity are holy and condemns these other things as evil. By majority rule, Christian morality condemns us to prefer tame, peaceful lives. Even in an atheistic age, this egalitarian spirit lives on in democracy. Nietzsche longs for a generation of “new philosophers” who can rescue us from our mediocrity. These philosophers will differ markedly from the “philosophical laborers” and scholars of the universities, who work to find new knowledge but lack the creative spirit to do anything with it. Nietzsche’s new philosophers will rebel against the values and assumptions of their day and will have the strength of will and creativity to affirm something new.Rather than thinking on egalitarian lines that the same rules apply to all people, Nietzsche argues that there is an “order of rank,” among both people and philosophies. Some people simply have stronger and more refined spirits than others, and to hold those people to the same rules is to hold them back. Pity is just a refined form of self-contempt, whereby we show preference for weakness.As a race, we have never lost our instinct for cruelty; we have only refined it. We are unique among animals in being both creatures and creators, and the strongest among us turn our instinct for cruelty against ourselves. The creator within us reshapes the creature that we are by violently attacking its weaknesses. Suffering, then, is essential to growing stronger, and we must struggle constantly to remake ourselves by assailing our weaknesses and prejudices. However, at heart, we have certain stupid convictions and assumptions that we simply cannot change. As if to prove his point, Nietzsche launches a diatribe about how he hates women.Nietzsche criticizes the narrow nationalism of many Europeans and praises the idea of the “good European,”

who foreshadows the future uniting of Europe. He discusses a number of different races, reserving particular venom for the English. He has high praise for the Jews, saying that though their religion is responsible for the slave morality that afflicts Europe, they also carry tremendous creative energy.Modern culture is defined by a tension between two kinds of morality. Master morality comes from the aristocratic view that whatever one is and likes is good and whatever one dislikes and is unlike one is bad. Slave morality, by contrast, comes from a resentment of the power of the masters: slaves see masters as evil and see themselves, in their weakness and poverty, as good. Thus, the master’s “good” is the slave’s “evil,” and the master’s “bad” is the slave’s “good.”Nietzsche believes that aristocratic nature is to some degree bred into us, so that some of us are simply born better off than others, and that society as a whole thrives with a strong aristocratic class. He suggests, however, that genius is perhaps not as rare as we suppose. What is rare is the self-mastery to remove oneself from others and discipline oneself to the point that one can refine one’s genius. Nietzsche closes the prose section of his book by lamenting that all his thoughts seem so dead and plain on paper. Language can only capture ideas that are fixed in place: the liveliest thoughts are free and constantly changing, and so they cannot be put into words. The book closes with a poem in which the speaker has climbed a high mountain and awaits like-minded friends to join him.AnalysisFor Nietzsche, change is the predominant feature of reality. Everything is always changing: not just matter and energy, but ideas, wills, and hence truth. Philosophy and science tend to see the world as primarily made up of facts and things that we can observe and regulate, providing the illusion of stable, objective truths. Nietzsche rejects this metaphysics of facts and things, suggesting instead that the world is primarily made up of wills—some conscious and some unconscious—which are constantly competing for

dominance. Whatever we see as “true” at a given moment is not objectively so but rather represents the victory of a particular will against the others working within us. Nietzsche’s main targets, from Christianity to science to democracy to traditional philosophy, are all guilty in one way or another of denying or avoiding the fact that reality is composed of a constantly shifting competition between wills. They wish to see the universe as fixed—whether by divine law or the laws of nature—and wish to slacken the struggle and competition that characterize existence. Nietzsche sees any effort to resist struggle and change as contrary to life.While Nietzsche’s account of the will to power applies to everything in existence, the concept is easiest to grasp if we think of it in terms of an inner struggle. We all live according to certain assumptions or fundamental beliefs, some more obvious than others. One person may hold fundamentalist religious views, while another may cling unquestioningly to the assumption that democracy is the best political system. For Nietzsche, the question of whether these assumptions and beliefs are true or false, just or unjust, is not an issue. What matters is that all beliefs and assumptions represent our identity—they are the bedrock from which we build ourselves. The greatest power that we can have is power over ourselves, and we gain power over ourselves in the same way we gain power over external enemies: by attacking them and submitting them to our will. Strong-willed people, whom Nietzsche often refers to as free spirits, are always ready to attack their fundamental beliefs and assumptions, to question their very identity. There is great safety in resting assured that certain truths or beliefs are beyond question, and it takes great courage to question our fundamental “truths.” Nietzsche writes that what is important is not the courage of our convictions but the courage for an attack on our convictions. Such courage exhibits a strong will to power, the will to choose self-mastery over safety.With Nietzsche’s denigration of Christianity and democracy, and his ardent praise of strife and violence, it is important

to note that he is not the warmongering brute that the Nazi party, among others, proclaimed him to be. Nietzsche does not so much promote physical violence as he admires the vigor of those who are capable of it. He thinks it hypocritical that people who lack the vigor to be violent condemn violence. However, physical violence is usually destructive and hardly ever useful. What Nietzsche admires most is the person who is capable of physical violence but sublimates this will to destroy others, directing it instead at himself or herself. Better than being ruthless with others is being ruthless with oneself and attacking all the petty beliefs and assumptions one clings to for a feeling of safety and stability. A free spirit is free by having won an inner struggle, not an outer one. When Nietzsche writes approvingly of violence, it is not so much that he thinks of war as inherently good but rather that he thinks anything is preferable to the mediocrity of our cloistered modern lives. Better to suffer hardship, he believes, than lead a safe and unadventurous life.The title of this book expresses Nietzsche’s interest in an extra-moral worldview. Concepts like good and evil come from a moral worldview, where we question people’s motives and judge them accordingly. However, as Nietzsche shows, our motives are themselves subject to analysis. For example, he criticizes the seemingly altruistic motives of Christian charity as a form of resentful vengeance by the powerless. Throughout the book, Nietzsche highlights the various drives and wills that lead us to adopt one or another moral worldview. In doing so, Nietzsche hopes to lead us to a point “beyond good and evil,” where we see moral concepts as manifestations of deeper drives. At this point, we will no longer judge an action based on its motives but will judge motives based on the spirit in which they were formulated. For example, we should not condemn a violent act for being violent; rather, we should inquire about the will behind it. If the violent act were motivated by a spiteful, resentful will, then the violent act is contemptible, but if it were motivated by a healthy will, guiltlessly claiming what it wants, then the violent act is acceptable. Nietzsche

advocates for a strong and healthy will, which acts cheerfully, independently, and free from resentment.

