Chapter seven, Our Virtues two hundred and fourteen Our virtues. It is probable
that we too have still our virtues, although naturally they are not those sincere
and massive virtues on account of which we hold our grandfathers in esteem. And
also at a little distance from us, we Europeans of the day after tomorrow,
we firstlings of the twentieth century, with all our dangerous curiosity, our
multifariousness, and art of disguising, our mellow and seemingly sweetened cruelty, incense
and spirit, we shall, presumably, if we must have virtues, have
those only which have come to agreement with our most secret and heartfelt inclinations,
with our most ardent requirements, Well, then let us look for them in
our abyrinths. Where as we know, so many things lose themselves, so
many things get quite lost. And is there anything finer than to search for
one's own virtues? Is it not almost to believe in one's own virtues?
But this believing in one's own virtues, is it not practically the same as
what was formerly called one's good conscience? That long respectable pigtail of an idea
which our grandfathers used to hang behind their heads. And often enough also behind
their understandings. It seems therefore, that, however little we may imagine ourselves
to be old fashioned and grandfatherly, respectable in other respects, in one thing,
we are nevertheless the worthy grandchildren of our grandfathers. We last Europeans with
good consciences. We also still wear the pigtail. Ah, if you only
knew how soon, so very soon, it will be different two hundred and
fifteen. As in the stellar firmament, there are sometimes two suns which determine
the path of one planet, and in certain cases sons of different colors shine
around a single planet, now with red light, now with green, and
then simultaneously illuminate and flooded with motley colors. So we modern men, owing
to the complicated mechanism of our firmament, are determined by different moralities. Our
actions shine alternately in different colors, and are seldom unequivocal. And there are
often cases also in which our actions are motley colored two hundred and sixteen.
To love one's enemies, I think that has been well learnt. It takes
place thousands of times at present, on a large and small scale. Indeed,
at times the higher and sublimer thing takes place. We learn to despise
when we love, and precisely when we love best. All of it,
however unconsciously, without noise, without ostentation, with the shame and secrecy of
goodness, which forbids the utterance of the pompous word and the formula of virtue.
Morality as attitude is opposed to our taste. Nowadays. This is also
an advance, as it was an advance in our fathers that religion as an
attitude finally became opposed to their taste, including the enmity and voltairean bitterness against
religion and all that formerly belonged to a freethinker antomime. It is the music
in our conscience, the dance in our spirit to which puritan litanies, moral
sermons, and goody goodness won't chime two hundred and seventeen. Let us be
careful in dealing with those who attach great importance to being credited with moral tact
and subtlety in moral discernment. They never forgive us if they have once made
a mistake before us, or even with regard to us. They inevitably become
our instinctive calumniators and detractors, even when they still remain our friends. Blessed
are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders two hundred
and eighteen. The psychologists of France, and where else are there still psychologists
nowadays, have never yet exhausted their bitter and manifold enjoyment of the petite bourgeois,
just as though in short they betray something thereby. Flaubert, for instance,
the honest citizen of Rouen neither saw, heard, nor tasted anything else.
In the end, it was his mode of self torment and refined cruelty.
As this is growing wearisome, I would now recommend for a change something
else for a pleasure, namely the unconscious astuteness with which good, fat,
honest mediocrity always behaves towards loftier spirits and the tasks they have to perform.
The subtle, barbed jesuitical astuteness, which is a thousand times subtler than the
taste and understanding of the middle class, and its best moments, subtler even
than the understanding of its victims. A repeated proof that instinct is the most
intelligent of all kinds of intelligence, which have hitherto been discovered. In short,
you psychologists study the philosophy of the rule in its struggle with the exception.
There you have a spectacle fit for gods and godlike malignity, or in
plainer words, practice vivisection on good people on the homo bonnet voluntatis on yourselves
two hundred and nineteen. The practice of judging and condemning morally is the favorite
revenge of the intellectually shallow on those who are less so. It is also
a kind of indemnity for their being badly endowed by nature. And finally,
it is an opportunity for acquiring spirit and becoming subtle melists spiritualise. They are
glad in their inmost heart that there is a standard according to which those who
are over endowed with intellectual goods and privileges are equal to them. They contend
for the equality of all before God, and almost need the belief in God
for this purpose. It is among them that the most powerful antagonists of atheism
are found. If anyone were to say to them, a lofty spirituality is
beyond all comparison with the honesty and respectability of a merely moral man, and
it would make them furious. I shall take care not to say so.
I would rather flatter them with my theory that lofty spirituality itself exists only as
the ultimate product of moral qualities, that it is a synthesis of all qualities
attributed to the merely moral man, after they have been acquired singly through long
training and practice, perhaps during a whole series of generations. That lofty spirituality
is precisely the spiritualizing of justice and the beneficent severity, which knows that it
is authorized to maintain gradations of rank in the world, even among things,
and not only among men two hundred and twenty. Now that the praise of
the disinterested person so popular, one must, probably not without some danger,
get an idea of what people actually take an interest in, and what are
the things generally which fundamentally and profoundly concern ordinary men, including the cultured,
even the learned, and perhaps philosophers also, if appearances do not deceive the
fact, thereby becomes obvious that the greater part of what interests and charms higher
natures and more refined and fastidious tastes seems absolutely uninteresting to the average man.
