X

Imagining this reign of youth, I cry out "Land, land! Enough and more than enough of the passionate seeking and the wandering passage on the dark alien seas!" Now finally a coast reveals itself. Whatever it may be, we must land on it. The worst emergency port is better than returning to staggering in hopeless infinite skepticism. If now we only hold onto the land, we will later find the good havens and ease the approach for those who come later. This journey was dangerous and exciting. How far we are now from the calm contemplation with which we first saw our ship set out to sea. By investigating the dangers of history, we have found ourselves exposed to all these dangers as strongly as possible. We ourselves bear the traces of that illness which has come over humanity in recent times as a result of an excess of history. For example, this very treatise shows its modern character, the character of the weak personality (which I will not conceal from myself) in the intemperance of its criticism, the immaturity of its humanity, the frequent transitions from irony to cynicism, from pride to skepticism. Nevertheless I trust in the inspiring power which, rather than my genius, controls the vessel: I trust in youth, that it has led me correctly when it requires from me now a protest against the historical education of young modern people and when the protester demands that human beings above all learn to live and to use history only in the service of the life which he has learned. People must be young to understand this protest. In fact, among the contemporary gray-haired types of our present youth, one can hardly be young enough still to feel what is here essentially being protested against.

To help people understand this point I will use an example. In Germany it is not much longer than a hundred years ago that a natural instinct for what people call poetry arose in a few young people. Do people think that the previous generations up to that time would never have spoken of that art, inwardly strange and unnatural to them? We know the opposite is true: they thought about "poetry" with loving passion, wrote and argued about it with words, words, and more words. The appearance of that revival of words for living was not the immediate death of those word makers. In a certain sense they are still alive, because if, as Gibbon says, for a world to go under takes not just time but plenty of time, then in Germany, the "land of gradual change," for a false idea to be destroyed takes more than time; it takes a great deal of time. Today there are perhaps a hundred people more than a hundred years ago who know what poetry is; perhaps one hundred years from now there will be another hundred people more who in the meantime have also learned what culture is and that the Germans up to this point have had no culture, no matter how much they may talk and boast about it. For them the very general contentment of the Germans with their "culture" would seem just as incredible and stupid as the formerly acknowledged classicism of Gottsched or the appraisal of Ramler as a German Pindar seem to us. They will perhaps judge that this culture has been only a sort of knowledge about culture and, in addition, a completely false and superficial knowledge. I say false and superficial because people endured the contradiction of life and knowledge, for they did not see anything characteristic of a truly cultured people: that the culture can only grow up and blossom forth out of living. By contrast, with the Germans culture is put up like a paper flower or poured out like a sugar drink. Therefore it must always remain untruthful and infertile.

The German education of the young, however, begins directly from this false and barren idea of culture. Its end goal, imagined in all purity and loftiness, is not at all the freely educated man, but the scholar, the scientific person, indeed, the scientific person who is useful as early as possible, the person who sets himself apart from life in order to recognize it clearly. The product of this education, considered in a correct empirically general way, is the historically and aesthetically educated Philistine, the precocious and freshly wise chatterer about state, church, and art, the sensorium for thousands of sensations, the inexhaustible stomach which nevertheless does not know what an honest hunger and thirst are. The fact that an education with this goal and result is an unnatural education is felt only by the person who has not yet completed it; it is felt only by the instinct of the young, because they still have the instinct of nature, which is first artificially and powerfully broken through that education. But the person who wants to break this education in its turn must assist the young in expressing themselves. He must shine the bright light of ideas to illuminate their unconscious resistance and turn that into a conscious and loudly uttered consciousness. How is he to reach such a strange goal?