On the Genealogy of MoralsSummaryOn the Genealogy of Morals, sometimes translated as On the Genealogy of Morality, consists of three essays, each of which questions the value of our moral concepts and examines their evolution.The first essay, “‘Good and Evil,’ ‘Good and Bad,’” examines the evolution of two distinctive moral codes. The first, “knightly-aristocratic” or “master” morality, comes from the early rulers and conquerors, who judged their own power, wealth, and success to be “good” and the poverty and wretchedness of those they ruled over to be “bad.” Nietzsche associates the second, “priestly” or “slave” morality, primarily with the Jews. This morality originates with priests, who despise the warrior caste and condemn their lustful power as evil, while calling their own state of poverty and self-denial good. This slave morality turns master morality on its head. Driven by a feeling of ressentiment, or resentment, slave morality is much deeper and more refined than master morality. Its crowning achievement is Christianity: Christian love is born from hatred. While slave morality is deeper and more interesting than the casual self-confidence of the masters, Nietzsche worries that it has rendered us all mediocre. Modern humans, who have inherited the mantle of slave morality, prefer safety and comfort to conquest and risk. The slave morality of the priestly caste focuses the attention on the evil of others and on the afterlife, distracting people from enjoying the present and improving themselves.Nietzsche illustrates the contrast between the two kinds of morality by reference to a bird of prey and a lamb. Nietzsche imagines that the lambs may judge the birds of prey to be evil for killing and consider themselves good for not killing. These judgments are meaningless, since lambs do not refrain from killing out of some kind of moral loftiness but simply because they are unable to kill. Similarly, we can only condemn birds of prey for killing if

we assume that the “doer,” the bird of prey, is somehow detachable from the “deed,” the killing. Nietzsche argues that there is no doer behind the deed, taking as an example the sentence, “lightning flashes.” There is no such thing as lightning separate from the flash. Our assumption that there are doers who are somehow distinct from deeds is simply a prejudice inspired by the subject–predicate form of grammar. Slave morality detaches subject from predicate, doer from deed, and identifies the subject with a “soul,” which is then liable to judgment. While slave morality is definitely dominant in the modern world, Nietzsche hopes that master morality will have a resurgence.In the second essay, “‘Guilt,’ ‘Bad Conscience,’ and the Like,” Nietzsche suggests that our concept of guilt originally had no moral overtones, identifying a similarity in the German words for guilt and debt. A person in debt was “guilty” and the creditor could make good on the debt by punishing the debtor. Punishment was not intended to make the debtor feel badly but simply to bring pleasure to the creditor. Punishment was cruel but cheerful: there were no hard feelings afterward. A society with laws is like a creditor: when someone breaks the law, they have harmed society and society can exact punishment. The concept of justice in effect takes punishment out of the hands of individuals by claiming that, in a society, it is not individuals but laws that are transgressed, and so it is the laws, not individuals, that must exact punishment. Reflecting on the many different purposes punishment has served over the ages, Nietzsche observes that all concepts have a long and fluid history where they have had many different meanings. The meanings of concepts are dictated by a will to power, where concepts are given meanings or uses by the different wills that appropriate them.Nietzsche identifies the origin of bad conscience in the transition from hunter–gatherer to agrarian societies. Our violent animal instincts ceased to be useful in a cooperative society, and we suppressed them by turning them inward. By struggling within ourselves, we carved out an inner life, bad conscience, a sense of beauty, and a sense of

indebtedness to our ancestors, which is the origin of religion. At present, we direct our bad conscience primarily toward our animal instincts, but Nietzsche urges us instead to direct our bad conscience against the life-denying forces that suppress our instincts.The title of the third essay poses the question, “What Is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?” Why have people from various cultures pursued an ascetic life of self-denial? Nietzsche suggests that asceticism enhances the feeling of power by giving a person complete control over him- or herself. In many cases, then, asceticism is ultimately life affirming rather than life denying. Ascetic ideals manifest themselves differently among different kinds of people. A sort of philosophical asceticism leads philosophers to claim that the world around them is illusory. This is one way of looking at things, and Nietzsche applauds looking at matters from as many perspectives as possible. There is no single right way to look at the truth, so it’s best to be flexible in our viewpoints.Nietzsche sees asceticism as being born of spiritual sickness. Those that find the struggle of life too hard turn against life and find it blameworthy. Nietzsche sees the majority of humanity as sick and sees priests as doctors who are themselves sick. Religion addresses this spiritual sickness partly by extinguishing the will through meditation and work but also through “orgies of feeling,” manifest in the consciousness of sin and guilt. We condemn ourselves as sinners and masochistically punish ourselves. Science and scholarship are not alternatives to the ascetic ideals of religion. They simply replace the worship of God with the worship of truth. A healthy spirit must question the value of truth. Nietzsche concludes by observing that while ascetic ideals direct the will against life, they still constitute a powerful exercise of the will: “Man would rather will nothingness than not will.”AnalysisIn his essay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Michel Foucault notes an important distinction in Nietzsche’s work between the concepts of genealogy and origin. An origin

suggests a fixed starting point and, hence, an original essence with which something is associated. For example, the Adam and Eve story of creation locates human origins in the Garden of Eden. Naturally, we have changed since the time of Adam and Eve, but certain essential features, such as original sin, remain with us. Genealogy fits more comfortably with the paradigm of Darwinian evolution. With genealogy, there is no fixed starting point and no essential features, just a gradual and often haphazard progression from one state to another. We might understand Nietzsche’s main purpose in this book as being to shift our understanding of morality from an origins model to a genealogy model. That is, we tend to think of moral concepts like good and evil as stable, grounded in some distant origin. Nietzsche attempts to show that our moral concepts have always been fluid, to the point that the word good, for example, has had contrary meanings to different people. Our moral concepts have a long genealogy and are by no means fixed. By dislodging the idea that good and evil exist somehow independently of our wills, Nietzsche encourages a greater sense of agency with regard to our moral lives.Nietzsche explains the fluidity of moral concepts by reference to the will to power. According to Nietzsche, the will to power is the fundamental drive in the universe. Every will has a desire for independence and to dominate other wills, though this will to power expresses itself in many different ways. For instance, the schoolyard bully achieves physical power over others, while the nerd studies hard to achieve an intellectual kind of power. Since all concepts are human inventions, Nietzsche argues, all concepts are ultimately the expression of some will or other. For example, the concept of good can mean wealth and vigor or it can mean meekness and charity, depending on who interprets it. If we seem to have relatively fixed moral concepts in this day and age, that is only a result of the triumph of slave morality over all other points of view. By assuming that these concepts have fixed meanings, we are surrendering our will to the wills of those who framed these