If, notwithstanding he perceived devotion to these interests, he calls it desinteresse,
and wonders how it is possible to act disinterestedly. There have been philosophers who
could give this popular astonishment a seductive and stickle other worldly expression, perhaps because
they did not know the higher nature by experience, instead of stating the naked
and candidly reasonable truth that disinterested action is very interesting, and interested action provided
that and love. What even an action for love's sake, shall be unegoistic?
But she fools and the praise of the self sacrificer. But whoever has
really offered sacrifice knows that he wanted and obtained something for it, perhaps something
from himself, for something from himself that he relinquished here in order to have
more there, perhaps in general, to be more, or even feel himself
more. But this is a realm of questions and answers in which a more
fastidious spirit does not like to stay. For here truth has to stifle her
yawn so much when she is obliged to answer. And after all, truth
is a woman. One must not use force with her. Two hundred and
twenty one. It sometimes happens, said a moralistic, pedant and trifle retailer,
that I honor and respect an unselfish man, not however, because he
is unselfish, but because I think he has a right to be useful to
another man at his own expense. In short, the question is always who
he is and who the other is. For instance, in a person created
and destined for command, self denial and mint retirement, instead of being virtues,
would be the waste of virtues. So it seems to me every system
of unegoistic morality which takes itself unconditionally and appeals to everyone not only sins against
good taste, but is also an incentive to sins of omission, an additional
seduction under the mask of philanthropy, and precisely as seduction and injury to the
higher, rarer and more privileged types of men. Moral systems must be compelled
first of all to bow before the gradations of rank. Their presumption must be
driven home to their conscience until they thoroughly understand at last that it is immoral
to say that what is right for one is proper for another. So said
my moralistic pedant, And buonum did he perhaps deserve to be laughed at when
he thus exhorted systems of morals to practice morality, But one should not be
too much in the right if one wishes to have the laughers on one's own
side. A grain of wrong pertains even to good taste two hundred and twenty
two. Wherever sympathy fellow suffering is preached nowadays, and if I gather rightly,
no other religion is any longer preached. Let the psychologist have his ears
open through all the vanity, through all the noise which is natural to these
preachers, as to all preachers, he will hear a hoarse, groaning,
genuine note of self contempt. It belongs to the overshadowing and uglifying of Europe,
which has been on the increase for a century, the first symptoms of
which are already specified documentarily in a thoughtful letter of Galiani to Madame d'Epinay.
If it is not really the cause thereof the man of modern ideas, the
conceited ape is excessively dissatisfied with himself. This is perfectly certain. He suffers,
and his vanity wants him only to suffer with his fellows two hundred and
twenty three. The hybrid European a tolerably ugly Plebeian taken all in all,
absolutely requires a costume. He needs history as a storeroom of costumes. To
be sure. He notices that none of the costumes fit him properly, he
changes and changes. Let us look at the nineteenth century with respect to these
hasty preferences and changes in its masquerades of style, and also with respect to
its moments of desperation. On account of nothing suiting us, it is in
vain to get ourselves up as Romantic or classical, or Christian, or Florentine
or Barocco or national. In moribus et artibus. It does not clothe us.
But the spirit, especially the historical spirit, profits even by this desperation.
Once and again a new sample of the past or of the foreign is
tested, put on, taken off, packed up, and above all studied.
We are the first studious age in puncto of costumes, I mean as
concerns, morals, articles of belief, artistic tastes, and religion. We
are prepared as no other age has ever been, for a carnival in the
grand style, for the most spiritual festival, laughter and arrogance, for the
transcendental height of supreme folly, an aristophanic ridicule of the world. Perhaps we
are still discovering the domain of our invention, just here, the domain where
even we can still be original, probably as parodists of the world's history,
and as God's merry Andrews. Perhaps, though nothing else of the present have
a future, our laughter itself may have a future two hundred and twenty four.
The historical sense, or the capacity for divining quickly the order of rank
of the valuations according to which a people, a community, or a vidual
has lived, the divining instinct for the relationships of these valuations, for the
relation of the authority of the valuations to the authority of the operating forces.
This historical sense, which we Europeans claim as our own specialty, has come
to us in the train of the enchanting and mad semi barbarity into which Europe
has been plunged by the democratic mingling of classes and races. It is only
the nineteenth century that has recognized this faculty as its sixth sense. Owing to
this mingling, the past of every form and mode of life, and of
cultures which were formerly closely contiguous and superimposed on one another, flows forth into
us modern souls. Our instincts now run back in all directions, we ourselves
are a kind of chaos in the end, as we have said, the
spirit perceives its advantage therein by means of our semi barbarity in body and in
desire. We have secret access everywhere, such as a noble age never had.
