8

One can see these are no unbribed witnesses and judges of the value of the ascetic ideal, these philosophers! They are thinking of themselves—what is “the saint” to them! They are thinking all the while of what is most indispensable precisely to them: freedom from compulsion, disturbance, noise, from business, duties, cares; clarity in the head; dance, leap, and flight of ideas; good air, thin, clear, free, dry, as the air in high places is, in which all animal being becomes more spiritual and acquires wings; quiet in all souterrains; all dogs neatly put on a chain; no barking of hostility and shaggy rancor; no gnawing worms of injured ambition; undemanding and submissive intestines, diligent as mill-works but distant; the heart in a foreign place, in the beyond, in the future, posthumous—at the mention of the ascetic ideal they think, all in all, of the lighthearted asceticism of an animal that has been deified and become fully fledged, that roams more than rests above life. One knows the three great pomp words of the ascetic ideal: poverty, humility, chastity: and now just look at the lives of all great fruitful inventive spirits close up—one will always find all three to a certain degree. Certainly not, as goes without saying, as if these were their “virtues”—what does this kind of human being have to do with virtues!—but rather as the truest and most natural conditions of their best existence, of their most beautiful fruitfulness. At the same time it is entirely possible that for the present their dominant spirituality had to put reins on an unbridled and irritable pride or a willful sensuality or that it perhaps had a difficult enough time keeping up its will to the “desert” against an inclination to luxury and to the most exquisite things, likewise against a wasteful liberality of heart and hand. But it did it, precisely as the dominant instinct that forced through all its demands against those of all other instincts—it is still doing so; if it didn’t do so, it would not dominate. In this, then, there is nothing of “virtue.” Incidentally, the desert of which I just spoke, into which the strong, independent-natured spirits retreat and grow lonely—oh how different it looks from the desert as the learned dream it!—for in some cases they themselves are this desert, these learned ones. And it is certain that no actor of the spirit would be at all able to endure living in it—for them it is not nearly romantic and Syrian enough, not nearly enough of a stage desert! Admittedly there is also no lack of camels in it: but here the entire similarity ends. A voluntary obscurity perhaps; a steering-clear of oneself; an aversion to noise, veneration, newspaper, influence; a modest position, a daily routine, something that conceals more so than it brings to light; an occasional association with harmless lighthearted beasts and fowl, the sight of which refreshes; a mountain range for company, but not a dead one, rather one with eyes (that is with lakes); perhaps even a room in a crowded run-of-the-mill inn, where one is sure of being mistaken for someone else and can speak to anyone with impunity—that is “desert” here: oh it is lonely enough, believe me! When Heraclitus retreated into the courtyards and colonnades of the enormous temple of Artemis, this “desert” was more dignified, I concede: why are we lacking such temples? (—perhaps we are not lacking them: I was just thinking of my most beautiful study, of the Piazza di San Marco, assuming it is spring, likewise forenoon, the time between 10 and 12.) That which Heraclitus was evading, however, is still the same thing we steer clear of: the noise and the democratic chatter of the Ephesians, their politics, their news from the “empire” (Persia, you understand me), their market stuff of “today”—for we philosophers need rest from one thing before all else: from all “today.” We venerate what is silent, cold, noble, distant, past, in general every kind of thing at whose sight the soul does not have to defend itself and lace itself shut—something with which one can talk without talking out loud. Just listen to the sound a spirit has when he talks: every spirit has its sound, loves its sound. This one over there, for example, must be an agitator, that is to say a hollow head, hollow pot: whatever it is that goes into him, each thing comes back out dull and thick, weighed down with the echo of great emptiness. That one there seldom speaks other than hoarsely: did he perhaps think himself hoarse? That would be possible—ask the physiologists—but whoever thinks in words thinks as a speaker and not as a thinker (it betrays the fact that he basically does not think facts, not factually, but rather only with respect to facts, that he really thinks himself and his listeners). This third one talks obtrusively, he steps too close to us, his breath brushes us—we close our mouths involuntarily although it is a book through which he speaks to us: the sound of his style tells us the reason—that he has no time, that he has little faith in himself, that he will never again get a word in if not today. A spirit who is sure of itself, however, speaks softly; it seeks seclusion, it makes others wait. One can recognize a philosopher by the fact that he keeps clear of three bright and loud things: fame, princes, and women—which is not to say they don’t come to him. He shies away from all-too-bright light: therefore he shies away from his time and its “day.” In this he is like a shadow: the more the sun sets for him the greater he becomes. As for his “humility,” he can also bear, as he bears the dark, a certain dependence and obscurity: still more, he fears being disturbed by lightning, he shrinks back from the unprotectedness of an all-too-isolated and exposed tree on which every bad weather vents its moods, every mood its bad weather. His “motherly” instinct, the secret love of that which grows in him directs him to situations where one relieves him of thinking of himself, in the same sense in which the instinct of the mother in woman has until now preserved the dependent situation of woman generally. In the end they demand little enough, these philosophers; their motto is “whoever possesses, will be possessed”—: not, as I must say again and again, out of a virtue, out of a meritorious will to contentedness and simplicity, but rather because their supreme lord demands it thus of them, demands prudently and relentlessly: he has a mind for only one thing and gathers everything—time, energy, love, interest—only for this, saves it only for this. This kind of human does not like to be disturbed by enmities, also not by friendships: he forgets or holds in contempt easily. He thinks it in bad taste to play the martyr; “to suffer for the truth”—he leaves that to the ambitious and to the stage heroes of the spirit and whoever else has time enough for it (—the philosophers themselves, they have something to do for the truth). They use great words sparingly; it is said that they even find the word “truth” repellent: it sounds pompous … Finally, as for the “chastity” of philosophers, this kind of spirit obviously has its fruitfulness somewhere other than in children; perhaps elsewhere also the continued existence of their name, their little immortality (among philosophers in ancient India one expressed oneself still more immodestly: “to what end progeny for one whose soul is the world?”). In this there is nothing of chastity out of any ascetic scruple and hatred of the senses, just as little as it is chastity when an athlete or jockey abstains from women: rather it is their dominant instinct that wants it this way, at least during times of great pregnancy. Every artist knows how harmful the effect of intercourse is in conditions of great spiritual tension and preparation; the most powerful and sure-of-instinct among them do not first require experience, negative experience—rather it is their “motherly” instinct here that ruthlessly commands all other stores and allowances of energy, of animal vigor, for the benefit of the growing work: the greater energy then consumes the lesser one.—Incidentally, piece together the above discussed case of Schopenhauer according to this interpretation: in him the sight of the beautiful apparently acted as a triggering stimulus on the principal force of his nature (the force of contemplation and of the engrossed gaze); so that this then exploded and became all at once lord of his consciousness. This is in no way meant to preclude the possibility that the peculiar sweetness and fullness characteristic of the aesthetic condition might have its origins precisely in the ingredient “sensuality” (just as that “idealism” characteristic of marriageable girls stems from the same source)—that sensuality is thus not suspended at the onset of the aesthetic condition, as Schopenhauer believed, but rather only transfigures itself and no longer enters consciousness as sexual stimulus. (I will return to this viewpoint at another time in connection with still more delicate problems of the thus far so untouched, so unexplored physiology of aesthetics.)

9

A certain asceticism—we have seen it—a hard and lighthearted renunciation with the best of intentions, belongs to the most favorable conditions of highest spirituality, likewise also to its most natural consequences: from the outset, then, it will not astonish us if the ascetic ideal has always been treated with considerable prepossession precisely by philosophers. A serious historical reckoning proves the tie between ascetic ideal and philosophy to be even closer and stricter still. One could say that it was only on the apron strings of this ideal that philosophy ever learned to take its first steps and half-steps on earth—alas, ever so clumsily, alas, with ever so discouraged faces, alas, so ready to fall down and lie on its belly, this shy little blunderer and milquetoast with crooked legs! In the beginning philosophy fared as have all good things,—for a long time they hadn’t the courage to themselves, they were always looking around to see if there weren’t someone who would come to their help, still more, they were afraid of everyone who watched them. Just list the individual drives and virtues of the philosopher one after the other—his doubting drive, his negating drive, his wait-and-see (“ephectic”) drive, his analytical drive, his exploring, searching, venturing drive, his comparing, balancing drive, his will to neutrality and objectivity, his will to every “sine ira et studio”⁷⁶—: have we already grasped that for the longest time they all went against the first demands of morality and of conscience? (not to mention reason itself, which, even in his late day, Luther loved to call Fraw Klüglin⁷⁷ the shrewd whore). That a philosopher, if he were to come to a consciousness of himself, would have had to feel himself to be none other than the “nitimur in vetitum”⁷⁸ incarnate—and accordingly was on guard against “feeling himself,” against coming to a consciousness of himself? … Things are, as stated, no different with all good things of which we are proud today; even measured by the standard of the ancient Greeks our entire modern being, insofar as it is not weakness but rather power and consciousness of power, appears as nothing but hubris and godlessness: for the longest time those very things that are the reverse of what we venerate today had conscience on their side and God as their watchman. Hubris is our entire stance toward nature today, our violation of nature with the help of machines and the so thoughtless inventiveness of technicians and engineers; hubris is our stance toward God, that is to say toward some alleged spider of purpose and morality behind the great snare-web of causality—we could say with Charles the Bold in battle with Louis XI “je combats l’universelle araignée”⁷⁹—; hubris is our stance toward ourselves—for we experiment with ourselves as we would not permit ourselves to do with any animal and merrily and curiously slit open our souls while the body is still living: what do we care anymore about the “salvation” of the soul! Afterwards we heal ourselves: being sick is instructive, we have no doubt, even more instructive than being healthy—today the ones who make sick appear to us to be even more necessary than any medicine men and “saviors.” We do violence to ourselves now, there is no doubt, we nutcrackers of souls, we questioners and questionable ones, as if life were nothing but nutcracking; precisely in so doing we must of necessity become, with each passing day, ever more questionable, worthier of questioning, perhaps also worthier—of living? … All good things were once bad things; every original sin has become an original virtue. Marriage, for example, seemed for a long time to be a sin against the rights of the community; one once paid a penalty for having been so immodest and having arrogated a wife for oneself alone (the jus primae noctis⁸⁰ belongs here, for example—even today still the privilege of the priests in Cambodia, these guardians of “old good customs”). For the longest time meek, benevolent, yielding, compassionate feelings—by now so high in value that they are almost “the values in themselves”—had precisely self-contempt against them: one was ashamed of leniency as one is today ashamed of harshness (cf. Beyond Good and Evil section 260). Submission to the law:—oh with what resistance of conscience the noble dynasties everywhere on earth renounced vendettas and granted the law power over themselves! For a long time the “law” was a vetitum,⁸¹ a wanton act, an innovation; it appeared with force, as force, to which one could not yield without feeling ashamed of oneself. In former times every smallest step on earth was won through spiritual and bodily torments: this entire viewpoint “that not only marching forward, no! marching, movement, change had need of their countless martyrs” sounds so foreign precisely today—I first brought this to light in Daybreak 18. “Nothing has been more dearly bought,” it says there, “than that little bit of human reason and feeling of freedom that now makes up our pride. Because of this pride, however, it is now becoming almost impossible for us to empathize with those enormous stretches of time characterized by the ‘morality of custom,’ which lie before ‘world history’ as the real and decisive principal history that established the character of humankind: when suffering counted everywhere as virtue, cruelty as virtue, dissimulation as virtue, revenge as virtue, denial of reason as virtue; on the other hand well-being as danger, desire for knowledge as danger, peace as danger, compassion as danger, being pitied as disgrace, work as disgrace, madness as divinity, change as the essence of what is immoral and pregnant with ruin!”—

