It seems increasingly clear to me that the philosopher, being necessarily a person of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has, in every age, been and has needed to be at odds with his today: his enemy has always been the ideal of today. So far, all these extraordinary patrons of humanity who are called philosophers (and who have seldom felt like friends of wisdom, but like disagreeable fools and dangerous question-marks instead -) have found that their task, their harsh, unwanted, undeniable task (though in the end, the greatness of their task) lay in being the bad conscience of their age. In applying a vivisecting knife directly to the chest of the virtues of the age , they gave away their own secret: to know a new greatness in humanity, a new, untraveled path to human greatness. Every time they have done this, they have shown how much hypocrisy and laziness, how much letting yourself go and letting go of yourself, how many lies are hidden beneath the most highly honored type of their present-day morality, and how much virtue is out of date . Every time, they have said: 'We need to go there, out there, out where you feel least at home today.' When encountering a world of 'modern ideas' which would gladly banish everyone into a corner and 'specialization,' a philosopher (if there could be philosophers today) would be compelled to locate the greatness of humanity, the concept of 'greatness,' in the very scope and variety of humanity, in its unity in multiplicity. He would determine even value and rank according to how much and how many things someone could carry and take upon himself, how far someone could stretch his responsibility. Today, the will is weakened and diluted by the tastes and virtues of the times, and nothing is as timely as weakness of will: this is why precisely strength of will and


the hardness and capacity for long-term resolutions must belong to the concept of 'greatness,' in the philosopher's ideal. With equal justice, the opposite doctrine and the ideal of a stupid, self-abnegating, humble, selfless humanity was suited to an opposite age, to an age like the sixteenth century that suffered from its accumulated energy of the will and from the most savage floods and storm tides of egoism. In the age of Socrates, among honest people with tired instincts, among conservatives of ancient Athens who let themselves go - 'toward happiness,' as they put it, toward pleasure, as they did it - and who kept mouthing old, magnificent words (words that they had absolutely no right to use any more, given the lives they were leading), - here, perhaps, irony was needed for greatness of soul, that malicious, Socratic certainty of the old physician and man of the rabble who cut brutally into his own flesh like he cut into the flesh and heart of the 'noble,' with a glance that spoke clearly enough: 'Don't act some part in front of me! Here - we are equals!' These days, by contrast, when only the herd animal gets and gives honor in Europe, when 'equal rights' could all too easily end up as equal wrongs (I mean, in waging a joint war on everything rare, strange, privileged, on the higher man, higher soul, higher duty, higher responsibility, on creative power and mastery) these days, the concept of 'greatness' will include: being noble, wanting to be for yourself, the ability to be different, standing alone and needing to live by your own fists. And the philosopher will be revealing something of his own ideal when he proposes: 'Greatest of all is the one who can be the mostsolitary, the most hidden, the most different, the person beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, the one with an abundance of will. Only this should be called greatness : the ability to be just as multiple as whole, just as wide as full.' And to ask once again: is greatness possible today?


It is difficult to learn what a philosopher is, because it cannot be taught: you have to 'know' by experience, - or you should be proud that you do not know it at all. But nowadays everyone talks about things that they cannot experience, and most especially (and most terribly) when it comes to philosophers and philosophical matters. Hardly anyone knows about them or is allowed to know, and all popular opinions about them are false. So, for instance, the genuinely philosophical compatibility between a bold and lively spirituality that runs along at a presto , and a dialectical rigor and Beyond Good and Evil


necessity that does not take a single false step - this is an experience most thinkers and scholars would find unfamiliar and, if someone were to mention it, unbelievable. They think of every necessity as a need, a painstaking having-to-follow and being-forced; and they consider thinking itself as something slow and sluggish, almost a toil and often enough 'worth the sweat of the noble.' Not in their wildest dreams would they think of it as light, divine, and closely related to dance and high spirits! 'Thinking' and 'treating an issue seriously,' 'with gravity' - these belong together, according to most thinkers and scholars: that is the only way they have 'experienced' it -. Artists might have a better sense of smell even in this matter: they are the ones who know only too well that their feeling of freedom, finesse and authority, of creation, formation, and control only reaches its apex when they have stopped doing anything 'voluntarily' and instead do everything necessarily, - in short, they know that inside themselves necessity and 'freedom of the will' have become one. In the last analysis, there is a rank order of psychic states which corresponds to the rank order of problems; and the highest problems will ruthlessly repel anyone who dares to get close without being predestined by sheer stature and power of spirituality to reach a solution. What good is it if, as happens so often these days, agile, ordinary minds or clumsy, worthy mechanists and empiricists throng with their plebeian ambition to these problems and into, as it were, the 'inner courtyard'! But crude feet would never be allowed on a carpet like this: this has already been provided for in the primordial laws of things. The door will stay barred against these intruders, however much they push or pound their heads against it! You need to have been born for any higher world; to say it more clearly, you need to have been bred for it: only your descent, your ancestry can give you a right to philosophy - taking that word in its highest sense. Even here, 'bloodline' is decisive. The preparatory labor of many generations is needed for a philosopher to come about; each of his virtues needs to have been individually acquired, cared for, passed down, and incorporated: and not only the bright, light, gentle gait and course of his thoughts, but above all the eagerness for great responsibilities, the sovereignty of


his ruling gazes and downward gazes, the feeling of separation from the crowd with its duties and virtues, the genial protection and defense of anything misunderstood and slandered, whether it is god or devil, the pleasure and practice in great justice, the art of command, the expanse of the will, the slow eye that hardly ever admires, hardly ever looks up, hardly ever loves ...


Our virtues? - We probably still have our virtues too, although of course they will not be those trusting and muscular virtues for which we hold our grandfathers in honor - but also slightly at arm's length. We Europeans from the day after tomorrow, we firstborn of the twentieth century, - with all of our dangerous curiosity, our diversity and art of disguises, our wornout and, as it were, saccharine cruelty in sense and in spirit, if wehappen to have virtues, they will presumably only be the ones that have learned best how to get along with our most secret and heartfelt propensities, with our most fervent desires. So let us look for them in our labyrinths! where, as we know, so many things lose their way, so many things get entirely lost. And is there anything more beautiful than looking for your own virtues? Doesn't this almost mean: believing in your own virtue? But this 'believing in your own virtue' - isn't this basically what people used to call their 'good conscience,' that venerable, long-haired pigtail of a concept that hung on the back of our grandfathers' heads, and often enough behind their intellects too? And so it seems that however up-to-date and unworthy of grandfatherly honor we might otherwise appear, there is nevertheless one respect in which we are the worthy grandchildren of these grandfathers, we last Europeans with a good conscience: we still wear their pigtail. - Oh! If you knew how soon, so soon now - things will be different! ... Beyond Good and Evil


Just as in the celestial realm, the track of one planet will sometimes be determined by two suns; just as, in certain cases, suns of different colors will shine on a single planet with red light one moment and green light the next, and then strike it again, inundating it with many colors all at once: in the same way, thanks to the complex mechanics of our 'starry skies,' we modern men are determined by a diversity of morals; our actions shine with different colors in turn, they are rarely unambiguous, - and it happens often enough that we perform multi-colored actions.


To love your enemies? I think this has been learned quite well: it happens thousands of times these days, in large and small ways; in fact, something even higher and more sublime happens every once in a while - we learn to despise when we love and precisely when we love the most. But all of this is unconscious, noiseless, lacking in pomp or pageantry but possessing that shame and concealed goodness which forbids the mouth from using any solemn words or virtuous formulas. Morality as posturing - offends our taste these days. This is progress too, just as it was progress for our fathers when religion as posturing finally offended their taste, including the hostility and Voltairean bitterness towards religion (and everything that used to belong to the sign language of free spirits). No puritan litany, moral homily, or petty bourgeois respectability wants to resonate with the music in our conscience and the dance in our spirit.


Watch out for people who put a high value on being credited with moral tact and with subtlety in making moral distinctions! They will never forgive us if they ever make a mistake in front of us (or especially about us), - they will inevitably become our instinctive slanderers and detractors, even if they still remain our 'friends.' Blessed are the forgetful: for they will 'have done' with their stupidities too.


The French psychologists - and where else are there still psychologists today? - have never grown tired of their bitter and manifold delight in


the betise bourgeoise , somewhat as if ... enough, this reveals something about them. For instance, Flaubert, the good citizen of Rouen, ultimately stopped seeing, hearing, or tasting anything else: this was his brand of self-torture and subtler cruelty. Now - because this is getting boring - I recommend another source of amusement for a change: the unconscious cunning that all good, fat, well-behaved, mediocre spirits have shown towards higher spirits and their tasks, that subtle, intricate, Jesuitical cunning that is a thousand times more subtle than any taste or understanding evinced by this middle class in its best moments - it is even more subtle than its victims' understanding (which is on-going proof that 'instinct' is the most intelligent type of intelligence discovered so far). In short, you psychologists should study the philosophy of the 'rule' in its struggle against the 'exception': there you will see drama good enough for gods and divine malice! Or, to be even more up to date: vivisect the 'good man,' the ' homo bonae voluntatis ' ... yourselves !


Moral judgment and condemnation is the favorite revenge of the spiritually limited on those who are less so, as well as a type of compensation for having been slighted by nature, and an opportunity to finally acquire spirit and become refined: - malice spiritualizes. It warms the bottom of their hearts for there to be a standard that makes them the equal of even people who are teeming with all the qualities and privileges of spirit: - they fight for the 'equality of all before God' and almost need to believe in God for this reason alone. Among them are the strongest opponents of atheism. If anyone were to tell them that 'a high spirituality is beyond comparison with any sort of good behavior or worthiness of a merely moral man,' they would be livid: - I certainly would not do it. I would rather flatter them by claiming that a high spirituality is itself only the final, monstrous product of moral qualities; that it is a synthesis of all the states attributed to the 'merely moral' men after they had been acquired individually, through long discipline and practice, perhaps through whole series of generations; that high spirituality is just the spiritualization of justice and a benevolent severity that knows how to charge itself with the preservation of the Bourgeois stupidity. 'Man of goodwill.'


order of rank in the world among things themselves - and not just among people.