Above all through the fact that he destroys a superstition, the faith in the necessity of that method of education. People think that there would be no other possibility than our contemporary highly tiresome reality. Just let someone examine the essential literature of the higher schooling and education system in the last decades exactly on this point. For all the varieties of proposals and for all the intensity of the opposition, the examiner will to his astonishment realize how uniform the thinking is about the entire purpose of education, how thoughtlessly people assume that the present result, the "educated person," as the term is now understood, is a necessary and reasonable fundamental basis for that wider education. That monotonous orthodoxy would sound something like this: the young person has to begin with a knowledge of culture, not at first with a knowledge of life, and even less with life and experience themselves. Moreover, this knowledge about culture as historical knowledge is poured over or stirred into the youth; that is, his head is filled up with a monstrous number of ideas derived from extremely indirect knowledge of past times and peoples, not from the immediate contemplation of living. His desire to experience something for himself and to feel growing in him a coordinated and living system of his own experiences—such a desire is narcotized and, as it were, made drunk through the opulent deceptions about matters of fact, as if it were possible in a few years to sum up in oneself the highest and most remarkable experiences of all times, especially of the greatest ages. It is precisely this insane procedure which leads our young developing artists into the halls of culture and galleries instead of into the workshop of a master and, above all, into the extraordinary workshops of the extraordinary master craftswoman Nature. Yes, as if people were able to predict their ideas and arts, their actual life's work, as cursory strollers in the history of past times. Yes, as if life itself were not a craft which must be learned continuously from the basic material and practised without special treatment, if it is not to allow bunglers and chatterers to be produced

Plato considered it necessary that the first generation of his new society (in the perfect state) would be brought up with the help of a powerful necessary lie. The children were to learn to believe that they had all already lived a long time dreaming under the earth, where they had been properly kneaded and formed by nature's master worker. It was impossible to have any effect against this work of the gods. It is to stand as an inviolable law of nature that the person who is born a philosopher has gold in his body, the person who is born as a guard has only silver, and the person who is born as a worker has iron and bronze. Since it is not possible to mix these metals, Plato explains, then it should not be possible to overthrow or mix up the order of classes. The faith in the aeterna veritas [eternal truth] of this order is the basis of the new education and thus of the new state. The modern German similarly believes now in the aeterna veritas of his education, of his style of culture. Nevertheless, this faith would collapse, as the Platonic state would have collapsed, if in opposition to the necessary lie there was set up a necessary truth: the German has no culture, because he can have nothing whatsoever on the basis of his education. He wants the flowers without roots and stalk. So he wants them in vain. That is the simple truth, unpleasant and gross, a correct necessary truth.

In this necessary truth, however, our first generation must be educated. Certainly they suffer from it with the greatest difficulty, for they must educate themselves through it, in fact, divided against themselves, to new habits and a new nature derived out of old and previous nature and habits, so that they might be able to say with the ancient Spaniards: "Efienda me Dios de my," God, defend me from myself, that is, from the nature already instilled into me. They must taste that truth drop by drop, as if sampling a bitter and powerful medicine. Each individual of this generation must overcome himself, to judge for himself what he might more easily endure as a general judgment concerning an entire age: we are without education, even more, we are ruined for living, for correct and simple seeing and hearing, for the fortunate grasping of what is closest at hand and natural, and we have up to this moment not yet even the basis of a culture, because we ourselves are not convinced that we have a genuine life within us. Fractured and fallen apart, in everything carved up mechanically into an inner and an outer half, saturated with ideas like dragons' teeth producing dragon ideas, thus suffering from the sickness of words and without trust in any unique sensation which is not yet franked with words, as such a non-living and yet uncannily lively factory of ideas and words, I still perhaps have the right to say about myself cogito, ergo sum [I am thinking; therefore, I am], but not vivo, ergo cogito [I am living; therefore, I am thinking]. That empty "Being", not that full and green "Living," is ensured for me. My original feeling only guarantees me that I am a thinking thing, not that I am a living essence, that I am not animal, but at most a cogital. First give me life; then I will make a culture out of it for you!—so shouts each individual of this first generation, and all these individuals will recognize each other from this call. Who will present this life to them?

No god and no human being: only their own youth unleashes this life, and with it you will liberate life for yourself. For it only lay hidden in a prison. It has not yet withered away and died—inquire of yourself!

But this unbridled life is sick and must be healed. It is ailing from many ills. Not only does it suffer from the memory of its fetters; it suffers from what is here our principal concern, from the historical sickness. The excess of history has seized the plastic force of life. It understands no more how to make use of the past as a powerful nourishment. The evil is fearsome, and nevertheless if youth did not have the clairvoyant gift of nature, then no one would know that that is an evil and that a paradise of health has been lost. This same youth surmises, however, also with the powerful healing instinct of this same nature, how this paradise can be won back. It knows the juices for wounds and the medicines to combat the historical sickness, to combat the excess of the historical. What are they called?