We have access above all to the labyrinth of imperfect civilizations, and to
every form of semi barbarity that has at any time existed on earth, and
in so far as the most considerable part of human civilization hitherto has just been
semi barbarity. The historical sense implies almost the sense and instinct for everything,
the taste and tongue for everything, whereby it immediately proves itself to be an
ignoble sense. For instance, we enjoy Homer once more. It is perhaps
our happiest acquisition that we know how to appreciate Homer, whom men of distinguished
culture as the French seventeenth century, like Saint Avmand, who reproached him for
his esprit vast, and even Voltaire, the last echo of the century,
cannot and could not so easily appropriate, whom they scarcely permitted themselves to enjoy.
The very decided yea and nay of their palate, their promptly ready disgust,
their hesitating reluctance with regard to everything strange, their horror of the bad
taste, even of lively curiosity, and in general the averseness of every distinguished
and self sufficing culture to avow a new desire, a dissatisfaction with its own
condition, or an admiration of what is strange. All this determines and disposes
them unfavorably, even towards the best things of the world, which are not
their property or could not become their prey. And no faculty is more unintelligible
to such men than just this historical sense, with its truckling plebeian curiosity.
The case is not different with Shakespeare, that marvelous Spanish Moorish Saxon synthesis of
taste, over whom an ancient Athenian of the circle of Esculus would have half
killed himself with laughter or irritation. But we accept precisely this wild motliness,
this medley of the most delicate, the most coarse, and the most artificial,
with a secret confidence and cordiality. We enjoy it as a refinement of
art, reserved expressly for us and allow ourselves to be as little disturbed by
the repulsive fumes and the proximity of the English populace in which Shakespeare's art and
taste lives, as perhaps on the chiaja of Naples, where with all our
senses awake, we go our way enchanted and voluntarily in spite of the drain
odor of the lower quarters of the town. That as men of the historical
sense we have our virtues is not to be disputed. We are unpretentious,
unselfish, modest, brave, habituated to self control and self renunciation, very
grateful, very patient, very complaisant. But with all this we are perhaps
not very tasteful. Let us finally confess it that what is most difficult for
us, men of the historical sense, to grasp, feel, taste,
and love, what finds us fundamentally prejudiced and almost hostile, is precisely the
perfection and ultimate maturity in every culture and art, the essentially noble in works
and men, their moment of smooth sea and halcyon self sufficiency, the goldenness
and coldness which all things show that have perfected themselves. Perhaps our great virtue
of the historical sense is in necessary contrast to good taste, at least to
the very bad taste. And we can only evoke in ourselves imperfectly, hesitatingly
and with compulsion, the small, short and happy godsends and glorifications of human
life as they shine here and there, those moments and marvelous experiences when a
great power has voluntarily come to a halt before the boundless and infinite, when
a superabundance of refined delight has been enjoyed by a sudden checking and petrifying by
standing firmly and planting oneself fixedly on trembling ground. Proportionateness is strange to us.
Let us confess it to ourselves. Our itching is really the itching for
the infinite, the immeasurable. Like the rider on his forward panting horse,
we let the reins fall before the infinite. We modern men, we semi
barbarians, and are only in our highest bliss when we are in the most
danger two hundred and twenty five. Whether it be hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism,
or eudaemonism, all those modes of thinking which measure the worth of things
according to pleasure and pain, that is, according to accompanying circumstances and secondary
considerations are plausible modes of thought and naivetes, which everyone conscious of creative powers
and an artist's conscience will look down upon with scorn, though not without sympathy
sympathy for you, to be sure, that is not sympathy, as you
understand it. It is not sympathy for social distress, for society with its
sick and misfortuned, for the hereditarily vicious and defective who lie on the ground
around us. Still less is its sympathy for the grumbling, vexed revolutionary slave
classes who strive after power they call it freedom. Our sympathy is a loftier
and further sighted sympathy. We see how man dwarfs himself, how you dwarf
him. And there are moments when we view your sympathy with an indescribable anguish,
when we resist it, when we regard your serious as more dangerous than
any kind of levity you want, if possible, And there is not a
more foolish, if possible, to do away with suffering, and we it
really seems that we would rather have it increased and made worse than it has
ever been. Well being, as you understand it is certainly not a goal,
it seems to us an end, a condition which at once renders man
ludicrous and contemptible, and makes its destruction desirable. The discipline of suffering,
of great suffering. Know ye not that it is only this discipline that has
produced all the elevations of humanity. Hitherto the tension of soul in misfortune,
which communicates to it its energy, its shuddering in view of rack and ruin,
inventiveness and bravery, in undergoing, enduring, interpreting and exploiting misfortune.