Given the popularity of the term 'disinterested' in praising people these days, we need to be aware (although this might prove dangerous) of what it is that really interests the people and what sorts of things the common man cares truly and deeply about (including educated people and even scholars and, unless I am badly mistaken, the philosophers as well). The fact then emerges that the overwhelming majority of things that interest and appeal to the more refined and discriminating tastes, to every higher nature, will strike the average person as utterly 'uninteresting.' If he notices a devotion to it anyway, then he calls it ' d'esint'eress'e ' and wonders how it is possible to act in a 'disinterested' fashion. There have been philosophers whohaveevenknownhowtoexpressthispopularperplexityinaseductive and mystico-otherworldly way (- perhaps because they did not have firsthand knowledge of higher natures?) - instead of laying down the naked and fully proper truth that a 'disinterested' action is a very interesting and interested action, provided ... 'And love?' - What? Even an action done out of love is supposed to be 'unegoistic'? But you fools-!'And praise for the self-sacrificing?' But anyone who has really made sacrifices knows that he wanted and got something in return, - perhaps something of himself in return for something of himself - that he gave up here in order to have more there, perhaps in order to be more in general, or just to feel like 'more.' But this is a realm of questions and answers in which a more discriminating spirit will not want to stay for very long: the truth is already desperate to keep herself from yawning when she is required to respond. In the end, she is a woman: we should not do violence to her.


'It sometimes happens,' said a moralistic pedant and stickler for detail, 'that I honor and esteem an altruistic person. Not because he is altruistic, however, but because it seems to me that he has the right to help another person at his own expense. Enough, it is always a question of who he is and whothat other is. For instance, in a person who was made and determined for command, self-denial and modest retreat would not be a virtue but


the waste of a virtue: that is how it seems to me. Every unegoistic morality that considers itself unconditional and is directed toward everyone does not just sin against taste: it is a provocation to sins of omission, and one more temptation under a mask of benevolence - a temptation and injury to precisely the higher, the rarer, the privileged. Morals must be compelled fromthevery start to bow before rank order , their presumptuousness must be forced onto their conscience, - until they are finally in agreement with each other that it is immoral to say: 'What's right for the one is fair for the other.' ' - So says my moralistic pedant and bonhomme : does he really deserve to be laughed at for urging morals to morality in this way? But you should not be too right if you want to get a laugh; a kernel of wrong belongs to even a good taste.


Whereverpityispreachedthesedays-andifyouarelisteningproperly,no other religion is preached any more - let the psychologist open up his ears. Through all the vanity, through all the noise that this preacher (like all preachers) intrinsically possesses, the psychologist will hear the genuine, rasping, groaning sound of self-hatred . This self-hatred belongs to the darkeningandincreasinguglinessof Europe,whichhavebeengrowingfor a hundred years now (and whose first symptoms were already documented in Galiani's thought-provoking letter to Madame d'Epinay): if it is not the cause! The man of 'modern ideas,' this proud ape, is exceedingly unhappy with himself: this is clear. He suffers: and his vanity would have it that he only pities ...


The hybrid mixed man of Europe - a fairly ugly plebeian, all in all absolutely must have a costume: he needs history as a storage closet of costumes. Of course, he notices that nothing really looks right on him, he keeps changing. Just look at these rapid preferences and changes in the masquerade of styles over the course of the nineteenth century; and at the momentsofdespairoverthefactthat'nothingsuits'us-.Itis pointless to Good man. In German: mit leidet (literally: 'suffers with'). Here as elsewhere, Nietzsche is playing on the similarities between the terms leiden (to suffer) and Mitleid (pity).


dress up as romantic or classical or Christian or Florentine or Baroque or 'national,' in moribus et artibus : it 'doesn't look good'! But the 'spirit,' and particularly the 'historical spirit,' finds that even this despair is to its own advantage: again and again, a new piece of prehistory or foreign country will be tried out, turned over, filed away, packed up, and above all studied . Wearethefirstagetobeeducated in puncto of 'costumes,'Imean of morals, articles of faith, artistic tastes, and religions, and prepared as no age has ever been for a carnival in the grand style, for the most spiritually carnivalesque laughter and high spirits, for the transcendental heights of the highest inanity and Aristophanean world mockery. Perhaps it's that we still discover a realm of our invention here, a realm where we can still be original too, as parodists of world history or buffoons of God, or something like that, - perhaps it's that, when nothing else from today has a future, our laughter is the one thing that does!


The historical sense (or the ability quickly to guess the rank order of the valuations that a people, a society, an individual has lived by, the 'divinatory instinct' for the connections between these valuations, for the relationship between the authority of values and the authority of effective forces): this historical sense that we Europeans claim as our distinguishing characteristic comes to us as a result of that enchanting and crazy half-barbarism into which Europe has been plunged through the democratic mixing of classes and races, - only the nineteenth century sees this sense as its sixth sense. Thanks to this mixture, the past of every form and way of life, of cultures that used to lie side by side or on top of each other, radiates into us, we 'modern souls.' At this point, our instincts are running back everywhere and we ourselves are a type of chaos -. 'Spirit,' as I have said, eventually finds that this is to its own advantage. Because of the half-barbarism in our bodies and desires, we have secret entrances everywhere, like no noble age has ever had, and, above all, access to the labyrinths of unfinished cultures and to every half-barbarism that has ever existed on earth. And since the most considerable part of human culture to date has been just such half-barbarism, the 'historical sense' practically amounts to a sense and In customs and arts. With respect to.


instinct for everything, a taste and tongue for everything: by which it immediately shows itself to be an ignoble sense. For instance, we are enjoying Homer again: knowing how to taste Homer might be our greatest advantage, one that people from a noble culture (such as seventeenth-century Frenchmen, like Saint-Evremond, who reproached Homer for an esprit vaste , and even Voltaire, their concluding note) do not and did not find very easy to acquire - and one that they would hardly allow themselves to enjoy. The very precise Yes and No of their palate, their ready disgust, their hesitant reserve about everything strange or exotic, their fear of the poor taste of even a lively curiosity, and in general that unwillingness seen in every noble and self-sufficient culture to admit to itself a new lust, a dissatisfaction with its own, an admiration of something foreign: all this prejudices a noble culture and puts it at odds with even the best things in the world, if they are not its property and could not become its spoils. And no sense is more incomprehensible to such people than precisely this historical sense with its obsequious plebeian curiosity. It is no different with Shakespeare, that amazing Spanish-Moorish-Saxon synthesis of tastes that would have almost killed one of Aeschylus' ancient Athenian friends with either rage or laughter: but we - accept precisely this wild burst of colors, this confusion of the most delicate, the crudest, and the most artificial with a secret familiarity and warmth. We enjoy him as the artistic refinement that has been reserved just for us, and meanwhile we do not let ourselves be bothered by the noxious fumes and the proximity of the English rabble in which Shakespeare's art and taste lives, any more than we do on the Chiaja of Naples, for instance: where we go on our way with all of our senses, enchanted and willing, however much the sewers of the rabble districts are in the air. We men of 'historical sense,' we do have our virtues - this cannot be denied. We are unassuming, selfless, modest, brave, full of self-overcoming, full of dedication, very grateful, very patient, very accommodating: - but for all that we are, perhaps, not very 'tasteful.' Finally, let us admit to ourselves: what we men of 'historical sense' find the most difficult to grasp,


to feel, to taste again and love again, what we are fundamentally biased against and almost hostile towards, is just that perfected and newly ripened aspect of every art and culture, the genuinely noble element in works and people, their moment of smooth seas and halcyon self-sufficiency, the gold and the coldness Enormous spirit. Beyond Good and Evil seen in all things that have perfected themselves. Perhaps our great virtue of historical sense is necessarily opposed to good taste, at least to the very best taste, and it is only poorly and haltingly, only with effort that we are able to reproduce in ourselves the trivial as well as greatest serendipities and transfigurations of human life as they light up every now and then: those moments and marvels when a great force stands voluntarily still in front of the boundless and limitless -, the enjoyment of an abundance of subtle pleasure in suddenly harnessing and fossilizing, in settling down and establishing yourself on ground that is still shaking. Moderation is foreign to us, let us admit this to ourselves; our thrill is precisely the thrill of the infinite, the unmeasured. Like the rider on a steed snorting to go further onward, we let the reins drop before the infinite, we modern men, we half-barbarians - and we feel supremely happy only when we are in the most danger .


Hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism, eudamonianism: these are all ways of thinking that measure the value of things according to pleasure and pain , which is to say according to incidental states and trivialities. They are all foreground ways of thinking and naivet'es, and nobody who is conscious of both formative powers and an artist's conscience will fail to regard them with scorn as well as pity. Pity for you ! That is certainly not pity as you understand it: it is not pity for social 'distress,' for 'society' with its sick and injured, for people depraved and destroyed from the beginning as they lie around us on the ground; even less is it pity for the grumbling, dejected, rebellious slave strata who strive for dominance - they call it 'freedom.' Our pity is a higher, more far-sighted pity: - we see how humanity is becoming smaller, how you are making it smaller! - and there are moments when we look on your pity with indescribable alarm, when we fight this pity -, when we find your seriousness more dangerous than any sort of thoughtlessness. You want, if possible (and no 'if possible' is crazier) to abolish suffering . And us? - it looks as though we would prefer it to be heightened and made even worse than it has ever been! Well-being as you understand it - that is no goal; it looks to us like an end ! - a condition that immediately renders people ridiculous and despicable - that makes their decline into something desirable ! The discipline of suffering, of great suffering - don't you know that this discipline has


been the sole cause of every enhancement in humanity so far? The tension that breeds strength into the unhappy soul, its shudder at the sight of great destruction, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, surviving, interpreting, and exploiting unhappiness, and whatever depth, secrecy, whatever masks, spirit, cunning, greatness it has been given: - weren't these the gifts of suffering, of the disciple of great suffering? In human beings, creature and creator are combined: in humans there is material, fragments, abundance, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in humans there is also creator, maker, hammer-hardness, spectator-divinity and seventh day: - do you understand this contrast? And that your pity is aimed at the 'creature in humans,' at what needs to be molded, broken, forged, torn, burnt, seared and purified, - at what necessarily needs to suffer and should suffer? And our pity - don't you realize who our inverted pity is aimed at when it fights against your pity as the worst of all pampering and weaknesses? - Pity against pity, then! - But to say it again: there are problems that are higher than any problems of pleasure, pain, or pity; and any philosophy that stops with these is a piece of naivet'e. -


We immoralists! - This world as it concerns us , in which we need to love and be afraid, this almost invisible, inaudible world of subtle command, subtle obedience, a world of the 'almost' in every respect, twisted, tricky, barbed, and loving: yes, it is well defended against clumsy spectators and friendly curiosity! We have been woven into a strong net and shirt of duties, and cannot get out of it -, in this sense we are 'people of duty,' even us! It is true that we sometimes dance quite well in our 'chains' and between our 'swords'; it is no less true that more often we grind our teeth and feel impatient at all the secret harshness of our fate. But we can do as we please: fools and appearances will speak up against us, claiming 'those are people without duties' - fools and appearances are always against us! Genuine honesty, assuming that this is our virtue and we cannot get rid of it, we free spirits - well then, we will want to work on it with all the In German: Redlichkeit . Beyond Good and Evil


love and malice at our disposal, and not get tired of 'perfecting' ourselves in our virtue, the only one we have left: may its glory come to rest like a gilded, blue evening glow of mockery over this aging culture and its dull and dismal seriousness! And if our genuine honesty nevertheless gets tired one day and sighs and stretches its limbs and finds us too harsh and would rather things were better, easier, gentler, like an agreeable vice: we will stay harsh , we, who are the last of the Stoics! And we will help it out with whatever devilishness we have - our disgust at clumsiness and approximation, our ' nitimur in vetitum ,' our adventurer's courage, our sly and discriminating curiosity, our subtlest, most hidden, most spiritual will to power and world-overcoming which greedily rambles and raves over every realm of the future, - we will bring all of our 'devils' to help out our 'god'! People will probably misjudge us and misconstrue us on account of this: so what! People will say: 'this 'genuine honesty' this is devilishness and absolutely nothing else!' So what! And even if they were right! Haven't all gods so far been devils like this, who have became holy and been re-baptized? And, ultimately, what do we know about ourselves? And what the spirit that leads us wants to be called ? (It is a question of names.) And how many spirits we are hiding? Our genuine honesty, we free spirits, - let us make sure that it does not become our vanity, our pomp and finery, our limitation, our stupidity! Every virtue tends towards stupidity, every stupidity towards virtue; 'stupid to the point of holiness' they say in Russia, - let us make sure we do not end up becoming saints or tedious bores out of genuine honesty! Isn't life a hundred times too short to be bored? You would have to believe in eternal life in order to ...


Youwill have to forgive me for having discovered that all moral philosophy so far has been boring and should be classified as a soporific - and that nothing has done more to spoil 'virtue' for my ears than this tediousness of its advocates; although I would not want to underestimate their general utility. It is quite important that as few people as possible think about morality - consequently, it is really quite important for morality not to somehowturninteresting one of these days! But there is no need to worry! 'We strive for the forbidden' from Ovid's Amores, III, , . Our virtues


Things today are the same as they have always been: I don't see anyone in Europe who has (or conveys ) any idea that moral deliberation could be dangerous, insidious, seductive - that it could be disastrous ! Just look at the indefatigable, unavoidable English utilitarians, for example, how awkwardly and honorably they walk in Bentham's footsteps, wandering to, wandering fro (a Homeric simile says it better), just as he himself had walked in the footsteps of the honorable Helv'etius (no, this was not a dangerous man, this Helv'etius!). No new thoughts, no sign of any subtle change or fold in an old thought, not even a real history of the earlier thought: an impossible literature on the whole, unless you know how to sour it with some malice. That old English vice called cant , which is a piece of moral tartufferie , has insinuated itself into these moralists too (who have to be read with ulterior motives, if they have to be read at all -), hidden this time under a new form: science. And there is no lack of secret defenses against all the bites of conscience that will afflict a race of former Puritans whenever they deal with morality on a scientific level. (Isn't a moralist the opposite of a Puritan? A thinker, that is, who treats morality as something questionable, question-mark-able, in short, as a problem? Shouldn't moralists be - immoral?) Ultimately, they all want English morality to be given its dues: since it is best for humanity, for the 'general utility' or 'the happiness of the majority' - no! the happiness of England . They want, with all the strength they can muster, to prove to themselves that striving for English happiness, I mean for comfort and fashion (and, at the highest level, for a seat in Parliament), is the proper path to virtue as well, and, in fact, that whatever virtue has existed in the world so far has involved just this sort of striving. Not one of these clumsy, conscience-stricken herd animals (who set out to treat egoism as a matter of general welfare -) wants to know or smell anything of the fact that 'general welfare' is no ideal, no goal, not a concept that can somehow be


grasped, but only an emetic; - that what is right for someone absolutely cannot be right for someone else; that the requirement that there be a single morality for everyone is harmful precisely to the higher men; in short, that there is an order of rank between people, and between moralities as well. They are a modest and thoroughly mediocre type of person, these utilitarian Englishmen, but, as I have said: to the extent Nietzsche uses the English word. Nietzsche uses the English words 'comfort' and 'fashion.' Beyond Good and Evil that they are boring, we cannot think highly enough of their utility. They should even be encouraged : as the following rhymes try, in part, to do. Good barrow pushers, we salute you, 'More is best' will always suit you, Always stiff in head and knee, Lacking spirit, humor too, Mediocre through and through, Sans genie et sans esprit !


Mature epochs that have the right to be proud of their humanity are still so full of fear, so full of superstitious fear of the 'cruel and wild beast' (although the pride these more humane ages feel is actually caused by their mastery of this beast), that even obvious truths remain unspoken for centuries, as if by agreement, because they have the appearance of helping bring the wild beast back to life after it had finally been killed off. Perhaps I am taking a risk in allowing a truth like this to escape: let other people recapture it and make it drink the 'milk of pious reflection' until it lies quiet and forgotten in its old corner. - People should rethink their ideas about cruelty and open up their eyes; they should finally learn impatience, so that big, fat, presumptuous mistakes like this will stop wandering virtuously and audaciously about. An example of this is the mistaken ideas about tragedy that have been nurtured by both ancient and modern philosophers. This is my claim: almost everything we call 'higher culture' is based on the spiritualization and deepening of cruelty . The 'wild animal' has not been killed off at all; it is alive and well, it has just - become divine. Cruelty is what constitutes the painful sensuality of tragedy. And what pleases us in so-called tragic pity as well as in everything sublime, up to the highest and most delicate of metaphysical tremblings, derives its sweetness exclusively from the intervening component of cruelty. Consider the Roman in the arena, Christ in the rapture of the cross, the Spaniard at the sight of the stake or the bullfight, the present-day Japanese flocking to tragedies, the Parisian suburban laborer who is homesick for bloody revolutions, the Wagnerienne who unfastens 'Without genius and without spirit.'


her will and lets Tristan und Isolde 'wash over her' - what they all enjoy and crave with a mysterious thirst to pour down their throats is 'cruelty,' the spiced drink of the great Circe. We clearly need to drive out the silly psychology of the past; the only thing this psychology was able to teach about cruelty was that it originated from the sight of another ' s suffering. But there is abundant, overabundant pleasure in your own suffering too, in making yourself suffer, - and wherever anyone lets himself be talked into self-denial in the religious sense, or self-mutilation (as the Phoenicians or ascetics did), or into desensitization, disembowelment or remorse in general, or into puritanical penitential spasms, vivisections of conscience or a Pascalian sacrifizio dell'intelletto - wherever this is the case, he is secretly being tempted and urged on by his cruelty, by that dangerous thrill of self -directed cruelty. Finally, people should bear in mind that even the knower, by forcing his spirit to know against its own inclination and, often enough, against the wishes of his heart (in other words, to say 'no' when he would like to affirm, love, worship), this knower will prevail as an artist of cruelty and the agent of its transfiguration. Even treating something in a profound or thorough manner is a violation, a wanting-to-hurt the fundamental will of the spirit, which constantly tends towards semblances and surfaces, - there is a drop of cruelty even in every wanting-to-know.


