Why I Am So Clever
1
Why do I know a few things more? Why am I altogether so clever? I have never reflected on questions that are none—I have not wasted myself.
Really religious difficulties, for example, I don’t know from experience. It has escaped me altogether in what way I was supposed to be “sinful.” Likewise, I lack any reliable criterion for recognizing the bite of conscience: according to what one hears about it, the bite of conscience does not seem respectable to me.
I do not want to leave an action in the lurch afterward;1 I should prefer to exclude the bad result, the consequences, from the question of value as a matter of principle. Faced with a bad result, one loses all too easily the right perspective for what one has done: the bite of conscience seems to me a kind of “evil eye.” To hold in honor in one’s heart even more what has failed, because it failed—that would go better with my morality.
“God,” “immortality of the soul,” “redemption,” “beyond”—without exception, concepts to which I never devoted any attention, or time; not even as a child. Perhaps I have never been childlike enough for them?
I do not by any means know atheism as a result; even less as an event: it is a matter of course with me, from instinct. I am too inquisitive, too questionable, too exuberant to stand for any gross answer.2 God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers—at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!
I am much more interested in a question on which the “salvation of humanity” depends far more than on any theologians’ curio: the question of nutrition. For ordinary use, one may formulate it thus: “how do you, among all people, have to eat to attain your maximum of strength, of virtu in the Renaissance style, of moraline-free3 virtue?”
My experiences in this matter are as bad as possible; I am amazed how late I heard this question, how late I learned “reason” from these experiences. Only the complete worthlessness of our German education—its “idealism”—explains to me to some extent why at precisely this point I was backward to the point of holiness. This “education” which teaches one from the start to ignore realities and to pursue so-called “ideal” goals—a “classical education,” for example—as if it were not hopeless from the start to unite “classical” and “German” into a single concept! More, it is amusing: only imagine a “classically educated” man with a Leipzig dialect!4
Indeed, till I reached a very mature age I always ate badly: morally speaking, “impersonally,” “selflessly,” “altruistically”—for the benefit of cooks and other fellow Christians. By means of Leipzig cuisine, for example, I very earnestly denied my “will to life” at the time when I first read Schopenhauer (1865). To upset one’s stomach for the sake of inadequate nutrition—this problem seemed to me to be solved incredibly well by the aforementioned cuisine. (It is said that 1866 brought about a change in this respect.)5 But German cuisine quite generally—what doesn’t it have on its conscience! Soup before the meal (in Venetian cookbooks of the sixteenth century this is still called alia tedesca);6 overcooked meats, vegetables cooked with fat and flour; the degeneration of pastries and puddings into paperweights! Add to this the virtually bestial prandial drinking habits of the ancient, and by no means only the ancient Germans, and you will understand the origin of the German spirit—from distressed intestines.
The German spirit is an indigestion: it does not finish with anything.
But English diet, too—which is, compared to the German and even to the French, a kind of “return to nature,” meaning to cannibalism—is profoundly at odds with my instincts: it seems to me that it gives the spirit heavy feet—the feet of English women.
The best cuisine is that of Piedmont.7
Alcohol is bad for me: a single glass of wine or beer in one day is quite sufficient to turn my life into a vale of misery—the people of Munich are my antipodes. Assuming that I did not comprehend this until rather late, I really experienced it from childhood. As a boy I believed that drinking wine was, like smoking, to begin with merely a vanity of young men, and later on a bad habit. Perhaps this harsh judgment should be blamed in part on the wine of Naumburg.8 To believe that wine exhilarates I should have to be a Christian—believing what is for me an absurdity. Strangely enough, in spite of this extreme vulnerability to small, strongly diluted doses of alcohol, I almost become a sailor when it is a matter of strong doses. Even as a boy, my fortitude appeared at that point. Writing a long Latin essay in a single night, and copying it over, too, with the ambition in my pen to emulate my model, Sallust, in severity and compactness, and to pour some grog of the heaviest caliber over my Latin—even when I was a student at the venerable Schulpforta,9 that did not in any way disagree with my physiology, nor perhaps with that of Sallust—however it disagreed with the venerable Schulpforta.
Later, around the middle of life, to be sure, I decided more and more strictly against all “spirits”: I, an opponent of vegetarianism from experience, just like Richard Wagner, who converted me, cannot advise all more spiritual natures earnestly enough to abstain entirely from alcohol. Water is sufficient.
I prefer towns in which opportunities abound for dipping from running wells (Nizza, Turin, Sils); a small glass accompanies me like a dog.10 In vino veritas:11 it seems that here, too, I am at odds with all the world about the concept of “truth”—in my case, the spirit moves over water.12
A few more hints from my morality. A hearty meal is easier to digest than one that is too small. That the stomach as a whole becomes active is the first presupposition of a good digestion. One has to know the size of one’s stomach. For the same reason one should be warned against those long-drawn-out meals which I call interrupted sacrificial feasts—those at a table d’h?te.
No meals between meals, no coffee: coffee spreads darkness. Tea is wholesome only in the morning. A little, but strong: tea is very unwholesome and sicklies one o’er the whole day if it is too weak by a single degree. Everybody has his own measure, often between the narrowest and most delicate limits. In a climate that is very aga?ant,13 tea is not advisable for a beginning: one should begin an hour earlier with a cup of thick, oil-less cocoa.
Sit as little as possible; give no credence to any thought that was not born outdoors while one moved about freely—in which the muscles are not celebrating a feast, too. All prejudices14 come from the intestines.
