Why I Am So Wise
l
The good fortune of my existence, its uniqueness perhaps, lies in its fatality: I am, to express it in the form of a riddle, already dead as my father, while as my mother I am still living and becoming old. This dual descent, as it were, both from the highest and the lowest rung on the ladder of life, at the same time a decadent and a beginning—this, if anything, explains that neutrality, that freedom from all partiality in relation to the total problem of life, that perhaps distinguishes me. I have a subtler sense of smell for the signs of ascent and decline than any other human being before me; I am the teacher par excellence for this—I know both, I am both.
My father died at the age of thirty-six: he was delicate, kind, and morbid, as a being that is destined merely to pass by—more a gracious memory of life than life itself. In the same year in which his life went downward, mine, too, went downward: at thirty-six, I reached the lowest point of my vitality—I still lived, but without being able to see three steps ahead. Then—it was 1879—I retired from my professorship at Basel, spent the summer in St. Moritz like a shadow, and the next winter, than which not one in my life has been poorer in sunshine, in Naumburg as a. shadow. This was my minimum: the Wanderer and His Shadow originated at this time. Doubtless, I then knew about shadows.
The following winter, my first one in Genoa, that sweetening and spiritualization which is almost inseparably connected with an extreme poverty of blood and muscle, produced The Dawn. The perfect brightness and cheerfulness, even exuberance of the spirit, reflected in this work, is compatible in my case not only with the most profound physiological weakness, but even with an excess of pain. In the midst of the torments that go with an uninterrupted three-day migraine, accompanied by laborious vomiting of phlegm, I possessed a dialectician’s clarity par excellence and thought through with very cold blood matters for which under healthier circumstances I am not mountain-climber, not subtle, not cold enough. My readers know perhaps in what way I consider dialectic as a symptom of decadence; for example in the most famous case, the case of Socrates.
All pathological disturbances of the intellect, even that half-numb state that follows fever, have remained entirely foreign to me to this day; and I had to do research to find out about their nature and frequency. My blood moves slowly. Nobody has ever discovered any fever in me. A physician who treated me for some time as if my nerves were sick finally said: “It’s not your nerves, it is rather I that am nervous.” There is altogether no sign of any local degeneration; no organically conditioned stomach complaint, however profound the weakness of my gastric system may be as a consequence of over-all exhaustion. My eye trouble, too, though at times dangerously close to blindness, is only a consequence and not a cause: with every increase in vitality my ability to see has also increased again.
A long, all too long, series of years signifies recovery for me; unfortunately it also signifies relapse, decay, the periodicity of a kind of decadence. Need I say after all this that in questions of decadence I am experienced? I have spelled them forward and backward. Even that filigree art of grasping and comprehending in general, those fingers for nuances, that psychology of “looking around the corner,” and whatever else is characteristic of me, was learned only then, is the true present of those days in which everything in me became subtler—observation itself as well as all organs of observation. Looking from the perspective of the sick toward healthier concepts and values and, conversely, looking again from the fullness and self-assurance of a rich life down into the secret work of the instinct of decadence—in this I have had the longest training, my truest experience; if in anything, I became master in this. Now I know how, have the know-how, to reverse perspectives: the first reason why a “revaluation of values” is perhaps possible for me alone.
2
Apart from the fact that I am a decadent, I am also the opposite. My proof for this is, among other things, that I have always instinctively chosen the right means against wretched states; while the decadent typically chooses means that are disadvantageous for him. As summa summarum,1 I was healthy; as an angle, as a specialty, I was a decadent. The energy to choose absolute solitude and leave the life to which I had become accustomed; the insistence on not allowing myself any longer to be cared for, waited on, and doctored—that betrayed an absolute instinctive certainty about what was needed above all at that time. I took myself in hand, I made myself healthy again: the condition for this—every physiologist would admit that—is that one be healthy at bottom. A typically morbid being cannot become healthy, much less make itself healthy. For a typically healthy person, conversely, being sick can even become an energetic stimulus for life, for living more. This, in fact, is how that long period of sickness appears to me now: as it were, I discovered life anew, including myself; I tasted all good and even little things, as others cannot easily taste them—I turned my will to health, to life, into a philosophy.
For it should be noted: it was during the years of my lowest vitality that I ceased to be a pessimist; the instinct of self-restoration forbade me a philosophy of poverty and discouragement.