And whatever depth mystery, disguise, spirit, artifice, or greatness has been
bestowed upon the soul, has it not been bestowed through suffering, through the
discipline of great suffering In man? Creature and creator are united. In man,
there is not only matter, shred, excess, clay, mire,
folly, chaos, but there is also the Creator, the sculptor, the
hardness of the hammer, the divinity of the spectator, and the seventh day.
Do ye understand this contrast, and that your sympathy for the creature in
man applies to that which has to be fashioned, bruised, forged, stretched,
roasted, annealed, refined, to that which must necessarily suffer and is
meant to suffer and our sympathy, do ye not understand what our reverse sympathy
applies to when it resists your sympathy as the worst of all pampering and enervation.
So it is sympathy against sympathy. But to repeat it once more,
there are higher problems than the problems of pleasure and pain and sympathy, And
all systems of philosophy which deal only with these are naivetes two hundred and twenty
six. We immoralists. This world with which we are concerned, in which
we have to fear and love, this almost invisible, inaudible world, world
of delicate command and delicate obedience, a world of almost in every respect captious,
insidious, sharp, and tender. Yes, it is well protected from
clumsy spectators and familiar curiosity. We are woven into a strong net and garment
of duties, and cannot disengage ourselves precisely. Here we are men of duty,
even we occasionally, it is true we dance in our chains and betwixt
our swords. It is none the less true that more often we gnash our
teeth under the circumstances, and are impatient at the secret hardship of our lot,
but do what we will. Fools and appearances say of us, these
are men without duty. We have always fools and appearances against us. Two
hundred and twenty seven. Honesty. Granting that it is the virtue of which
we cannot rid ourselves, we free spirits well, we will labor at it
with all our perversity and love, and not tire of perfecting ourselves in our
virtue, which alone remains may its glance some day overspread like a gilded blue
mocking twilight, this aging civilization, with its dull, gloomy seriousness. And
if nevertheless, our honesty should one day grow weary and sigh and stretch its
limbs, and find us too hard, and would fain have it pleasanter,
easier and gentler, like an agreeable vice, let us remain hard, we
latest stoics, and let us send to its help whatever devilry we have in
us, our disgust at the clumsy and undefined, our nitimur in vetitum,
our love of adventure, our sharpened and fastidious curiosity, our most subtle,
disguised intellectual will to power and universal conquest, which rambles and roves evidiously around
all the realms, of the future. Let us go with all our devils
to the help of our God. It is probable that people will misunderstand and
mistake us on that account. What does it matter? They will say,
their honesty, that is their devilry, and nothing else. What does it
matter? And even if they were right, have not all gods hitherto been
such sanctified rebaptized devils? And after all, what do we know of ourselves?
And what the spirit that leads us wants to be called? It is
a question of names, and how many spirits we harbor? Our honesty,
we free spirits. Let us be careful lest it become our vanity, our
ornament and ostentation, our limitation, our stupidity, every virtue inclines to stupidity,
every stupidity to virtue, stupid to the point of sanctity. They say
in Russia, let us be careful lest out of pure honesty we eventually become
saints and bores. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to
bore ourselves? One would have to believe in eternal life in order to two
hundred and twenty eight. I hope to be forgiven for discovering that all moral
philosophy hitherto has been tedious and has belonged to the soporific appliances, and that
virtue, in my opinion, has been more injured by the tediousness of its
advocates than by anything else. At the same time, however, I would
not wish to overlook their general usefulness. It is desirable that as few people
as possible should reflect upon morals, and consequently, it is very desirable that
morals should not some day become interesting. But let us not be afraid.
Things still remain today as they have always been. I see no one in
Europe who has or discloses an idea of the fact that philosophizing concerning morals might
be conducted in a dangerous, captious, and ensnaring manner, that calamity might
be involved therein observe, for example, the indefatigable, inevitable English utilitarians,
how ponderously and respectably they stalk on stalk along. A Homeric metaphor expresses it
better in the footsteps of Bentham, just as he had already stalked in the
footsteps of the respectable Helvetius. No, he was not a dangerous man.
Helvetius sus Senator Pococurante to use an expression of Galiani. No new thought,
nothing of the nature of a finer turning or better expression of an old thought,
not even a proper history of what has been previously thought on the subject,
an impossible literature, taking it all in all, unless one knows how
to leavin it with some mischief. In effect, the old English vice called
can't, which is moral tartufism, has insinuated itself also into these moralists,
whom one must certainly read with an eye to their motives, if one must
read them concealed this time under the new form of the scientific spirit. Moreover,
there is not absent from them a secret struggle with the pangs of conscience
from which a race of former Puritans must naturally suffer in all their scientific tinkering
with morals. Is not a moralist, the opposite of a Puritan, that
is to say, as a thinker who regards morality as questionable, as worthy
of interrogation, in short, as a problem, is moralizing, not immoral.