The sedentary life—as I have said once before15—is the real sin against the holy spirit.
2
The question of place and climate is most closely related to the question of nutrition. Nobody is free to live everywhere; and whoever has to solve great problems that challenge all his strength actually has a very restricted choice in this matter. The influence of climate on our metabolism, its retardation, its acceleration, goes so far that a mistaken choice of place and climate can not only estrange a man from his task but can actually keep it from him: he never gets to see it. His animal vigor has never become great enough for him to attain that freedom which overflows into the most spiritual regions and allows one to recognize: this only I can do.
The slightest sluggishness of the intestines is entirely sufficient, once it has become a bad habit, to turn a genius into something mediocre, something “German.” The German climate alone is enough to discourage strong, even inherently heroic, intestines. The tempo of the metabolism is strictly proportionate to the mobility or lameness of the spirit’s feet; the “spirit” itself is after all merely an aspect of this metabolism. List the places where men with esprit1 are living or have lived, where wit, subtlety, and malice belonged to happiness, where genius found its home almost of necessity: all of them have excellent dry air. Paris, Provence, Florence, Jerusalem, Athens—these names prove something: genius depends on dry air, on clear skies—that is, on a rapid metabolism, on the possibility of drawing again and again on great, even tremendous quantities of strength. I know of a case in which a spirit of generous predisposition, destined for greatness, became, merely because he lacked any delicate instinct for climate, narrow, withdrawn, a peevish specialist. And I myself might ultimately have become just such a case, if my sickness had not forced me to see reason, to reflect on reason in reality. Now that the effects of climate and weather are familiar to me from long experience and I take readings from myself as from a very subtle and reliable instrument—and even during a short journey, say, from Turin to Milan, my system registers the change in the humidity—I reflect with horror on the dismal fact that my life, except for the last ten years, the years when my life was in peril, was spent entirely in the wrong places that were nothing short of forbidden to me. Naumburg, Schulpforta, the province of Thuringia quite generally, Leipzig, Basel, Venice—so many disastrous places for my physiology.
Altogether, I have no welcome memories whatever from my whole childhood and youth; but it would be folly to drag in so-called “moral” reasons, such as the undeniable lack of adequate company: for this lack persists today as it has always persisted, without preventing me from being cheerful and brave. Rather it was the ignorance in physiologicis—that damned “idealism”—that was the real calamity in my life, totally superfluous and stupid, something of which nothing good ever grew, for which there is no compensation, no counterbalance. The consequences of this “idealism” provide my explanation of all blunders, all great instinctual aberrations and “modesties” that led me away from the task of my life; for example, that I became a philologist—why not at least a physician or something else that opens one’s eyes?
During my Basel period2 my whole spiritual diet, including the way I divided up my day, was a completely senseless abuse of extraordinary resources, without any new supply to cover this consumption in any way, without even any thought about consumption and replenishment. Any refined self-concern, any protection by some commanding instinct was lacking; I simply posited myself as equal to any nobody; it was a “selflessness,” an oblivion of all distance between myself and others that I shall never forgive myself. When I was close to the end, because I was close to the end, I began to reflect on this fundamental unreason of my life—this “idealism.” Only my sickness brought me to reason.
3
The choice of nutrition; the choice of climate and place: the third point at which one must not commit a blunder at any price is the choice of one’s own kind of recreation. Here, too, depending on the degree to which a spirit is sui generis,1 the limits of what is permitted to him, that is, profitable for him, are narrow, quite narrow. In my case, every kind of reading belongs among my recreations—hence among the things that liberate me from myself, that allow me to walk about in strange sciences and souls—that I no longer take seriously. Reading is precisely my recreation from my own seriousness. During periods when I am hard at work you will not find me surrounded by books: I’d beware of letting anyone near me talk, much less think. And that is what reading would mean.
Has it been noted that in that profound tension to which pregnancy condemns the spirit, and at bottom the whole organism, chance and any kind of stimulus from the outside have too vehement an effect and strike2 too deep? One must avoid chance and outside stimuli as much as possible; a kind of walling oneself in belongs among the foremost instinctive precautions of spiritual pregnancy. Should I permit an alien thought to scale the wall secretly?— And that is what reading would mean.
The periods of work and fertility are followed by periods of recreation: come to me, pleasant, brilliant, clever books!
Will it be German books?
I must count back half a year before catching myself with a book in my hand. What was it?—A superb study by Victor Brochard, Les Sceptiques Grecs,3 in which my Laertiana4 are also put to good use. The skeptics, the only honorable type among the equivocal, quinquivocal tribe of philosophers!
Otherwise I almost always seek refuge with the same books—actually, a small number—books proved to me. Perhaps it is not my way to read much, or diverse things: a reading room makes me sick. Nor is it my way to love much, or diverse things. Caution, even hostility against new books comes closer to my instincts than “tolerance,” “largeur du coeur,”5 and other “neighbor love.”6
It is a small number of old Frenchmen to whom I return again and again: I believe only in French culture7 and consider everything else in Europe today that calls itself “culture” a misunderstanding—not to speak of German culture.
The few cases of high culture that I have encountered in Germany have all been of French origin, especially Frau Cosima Wagner, by far the first voice in matters of taste that I have ever heard.