10

In the same book, section 42, is set forth within what valuation, under what pressure of valuation the earliest race of contemplative humans had to live,—held in contempt to the same degree they were not feared! Contemplation first appeared on earth in disguised form, with an ambiguous appearance, with an evil heart and often with a frightened head: of this there is no doubt. The inactive, brooding, unwarrior like elements in the instincts of contemplative human beings laid a deep mistrust around them for a long time: against this there was no other remedy than decisively to awaken fear of themselves. And in this the ancient Brahmins, for example, were experts! The earliest philosophers knew how to give their existence and appearance a meaning, a support and background against which one learned to fear them: more precisely considered, out of an even more fundamental need, namely to win fear and reverence from themselves. For within themselves they found all value judgments turned against them, they had to fight down every kind of suspicion and resistance against “the philosopher in them.” This they did, as human beings of terrible ages, with terrible means: cruelty against themselves, inventive self-castigation—that was the principal means of these power-thirsty hermits and innovators of ideas who first needed to lay waste to the gods and tradition within themselves in order even to be able to believe in their innovation. I call attention to the famous story of king Vishvamitra, who from a thousand years of self-torments won such a feeling of power and self-confidence that he undertook to build a new heaven: an uncanny symbol of the earliest and latest histories of philosophers on earth—anyone who ever built a “new heaven” first found the power to do so in his own hell … Let us compress the whole state of affairs into brief formulas: at first the philosophical spirit always had to slip into the disguise and chrysalis of the previously established types of contemplative human beings—as priest, magician, soothsayer, as religious human generally—in order even to be possible in any degree at all: for a long time the ascetic ideal served the philosopher as the form in which he could appear, as presupposition of existence—he had to act it in order to be able to be a philosopher, he had to believe it in order to be able to act it. The characteristic aloof stance of philosophers, world-negating, hostile toward life, not believing in the senses, desensualized, a stance which has been preserved up to the most recent time and has thus won acceptance as the virtual philosopher’s pose in itself,—it is above all a consequence of the poverty of conditions under which philosophy came about and survived at all: for the longest time philosophy would not have been at all possible on earth without an ascetic covering and mantle, without an ascetic self-misunderstanding. Graphically and clearly expressed: until the most recent time the ascetic priest has functioned as the repulsive and gloomy caterpillar-form in which alone philosophy was allowed to live and in which it crept around … Has this really changed? Has the colorful and dangerous winged animal, the “spirit” that this caterpillar concealed within itself, really—thanks to a sunnier, warmer, more brightly lit world—finally been unfrocked after all and let out into the light? Is there already enough pride, daring, bravery, self-assuredness in existence today, enough will of the spirit, will to responsibility, freedom of the will so that henceforth on earth “the philosopher” is truly—possible? …

11

Only now that we have gotten the ascetic priest in sight do we seriously begin to tackle our problem: what does the ascetic ideal mean?—only now does it become “serious”: henceforth we have opposite us the true representative of seriousness itself. “What does all seriousness mean?”—perhaps already here this still more fundamental question comes to our lips: a question for physiologists, as is fair, but one we will still slip past for the present. The ascetic priest has not only his faith in that ideal but also his will, his power, his interest. His right to existence stands and falls with that ideal: no wonder we run into a terrible opponent here—supposing, that is, that we were the opponents of that ideal?—one who fights for his existence against the deniers of that ideal? … On the other hand it is from the outset improbable that so interested a stance toward our problem will be of particular use to it; the ascetic priest will hardly even be the most successful defender of his ideal—for the same reason that a woman tends to fail when she wishes to defend “woman in herself”—much less the most objective assessor and judge in the controversy that has been stirred up here. It is hence more likely that we will yet have to help him defend himself effectively against us—this much is already clear as day—than that we should have to fear being too effectively refuted by him … The idea we are fighting about here is the valuation of our life on the part of the ascetic priest: he relates our life (together with that to which it belongs: “nature,” “world,” the entire sphere of becoming and of transitoriness) to an entirely different kind of existence, which it opposes and excludes, unless, perhaps, it were to turn against itself, to negate itself: in this case, the case of an ascetic life, life is held to be a bridge for that other existence. The ascetic treats life as a wrong path that one must finally retrace back to the point where it begins; or as an error that one refutes through deeds—should refute: for he demands that one go along with him; where he can, he forces his valuation of existence. What does that mean? Such a monstrous manner of valuation is not inscribed into the history of humankind as an exception and curiosity: it is one of the broadest and longest facts there is. Read from a distant star the majuscule script of our earthly existence would perhaps tempt one to conclude that the earth is the true ascetic star, a nook of discontented, arrogant, and repulsive creatures who could not get rid of a deep displeasure with themselves, with the earth, with all life and who caused themselves as much pain as possible out of pleasure in causing pain:—probably their only pleasure. Let us consider after all how regularly, how universally, how in almost all ages the ascetic priest emerges; he does not belong to any single race; he flourishes everywhere; he grows forth from every social rank. Not that he breeds and propagates his manner of valuation through heredity: the opposite is the case—a deep instinct forbids him, broadly speaking, reproduction. It must be a necessity of the first rank that makes this species that is hostile to life grow and prosper again and again—it must be in the interest of life itself that this type of self-contradiction not die out. For an ascetic life is a self-contradiction: here a ressentiment without equal rules, that of an unsatiated instinct and power-will that would like to become lord not over something living but rather over life itself, over its deepest, strongest, most fundamental preconditions; an attempt is made here to use energy to stop up the source of the energy; here the gaze is directed greenly and maliciously against physiological flourishing itself, in particular against its expression, beauty, joy; whereas pleasure is felt and sought in deformation, atrophy, in pain, in accident, in the ugly, in voluntary forfeit, in unselfing, self-flagellation, self-sacrifice. This is all paradoxical in the highest degree: we stand here before a conflict that wants itself to be conflicted, that enjoys itself in this suffering and even becomes ever more self-assured and triumphant to the extent that its own presupposition, physiological viability, decreases. “Triumph precisely in the final agony”: under this hyperbolic sign the ascetic ideal has fought from time immemorial; in this enigma of seduction, in this image of delight and torment it recognized its brightest light, its salvation, its ultimate victory. Crux, nux, lux⁸²—in the ascetic ideal they all belong together.—

12

Supposing that such an incarnate will to contradiction and anti-nature is prevailed upon to philosophize: on what will he vent his innermost capricious will? On what is most certainly felt to be true, real: he will seek error precisely where the true life instinct most unconditionally posits truth. For example, he will—as the ascetics of the Vedânta philosophy did—demote physicality to an illusion, likewise pain, multiplicity, the whole conceptual opposition “subject” and “object”—errors, nothing but errors! To refuse to believe in the self, to deny one’s own “reality”—what a triumph!—already no longer merely over the senses, over appearance, but a much higher kind of triumph, a violence and cruelty to reason: this lust reaches its peak when the ascetic self-contempt, self-derision of reason decrees: “there is a realm of truth and being, but precisely reason is excluded from it!” … (Incidentally: even in the Kantian concept of the “intelligible character of things” there remains something of this lascivious ascetic conflict, which loves to turn reason against reason: for in Kant “intelligible character” means a kind of constitution of things, of which the intellect comprehends just this much: that for the intellect it is—completely and utterly incomprehensible.)—Finally let us, particularly as knowers, not be ungrateful toward such resolute reversals of the familiar perspectives and valuations with which the spirit has raged against itself all too long now, apparently wantonly and futilely: to see differently in this way for once, to want to see differently, is no small discipline and preparation of the intellect for its future “objectivity”—the latter understood not as “disinterested contemplation” (which is a non-concept and absurdity), but rather as the capacity to have one’s pro and contra in one’s power, and to shift them in and out: so that one knows how to make precisely the difference in perspectives and affective interpretations useful for knowledge. For let us guard ourselves better from now on, gentlemen philosophers, against the dangerous old conceptual fabrication that posited a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge”; let us guard ourselves against the tentacles of such contradictory concepts as “pure reason,” “absolute spirituality,” “knowledge in itself “: here it is always demanded that we think an eye that cannot possibly be thought, an eye that must not have any direction, in which the active and interpretive forces through which seeing first becomes seeing-something are to be shut off, are to be absent; thus, what is demanded here is always an absurdity and non-concept of an eye. There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about a matter, the more eyes, different eyes, we know how to bring to bear on one and the same matter, that much more complete will our “concept” of this matter, our “objectivity” be. But to eliminate the will altogether, to disconnect the affects one and all, supposing that we were capable of this: what? would that not be to castrate the intellect? …

13

But let us return to our problem. In an accounting that is physiological and no longer psychological, a contradiction such as the ascetic seems to represent, “life against life,” is—this much is immediately clear as day—simply nonsense. It can only be apparent; it must be a kind of provisional expression, an interpretation, formula, arrangement, a psychological misunderstanding of something whose actual nature could not be understood for a long time, could not be designated in itself—a mere word, jammed into an old gap in human knowledge. And to oppose this with a brief statement of the facts of the matter: the ascetic ideal springs from the protective and healing instincts of a degenerating life that seeks with every means to hold its ground and is fighting for its existence; it points to a partial physiological hindrance and tiredness against which the deepest instincts of life, which have remained intact, fight incessantly with new means and inventions. The ascetic ideal is such a means: it is exactly the opposite of what its venerators suppose—in it and through it life is wrestling with death and against death; the ascetic ideal is an artifice for the preservation of life. That this ideal has been able to rule and achieve power over humans to the extent that history teaches us it has, in particular wherever the civilization and taming of man has been successfully carried out, expresses a great fact: the diseasedness of the previous type of human, at least of the human made tame, the physiological struggle of man with death (more precisely: with satiety with life, with tiredness, with the wish for the “end”). The ascetic priest is the incarnate wish for a different existence, an existence somewhere else, and in fact the highest degree of this wish, its true fervor and passion: but the very power of his wishing is the shackle that binds him here; in this very process he becomes a tool that must work at creating more favorable conditions for being-here and being-human—with this very power he ties to existence the entire herd of the deformed, out of sorts, short-changed, failed, those of every kind who suffer from themselves, by instinctively going before them as shepherd. One understands me already: this ascetic priest, this seeming enemy of life, this negating one—precisely he belongs to the very great conserving and yes-creating forces of life … Whence it stems, this diseasedness? For man is sicker, more unsure, more changing, more undetermined than any other animal, of this there is no doubt—he is the sick animal: how does this come about? Certainly he has also dared more, innovated more, defied more, challenged fate more than all the other animals taken together: he, the great experimenter with himself, the unsatisfied, unsatiated one who wrestles with animal, nature, and gods for final dominion—he, the one yet unconquered, the eternally future one who no longer finds any rest from his own pressing energy, so that his future digs inexorably like a spur into the flesh of every present:—how could such a courageous and rich animal not also be the most endangered, the most prolongedly and most deeply sick among all sick animals? … Man is fed up with it, often enough, there are entire epidemics of this being-fed-up (—around 1348, at the time of the Dance of Death): but even this loathing, this tiredness, this vexation with himself—everything emerges so powerfully in him that it immediately becomes a new shackle. As if by magic, the “no” that he says to life brings to light an abundance of tender “yes’s”; even when he wounds himself, this master of destruction, self-destruction—afterwards it is the wound itself that compels him to live …