What is it, fundamentally, that allows us to recognize who has turned out well? That a well-turned-out person pleases our senses, that he is carved from wood that is hard, delicate, and at the same time smells good. He has a taste only for what is good for him; his pleasure, his delight cease where the measure of what is good for him is transgressed. He guesses what remedies avail against what is harmful; he exploits bad accidents to his advantage; what does not kill him makes him stronger.2 Instinctively, he collects from everything he sees, hears, lives through, his sum: he is a principle of selection, he discards much. He is always in his own company, whether he associates with books, human beings, or landscapes: he honors by choosing, by admitting, by trusting. He reacts slowly to all kinds of stimuli, with that slowness which long caution and deliberate pride have bred in him: he examines the stimulus that approaches him, he is far from meeting it halfway. He believes neither in “misfortune” nor in “guilt”: he comes to terms with himself, with others; he knows how to forget—he is strong enough; hence everything must turn out for his best.
Well then, I am the opposite of a decadent, for I have just described myself.
3
This dual series of experiences, this access to apparently separate worlds, is repeated in my nature in every respect: I am a Doppelg?nger, I have a “second” face in addition to the first. And perhaps also a third.
Even by virtue of my descent, I am granted an eye beyond all merely local, merely nationally conditioned perspectives; it is not difficult for me to be a “good European.” On the other hand, I am perhaps more German than present-day Germans, mere citizens of the German Reich, could possibly be—I, the last anti-political German. And yet my ancestors were Polish noblemen: I have many racial instincts in my body from that source—who knows? In the end perhaps even the liberum veto.1
1Unrestricted veto—one of the traditional privileges of the members of the Polish Diet.
During the Nazi period, one of Nietzsche’s relatives, Max Oehler, a retired major, went to great lengths to prove that Nietzsche had been racially pure: “Nietzsches angebliche polnische Herkunft” (N’s alleged Polish descent) in Ostdeutsche Monatshefte, 18 (1938), 679-82, and Nietzsches Ahnentafel (N’s pedigree), Weimar, 1938.
When I consider how often I am addressed as a Pole when I travel, even by Poles themselves, and how rarely I am taken for a German, it might seem that I have been merely externally sprinkled with what is German. Yet my mother, Franziska Oehler, is at any rate something very German; ditto, my grandmother on my father’s side, Erdmuthe Krause. The latter lived all her youth in the middle of good old Weimar, not without some connection with the circle of Goethe. Her brother, the professor of theology Krause in K?nigsberg, was called to Weimar as general superintendent after Herder’s death. It is not impossible that her mother, my great-grandmother, is mentioned in the diary of the young Goethe under the name of “Muthgen.” Her second marriage was with the superintendent Nietzsche in Eilenburg; and in the great war year of 1813, on the day that Napoleon entered Eilenburg with his general staff, on the tenth of October, she gave birth. As a Saxon, she was a great admirer of Napoleon; it could be that I still am, too. My father, born in 1813, died in 1849. Before he accepted the pastor’s position in the parish of R?cken, not far from Lützen, he lived for a few years in the castle of Altenburg and taught the four princesses there. His pupils are now the Queen of Hanover, the Grand Duchess Constantine, the Grand Duchess of Altenburg, and the Princess Therese of Saxe-Altenburg. He was full of deep reverence for the Prussian king Frederick William IV, from whom he had also received his pastoral position; the events of 1848 grieved him beyond all measure. I myself, born on the birthday of the above named king, on the fifteenth of October, received, as fitting, the Hohenzollern name Friedrich Wilhelm. There was at least one advantage to the choice of this day; my birthday was a holiday throughout my childhood.
I consider it a great privilege to have had such a father: it even seems to me that this explains whatever else I have of privileges—not including life, the great Yes to life. Above all, that it requires no resolve on my part, but merely biding my time, to enter quite involuntarily into a world of lofty and delicate things: I am at home there, my inmost passion becomes free only there. That I have almost paid with my life for this privilege is certainly no unfair trade.
In order to understand anything at all of my Zarathustra one must perhaps be similarly conditioned as I am—with one foot beyond life.
4
I have never understood the art of predisposing people against me—this, too, I owe to my incomparable father—even when it seemed highly desirable to me. However un-Christian this may seem, I am not even predisposed against myself. You can turn my life this way and that, you will rarely find traces, and actually only once, that anybody felt ill will toward me—but perhaps rather too many traces of good will.