concepts. Strong-willed people, according to Nietzsche, resist the categories of thought that are foisted upon them and have the independence and creativity to see the world from their own distinctive perspectives.While it often seems as if Nietzsche praises the morality of ancient aristocratic cultures and condemns Judeo-Christian “slave” morality, he does not simply advocate a return to the older “master” morality. Although its net effect has been detrimental, slave morality has brought a number of benefits. While ancient conquerors had clearer consciences, they were also shallow. We have become deep and cunning and have acquired the characteristics that distinguish us from animals, as a result of the slave’s turning inward. Those who cannot successfully project their will to power outward and dominate those around them project it inward instead and gain fearsome power over themselves. The dominance of Judeo-Christian morality in the modern age is evidence of how the slave’s inner strength is much more powerful than the conqueror’s outer strength. Nietzsche’s concern with slave morality is not that it has turned us inward but that we are in danger of losing our inner struggle. Inner struggle is painful and difficult, and Nietzsche sees in the asceticism of religion, science, and philosophy a desire to give up the struggle or to minimize the hardship. Nietzsche insists that we must not see humanity as an end to be settled for but rather as a bridge to be crossed between animals and what he memorably terms the overman. Properly directed against the life-denying forces within us, the inner strength brought about by slave morality can be our greatest blessing.Nietzsche often laments that language is incapable of expressing what he wishes to express, and he lays principal blame on the subject–predicate form of grammar. Because all sentences divide into subject and predicate, we are lulled into thinking that reality, too, bears this form and that there are doers and deeds. In Nietzsche’s view there are only deeds and no doers, and it is just as absurd to say that an eagle exists distinct from its act of killing as it is to say that lightning exists distinct from its act of flashing. An eagle is

the act of killing just as much as lightning is the act of flashing: we are what we do. We might say Nietzsche’s is a metaphysics of verbs rather than a metaphysics of nouns. While most metaphysics conceives of a universe made up of things, Nietzsche conceives of a universe made up of wills. We are inclined to believe that there are subjects who exercise their will only because our grammar demands that we give subjects to verbs. In fact, Nietzsche suggests, there is no “I” that makes decisions and acts on them. Rather, that “I” is the forum in which different wills assert themselves in the form of decisions and actions. Frustratingly, both for Nietzsche and his readers, it is very difficult to wrap our minds around this idea that there is no doer behind the deed because every written expression of this idea relies on grammatical structures that reinforce the contrary idea.

In Ecce Homo, essentially Nietzsche's autobiography, he expresses surprise that no one ever asked what the real Zarathushtra meant to him (most folks wrongly thought it was just Nietzsche having some fun). "What constitutes the tremendous uniqueness of that Persian in history" Nietzsche wrote, was that "Zarathushtra was the first to see in the struggle between good and evil the actual wheel in the working of things....". And although Nietzsche was not a fan of the moral categories that Judeo-Christians then seized upon, he pointed out that Zarathushtra's teaching "and his alone, upholds truthfulness as the supreme virtue... To tell the truth and to shoot well with arrows: that is Persian virtue." He called Zarathushtra "more truthful than any other thinker." And he announced that "the self-overcoming of morality through truthfulness is what the name Zarathustra means in my mouth."

Nietzsche, in other words, praised Zarathushtra for what Nietzsche took to be his willingness to take a fresh look at the world and to make distinctions (as between "good and evil"). But the specific values of GOOD and EVIL that evolved (through what I take to be Judeo-Christian MIS-interpretation of Zarathushtra) --based upon a transcendental, unchanging, objective, omniscient, supreme God-- were anathema to Nietzsche.

Why? Because such values do not apply to what we as human beings are in real life. We are not omnipotent beings--never will be. These kinds of values do not promote growth but rather inhibit the realization of our potential as human beings. They deny our nature.

The ubermensch or overman[2] that Nietzsche spoke of (and which I take to be analogous to what Zarathushtra wants us to aspire to) looks at the world as it is (and uses what Zarathushtra would call his "good mind") to generate values from that very environment--he then tests these values in the real world, avoiding prejudgment.

Rather than deny the drives within him and his needs for gratification, the overman joyously pursues the fullness of his potential--guilt and negativity are avoided. Likewise, Zarathushtra himself was anything but an ascetic (and in this aspect, at least, most Zoroastrians--even among the traditionalists, still agree. In the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition, for example, sex is somehow sinful--something that both Nietzsche and Zarathushtra would consider utterly absurd).

"Good and evil" are not specifically, immutably defined terms (Dr. Jafarey's definition, I think, is suitably generic)--not some higher authority, some set of holy values for us to discover--rather, according to Nietzsche, the overman trusts himself to make the distinction between good and evil. My own personal take is that it is a pragmatic calculus--that which promotes the welfare of the "living world," that which helps us realize our potential and radiate happiness. But, in any case, values themselves are not immutable--they can and should change as we make the world, as in Dr. Jafarey's translation "ever fresh."

This process of renovation of the world--reinvention and self-realization, taking nothing for granted, is what it means to live (I think both to Nietzsche and to Zarathushtra). It is life itself.  This, I think, is what Nietzsche means by the term "overcoming."

That's a brief summary of where I think Nietzsche is on Zarathushtra. Zarathushtra, I believe, was a very powerful inspiration to Nietzsche and few westerners (I dare say few people) have ever understood Zarathushtra so intelligently.

[1] These notes were produced by Arthur Pearlstein.  He has had an interest in understanding Nietzsche’s philosophy starting in college when the trivial fact that Nietzsche and him have the same birthday caught his attention.

[2] Insight into the significance of the term Overman provided courtesy of Mr. Alexander Bard: Overman as in the English word ‘overcoming,’ meaning Man overcoming his own predicament, understanding who he is, beyond his own actions. This is the same as introducing words, deeds, actions as ethics. Strictly, seeing the human condition as a series of cause and effect. Making ethics immanent. Reducing the transcendental to a condition for the thought process. This is the exact opposite of Judeo-Christian thought where Man is REMOVED from Nature and Mind is turned into an independent capacity from, for example, The Body or The Context. Nietzsche puts Mind back into The Body and makes it a part of The Body, realizing that Mind, although its product is different from Nature (Culture) is not in any way independent of Nature. Because without Nature (as in Body or Society) there would be no Mind.

Superman, as in a transcendentally superior being to current Man, is a totally absurd notion to Nietzsche. This is why for example Nazism (but also much of current popular culture) or for that matter the worship of messiahs as “men of God” is totally alien to Nietzscheanism, as it of course is to Zarathushtra. The founder of our religion is our equal, not our superior.

To read a book early in the morning, at daybreak, in the vigor and dawn of one's strength—this is sheer viciousness! —"—Ecce Homo, WIASC, 8