14

The more normal the diseasedness in man is—and we cannot deny this normality—the higher one should honor the rare cases of powerfulness in soul and body, the strokes of luck among humans; the more strictly one should guard the well-formed against the worst air, against the air of the sick. Do we do this? … The sick are the greatest danger to the healthy; it is not from the strongest that harm comes to the strong, but rather from the weakest. Do we know this? … Broadly speaking, it is by no means the fear of man one might wish lessened: for this fear compels the strong to be strong, in some cases to be terrible—it keeps the well-formed type of human upright. What is to be feared, what has a doomful effect such as no other doom, would not be the great fear but rather the great disgust at man; likewise the great compassion for man. Supposing that these two should mate one day, then immediately something of the most uncanny nature would unavoidably come into the world, the “last will” of man, his will to nothingness, nihilism. And indeed: much is prepared for this. Whoever has not only a nose for smelling but also eyes and ears will sense something like madhouse air, like hospital air almost everywhere he might go today—I am speaking, in fairness, of the man’s cultural regions, of every kind of “Europe” there is on earth by now. The diseased are man’s great danger: not the evil, not the “beasts of prey.” Those who from the outset are failed, downcast, broken—they are the ones, the weakest are the ones who most undermine life among humans, who most dangerously poison and call into question our confidence in life, in man, in ourselves. Where might one escape it, that veiled look from which one carries away a deep sadness, that backward-turned look of one deformed from the beginning, a look that betrays how such a human speaks to himself—that look that is a sigh. “If only I might be someone else!” thus sighs this look: but there is no hope. “I am who I am: how could I get free from myself. And yet—I am fed up with myself!” … On such ground of self-contempt, a true swamp-ground, every weed grows, every poisonous plant, and all of it so small, so hidden, so dishonest, so cloying. Here the worms of vengeful and grudging feelings teem; here the air stinks of things that are secret and cannot be acknowledged; here the web of the most vicious conspiracy spins itself constantly—the conspiracy of the sufferers against the well-formed and victorious; here the appearance of the victorious one is hated. And what mendacity not to acknowledge this hate as hate! What expenditure of great words and poses, what art of “righteous” defamation! These deformed ones: what noble eloquence streams forth from their lips! How much sugary, slimy, humble submission swims in their eyes! What do they actually want? At least to represent justice, love, wisdom, superiority—that is the ambition of these “undermost ones,” of these sick ones! And how skillful such an ambition makes one! One should particularly admire the counterfeiter’s skill with which the stamp of virtue, even the cling-clang, the golden tone of virtue, is copied. They have now taken virtue in lease completely and utterly for themselves, these weak and incurably diseased ones, of this there is no doubt: “we alone are the good, the just,” so they speak, “we alone are the homines bonae voluntatis.”⁸³ They walk about among us as bodily reproaches, as warnings to us—as if health, being well-formed, strength, pride, a feeling of power were depraved thing sin themselves, for which one will someday have to atone, bitterly atone: oh how ready they themselves basically are to make others atone, how they thirst to be hangmen! Among them there are plenty of vengeful ones disguised as judges, who constantly carry the word “justice” in their mouths like poisonous saliva, forever with pursed lips, forever ready to spit on everything that does not look dissatisfied and that goes its way in good spirits. Among them there is no lack of that most disgusting species of the vain—the mendacious misbirths who are out to play the role of “beautiful souls” and who for instance bring their mangled sensuality, wrapped in verses and other diapers, onto the market as “purity of heart”: the species of the moral onanist and “self-gratifier.” The will of the sick to represent any form of superiority, their instinct for secret paths that lead to a tyranny over the healthy—where might this not be found, this will of precisely the weakest to power! The sick woman in particular: no one excels her in refinements for ruling, oppressing, tyrannizing. Furthermore the sick woman does not spare anything living, anything dead; she digs the most buried of things up again (the Bogos say: “woman is a hyena”). Look into the background of every family, every corporation, every community: everywhere the battle of the sick against the healthy—a silent battle for the most part with little poisonous powders, with needle pricks, with insidious plays of martyr expressions, at times, however, even with the loud gestures of an invalid’s pharisaism, which loves most of all to play “noble indignation.” It would like to make itself heard all the way into the hallowed halls of science, this hoarse indignant bark of the diseased dogs, the biting mendacity and rage of such “noble” Pharisees (—once again I remind readers who have ears of that Berliner apostle of revenge, Eugen Dühring, who is making the most indecent and repulsive use of moral boom-boom in present-day Germany: Dühring, the foremost moral big-mouth there now is, even among his own kind, the anti-Semites). They are all human beings of ressentiment, these physiologically failed and worm-eaten ones, a whole trembling earth of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible, insatiable in outbursts against the happy, and likewise in masquerades of revenge, in pretexts for revenge: when would they actually arrive at their last, finest, most sublime triumph of revenge? Undoubtedly, if they should succeed in shoving their own misery, all misery generally into the conscience of the happy: so that the happy would one day begin to be ashamed of their happiness and perhaps say among themselves: “it is a disgrace to be happy! there is too much misery!” … But there could not be any greater and more doomful misunderstanding than when the happy, the well-formed, the powerful of body and soul begin to doubt their right to happiness. Away with this “inverted world”! Away with this disgraceful softening of the feelings! That the sick not make the healthy sick—and this would be such a softening—that should certainly be the highest viewpoint on earth:—but this would require above all else that the healthy remain separated from the sick, guarded even against the sight of the sick, that they not confuse themselves with the sick. Or would it perhaps be their task to be nurses or physicians? … But they could in no way more gravely mistake and deny their task—the higher must not degrade itself to a tool of the lower, the pathos of distance must also keep their tasks separated to all eternity! Their right to exist, the privilege of the bell with full sound over the dissonant, cracked one is of course a thousandfold greater one: they alone are the guarantors of the future, they alone have been given responsibility for the human future. What they can do, what they should do, a sick person can never and should never do: but in order for them to be able to do what only they should do, how could they be free to choose to be physician, comforter, “savior” for the sick? … And therefore good air! good air! And in any case away from the proximity of all madhouses and hospitals of culture! And therefore good company, our company! Or solitude if it must be! But in any case away from the foul vapors of inward corruption and the secret wormfodder of invalids! … So that we may defend ourselves, my friends, at least for a while yet, against what may be the two gravest epidemics that have been reserved just for us—against the great disgust at the sight of man! against the great compassion for man! …

15

If one has grasped in all its depth—and I demand that precisely here one reach deeply, grasp deeply—why it positively can not be the task of the healthy to nurse the sick, to make the sick well, then a further necessity has also been grasped—the necessity of physicians and nurses who are themselves sick: and now we have and hold with both hands the meaning of the ascetic priest. The ascetic priest must be counted as the foreordained savior, shepherd, and advocate of the sick herd: only then do we understand his historic mission. Dominion over ones who suffer is his realm, it is to this that his instinct directs him, in this he has his most characteristic art, his mastery, his kind of happiness. He must be sick himself, he must be related to the sick and short-changed from the ground up in order to understand them—in order to get along with them; but he must also be strong, lord over himself more than over others, with his will to power intact, so that he has the confidence and the fear of the sick, so that for them he can be a foothold, resistance, support, compulsion, disciplinarian, tyrant, god. He is to defend them, his herd—against whom? Against the healthy, no doubt, also against envying the healthy; he must by nature oppose and hold in contempt all coarse, tempestuous, unbridled, hard, violent-predatory health and powerfulness. The priest is the first form of the more delicate animal that holds in contempt even more readily than it hates. He will not be spared waging war with the beasts of prey, a war of cunning (of the “spirit”) more than of force, as goes without saying—to this end he will perhaps need almost to develop in himself, at least to signify, a new type of beast of prey—a new animal terribleness in which the polar bear, the lithe cold wait-and-see tiger cat, and not least of all the fox appear to be bound into a unity just as attractive as it is fear-inspiring. Supposing that necessity compels him, he then steps into the very midst of the other kind of beast of prey with bearish seriousness, venerable, cold, shrewd, deceptively superior, as herald and mouthpiece of mysterious forces, determined to sow sorrow, conflict, self-contradiction on this ground wherever he can and, only too sure of his art, to become lord over sufferers at all times. He brings along ointments and balm, no doubt; but he first needs to wound in order to be a physician; as he then stills the pain that the wound causes, he poisons the wound at the same time—for in this above all he is an expert, this magician and tamer of beasts of prey, in whose vicinity everything healthy necessarily becomes sick and everything sick, tame. He defends his sick herd well enough indeed, this strange shepherd—he defends it against itself as well, against what smolders within the herd itself: badness, deceitfulness, maliciousness and whatever else is characteristic of all the sick and invalids when among themselves; he fights shrewdly, hard, and secretively against the anarchy and ever-incipient self-dissolution within the herd, where that most dangerous blasting and explosive material, ressentiment, is constantly mounting and mounting. To discharge this explosive in such a way that it does not blow up either the herd or the shepherd, that is his true feat, also his supreme usefulness; if one wanted to sum up the value of the priestly mode of existence in the shortest formula one would have to say straight away: the priest changes the direction of ressentiment. For every sufferer instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering; still more precisely, a perpetrator, still more specifically, a guilty perpetrator who is receptive to suffering—in short, some living thing on which, in response to some pretext or other, he can discharge his affects in deed or in effigy: for the discharge of affect is the sufferer’s greatest attempt at relief, namely at anesthetization—his involuntarily craved narcotic against torment of any kind. It is here alone, according to my surmise, that one finds the true physiological causality of ressentiment, of revenge, and of their relatives—that is, in a longing for anesthetization of pain through affect:—this causality has been commonly sought, very mistakenly it seems to me, in the defensive counterblow, a mere reactive protective measure, a “reflex movement” in the case of some sudden harm and endangerment, of the kind that a frog without a head still carries out in order to get rid of a corrosive acid. But the difference is fundamental: in the one case, one wishes to prevent further damage; in the other case, one wishes, by means of a more vehement emotion of any kind, to anesthetize a tormenting, secret pain that is becoming unbearable and, at least for the moment, to put it out of consciousness—for this one needs an affect, as wild an affect as possible and, for its excitation, the first best pretext. “Someone must be to blame for the fact that I feel bad”—this kind of reasoning is characteristic of all those who are diseased, indeed the more the true cause of their feeling bad, the physiological one, remains concealed from them (—it can lie for instance in a sickening of the nervus sympathicus⁸⁴ or in an excessive secretion of bile, or in a deficiency of potassium sulfate or phosphate in the blood or in pressure conditions in the abdomen that stop the circulation of the blood, or in degeneration of the ovaries and the like). Those who suffer are one and all possessed of a horrifying readiness and inventiveness in pretexts for painful affects; they savor even their suspicion, their brooding over bad deeds and apparent curtailments; they dig around after dark questionable stories in the viscera of their past and present, where they are free to wallow in a tormenting suspicion and to intoxicate themselves on their own poison of malice—they tear open the oldest wounds, they bleed to death from scars long healed, they make malefactors out of friend, wife, child and whatever else stands closest to them. “I am suffering: for this someone must be to blame”—thus every diseased sheep thinks. But his shepherd, the ascetic priest, says to him: “That’s right, my sheep! someone must be to blame for it: but you yourself are this someone, you alone are to blame for it—you alone are to blame for yourself!” … That is bold enough, false enough: but one thing at least has been achieved by it, in this way, as noted, the direction of the ressentiment has been—changed.

16

One can guess by now what I think life’s healing-artist instinct has at least attempted through the ascetic priest and to what end a temporary tyranny of such paradoxical and paralogical concepts as “guilt,” “sin,” “sinfulness,” “corruption,” “damnation” has had to serve him: to make the sick to a certain degree harmless, to destroy the incurable through themselves, to strictly direct the more mildly sick toward themselves, to give a backwards direction to their ressentiment (“one thing is needful”) and in this manner to exploit the bad instincts of all sufferers for the purpose of self-discipline, self-supervision, self-overcoming. As goes without saying, with a “medication” of this kind, a mere affect-medication, it absolutely cannot be a matter of a true healing of the sick in the physiological sense; one could not even claim that the instinct of life in any way has healing in mind or in intention. A kind of crowding together and organizing of the sick, on the one hand (—the word “church” is the most popular name for this), a kind of provisional securing of the more healthily formed, the more fully cast, on the other, thus the tearing open of a chasm between healthy and sick—for a long time that was all! And it was a great deal! it was a very great deal! … [In this treatise I am proceeding, as one can see, on the presupposition, which I do not first have to justify as far as readers of the type I need are concerned: that “sinfulness” in humans is not a factual state but rather only the interpretation of a factual state, namely of being physiologically out of sorts—the latter seen from a moral-religious perspective that is no longer binding on us.—That someone feels “guilty,” “sinful” does not at all prove he is right in feeling so; just as little as someone is healthy merely because he feels healthy. Just recall the famous witch trials: back then the most sharp-sighted and philanthropic judges did not doubt that there was guilt; the “witches” themselves did not doubt it—and still there was no guilt.—To express that presupposition in expanded form: “pain of the soul” itself does not at all count as a factual state but rather only as an interpretation (causal interpretation) of factual states that could not yet be exactly formulated: thus something that is still entirely up in the air and is not scientifically binding—actually only a fat word in the place of a very thin question mark. If someone cannot cope with his “pain of the soul” it is not, crudely put, due to his “soul”; more likely to his belly (crudely put, as stated: which in no way expresses a wish also to be heard crudely, understood crudely …) A strong and well-formed human digests his experiences (deeds, misdeeds included)as he digests his meals, even when he has hard bites to swallow. If he “cannot cope” with an experience, this kind of indigestion is just as physiological as that other one—and in many cases in fact only one of the consequences of that other.—With such a conception one can, speaking among ourselves, still be the strictest opponent of all materialism …]

