Why I Write Such Good Books
1
I am one thing, my writings are another matter.—Before I discuss them, one by one, let me touch on the question of their being understood or not understood. I’ll do it as casually as decency permits; for the time for this question certainly hasn’t come yet. The time for me hasn’t come yet: some are born posthumously.
Some day institutions will be needed in which men live and teach as I conceive of living and teaching; it might even happen that a few chairs will then be set aside for the interpretation of Zarathustra. But it would contradict my character entirely if I expected ears and hands for my truths today: that today one doesn’t hear me and doesn’t accept my ideas is not only understandable, it even seems right to me. I don’t want to be confounded with others—not even by myself.
To repeat, one cannot find many traces of ill will in my life; and of literary ill will, too, I could scarcely relate a single case. But only too many of pure foolishness!
To me it seems one of the rarest distinctions that a man can accord himself if he takes one of my books into his hands—I even suppose that he first takes off his shoes,1 not to speak of boots.
When Dr. Heinrich von Stein once complained very honestly that he didn’t understand a word of my Zarathustra, I told him that this was perfectly in order: having understood six sentences from it—that is, to have really experienced them—would raise one to a higher level of existence than “modern” men could attain. Given this feeling of distance, how could I possibly wish to be read by those “moderns” whom I know!
My triumph is precisely the opposite of Schopenhauer’s: I say, “non legor, non legar!”2
Not that I should like to underestimate the pleasure I have felt on several occasions at the innocence of people who said No to my writings. Only this past summer, at a time when I may have upset the balance of the whole rest of literature with my weighty, too weighty, literature, a professor from the University of Berlin suggested very amiably that I ought to try another form: nobody read such things.
In the last analysis, it was not Germany but Switzerland that produced the two extreme cases. An essay by Dr. V. Widmann in the Bund, about Beyond Good and Evil, under the title “Nietzsche’s Dangerous Book,” and a comprehensive report about my books in general by Karl Spitteler,3 also in the Bund, represent a maximum in my life—I refrain from saying, of what.
The latter treated my Zarathustra, for example, as an advanced exercise in style, and expressed the wish that later on I might provide some content as well. Dr. Widmann expressed his respect for the courage I had shown in my attempt to abolish all decent feelings.4
As the petty spite of accident would have it, every sentence in this latter piece was, with a consistency I admired, some truth stood on its head: one really had to do no more than “revalue all values” in order to hit the nail on the head about me in a truly remarkable manner—instead of hitting my head with a nail.—That makes an explanation only more desirable.
Ultimately, nobody can get more out of things, including books, than he already knows. For what one lacks access to from experience one will have no ear. Now let us imagine an extreme case: that a book speaks of nothing but events that lie altogether beyond the possibility of any frequent or even rare experience—that it is the first language for a new series of experiences. In that case, simply nothing will be heard, but there will be the acoustic illusion that where nothing is heard, nothing is there.
This is, in the end, my average experience and, if you will, the originality of my experience. Whoever thought he had understood something of me, had made up something out of me after his own image—not uncommonly an antithesis to me; for example, an “idealist”—and whoever had understood nothing of me, denied that I need be considered at all.
The word “overman,” as the designation of a type of supreme achievement, as opposed to “modern” men, to “good” men, to Christians and other nihilists—a word that in the mouth of a Zarathustra, the annihilator of morality, becomes a very pensive word—has been understood almost everywhere with the utmost innocence in the sense of those very values whose opposite Zarathustra was meant to represent—that is, as an “idealistic” type of a higher kind of man, half “saint,” half “genius.”
Other scholarly oxen have suspected me of Darwinism on that account. Even the “hero worship” of that unconscious and involuntary conterfeiter, Carlyle, which I have repudiated so maliciously, has been read into it. Those to whom I said in confidence that they should sooner look even for a Cesare Borgia than for a Parsifal, did not believe their own ears.5
That I feel no curiosity at all about reviews of my books, especially in newspapers, should be forgiven me. My friends and my publishers know this and do not speak to me about such things. In one particular case I once did get to see all the sins that had been committed against one of my books—it was Beyond Good and Evil—and I could make a pretty report about that. Would you believe it? The Nationalzeitung—a Prussian newspaper, as I might explain for the benefit of my foreign readers—I myself read, if I may say so, only the Journal des Débats—actually managed to understand the book as a “sign of the times,” as the real and genuine Junker philosophy for which the Kreuzzeitung6 merely lacked the courage.