The fact that I do not read but love Pascal, as the most instructive victim of Christianity, murdered slowly, first physically, then psychologically—the whole logic of this most gruesome form of inhuman cruelty; that I have in my spirit—who knows? perhaps also in my body—something of Montaigne’s sportiveness; that my artist’s taste vindicates the names of Molière, Corneille, and Racine, not without fury, against a wild genius like Shakespeare—all that does not preclude in the end that I find even the most recent Frenchmen charming company. I do not see from what century of the past one could dredge up such inquisitive and at the same time such delicate psychologists as in contemporary Paris: tentatively—for their number is far from small—I name Messieurs Paul Bourget, Pierre Loti, Gyp, Meilhac, Anatole France, Jules Lema?tre, or,to single out one of the strong race, a genuine Latin toward whom I am especially well disposed, Guy de Maupassant.8 Between ourselves, I prefer this generation even to their great teachers who, without exception, have been corrupted by German philosophy (M. Taine, for example, by Hegel, to whom he owes his misunderstanding of great men and ages). As far as Germany extends, she corrupts culture. Only the war9“redeemed” the spirit in France.
Stendhal, one of the most beautiful accidents of my life—for whatever marks an epoch in it came my way by accident, never through someone’s recommendation—is truly invaluable with his anticipatory psychologist’s eye, with his knack for the facts which is reminiscent of the greatest of factual men (ex ungue Napoleonem),10 and finally not least as an honest atheist—a species that is rare in France and almost impossible to find—with all due respect for Prosper Mérimée.11
Perhaps I am even envious of Stendhal? He took away from me the best atheistical joke that precisely I might have made: “God’s only excuse is that he does not exist.” I myself have said somewhere: what has been the greatest objection to existence so far? God.12
4
The highest concept of the lyrical poet was given to me by Heinrich Heine. I seek in vain in all the realms of history for an equally sweet and passionate music. He possessed that divine malice without which I cannot imagine perfection: I estimate the value of men, of races, according to the necessity by which they cannot conceive the god apart from the satyr.
And how he handles his German! One day it will be said that Heine and I have been by far the foremost artists of the German language—at an incalculable distance from everything mere Germans have done with it.1
I must be profoundly related to Byron’s Manfred: all these abysses I found in myself; at the age of thirteen I was ripe for this work. I have no word, only a glance, for those who dare to pronounce the word “Faust” in the presence of Manfred.2 The Germans are incapable of any notion of greatness; proof: Schumann. Simply from fury against this sugary Saxon, I composed a counter-overture for Manfred of which Hans von Bülow said that he had never seen anything like it on paper, and he called it rape of Euterpe.3
When I seek my ultimate formula for Shakespeare, I always find only this: he conceived of the type of Caesar. That sort of thing cannot, be guessed: one either is it, or one is not. The great poet dips only from his own reality—up to the point where afterward he cannot endure his work any longer.
When I have looked into my Zarathustra, I walk up and down in my room for half an hour, unable to master an unbearable fit of sobbing.
I know no more heart-rending reading than Shakespeare: what must a man have suffered to have such a need of being a buffoon!4
Is Hamlet understood? Not doubt, certainty is what drives one insane!5—But one must be profound, an abyss, a philosopher to feel that way.—We are all afraid of truth.
And let me confess it: I feel instinctively sure and certain that Lord Bacon was the originator, the self-tormentor6 of this uncanniest kind of literature: what is the pitiable chatter of American flat-and muddle-heads to me? But the strength required for the vision of the most powerful reality is not only compatible with the most powerful strength for action, for monstrous action, for crime—it even presupposes it.7
We are very far from knowing enough about Lord Bacon, the first realist in every great sense of that word, to know everything he did, wanted, and experienced in himself.
And damn it, my dear critics! Suppose I had published my Zarathustra under another name—for example, that of Richard Wagner—the acuteness of two thousand years would not have been sufficient for anyone to guess that the author of Human, All-Too-Human is the visionary of Zarathustra.
5
Speaking of the recreations of my life, I must say a word to express my gratitude for what has been by far the most profound and cordial recreation of my life. Beyond a doubt, that was my intimate relationship with Richard Wagner. I’d let go cheap the whole rest of my human relationships; I should not want to give away out of my life at any price the days of Tribschen1—days of trust, of cheerfulness, of sublime accidents, of profound moments.
I do not know what experiences others have had with Wagner: our sky was never darkened by a single cloud.
And with that I return once more to France—I have no reasons but merely a contemptuous corner of the mouth for Wagnerians et hoc genus omne2 who think they are honoring Wagner by finding him similar to themselves.
The way I am, so alien in my deepest instincts to everything German that the mere proximity of a German retards my digestion, the first contact with Wagner was also the first deep breath of my life: I experienced, I revered him as a foreign land, as an antithesis, as an incarnate protest against all “German virtues.”
We who were children in the swamp air of the fifties are of necessity pessimists concerning the concept “German;” we simply cannot be anything but revolutionaries—we shall not come to terms with any state of affairs in which the bigot3 is at the top. It is a matter of total indifference to me whether today he dons different colors, clothing himself in scarlet and putting on a hussar’s uniform.4
Well then! Wagner was a revolutionary—he ran away from the Germans.5
As an artist one has no home in Europe, except Paris: the délicatesse in all five artistic senses that is presupposed by Wagner’s art, the fingers for nuances, the psychological morbidity are found only in Paris. Nowhere else does one have this passion in questions of form, this seriousness in mise en scène6—which is Parisian seriousness par excellence. In Germany people simply lack any notion of the tremendous ambition that lives in the soul of a Parisian artist. Germans are good-natured—Wagner was anything but good-natured.