Now, people should not be surprised: they are the names of poisons: the antidotes against the historical are called the unhistorical and the super-historical. With these names we turn back to the start of our examination and to its close.

With the phrase "the unhistorical" I designate the art and the power of being able to forget and to enclose oneself in a horizon with borders; "super-historical" I call the powers which divert the gaze from what is developing back to what gives existence an eternal and unchanging character, to art and religion. Science (for it is science which would talk about poisons) sees in that force, in these powers, opposing forces, for it maintains that only the observation of things is true and right, the scientific way of considering things, which everywhere sees what has come into being as something historical and never as something eternally living. Science lives in an inner contradiction with the eternalizing powers of art and religion, just as much as it hates forgetfulness, the death of knowledge, when it seeks to remove all limitations of horizons and to hurl human beings into an infinite sea without frontiers, a sea of light waves of acknowledged becoming.

If he only could live there! As the cities collapse in an earthquake and become desolate and the human being, trembling and in haste, erects his house on volcanic ground, so life breaks apart and becomes weak and dispirited when the earthquake of ideas which science arouses takes from a person the basis of all his certainty and rest, his faith in the eternally permanent. Is life to rule over knowledge now, over science, or is knowledge to rule over life? Which of the two forces is the higher and the decisive one? No one will have any doubt: life is the higher, the ruling power, for knowledge which destroyed life would in the process have destroyed itself. Knowledge presupposes life and has the same interest in preserving life which every being has in its own continuing existence. So science needs a higher supervision and control. A doctrine of a healthy life is positioned close beside science, and a principle of this doctrine of health would sound like this: the unhistorical and the super-historical are the natural counter-measures against the excess cancerous growth of history on life, against the historical sickness. It is probable that we, the historically ill, also have to suffer from the counter measures. But the fact that we suffer from them is no proof against the correctness of the course of treatment we have chosen.

And here I recognize the mission of that youth, that first generation of fighters and dragon slayers, which brings forth a more fortunate and more beautiful culture and humanity, without having more of this future happiness and future beauty than a promise-filled premonition. These youth will suffer from the evil and the counter-measures simultaneously, and nevertheless they believe they may boast of a more powerful health and in general a more natural nature than their previous generations, the educated "Men" and "Old Men" of the present. However, their mission is to shake the ideas which this present holds about "health" and "culture" and to develop contempt and hatred against such hybrid monstrous ideas. The most strongly guaranteed mark of their own stronger health is to be precisely the fact that they, I mean these youth, themselves can use no idea, no party slogan from the presently circulating currency of words and ideas, as a designation of their being, but are convinced only by a power acting in it, a power which fights, eliminates, and cuts into pieces, and by an always heightened sense of life in every good hour. People may dispute the fact that these youth already have culture, but for what young person would this be a reproach? People may speak against their crudeness and immoderation, but they are not yet old and wise enough to be content; above all they do not need to feign any ready-made culture to defend and enjoy all the comforts and rights of youth, especially the privilege of a braver spontaneous honesty and the rousing consolation of hope.

Of these hopeful people I know that they understand all these generalities at close hand and in their own most personal experience will translate them into a personally thought-out teaching for themselves. The others may for the time being perceive nothing but covered over bowls, which could also really be empty, until, surprised one day, they see with their own eyes that the bowls are full and that attacks, demands, living impulses, passions lay mixed in and impressed into these generalities, which could not lie hidden in this way for a long time. I refer these doubters to time, which brings all things to light, and, in conclusion, I turn my attention to that society of those who hope, in order to explain to them in an allegory the progress and outcome of their healing, their salvation from the historical sickness, and thus their own history, up to the point where they will be again healthy enough to undertake a new history and to make use of the past under the mastery of life in a threefold sense, that is, monumental, or antiquarian, or critical. At that point of time they will be less knowledgeable than the "educated" of the present, for they will have forgotten a good deal and even have lost the pleasure of looking for what those educated ones above all wish to know, in general still in order to look back. Their distinguishing marks, from the point of view of those educated ones, are precisely their "lack of education," their indifference and reserve with respect to many famous men, even with respect to many good things. But they have become, at this final point of their healing, once again men and have ceased to be human-like aggregates—that is something! There are still hopes! Are you not laughing at that in your hearts, you hopeful ones!