Human, All Too HumanPreface

1

Often enough, and always with great consternation, people have told me that there is something distinctive in all my writings, from the "Birth of Tragedy" to the most recently published "Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future" [subtitle of Beyond Good and Evil]. All of them, I have been told, contain snares and nets for careless birds, and an almost constant, unperceived challenge to reverse one's habitual estimations and esteemed habits. "What's that? Everything is only—human, all too human?" With such a sigh one comes from my writings, they say, with a kind of wariness and distrust even toward morality, indeed tempted and encouraged in no small way to become the spokesman for the worst things: might they perhaps be only the best slandered? My writings have been called a school for suspicion, even more for contempt, fortunately also for courage and, in fact, for daring. Truly, I myself do not believe that anyone has ever looked into the world with such deep suspicion, and not only as an occasional devil's advocate, but every bit as much, to speak theologically, as an enemy and challenger of God. Whoever guesses something of the consequences of any deep suspicion, something of the chills and fears stemming from isolation, to which every man burdened with an unconditional difference of viewpoint is condemned, this person will understand how often I tried to take shelter somewhere, to recover from myself, as if to forget myself entirely for a time (in some sort of reverence, or enmity, or scholarliness, or frivolity, or stupidity); and he will also understand why, when I could not find what I needed, I had to gain it by force artificially, to counterfeit it, or create it poetically. (And what have poets ever done otherwise? And why else do we have all the art in the world?) What I always needed most to cure and restore myself, however, was the belief that I was not the only one to be thus, to see thus—I needed the enchanting intuition of kinship and equality in the eye and in desire, repose in a trusted friendship; I needed a shared blindness, with no suspicion or question marks, a pleasure in foregrounds, surfaces, what is near, what is nearest, in everything that has color, skin, appearance. Perhaps one could accuse me in this regard of some sort of "art," various sorts of finer counterfeiting: for example, that I had deliberately and willfully closed my eyes to Schopenhauer's blind will to morality, at a time when I was already clear-sighted enough about morality; similarly, that I had deceived myself about Richard Wagner's incurable romanticism, as if it were a beginning and not an end; similarly, about the Greeks; similarly about the Germans and their future—and there might be a whole long list of such similarlies. But even if this all were true and I were accused of it with good reason, what do you know, what could you know about the amount of self-preserving cunning, or reason and higher protection that is contained in such self-deception—and how much falseness I still require so that I may keep permitting myself the luxury of my truthfulness?...Enough, I am still alive; and life has not been devised by morality: it wants deception, it lives on deception—but wouldn't you know it? Here I am, beginning again, doing what I have always done, the old immoralist and birdcatcher, I am speaking immorally, extra-morally, "beyond good and evil."

2

Thus then, when I found it necessary, I invented once upon a time the "free spirits," to whom this discouragingly encouraging book with the title "Human, All Too Human," is dedicated. There are no such " free spirits" nor have there been such, but, as already said, I then required them for company to keep me cheerful in the midst of evils (sickness,

loneliness, foreignness—acedia, inactivity) as brave companions and ghosts with whom I could laugh and gossip when so inclined and send to the devil when they became bores—as compensation for the lack of friends. That such free spirits will be possible some day, that our Europe will have such bold and cheerful sights amongst her sons of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, actually and bodily, and not merely, as in my case, as the shadows of a hermit's phantasmagoria—I should be the last to doubt thereof. Already I see them coming, slowly; and perhaps I am doing something to hasten their coming when I describe in advance under what auspices I see them originate, and upon what paths I see them come.

3

One may conjecture that a spirit in whom the type "free spirit" will one day become ripe and sweet to the point of perfection has had its decisive experience in a great liberation and that previously it was all the more a fettered spirit and seemed to be chained forever to its pillar and corner. What fetters the fastest? What bonds are all but unbreakable? In the case of men of a high and select kind they will be their duties: that reverence proper to youth, that reserve and delicacy before all that is honored and revered from of old, that gratitude for the soul out of which they have grown, for the hand which led them, for the holy place where they learned to worship—their supreme moments themselves will fetter them the fastest, lay upon them the most enduring obligation. The great liberation comes from those who are thus fettered suddenly, like the shock of an earthquake: the youthful soul is all at once convulsed, torn loose, torn away—it itself does not know what is happening. A drive and impulse rules and masters it like a command; a will and desire awakens to go off, anywhere, at any cost; a vehement dangerous curiosity for an undiscovered world flames and flickers in all its senses. "Better to die than to go on living here"—thus resounds the imperious voice and temptation: and this "here," this "at home" is everything it had hitherto loved! A sudden terror and suspicion of what it loved, a lightning-bolt of contempt for what it called "duty," a rebellious, arbitrary, volcanically erupting desire for travel, strange places, estrangement, coldness, soberness, frost, a hatred for love, perhaps a desecrating blow and glance backwards to where it formerly loved and worshipped, perhaps a hot blush of shame at what it has just done and at the same time an exultation that it has done it, a drunken, inwardly exultant shudder which betrays that a victory has been won—a victory? over what? over whom? an enigmatic, question-packed, questionable victory, but the first victory nonetheless: such bad and painful things are part of the history of the great liberation. It is at the same time a sickness that can destroy the man who has it, this first outbreak of strength and will to self-determination, to evaluating on one's own account, this will to free will: and how much sickness is expressed in the wild experiments and singularities through which the liberated prisoner now seeks to demonstrate his mastery over things! He prowls cruelly around with an unslaked lasciviousness; what he captures has to expiate the perilous tension of his pride; what excites him he tears apart. With a wicked laugh he turns round whatever he finds veiled and through some sense of shame or other spared and pampered: he puts to the test what these things look like when they are reversed. It is a matter of arbitrariness with him, and pleasure in arbitrariness, if he now perhaps bestows his favor on what had hitherto a bad repute—if he inquisitively and temptingly haunts what is

specially forbidden. Behind all his toiling and weaving—for he is restlessly and aimlessly on his way as if in a desert—stands the question mark of a more and more perilous curiosity. "Can all values not be turned round? and is good perhaps evil? and God only an invention and finesse of the Devil? Is everything perhaps in the last resort false? And if we are deceived, are we not for that very reason also deceivers? must we not be deceivers?—such thoughts as these tempt him and lead him on, ever further away, ever further down. Solitude encircles and embraces him, ever more threatening, suffocating, heart-tightening, that terrible goddess and mater saeva cupidinum ["wild mother of the passions"]—but who today knows what solitude is?...

4

From this morbid isolation, from the desert of these years of temptation and experiment, it is still a long road to that tremendous overflowing certainty and health which may not dispense even with sickness, as a means and fish-hook of knowledge, to that mature freedom of spirit which is equally self-mastery and discipline of the heart and permits access to many and contradictory modes of thought—to that inner spaciousness and indulgence of superabundance which excludes the danger that the spirit may even on its own road perhaps lose itself and become infatuated and remain seated intoxicated in some corner or other, to that superfluity of formative, curative, molding and restorative forces which is precisely the sign of great health, that superfluity which grants to the free spirit the dangerous privilege of living experimentally and of being allowed to offer itself to adventure: the master's privilege of the free spirit! In between there may lie long years of convalescence, years full of variegated, painfully magical transformations ruled and led along by a tenacious will to health which often ventures to clothe and disguise itself as health already achieved. There is a midway condition which a man of such a destiny will not be able to recall without emotion: it is characterized by a pale, subtle happiness of light and sunshine, a feeling of bird-like freedom, bird-like altitude, bird-like exuberance, and a third thing in which curiosity is united with a tender contempt. A "free spirit"—this cool expression does one good in every condition, it is almost warming. One lives no longer in the fetters of love and hatred, without yes, without no, near or far as one wishes, preferably slipping away, evading, fluttering off, gone again, again flying aloft; one is spoiled, as everyone is who has at some time seen a tremendous number of things beneath him—and one becomes the opposite of those who concern themselves with things which have nothing to do with them. Indeed, the free spirit henceforth has to do only with things—and how many things!—with which he is no longer concerned...