Perhaps people will not immediately understand what I have said here about a 'fundamental will of the spirit': let me explain. - The commanding element (whatever it is) that is generally called 'spirit' wants to dominate itself and its surroundings, and to feel its domination: it wills simplicity out of multiplicity, it is a binding, subduing, domineering, and truly masterful will. Its needs and abilities are the same ones that physiologists have established for everything that lives, grows, and propagates. The power of spirit to appropriate foreign elements manifests itself in a strong tendency to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the manifold, to disregard or push aside utter inconsistencies: just as it will arbitrarily select certain aspects or outlines of the foreign, of any piece of the 'external world,' for stronger emphasis, stress, or falsification in its own interest. Its Sacrifice of the intellect. Beyond Good and Evil


intention here is to incorporate new 'experiences,' to classify new things into old classes, - which is to say: it aims at growth, or, more particularly, the feeling of growth, the feeling of increasing strength. This same will is served by an apparently opposite drive of spirit, a suddenly emerging resolution in favor of ignorance and arbitrary termination, a closing of its windows, an inner nay-saying to something or other, a come-no-closer, a type of defensive state against many knowable things, a contentment with darkness, with closing horizons, a yea-saying and approval of ignorance: all of which are necessary in proportion to the degree of its appropriating force, its 'digestive force,' to speak metaphorically - and really, 'spirit' resembles a stomach more than anything. The spirit's occasional will to be deceived belongs here too, perhaps with a playful hunch that things are not one way or the other, that people just accept things as one way or the other, a sense of pleasure in every uncertainty and ambiguity, a joyful self-delight at the arbitrary narrowness and secrecy of a corner, at the all-too-close, the foreground, at things made bigger, smaller, later, better, a self-delight at the sheer caprice in all these expressions of power. Finally, the spirit's not quite harmless willingness to deceive other spirits and to act a part in front of them belongs here too, that constant stress and strain of a creative, productive, mutable force. What the spirit enjoys here is its multiplicity of masks and its artfulness, and it also enjoys the feeling of security these provide, - after all, its Protean arts are the very things that protect and conceal it the best! This will to appearances, to simplification, to masks, to cloaks, in short, to surfaces - since every surface is a cloak - meets resistance from that sublime tendency of the knower, who treats and wants to treat things in a profound, multiple, thorough manner. This is a type of cruelty on the part of the intellectual conscience and taste, and one that any brave thinker will acknowledge in himself, assuming that he has spent as long as he should in hardening and sharpening his eye for himself, and that he is used to strict discipline as well as strict words. He will say 'There is something cruel in the tendency of my spirit': - just let kind and virtuous


people try to talk him out of it! In fact, it would sound more polite if, instead of cruelty, people were to accuse, mutter about and praise us as having a sort of 'wild honesty' - free, very free spirits that we are: - and perhaps this is what our reputation will really be - posthumously? In the meantime - because this won't be happening for a while - we are the least likely to dress ourselves up with these sorts of moral baubles and beads: all the work we have done so far has spoiled our taste for precisely this sort


of bright opulence. These are beautiful, twinkling, tinkling, festive words: genuine honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom, sacrifice for knowledge, the heroism of truthfulness, - there is something about them that makes you swell with pride. But we hermits and marmots, we convinced ourselves a long time ago and in all the secrecy of a hermit's conscience that even this dignified verbal pageantry belongs among the false old finery, debris, and gold dust of unconscious human vanity, and that the terrible basic text of homo natura must be recognized even underneath these fawning colors and painted surfaces. To translate humanity back into nature; to gain control of the many vain and fanciful interpretations and incidental meanings that have been scribbled and drawn over that eternal basic text of homo natura so far; to make sure that, from now on, the human being will stand before the human being, just as he already stands before the rest of nature today, hardened by the discipline of science, - with courageous Oedipus eyes and sealed up Odysseus ears, deaf to the lures of the old metaphysical bird catchers who have been whistling to him for far too long: 'You are more! You are higher! You have a different origin!' - This may be a strange and insane task, but it is a task - who would deny it! Why do we choose it, this insane task? Or to ask it differently: 'Why knowledge at all?' - Everyone will be asking us this. And we who have been prodded so much, we who have asked ourselves the same question a hundred times already, we have not found and are not finding any better answers ... Learning transforms us, it acts like all other forms of nourishment that do not just 'preserve' -: as physiologists know. But at our foundation, 'at the very bottom,' there is clearly something that will not learn, a brick wall of spiritual fatum , of predetermined decisions and answers to selected, predetermined questions. In any cardinal problem, an immutable 'that is me' speaks up. When it comes to men and women, for instance, a thinker cannot change his views but only reinforce them, only finish discovering what, to his mind, 'is established.' In time, certain solutions are found to problems that inspire our strong beliefs in particular; perhaps they will


Natural man. Fate. Beyond Good and Evil start to be called 'convictions.' Later - they come to be seen as only footsteps to self-knowledge, signposts to the problems that we are , - or, more accurately, to the great stupidity that we are, to our spiritual fatum , to that thing 'at the very bottom' that will not learn . - On account of the abundant civility that I have just extended to myself, I will perhaps be more readily allowed to pronounce a few truths about the 'woman an sich ': assuming that people now know from the outset the extent to which these are only my truths. -


Women want to become independent, so they are beginning to enlighten men about the 'woman an sich '-this is one of the worst developments in Europe's general trend towards increasing ugliness . Just imagine what these clumsy attempts at female scientificity and self-disclosure will bring to light! Women have so much cause for shame; they contain so much that is pedantic, superficial, and schoolmarmish as well as narrowmindedly arrogant, presumptuous, and lacking in restraint (just think about their interactions with children!), all of which has been most successfully restrained and kept under control by their fear of men. Look out when the 'eternal tedium of woman' (which they all have in abundance!) first dares to emerge! When, on principle, they start completely forgetting their discretion and their art - of grace, play, chasing-all-cares-away, of making things easier and taking them lightly, as well as their subtle skill at pleasant desires! Even now, female voices are becoming heard which - holy Aristophanes! - are terrifying, and threaten with medicinal clarity what, in the first and last instance, women want from men. Isn't it in the very worst taste when women prepare to be scientific like this? Fortunately, enlightenment had been a man's business, a man's talent until now - as such, we could remain 'among ourselves.' And with respect to everything that women write about 'woman,' we can ultimately reserve a healthy doubt as to whether women really want - and are able to want - to provide enlightenment about themselves ... If this is not really all about some woman trying to find a new piece of finery for herself (and isn't dressing up a part of the Eternal Feminine?), well then, she wants to inspire fear of In German: das ' Weib an sich .' The term ' an sich ' means 'in itself,' as in Kant's Ding an sich (thing in itself). I have left the term in German because any English rendering is clumsy, and the German retains both the gender neutrality and the philosophical connotations of the term.


herself: - perhaps in order to dominate. But she does not want truth: what does truth matter for a woman! Nothing is so utterly foreign, unfavorable, hostile for women from the very start than truth, - their great art is in lying, their highest concern is appearance and beauty. Let us admit that we men love and honor precisely this art and this instinct in women: we have a rough time of it, and gladly seek relief by attaching ourselves to a being in whose hands, eyes, and gentle stupidities our seriousness, our gravity, and profundity look almost stupid to us. Finally, I will pose the question: has a woman herself ever acknowledged a female mind as profound or a female heart as just? And isn't it true that, judging overall, 'woman' has historically been most despised by women themselves - and not by us at all? - We men wish that women would stop compromising themselves through enlightenment: just as male care and protection of women were at work when the church decreed: mulier taceat in ecclesia ! It was for women's own good, when Napoleon gave the all-too-eloquent Madame de Stael to understand: mulier taceat in politicis ! - and I think that it is a true friend of the ladies who calls to them today: mulier taceat de muliere !


It shows corruption of the instincts - even apart from the fact that it shows bad taste - when a woman refers specifically to Madame Roland or MadamedeStael or Monsieur Georges Sand, as if that proved something in favor of the 'woman an sich .' Men consider these the three comical women an sich - nothing else! - and precisely the best involuntary counterarguments against emancipation and female self-determination.


Stupidity in the kitchen; woman as cook; the spine-chilling thoughtlessness in the feeding of the family and the head of the house! Women do not understand what food means : and yet want to cook! If woman were a thoughtful creature, then the fact that she has been the cook for thousands of years would surely have led her to discover the greatest physiological facts, and at the same time make the art of medicine her own! Bad cooking 'Woman should be silent in church.' 'Woman should be silent about politics.' 'Woman should be silent about woman.' Beyond Good and Evil and the complete absence of reason in the kitchen have caused the longest delays and the worst damage to the development of humanity: even today, things are hardly any better. A speech for young ladies.


There are phrases and masterstrokes of the spirit, there are aphorisms, a small handful of words, in which an entire culture, an entire society is suddenly crystallized. Madame de Lambert's occasional remark to her son is one of them: ' Mon ami, ne vous permettez jamais que de folies qui vous feront grand plaisir ': - which, by the way, is the most motherly and astute remark that has ever been addressed to a son.


What Dante and Goethe believed about women - the former when he sang ' ella guardava suso, ed io in lei ,' the latter when he translated it as 'the Eternal Feminine draws us upward '-: I have no doubt that any noble woman will object to this belief, since this is just what she believes about the Eternal Masculine.


Seven little maxims about women Suddenly we're bored no more when a man crawls through the door! Age, alas! and science too gives weaker virtues strength anew. Black gowns and a silent guise make any woman look quite - wise. Who to thank for my success? God - and my own tailoress. 'My friend, only allow yourself the follies that will give you great pleasure.' 'She looked up, and I at her.' From Dante's Divina Commedia: Paradiso , II, . From Goethe's Faust II, line f. So far, men have been treating women like birds that have lost their way and flown down to them from some height or another: like something finer, more vulnerable, wilder, stranger, sweeter, more soulful, - but also like something that has to be locked up to keep it from flying away.