But I have long said adequately (in Beyond Good and Evil section 256)7 where Wagner belongs and who are his closest relatives: the late French romantics, that high-flying and yet rousing manner of artists like Delacroix, like Berlioz, with a characteristic fond8 of sickness, of incurability—all of them fanatics of expression, virtuosos through and through.
Who was the first intelligent adherent of Wagner anywhere? Charles Baudelaire, who was also the first to understand Delacroix—that typical decadent in whom a whole tribe of artists recognized themselves—and perhaps he was also the last.9
What did I never forgive Wagner? That he condescended to the Germans—that he became reichsdeutsch.10
As far as Germany extends, she corrupts culture.11
6
All things considered, I could not have endured my youth without Wagner’s music. For I was condemned to Germans. If one wants to rid oneself of an unbearable pressure, one needs hashish. Well then, I needed Wagner. Wagner is the antitoxin against everything German par excellence—a toxin, a poison, that I don’t deny.
From the moment when there was a piano score of Tristan—my compliments, Herr von Bülow—I was a Wagnerian.1 Wagner’s older works I deemed beneath myself—still too vulgar, too “German.”
But to this day I am still looking for a work that equals the dangerous fascination and the gruesome2 and sweet infinity of Tristan—and look in all the arts in vain. All the strangenesses of Leonardo da Vinci emerge from their spell at the first note of Tristan. This work is emphatically Wagner’s non plus ultra; with the Meistersinger and the Ring he recuperated3 from it. Becoming healthier—is a retrogression, given a nature like Wagner’s.
I take it for a good fortune of the first order that I lived at the right time and among Germans, of all peoples, so that I was ripe for this work: that is how far the psychologist’s inquisitiveness extends in my case. The world is poor for anyone who has never been sick enough for this “voluptuousness of hell”: it is permitted, it is almost imperative, to employ a formula of the mystics at this point.
I think I know better than anyone else of what tremendous things Wagner is capable—the fifty worlds of alien ecstasies for which no one besides him had wings; and given the way I am, strong enough to turn even what is most questionable and dangerous to my advantage and thus to become stronger, I call Wagner the great benefactor of my life. That in which we are related—that we have suffered more profoundly, also from each other, than men of this century are capable of suffering—will link our names again and again, eternally; and as certainly as Wagner is merely a misunderstanding among Germans, just as certainly I am and always shall be.
Two centuries of psychological and artistic discipline must come first, my dear Teutons!—But with that one does not catch up.
7
I shall say another word for the most select ears: what I really want from music. That it be cheerful and profound like an afternoon in October. That it be individual, frolicsome, tender, a sweet small woman full of beastliness and charm.
I shall never admit that a German could know what music is. Those who are called German composers—the greatest above all—are foreigners: Slavs, Croats, Italians, Dutchmen—or Jews; otherwise, Germans of the strong race, extinct Germans, like Heinrich Schütz, Bach, and Handel. I myself am still enough of a Pole to surrender the rest of music for Chopin, excepting, for three reasons, Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, perhaps also a few things by Liszt, who surpasses all other musicians in his noble orchestral accents, and, finally, everything that grew beyond the Alps—this side.1
I should not know how to get along without Rossini; even less, without my own south in music, the music of my Venetian maestro Pietro Gasti.2 And when I say beyond the Alps, I really merely say Venice. When I seek another word for music, I always find only the word Venice. I do not know how to distinguish between tears and music—I do not know how to think of happiness, of the south, without shudders of timidity.
At the bridge I stood
lately in the brown night.
From afar came a song:
as a golden drop it welled
over the quivering surface.
Gondolas, lights, and music—
drunken it swam out into the twilight.
My soul, a stringed instrument, sang to itself, invisibly touched, a secret gondola song, quivering with iridescent happiness.—Did anyone listen to it?
8
In all these matters—in the choice of nutrition, of place and climate, of recreation—an instinct of self-preservation issues its commandments, and it gains its most unambiguous expression as an instinct of self-defense. Not to see many things, not to hear many things, not to permit many things to come close—first imperative of prudence, first proof that one is no mere accident but a necessity. The usual word for this instinct of self-defense is taste. It commands us not only to say No when Yes would be “selfless” but also to say No as rarely as possible. To detach oneself, to separate oneself from anything that would make it necessary to keep saying No. The reason in this is that when defensive expenditures, be they ever so small, become the rule and a habit, they entail an extraordinary and entirely superfluous impoverishment. Our great expenses are composed of the most frequent small ones. Warding off, not letting things come close, involves an expenditure—let nobody deceive himself about this—energy wasted on negative ends. Merely through the constant need to ward off, one can become weak enough to be unable to defend oneself any longer.
Suppose I stepped out of my house and found, instead of quiet, aristocratic Turin, a small German town: my instinct would have to cast up a barrier to push back everything that would assail it from this pinched and flattened, cowardly world. Or I found a German big city—this built-up vice where nothing grows, where everything, good or bad, is imported. Wouldn’t this compel me to become a hedgehog?
But having quills is a waste, even a double luxury when one can choose not to have quills but open hands.
Another counsel of prudence and self-defense is to react as rarely as possible, and to avoid situations and relationships that would condemn one to suspend, as it were, one’s “freedom” and initiative and to become a mere reagent. As a parable I choose association with books. Scholars who at bottom do little nowadays but thumb books—philologists, at a moderate estimate, about 200 a day—ultimately lose entirely their capacity to think for themselves. When they don’t thumb, they don’t think. They respond to a stimulus (a thought they have read) whenever they think—in the end, they do nothing but react. Scholars spend all of their energies on saying Yes and No, on criticism of what others have thought—they themselves no longer think.