5

A step further in convalescence: and the free spirit again draws near to life—slowly, to be sure, almost reluctantly, almost mistrustfully. It again grows warmer around him, yellower, as it were; feeling and feeling for others acquire depth, warm breezes of all kinds blow across him. It seems to him as if his eyes are only now open to what is close at hand. He is astonished and sits silent: where had he been? These close and closest things: how changed they seemed! what bloom and magic they have acquired! He looks back gratefully—grateful to his wandering, to his hardness and self-alienation, to his

viewing of far distances and bird-like flights in cold heights. What a good thing he had not always stayed "at home," stayed "under his own roof" like a delicate apathetic loafer! He had been beside himself: no doubt of that. Only now does he see himself—and what surprises he experiences as he does so! What unprecedented shudders! What happiness even in the weariness, the old sickness, the relapses of the convalescent! How he loves to sit sadly still, to spin out patience, to lie in the sun! Who understands as he does the happiness that comes in winter, the spots of sunlight on the wall! They are the most grateful animals in the world, also the most modest, these convalescents and lizards again half turned towards life:—there are some among them who allow no day to pass without hanging a little song of praise on the hem of its departing robe. And, speaking seriously, it is a radical cure for all pessimism (the well-known disease of old idealists and falsehood-mongers) to become ill after the manner of these free spirits, to remain ill a good while, and then grow well (I mean "better ") for a still longer period. It is wisdom, practical wisdom, to prescribe even health for oneself for a long time only in small doses.

6

At that time it may finally happen that, under the sudden illumination of a still stressful, still changeable health, the free, ever freer spirit begins to unveil the riddle of that great liberation which had until then waited dark, questionable, almost untouchable in his memory. If he has for long hardly dared to ask himself: "why so apart? so alone? renouncing everything I once reverenced? renouncing reverence itself? why this hardness, this suspiciousness, this hatred for your own virtues?"—now he dares to ask it aloud and hears in reply something like an answer. "You shall become master over yourself, master also over your virtues. Formerly they were your masters; but they must be only your instruments beside other instruments. You shall get control over your For and Against and learn how to display first one and then the other in accordance with your higher goal. You shall learn to grasp the sense of perspective in every value judgment—the shifting, distortion, and apparent teleology of the horizons and everything that belongs to perspective; also the amount of stupidity which opposite values involve, and all the intellectual loss with which every every For and Against has to be paid for. You shall learn to grasp the necessary injustice in every For and Against, injustice as inseparable from life, life itself as conditioned by the sense of perspective and its injustice. You shall above all see with your own eyes where injustice is always at its greatest: where life has developed at its smallest, narrowest, neediest, most incipient and yet cannot avoid taking itself as the goal and measure of things and for the sake of its own preservation secretly and meanly and ceaselessly crumbling away and calling into question the higher, greater, richer—you shall see with your own eyes the problem of order of rank, and how power and right and spaciousness of perspective grow into the heights together. You shall"—enough: from now on the free spirit knows what "you shall" he has obeyed, and he also knows what he now can, what only now he—may do...

7

Thus does the free spirit answer himself with regard to the riddle of emancipation, and ends therewith, while he generalises his case, in order thus to decide with regard to his

experience. "As it has happened to me," he says to himself, "so must it happen to everyone in whom a mission seeks to embody itself and to 'come into the world.'" The secret power and necessity of this mission will operate in and upon the destined individuals like an unconscious pregnancy—long before they have had the mission itself in view and have known its name. Our destiny rules over us, even when we are not yet aware of it; it is the future that makes laws for our today. Granted that it is the problem of the gradations of rank, of which we may say that it is our problem, we free spirits; now only in the midday of our life do we first understand what preparations, detours, tests, experiments, and disguises the problem needed, before it was permitted to rise before us, and how we had first to experience the most manifold and opposing conditions of distress and happiness in soul and body, as adventurers and circumnavigators of the inner world called "man," as surveyors of all the "higher" and the "one-above-another," also called "man"—penetrating everywhere, almost without fear, rejecting nothing, losing nothing, tasting everything, cleansing everything from all that is accidental, and, as it were, sifting it out—until at last we could say, we free spirits, "Here—a new problem! Here a long ladder, the rungs of which we ourselves have sat upon and mounted—which we ourselves at some time have been! Here a higher place, a lower place, an under-us, an immeasurably long order, a hierarchy which we see; here—our problem!"

8

No psychologist or augur will be in doubt for a moment as to what stage of the development just described the following book belongs (or is assigned to). But where are these psychologists nowadays? In France, certainly; perhaps in Russia; assuredly not in Germany. Reasons are not lacking why the present-day Germans could still even count this as an honour to them—bad enough, surely, for one who in this respect is un-German in disposition and constitution! This German book, which has been able to find readers in a wide circle of countries and nations—it has been about ten years going its rounds—and must understand some sort of music and piping art, by means of which even coy foreign ears are seduced into listening—it is precisely in Germany that this book has been most negligently read, and worst listened to; what is the reason? "It demands too much," I have been told, "it appeals to men free from the pressure of coarse duties, it wants refined and fastidious senses, it needs superfluity—superfluity of time, of clearness of sky and heart, of otium [leisure, idleness] in the boldest sense of the term—purely good things, which we Germans of today do not possess and therefore cannot give." After such a polite answer my philosophy advises me to be silent and not to question further; besides, in certain cases, as the proverb points out, one only remains a philosopher by being—silent.

Friedrich NietzscheNice,

Spring 1886

Ecce HomoHow one becomes what one is

Human, All Too HumanWith Two Sequels

1.

"Human, All Too Human" is the monument of a crisis. It is called a book for free spirits: almost every sentence marks some victory—here I liberated myself from what in my nature did not belong to me. Idealism does not belong to me; the title means: "where you see ideal things, I see—human, alas, all too human!" ... I know man better ...— The term "free spirit" here is not to be understood in any other sense: it means a spirit that has become free, that has again taken possession of itself. The tone, the tone-of-voice, is completely changed: you will find the book clever, cool, perhaps hard and mocking. A certain spirituality of noble taste seems to be fighting continually against a more passionate current in order to stay afloat. In this connection it makes sense that it was actually the hundredth anniversary of the death of Voltaire that the book pleaded, as it were, as an excuse for coming out in 1878. For Voltaire was above all, in contrast to all who wrote after him, a grandseigneur of the spirit: just like me.— The name of Voltaire on one of my essays—that really meant progress—toward me ... On closer inspection you discover a merciless spirit that knows all the hideouts where the ideal is at home,—where it has its secret dungeons and, as it were, its ultimate safety. With a torch whose light never "wavers" [Eine Fackel in den Händen, die durchaus kein "fackelndes" Licht giebt], an incisive light is thrown into this underworld of the ideal. This is war, but war without powder and smoke, without warlike poses, without pathos and contorted limbs—all that would still be "idealism." One error after another is coolly placed on ice, the ideal is not refuted—it freezes to death ... Here, for example, "the genius" freezes to death; at the next corner, "the saint"; under a huge icicle, "the hero"; in the end "faith" freezes to death, so-called "conviction," "pity" cools down considerably too—almost everywhere "the thing in itself" freezes to death ...