Even my experiences with people with whom everybody has bad experiences bear witness, without exception, in their favor: I tame every bear, I make even buffoons behave themselves. During the seven years that I taught Greek in the senior class in the P?dagogium in Basel, I never had occasion to punish anyone; the laziest boys worked hard. I am always equal to accidents; I have to be unprepared to be master of myself. Let the instrument be what it may, let it be as out of tune as only the instrument “man” can be—I should have to be sick if I should not succeed in getting out of it something worth hearing. And how often have I been told by the “instruments” themselves that they had never heard themselves like that.—Most beautifully perhaps by Heinrich von Stein,1 who died so unpardonably young. Once, after he had courteously requested permission, he appeared for three days in Sils Maria, explaining to everybody that he had not come to see the Engadine. This excellent human being, who had walked into the Wagnerian morass with all the impetuous simplicity of a Prussian Junker (and in addition even into that of Dühring!2), acted during these three days like one transformed by a tempest of freedom, like one who has suddenly been lifted to his own height and acquired wings. I always said to him that this was due to the good air up here, that this happened to everybody, that one was not for nothing six thousand feet above Bayreuth3—but he would not believe me. If, in spite of that, some small and great misdemeanors have been committed against me, “the will” cannot be blamed for this, least of all any ill will: sooner could I complain, as I have already suggested, of the good will that has done no small mischief in my life. My experiences entitle me to be quite generally suspicious of the so-called “selfless” drives, of all “neighbor love” that is ready to give advice and go into action. It always seems a weakness to me, a particular case of being incapable of resisting stimuli: pity is considered a virtue only among decadents. I reproach those who are full of pity for easily losing a sense of shame, of respect, of sensitivity for distances; before you know it, pity begins to smell of the mob and becomes scarcely distinguishable from bad manners—and sometimes pitying hands can interfere in a downright destructive manner in a great destiny, in the growing solitude of one wounded, in a privileged right to heavy guilt.
The overcoming of pity I count among the noble virtues: as “Zarathustra’s temptation” I invented a situation in which a great cry of distress reaches him, as pity tries to attack him like a final sin that would entice him away from himself.4 To remain the master at this point, to keep the eminence of one’s task undefiled by the many lower and more myopic impulses that are at work in so-called selfless actions, that is the test, perhaps the ultimate test, which a Zarathustra must pass—his real proof of strength.
5
At another point as well, I am merely my father once more and, as it were, his continued life after an all-too-early death. Like everyone who has never lived among his equals and who finds the concept of “retaliation” as inaccessible as, say, the concept of “equal rights,” I forbid myself all countermeasures, all protective measures, and, as is only fair, also any defense, any “justification,” in cases when some small or very great folly is perpetrated against me. My kind of retaliation consists in following up the stupidity as fast as possible with some good sense: that way one may actually catch up with it.1 Metaphorically speaking, I send a box of confections to get rid of a painful story.
One needs only to do me some wrong, I “repay” it—you may be sure of that: soon I find an opportunity for expressing my gratitude to the “evil-doer” (at times even for his evil deed)—or to ask him for something, which can be more obliging than giving something.
It also seems to me that the rudest word, the rudest letter are still more benign, more decent than silence. Those who remain silent are almost always lacking in delicacy and courtesy of the heart. Silence is an objection; swallowing things leads of necessity to a bad character—it even upsets the stomach. All who remain silent are dyspeptic.
You see, I don’t want rudeness to be underestimated: it is by far the most humane form of contradiction and, in the midst of effeminacy, one of our foremost virtues.
If one is rich enough for this, it is even a good fortune to be in the wrong. A god who would come to earth must not do anything except wrong: not to take the punishment upon oneself but the guilt would be divine.2
6
Freedom from ressentiment, enlightenment about ressentiment—who knows how much I am ultimately indebted, in this respect also, to my protracted sickness! This problem is far from simple: one must have experienced it from strength as well as from weakness. If anything at all must be adduced against being sick and being weak, it is that man’s really remedial instinct, his fighting instinct1 wears out. One cannot get rid of anything, one cannot get over anything, one cannot repel anything—everything hurts. Men and things obtrude too closely; experiences strike one too deeply; memory becomes a festering wound. Sickness itself is a kind of ressentiment.
Against all this the sick person has only one great remedy: I call it Russian fatalism, that fatalism without revolt which is exemplified by a Russian soldier who, finding a campaign too strenuous, finally lies down in the snow. No longer to accept anything at all, no longer to take anything, no longer to absorb anything—to cease reacting altogether.
This fatalism is not always merely the courage to die; it can also preserve life under the most perilous conditions by reducing the metabolism, slowing it down, as a kind of will to hibernate. Carrying this logic a few steps further, we arrive at the fakir who sleeps for weeks in a grave.
Because one would use oneself up too quickly if one reacted in any way, one does not react at all any more: this is the logic. Nothing burns one up faster than the affects of ressentiment. Anger, pathological vulnerability, impotent lust for revenge, thirst for revenge, poison-mixing in any sense—no reaction could be more disadvantageous for the exhausted: such affects involve a rapid consumption of nervous energy, a pathological increase of harmful excretions—for example, of the gall bladder into the stomach. Ressentiment is what is forbidden par excellence for the sick—it is their specific evil—unfortunately also their most natural inclination.