The instinct of self-defense has become worn-out in them; otherwise they would resist books. The scholar—a decadent.
I have seen this with my own eyes: gifted natures with a generous and free disposition, “read to ruin” in their thirties—merely matches that one has to strike to make them emit sparks—“thoughts.”
Early in the morning, when day breaks, when all is fresh, in the dawn of one’s strength—to read a book at such a time is simply depraved!
9
At this point the real answer to the question, how one becomes what one is, can no longer be avoided. And thus I touch on the masterpiece of the art of self-preservation—of selfishness.
For let us assume that the task, the destiny, the fate of the task transcends the average very significantly: in that case, nothing could be more dangerous than catching sight of oneself with this task. To become what one is, one must not have the faintest notion what one is. From this point of view even the blunders of life have their own meaning and value—the occasional side roads and wrong roads, the delays, “modesties,” seriousness wasted on tasks that are remote from the task. All this can express a great prudence, even the supreme prudence: where nosce te ipsum1 would be the recipe for ruin,2 forgetting oneself, misunderstanding oneself, making oneself smaller, narrower, mediocre, become reason itself. Morally speaking: neighbor love, living for others, and other things can be a protective measure for preserving the hardest self-concern. This is the exception where, against my wont and conviction, I side with the “selfless” drives: here they work in the service of self-love, of self-discipline.3
The whole surface of consciousness—consciousness is a surface4—must be kept clear of all great imperatives. Beware even of every great word, every great pose! So many dangers that the instinct comes too soon to “understand itself”—. Meanwhile the organizing “idea” that is destined to rule keeps growing deep down—it begins to command; slowly it leads us back from side roads and wrong roads; it prepares single qualities and fitnesses that will one day prove to be indispensable as means toward a whole—one by one, it trains all subservient capacities before giving any hint of the dominant task, “goal,” “aim,” or “meaning.”
Considered in this way, my life is simply wonderful. For the task of a revaluation of all values more capacities may have been needed than have ever dwelt together in a single individual—above all, even contrary capacities that had to be kept from disturbing, destroying one another. An order of rank among these capacities; distance; the art of separating without setting against one another; to mix nothing, to “reconcile” nothing; a tremendous variety that is nevertheless the opposite of chaos—this was the precondition, the long, secret work and artistry of my instinct. Its higher protection manifested itself to such a high degree that I never even suspected what was growing in me—and one day all my capacities, suddenly ripe, leaped forth in their ultimate perfection.5 I cannot remember that I ever tried hard6—no trace of struggle can be demonstrated in my life; I am the opposite of a heroic nature. “Willing” something, “striving”7 for something, envisaging a “purpose,” a “wish”—I know none of this from experience. At this very moment I still look upon my future—an ample future!—as upon calm seas: there is no ripple of desire. I do not want in the least that anything should become different than it is; I myself do not want to become different.
But that is how I have always lived. I had no wishes. A man over forty-four who can say that he never strove8 for honors, for women, for money!
Thus it happened, for example, that one day I was a university professor—no such idea had ever entered my mind., for I was barely twenty-four years old. Thus it happened two years earlier that one day I was suddenly a philologist—insofar as my first philological essay, my beginning in every sense, was requested by my teacher, Ritschl, for publication in his Rheinisches Museum.9 (Ritschl—I say it with reverence—the only scholar of genius on whom I have laid eyes to this day. He was characterized by that agreeable corruption which distinguishes us Thuringians and which makes even Germans sympathetic: even to reach truth, we still prefer furtive paths. These words are not meant to underestimate my close compatriot, the clever Leopold von Ranke—.)10
10
One will ask me why on earth I’ve been relating all these small things which are generally considered matters of complete indifference: I only harm myself, the more so if I am destined to represent great tasks. Answer: these small things—nutrition, place, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of selfishness—are inconceivably more important than everything one has taken to be important so far. Precisely here one must begin to relearn. What mankind has so far considered seriously have not even been realities but mere imaginings—more strictly speaking, lies prompted by the bad instincts of sick natures that were harmful in the most profound sense—all these concepts, “God,” “soul,” “virtue,” “sin,” “beyond,” “truth,” “eternal life.”—But the greatness of human nature, its “divinity,” was sought in them.—All the problems of politics, of social organization, and of education have been falsified through and through because one mistook the most harmful men for great men—because one learned to despise “little” things, which means the basic concerns of life itself.1
When I now compare myself with the men who have so far been honored as the first, the difference is palpable. I do not even count these so-called “first” men among men in general: for me they are the refuse of humanity, monsters of sickness and vengeful instincts; they are inhuman, disastrous, at bottom incurable, and revenge themselves on life.
I want to be their opposite: it is my privilege to have the subtlest sensitivity for all signs of healthy instincts. There is no pathological trait in me; even in periods of severe sickness I never became pathological; in vain would one seek for a trait of fanaticism in my character. There is not a moment in my life to which one could point to convict me of a presumptuous and pathetic2 posture. The pathos of poses does not belong to greatness; whoever needs poses at all is false.—Beware of all picturesque men!