17

But is he actually a physician, this ascetic priest?—We have already grasped why it is hardly permissible to call him a physician, as much as he likes to feel himself to be a “savior,” to allow himself to be venerated as a “savior.” He combats only suffering itself, the listlessness of the one suffering, not its cause, not the actual state of sickness—this must form our most fundamental objection to priestly medication. If, however, one adopts for once that perspective as only the priest knows and has it, one will not easily come to the end of one’s amazement at all he has seen, sought, and found from within it. The alleviation of suffering, “comforting” of every kind—this turns out to be his very genius: how inventively he has understood his task as comforter, how unhesitatingly and boldly he has chosen the means for it! One might call Christianity in particular a great treasury of the most ingenious means for comforting, so much that is invigorating, alleviating, narcotizing has been heaped up in it; so much that is most dangerous and most audacious has been ventured for this purpose; so subtle, so sophisticated, so Mediterraneanly sophisticated has Christianity been in intuiting what kind of stimulant-affects can conquer, at least for a time, the deep depression, the leaden tiredness, the black sadness of the physiologically inhibited. For stated generally: with all great religions the main concern is to combat a certain tiredness and heaviness that have become epidemic. From the outset one can posit as probable that from time to time at certain places on earth a feeling of physiological inhibition must almost necessarily become lord over broad masses of people; from a lack of physiological knowledge, however, this feeling does not enter into consciousness as such, so that its “cause,” its remedy can only be sought and attempted in the psychological-moral realm (—indeed this is my most general formula for that which is commonly called a “religion”). Such a feeling of inhibition can be of the most varied extraction: for instance as consequence of the crossbreeding of races that are too different from each other (or of social ranks—social ranks always express differences of extraction and race as well: the European “Weltschmerz,”⁸⁵ the “pessimism” of the nineteenth century is essentially the consequence of a nonsensically sudden mixing of the social ranks); or conditioned by a flawed emigration—a race that has ended up in a climate for which its power of adaptation is not sufficient (the case of the Indians in India); or the after-effect of age and exhaustion of the race (Parisian pessimism from 1850 on); or of a wrong diet (alcoholism of the Middle Ages; the nonsense of vegetarians, who admittedly have the authority of Sir Andrew⁸⁶ in Shakespeare on their side); or of corruption of the blood, malaria, syphilis, and the like (German depression after the Thirty-Years’ War, which infected half of Germany with bad diseases and thereby prepared the soil for German servility, German timidity). In such cases a battle with the feeling of listlessness is always attempted on the grandest scale; let us instruct ourselves briefly in its most important practices and forms. (I ignore here entirely, as is fair, the actual philosophers’ battle against the feeling of listlessness, which always tends to go on simultaneously—it is interesting enough, but too absurd, too inconsequential in practical terms, too much in the manner of cobweb-spinners and idlers, as, say, when pain is to be proven an error under the naive presupposition that the pain would have to disappear once the error in it has been recognized—but behold! it guarded itself against disappearing …) This dominant feeling of listlessness is combatted, first, by means that reduce the general feeling of life to its lowest point. If possible no willing at all, not another wish; avoiding whatever stirs up affect, whatever stirs up “blood” (no eating salt: hygiene of the fakir); no loving; no hating; apathy; no avenging oneself; no making oneself rich; no working; begging; if possible no woman, or as little woman as possible: in respect to the spiritual the principle of Pascal⁸⁷ “il faut s’abêtir.”⁸⁸ The result, expressed in psychological-moral terms: “un-selfing,” “hallowing”; expressed physiologically: hypnotization—the attempt to achieve something for man that approximates what hibernation is for some species of animals, what aestivation is for many plants in hot climates, a minimum of consumption and metabolism where by life just barely continues without actually entering into our consciousness anymore. An astounding amount of human energy has been expended on this goal—perhaps in vain? … There is certainly no doubt that such sportsmen of “holiness,” who abound in all ages, among almost all peoples, have in fact found a real redemption from that which they combatted with such rigorous training—in countless cases they really got free of that deep physiological depression with the help of their system of hypnotics: for which reason their methodology counts as one of the most universal ethnological facts. There is likewise nothing that would permit us to count such an intention to starve physicality and desire as in itself among the symptoms of madness (as it pleases a clumsy kind of roastbeef-eating “free spirit” and Sir Andrew to do). It is all the more certain that it forms, can form, the path to all kinds of mental disturbances, to “inner lights,” for example, as with the Hesychasts of Mount Athos, to hallucinations of sounds and figures, to lustful effusions and ecstasies of sensuality (story of Saint Theresa). The interpretation given to conditions of this kind by those who are afflicted with them has always been as fanatically false as possible, this goes without saying: but do not fail to hear the tone of the most convinced gratitude that resounds already in the will to such a manner of interpretation. The highest condition, redemption itself, that final achievement of total hypnotization and stillness, always counts for them as the mystery in itself, for the expression of which even the highest symbols are insufficient, as a turning in and returning home into the ground of things, as becoming free from all illusion, as “knowledge,” as “truth,” as “being,” as escaping from every goal, every wish, every doing, as a state beyond good and evil as well. “Good and evil,” the Buddhist says,—“both are shackles: over both the perfect one became lord”; “that which has been done and that which has been left undone,” says the believer of the Vedânta, “cause him no pain; good and evil he shakes from himself, as a wise man; his realm no longer suffers through any deed; over good and evil, over both he passed beyond”: a pan-Indian conception then, just as brahmanistic as buddhistic. (Neither in the Indian nor in the Christian manner of thinking is this “redemption” considered to be attainable through virtue, through moral improvement, however high they may fix the value of virtue as a hypnotic: make note of this,—it corresponds, moreover, to the facts of the matter. To have remained true in this may perhaps be considered the best piece of realism in the three greatest, otherwise so fundamentally moralized religions. “For the knowing one there is no duty” … “Redemption is not brought about by the addition of virtues—for it consists in being one with brahma, which is not capable of any addition of perfection—and just as little by the discarding of faults: for brahma, to be one with which constitutes redemption, is eternally pure”—these passages from the commentary of Shankara,⁸⁹ quoted from Europe’s first real expert on Indian philosophy, my friend Paul Deussen.) Let us then honor “redemption” in the great religions; but it is a bit difficult to remain serious when faced with the esteem in which deep sleep is held by these people, who are tired of life, too tired even for dreaming—deep sleep, that is, as already an entering into brahma, as achieved unio mystica with God. “When he has then fallen asleep completely and utterly”—it says concerning this in the oldest most venerable “Scripture”—“and has completely come to rest so that he no longer sees any dream images, then he is, oh dear one, united with That Which Is, he has entered into himself—embraced by the knowledge-like self, he no longer has any consciousness of that which is outside or inside. Day and night do not cross over this bridge, age does not, death does not, suffering does not, good works do not, evil works do not.” “In deep sleep,” the faithful of this deepest of the three great religions likewise say, “the soul raises itself out of this body, enters into the highest light, and thereby appears in its own form: there it is the highest spirit itself, which walks about while joking and playing and delighting itself, be it with women or with carriages or with friends; there it no longer thinks back on this appendage of a body to which the prâna (the breath of life) is harnessed like a draught animal to the cart.” Nevertheless let us bear in mind here, too, as in the case of “redemption,” that what is expressed in the preceding, however much in the splendor of oriental exaggeration, is simply the same esteem as that of the clear, cool, Greek-cool, but suffering Epicurus: the hypnotic feeling of nothingness, the rest of the deepest sleep, in short, absence of suffering—this may count already as the highest good, as value of values for those who suffer and are thoroughly out of sorts, this must be appraised by them as positive, felt to be the positive itself. (According to the same logic of feelings, in all pessimistic religions nothingness is called God.)

18

Much more frequent than this sort of hypnotic general suppression of sensitivity, of susceptibility to pain—which presupposes even rarer forces, above all courage, contempt of opinion, “intellectual stoicism,”—is the attempt at a different kind of training against conditions of depression, one that is in any case easier: mechanical activity. That this relieves a suffering existence to a not inconsiderable degree is beyond all doubt: today this fact is called, somewhat dishonestly, “the blessing of work.” The relief consists in this: that the interest of the sufferer is thoroughly diverted from the suffering—that it is continually doing and yet again only doing that enters into consciousness and, consequently, that little room remains in it for suffering: for it is narrow, this chamber of human consciousness! Mechanical activity and that which belongs to it—like absolute regularity, punctual unreflected obedience, one’s way of life set once and for all, the filling up of time, a certain permission for, indeed discipline in “impersonality,” in self-forgetfulness, in “incuria sui”⁹⁰—: how thoroughly, how subtly the ascetic priest knew how to use these in the battle with pain! Precisely when he had to deal with sufferers of the lower social ranks, with work slaves or prisoners (or with women: who are of course usually both at the same time, work slaves and prisoners), it required little more than a small art of name-changing and rebaptizing to make them henceforth see in hated things a boon, a relative bit of good fortune:—in any case the dissatisfaction of the slave with his lot was not invented by priests.—A still more valued means in the battle with depression is the prescription of a small joy that is easily accessible and can be made a regular practice; this medication is frequently made use of in connection with the one just discussed. The most frequent form in which joy is thus prescribed as a means to a cure is the joy of giving joy (as doing good, giving gifts, relieving, helping, encouraging, comforting, praising, honoring); by prescribing “love of one’s neighbor” the ascetic priest is basically prescribing an arousal of the strongest, most life-affirming drive, even if in the most cautious of doses—the will to power. The happiness of the “smallest superiority,” such as accompanies all doing good, being useful, helping, honoring, is the most plentiful means of consolation that the physiologically inhibited tend to make use of, assuming they are well advised: otherwise they cause each other pain, in obedience to the same basic instinct, naturally. When one looks for the beginnings of Christianity in the Roman world, one finds associations for mutual support, pauper-, invalid-, burial-associations, which sprung up on the undermost soil of the society of that time, and in which that principal medicine against depression, the small joy, that of mutual good deeds was consciously cultivated—perhaps this was something new back then, a true discovery? In a “will to mutuality,” to herd-formation, to “community,” to “cenacle” elicited in this manner, the will to power thus aroused in the process—even if it is on the smallest scale—must now in turn come to a new and much fuller outburst: herd-formation is an essential step and victory in the battle with depression. With the growth of the community a new interest also grows strong in the individual, one that often enough lifts him above and beyond that which is most personal in his ill-humor, his aversion to himself (the “despectio sui”⁹¹ of Geulincx). Out of a longing to shake off the dull listlessness and the feeling of weakness, all the sick, the diseased strive instinctively for a herd organization: the ascetic priest intuits this instinct and fosters it; wherever there are herds it is the instinct of weakness that willed the herds and the shrewdness of priests that organized them. For do not overlook this: the strong strive just as naturally and necessarily away from each other as the weak strive toward each other; when the former band together it occurs only with a view to an aggressive joint action and joint satisfaction of their will to power, with a great deal of resistance from the individual conscience; the latter, on the other hand, arrange themselves into groups with pleasure precisely in the arrangement into groups—their instinct is satisfied in the process just as much as the instinct of the born “lords” (that is of the solitary beast-of-prey species of human) is at bottom irritated and disquieted by organization. Beneath every oligarchy—all of history teaches this—tyrannical craving always lies hidden; every oligarchy trembles constantly from the tension that every individual in it needs in order to remain lord over this craving. (Thus it was for example with the Greeks: Plato attests it in a hundred passages, Plato who knew his own kind—and himself …)

19

The means employed by the ascetic priest with which we have thus far become acquainted—the general muffling of the feeling of life, mechanical activity, the small joy, above all that of “love of one’s neighbor,” the herd organization, the awakening of the communal feeling of power, whereby the individual’s vexation with himself is drowned out by his pleasure in the prospering of the community—these are, measured according to a modern standard, his innocent means in the battle with listlessness: let us now turn to the more interesting ones, the “guilty” ones. They are all concerned with one thing: some kind of excess of the emotions—used as the most effective means of anesthetizing the dull paralyzing long painfulness; for which reason priestly inventiveness has been virtually inexhaustible in thinking through this single question: “by what means does one achieve an emotional excess?” … That sounds harsh: it is clear as day that it would sound more pleasant and perhaps suit the ears better if I said, for instance, “the ascetic priest has always taken advantage of the enthusiasm that lies in all strong affects.” But why stroke the tender ears of our modern milquetoasts? Why should we give in even one step to their Tartuffery of words? For us psychologists there would already be a Tartuffery of deed in this; not to mention that it would disgust us. For in this, if in anything, a psychologist today has his good taste (—others may say: his righteousness), that he resists the disgracefully moralized manner of speaking that clings like slime to virtually all modern judging of humans and things. For do not deceive yourself in this: what constitutes the most characteristic feature of modern souls, modern books is not the lie, but rather the ingrained innocence in their moralistic mendacity. To have to discover this “innocence” everywhere again and again—this constitutes perhaps the most repulsive piece of work in all the questionable work a psychologist must take upon himself today; it is a piece of our great danger—it is a path that perhaps leads precisely us to the great disgust … I do not doubt what purpose alone modern books (supposing that they have any permanence, which is admittedly not to be feared, and likewise supposing that there will one day be a posterity with stricter, harsher, healthier taste)—what purpose absolutely everything modern would serve, could serve for this posterity: as emetics—and this by virtue of its moral cloyingness and falseness, of its innermost feminism that likes to call itself “idealism” and in any case believes itself to be idealism. Our educated ones of today, our “good ones” do not lie—this is true; but it is not to their credit! The true lie, the authentic resolute “honest” lie (concerning whose value one should listen to Plato) would be something far too rigorous, too strong for them; it would demand what one is not permitted to demand of them, that they open their eyes toward themselves, that they know how to distinguish between “true” and “false” in their own case. The dishonest lie alone befits them; whatever feels itself to be a “good human being” today is completely incapable of relating to any issue except in a manner that is dishonestly mendacious, abysmally mendacious, but innocently mendacious, trustingly mendacious, blue-eyedly mendacious, virtuously mendacious. These “good human beings”—they are all moralized down to the roots now and with respect to honesty spoiled and ruined to all eternity: which of them could still endure a truth “about humankind”! … Or, more concretely asked: which of them could bear a true biography! … A few signs of this: Lord Byron wrote down a considerable number of most personal things about himself but Thomas Moore was “too good” for it: he burned the papers of his friend. Dr. Gwinner, the executor of Schopenhauer’s will, is supposed to have done the same thing: for Schopenhauer as well had written down a considerable amount about himself and perhaps even against himself (“eis heauton”).⁹² The able American Thayer, the biographer of Beethoven, stopped all at once in his work: having arrived at some point or other in this venerable and naive life he could no longer endure it … Moral: what prudent man would write an honest word about himself anymore today?—for he would have to belong to the Order of Holy Foolhardiness. We are promised an autobiography of Richard Wagner: who doubts that it will be a prudent autobiography? … Let us also call to mind the comical horror that the Catholic priest Janssen aroused in Germany with his inconceivably simplistic and innocuous picture of the German Reformation movement; what would one do if someone were to narrate this movement differently some day, if a real psychologist were to narrate a real Luther some day, no longer with the moralistic simplicity of a country cleric, no longer with the cloying and discreet prudishness of Protestant historians, but rather, say, with a Taine-⁹³ like dauntlessness, out of strength of the soul and not out of a prudent indulgence toward strength? … (The Germans, incidentally, have in the end brought forth the classical type of the latter nicely enough—they may indeed count him as one of their own, count him to their credit: namely their Leopold Ranke,⁹⁴ this born classical advocatus of every causa fortior,⁹⁵ this most prudent of all prudent “factual ones.”)