In the end, they all want English morality to be recognized as authoritative,
inasmuch as mankind, or the general utility, or the happiness of the
greatest number know the happiness of England will be best served thereby. They would
like, by all means to convince themselves that the striving after English happiness,
I mean after comfort and fashion, and in the highest instance a seat in
Parliament, is at the same time the true path of virtue. In fact,
that in so far as there has been virtue in the world hitherto,
it has just consisted in such striving. Not one of those ponderous, conscience
stricken, hurting animals who undertake to advocate the cause of egoism as conducive to
the general welfare, wants to have any knowledge or inkling of the facts that
the general welfare is known, ideal, no goal, no notion that can
be at all grasped, but is only a nostrum that what is fair to
one may not at all be fair to another. That the requirement of one
morality for all is really a detriment to higher men. In short, that
there is a distinction of rank between man and man, and consequently between morality
and morality. They are an unassuming and fundamentally mediocre species of men, these
utilitarian Englishmen, and as already remarked, insofar as they are tedious. One
cannot think highly enough of their utility, one not even to encourage them,
as has been partially attempted in the following rhymes Hail ye worthies barrow wheeling longer,
better, eye revealing stiffer in head and knee, unenraptured, never jesting,
mediocre, ever lasting San Jennie A. San's Espani, two hundred and
twenty nine. In these later ages, which may be proud of their humanity,
there still remains so much fear, so much superstition, of the fear
of the cruel wild beast, the mastering of which constitutes the very pride of
these humaner ages. That even obvious truths, as if by the agreement of
centuries, have long remained unuttered, because they have the appearance of helping the
finally slain wild beast back to life again. I perhaps risk something when I
allow such a truth to escape. Let others capture it again and give it
so much milk of pious sentiment footnote an expression from Schiller's William Tell Act for
scene three. Let others capture it again and give it so much milk of
pious sentiment to drink that it will lie down quiet and forgotten in its old
corner. One ought to learn anew about cruelty and open one's eyes. One
ought at last to learn impatience, in order that such immodest, gross errors,
as for instance, have been fostered by ancient and modern philosophers with regard
to tragedy, may no longer wander about virtuously and boldly. Almost everything that
we call higher culture is based upon the spiritualizing and intensifying of cruelty. This
is my thesis. The wild beast has not been slain. All it lives,
it flourishes, It has only been transfigured. That which constitutes the painful
delight of tragedy is cruelty. That which operates agreeably in so called tragic sympathy,
and at the basis even of everything sublime up to the highest and most
delicate thrills of metaphysics, obtains its sweetness solely from the intermingled ingredient of cruelty.
What the Roman enjoys in the arena the Christian and the ecstasies of the
Cross, the Spaniard at the sight of the fagot and stake, or of
the bull fight. The present day Japanese who presses his way to the tragedy,
the workman of the Parisian suburbs, who has a homesickness for bloody revolutions,
the Wagnerien, who, with unhinged will undergoes the performance of Tristan and
a sould. What all these enjoy and strive with mysterious ardor to drink in
is the filter of the great circe cruelty. Here, to be sure,
we must put aside entirely the blundering psychology of former times, which could only
teach with regard to cruelty that originated at the sight of the suffering of others.
There is an abundant, superabundant enjoyment, even in one's own suffering,
in causing one's own suffering, and wherever man has allowed himself to be persuaded
to self denial in the religious sense, or to self mutilation, as among
the Phoenicians and Ascetics, or in general, to desensualization, decarnalization and contrition,
to puritanical repentance, spasms, to vivisection of conscience, and to pascal
like sacri ephesiad del Intoletto. He is secretly allured and impelled forwards by his
cruelty by the dangerous thrill of cruelty towards himself. Finally, let us consider
that even the seeker of knowledge operates as an artist and a glorifier of cruelty,
in that he compels his spirit to perceive against its own inclination, and
often enough against the wishes of his heart. He forces it to say nay
where he would like to affirm love and adore. Indeed, every instance of
taking a thing profoundly and fundamentally is a violation and intentional injuring of the fundamental
will of the spirit, which instinctively aims at appearance and superficiality. Even in
every desire for knowledge, there is a drop of cruelty to one hundred and
thirty. Perhaps what I have said here about a fundamental will of the spirit
may not be understood without further details. I may be allowed a word of
explanation that imperious, something which is popularly called the spirit, wishes to be
master internally and externally, and to feel itself master. It has the will
of a multiplicity, for a simplicity, a binding, taming, imperious and
essentially ruling will. Its requirements and capacities. Here are the same as those
assigned by physiologists to everything that lives, grows and multiplies. The power of
the spirit to appropriate foreign elements reveals itself in a strong tendency to assimilate the
new to the old, to simplify the manifold, to overlook or repudiate the
absolutely contradictory, just as it arbitrarily re underlines, makes prominent and falsifies for
itself certain traits and lines in the foreign elements in every portion of the outside
world. Its object thereby is the incorporation of new experiences, the assortment of
new things in the old arrangements in short growth, or more properly, the
feeling of growth, the feeling of increased power, is its object. This
same will has at its service an apparently opposed impulse of the spirit, a
suddenly adopted preference of ignorance, of arbitrary shutting out, a closing of windows,
an inner denial of this or that, a prohibition to approach, a
sort of defensive attitude against much that is knowable, a contentment with obscurity,
with the shutting in horizon, an acceptance an approval of ignorance as that which
is all necessary according to the degree of its appropriating power, its digestive power
to speak figuratively, and in fact the spirit resembles a stomach more than anything
else. Here also belonged an occasional propensity of the spirit to let itself be
deceived, perhaps with a waggish suspicion that it is not so and so,
but is only allowed to pass as such. A delight in uncertainty, an
ambiguity, an exulting enjoyment of arbitrary out of the way, narrowness and mystery
of the too near, of the foreground, of the magnified, the diminished,
the misshapen, the beautified, an enjoyment of the arbitrariness of all these
manifestations of power. Finally, in this connection there is the not unscrupulous readiness
of the spirit to deceive other spirits and dissemble before them the constant pressing and
straining of a creating, shaping, changeable power. The spirit enjoys therein its
craftiness and its variety of disguises. It enjoys also its feeling of security.