Life was easy for me—easiest when it made the hardest demands on me. Whoever saw me during the seventy days this fall when, without interruption, I did several things of the first rank the like of which nobody will do after me—or impose on me3—with a responsibility for all millennia after me, will not have noticed any trace of tension in me; but rather an overflowing freshness and cheerfulness. I never ate with more pleasant feelings; I never slept better.
I do not know any other way of associating with great tasks than play: as a sign of greatness, this is an essential presupposition. The least compulsion, a gloomy mien, or any harsh tone in the throat are all objections to a man; how much more against his work!—One must not have any nerves.—Suffering from solitude is also an objection—I have suffered only from “multitudes.”
At an absurdly early age, at seven, I already knew that no human word would ever reach me: has anyone ever seen me saddened on that account?
To this day I still have the same affability for everyone; I even treat with special respect those who are lowliest: in all of this there is not one grain of arrogance or secret contempt. If I despise a man, he guesses that I despise him: by my mere existence I outrage everything that has bad blood in its veins.
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati:4 that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it.
1Cf. Twilight, Chapter I, section 10: “Not to perpetrate cowardice against one’s own acts! Not to leave them in the lurch afterwards! The bite of conscience is indecent.” And The Will to Power, section 234: “The bite of conscience: a sign that the character is no match for the deed.” Also Sartre’s The Flies and Walter Kaufmann, “Nietzsche Between Homer and Sartre,” Revue internationale de philosophie, 1964.
2Ich bin zu neugierig, zu fragwürdig, zu übermütig, um mir eine faustgrobe Antwort gefalien zu lassen. Nietzsche’s atheism is not a “result”; it is a corrolary of his commitment to question every conviction, including his own convictions.
In a sense, of course, he does know atheism “as an event;” namely, as a cultural event which he designated with the words, “God is dead” (Gay Science, section 125; Zarathustra, Prologue, section 2: Portable Nietzsche). What he means above is that he did not experience the loss of faith in God as an event in his own life: he did not pass through any crisis of faith. Cf. Genealogy III, section 27, and Kaufmann’s Nietzsche, Chapter 3, section I.
3The coinage of a man who neither smoked nor drank coffee. Cf. Antichrist, section 2 (Portable Nietzsche).
4Leipzig, about a hundred miles south-southwest of Berlin, is one of the two major cities of Saxony and renowned for its exceptionally broad dialect. It is also the seat of a university at which Nietzsche studied classical philology
5In June 1866, during the war with Austria, the Prussians marched into Saxony and occupied Dresden (the capital).
6After the German manner.
7The north-westermost province of Italy, which borders on France and Switzerland. Its biggest city is Turin, where Nietzsche lived for two months in the spring of 1888, and again from September 21, 1888, until his collapse in January, 1889.
8The city, thirty miles southwest of Leipzig, where Nietzsche had grown up.
9Perhaps the most famous boarding school in Germany.
10This is surely the meaning intended, although ein kleines Glas l?uft mir nach wie ein Hund means literally: a small glass runs after me like a dog. This sentence has been adduced—very unreasonably—as evidence that Nietzsche was suffering from hallucinations and no longer sane when he wrote Ecce Homo.
11In wine there is truth.
12Allusion to Genesis 1.2.
13Provocative.
14Vorurteile. Vorteile (advantages) in Karl Schlechta’s edition is a misprint.
15 Twilight, Chapter I, section 34 (Portable Nietzsche).
1Geistreiche Menschen. Geistreich, literally rich in spirit, means ingenious, witty, intelligent, bright.
2The ten years when Nietzsche was a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel, Switzerland.
1Unique.
2“Einschl?gt” (placed in quotes by Nietzsche) suggests lightning.
3The Greek skeptics.
4Nietzsche’s early philological studies of Diogenes Laertius: De Laertii Diogenis fontibus (On Diogenes Laertius’ sources, 1868 and 1869) and Beitr?ge zur Quellenkunde und Kritik des Laertius Diogenes (contributions to the critique and the study of the sources of Diogenes Laertius, 1870).
5Largeness of heart.
6Nietzsche had corrected printer’s proofs and given his imprimatur up to this point in the book, before he collapsed.
7The word here rendered several times as “culture” is Bildung.
8Paul Bourget (1852–1935), a critic and novelist, wrote, among other things, Essais de psychologie contemporaine, of which the first volume (1883) contains a chapter “Théorie de la décadence.” On the question of Bourget’s influence on Nietzsche see the first footnote in Chapter 2 of my Nietzsche.
Pierre Loti was the pen name of Louis Marie Julien Viaud (1850–1923) who wrote, e.g., Pêcheur d’Islande (the Iceland fisherman; 1886).
Gyp was the pen name of Sibylle Gabrielle Marie Antoinette Riqueti de Mirabeau, Comtesse de Martel de Janville (1850–1932), a very prolific writer.
Henri Meilhac (1831–1897) was a dramatist and collaborated with Ludovic Halévy (1834–1908) on a large number of operettas, farces, and comedies, including librettos for Offenbach; e.g., La Belle Hélène (1864).
Anatole France was the pen name of Jacques Anatole Thibault (1844–1924), generally regarded as one of the leading French writers of his time.
Fran?ois Elie Jules Lema?tre (1853–1914) was a critic and dramatist.
Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893), though also a poet and novelist, is remembered chiefly for his magnificent short stories. He died in an insane asylum.
9The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.
10From the claw (you can tell) Napoleon. Nietzsche’s variation of ex ungue leonem (from the claw, a lion).