20

But you will have understood me already:—all in all reason enough, isn’t there, that we psychologists nowadays cannot get rid of considerable mistrust of ourselves? … We, too, are probably still “too good” for our trade; we, too, are probably still the victims, the booty, the invalids of this moralized taste of the times, as much as we may feel ourselves to be ones who hold it in contempt—it probably infects us too. What was it of which that diplomat⁹⁶ warned when speaking to his peers? “Let us mistrust above all, gentlemen, our first impulses!” he said, “they are almost always good” … Thus, too, every psychologist today should speak to his peers … And with that we come back to our problem, which indeed demands considerable strictness of us, considerable mistrust, in particular of “first impulses.” The ascetic ideal serving an intent to produce emotional excess:—whoever recalls the previous treatise will already anticipate the essential content of what remains to be presented—pressed into these ten words. To free the human soul from all its moorings for once, to immerse it in terrors, frosts, blazes, and ecstasies in such a way that it is freed from everything that is small and small-minded in listlessness, dullness, being out of sorts as if by a bolt of lightning: which paths lead to this goal? And which of them most surely? … Basically all great affects have the capacity to do so, assuming that they discharge themselves suddenly: anger, fear, lust, revenge, hope, triumph, despair, cruelty; and indeed the ascetic priest has unhesitatingly taken into his service the whole pack of wild dogs in man and unleashed first this one, then that one, always for the same purpose, to waken man out of slow sadness, to put to flight, at least for a time, his dull pain, his lingering misery, always under a religious interpretation and “justification.” Every such emotional excess exacts payment afterwards, that goes without saying—it makes the sick sicker—and therefore this kind of remedy for pain is, measured by a modern standard, a “guilty” kind. Since fairness demands it, however, one must insist all the more that it has been applied with a good conscience, that the ascetic priest has prescribed it with the deepest faith in its usefulness, indeed indispensability—and often enough almost breaking down in the face of the wretchedness he has created; likewise, that the vehement physiological avengings of such excesses, perhaps even mental disturbances, do not actually contradict the overall sense of this kind of medication: which, as has previously been shown, is not out to heal sicknesses, but rather to combat the listlessness of depression, to alleviate it, to anesthetize it. And it was thus that this goal was achieved. The principal bow stroke the ascetic priest allowed himself in order to cause the human soul to resound with wrenching and ecstatic music of every kind was executed—everyone knows this—by exploiting the feeling of guilt. The previous treatise briefly suggested its origins—as a piece of animal psychology, no more: there the feeling of guilt first confronted us in its raw state as it were. Only in the hands of the priest, this true artist of the feeling of guilt, did it take on form—oh what a form! “Sin”—for thus reads the priestly reinterpretation of the animal’s “bad conscience” (cruelty turned backwards)—has so far been the greatest event in the history of the sick soul: in it we have the most dangerous and doom-laden feat of religious interpretation. Man, suffering from himself in some way or other, physiologically in any case, somewhat like an animal locked in a cage, uncertain why, to what end? desirous of reasons—reasons alleviate—desirous also of cures and narcotics, finally holds counsel with one who also knows concealed things—and behold! he receives a hint; from his magician, the ascetic priest, he receives the first hint concerning the “cause” of his suffering: he is to seek it in himself, in a guilt, in a piece of the past, he is to understand his suffering itself as a state of punishment … He has heard, he has understood, the unhappy one: now things stand with him as with the hen around whom a line has been drawn. He can no longer get out of this circle of lines: out of the invalid “the sinner” has been made … And now one will not be rid of the sight of this invalid, of “the sinner,” for a couple of millennia—will one ever be rid of him again?—wherever one looks, everywhere the hypnotic gaze of the sinner forever moving in the same direction (in the direction of “guilt” as the only causality of suffering); everywhere bad conscience, this “hideous animal,” to use Luther’s words; everywhere the past regurgitated, the deed twisted around, the “green eye” for all activity; everywhere that wanting-to-misunderstand-suffering made into life’s meaning, the reinterpretation of suffering into feelings of guilt, fear, and punishment; everywhere the whip, the hair shirt, the starving body, contrition; everywhere the sinner breaking himself on the cruel wheels of a restless, diseased-lascivious conscience; everywhere mute torment, extreme fear, the agony of a tortured heart, the cramps of an unknown happiness, the cry for “redemption.” Indeed, through this system of procedures the old depression, heaviness, and tiredness was thoroughly overcome, life became very interesting again: awake, eternally awake, in need of sleep, glowing, charred, exhausted and still not tired—this is what the human being looked like, “the sinner” who was initiated into these mysteries. This old great magician in the battle with listlessness, the ascetic priest—he had obviously been victorious, his kingdom had come: people no longer protested against pain, they thirsted after pain; “more pain! more pain!” thus cried the longing of his disciples and initiates for centuries. Every emotional excess that caused pain, everything that shattered, toppled, crushed, entranced, enraptured, the secret of places of torture, the inventiveness of hell itself—everything had now been discovered, guessed, exploited, everything stood at the disposal of the magician, everything served henceforth to the victory of his ideal, of the ascetic ideal … “My kingdom is not of this world”—he spoke now as before: did he really still have the right to speak so? … Goethe claimed that there were only thirty-six tragic situations: one can guess from this, if one didn’t already know it, that Goethe was no ascetic priest. He—knows more …

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With respect to this entire kind of priestly medication, the “guilty” kind, any word of criticism is too much. That an emotional excess such as the ascetic priest tends to prescribe for his sick ones in this case (under the holiest name, as goes without saying, likewise imbued with the holiness of his purpose) has really been of use to any sick person, who would have any desire to uphold a claim of this kind? One should at least be clear about the expression “be of use.” If by this one intends to express that such a system of treatment has improved man, then I will not contradict: I only add what “improve” means for me—the same as “tamed,” “weakened,” “discouraged,” “sophisticated,” “pampered,” “emasculated” (hence almost the same as injured …) If, however, we are dealing chiefly with those who are sick, out of sorts, depressed, then such a system makes the sick, even supposing that it makes him “better,” at all events sicker; just ask doctors who work with the insane what a methodical application of penitential torments, contritions, and cramps of redemption always brings on. Likewise interrogate history: wherever the ascetic priest has succeeded in establishing this treatment of the sick, diseasedness has always grown in depth and breadth with uncanny speed. What was the “success” in every case? A shattered nervous system, added to that which was already sick anyway; and this on the largest as on the smallest scale, with individuals as with masses. In the wake of penitence and redemption training we find enormous epileptic epidemics, the greatest known to history, like those of the St. Vitus’ and St. John’s dancers of the Middle Ages; as another form of its postlude we find terrible paralyses and chronic depressions with which in some cases the temperament of a people or city (Geneva, Basel) changes once and for all into its opposite;—witch hysteria belongs here as well, something related to somnambulism (eight great epidemic outbursts between 1564 and 1605 alone)—; in its wake we likewise find those death-seeking mass deliria whose horrifying cry “evviva la morte”⁹⁷ was heard across all of Europe, interrupted now by lustful, now by destructive idiosyncrasies: even today the same alternation of affects, with the same intermittences and sudden leaps, is still to be observed everywhere, in every case in which the ascetic doctrine of sin once again achieves a great success (religious neurosis appears as a form of “evil spirit”: there is no doubt about this. What it is? Quaeritur.)⁹⁸ To put it bluntly, the ascetic ideal and its sublime-moral cult, this most ingenious, most unsuspected and most dangerous systematizing of all the instruments of emotional excess under the aegis of holy intentions, has inscribed itself in a terrible and unforgettable way into the entire history of man; and unfortunately not only into his history … There is hardly anything else I could point out that has pressed so destructively upon health and racial robustness, particularly of Europeans, as this ideal; without any exaggeration one may call it the true doom in the history of European health. At best, that the specifically Germanic influence might be comparable to its influence: I mean the alcohol poisoning of Europe that has thus far kept strict pace with the political and racial predominance of the Germanic peoples (—wherever they injected their blood, they injected their vice as well).—Third in line one ought to mention syphilis—magno sed proxima intervallo.⁹⁹

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The ascetic priest has ruined the health of the soul wherever he has come to power, he has consequently ruined taste in artibus et litteris as well—he is still ruining it. “Consequently”?—I hope one will simply concede me this consequently; at any rate, I do not wish to prove it first. A single pointer: it is directed at the basic book of Christian literature, its true model, its “book in itself.” Even in the midst of Greco-Roman glory, which was also a glory of books, in the face of a classical scripture-world that was not yet atrophied and decimated, at a time when one could still read a few books for whose possession one would now give half of a nation’s literature, the simplicity and vanity of Christian agitators—one calls them Church Fathers—already dared to decree: “we too have our classical literature, we do not need that of the Greeks”—and at the same time one pointed proudly to books of legends, apostolic epistles, and little apologetic tracts, in roughly the same way as the English “Salvation Army” today fights its battle against Shakespeare and other “heathens” with a related literature. I have no love for the “New Testament,” one can guess that already; it almost makes me uneasy to stand so alone in my taste regarding this most esteemed, most overestimated scriptural work (the taste of two millennia is against me): but what good does it do! “Here I stand, I can do no other”—I have the courage of my bad taste. The Old Testament—now that is something entirely different: I take my hat off to the Old Testament! In it I find great human beings, a heroic landscape, and something most rare on earth, the incomparable naïveté of the strong heart; still more, I find a people. In the New, on the other hand, nothing but petty sectarian economy, nothing but rococo of the soul, nothing but embellishment, crookedness, oddness, nothing but conventicle air, not to forget an occasional breath of bucolic cloyingness that belongs to that epoch (and to the Roman province) and is not so much Jewish as Hellenistic. Humility and pomposity side by side; a garrulousness of feeling that almost numbs; passionateness, no passion; embarrassing play of gestures; it is obvious that all good breeding was lacking here. How can one be allowed to make such a fuss about one’s little bad habits as these pious little men do! No cock will crow about this, much less God. Finally they even want to have “the crown of eternal life,” all these little people from the province: and to what end? and for what? one cannot push immodesty further than this. An “immortal” Peter: who could endure that! They have an ambition that makes one laugh: this one openly chews what is most personal to him, his foolishnesses, sadnesses, and idler’s worries, as if the in-itself-of-things were obliged to take care of it all; that one never tires of drawing God himself into the pettiest distress in which they are stuck. And this constant familiarity with God, in the worst taste! This Jewish, not merely Jewish impertinence toward God with muzzle and paw! … There are minor despised “heathen peoples” in the east of Asia from whom these first Christians could have learned something substantial, some tact of reverence; as Christian missionaries attest, the former do not permit themselves to give voice to the name of their god at all. This seems delicate enough to me; what is certain is that it is not only “first” Christians who find it too delicate: to feel the contrast just recall Luther, for instance, this “most eloquent” and immodest peasant that Germany has had, and the Lutheran tone that precisely he liked best in his conversations with God. In the final analysis, Luther’s resistance to the mediator saints of the Church (particularly to “the devil’s sow, the pope”) was, there is no doubt, the resistance of a boor annoyed by the good etiquette of the Church, that reverential etiquette of hieratic taste, which admits only the more devoted and more silent into the Holy of Holies and locks it against the boors. Precisely here these boors are absolutely not to be allowed to speak—but Luther, the peasant, wanted it otherwise, it wasn’t German enough for him as it was: above all he wanted to speak directly, to speak himself, to speak “uninhibitedly” with his God … Well, he did it.—The ascetic ideal, one will likely guess it, was never and nowhere a school of good taste, still less of good manners—in the best case it was a school of hieratic manners—: that is because it has something in its very flesh that is the mortal enemy of all good manners—lack of measure, aversion to measure, it is itself a “non plus ultra.”¹⁰⁰