Therein it is precisely by its protean arts that it is best protected and concealed.
Counter to this propensity for appearance, for simplification for a disguise for a
cloak, in short for an outside, for every outside is a cloak.
There operates the sublime tendency of the man of knowledge, which takes and insists
on taking things profoundly, various, and thoroughly, as a kind of cruelty
of the intellectual conscience and taste, which every courageous thinker will acknowledge in himself,
provided as it ought to be, that he has sharpened and hardened his
eye sufficiently long for introspection, and is accustomed to severe discipline and even severe
words, he will say, there is something cruel in the tendency of my
spirit. Let the virtuous and amiable try to convince him that it is not
so. In fact, it would sound nicer if, instead of our cruelty,
perhaps our extravagant honesty were talked about, whispered about and glorified. We
free very free spirits, And some day perhaps such will actually be our posthumous
glory. Meanwhile, for there is plenty of time until then, we should
be least inclined to deck ourselves out in such florid and fringed moral verbiage.
Our whole former work has just made us sick of this taste and its sprightly
exuberance. They are beautiful, glistening, jingling, festive words. Honesty,
love of truth, love of wisdom sacrificed for knowledge, heroism of the truthful.
There is something in them that makes one's heart swell with pride. But
we anchorites and marmots have long ago persuaded ourselves, in all the secrecy of
an anchorite's conscience, that this worthy parade of verbiage also belongs to the old
false adornment, frippery and gold dust of unconscious human vanity, and that even
under such flattering color and repainting, the terrible original text Homo natura must again
be recognized, in effect, to translate man back again into nature, to
master the many vain and visionary interpretations and subordinate meanings which have hitherto been scratched
and daubed over the eternal original text Homonatura, to bring it about that man
shall henceforth stand before man as he, now hardened by the discipline of science,
stands afore the other forms of nature, with fearless Oedipus eyes and stopped
ulysses ears, deaf to the enticements of old metaphysical bird catchers who have piped
to him far too long. Thou art more, thou art higher, thou
hast a different origin. This may be a strange and foolish task, but
that it is a task. Who can deny why did we choose it?
This foolish task? Or to put the question differently, why knowledge at all?
Every one will ask us about this, and thus pressed, we who
have asked ourselves the question a hundred times, have not found and cannot find
any better answer two hundred and thirty one. Learning alters us. It does
what all nourishment does. That does not merely conserve, as the physiologist knows.
But at the bottom of our souls, quite down below, there is
certainly something unteachable, a granite of spiritual fate, of predetermined decision, an
answer to predetermine chosen questions. In each cardinal problem there speaks an unchangeable I
am this. A thinker cannot learn anew about man and woman, for instance,
but can only learn fully. He can only follow to the end what
is fixed about them in himself. Occasionally we find certain solutions of problems which
make strong beliefs for us. Perhaps they are henceforth called convictions. Later on
one sees in them only footsteps to self knowledge, guideposts to the problem which
we ourselves are, or more correctly, to the great stupidity which we embody
our spiritual fate. The unteachable in us quite down below. In view of
this liberal compliment which I have just paid myself permission, will perhaps be more
readily allowed me to utter some truths about woman as she is, provided that
it is known at the outset how literally they are merely my truths two hundred
and thirty two. Woman wishes to be independent, and therefore she begins to
enlighten men about woman as she is. This is one of the worst developments
of the general uglifying of Europe. For what must these clumsy attempts of feminine
scientificality and self exposure bring to light? Woman has so much cause for shame
in woman. There is so much pedantry, superficiality, schoolmasterliness, petty presumption,
unbridledness and indiscretion concealed studying only women's behavior towards children, which has really
been best restrained and dominated hitherto by the fear of man alas if ever,
the eternally tedious in woman, she has plenty of it is allowed to venture
forth if she begins radically and on principle, to unlearn her wisdom and art
of charming, of playing, of frightening away sorrow, of alleviating and taking
easily. If she forgets her delicate aptitude for agreeable desires. Female voices are
already raised, which by Saint Aristophanes make one afraid with medical explicitness. It
is stated in a threatening manner, what woman first and last requires from man?