11Novelist, essayist, and archaeologist (1803–1870), now best remembered for his Carmen (1847), which became the basis of the libretto for Georges Bizet’s opera.
12Twilight, “The Four Great Errors,” section 8 (Portable Nietzsche).
1Ecce Homo was published in 1908. The same year Thomas Mann penned a “Note on Heine” (Notiz über Heine) in which he said: “Of his works I have long loved the book on Borne most…. His psychology of the Nazarene type anticipates Nietzsche…. And incidentally no German prose prior to Nietzsche’s matches its genius” (Rede und Antwort [speech and reply], 1922). Nietzsche’s reference to “mere Germans” makes a point of the fact that Heine was a Jew (and very widely resented), and Nietzsche took himself to be of Polish descent.
2Nietzsche neither emphasizes book titles nor usually places them in quotes after the German manner; but the comparison Nietzsche intends is presumably between the two heroes, Faust and Manfred. Nietzsche’s tremendous admiration for Goethe was not primarily based on Faust. Cf. Portable Nietzsche, and for further quotations Kaufmann’s Nietzsche, the final pages of Chapter 4.
3The muse of music. Bülow (1830–1894) was a pianist and conductor. In 1857 he married Cosima Liszt, who later left him for Richard Wagner, whom she married in 1870.
4A hint for readers of Ecce Homo.
5Cf. The Birth of Tragedy, end of section 7.
6Selbsttierqu?ler: literally, self-animal-tormentor. Incidentally, Freud believed that the Earl of Oxford had written “Shakespeare’s” plays.
7Presumably Nietzsche means that he has been persuaded not by American Baconians but by considerations of his own. Bacon was Lord Chancellor, and the “crime” to which he pleaded guilty in 1621 was bribery. He explained: “I was the justest judge that was in England these fifty years; but it was the justest censure in Parliament that was these two hundred years.” In accordance with the general practice of the age, he said, he had accepted gifts from litigants; but his judgment had never been swayed by a bribe.
1The place in Switzerland where Wagner had lived and Nietzsche had often visited him.
2And all that tribe. Wagner was a Francophobe and Teutomaniac, but Nietzsche insists that he was very different indeed from his nationalist followers.
3Mucker.
4The allusion is primarily to Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had ascended to the throne in June 1888, but is also aimed at the German Reich in which Wagner had become a national—and nationalist—hero.
5During the time of their friendship Wagner was quite literally living in voluntary exile in Switzerland.
6Staging.
7Pp. 256f. in the MS is a slip.
8Core.
9That is, the last intelligent adherent of Wagner.
10That is, made common cause with the new German Empire.
11Quoting section 3 above.
1This would take us back to the spring of 1861 when Nietzsche was sixteen. Indeed, the text of one of Nietzsche’s own compositions, dated June 1861, “included an unmistakable token of the proximity of Tristan und Isolde: ‘Wild wogt der Wahn, wo durch bewegt, das Wunder wollend mein Gemüth? [sic]’” (Frederick R. Love, Young Nietzsche and the Wagnerian Experience, Chapel Hill, N. C, University of North Carolina Press, 1963; reviewed by Walter Kaufmann in Journal of the History of Philosophy, October 1965). The quoted passage reads like a parody of Wagner and makes little sense: “Wildly illusion surges, whereby moves the wonder wishing my bosom?”
Nevertheless, Love, making use of unpublished materials, including Nietzsche’s compositions, argues convincingly that Nietzsche never was “a passionate devotee of Wagnerian music” (p. viii). He finals “nothing whatever Wagnerian” in Nietzsche’s songs between 1862 and 1865 (p. 28); he cites a letter of the winter 1865-66 in which Nietzsche, then a student, wrote, “Three things are my recreations, but rare recreations, my Schopenhauer, Schumann’s music, finally long walks;” and he cites a list Nietzsche made around the same time of his musical favorites: Schumann, Beethoven, and Schubert are most prominent, “two choral works by Bach are mentioned, ‘ein paar’ [a couple of] Lieder of Brahms, and of Wagner only the early opera Tannh?user, listed indiscriminately next to a work by Meyerbeer” (p. 35).
Love argues further: “As for Wagner’s music, it can be stated unequivocally that Die Meistersinger was the only one of the mature works which Nietzsche acquired fully on his own and the one which he knew best from actual performance” (p. 63). Tristan he heard only twice, in June 1872, in Munich, where “Hans von Bülow gave the European musical public its second chance to experience a production of Tristan” (p. 64). Love thinks that Tristan “became for Nietzsche the permanent symbol of his unforgettable Tribschen experience” because “Wagner himself must have opened his mind to the deeper meaning of his most radical work” (p. 65).
Love fails to note that Nietzsche’s tribute to von Bülow in the text above evidently conflates two events: the one in 1861 to which Nietzsche alludes, and the other in 1872. Love also refers to (p. 69) but does not quote von Bülow’s scathing letter to Nietzsche about one of Nietzsche’s compositions. It is noteworthy that Nietzsche cites this letter in section 4 above, humorously, without any trace of ressentiment, and that he goes out of his way in the text above to voice his gratitude to von Bülow.
Regarding Nietzsche’s relationship to Wagner’s music, Love is surely right in not regarding Nietzsche’s break with Wagner as an act of self-betrayal (as many Wagnerians have done), concluding instead that “Nietzsche’s infatuation with Wagnerian music … may indeed be regarded as an aberration” from his own line. But again it is noteworthy that Nietzsche makes a point of speaking of Wagner without ressentiment and with gratitude; and it is obviously possible to have more opportunities to hear Die Meistersinger and even, whether this is true in Nietzsche’s case or not, to know and in some sense like this opera especially well, while yet considering Tristan “Wagner’s non plus ultra.”