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The ascetic ideal has not only ruined health and taste, it has also ruined a third, fourth, fifth, sixth something—I will restrain myself from saying what all (when would I come to an end!). It is not what this ideal has done that I propose to bring to light here; rather solely what it means, what it hints at, what lies hidden behind it, beneath it, in it, for which it is the provisional, indistinct expression, overladen with question marks and misunderstandings. And it is only with respect to this purpose that I am not permitted to spare my readers a look at the enormity of its effects, of its doomful effects as well: namely in order to prepare them for the last and most terrible aspect that the question of the meaning of this ideal has for me. What does the very power of this ideal mean, the enormity of its power? Why has it been given room to this extent? why has there not been better resistance? The ascetic ideal expresses a will: where is the opposing will in which an opposing ideal expresses itself ? The ascetic ideal has a goal—it is general enough that all other interests of human existence appear small-minded and narrow measured against it; it relentlessly interprets ages, peoples, human beings according to this one goal, it refuses to tolerate any other interpretation, any other goal, it rejects, negates, affirms, confirms solely in accordance with its interpretation (—and was there ever a system of interpretation more thoroughly thought to the end?); it submits itself to no power, rather it believes in its privilege over every other power, in its unconditional distance of rank with respect to every power—it believes that there is no instance of power on earth that does not first have to receive from it a meaning, a right to existence, a value, as a tool in its work, as a way and means to its goal, to one goal … Where is the counterpart to this closed system of will, goal, and interpretation? Why is the counterpart lacking? … Where is the other “one goal”? … But I am told it is not lacking, it has not only fought a long successful battle with this ideal but rather has already become lord over that ideal in all essential matters: our entire modern science is said to be witness to this—this modern science, which, as a true philosophy of reality, clearly believes in itself alone, clearly possesses the courage to itself, the will to itself and has so far got along well enough without God, the beyond, and virtues that negate. Nevertheless, in my case one accomplishes nothing with such noise and agitator-babble: these trumpeters of reality are bad musicians, it is easy enough to hear that their voices do not come from the depths, it is not the abyss of the scientific conscience that speaks through them—for the scientific conscience is an abyss today—in such trumpeter-mouths the word “science” is simply an obscenity, a misuse, a shameless act. Precisely the opposite of what is claimed here is the truth: science has utterly no faith in itself today, to say nothing of an ideal above itself—and where it is at all still passion, love, ardor, suffering, it is not the opposite of that ascetic ideal but rather its most recent and noblest form. Does that sound strange to you? … Of course even among the scholars of today there are enough steady and modest working folk who like their little corner and therefore, because they like it there, from time to time speak up rather immodestly with the demand that one should be satisfied in general today, above all in the sciences—there is so much that is useful that needs doing precisely there. I won’t contradict; least of all do I want to ruin the pleasure these honest workers take in their craft: for I enjoy their work. But the fact that one now works rigorously in the sciences and that there are contented workers does not by any means prove that as a whole science today has a goal, a will, an ideal, the passion of a great faith. As stated, the opposite is the case: where it is not the most recent manifestation of the ascetic ideal—there it is a matter of cases too rare, noble, select to overturn the general judgment—science today is a hiding place for every kind of ill-humor, unbelief, gnawing worm, despectio sui, bad conscience—it is the very unrest of being without an ideal, the suffering from the lack of a great love, the discontent in an involuntary contentedness. Oh what does science today not conceal! how much it is at least supposed to conceal! The competence of our best scholars, their mindless diligence, their heads smoking day and night, their very mastery of their craft—how often all this has its true sense in preventing something from becoming visible to oneself ! Science as a means of self-anesthetization: are you acquainted with that? … By means of a harmless word one sometimes cuts them to the quick—everyone who keeps company with scholars experiences this—one embitters one’s scholarly friends toward oneself at the very moment one means to honor them, one drives them beside themselves merely because one was too coarse to guess with whom one was actually dealing—with sufferers who do not want to admit to themselves what they are, with anesthetized and unconscious ones who fear only one thing: coming to consciousness …

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—And now take a look, by comparison, at those rarer cases of which I spoke, the last idealists there are among philosophers and scholars today: do we perhaps have in them the sought-after opponents of the ascetic ideal, its counter-idealists? Indeed they believe themselves to be such, these “unbelieving ones” (for that they all are); they are so serious on this point, here in particular becoming so passionate in word, in gesture, that precisely this seems to be their last bit of belief, that they are opponents of this ideal:—need it therefore be true, what they believe? … We “knowers” are mistrustful of every kind of believer by now; our mistrust has gradually trained us to infer the opposite of what one formerly inferred: namely, wherever the strength of a belief comes strikingly to the fore to infer a certain weakness of demonstrability, even the improbability of what is believed. We too do not deny that faith “makes blessed”: it is precisely for this reason that we deny that faith proves anything—a strong faith that makes blessed raises suspicion against that in which it believes, it does not establish “truth,” it establishes a certain probability—of deception. And how do things stand in this case?—These negating and aloof ones of today, these who are unconditional on one point—the claim to intellectual cleanliness—these hard, strict, abstinent, heroic spirits who constitute the honor of our age, all these pale atheists, anti-Christians, immoralists, nihilists, these skeptics, ephectics, hectics of the spirit (all of them are the latter in some sense or other), these last idealists of knowledge in whom alone the intellectual conscience today dwells and has become flesh—in fact they believe themselves to be as detached as possible from the ascetic ideal, these “free, very free spirits”: and yet, to divulge to them what they themselves cannot see—for they stand too close to themselves—this ideal is precisely their ideal as well, they themselves represent it today, and perhaps they alone; they themselves are its most spiritualized outgrowth, the troop of warriors and scouts it deploys on the front line, its most entrapping, most tender, most incomprehensible form of seduction:—if I am a guesser of riddles in anything then let it be with this proposition! … These are by no means free spirits: for they still believe in truth … When the Christian crusaders in the Orient came across that invincible order of Assassins, that order of free spirits par excellence whose lowest degree lived in an obedience the like of which no order of monks has attained, they also received, through some channel or other, a hint about that symbol and tally-word reserved for the uppermost degrees alone, as their secretum¹⁰¹: “nothing is true, everything is permitted” … Now that was freedom of the spirit, with that, belief in truth itself was renounced … Has any European, any Christian free spirit ever lost his way in this proposition and its labyrinthine consequences? does he know the Minotaur of this cave from experience? … I doubt it, still more, I know otherwise:—nothing is more foreign to these who are unconditional on one point, these so-called “free spirits,” than precisely freedom and breaking one’s fetters in this sense, in no respect are they more firmly bound; precisely in their belief in truth they are more firm and unconditional than anyone else. I know all of this from too close a proximity perhaps: that commendable philosophers’ abstinence to which such a belief obligates; that stoicism of the intellect that finally forbids itself a “no” just as strictly as a “yes”; that wanting to halt before the factual, the factum brutum; that fatalism of “petits faits”¹⁰² (ce petit faitalisme, as I call it), in which French science now seeks a kind of moral superiority over German science, that renunciation of all interpretation (of doing violence, pressing into orderly form, abridging, omitting, padding, fabricating, falsifying and whatever else belongs to the essence of all interpreting)—broadly speaking, this expresses asceticism of virtue as forcefully as does any negation of sensuality (it is basically only a modus of this negation). What compels one to this, however, this unconditional will to truth, is the belief in the ascetic ideal itself, even if as its unconscious imperative—do not deceive yourself about this,—it is the belief in a metaphysical value, a value in itself of truth as it is established and guaranteed by that ideal alone (it stands and falls with that ideal). There is, strictly speaking, absolutely no science “without presuppositions,” the thought of such a science is unthinkable, paralogical: a philosophy, a “belief” must always be there first so that science can derive a direction from it, a meaning, a boundary, a method, a right to existence. (Whoever understands it the other way around—for example, whoever sets outto place philosophy “on a strictly scientific foundation”—first needs to turn not only philosophy but also truth itself on its head: the grossest violation of propriety there can be with regard to two such venerable ladies!) Why, there is no doubt—and with this I will give my Gay Science a chance to speak, cf. its fifth book (section 344)—“the truthful one, in that audacious and ultimate sense presupposed by the belief in science, thus affirms another world than that of life, nature, and history; and insofar as he affirms this “other world,” what? must he not, precisely in so doing, negate its counterpart, this world, our world? … It is still a metaphysical belief on which our belief in science rests—we knowers today, we godless ones and anti-metaphysicians, we too still take our fire from that great fire that was ignited by a thousand-year old belief, that belief of Christians, which was also Plato’s belief, that God is truth, that truth is divine … But what if precisely this is becoming ever more implausible, if nothing proves to be divine any longer, unless perhaps error, blindness, lie—if God himself proves to be our longest lie?”——At this point it is necessary to pause and to reflect for a long time. Science itself now is in need of a justification (which is not to say that there is one). On this question, just look at the earliest and the most recent philosophies: all of them lack a consciousness of the extent to which the will to truth itself first needs a justification, here there is a gap in every philosophy—why is that? Because the ascetic ideal has until now been lord over all philosophy, because truth was posited as being, as God, as highest authority; because truth was simply not permitted to be a problem. Do you understand this “permitted”?—From the moment belief in the god of the ascetic ideal is negated, there is also a new problem: that of the value of truth.—The will to truth is in need of a critique—let us thus define our own task—the value of truth is for once to be experimentally called into question … (Anyone who finds this stated too briefly is advised to read the section of the Gay Science that bears the title: “To What Extent We Too Are Still Pious” (section 344), or, best of all, the entire fifth book of said work, likewise the preface to Daybreak.)