This was comprehended by that profound physiologist, the Buddha. His “religion” should rather be called a kind of hygiene, lest it be confused with such pitiable phenomena as Christianity: its effectiveness was made conditional on the victory over ressentiment. To liberate the soul from this is the first step toward recovery. “Not by enmity is enmity ended; by friendliness enmity is ended”: these words stand at the beginning of the doctrine of the Buddha.2 It is not morality that speaks thus; thus speaks physiology—.
Born of weakness, ressentiment is most harmful for the weak themselves. Conversely, given a rich nature, it is a superfluous feeling; mastering this feeling is virtually what proves riches. Whoever knows how seriously my philosophy has pursued the fight against vengefulness and rancor, even into the doctrine of “free will”3 s—the fight against Christianity is merely a special case of this—will understand why I am making such a point of my own behavior, my instinctive sureness in practice. During periods of decadence I forbade myself such feelings as harmful; as soon as my vitality was rich and proud enough again, I forbade myself such feelings as beneath me. I displayed he “Russian fatalism” I mentioned by tenaciously clinging for years to all but intolerable situations, places, apartments, and society, merely because they happened to be given by accident: it was better than changing them, than feeling that they could be changed—than rebelling against them.
Any attempt to disturb me in this fatalism, to awaken me by force, used to annoy me mortally—and it actually was mortally dangerous every time.
Accepting oneself as if fated, not wishing oneself “different”—that is in such cases great reason itself.
7
War1 is another matter. I am warlike by nature. Attacking is one of my instincts. Being able to be an enemy, being an enemy—perhaps that presupposes a strong nature; in any case, it belongs to every strong nature. It needs objects of resistance; hence it looks for what resists: the aggressive pathos belongs just as necessarily to strength as vengefulness and rancor belong to weakness. Woman, for example, is vengeful: that is due to her weakness, as much as is her susceptibility to the distress of others.
The strength of those who attack can be measured in a way by the opposition they require: every growth is indicated by the search for a mighty opponent—or problem; for a warlike philosopher challenges problems, too, to single combat. The task is not simply to master what happens to resist, but what requires us to stake all our strength, suppleness, and fighting skill—opponents that are our equals.
Equality before the enemy: the first presupposition of an honest duel. Where one feels contempt, one cannot wage war; where one commands, where one sees something beneath oneself, one has no business waging war.
My practice of war can be summed up in four propositions. First: I only attack causes that are victorious; I may even wait until they become victorious.2
Second: I only attack causes against which I would not find allies, so that I stand alone—so that I compromise myself alone.—I have never taken a step publicly that did not compromise me: that is my criterion of doing right.
Third: I never attack persons; I merely avail myself of the person as of a strong magnifying glass that allows one to make visible a general but creeping and elusive calamity. Thus I attacked David Strauss—more precisely, the success of a senile book with the “cultured” people in Germany: I caught this culture in the act.
Thus I attacked Wagner—more precisely, the falseness, the half-couth instincts of our “culture” which mistakes the subtle for the rich, and the late for the great.
Fourth: I only attack things when every personal quarrel is excluded, when any background of bad experiences is lacking. On the contrary, attack is in my case a proof of good will, sometimes even of gratitude. I honor, I distinguish by associating my name with that of a cause or a person: pro or con—that makes no difference to me at this point. When I wage war against Christianity I am entitled to this because I have never experienced misfortunes and frustrations from that quarter—the most serious Christians have always been well disposed toward me. I myself, an opponent of Christianity de rigueur?3 am far from blaming individuals for the calamity of millennia.
8
May I still venture to sketch one final trait of my nature that causes me no little difficulties in my contacts with other men? My instinct for cleanliness is characterized by a perfectly uncanny sensitivity so that the proximity or—what am I saying?—the inmost parts, the “entrails” of every soul are physiologically perceived by me—smelted.
This sensitivity furnishes me with psychological antennae with which I feel and get a hold of every secret: the abundant hidden dirt at the bottom of many a character—perhaps the result of bad blood, but glossed over by education—enters my consciousness almost at the first contact. If my observation has not deceived me, such characters who offend my sense of cleanliness also sense from their side the reserve of my disgust—and this does not make them smell any better.