Is it not in the very worst taste that woman sets herself up to
be? Scientific? Enlightenment hitherto has fortunately been men's affair, men's gift,
remained therewith among ourselves. And in the end, in view of all that
women write about woman, we may well of considerable doubt as to whether woman
really desires enlateenment about herself, and can desire it. If woman does not
thereby seek a new ornament for herself, I believe ornamentation belongs to the eternally
feminine, Why then she wishes to make herself feared? Perhaps she thereby wishes
to get the mastery? But she does not want truth? What does woman
care for truth? From the very first? Nothing is more foreign, more
repugnant, or more hostile to woman than truth. Her great art is falsehood.
Her chief concern is appearance and beauty. Let us confess it, We
men, we honor and love this very art and this very instinct in woman.
We who have the hard task and for our recreation, gladly seek the
company of beings under whose hands glances and delicate follies. Our seriousness, our
gravity, and profundity appear almost like follies to us. Finally, I asked
the question, did a woman herself ever acknowledge profundity in a woman's mind or
justice in a woman's heart? And is it not true that on the whole
woman has hitherto been most despised by woman herself, and not at all by
us. We men desire that woman should not continue to compromise herself by enlightening
us. Just as it was man's care and the consideration for woman when the
Church decreed Molier Tassait in Ecclesia, it was to the benefit of woman when
Napoleon gave the too eloquent Madame de Stail to understand Molier Tassaya in politicis,
and in my opinion, he is a true friend of woman who calls out
to woman to day moliere tassait de millierro two hundred and thirty three. It
betrays corruption of the instincts, apart from the fact that it betrays bad taste
when a woman refers to Madame Roland or Madame de Stelle or Monsieur George sand
as though something was proved thereby in favor of woman as she is among men.
These are the three comical women, as they are nothing more and just
the best involuntary counter arguments against feminine emancipation and autonomy two hundred and thirty four.
Stupidity in the kitchen woman as cook, the terrible thoughtlessness with which the
feeding of the family and the master of the house is managed. Woman does
not understand what food means, and she insists on being cook. If woman
had been a thinking creature, she should certainly, as cook for thousands of
years, have discovered the most important physiological facts, and should likewise have got
possession of the healing art. Through bad female cooks, through the entire lack
of reason in the kitchen, the development of mankind has been longest retarded and
most interfered with. Even today, matters are very little better a word to
high school girls two hundred and thirty five. There are turns and casts of
fancy. There are sentences, little handfuls of words in which a whole culture,
a whole society, suddenly crystallizes itself. Among these is the incidental remark
of Madame de Lambert to her son Monemis ne vouperete James cous de Foeli cavouferon
gran Pleisier, the motherliest and wisest remark, by the way, that was
ever addressed to a son two hundred and thirty six. I have no doubt
that every noble woman will oppose what Dante and Gerda believed about woman, the
former when he sang a la gualda vassouso a dio inlay, and the latter
when he interpreted it the eternally feminine, draws us Aloft, for this is
just what she believes of the eternally masculine two hundred and thirty seven. Seven
Apithemes for women, how the longest enu flees when a man comes to our
knees. Age, alas and science stay'd furnish even weak virtue, aid somber,
garb and silence meet dress for ev'ry dame discreet, whom I thank when
in my bliss God and my good Tailoress young a flower decked cavern home old
a dragon, thence doth Rome, noble title leg that's fine man as well,
oh were he mine? Speech in brief and sense in mass slippery for
the Jennyass two hundred and thirty seven. A woman has hitherto been treated by
men like birds, which, losing their way, have come down among them
from an elevation, as something delicate, fragile, wild, strange, sweet
and animating, but as something also which must be cooped up to prevent it
flying away two hundred and thirty eight. To be mistaken in the fundamental problem
of man and woman, To deny here the profoundest antagonism, and the necessity
for an eternally hostile tension. To dream here perhaps of equal rights, equal
training, equal claims and obligations. That is a typical sign of shallow mindedness,
and a thinker who has proved himself shallow at this dangerous spot shallow and
instinct may generally be regarded as suspicious, nay more, as betrayed. As
discovered, he will probably prove too short for all fundamental questions of life,
future as well as present, and will be unable to descend into any of
the depths. On the other hand, a man who has depth of spirit
as well as of desires, and has also the depth of benevolence, which
is capable of severity and harshness, and easily confounded with them, can only
think of woman as orientals do. He must conceive of her as a possession,
as confinable property, as being predestined for service and accomplishing her mission.