To be wrong about the fundamental problem of 'man and woman'; on the one hand, to deny the most abysmal antagonism and the necessity of an eternally hostile tension; and, on the other hand, to dream, perhaps, of equal rights, equal education, equal entitlements and obligations: thatisa typical sign of a shallow mind, and a thinker who has proven to be shallow in this dangerous area - shallow in instinct! -, can be generally regarded as suspicious, or, even more, as shown up for what he is, as exposed. He will probably be too 'short' for all the fundamental questions of life, including future life, and unable to get down to them in any depth. On the other hand, someone who has the same depth in his spirit as he does in his desires, and also that depth of goodwill which is capable of harshness and strictness and is easily mistaken for them - that sort of man will only ever be able to think about woman in an oriental manner. He needs to understand the woman as a possession, as property that can be locked up, as something predestined for servitude and fulfilled by it. In this he has to adopt the position of Asia's enormous rationality, Asia's superiority of instinct, just as the Greeks once did (being Asia's best heirs and students); we know that, from Homer up to the times of Pericles, while their culture was growing and their strength expanding, the Greeks were gradually becoming stricter with women too - in short, more oriental. How necessary, how logical - in Beyond Good and Evil fact, how humanly desirable all this has been: just think about it for a while!


The men of our epoch treat the weaker sex with more respect than any epoch has ever done - this is part of the democratic tendency and fundamental taste, as is a lack of respect for age -: is it any wonder that this respect is immediately misused? People want more, people learn to make demands, people ultimately find this respect tax almost hurtful, people would prefer to compete for rights or, in all seriousness, wage war: enough, woman loses her shame. Let us immediately add that she also loses her taste. She forgets her fear of man: but the woman who 'forgets fear' abandons her most feminine instincts. It is fair enough and also understandable enough for women to dare to emerge when fear of men is no longer inculcated, or, to be more exact, when the man in men is no longer wanted and cultivated; what is more difficult to understand is that in the process - women degenerate. This is happening today, make no mistake about it! Wherever the industrial spirit has won out over the military and aristocratic spirit, women are now striving for the economic and legal independence of a clerk: 'the woman as clerk' is written on the gateway to the developing, modern society. While women are seizing new rights in this manner, trying to become 'master' and writing 'progress' for women on their flags and pennants, the opposite is taking place with terrifying clarity: woman are regressing . Ever since the French Revolution, the influence of women in Europe has decreased proportionately as they have gained rights and entitlements. Accordingly, the 'emancipation of women,' to the extent that it has been demanded and called for by women themselves (and not just by shallow-minded masculine dolts), turns out to be a strange symptom of the increased weakening and softening of the most feminine instincts of all. The stupidity in this movement, an almost masculine stupidity, is enough to make any woman who has turned out well (which always means a clever woman) thoroughly ashamed. To lose your sense for which ground best insures your victory; to neglect practice of your own military arts; to lose control of yourself in front of men, perhaps even 'to the point of writing books,' where you used to act with discipline and subtle, cunning humility; to work with virtuous courage against men's belief in any veiled , fundamentally different ideal in women, Our virtues


in any sort of Eternal or Necessary Feminine; to dissuade men, emphatically and at length, from thinking that women must by kept, cared for, protected, and looked after like gentle, strangely wild and often pleasant house pets; to collect together, in an inept and indignant manner, everything slavish and serflike that was and still is intrinsic to the position of women in the present social order (as if slavery were a counter-argument and not rather a condition of any higher culture, any elevation of culture): - what does all this mean except a crumbling away of feminine instincts, a defeminization? Of course, there are plenty of idiotic friends and corrupters of women among the scholarly asses of the male sex who recommend that women defeminize themselves like this and copy all the stupidities that the 'man' in Europe, that European 'manliness' suffers from, - who would like to bring women down to the level of 'general education,' and maybe even of reading the newspapers and taking part in politics. Every now and then, people even want to make free spirits and literati out of women: as if a woman without piety were anything other than absolutely repugnant or ludicrous to a profound and godless man -. Almost everywhere, women's nerves are being ruined by the most pathological and dangerous of all types of music (our most recent German music) and women are being made more hysterical by the day, and less capable of performing their first and last profession, the bearing of strong children. People want women to be more 'cultivated' in general and want, as they say, to make the 'weaker sex' strong through culture: as if history did not teach as vividly as possible that 'cultivating' human beings and weakening - in particular, weakening, dissipating, afflicting the strength of the will - have always kept pace with each other, and that the most powerful and influential women in the world (recently even Napoleon's mother) owed their power and their dominance over men precisely to the strength of their will - and not to schoolteachers! What inspires respect and, often enough, fear of women is their nature (which is 'more natural' than that of men), their truly predatory and cunning agility, their tiger's claws inside their glove, the naivet'e of their egoism, their inner wildness and inability to be trained, the


incomprehensibility, expanse, and rambling character of their desires and virtues ... What inspires pity, in spite of all the fear, for this dangerous and beautiful cat 'woman' is that she seems to suffer more, be more vulnerable, need more love, and be condemned to more disappointments than any animal. Fear and pity: these are the feelings with which men have stood before women so far,


always with one foot in tragedy which tears you apart even as it delights you -. What? And that brings it to an end? The demystification of women is in progress? Women's tediousness comes slowly into view? Oh Europe, Europe! We are familiar with the horned animal that you always found the most attractive, who kept threatening you with more danger! Your old fable could become 'history' once more, - once more an enormous stupidity could come to dominate you and carry you away! And there is no god hidden inside, no! only an 'idea,' a 'modern idea'! ... An allusion to the Greek myth in which Zeus, in the form of a bull, abducts Europa, daughter of the royal house of Phoenicia.


I heard it again for the first time - Richard Wagner's overture to Meistersinger : it is magnificent, ornate, heavy, late art that takes pride in presupposing two hundred years of music as still living in order to be comprehensible: - it is a credit to the Germans that this sort of pride is not mistaken! What strengths and life forces, what seasons and territories are not combined here! One moment the work will strike us as old-fashioned, and the next as alien, harsh, and overly young. It is just as capricious as it is pompously conventional, it is not infrequently mischievous, and more often coarse and uncouth - it has fire and courage and at the same time the loose, drab skin of fruit that ripens too late. It flows in a full and expansive manner: and then suddenly a moment of inexplicable hesitation, like a gap that springs up between cause and effect, a dream-inducing pressure, practically a nightmare - , but, even then, the old stream of contentment spreads far and wide once again, that stream of the most varied contentment, of fortunes old and new which very much include the artist's happiness with himself (a happiness he does not want to hide), his astonished, joyful part in knowing he has mastered the devices he employs here - new, newly acquired, untried artistic devices, as he seems to reveal to us. All told, no beauty, nothing of the south, none of the fine, southern, brilliant skies, no gracefulness or dance, barely a will to logic; a certain awkwardness, in fact, which is even emphasized, as if the artist wanted to tell us: 'I meant to do that'; an unwieldy guise, something capriciously barbaric and solemn, a flurry of erudite and venerable delicacies and lace; something German in the best and the worst senses


of the word, something multiple, informal and inexhaustible in a German way; a certain German powerfulness and overfullness of the soul that is not afraid to hide behind the refinements of decline (and perhaps this is where it feels best); a fair and fitting emblem of the German soul that is simultaneously young and obsolete, over-done and still overflowing with future. This type of music best expresses what I think about the Germans: they are from the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow, they still have no today .


We 'good Europeans': even we have hours when we allow ourselves a robust fatherlandishness, a slip and backslide into old loves and confines (I have just given a sample of this), hours of national outbursts, patriotic trepidations, and all sorts of other antiquated floods of affect. But things that run their course in us in a matter of hours might take clumsier spirits longer periods of time to get over, a good half a year in some cases and half a lifetime in others, according to the speed and strength of their digestion andmetabolism.Infact,Icouldimaginedullandhesitantraceswhowould need half a century even in our speedy Europe to overcome such atavistic fits of fatherlandishness, to unglue themselves from the soil and return to reason, by which I mean 'good Europeanism.' And while digressing on this possibility, it so happens that I'm becoming an ear-witness to a conversation between two old 'patriots,' both obviously hard of hearing, and so speaking that much louder. ' He thinks and knows as much about philosophy as a peasant or a fraternity student,' said the one -: 'He's still innocent. But who cares these days? This is the age of the masses: they lie prostrate in front of anything massive. And the same in politicis too. They call a statesman 'great' if he builds them a new tower of Babel or some sort of monstrosity of empire and power - who cares if we are more cautious and circumspect and keep holding on to our old belief that it takes a great thought to make a cause or action great. Suppose that a statesman puts his people in the position of needing to do 'great politics' in the future, although they are ill equipped and ill prepared by nature for this task, so that they need to sacrifice their old and reliable virtues for the sake of a new and dubious mediocrity, - suppose that such a statesman condemns his people to any 'political activity' at all, when in fact they have had better things to do and to think about until now, and at the bottom of their souls


they hadn't got rid of a cautious disgust at the agitation, emptiness, and riotous brawling of truly politicized peoples: - suppose that a statesman like this incites the dormant passions and greed of his people, makes a flaw out of their former shyness and the way they enjoyed staying to the side, makes a fault out of their cosmopolitanism and secret infinity, devalues their most heart-felt tendencies, turns their conscience around, makes their spirit narrow and their taste 'national,' - what! A statesman whowould do all that, whose people would have to serve him like a prison sentenceforallthefuture(iftheyevenhadafuture);thissortofastatesman is great ?' 'Without a doubt!' answered the other old patriot vehemently, 'Otherwise he wouldn't have been able to do it! Perhaps it was crazy to want something like this? But perhaps everything great started out as simply crazy!' - 'That's an abuse of language!' shouted the first speaker in reply: '- strong! strong! strong and crazy! Not great!' - The old men had grown visibly heated as they yelled their 'truths' into each other's faces like this; but me, in my happiness and my beyond, I considered how soon the strong come to be dominated by the stronger; and also that the spiritual leveling of one people is compensated for in the deepening of another. -