And, you will ask, How do we come to that end point? The Delphic god shouts out to you, at the very start of your trek to that goal, his aphorism: "Know thyself." It is a difficult saying; for that god "hides nothing and announces nothing, but only points the way," as Heraclitus has said. But what direction is he indicating to you?

There were centuries when the Greeks found themselves in a danger similar to the one in which we find ourselves, that is, the danger of destruction from being swamped by what is foreign and past, from "history." The Greeks never lived in proud isolation; their "culture" was for a long time much more a chaos of foreign, Semitic, Babylonian, Lydian, and Egyptian forms and ideas, and their religion a real divine struggle of the entire Orient, something similar to the way "German culture" and religion are now a self-struggling chaos of all foreign lands and all prehistory. Nevertheless Hellenic culture did not become an aggregate, thanks to that Apollonian saying. The Greeks learned gradually to organize the chaos because, in accordance with the Delphic teaching, they directed their thoughts back to themselves, that is, to their real needs, and let the apparent needs die off. So they seized possession of themselves again. They did not remain long the over-endowed heirs and epigones of the entire Orient. After an arduous battle with themselves, through the practical interpretation of that saying, they became the most fortunate enrichers and increasers of the treasure they had inherited and the firstlings and models for all future national cultures.

This is a parable for every individual among us. He must organize the chaos in himself by recalling in himself his own real needs. His honesty, his better and more genuine character, must now and then struggle against what will be constantly repeated, relearned, and imitated. He begins then to grasp that culture can still be something other than a decoration of life, that is, basically always only pretence and disguise; for all ornamentation covers over what is decorated. So the Greek idea of culture reveals itself to him, in opposition to the Roman, the idea of culture as a new and improved nature, without inner and outer, without pretence and convention, culture as a unanimity of living, thinking, appearing, and willing. Thus, he learns out of his own experience that it was the higher power of moral nature through which the Greeks attained their victory over all other cultures and that each increase of truthfulness must also be a demand in preparation for true culture. This truthfulness may also occasionally seriously harm the idea of culture esteemed at the time; it even may be able to assist a totally decorative culture to collapse. .

Human, All-Too-Human


Preface

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 Prologue to a Philosophy of the Future2. 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,3 at a time when I was already clear‑sighted enough about morality; similarly, that I had deceived myself about Richard Wagner's incurable romanticism,4 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 Similarly's. 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, of 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:"
1. In the place of this preface to the 1886 edition, the 1878 edition of Human All Too Human included a quotation from René Descartes's Discourse on Method
2. The Birth Of Tragedy was published in 1872, Prologue to a Philosophy of the Future is the subtitle of Beyond Good and Evil, published in 1886
3. In "Schopenhauer as Educator"(1874). For Nietzsche's later response to Schopenhauer's blind will to morality, see especially Aphorism 39.
4. In "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth"(1876) : for Nietzsche's later response to Wagner's art see especially Aphorisms 164, 165, 215, 219

2

Thus I invented, when I needed them, the "free spirits"5 too, to whom this heavyhearted- stouthearted6 book with the title "Human, All Too Human" is dedicated. There are no such "free spirits," were none--but, as I said, I needed their company at the time, to be of good cheer in the midst of bad things (illness, isolation, foreignness, sloth, inactivity); as brave fellows and specters to chat and laugh with, when one feels like chatting and laughing, and whom one sends to hell when they get boring--as reparation for lacking friends. That there could someday be such free spirits, that our Europe will have such lively, daring fellows among its sons of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, real and palpable and not merely, as in my case, phantoms and a hermit's shadow play: I am the last person to want to doubt that. I already see them coming, slowly, slowly; and perhaps I am doing something to hasten their coming when I describe before the fact the fateful conditions that I see giving rise to them, the paths on which I see them coming?
5. die "freien Geister"
6. schwermütig-mutig