2.

The beginnings of this book belong right in the midst of the first Bayreuth Festival performance; a profound alienation from everything that surrounded me there is one of its preconditions. Whoever has any notion of the visions I had encountered even before that, may guess how I felt when one day I woke up in Bayreuth. As if I were dreaming ... Wherever was I? I recognized nothing, I scarcely recognized Wagner. In vain did I leaf through my memories. Tribschen—a distant isle of the blessed: not a trace of any similarity. The incomparable days when the foundation stone was laid, the small group of people that had belonged, had celebrated and did not need first to acquire fingers for delicate matters: not a trace of any similarity. What had happened?— Wagner had been translated into German! The Wagnerian had become master over Wagner.— German art! the German master! German beer! ... We others, who knew only too well to what subtle artists and what cosmopolitanism of taste Wagner's art speaks, exclusively, were beside ourselves when we found Wagner again, draped with German "virtues."— I think I know the Wagnerians; I have "experienced" three generations, from the late Brendel [Karl Franz Brendel (1811-1868): music critic and editor of Neue Zeitschrift für Musik and co-editor of Anregungen für

Kunst] who confounded Wagner and Hegel, to the "idealists" of the Bayreuther Blätter [Wagner's periodical] who confounded Wagner and themselves,—I have heard every kind of confession of "beautiful souls" about Wagner. A kingdom for one sensible word!— In truth, a hair-raising company! Nohl, Pohl, Kohl—with charm [Grazie], in infinitum! [Karl Friedrich Ludwig Nohl (1831-1885): music professor and critic; Richrd Pohl (1826-1896): co-editor of Anregungen für Kunst; Kohl: i.e., rubbish (literally: cabbage).] Not a single abortion is missing among them, not even the anti-Semite.— Poor Wagner! Where had he landed!— If he had at least entered into swine! [Luke 8:33: "Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned."] But to descend among Germans! ... Really, for the instruction of posterity one ought to stuff a genuine Bayreuther or, better yet, preserve him in spirits, for spirits are lacking—, with the label: that is how the "spirit" looked on which the "Reich" was founded ... Enough, in the midst of it I left for a couple of weeks, very suddenly, although a charming Parisienne tried to console me; the only excuse I offered Wagner was a fatalistic telegram. In Klingenbrunn, a small town concealed in the woods of the Böhmerwald, I dragged around my melancholy and contempt for Germans like a disease and from time to time I would write a sentence into my notebook, under the general title "The Plowshare," hard psychologica that can perhaps still be found in "Human, All Too Human."

3.

What reached a decision in me at that time was not a break with Wagner—I noted a total aberration of my instincts of which particular blunders, whether Wagner or the professorship of Basel, were mere symptoms. I was overcome by impatience with myself; I saw that it was high time for me to recall and reflect on myself. All at once it became clear to me in a terrifying way how much time I had already wasted,—how useless and arbitrary my whole existence as a philologist appeared in relation to my task. I felt ashamed of this false modesty ... Ten years lay behind me in which the nourishment of my spirit had really come to a stop, in which I had not learned anything new that was useful, in which I had forgotten an absurd amount for the sake of dusty scholarly odds and ends [Krimskrams]. Crawling scrupulously with bad eyes through ancient metrists—that’s what I had come to!— It stirred my compassion to see myself utterly emaciated, utterly starved: my knowledge simply failed to include realities, and my "idealities" were not worth a damn!— A truly burning thirst took hold of me: henceforth I really pursued nothing more than physiology, medicine, and natural sciences,—and I did not return even to properly historical studies until my task compelled me to, imperiously. It was then, too, that I first guessed how an activity chosen in defiance of one’s instincts, a so-called "vocation" for which one does not have the least vocation, is related to the need for deadening the feeling of desolation and hunger by means of a narcotic art,—for example, Wagnerian art. Looking about me cautiously, I have discovered that a large number of young men experience the same distress: one antinatural step virtually compels the second. In Germany, in the "Reich," to speak unambiguously, all too many are condemned to choose vocations too early, and then to waste away under a burden they can no longer shake off ... These people require Wagner as an opiate,—they forget themselves, they are rid of themselves for a moment ... What am I saying! for five or six hours! —

4.

It was then that my instinct made its inexorable decision against any longer yielding, going along, and confounding myself. Any kind of life, the most unfavorable conditions, sickness, poverty—anything seemed preferable to that unseemly "selflessness" into which I had got myself originally in ignorance and youth and in which I had got stuck later on from inertia and so-called "sense of duty."— Here it happened in a manner that I cannot admire sufficiently that, precisely at the right time, my father’s wicked heritage came to my aid,—at bottom, predestination to an early death. Sickness detached me slowly: it spared me any break, any violent and offensive step. Thus I did not lose any goodwill and actually gained a little. My sickness also gave me the right to change all my habits completely; it permitted, it commanded me to forget; it bestowed on me the necessity of lying still, of leisure, of waiting and being patient ... But that means, of thinking! ... My eyes alone put an end to all bookwormishness, in plain language: philology: I was delivered from the "book," for years I did not read a thing—the greatest benefit I ever conferred on myself! That nethermost self which had, as it were, been buried and grown silent under the continual pressure of having to listen to other selves (—and that is after all what reading means!) awakened slowly, shyly, dubiously,—but eventually it spoke again. Never have I felt happier with myself than in the sickest and most painful periods of my life: one only need look at "The Dawn" or perhaps the "Wanderer and His Shadow" to comprehend what this “return to myself” meant: a supreme kind of recovery! ... The other kind merely followed from this. —

5.

Human, All Too Human, this monument of rigorous self-discipline with which I put a sudden end to all my infections with "higher swindle," "idealism," "beautiful feelings," and other effeminacies, was written in the main in Sorrento; it was finished and received its final form during a winter in Basel, under conditions incomparably less favorable than those in Sorrento. Ultimately, Herr Peter Gast, who was then studying at the University of Basel and very devoted to me, has this book on his conscience. I dictated, my head bandaged and in pain, he wrote and also corrected,—fundamentally, he was really the writer while I was merely the author. When the book was finally finished and in my hands—a profound surprise for one so seriously ill—, I also sent two copies, among others, to Bayreuth. By a miraculously meaningful coincidence, I received at the very same time a beautiful copy of the text of Parsifal, with Wagner's inscription for me, "for his dear friend, Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Church Councilor."— This crossing of the two books—I felt as if I heard an ominous sound. Didn't it sound as if swords had crossed? ... At any rate, both of us felt that way: for both of us remained silent.— Around that time the first Bayreuther Blätter appeared: I understood for what it was high time.— Incredible! Wagner had become pious ...

6.