As has always been my wont—extreme cleanliness in relation to me is the presupposition of my existence; I perish under unclean conditions—I constantly swim and bathe and splash, as it were, in water—in some perfectly transparent and resplendent element. Hence association with people imposes no mean test on my patience: my humanity does not consist in feeling with men how they are, but in enduring that I feel with them.1
My humanity is a constant self-overcoming.
But I need solitude—which is to say, recovery, return to myself, the breath of a free, light, playful air.
My whole Zarathustra is a dithyramb on solitude or, if I have been understood, on cleanliness.2—Fortunately not on pure foolishness?—Those who have eyes for colors will compare it to a diamond.—Nausea over man, over the “rabble,” was always my greatest danger.—Do you want to hear the words in which Zarathustra speaks of the redemption from nausea?
What was it that happened to me? How did I redeem myself from nausea? Who rejuvenated my sight? How did I fly to the height where no more rabble sits by the well? Was it my nausea itself that created wings for me and water-divining powers? Verily, I had to fly to the highest spheres that I might find the fount of pleasure again.
Oh, I found it, my brothers! Here, in the highest spheres the fount of pleasure wells up for me! And here is a life of which the rabble does not drink.
You flow for me almost too violently, fountain of pleasure. And often you empty the cup again by wanting to fill it. And I must still learn to approach you more modestly: all too violently my heart still flows toward you—my heart, upon which my summer burns, short, hot, melancholy, overblissful: how my summer heart craves your coolness!
Gone is the hesitant gloom of my spring! Gone the snow-flakes of my malice in June!3 Summer have I become entirely, and summer noon! A summer in the highest spheres with cold wells and blissful silence: oh, come, my friends, that the silence may become still more blissful!
For this is our height and our home: we live here too high and steep for all the unclean and their thirst. Cast your pure eyes into the well of my pleasure, friends! How should that make it muddy? It shall laugh back at you in its own purity.
On the tree, Future, we build our nest; and in our solitude eagles shall bring us nourishment in their beaks. Verily, no nourishment that the unclean might share: they would think they were devouring fire, and they would burn their mouths. Verily, we keep no homes here for the unclean: our pleasure would be an ice cave to their bodies and their spirits.
And we want to live over them like strong winds, neighbors of the eagles, neighbors of the snow, neighbors of the sun: thus live strong winds. And like a wind I yet want to blow among them one day, and with my spirit take away the breath of their spirit: thus my future wills it.
Verily, a strong wind is Zarathustra for all who are low; and this counsel I give to all his enemies and all who spit and spew: Beware of spitting against the wind! …
1Over-all.
2Cf. Twilight, Chapter I, section 8 (Portable Nietzsche, p. 467).
1For Nietzsche’s relation to this young man, see my note on the “Aftersong” that concludes Beyond Good and Evil.
2See my note in Genealogy II, section 11.
3The capital of the Wagner cult. Stein admired Wagner as well as Nietzsche.
4Zarathustra IV, Chapter 2.
1Cf. the chapter “On The Adder’s Bite” inZarathustra I: “If you have an enemy, do not requite him evil with good, for that would put him to shame. Rather prove that he did you some good. And rather be angry than put to shame….”
2Cf. ibid., “Would that you might invent for me the love that bears not only all punishment but also all guilt!” This theme is developed in Sartre’s Flies. For Nietzsche’s immense influence on The Flies, see my article on “Nietzsche Between Homer and Sartre” in Revue internationale de philosophie, 1964.
1Wehr- und Waffen-Instinkt (emphasized in the original) alludes to Luther’s famous hymn, “A mighty fortress is our God, a good defense and weapons [eir’ gute Wehr und Waffen].”
2Cf. The Dhammapada, tr. Max Müller: “Hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love” (Chapter 1). Given the original context, Nietzsche’s comments are not at all far-fetched.
3Cf. Twilight, “The Four Great Errors,” section 7 (Portable Nietzsche). Nietzsche’s attack on Christianity cannot be understood apart from the point made in the sentence above.
1This section throws a great deal of light on some of Nietzsche’s other writings—especially the chapter “On War and Warriors” in Zarathustra I. Cf. also below, “Human, All-Too-Human,” section 1, and “Dawn,” section 1.
2Nietzsche’s first great polemic was directed against the tremendous success of David Friedrich Strauss’ book, The Old Faith and The New, and he broke with Wagner only after Wagner had returned to Germany and triumphed in Bayreuth.
3In accordance with good manners.
1Nietzsche’s critique of pity should be considered in this light.
2Wagner himself had characterized his Parsifal as the pure fool.
3This long passage is quoted from the chapter “On The Rabble” in Zarathustra II. But in Zarathustra, Nietzsche had “the malice of my snowfiakes in June!”