3

It may be conjectured that the decisive event for a spirit in whom the type of the "free spirit" is one day to ripen to sweet perfection has been a great separation,7 and that before it, he was probably all the more a bound spirit, and seemed to be chained forever to his corner, to his post. What binds most firmly? Which cords can almost not be torn? With men of a high and select type, it will be their obligations: that awe which befits the young, their diffidence and delicacy before all that is time‑honored and dignified, their gratitude for the ground out of which they grew, for the hand that led them, for the shrine where they learned to worship--their own highest moments will bind them most firmly and oblige them most lastingly. For such bound people the great separation comes suddenly, like the shock of an earthquake: all at once the young soul is devastated, torn loose, torn out--it itself does not know what is happening. An urge, a pressure governs it, mastering the soul like a command: the will and wish awaken to go away, anywhere, at any cost: a violent, dangerous curiosity for an undiscovered world flames up and flickers in all the senses. "Better to die than live here," so sounds the imperious and seductive voice. And this "here," this "at home" is everything which it had loved until then! A sudden horror and suspicion of that which it loved; a lightning flash of contempt toward that which was its "obligation"; a rebellious, despotic, volcanically jolting desire to roam abroad, to become alienated, cool, sober, icy: a hatred of love, perhaps a desecratory reaching and glancing backward, to where it had until then worshiped and loved; perhaps a blush of shame at its most recent act, and at the same time, jubilation that it was done; a drunken, inner, jubilant shudder, which betrays a victory‑a victory? over what? over whom? a puzzling, questioning, questionable victory, but the first victory nevertheless: such bad and painful things are part of the history of the great separation. It is also a disease that can destroy man, this first outburst of strength and will to self‑determination, self‑valorization, this will to free will: and how much disease is expressed by the wild attempts and peculiarities with which the freed man, the separated man, now tries to prove his rule over things! He wanders about savagely with an unsatisfied lust; his booty must atone for the dangerous tension of his pride; he rips apart what attracts him.8 With an evil laugh he overturns what he finds concealed, spared until then by some shame; he investigates how these things look if they are overturned. There is some arbitrariness and pleasure in arbitrariness to it, if he then perhaps directs his favor to that which previously stood in disrepute--if he creeps curiously and enticingly around what is most forbidden. Behind his ranging activity (for he is journeying restlessly and aimlessly, as in a desert) stands the question mark of an ever more dangerous curiosity. "Cannot all values be overturned? And is Good perhaps Evil? And God only an invention, a nicety of the devil? Is everything perhaps ultimately false? And if we are deceived, are we not for that very reason also deceivers? Must we not be deceivers, too?" Such thoughts lead and mislead9 him, always further onward, always further away. Loneliness surrounds him, curls round him, ever more threatening, strangling, heart‑constricting, that fearful goddess and mater saeva cupidinum10--but who today knows what loneliness is?
7. Loslösung
8. er zerreist was ihn reitzt
9. führen und verführen ihn
10. wild mother of the passions

4

It is still a long way from this morbid isolation, from the desert of these experimental years, to that enormous, overflowing certainty and health which cannot do without even illness itself, as an instrument and fishhook of knowledge; to that mature freedom of the spirit which is fully as much self‑mastery and discipline of the heart, and which permits paths to many opposing ways of thought. It is a long way to the inner spaciousness and cosseting of a superabundance which precludes the danger that the spirit might lose itself on its own paths and fall in love and stay put, intoxicated, in some nook; a long way to that. excess of vivid healing, reproducing, reviving powers, the very sign of great health, an excess that gives the free spirit the dangerous privilege of being permitted to live experimentally and to offer himself to adventure: the privilege of the master free spirit! In between may lie long years of convalescence, years full of multicolored, painful magical transformations, governed and led by a tough will to health which already often dares to dress and disguise11 itself as health. There is a middle point on the way, which a man having such a fate cannot remember later without being moved: a pale, fine light and sunny happiness are characteristic of it, a feeling of a birdlike freedom, birdlike perspective, birdlike arrogance, some third thing in which curiosity and a tender contempt are united. A "free spirit"--this cool term is soothing in that state, almost warming. No longer chained down by hatred and love, one lives without Yes, without No, voluntarily near, voluntarily far, most preferably slipping away, avoiding, fluttering on, gone again, flying upward again; one is spoiled, like anyone who has ever seen an enormous multiplicity beneath him--and one becomes the antithesis of those who trouble themselves about things that do not concern them. Indeed, now the free spirit concerns himself only with things (and how many there are!) which no longer trouble him.
11. zu kleiden und zu verkleiden