Whatever term is used these days to try to mark what is distinctive about the European, whether it is 'civilization' or 'humanization' or 'progress' (or whether, without implying praise or censure, it is simply labeled Europe's democratic movement); behind all the moral and political foregrounds that are indicated by formulas like these, an immense physiological process is taking place and constantly gaining ground - the process of increasing similarity between Europeans, their growing detachment from the conditions under which climate- or class-bound races originate, their increasing independence from that determinate milieu where for centuries the same demands would be inscribed on the soul and the body - and so the slow approach of an essentially supra-national and nomadic type of person who, physiologically speaking, is typified by a maximal degree of the art and force of adaptation. This process of the European in a state of becoming can be slowed down in tempo through large-scale relapses (although this might be the very thing that makes it gain and grow in vehemence and depth). The still-raging storm and


stress of 'national feeling' belongs here, as does the anarchism that is only just approaching. This process will probably end up with results that its naive supporters and eulogists, the apostles of 'modern ideas,' have least expected. The same new conditions that generally lead to a leveling and mediocritization of man - a useful, industrious, abundantly serviceable, and able herd animal man - are to the highest degree suitable for giving rise to exceptional people who possess the most dangerous and attractive qualities. Considering the fact that every adaptive force which systematically tests an ever-changing set of conditions (starting over with each generation, practically with each decade) does not make the powerfulness of the type even remotely possible; considering the fact that the overall impression of such future Europeans will probably be of exceedingly garrulous, impotent and eminently employable workers who need masters and commanders like they need their daily bread; and, finally, considering the fact that Europe's democratization amounts to the creation of a type prepared for slavery in the most subtle sense: taking all this into account, the strong person will need, in particular and exceptional cases, to get stronger and richer than he has perhaps ever been so far, - thanks to a lack of prejudice in his schooling, thanks to an enormous diversity in practice, art, and masks. What I'm trying to say is: the democratization of Europe is at the same time an involuntary exercise in the breeding of tyrants -understanding that word in every sense, including the most spiritual.


I'm glad to hear that our sun is moving rapidly towards the constellation of Hercules , and I hope that the people of this earth will act like the sun. With us in front, we good Europeans! -


There was a time when it was customary to call the Germans 'profound,' as a term of distinction. Now that the most successful type of new Germanism desires a completely different sort of honor and has, perhaps, come to regret the absence of a certain 'elan' in everything profound, it is almost timely and patriotic to ask whether people have not been fooling themselves with this praise; in short, whether German profundity is not something fundamentally different and worse - and something we


are about to get rid of, thank God. So: to try to change our ideas about Germanprofundity,all we need is a little vivisection of the German soul. More than anything else, the German soul is multiple, it originates in different places and is more piled up and pieced together than actually constructed: this is due to its origin. A German with the audacity to claim 'two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast' would be abusing the truth quite badly, or to be more accurate, would fall quite a few souls short of the truth. As a people composed of the most enormous assortment and combination of races (perhaps even with a preponderance of the pre-Aryan element), as a 'people of the middle' in every sense, the Germans are more incomprehensible, comprehensive, contradictory, unfamiliar, unpredictable, surprising, and even frightening than other peoples are to themselves: - they escape definition whichbyitself makes them the despair of the French. It is characteristic of the Germans that the question 'what is German?' never dies out with them. Kotzebue certainly knew his Germans well enough: 'Weare known' they called out to him in joy, - but Sand claimed to know them too. Jean Paul knew what he was doing when he came out furiously against Fichte's dishonest but patriotic flattery and exaggerations -but Goethe probably felt differently from Jean Paul about the Germans, even though he thought Jean Paul was right about Fichte. What did Goethe really think about the Germans? - But Goethe never did speak plainly about many of the things around him, and was an expert at subtle silence all his life: - he probably had his reasons. It is clear that the 'Wars of Liberation' did not raise his level of enthusiasm any more than the French Revolution had done; the event that made him rethink his Faust - and indeed the whole problem of 'man' - was the appearance of Napoleon. There are sayings where Goethe speaks as if from abroad, disputing with impatient hardness just what Germans take pride in. He once defined the famous German Gemut as 'tolerance towards others' weaknesses as well as your own.' Was he wrong? It is characteristic of the Germans that people are rarely completely wrong about them. The German soul has passages going this way and that, it has caves, hiding places and dungeons; its disorder has much of the


charm of the mysterious; the German is an expert on Goethe's Faust I, line . Reference to Jean Paul's review of Fichte's Reden an die Deutsche Nation ( Speeches to the German Nation ), in Heidelberger Jahrb ucher ( ). This term is difficult to translate, but suggests a soulful quality or warm-hearted disposition. Beyond Good and Evil


the secret paths to chaos. And just as everything loves its likeness, the German loves clouds and everything unclear, becoming, nebulous, damp and overcast: he feels that uncertainty, disorganization, displacement, and growth of every type are 'profound.' The German himself is not, he becomes , he 'develops.' 'Development,' then, is the truly German discovery and sensation in the great realm of philosophical formulas: - a governing concept that, in conjunction with German beer and German music, is working to Germanize all of Europe. Foreigners stand amazed and enthralled before the riddles posed to them by the contradictory nature at the base of the German soul (which Hegel brought into a system and Richard Wagner finally set to music). 'Good-natured and spiteful' a juxtaposition like this, which would be absurd in reference to any other people, is all too often justified in Germany (unfortunately: just live with Swabians for a while!). The ponderousness of German scholars, their social fatuousness, is frighteningly consistent with an inner high-wire act and easy boldness in the face of which all gods have learned fear by now. If you want a demonstration of the German soul ad oculos , just look at German taste, German arts and customs: what a boorish indifference to 'taste'! How the noblest stands right next to the most base! How disorderly and rich this whole psychic economy really is! The German lugs his soul around, he lugs around everything he experiences. He digests his events badly, he is never 'finished' with them; German profundity is often just a weak and sluggish 'digestion.' And just as everyone who is chronically ill (all dyspeptics) tends toward comfortable things, the Germans love 'openness' and everything 'upright.' How comfortable it is to be open and upright! Today, the Germans are expert at what is perhaps the happiest and most dangerous disguise, that trusting, accommodating, allcards-on-the-table attitude of genuine German honesty : this is their truly Mephistophelean art, and with it they can 'still go far'! The German lets himself go, looks out with true, blue, empty German eyes, - and foreigners immediately mistake him for his nightshirt! - What I am trying to say is: let 'German


profundity' be what it will (and just between us, perhaps, we will allow ourselves a laugh at its expense?), we would do well to honor its appearance and good name in the future as well, and Before the eyes. In German: Biederkeit . From Goethe's Faust part I, line . not to trade in our old reputation as people of profundity too cheaply for Prussian 'elan' or Berliner wit and sand. It is clever of a people to pass themselvesoff-to let themselvespass-forprofound,undiplomatic,goodnatured,honestandun-clever:itcouldevenbe-profound!Finally:people should live up to their name, - and it's not for nothing that the Germans [ die Deutsche ] are called the ' tiusche ' people, the ' Tausche ' (deceptive) people ...


The 'good old days' are over - they sang themselves out in Mozart. How lucky for us that his Rococo still speaks to us, that his 'good company,' his tender enthusiasms, his childish pleasure in Chinoiserie and fancy flourishes, his courtesy of the heart, his longing for the delicate and the amorous, for dancing and tearful moments of bliss, his faith in the south, might still appeal to some vestige in us! Oh, some day all this will be gone! - but who can doubt that the understanding and taste for Beethoven will be gone even sooner! - although he was only the finale of a transitional style and stylistic discontinuity and not, like Mozart, the finale of a centuries-old, great European taste. Beethoven falls somewhere between a brittle old soul that is constantly coming apart and an overly young, future-oriented soul that is constantly on its way . A dusk of eternal loss and eternal, wild hope lies over his music - the same light that lay across Europe when it dreamed with Rousseau, danced around the freedom tree of the Revolution and ended up practically worshipping Napoleon. But howquickly this very feeling is now fading, how difficult it is to even know about this feeling these days - how foreign the language of this Rousseau, Schiller, Shelley, and Byron sounds to our ear, these men in whom, collectively , the same European destiny which in Beethoven knew how to sing, found its way into words! - What became of German music afterwards belongs in romanticism, which is to say in a movement that was (calculated historically), even briefer, more fleeting and more superficial than that great entr'acte , that European transition from Rousseau to Napoleon and the rise of democracy. Weber: but what are Freischutz and Oberon to us these days! Or Marschner's Hans Heiling and Vampyr ! Or even Wagner's Tannhauser ! This music is gone, if not yet forgotten. At any rate, the whole music of romanticism was not noble enough, not music enough to have rights anywhere except in the theater and in front of crowds; it was Beyond Good and Evil


second-rate music from the very start, and real musicians took little notice of it. Things were different with Felix Mendelssohn, that halcyon master who, thanks to his easier, purer, happier soul, was quickly honored and just as quickly forgotten, as a lovely incident in German music. But when it comes to Robert Schumann, who took things seriously and was from the start taken seriously himself (he is the last to have founded a school): don't we think of it today as a stroke of luck, a relief, a liberation that just this Schumannian romanticism has been overcome? Schumann, fleeing into the 'Saxon Switzerland' of his soul, half Werther-ish, half Jean Paul-ine by nature, certainly not Beethoven-esque! certainly not Byronic! His Manfred music is a mistake and a misunderstanding to the point of injustice -; Schumann with his taste, which was fundamentally a small taste (being a dangerous tendency towards calm lyricism and a drunkenness of feeling, which is twice as dangerous among Germans), going constantly to the side, timidly excusing himself and retreating, a noble, tender creature, who reveled in nothing but anonymous happiness and pain, a type of little girl and noli me tangere from the start: this Schumann was already a merely German event in music, no longer a European event like Beethoven, or, to a still more comprehensive extent, like Mozart. With Schumann, German music was threatened with its greatest danger, that of losing the voice of the European soul and descending to a mere fatherlandishness. -