How I thought about myself at this time (1876), with what tremendous sureness I got hold of my task and its world-historical aspect, the whole book bears witness to that,

above all a very explicit passage: only, with my instinctive cunning, I avoided the little word "I" once again and bathed in world-historical glory, not Schopenhauer or Wagner this time but one of my friends, the excellent Dr. Paul Rée—fortunately far too refined a creature to ... Others were less refined: I have always recognized who among my readers was hopeless, for example the typical German professor—because on the basis of this passage they thought that they had to understand the whole book as higher Réealism ... In fact, the contents contradicted five or six propositions of my friend: a point discussed in the Preface to my Genealogy of Morals.— The passage reads: What is after all the main proposition that one of the boldest and coldest thinkers, the author of the book "On the Origin of Moral Feelings" [read: Nietzsche, the first immoralist] has reached on the basis of his incisive and penetrating analyses of human activity? "The moral man is no closer to the intelligible world than the physical man—for there is no intelligible world ..." This proposition, grown hard and sharp under the hammer blow of historical insight [read: revaluation of all values], may perhaps one day, in some future—1890!—serve as the ax swung against the "metaphysical need" of mankind,—but whether that will be more of a blessing or a curse for mankind, who could say? But in any case as a proposition of immense consequences, fruitful and terrible at the same time, looking into the world with that double vision [Doppelblick] which all great insights share ..."

In Human, All Too Human and Daybreak (1881), an almost Voltairean Nietzsche exulted in his own capacity to endure with a smile what Pascal had described as the "horror at the infinite immensity of spaces." Not until 1882's The Joyful Science did Nietzsche begin to develop the profundity that characterizes his mature and most justly admired work.

Like its immediate predecessors, The Joyful Science is a collection of numbered aphorisms ranging in length from a few words to several pages. This style, which Nietzsche employs in most of his later works, enables him to shift topics in unpredictable ways. An aphorism on politics might be followed by one on art, science, religion, psychology, German Idealism, newspapers, ancient philosophy, Renaissance history, or modern literature. Sometimes one aphorism builds on another, producing a sustained argument or interpretation; at other times the jarring juxtaposition between them leads to deliberate disorientation. It is amidst the chaotic stream of brilliantly disjointed insights and observations that the reader of The Joyful Science comes upon aphorism 125, "The Madman."

Nietzsche begins this one-and-a-half-page masterpiece of modern disenchantment by describing a madman who "lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: 'I seek God! I seek God!'" Then, as those in the square gawk and laugh at the lunatic with embarrassed disapproval, he cries out: "Whither is God? . . . I will tell you. We have killed him--you and I. All of us are his murderers. . . . God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him."

Nietzsche was hardly the first modern figure to espouse atheism. The most radical writers of the Enlightenment suspected that God was a fiction created by the human mind. G. W. F. Hegel famously declared that modernity is "Good Friday without Easter Sunday." And throughout the nineteenth century, a series of authors, from Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl

Marx to Charles Darwin, claimed that religion is a human projection onto a spiritually lifeless world. Nietzsche agreed with this tradition in every respect but one. Whereas most modern atheists viewed their lack of piety as an unambiguous good--as a mark of their liberation from the dead weight of authority and tradition--Nietzsche responded to his insight into the amoral chaos at the heart of the world with considerable pathos. If in Human, All Too Human and Daybreak he flirted with the facile cheerfulness so common to his fellow atheists, beginning with aphorism 125 of The Joyful Science, Nietzsche showed that he now understood with greater depth that the passing of God has potentially devastating consequences for Western Civilization. This is the madman's requiem aeternam deo:

But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?

If God is dead, then man has completely lost his orientation. There is no human dignity, no equality, no rights, no democracy, no liberalism, and no good and evil. In the light of Nietzsche's insight, a thinker such as Marx looks extraordinarily superficial, railing against religion on the one hand while remaining firmly attached to ideals of justice and equality on the other. He has failed to grasp the simple truth that if God is dead, then nothing at all can be taken for granted--and absolutely everything is permitted.

But how could God be dead? The idea is permeated by paradox. If God is who He claims to be, then it is obviously impossible for Him to have "bled to death under our knives," as the madman declares. (Of course Christians believe that, as the Son, God did die at our hands, but Nietzsche intends the madman's statements to apply to the triune God in His monotheistic unity.) God may come to be ignored by a world too fixated on earthly goods to notice Him, but clearly He is not vulnerable to human malice or indifference. Unless, of course, He never existed in the first place. Perhaps then it would make a kind of poetic sense to speak of God "dying" once people have ceased to believe in Him. In this case, man would not simply be responsible for killing God, but also for having given birth to Him in the first place. Much of Nietzsche's late work defends just such an interpretation, arguing that Western man is equally responsible for creating and destroying God. The most thorough statement of this view can be found in The Genealogy of Morals (1887), which purports to tell the hidden history of morality from its origins to its collapse in the modern age.

In the beginning, there was chaos. All of Nietzsche's books begin from this assumption. The Genealogy departs from those works in asserting that this primordial anarchy consisted of an unfocused, undifferentiated, and purposeless "will to power" that permeated all things. (Whether the will to power merely animates living creatures or acts as a metaphysical force that pervades all of nature remains unclarified.) The pointless,

anarchistic violence that characterized the prehistoric world came to an end when certain individuals began to focus their will to power on the goal of decisively triumphing over others. When they finally succeeded, these victorious individuals, whom Nietzsche dubs "the strong," foisted the first "moral valuation" onto mankind.

In the strong (or "noble") valuation, the good is nothing other than an expression of what the members of the victorious class do and what they affirm. And what they do is triumph ruthlessly over the weak by violence. Likewise, the opposite of the good--the bad--is defined by the strong as weakness, or the inability to conquer the strong. Nietzsche illustrates the dynamics of the strong valuation with an infamous image of birds of prey devouring defenseless lambs. The birds of prey do not choose to eat the lambs; there is thus no free will involved and nothing blameworthy about their viciousness. It's simply what they do; what they do is the essence of who they are; and who they are serves as the measure of good and bad.

Once the meaning of good and bad has been established, a theory of justice grows up on its basis. Justice for the strong amounted to a simple sense of proportionality: when an individual incurs a debt, he must discharge it by repaying it and/or submitting to retributive punishment. Nietzsche implies that, for the strong, facing up to wrongdoing and accepting punishment was largely a matter of honor, so in societies governed by the noble valuation justice was usually meted out quickly and brutally.

The preconditions were now in place for the birth of the gods. In Nietzsche's view, polytheistic religions emerged out of the stories that the strong told themselves about their long-forgotten, prehistoric origins. First, they imagined that the founders of their community were just like them, only stronger--and they developed rituals of sacrifice that enabled them to express gratitude and discharge imagined debts to these founders. Then, as their community grew in power and extent over time, the founders that the strong projected onto the past became even stronger. Eventually, the founders came to be thought of as gods, who served as noble ideals for the strong to emulate as they sought to cultivate their power and cruelty.