Therein. He must take his stand in this matter upon the immense rationality of
Asia, upon the superiority of the instinct of Asia, as the Greeks did
formerly, those best heirs and scholars of Asia, who, as is well
known, with their increasing culture and amplitude of power from Homer to the time
of Pericles, became gradually stricter towards woman, in short, more oriental.
How necessary, how logical, even how humanely desirable this was. Let us
consider for ourselves two hundred and thirty nine. The weaker sex has in no
previous age been treated with so much respect by men as at present. This
belongs to the tendency and fundamental taste of democracy in the same way as disrespectfulness
to old age. What wonder is it that abuse should be immediately made of
this respect? They want more, they learn to make claims. The tribute
of respect is at last felt to be well nigh galling rivalry for rights.
Indeed, actual strife itself would be preferred. In a word, woman is
losing modesty, and let us immediately add that she is also losing taste.
She is unlearning to fear man. But the woman who unlearns to fear sacrifices
her most womanly instincts that woman should venture forward when the fear inspiring quality in
man, or more definitely, the man in man is no longer either desired
or fully developed. Is reasonable enough and also intelligible enough. What is more
difficult to understand is that precisely thereby woman deteriorates. This is what is happening
nowadays. Let us not deceive ourselves about it. Wherever the industrial spirit has
triumphed over the military and aristocratic spirit, woman strives her the economic and legal
independence of a clerk woman, as clerk esse is inscribed on the portal of
the modern society, which is in the course of formation. While she thus
appropriates new rights, aspires to be master, and inscribes progress of woman on
her flags and banners. The very opposite realizes itself with terrible obviousness. Woman
retrogrades. Since the French Revolution, the influence of woman in Europe has declined
in proportion as she has increased her rights and claims, and the emancipation of
woman in so far as it is desired and demanded by women themselves, and
not only by masculine shallow pates. This proves to be a remarkable symptom of
the increasing weakening and deadening of the most womanly instincts. There is stupidity in
this movement, an almost masculine stupidity, of which a well reared woman,
who is always a sensible woman, might be heartily ashamed. To lose the
intuition as to the ground upon which she can most surely achieve victory, to
neglect exercise in the use of her proper weapons, to let herself go before
man, perhaps even to the book where formerly she kept herself in control,
and in refined artful humility, to neutralize with her virtuous audacity man's faith in
a veiled, fundamentally different ideal in woman, something eternally necessarily feminine, to
emphatically and loquaciously dissuade man from the idea that woman must be preserved, cared
for, protected, and indulged like some delicate, strangely wild and often pleasant
domestic animal, the clumsy and indignant collection of everything of the nature of servitude
and bondage which the position of woman in the hitherto existing order of society has
entailed and still entails, as though slavery were a counter argument, and not
rather a condition of every higher culture, of every elevation of culture. What
does all this betoken, if not a disintegration of womanly instincts, a defeminizing
Certainly, there are enough of idiotic friends and corruptors of woman among the learned
asses of the masculine sex, who advise woman to defeminize herself in this manner,
and to imitate all the stupidities from which man in Europe European manliness suffers,
who would like to lower woman to general culture, indeed even to newspaper
reading and meddling with politics here and there. They wish even to make women
into free spirits and literary workers, as though a woman without piety would not
be something perfectly obnoxious or ludicrous to a profound and godless man. Almost everywhere,
her nerves are being ruined by the most morbid and dangerous kind of music,
our latest German music, and she's daily being made more hysterical and more
incapable of fulfilling her first and last function, that of bearing robust children.
They wish to cultivate her in general still more, and intend, as they
say, to make the weaker sex strong by culture, as if history did
not teach in the most emphatic manner, that the cultivating of mankind and his
weakening, that is to say, the weakening, dissipating, and languishing of
his force of will, have always kept pace with one another, and that
the most powerful and influential women in the world, and lastly the mother of
Napoleon, had just to thank their force of will and not their schoolmasters,
for their power and ascendancy over men. That which inspires respect in woman,
and often enough fear also is her nature, which is more natural than that
of man. Her genuine carnivora like cunning flexibility, her tiger claws beneath the
glove, her naivete and egoism, her untrainableness, and innate wildness, the
incomprehensibleness, extent, and deviation of her desires and virtues. That which,
in spite of fear, excites one's sympathy for the dangerous and beautiful cat woman
is that she seems more afflicted, more vulnerable, more necessitous of love,
and more condemned to disillusionment than any other creature. Fear and sympathy. It
is with these feelings that man has hitherto stood in the presence of woman,
always with one foot already in tragedy which rends while it delights, what and
all that is now to be at an end, and the disenchantment of woman
is in progress. The tediousness of woman is slowly evolving. Oh, Europe.
Europe, we know the horned animal, which is always most attractive to
thee, from which danger is ever again threatening. Thee. Thy old fable
might once more become history. An immense stipidity might once again overmaster thee and
carry thee away. And no God concealed beneath it, no only an idea,
a modern idea. End of Chapter seven