2
This was said for the benefit of Germans; for everywhere else I have readers—nothing but first-rate intellects and proven characters, trained in high positions and duties; I even have real geniuses among my readers. In Vienna, in St. Petersburg, in Stockholm, in Copenhagen, in Paris, in New York—everywhere I have been discovered; but not in the shallows of Europe, Germany.1
And let me confess that my nonreaders delight me even more—those who have never heard my name, nor the word “philosophy.” But wherever I go, here in Turin, for example, everybody’s face lights up and looks pleased at my sight. What has flattered me most so far is that old costermonger women won’t relax until they have found their sweetest grapes for me. That is the extent to which one should be a philosopher.
It is not for nothing that the Poles are called the Frenchmen among the Slavs. A charming Russian woman would not doubt for a moment where I belong. I cannot be solemn, at most I become embarrassed.
To think German, to feel German—I can do anything, but not that.
My old teacher, Ritschl, actually claimed that I planned even my philological essays like a Parisian romancier—absurdly exciting. Even in Paris they are amazed by “tout mes audaces et finesses”—this is M. Taine’s expression.2 I fear that even into the highest forms of the dithyramb one finds in my case some admixture of that salt which never loses its savor and becomes flat—“German”—namely, esprit.—I cannot do otherwise. God help me! Amen.3
All of us know, some even know from experience, which animal has long ears. Well then, I dare assert that I have the smallest ears. This is of no small interest to women—it seems to me that they may feel I understand them better.—I am the anti-ass par excellence and thus a world-historical monster—I am, in Greek, and not only in Greek, the Antichrist.
3
I have some notion of my privileges as a writer; in a few instances I have been told, too, how getting used to my writings “spoils” one’s taste. One simply can no longer endure other books, least of all philosophical works. It is a distinction without equal to enter this noble and delicate world—one must not by any means be a German; it is after all a distinction one must have earned. But whoever is related to me in the height of his aspirations will experience veritable ecstasies of learning; for I come from heights that no bird ever reached in its flight, I know abysses into which no foot ever strayed. I have been told that it is impossible to put down one of my books—that I even disturb nightly rest.
Altogether, there is no prouder and at the same time subtler type of book: here and there they achieve the highest thing achievable on earth, cynicism; they have to be conquered with the most delicate fingers as well as the bravest fists. Every frailty of the soul excludes one once and for all, even every kind of dyspepsia: one must not have any nerves, one needs a cheerful digestion. Not only the poverty, also the nook air of a soul excludes one; even more, any cowardice, uncleanliness, secret vengefulness in the entrails: a single word from me drives all his bad instincts into a man’s face, My acquaintances include several guinea pigs who illustrate for me different reactions to my writings—different in a very instructive manner. Those who want no part of the contents, my so-called friends, for example, become “impersonal”: they congratulate me for having got “that far” again—and find some progress in the greater cheerfulness of the tone.
Utterly depraved “spirits,” “beautiful souls,” being mendacious through and through, simply do not know where they are with these books—hence they consider them beneath themselves, the beautiful consistency of all “beautiful souls.” The oxen among my acquaintances—mere Germans, if I may say so—suggest that one cannot always agree with my opinions, but at times—This I have been told even about Zarathustra.
All “feminism,” too—also in men—closes the door: it will never permit entrance into this labyrinth of audacious insights. One must never have spared oneself, one must have acquired hardness as a habit to be cheerful and in good spirits in the midst of nothing but hard truths. When I imagine a perfect reader, he always turns into a monster of courage and curiosity; moreover, supple, cunning, cautious; a born adventurer and discoverer. In the end, I could not say better to whom alone I am speaking at bottom than Zarathustra said it: to whom alone will he relate his riddle?
“To you, the bold searchers, researchers, and whoever embarks with cunning sails on terrible seas—to you, drunk with riddles, glad of the twilight, whose soul flutes lure astray to every whirlpool, because you do not want to grope along a thread with cowardly hand; and where you can guess, you hate to deduce.”1
4
This is also the point for a general remark about my art of style. To communicate a state, an inward tension of pathos, by means of signs, including the tempo of these signs—that is the meaning of every style;1 and considering that the multiplicity of inward states is exceptionally large in my case, I have many stylistic possibilities—the most multifarious art of style that has ever been at the disposal of one man. Good is any style that really communicates an inward state, that makes no mistake about the signs, the tempo of the signs, the gestures—all the laws about long periods are concerned with the art of gestures.2 Here my instinct is infallible.
Good style in itself—a pure folly, mere “idealism,” on a level with the “beautiful in itself,” the “good in itself,” the “thing in itself.”
Always presupposing that there are ears—that there are those capable and worthy of the same pathos, that there is no lack of those to whom one may communicate oneself.—My Zarathustra, for example, is still looking for those—alas, it will have to keep looking for a long time yet!—One must be worthy of hearing him.