According to Nietzsche, it was within this context of divinely sanctioned oppression that an epochal "transvaluation of values" took place. This "slave revolt in morality" began when the weak--out of what Nietzsche calls their ressentiment and their "spirit of revenge" against the strong--started to teach a series of radically new and ingenious ideas. To begin with, they claimed for the first time that there is such a thing as free will, so the brutal actions of the strong, far from being simply "what they do," came to be understood as the result of a choice. The weak then likewise asserted that their own failure to triumph over the strong was a result of the choice to refrain from such actions, rather than an inability to do so. For the slavish revolutionaries, all human beings are tempted by "sin" to engage in "evil," and the strong are noteworthy above all else for their decision to embrace and even encourage such behavior, while the weak define their lives by the struggle to resist it. Thus it comes to be that what was formerly considered bad--namely, weakness--is christened as the highest good, while the formerly good--namely, strength--is transformed into evil.

In this way, the slaves (obviously the Jews and their Christian descendants) fashioned a life-denying "ascetic ideal" to replace the life-affirming valuation of the strong. Along with it comes the notion of a new kind of deity--a God above all other gods, to whom each of us owes a debt--an "original sin"--so great that we are powerless to discharge it on our own, without His gratuitous gift of redeeming grace. Unlike the gods of the strong, who behaved like outsized brutes and whose cruelty served as an attainable ideal for the strong to emulate, the God of the slaves is so transcendently good that all attempts to approximate His holiness inevitably fall short. Far from serving as a healthy ideal, then, the ascetic God ends up negating the world and everything in it, including human beings, by His very existence.

The ascetic ideal that gives birth to God is thus much more complicated than the valuation that preceded it. Whereas the noble valuation grew out of and enhanced the self-affirmation of the strong, the slaves adhere to an ideal that denigrates pride and therefore seeks to diminish and humiliate the self. And yet it, like all valuations, arises from out of the self and its will to power. As Nietzsche writes in Human, All Too Human, "Man takes positive pleasure in violating himself with excessive demands and afterwards idolizing this tyrannically demanding something in his soul. In every ascetic morality, man worships one part of himself as a god and in doing so demonizes the other part."

Sociology, the scientific study of human social relations or group life. Other disciplines within the social sciences—including economics, political science, anthropology, and psychology—are also concerned with topics that fall within the scope of human society. Sociologists examine the ways in which social structures and institutions—such as class, family, community, and power—and social problems—such as crime and abuse—influence society.

Social interaction, or the responses of individuals to each other, is perhaps the basic sociological concept, because such interaction is the elementary component of all relationships and groups that make up human society. Sociologists who concentrate on the details of particular interactions as they occur in everyday life are sometimes called microsociologists; those concerned with the larger patterns of relations among major social sectors, such as the state and the economy, and even with international relations, are called macrosociologists.

II

HISTORY OF THE DISCIPLINE

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As a discipline, or body of systematized knowledge, sociology is of relatively recent origin. The concept of civil society as a realm distinct from the state was expressed in the writings of the 17th century English philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and of the later thinkers of the French and Scottish enlightenments (see Age of Enlightenment). Their works anticipated the subsequent focus of sociology, as did the later philosophies of history of the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico and the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel with regard to the study of social change.

A

Origins

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The first definition of sociology was advanced by the French philosopher Auguste Comte. In 1838 Comte coined the term sociology to describe his vision of a new science that would discover laws of human society resembling the laws of nature by applying the methods of factual investigation that had proved so successful in the physical sciences. The British philosopher Herbert Spencer adopted both Comte's term and his mission.

In Germany, sociology was finally recognized as an academic discipline in the first decade of the 20th century, largely because of the efforts of the German economist and historian Max Weber. In contrast with the attempts to model the field after the physical sciences that were dominant in France and in English-speaking countries, German sociology was largely the outgrowth of far-ranging historical scholarship, combined with the influence of Marxism, both of which were central to Weber's work. The influential efforts of the German philosopher Georg Simmel to define sociology as a distinctive discipline emphasized the human-centered focus of German philosophical idealism.

The origin of sociology is found in the 19th century, with the increasing acceptance of the idea that scientific study and technology were capable of solving all of a society’s problems. Mirroring the physical scientists’ focus on unraveling the mysteries of the natural world, sociologists sought to create an ideal social order by addressing the problematic aspects of the social world. Issues of concern to early sociologists included poverty, crime, ethnic and racial conflict, war, deviance, and suicide - and these remain a focus of much sociological theory and research.  However, the discipline now defines itself more broadly as the study of social behaviour in all its forms.

Contemporary sociology examines the patterns of interaction among individuals and the various forms of group activity that emerge from such interaction, ranging from the seemingly chaotic behaviour of rioting mobs to the highly regimented activities of military units. A basic premise in this examination is that these various forms of social behaviour, and indeed society itself, cannot be fully understood simply by studying the individuals involved. For example, there are few people who claim to want war; yet wars have occurred throughout human history, and continue to do so today. Whether individuals cooperate or compete, is in large measure determined by social forces, conditions, and values that facilitate, constrain, and shape our behaviour.

Sociological investigation seeks to expose these social influences in order that we might better understand how people behave in diverse situations, and to explore the effects that changes in existing social arrangements might have. In practical terms this may involve analyzing government policies, canvassing public opinion, assessing the quality of life, forecasting social trends, recommending alternative policies, and documenting the sources of inequality. To assist them in these endeavours sociologists employ various data gathering techniques including social surveys,

analysis of census data, examination of historical documents, and direct or indirect observation of behaviour.

Through the use of such investigative techniques, sociologists routinely challenge the taken for granted assumptions about the nature of society. Many people, for example, believe that large bureaucratic organizations are less efficient than small, more personal organizations. Many others believe that people who live in large cities have greater difficulty making close friends and establishing warm relationships than do people who live in small towns or rural areas. Yet research by sociologists has revealed that neither of these widely-held beliefs is true without serious qualifications. Many similar examples could be cited. As one eminent sociologist has noted, "the fascination of sociology lies in the fact that its perspective makes us see in a new light the very world in which we have lived all our lives....It can be said that the first wisdom of sociology is this - things are not what they seem." (Peter Berger, Invitation to Sociology).

Emile Durkheim was the first French academic sociologist. His life was dominated throughout by his academic career, even though he was intensely and passionately involved in the affairs of French society at large. In his well-established status he differed from the men dealt with so far, and his life may seem uneventful when compared with theirs. Undoubtedly their personal idiosyncrasies had a share in determining their erratic course. But in addition, they were all devoted to a calling that had not yet found recognition in the university. In their attempts to defend the claim to legitimacy of the new science of sociology, they faced enormous obstacles, which contributed in large measure to their personal difficulties.

The main thrust of Durkheim's overall doctrine is his insistence that the study of society must eschew reductionism and consider social phenomena sui generis. Rejecting biologistic or psychologistic interpretations, Durkheim focused attention on the social-structural determinants of mankind's social problems.

Durkheim presented a definitive critique of reductionist explanations of social behavior. Social phenomena are "social facts" and these are the subject matter of sociology.