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No! Don’t give me science as an answer when I look for the natural antagonist of the ascetic ideal, when I ask: “where is the opposing will in which its opposing ideal expresses itself ?” Science is far from standing enough on its own for this, in every respect it first needs a value-ideal, a value-creating power in whose service it may believe in itself—it is itself never value-creating. Its relationship to the ascetic ideal is still by no means inherently antagonistic; on the whole it is even more likely that science represents the forward-driving force in the inner shaping of this ideal. On closer scrutiny its protest and battle are not in the least directed at the ideal itself, but rather only at its outworks, sheathing, play of masks, at its temporary solidification, lignification, dogmatization—by negating what is exoteric about this ideal, it sets the life in it free again. These two, science and ascetic ideal, they do, after all, stand on one and the same ground—I have already suggested that this is so—: namely on the same overestimation of truth (more correctly: on the same belief in the inassessability, the uncriticizability of truth), precisely in this they are necessarily confederates—so that, supposing one combats them, they can only be combatted and called into question together. An assessment of the value of the ascetic ideal unavoidably entails an assessment of the value of science as well: open your eyes and prick up your ears to this while the time is right! (Art, to state it beforehand, for I will come back to it sometime in greater length—art, in which precisely the lie hallows itself, in which the will to deception has good conscience on its side, is much more fundamentally opposed to the ascetic ideal than is science: this was sensed instinctively by Plato, this greatest enemy of art that Europe has yet produced. Plato contra Homer: that is the complete, the genuine antagonism—there the “otherworldly one” with the best of wills, the great slanderer of life; here its involuntary deifier, golden nature. An artist’s subservience in the service of the ascetic ideal is therefore the truest corruption of the artist there can be, unfortunately one of the most common: for nothing is more corruptible than an artist.) Science also rests on the same ground as the ascetic ideal when calculated physiologically: a certain impoverishment of life is a presupposition here as well as there—the affects become cool, the tempo slowed, dialectic in place of instinct, seriousness impressed on faces and gestures (seriousness, this most unmistakable mark of a more laborious metabolism, of a struggling, harder-working life). Look at those ages in the history of a people when the scholar comes to the fore: they are ages of tiredness, often of evening, of decline—overflowing energy, certainty of life, certainty of the future are lost. The predominance of the mandarin is never a sign of anything good: any more than the rise of democracy, of peace-arbitration courts in place of wars, of equal rights for women, of the religion of compassion, and whatever other symptoms of declining life there are. (Science understood as problem; what does science mean?—on this cf. the preface to “The Birth of Tragedy.”)—No! this “modern science”—just keep your eyes open for this!—is for the present the best confederate of the ascetic ideal, and this precisely because it is the most unconscious, the most involuntary, the most secret and subterranean one! They have until now played one game, the “poor of the spirit” and the scientific adversaries of that ideal (beware, by the way, of thinking that they are the antithesis of the former, say, as the rich of the spirit:—this they are not; I called them hectics of the spirit). These famous victories of the latter: undoubtedly they are victories—but over what? The ascetic ideal was in no way conquered in them, rather it was made stronger, which is to say more incomprehensible, more spiritual, more ensnaring by the fact that again and again a wall, an outwork that had attached itself to this ideal and was coarsening its appearance was ruthlessly removed, demolished by science. Does anyone really think that, for instance, the defeat of theological astronomy meant the defeat of that ideal? … Has man perhaps become less in need of an otherworldly solution to his riddle of existence now that this existence looks even more arbitrary, more loiterer-like, more dispensable in the visible order of things? Hasn’t precisely the self-belittlement of man, his will to self-belittlement been marching relentlessly forward since Copernicus? Alas, the belief in his dignity, uniqueness, irreplaceability in the hierarchy of beings is lost—he has become an animal, without simile, qualification, or reservation an animal, he who in his earlier belief was almost god (“child of God,” “God-man”) … Since Copernicus¹⁰³ man seems to have stumbled onto an inclined plane—he is now rolling faster and faster away from the center—whither? into nothingness? into the “penetrating feeling of his nothingness?” … So be it! exactly this would be the straight path—into the old ideal? … All science (and by no means only astronomy, concerning whose humiliating and debasing effect Kant made a noteworthy confession, “it annihilates my importance” …), all science, the natural as well as the unnatural—which is what I call the self-critique of knowledge—today aims to talk man out of his previous respect for himself, as if this were nothing but a bizarre self-conceit; one could even say that science’s own pride, its own austere form of stoical ataraxy consists in upholding this hard-won self-contempt of man as his last, most serious claim to respect from himself (with good reason in fact: for the one who holds in contempt is still one who “has not forgotten how to respect” …) Does this actually work against the ascetic ideal? Does anyone in all seriousness still think (as the theologians for a time imagined) that, say, Kant’s victory over the conceptual dogmatism of theology (“God,” “soul,” “freedom,” “immortality”) did damage to that ideal?—it is of no concern for the present whether Kant himself even remotely intended anything of the kind. What is certain is that since Kant all kinds of transcendentalists are again playing a winning game—they are emancipated from the theologians: what good fortune!—he betrayed to them that secret path on which they may now pursue their “heart’s desires” on their own initiative and with the best scientific decorum. Likewise: who could henceforth hold it against the agnostics, as the venerators of the unknown and mysterious in itself, if they now worship the question mark itself as God? (Xaver Doudan speaks at one point of the ravages caused by “l’habitude d’admirer l’inintelligible au lieu de rester tout simplement dans l’inconnu”;¹⁰⁴ it is his opinion that the ancients were free of this. Supposing that everything man “knows” fails to satisfy his desires, moreover, that it contradicts them and makes one shudder—what divine escape, to be permitted to seek the blame for this not in “desiring” but rather in “knowing”! … “There is no knowing: consequently—there is a God”: what a novel elegantia syllogismi!¹⁰⁵ what a triumph of the ascetic ideal!—

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—Or did the whole of modern historiography perhaps show a stance more sure of life, more sure of its ideal? Its most noble claim now runs in the direction of being a mirror; it rejects all teleology; it no longer wants to “prove” anything; it scorns playing the judge and has its good taste in this—it affirms as little as it negates, it ascertains, it “describes” … All of this is to a high degree ascetic; at the same time, however, it is to a still higher degree nihilistic, do not deceive yourselves about this! One sees a sad, hard, but determined look—an eye that looks outward as an isolated arctic traveller looks outward (perhaps in order not to look inward? in order not to look back? …) Here there is snow, here life has become silent; the last crowings heard here are “To what end?,” “In vain!,” “Nada!”—here nothing more prospers or grows, at best St. Petersburg metapolitics and Tolstoyian “compassion.” As for that other kind of historian, however, an even more “modern” kind perhaps, a hedonistic, lascivious kind, who makes eyes at life just as much as at the ascetic ideal, who uses the word “artist” as a glove and has leased the praise of contemplation completely and utterly for himself these days: oh what thirst these sweet ingenious ones arouse, even for ascetics and winter landscapes! No! the devil take this “contemplative” folk! How much more would I prefer to journey with those historical nihilists through the most dismal gray cold fogs!—indeed, supposing I must choose, I wouldn’t be against lending an ear even to one who is truly unhistorical, anti-historical (like Dühring, whose tones have intoxicated a previously still shy, still unacknowledgeable species of “beautiful souls” in present-day Germany, the species anarchistica within the educated proletariat). A hundred times worse are the “contemplatives”—: I know of nothing as disgusting as this sort of “objective” armchair, this sort of sweet-smelling hedonist facing history, half priest, half satyr, perfume Renan,¹⁰⁶ who betrays already with the high falsetto of his cheers what he is lacking, where he is lacking, where in this case the Fate has oh! all-too-surgically wielded her cruel scissors! This goes against my taste, also against my patience: let those who have nothing to lose by it keep their patience at such sights—such a sight enrages me, such “spectators” embitter me toward the “spectacle” still more than the spectacle itself (history itself, you understand me), in the process Anacreontic moods come over me unawares. This nature that gave to the bull its horns, to the lion chasm’ odonton,¹⁰⁷ why did nature give me a foot? … To kick with, by holy Anacreon! and not just for running away: for kicking apart the rotted armchairs, the cowardly contemplativeness, the lecherous eunuchry in the face of history, the making-eyes at ascetic ideals, the justice-Tartuffery of impotence! All my reverence to the ascetic ideal, as long as it is honest! as long as it believes in itself and does not present us with a facade of clownery! But I do not like all these coquettish bugs who have an insatiable ambition for smelling out the infinite, until finally the infinite smells of bugs; I do not like the whited sepulchers that play-act life; I do not like the tired and used-up who wrap themselves in wisdom and look about “objectively”; I do not like the agitators spruced up into heroes, who wear a magic concealing-cap of an ideal on their straw-whisk of a head; I do not like the ambitious artists who would like to act the role of ascetics and priests and are basically only tragic buffoons; I do not like them either, these newest speculators in idealism, the anti-Semites, who roll their eyes nowadays in a Christian-Aryan-Philistine manner and try to stir up all the horned-cattle elements among the people through a misuse of the cheapest tool of agitation, moral posturing—a misuse that exhausts all patience (—that no kind of swindle-spiritism goes without success in present-day Germany is linked to the positively undeniable and already tangible desolation of the German spirit, whose cause I seek in an all-too-exclusive diet of newspapers, politics, beer, and Wagnerian music, including that which supplies the presupposition for this diet: first, the national constriction and vanity, the strong but narrow principle “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,”¹⁰⁸ second, however, the paralysis agitans¹⁰⁹ of “modern ideas”). Europe today is rich and inventive above all in excitants, it seems there is nothing it needs more than stimulants and fire-waters: hence also the enormous counterfeiting of ideals, these fieriest waters of the spirit; hence also the repulsive, foul-smelling, mendacious, pseudo-alcoholic air everywhere. I would like to know how many shiploads of imitation idealism, of hero-costumes and grand-word-noisemakers, how many barrels of sugared spirituous sympathy (firm of: la religion de la souffrance),¹¹⁰ how many wooden legs of “noble indignation” for the assistance of the spiritually flat-footed, how many comedians of the Christian-moral ideal would have to be exported out of Europe today in order for its air to smell cleaner again … Obviously a new trade opportunity has opened up with respect to this overproduction; obviously there is a new “business” to transact in little ideal-idols and accompanying “idealists”—don’t overlook this none-too-subtle hint! Who has enough courage for it?—we have the means in hand to “idealize” the entire earth! … But why am I talking about courage: here only one thing is needed, precisely the hand, an uninhibited, a very uninhibited hand …

27

—Enough! Enough! let’s leave these curiosities and complexities of the modern spirit, where there is as much to laugh about as to be vexed at: precisely our problem can do without them, the problem of the meaning of the ascetic ideal—what does it have to do with yesterday and today! I will tackle those things more rigorously and more thoroughly in another context (under the title “On the History of European Nihilism”; with regard to this I refer to a work that I am preparing: The Will to Power, Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values). All I care to have pointed out here is this: in the spiritual sphere as well, the ascetic ideal has in the meantime only one kind of real enemy and injurer: the comedians of this ideal—for they arouse mistrust. Everywhere else that the spirit is strictly and powerfully at work today without any counterfeiting, it now does without ideals entirely—the popular expression for this abstinence is “atheism”—except for its will to truth. This will, however, this remnant of an ideal is, if one is willing to believe me, that ideal itself in its strictest, most spiritual formulation, completely and utterly esoteric, stripped of all outworks, thus not so much its remnant as its core. Unconditional honest atheism (—and its is the only air we breathe, we more spiritual human beings of this age!) is accordingly not in opposition to that ideal, as appearance would have it; it is rather only one of its last stages of development, one of its final forms and inner logical consequences—it is the awe-inspiring catastrophe of a two-thousand-year discipline in truth, which in the end forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God. (The same course of development in India, completely independent of the former and therefore proving something; the same ideal compelling to the same conclusion; the decisive point reached five centuries before the point from which Europeans reckon time, with Buddha, more precisely: already with the Samkhya philosophy, this then popularized and made into a religion by Buddha.) Asking in all strictness, what actually triumphed over the Christian god? The answer is found in my Gay Science (section 357); “Christian morality itself, the ever more strictly understood concept of truthfulness, the father-confessor subtlety of the Christian conscience, translated and sublimated into the scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price. Looking at nature as if it were a proof of the goodness and guardianship of a god; interpreting history to the honor of divine reason, as constant witness of a moral world order and moral final intentions; interpreting one’s own experiences as pious human beings have long enough interpreted them, as if everything were an act of providence, everything a sign, everything thought up and sent for the sake of the soul’s salvation: this is henceforth past, it has conscience against it, it is regarded by all subtler consciences as indecent, dishonest, as mendacity, feminism, weakness, cowardice—it is precisely in this strictness, if in anything, that we are good Europeans and heirs of Europe’s longest and bravest self-overcoming” … All great things perish through themselves, through an act of self-cancellation: thus the law of life wills it, the law of the necessary “self-overcoming” in the essence of life—in the end the call always goes forth to the lawgiver himself: “patere legem, quam ipse tulisti.”¹¹¹ In this manner Christianity as dogma perished of its own morality; in this manner Christianity as morality must now also perish—we stand at the threshold of this event. Now that Christian truthfulness has drawn one conclusion after the other, in the end it draws its strongest conclusion, its conclusion against itself; this occurs, however, when it poses the question, “what does all will to truth mean?” … And here I again touch on my problem, on our problem, my unknown friends (—for I as yet know of no friends): what meaning would our entire being have if not this, that in us this will to truth has come to a consciousness of itself as a problem? … It is from the will to truth’s becoming conscious of itself that from now on—there is no doubt about it—morality will gradually perish: that great spectacle in a hundred acts that is reserved for Europe’s next two centuries, the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also most hopeful of all spectacles …

28

If one disregards the ascetic ideal: man, the animal man, has until now had no meaning. His existence on earth contained no goal; “to what end man at all?”—was a question without answer; the will for man and earth was lacking; behind every great human destiny a still greater “for nothing!” resounded as refrain. Precisely this is what the ascetic ideal means: that something was lacking, that an enormous void surrounded man—he did not know how to justify, to explain, to affirm himself; he suffered from the problem of his meaning. He suffered otherwise as well, he was for the most part a diseased animal: but the suffering itself was not his problem, rather that the answer was missing to the scream of his question: “to what end suffering?” Man, the bravest animal and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not negate suffering in itself: he wants it, he even seeks it out, provided one shows him a meaning for it, a to-this-end of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not the suffering itself, was the curse that thus far lay stretched out over humanity—and the ascetic ideal offered it a meaning! Thus far it has been the only meaning; any meaning is better than no meaning at all; in every respect the ascetic ideal has been the “faute de mieux”¹¹² par excellence there has been thus far. In it suffering was interpreted; the enormous emptiness seemed filled; the door fell shut to all suicidal nihilism. The interpretation—there is no doubt—brought new suffering with it, deeper, more inward, more poisonous, gnawing more at life: it brought all suffering under the perspective of guilt … But in spite of all this—man was rescued by it, he had a meaning, he was henceforth no longer like a leaf in the wind, a plaything of nonsense, “without-sense,” now he could will something—no matter for the moment in what direction, to what end, with what he willed: the will itself was saved. One simply cannot conceal from oneself what all the willing that has received its direction from the ascetic ideal actually expresses: this hatred of the human, still more of the animal, still more of the material, this abhorrence of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and of beauty, this longing away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wish, longing itself—all of this means—let us dare to grasp this—a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but it is and remains a will! … And, to say again at the end what I said at the beginning: man would much rather will nothingness than not will …

From Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, translated by Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1988). Copyright © 1988. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

1. [Matthew 6:21.]