And until then there will be nobody to understand the art that has been squandered here: nobody ever was in a position to squander more new, unheard-of artistic devices that had actually been created only for this purpose. That this was possible in German, of all languages, remained to be shown: I myself would have rejected any such notion most unhesitatingly before. Before me, it was not known what could be done with the German language—what could be done with language in general. The art of the great rhythm, the great style of long periods to express a tremendous up and down of sublime, of superhuman passion, was discovered only by me; with a dithyramb like the last one in the third part of Zarathustra, entitled “The Seven Seals,” I soared a thousand miles beyond what was called poetry hitherto.
5
That a psychologist without equal speaks from my writings, is perhaps the first insight reached by a good reader—a reader as I deserve him, who reads me the way good old philologists read their Horace. Those propositions on which all the world is really agreed—not to speak of the world’s common run of philosophers, the moralists and other hollow pots, cabbage heads1—appear in my books as na?ve blunders: for example, the belief that “unegoistic” and “egoistic” are opposites, while the ego itself is really only a “higher swindle,” an “ideal.”—There are neither egoistic nor unegoistic acts: both concepts are psychological absurdities. Or the proposition: “man strives for happiness.”—Or the proposition: “happiness is the reward of virtue.”—Or the proposition: “pleasure and displeasure are opposites.”—The Circe of humanity, morality, has falsified all psychologica through and through—moralizing them—down to that gruesome nonsense that love is supposed to be something “unegoistic.”—One has to sit firmly upon oneself, one must stand bravely on one’s own two legs, otherwise one is simply incapable of loving. Ultimately, women know that only too well: they don’t give a damn about selfless, merely objective men.
May I here venture the surmise that I know women? That is part of my Dionysian dowry. Who knows? Perhaps I am the first psychologist of the eternally feminine. They all love me—an old story—not counting abortive females, the “emancipated” who lack the stuff for children.—Fortunately, I am not willing to be torn to pieces: the perfect woman tears to pieces when she loves.—I know these charming maenads.—Ah, what a dangerous, creeping, subterranean little beast of prey she is! And yet so agreeable!—A little woman who pursues her revenge would run over fate itself.—Woman is indescribably more evil than man; also cleverer: good nature is in a woman a form of degeneration.—In all so-called “beautiful souls” something is physiologically askew at bottom; I do not say everything, else I should become medi-cynical. The fight for equal rights is actually a symptom of a disease: every physician knows that.—Woman, the more she is a woman, resists rights in general hand and foot: after all, the state of nature, the eternal war between the sexes, gives her by far the first rank.
Has my definition of love been heard? It is the only one worthy of a philosopher. Love—in its means, war; at bottom, the deadly hatred of the sexes.
Has my answer been heard to the question how one cures a woman—“redeems” her? One gives her a child. Woman needs children, a man is for her always only a means: thus spoke Zarathustra.
“Emancipation of women”—that is the instinctive hatred of the abortive2 woman, who is incapable of giving birth, against the woman who is turned out well3—the fight against the “man” is always a mere means, pretext, tactic. By raising themselves higher, as “woman in herself,” as the “higher woman,” as a female “idealist,” they want to lower the level of the general rank of woman; and there is no surer means for that than higher education, slacks, and political voting-cattle rights. At bottom, the emancipated are anarchists in the world of the “eternally feminine,” the underprivileged whose most fundamental instinct is revenge.
One whole species of the most malignant “idealism”—which, incidentally, is also encountered among men; for example, in Henrik Ibsen, this typical old virgin—aims to poison the good conscience, what is natural in sexual love.4
And lest I leave any doubt about my very decent and strict views in these matters, let me still cite a proposition against vice from my moral code: I use the word “vice” in my fight against every kind of antinature or, if you prefer pretty words, idealism. The proposition reads: “The preaching of chastity amounts to a public incitement to antinature. Every kind of contempt for sex, every impurification of it by means of the concept ‘impure,’ is the crime par excellence against life—is the real sin against the holy spirit of life.”