5

Another step onward in convalescence. The free spirit again approaches life, slowly, of course, almost recalcitrantly, almost suspiciously. It grows warmer around him again, yellower, as it were; feeling and fellow‑feeling gain depth; mild breezes of all kinds pass over him. He almost feels as if his eyes were only now open to what is near. He is amazed and sits motionless: where had he been, then? These near and nearest things, how they seem to him transformed! What magical fluff they have acquired in the meantime! He glances backward gratefully--grateful to his travels, to his severity and self‑alienation, to his far‑off glances and bird flights into cold heights. How good that he did not stay "at home," "with himself" the whole time, like a dull, pampered loafer! He was beside himself: there is no doubt about that. Only now does he see himself--and what surprises he finds there! What untried terrors! What happiness even in weariness, in the old illness, in the convalescent's relapses! How he likes to sit still, suffering, spinning patience, or to lie in the sun! Who understands as he does the happiness of winter, the sun spots on the wall! They are the most grateful animals in the world, the most modest, too, these convalescents and squirrels, turned halfway back to life again--there are those among them who let no day pass without hanging a little song of praise on its trailing hem. And to speak seriously, all pessimism (the inveterate evil of old idealists and liars, as we know) is thoroughly cured by falling ill in the way these free spirits do, staying ill for a good while, and then, for even longer, even longer, becoming healthy--I mean "healthier." There is wisdom, practical wisdom in it, when over a long period of time even health itself is administered only in small doses.

6

About that time it may finally happen, among the sudden illuminations of a still turbulent, still changeable state of health, that the free spirit, ever freer, begins to unveil the mystery of that great separation which until then had waited impenetrable, questionable, almost unapproachable in his memory. Perhaps for a long time he hardly dared ask himself, "Why so apart, so alone? Renouncing everything I admired, even admiration? Why this severity, this suspicion, this hatred of one's own virtues?" But now he dares to ask it loudly, and already hears something like an answer. "You had to become your own master, and also the master of your own virtues. Previously, your virtues were your masters; but they must be nothing more than your tools, along with your other tools. You had to gain power over your For and Against, and learn how to hang them out or take them in, according to your higher purpose. You had to learn that all estimations have a perspective, to learn the displacement, distortion, apparent teleology of horizons, and whatever else is part of perspective; also the bit of stupidity in regard to opposite values and all the intellectual damage that every For or Against exacts in payment. You had to learn to grasp the necessary injustice in every For and Against; to grasp that injustice is inseparable from life, that life itself is determined by perspective and its injustice. Above all you had to see clearly wherever injustice is greatest, where life is developed least, most narrowly, meagerly, rudimentarily, and yet cannot help taking itself as the purpose and measure of things, and for the sake of its preservation picking at and questioning secretly and pettily and incessantly what is higher, greater, and richer. You had to see clearly the problem of hierarchy, and how power and justice and breadth of perspective grow upward together. You had to--." Enough, now the free spirit knows which "thou shalt" he has obeyed, and also what he now can do, what he only now is permitted to do.

7

That is how the free spirit answers himself about that mystery of separation and he ends by generalizing his case, to decide thus about his experience. "As it happened to me," he tells himself, "so must it happen to everyone in whom a task wants to take form and `come into the world."' The secret power and necessity of this task will hold sway within and among his various destinies like an unsuspected pregnancy, long before he has looked the task itself in the eye or knows its name. Our destiny commands us, even when we do not yet know what it is; it is the future which gives the rule to our present. Granted that it is the problem of hierarchy which we may call our problem, we free spirits; only now, in the noonday of our lives, do we understand what preparations, detours, trials, temptations, disguises, were needed before the problem was permitted to rise up before us. We understand how we first had to experience the most numerous and contradictory conditions of misery and happiness in our bodies and souls, as adventurers and circumnavigators of that inner world which is called "human being," as surveyors of every "higher" and "one above the other" which is likewise called "human being," penetrating everywhere, almost without fear, scorning nothing, losing nothing, savoring everything, cleaning and virtually straining off everything of the coincidental--until we finally could say, we free spirits: "Here is a new problem! Here is a long ladder on whose rungs we ourselves have sat and climbed, and which we ourselves were at one time! Here is a Higher, a Deeper, a Below‑us, an enormous long ordering, a hierarchy which we see: here--is our problem!"