- What torture German books are for anyone with a third ear! How reluctantly he stands by the slowly revolving quagmire of toneless tones and rhythms without dance that the Germans call a 'book'! And the Germans who read books! How lazily, how grudgingly, how badly they read! How many Germans know (and require themselves to know) that there is art in every good sentence! Art that wants to be discerned to the extent that the sentence wants to be understood! A misunderstanding about its tempo, for instance, and the sentence itself is misunderstood! To have no doubts as to the rhythmically decisive syllables, to feel breaks in the most stringent of symmetries as deliberate and attractive, to extend a subtle and patient ear to every staccato and every rubato , guessing the Do not touch me.


meaning of the order of vowels and diphthongs and how tenderly and richly they can change color and change it again when put next to each other - who among book-reading Germans is well-meaning enough to acknowledge duties and demands like these and to listen for so much art and intent in language? In the end, people just do not have 'the ear for it,' and so the strongest contrasts in style go unheard and the most subtle artistry is wasted as if on the deaf. - These were my thoughts as I noticed two masters in the art of prose being crudely and thoughtlessly mistaken for each other, the one whose words drip down with coldness and hesitation, as if from the roof of a damp cave (he counts on their dull sound and resonance) and another who handles his language like a supple rapier and, from his fingers to his toes, feels the dangerous joy of the quivering, over-sharpened sword that wants to bite, sizzle, cut. -


Howlittle the German style has to do with tones and with ears is shown by the fact that it is precisely our good musicians who write poorly. Germans do not read aloud, they do not read for the ear but only with the eye, keeping their ears in a drawer in the meantime. When ancient people read, if they read at all (it happened seldom enough), it was aloud to themselves, and moreover in a loud voice. People were surprised by someone reading quietly, and secretly wondered why. In a loud voice: that means with all the swells, inflections, sudden changes in tone, and shifts in tempo that the ancient, public world took pleasure in. At that time, the rules for written style were the same as those for spoken style, and those rules depended in part on the astonishing development and subtle requirements of the ear and larynx, and also, in part, on the strength, endurance, and power of the ancient lung. What the ancients meant by a period is primarily a physiological unit insofar as it is combined in a single breath. Periods like the ones that occur in Demosthenes and Cicero - swelling up twice and twice sinking down and all within a single breath - those were a delight for people of antiquity who knew from their own training to value the virtue of the rarity and difficulty involved in performing periods like these. We have no real right to the great period, we who are modern, we who are short-winded in every sense! On the whole, these ancients were themselves dilettantes in rhetoric, and therefore authorities, and consequently critics - this is how they drove their rhetoricians to extremes. Similarly, Beyond Good and Evil


in the previous century, when all the men and women of Italy knew how to sing, virtuosity in song (and with it the art of melody too -) reached a high point. But in Germany there was (until very recently, when a sort of grandstand verbosity shyly and awkwardly stirred its young wings) really only one species of public and vaguely artistic rhetoric, and that came from the pulpit. In Germany, only the preachers knew the weight of a word or syllable, the extent to which a sentence stumbled, sprang, rang, ran, or ran away. They were the only ones with a conscience in their ears, which was often enough an evil conscience: because there was no shortage of reasons why a German of all people should achieve competence in rhetoric infrequently and almost always too late. This is why the masterpiece of German prose is by all rights the masterpiece of its greatest preacher: the Bible has been the best German book to date. Compared to Luther's Bible, almost everything else is merely 'literature' - something that had not grown in Germany and for that reason did not grow and is not growing into German hearts like the Bible did.


There are two types of genius: one that fundamentally begets and wants to beget, and another that is happy to be impregnated and give birth. Similarly with peoples of genius, there are those who inherit the female problem of pregnancy and the secret task of forming, ripening, and bringing to completion - the Greeks, for instance, were this type of people as well as the French -; and others who need to impregnate and be the cause of new orders of life, - like the Jews, the Romans, and, to pose a modest question, the Germans? - peoples tortured and delighted by unknown fevers who irresistibly leave themselves, loving and lusting after foreign races (after ones who 'let themselves be impregnated' -) and also domineering, like everything that knows itself to be full of creative forces and consequently knows of 'God's grace.' These two types of genius look for each other like men and women; but they also misunderstand each other, - like men and women.


Every people has its own tartufferies, and calls them its virtues. You do not know - you cannot know - what is best about yourself. Peoples and fatherlands


What Europe owes to the Jews? Many things both good and bad, but mainly one thing that is both best and worst: the grand style in morality, the horror and majesty of infinite demands, infinite meanings, the whole romanticism and sublimity of the morally questionable - and, consequently, precisely the most appealing, insidious, and exceptional aspect of those plays of colors and seductions to life in whose afterglow the sky of our present European culture, its evening sky, glows away - perhaps goes away. This is why, among the spectators and philosophers, artists like us regard the Jews with - gratitude.


We have to accept the fact that all sorts of clouds and disturbances (basically, small fits of stupefaction) drift over the spirit of a people who suffers and wants to suffer from national nervous fevers and political ambition. With today's Germans, for instance, there is the anti-French stupidity one moment and the anti-Jewish stupidity the next, now the anti-Polish stupidity, now the Christian-Romantic, the Wagnerian, the Teutonic, the Prussian (just look at these poor historians, these Sybels and Treitschkes with their thickly bandaged heads -), or whatever else they might be called, these little stupors of the German spirit and conscience. Please forgive the fact that, during a short and risky stay in a badly infected region, I did not completely escape this illness either, and like everyone else started worrying about things that were none of my business: the first sign of political infection. About the Jews, for instance: just listen. - I have yet to meet a German who was well disposed towards Jews. And however unconditional the rejection of genuine anti-Semitism might be on the part of every prudent or political person, such prudence and politics are not really aimed at anti-Semitic sentiment in general, but instead at its dangerous excess, and especially at the outrageous and disgraceful expression of this excessive sentiment - this cannot be denied. That Germany has ample quantities of Jews, that the German stomach and the German blood have difficulty (and will continue for a long time to have difficulty) coping with even this number of 'Jews' - as the Italians, the French, the British have coped, due to a stronger digestion -: this is the clear statement and language of a universal instinct that needs to Beyond Good and Evil


be listened to and acted on. 'Don't let in any more Jews! And lock the doors to the east in particular (even to Austria)!' - so commands the instinct of a people whose type is still weak and indeterminate enough to blur easily and be easily obliterated by a stronger race. But the Jews are without a doubt the strongest, purest, most tenacious race living in Europe today. They know how to thrive in even the worst conditions (and actually do better than in favorable ones) due to some virtues that people today would like to see labeled as vices, - above all, thanks to a resolute faith that does not need to feel ashamed in the face of 'modern ideas.' The Jews change, if they change, only in the way the Russian empire makes its conquests (being an empire that has time and was not made yesterday): namely, according to the fundamental principle 'as slowly as possible!' A thinker who has Europe's future on his conscience will, in every sketch he draws of this future, consider the Jews, like the Russians, to be the most certain and probable factors at present in the great play and struggle of forces. What gets called a 'nation' in Europe today (and is really more a res facta than nata - every once in a while a res ficta et picta will look exactly the same -) is, in any case, something young, easily changed, and in a state of becoming, not yet a race let alone the sort of aere perennius that the Jewish type is: these 'nations' should be on a careful lookout for any hotheaded rivalry and hostility! The fact that the Jews, if they wanted (or if they were forced, as the anti-Semites seem to want), could already be dominant, or indeed could quite literally have control over present-day Europe - this is established. The fact that they are not working and making plans to this end is likewise established. Meanwhile, what they wish and want instead, with a unified assertiveness even, is to be absorbed and assimilated into Europe; they thirst for some place where they can be settled, permitted, respected at last and where they can put an end to the nomadic life, the 'wandering Jew' -; and this urge and impulse (which in itself perhaps already reveals a slackening of the Jewish instincts) should be carefully noted and accommodated - in which case it might be practical and appropriate


to throw the anti-Semitic hooligans out of the country. Approached selectively and with all due caution, the way it is done by the English nobility. It would clearly be unproblematic Res facta means 'something made'; res nata means 'something born.' Something fictitious and unreal. More enduring than bronze.


for the stronger and more strongly delineated types of new Germanism (the officers of noble rank from the Mark, for instance) to get involved with them: and it would be very interesting to see whether the genius of fortune and fortitude (and above all some spirit and spiritedness, which are in very short supply in the place just mentioned -) could not be added into, bred into, the hereditary art of commanding and obeying - both of which are classic features of the Mark these days. But I should really break off my cheerful speeches and hyper-Germania here, since I am already touching on something I take seriously , on the 'European problem' as I understand it, on the breeding of a new caste to rule Europe. -


This is not a philosophical race - these Englishmen. Bacon signified an attack on the philosophical spirit in general; Hobbes, Hume, and Locke indicated a degradation and a depreciation in value of the concept 'philosopher' for more than a century. Kant rose up and rebelled against Hume; anditwasLockeaboutwhomSchelling was able to say ' je m'eprise Locke .' Hegel and Schopenhauer were of one mind (along with Goethe) in the struggle against the English-mechanistic world-stupidification; those two hostile brother geniuses in philosophy who divided along the opposing poles of the German spirit and, in the process, wronged each other as only brothers can. That fatuous dolt, Carlyle, knew well enough what England lacks and has always lacked; Carlyle, that half-actor and rhetorician who tried to conceal under impassioned grimaces what he knew about himself: namely, what he lacked - real power of intellect, real profundity of spiritual vision, in short: philosophy. It is characteristic of an unphilosophical race like this to firmly support Christianity: they need its discipline to be 'moralized' and in some sense humanized. It is just because the English are gloomier, stronger-willed, more sensuous, and more brutal than the Germans that they, as the baser of the two, are the more pious as well: they need Christianity that much more. To subtler nostrils, even this English Christianity bears the genuinely English odor of the very spleen and alcoholic dissipation against which it is rightly used as a remedy, - the subtler poison treating the cruder. In fact, a subtler poisoning is a sign of The Mark Brandenburg, the region around Berlin. 'I despise Locke.' Beyond Good and Evil


progress in crude peoples; it is a step towards spiritualization. The English crudeness and peasant-like seriousness is most tolerably disguised (or better: explained and reinterpreted) by Christian gestures, prayers, and psalm-singing. And for that herd of drunken and dissipated cows who in the past learned to grunt morally under the influence of Methodism and again more recently as a 'salvation army,' - for them, a penitential spasm just might be the highest level of 'humanity' that they can attain: that much you can allow. But what is offensive in even the most humane Englishman is his lack of music, speaking metaphorically (and without metaphors -): there is no dance or timing in the movement of his soul and his body, not even a desire for dance or timing,for'music.' Just listen to him speak; just watch the most beautiful Englishwomen walk - no other country on earth has more beautiful doves or swans, - finally, listen to them sing! But I am asking too much ...