Nietzsche’s judgments in Ecce Homo are plainly highly stylized: he loves Wagner—in spite of his Teutonomania, in spite of his ideas and his self-image, in spite of everything that eventually endeared him to his countrymen; he loves Wagner as the ultimate in decadence, as a kind of apotheosis of French romanticism, as fascinatingly sick—and Tristan fits into that picture a thousand times better than Die Meistersinger.
2Schauerlich: etymologically, what makes one shudder.
3Er erholte sich. Above, Erholung has been rendered several times as recreation.
1Nietzsche spent his summers in Switzerland, his winters in Italy, and wrote Ecce Homo in Turin.
2Heinrich K?selitz, a young composer who vastly admired Nietzsche, helped him prepare copies of his manuscripts for the printer, read proofs for him, and assisted him very devotedly. Nietzsche called him Peter Gast, and this became his pen name when he later became one of the editors of Nietzsche’s works. His opera, “The Lion of Venice,” never made a reputation for him as a composer, but Nietzsche’s letters to Gast (1908) made him famous. His own letters to Nietzsche (2 vols., 1923-24) are much less interesting and not at all widely known. The passage in the text is plainly inspired by gratitude and to that extent offers a clue to some of Nietzsche’s other judgments in Ecce Homo: he is often more concerned with his own attitudes and their fittingness, their style, than with their literal content.
1Know thyself.
2Untergang.
3Selbstsucht, Selbstzucht.
4This anti-Cartesian epigram anticipates Freud.
5An allusion to the birth of Pallas Athene who was said to have sprung, fully armed, from the head of Zeus.
6Dáss ich mich je bemüht h?tte. Deliberately or not, Nietzsche pictures himself as the antithesis of Goethe’s Faust who speaks of his ardent Bemühn in the first sentence of his first speech (line 357); and Faust’s redemption after his death is explained by the angels in two of the most famous lines of German literature: “Who ever strives with all his power,/ We are allowed to save;” Wer immer strebend sich bemüht,/ Den k?nnen wir erl?sen (lines 11936-37).
7Streben: see the preceding note.
8Dass er sich nie … bemüht hat!
9One of the leading professional journals.
10The great historian (1795–1886) was born in Wiehe, in Thuringia, roughly thirty miles west of R?cken (near Lützen), where Nietzsche was born. And Ranke, like Nietzsche, got his secondary school education at Schulpforta.
1Podach (Friedrich Nietzsches Werke, 1961) reproduces a photograph of section 10 (plate XV) and points out that the spiral scribble used to delete the following passage at this point was characteristic of Nietzsche’s sister and never employed by him (p. 408; cf. also pp. 245f.).
“Our present culture is ambiguous in the highest degree.—The German emperor making a pact with the pope, as if the pope were not the representative of deadly hostility to life!—What is being built today will no longer stand in three years.—When I measure myself against my ability, not to speak of what will come after me, a collapse, a construction without equal, then I more than any other mortal have a claim to the epithet of greatness.”
In the first edition of Ecce Homo (1908) this paragraph was printed in a footnote in Raoul Richter’s postscript (pp. 147f.) and introduced with the following comment: “There are only two passages of any length where the peculiarity of the crossing out and Peter Gast’s testimony, based on his recollection, make it merely probable that the deletion was Nietzsche’s own.” The other passage will be found at the end of the discussion of “The Case of Wagner,” below.
2Pathetisch in German is closer in meaning to bombastic than it is to pitiful. The word is readily associated with an actor’s style and with highly idealistic passages in drama—in Schiller’s plays, for example—where big words are used freely and a laugh would puncture the whole effect. The same consideration applies to Pathos in the next sentence.
One may wonder whether this whole paragraph is starkly ironical or, on the contrary, totally lacking in self-awareness. Without denying that both alternatives contain a grain of truth, one may insist that Nietzsche’s central point is important. He never lost the ability to laugh, and his self-image was the very antithesis of his sister’s later image of him which, at her bidding, was translated into pictures and sculptures that she commissioned and for which she posed her brother who was by then a helpless invalid.
Finally, if we take seriously Nietzsche’s words, “not a moment in my life”—as distinguished from “not a line in this book”—he is incontestably right. Consider how Dr. Paneth, one of Freud’s friends, described Nietzsche of whom he saw a great deal in Nizza from December 26, 1883, until March 26, 1884: “There is not a trace of false pathos or the prophet’s pose in him, as I had rather feared after his last work. Instead his manner is completely inoffensive and natural…. He told me, but without the least affectation or conceit, that he always felt himself to have a task …” For further quotations from his letters and some discussion, see Walter Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism (Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday Anchor Books, 1960).
3Die kein Mensch mir nachmacht—oder vormacht … If Nietzsche meant—and this possibility cannot be ruled out—“or has done before me,” the text ought to read: oder mir vorgemacht hat.
4Love of fate. It should be noted how Ecce Homo exemplifies this attitude. As long as one overlooks this, as well as the fact that Nietzsche’s life for the preceding decade, and more, had been troubled by continued ill health and excruciating physical pain, and that his books were, without exception, totally “unsuccessful,” one does not begin to understand Ecce Homo.