8

No psychologist or soothsayer will have a moment's difficulty in discovering at which place in the development sketched out above the present book belongs (or is placed). But where are there psychologists today? In France, certainly; perhaps in Russia; surely not in Germany. There are sufficient reasons for which the present‑day Germans could esteem it an honor to be such; bad enough for a person who is constituted and has become un‑German in this respect! This German book, which has known how to find its readers in a wide circle of countries and peoples (it has been on the road for approximately ten years), which must understand some kind of music and flute playing to seduce even unreceptive foreign ears to listen--precisely in Germany has this book been read most negligently, heard most poorly. What is the cause? "It demands too much," has been the reply, "it addresses itself to men who do not know the hardship of crude obligations; it demands fine, cosseted senses; it needs superfluity, superfluity of time, of bright heavens and hearts, of otium12 in the boldest sense--all good things which we Germans of today do not have and therefore cannot give." After such a polite answer, my philosophy counsels me to be silent and inquire no further, especially since in certain cases, as the saying suggests, one remains a philosopher only by--being silent.13
12. leisure
13. A reference to the medieval Latin distich: "o si tacuisses/ Philosophus mansisses."

Nice, Spring, 1886.

Of First and Last Things1

1

Chemistry of concepts and feelings. In almost all respects, philosophical problems today are again formulated as they were two thousand years ago: how can something arise from its opposite--for example, reason from unreason, sensation from the lifeless, logic from the illogical, disinterested contemplation from covetous desire, altruism from egoism, truth from error? Until now, metaphysical philosophy has overcome this difficulty by denying the origin of the one from the other, and by assuming for the more highly valued things some miraculous origin, directly from out of the heart and essence of the "thing in itself."2 Historical philosophy, on the other hand, the very youngest of all philosophical methods, which can no longer be even conceived of as separate from the natural sciences, has determined in isolated cases (and will probably conclude in all of them) that they are not opposites, only exaggerated to be so by the popular or metaphysical view, and that this opposition is based on an error of reason. As historical philosophy explains it, there exists, strictly considered, neither a selfless act nor a completely disinterested observation: both are merely sublimations. In them the basic element appears to be virtually dispersed and proves to be present only to the most careful observer.
All we need, something which can be given us only now, with the various sciences at their present level of achievement, is a chemistry of moral, religious, aesthetic ideas and feelings, a chemistry of all those impulses that we ourselves experience in the great and small interactions of culture and society, indeed even in solitude. What if this chemistry might end with the conclusion that, even here, the most glorious colors are extracted from base, even despised substances? Are there many who will want to pursue such investigations? Mankind loves to put the questions of origin and beginnings out of mind: must one not be almost inhuman to feel in himself the opposite inclination?
1. "Last Things" (die letzten Dinge) refers to eschatology.
2. Ding an sich: the thing in itself, in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781), refers to the existent as it exists independently of our knowledge; a noumenon, a thing of the mind rather than of the senses; that which a thing is when there is no human perception of it, i.e., when it is in "essence" rather than in "appearance."

2

Congenital defect of philosophers. All philosophers suffer from the same defect, in that they start with present‑day man and think they can arrive at their goal by analyzing him. Instinctively they let "man" hover before them as an aeterna veritas,3 something unchanging in all turmoil, a secure measure of things. But everything the philosopher asserts about man is basically no more than a statement about man within a very limited time span. A lack of historical sense is the congenital defect of all philosophers. Some unwittingly even take the most recent form of man, as it developed under the imprint of certain religions or even certain political events, as the fixed form from which one must proceed. They will not understand that man has evolved, that the faculty of knowledge has also evolved, while some of them even permit themselves to spin the whole world from out of this faculty of knowledge.
Now, everything essential in human development occurred in primeval times, long before those four thousand years with which we are more or less familiar. Man probably hasn't changed much more in these years. But the philosopher sees "instincts" in present-day man, and assumes that they belong to the unchangeable facts of human nature, that they can, to that extent, provide a key to the understanding of the world in general. This entire teleology is predicated on the ability to speak about man of the last four thousand years as if he were eternal, the natural direction of all things in the world from the beginning. But everything has evolved; there are no eternal facts, nor are there any absolute truths. Thus historical philosophizing is necessary henceforth, and the virtue of modesty as well.
3. eternal truth