2. [Lines 3781–82 of Goethe’s Faust, Part One—M.C.]

3. [Nonempirical or independent of experience; literally: from what is before.]

4. [Dr. Paul Rée (1849–1901), doctor of law, philosopher, physician. N met Rée in 1873 and the two developed a close friendship. They shared a commitment to providing an explanation of morality in completely naturalistic terms, without reference to religious or metaphysical sources and taking account only of what can be known of human beings from a scientific point of view. Their relationship ended badly in the winter of 1882–83 due to complications within the “trinity” the two men had formed with a young Russian woman, Lou Andreas-Salomé.]

5. [By a tremendous distance; literally:by all of heaven.]

6. [Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), sometimes described as the “philosopher of pessimism.” Largely ignored until very late in his life, he became the most widely read German philosopher in the English-speaking world during the second half of the nineteenth century.]

7. [Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza (1632–1677), Dutch-Jewish philosopher, usually grouped with Descartes and Leibniz as one of the three most important modern rationalists; known especially for his attempt to overcome the dualism between mind and matter and for his “geometrical” method of presenting philosophy. Spinoza’s major work, Ethica, was published by his friends shortly after his death.]

8. [François VI, duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680), French aristocrat and classical author. La Rochefoucauld’s only major work, the Maximes, is a collection of maxims or aphorisms—a literary form that aims at expressing a truth in a brief and pointed and sometimes paradoxical form.]

9. [Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882), English naturalist, author of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859).]

10. [Shameful part (in the plural, this expression is the equivalent of the English “private parts”).]

11. [Force of inactivity. In Newtonian physics, this term denotes the resistance offered by matter to any force tending to alter its state of rest or motion.]

12. [Disinterested, unselfish, selfless.]

13. [Obsession; literally: a fixed idea.]

14. [Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), English sociologist and philosopher. An early advocate of evolutionary theory, he is the father of Social Darwinism: Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.”]

15. [Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–1862), English historian. Holding in contempt the history of his day, which emphasized politics, war, and heroes, he aimed to make history scientific by discovering the fixed laws that govern the actions of men and therefore of societies.]

16. [Sanskrit: noble.]

17. [Late 6th–early 5th century B.C.E..]

18. [Good, brave, noble.]

19. [Bad, ugly, ill-born, base, cowardly, ignoble.]

20. [Cowardly, worthless, low-born, miserable, wretched.]

21. [Good, well-born, noble, brave, capable.]

22. [Bad, evil.]

23. [Black, dark.]

24. [He is black. Horace’s Satires, I. 4, line 85.]

25. [Gaelic: white, bright.]

26. [Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902), physician, professor of medicine, and liberal politician.]

27. [Good.]

28. [Earlier form of bonus.]

29. [War; the latter two are older, poetic forms.]

30. [Silas Weir Mitchell (1829–1914), Philadelphian physician and novelist who specialized in treating “nervous” disorders. He became widely known in America and Europe for his “rest cure” for such illnesses: patients were first isolated from the influence of hovering, over-careful family members and restricted to bed for four to six weeks, during which they were not allowed to have visitors or to read or write. They were fed by a nurse and given massages to keep up strength and muscle tone. When they began to show improvement, patients were ordered to get up and take exercise.]

31. [Mystical union.]

32. [Under this sign.]

33. [One asks, i.e., that is the question.]

34. [Deilos: cowardly, worthless, low-born, miserable, wretched; deilaios: wretched, sorry, paltry; poneros: wretched, oppressed by toils, worthless, base, cowardly; mochtheros: wretched, suffering hardship, miserable, worthless, knavish.]

35. [Oizyros: woeful, pitiable, miserable, sorry, poor; anolbos: unblest, wretched, luckless, poor; tlemon: suffering, enduring; hence: “steadfast, stouthearted,” but also “wretched, miserable”; dystychein: to be unlucky, unhappy, unfortunate; xymphora: originally “chance,” then usually in a bad sense, that is, “misfortune.”]

36. [To do well, to fare well, or to do good.]

37. [Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau (1749–1791), French politician, orator, and writer.]

38. [Among equals; here, “among themselves.”]

39. [Easiness of temper; indifference, rashness. Thucydides 2. 39.]

40. [Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), Christian theologian and philosopher, canonized by Pope John XXII in 1323 and declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Pius V in 1567.]

41. [“The blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the punishments of the damned, in order that their bliss be more delightful to them.” Summa Theologica III Supplementum Q. 94, Art. 1.]

42. [Tertullian (ca. 155–after 220), important early Christian theologian, polemicist, and moralist from Carthage in North Africa.]

43. [“But indeed there are still other sights, that last and eternal day of judgment, that day unlooked for by the nations, that day they laughed at, when the world so great with age and all its generations shall be consumed by one fire. What variety of sights then! What should I admire! What should I laugh at! In which should I feel joy! In which should I exult, seeing so many and great kings who were reported to have been received into heaven, now groaning in deepest darkness with Jove himself and those who testified of their reception into heaven! Likewise the praesides (the provincial governor), persecutors of the name of the Lord, being liquefied by flames fiercer than those with which they themselves raged against the Christians! What wise men besides, those very philosophers reddening before their disciples as they blaze together, the disciples to whom they suggested that nothing was of any concern to God; to whom they asserted that our souls are either nothing or they will not return to their former bodies! And also the poets, trembling before the judgment seat, not of Rhadamanthys or Minos but of the Christ, whom they did not expect! Then the great tragedians will be heard, in great voice, no doubt (in better voice, even more awful screamers), in their own calamities; then the actors will be recognized, made a great deal more limber by the fire; then the charioteer will be seen, all red on a flaming wheel; then the athletes will be observed, not in their gymnasiums but cast in the fire—were it not for the fact that not even then would I wish to see them since I would much rather bestow my insatiable gaze on those who raged against the Lord. ‘This is he,’ I shall say, ‘the son of the carpenter or the prostitute (as everything that follows shows, and in particular also this well-known designation from the Talmud for the mother of Jesus, from here on Tertullian means the Jews), the Sabbath-breaker, the Samaritan, the one possessed of a devil. This is he whom you bought from Judas, this is the one struck by reed and fist, defiled by spit, given gall and vinegar to drink. This is he whom the disciples secretly stole away that it might be said he had risen, or perhaps the gardener dragged him away so that his lettuce would not be damaged by the crowd of those coming and going.’ That you may see such things, that you may exult in such things—what praetor or consul or quaestor or priest will, out of his generosity, see to this? And yet even now we have them in a way, by faith, represented through the imagining spirit. On the other hand, what are those things which eye hath not seen nor ear heard, nor have ever entered into the heart of man? (1 Cor. 2:9) I believe they are more pleasing than circus and both theaters (first and fourth tiers, or, according to others, comic and tragic stages) and any stadium.”]

44. [By (my) faith.]

45. [Shelved, filed away.]

46. [If they have secured more or less, let that be no crime.]

47. [To do evil for the pleasure of doing it.]

48. [Ill-willing sympathy.]

49. [The nostalgias of the cross.]

50. [John Calvin (1509–1564) Protestant Reformer and theologian.]

51. [Martin Luther (1483–1546), instigator of the 16th century Reformation and of Protestantism.]

52. [Sanskrit: mind; understanding or the conscious will.]

53. [The New High German Elend (misery) derives from the Old High German adjective elilenti (in another land or country; banished) via the shortened Middle High German ellende or êlend (foreign, miserable).]

54. [Woe to the conquered! Livy, Ab urbe condita, Book V, 48, 9.]

55. [Term from Roman law referring to the settlement in a case of injury or damage caused by an illegal act.]

56. [Eugen Karl Dühring (1833–1921). Philosopher and political economist. In his autobiography (1882) he claims to have been the founder of anti-Semitism, and he was a major figure in the anti-Semitic movement in Germany.]

57. [Cause of the coming into being.]

58. [T(homas) H(enry) Huxley (1825–1895), English biologist. He was one of Darwin’s close associates and perhaps his chief defender in the public debates concerning the theory of evolution.]

59. [Kuno Fischer (1824–1907), professor of philosophy at Heidelberg, author of the ten-volume Geschichte der neuern Philosophie (History of Modern Philosophy).]

60. [Sting of conscience.]

61. [For the sake of the good.]

62. [Joy.]

63. [First cause.]

64. [The last thing, passion for glory. Tacitus, Histories IV, 6.]

65. [Horror of emptiness.]

66. [Richard Wagner (1813–1883), German composer and music theorist.]

67. [Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) was in his own time the most famous of the “Young” or leftist Hegelians—only later eclipsed by Marx—and was influential not only among philosophers but also writers, especially the writers of the movement known as “Young Germany.” Feuerbach’s philosophy was a radical humanism.]

68. [Georg Herwegh (1817–1875), one of the most prominent of the Young German poets.]

69. [For the greater glory of music.]

70. [Pseudonym of Henri Beyle (1783-1842), French author.]

71. [A promise of happiness.]

72. [Instrument of the devil.]

73. [Medicine.]

74. [The philosophical animal.]

75. [Let the world perish, let there be philosophy, let there be the philosopher, let there be me!]

76. [Without anger and partiality. Tacitus, Annales I, 1.]

77. [Early New High German: “Lady Shrewd.”]

78. [We strive for what is forbidden. Ovid, Amores, III, 4, 17.]

79. [I combat the universal spider.]

80. [Right of the first night—alleged right of the feudal lord to have sexual intercourse with his vassal’s bride on the wedding night.]

81. [Something forbidden.]

82. [Cross, nut, light.]

83. [Men of good will. Luke 2:14.]

84. [Sympathetic nerve (nervous system).]

85. [“World-pain,” an emotional state in which the predominant tone is a feeling of pain or sadness because of the inadequacy of the world.]

86. [A character in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. The passage in question is I, iii.]

87. [Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher.]

88. [One must make oneself stupid.]

89. [Indian philosopher and theologian (ca. 788–ca. 820)].

90. [Neglect of oneself.]

91. [Contempt of oneself.]

92. [About himself or against himself.]

93. [Hippolyte Adolphe Taine (1828–1893), French philosopher, historian and critic.]

94. [Leopold Ranke (1795–1886), highly successful and influential historian, author of over fifty volumes of history.]

95. [Stronger cause.]

96. [Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand (-Périgord), Prince de Bénévent (1754–1838). French statesman and diplomat known for his lack of scruples and for his capacity for political survival.]

97. [Long live death!]

98. [One asks—i.e., “that is the question.”]

99. [Next, but by a great distance. Cf. Virgil, Aeneid, Book 5, line 320.]

100. [The highest or ultimate of its kind; literally: not more beyond.]

101. [Medieval Latin, elliptical for: sigillum secretum, “privy seal”—a personal or private seal.]

102. [Little facts. The parenthesis that follows puns on the word fait (fact) by replacing the first three letters of the French fatalism (fatalism) with this similar-sounding word, a pun that doesn’t quite work in English: “that little factalism.”]

103. [Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), Polish scholar and astronomer, founder of modern astronomy.]

104. [“The habit of admiring the unintelligible instead of staying quite simply in the unknown.”]

105. [Elegance of the syllogism.]

106. [Ernest Renan (1823–1892), French historian of religion and critic, best known for his La vie de Jésus (Life of Jesus, 1863), the first volume in his multivolume work, Origins of Christianity. He and Taine were the most influential French intellectuals of their time.]

107. [“Chasm of teeth,” from Anacreonta, Poem 24.]

108. [“Germany, Germany above all else.” Fallersleben, Das Lied der Deutschen, 1841.]

109. [Shaking disability, i.e., “shaking palsy” or Parkinson’s disease.]

110. [The religion of suffering.]

111. [Submit to the law you yourself proposed.]

112. [For lack of anything better.]