There are truths best known by mediocre minds, because they are best suited to mediocre minds; there are truths that have a charm and seductive allure only for mediocre spirits. We are coming up against this perhaps unpleasant proposition right now, since the spirit of worthy but mediocre Englishmen - I mean Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer - is starting to come to prominence in the middle regions of European taste. In fact, who would doubt the utility of having spirits like these prevail for the time being? It would be a mistake to think that far-flying spirits of the highest type would be particularly adept at detecting, collecting, and drawing conclusions from lots of common little facts: - rather, being exceptions, they are not well situated with respect to the 'rule.' Ultimately, they have more to do than just to know - they have to be something new, mean something new, and present new values! The chasm between knowing something and being able to do it is perhaps even greater and more uncanny than it is generally thought to be: people who can do things in the grand style, the creators, might need to be ignorant. On the other hand, when it comes to scientific discoveries of a Darwinian type, a certain narrowness, aridity, and diligent, painstaking care - in short, something English - is not a bad thing to have at your disposal. - Finally, let us not forget that the English have caused a total depression of the European spirit once already with their profound


ordinariness. What people call 'modern ideas' or 'eighteenth-century ideas' or even 'French ideas' - in other words, what the German spirit rebelled against in profound disgust -, was English in origin, there is no doubtaboutit.TheFrenchwerejusttheapesandactors(aswellasthebest soldiers) of these ideas, and unfortunately their first and most thorough victims too, since the ame fran caise ended up so sparse and emaciated from the damned Anglomania of 'modern ideas' that people these days look back at its sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its profound impassioned strength, and its inventive nobility, with something bordering on disbelief. But we have to hold on to this statement of historical fairness with our teeth and defend it against the moment and appearances: the European noblesse (of feeling, of taste, of manner - in short, taking the word in all its higher senses) - is France's work and invention; European baseness, the plebeianism of modern ideas - is England's .-


France is still the seat of the most spiritual and sophisticated culture in Europe today, and the preeminent school of taste: but you have to know how to find this 'France of taste.' People belonging to it keep themselves well hidden: - there might be only a small number of people in which it loves and lives, people who might not have the sturdiest legs to stand on, some of them fatalists, somber and ill, some of them pampered and over the top, people who have the ambition to hide themselves. There is something they all have in common: they shut their ears to the raging stupidity and the noisy jabbering of the democratic bourgeoisie. In fact, it is a coarsened and stultified France that thrashes around in the foreground these days, - it recently celebrated a real orgy of bad taste combined with self-admiration at Victor Hugo's funeral. They have something else in common too: the goodwill to ward off spiritual Germanization - and an even better inability to do it! Perhaps Schopenhauer is more at home and settled now in this France of the spirit (which is also a France of pessimism) than he ever was in Germany; not to mention Heinrich Heine, who has been in the flesh and blood of the subtler and more promising lyric poets of Paris for a while now; or Hegel who, in the form of Taine French soul. In . Beyond Good and Evil


(which is to say: in the form of the foremost living historian), exerts an almost tyrannical influence these days. But as far as Wagner goes, the more French music learns to develop according to the real needs of the ame moderne , the more 'Wagnerianized' it becomes; this can be predicted, - it is already happening now! Nevertheless, there are three things that, even today, the French can proudly exhibit as their heir and their own and an enduring mark of an old cultural superiority over Europe, in spite of any voluntary or involuntary Germanization or vulgarization of taste. One is the capacity for artistic passions and devotion to 'form,' for which the phrase l'art pour l'art (along with a thousand others) was invented. Things like this have not been absent from France for the last three hundred years and, thanks to a reverence for 'small numbers,' keep making possible a type of literary chamber music that is not to be found anywhere else in Europe -. The second point on which France can base a claim to superiority over Europe is its old, diverse culture of moralism , whichmeansthatevenamonglittle romanciers of newspapers and chance boulevardiers de Paris you will find, on average, a psychological sensitivity and curiosity that people in Germany, for instance, have no concept of (much less the thing itself!). For this, the Germans would need a few hundred years of moralism which, as I have said, France had not spared itself. Anyone calling the Germans 'naive' on this account is dressing up a deficiency as a compliment. (As a contrast to the German inexperience and innocence in voluptate psychologica - which is not at all unrelated to the tedium of German company -, and as the most successful expression of a genuinely French curiosity and inventiveness in this realm of delicate tremblings, we can name Henri Beyle. This remarkable, anticipatory forerunner ran with a Napoleonic tempo through his Europe, through several centuries of the European soul, as a pathfinder and discoverer of this soul. It took two generations to somehow catch up with him, to guess some of the riddles that tormented and delighted him, this strange Epicurean and question-mark of a man who was France's last great psychologist -.) Modern soul. Art for art's sake. Novelists. People on the Parisian boulevards. Taking pleasure in psychology.


There is, in addition, a third claim to superiority: at the core of the French there is a half-successful synthesis of north and south which lets them conceive many things and do many others that will never occur to an Englishman.Usingatemperamentthatisturnedperiodicallytowardsand away from the south, and whose Provenc al and Ligurian blood bubbles over from time to time, the French fortify themselves against the awful northern gray on gray, the sunless concept-ghostliness and anemia, - our German disease of the taste, against whose excess people at the moment are strongly resolved to prescribe blood and iron: I mean 'great politics' (following a dangerous medical practice that teaches me to wait and wait but not, so far, to hope -). And in France there is still a predisposition to understand and accommodate those rarer and rarely satisfied people who are too far-ranging to find satisfaction in any fatherlandishness, and know how to love the south in the north and the north in the south, the born Mediterraneans, the 'good Europeans.' - It was for them that Bizet made music, this last genius to have seen a new beauty and seduction, - who discovered a piece of the southernness of music .


I recommend taking a number of precautions against German music. Suppose that someone loves the south like I do, as an immense school for convalescence of both the most spiritual and the most sensual kind, as an unbridled, sun-drenched, sun-transfiguration that spreads across a high-handed, self-assured existence: such a person will learn to be somewhat careful with German music, because, along with ruining his taste, it will ruin his health again too. If someone like this (who is southern not by descent but by belief ) dreams about the future of music, he will also have to dream about music being redeemed from the north, and have the prelude to a more profound and powerful, perhaps more evil and mysterious music in his ears, a supra-German music that does not fade, yellow, or pale at the sight of the voluptuous blue sea or the luminous Mediterranean sky, which is what happens with all German music; a supra-European music that still stands its ground before the brown sunsets of the desert, whose soul is related to the palm tree, and that knows Bismarck's famous phrase. In German: Mittell andler (literally: people whose country is in the middle). Beyond Good and Evil how to wander and to be at home among huge, beautiful, lonely beasts of prey ... I could imagine a music whose rarest magic consisted in no longer knowing anything of good and evil - although, perhaps, some sailor's homesickness, some golden shadow and delicate weakness might run across it every now and then: an art that would see colors flying towards it from a setting moral world - a distant world that had become almost incomprehensible - and would be hospitable and profound enough to receive such late refugees. -


Thanks to the pathological manner in which nationalist nonsense has alienated and continues to alienate the peoples of Europe from each other; thanks as well to the short-sighted and swift-handed politicians who have risen to the top with the help of this nonsense, and have no idea of the extent to which the politics of dissolution that they practice can only be entr'acte politics, - thanks to all this and to some things that are strictly unmentionable today, the most unambiguous signs declaring that Europe wants to be one are either overlooked or willfully and mendaciously reinterpreted. The mysterious labor in the souls of all the more profound andfar-rangingpeopleofthiscenturyhasactuallybeenfocusedonpreparing the path to this new synthesis and on experimentally anticipating the Europeansofthefuture.Onlyintheirforegroundsorinhoursofweakness (like old age) were they 'fatherlanders,' - they only became 'patriots' when they were resting from themselves. I am thinking about people like Napoleon,Goethe,Beethoven,Stendhal,HeinrichHeine,Schopenhauer: and do not blame me for including Richard Wagner as well; we should not let his own self-misunderstanding lead us astray - geniuses of his type do not often have the right to understand themselves. Although, admittedly, it is not so apparent given the rude clamor with which Wagner is resisted and opposed in France today, it nonetheless remains the case that late French romanticism of the ' s and Richard Wagner belong most closely andintimately together. They are related, fundamentally related, in all the heights and depths of their needs: it is the soul of Europe, the one Europe, that presses and yearns upwards and outwards through their multiple and In German: versuchsweise (see note ,p. above). Peoples and fatherlands