6
To give an idea of me as a psychologist, I choose a curious bit of psychology from Beyond Good and Evil; incidentally, I forbid any surmise about whom I am describing in this passage:1
The genius of the heart, as that great concealed one possesses it, the tempter god and born pied piper of consciences whose voice knows how to descend into the netherworld of every soul; who does not say a word or cast a glance in which there is no consideration and ulterior enticement; whose mastery includes the knowledge of how to seem—not what he is but what is to those who follow him one more constraint to press ever closer to him in order to follow him even more inwardly and thoroughly—the genius of the heart who silences all that is loud and self-satisfied, teaching it to listen; who smooths rough souls and lets them taste a new desire—to lie still as a mirror, that the deep sky may mirror itself in them—the genius of the heart who teaches the doltish and rash hand to hesitate and reach out more delicately; who guesses the concealed and forgotten treasure, the drop of graciousness and sweet spirituality under dim and thick ice, and is a divining rod for every grain of gold that has long lain buried in the dungeon of much mud and sand; the genius of the heart from whose touch everyone walks away richer, not having received grace and surprised, not as blessed and oppressed by alien goods, but richer in himself, newer to himself than before, broken open, blown at and sounded out by a thawing wind, perhaps more unsure, tenderer, more fragile, more broken, but full of hopes that as yet have no name, full of new will and currents, full of new dissatisfaction and undertows …
1Allusion to Exodus 3:5.
2I am not read, I will not be read.
3J. V. Widmann (1842–1911) published his review in the Berner Bund on September 16-17, 1888. In the Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger (Princeton, N. J., Princeton University Press, 1965), Henri de Ziègler, former President of the University of Geneva, says of him in the article on “Swiss Poetry” (p. 830): “A fascinating grace of expression—rare in German-Swiss literature—distinguishes the anachronistic verse-idylls of Spitteler’s friend J. V. Widmann.”
Carl Spitteler (1845–1924) published the “comprehensive report,” mentioned in the text, in the New Year’s Supplement, 1888, of the Bund. On November 8, 1888, he published a very favorable review of The Case of Wagner in the Bund. This book he also reviewed in Basler Nachrichten. Nietzsche was so pleased with Spitteler’s reaction to The Case of Wagner that he asked him to publish, with a preface, the passages from Nietzsche’s earlier books that Nietzsche then decided—even before Spitteler had had time to decline—to publish himself: Nietzsche contra Wagner. In 1908 Spitteler published a small fifty-page pamphlet, Meine Beziehungen zu Nietzsche (my relations—or contacts—with Nietzsche; Munich, Süddeutsche Monatshefte). In Peter Gast’s notes on Nietzsche’s letters to him, February 26, 1888, and December 16, 1888, Gast took issue with Spitteler (Friedrich Nietzsches Briefe an Peter Gast, Leipzig, 1908.). In 1919 Spitteler received the Nobel Prize for literature.
See also note 4 below.
4At this point Nietzsche himself deleted the following passage in his MS: “Not that there was any lack of ‘good will’ in either case; even less, of intelligence. Indeed, I consider Herr Spitteler one of the most welcome and refined of all who write criticism today; his work on the French drama—not published yet—may be of the first rank. That much more do I seek some explanation” (see Podach, Friedrich Nietzsches Werke; and for Nietzsche’s instructions to delete these sentences).
5All of Nietzsche’s references to Cesare Borgia are discussed in Kaufmann’s Nietzsche, Chapter 7, section III.
6An ultra-right newspaper.
1In a discarded draft for this passage we find the following (Podach.): “Whoever reads me in Germany today has first de-Germanized himself thoroughly, as I have done: my formula is known, ‘to be a good German means to de-Germanize oneself; or he is—no small distinction among Germans—of Jewish descent.—Jews among Germans are always the higher race—more refined, spiritual, kind.—L’adorable Heine, they say in Paris.”
2“All my audacities and finesses.” Nietzsche’s correspondence with Hippolyte Taine has been published in Friedrich Nietzsches Gesammelte Briefe, vol. Ill, Berlin and Leipzig, Schuster & Loeffler, 1905.
3Luther’s famous words at the Diet of Worms.
1Part III, “On the Vision and the Riddle,” section 1.
1For the importance of tempo, cf. Beyond Good and Evil, sections 27, 28, and 246.
2See ibid., section 247. This sentence suggests some of the difficulties faced by a translator of Nietzsche.
1Den Allerwelts-Philosophen, den Moralisten und andren Hohlt?pfen, Kohlk?pfen.
2Missraten.
3Wohlgeraten.
4It seems plain that Nietzsche did not know most of Ibsen’s plays. Cf. my edition of The Will to Power (New York, Random House, 1967), sections 86 (including my long note) and 747, and for some parallels between Ibsen and Nietzsche also my Preface to Beyond Good and Evil, as well as note 37. Nietzsche would have loved The Wild Duck.
1Section 295. In a footnote for that section (in my translation of Beyond Good and Evil) I have brought together materials that show how much this portrait owes to Socrates: also how Nietzsche came to see himself this way. “I forbid any surmise …” surely suggests that the description seems to Nietzsche to fit himself.