Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Future Philosophy (Wisehouse Classics). Фридрих Вильгельм Ницше

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СКАЧАТЬ in so doing we cloud his memory. Some people know how to befuddle or batter their own memories in order at least to take revenge on this single witness:— shame is resourceful. It is not the worst things that make people feel the worst shame. Behind a mask there is not only malice—there is so much goodness in cunning. I could imagine that a person who had something valuable and vulnerable to hide might roll through his life as coarse and round as an old green wine barrel with strong hoops. The delicacy of his shame wants it that way. For a person whose shame is profound runs into his fate and delicate decisions on pathways which few people ever reach and of whose existence those closest to him and his most intimate associates are not permitted to know. His mortal danger hides itself from their eyes, just as much as his confidence in life does, once he regains it. A person who is concealed in this way, who from instinct uses speaking for silence and keeping quiet and who is tireless in avoiding communication, wants and demands that, instead of him, a mask of him wanders around in the hearts and heads of his friends. And suppose he does not want that mask: one day his eyes will open to the fact that nonetheless there is a mask of him there—and that that’s a good thing. Every profound spirit needs a mask; even more, around every profound spirit a mask is continuously growing, thanks to the constantly false, that is, shallow interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives. —

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      A person has to test himself, to see that he is meant for independence and command— and he must do this at the right time. He should not evade his tests, although they are perhaps the most dangerous game he can play, tests which in the end are made only with ourselves as witnesses and with no other judges. Not to get stuck on a single person:— not even on the someone one loves the most. Every person is a prison—a cranny as well. And don’t remain stuck on one’s fatherland:— not even if it is enduring the greatest suffering and in the greatest need of assistance—it is less difficult to disentangle one’s heart from a victorious fatherland. Don’t get stuck on pity, even in the case of higher men whose rare torment and helplessness some fortuitous circumstance has allowed us to see. Don’t get stuck on a science, not even if it tempts us with the most precious discoveries apparently reserved explicitly for us. Don’t get stuck on one’s own detachment, on that sensual distancing and strangeness of a bird which constantly flies further up into the heights in order always to see more beneath it:— the danger of man in flight. Don’t get stuck on our own virtues and let our totality become a sacrifice to some particular detail in us, for example, our “hospitality,” the danger of dangers for lofty and rich souls, who spread themselves around lavishly, almost indifferently, and push the virtue of liberality into a vice. One must know how to preserve oneself: the sternest test of independence.

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      A new sort of philosopher is emerging: I venture to baptize them with a name which is not without danger. As I figure them out—to the extent that they let themselves be figured out, for it belongs to their type to want to remain something of an enigma— these philosophers of the future may have a right, perhaps also a wrong, to be described as attempters. This name itself is finally merely an attempt and, if you will, a temptation.

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      Are they new friends of the “truth,” these emerging philosophers? That seems plausible enough: for all philosophers up to this point have loved their truths. But they certainly will not be dogmatists. It must go against their pride as well as their taste if their truth is still supposed to be some truth for everyman: and that’s been the secret wish and deeper meaning of all dogmatic efforts up to now. “My opinion is my opinion: someone else has no casual right to it”— that’s what such a philosopher of the future will perhaps say. One must rid oneself of the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. “Good” is no longer good when one’s neighbour utters it. And how could there even be a “common good”! That expression contradicts itself: what can be common always has only little value. In the end things must stand as they stand and have always stood: great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and shudders for the refined, and, to sum up all this in brief, everything rare for the rare.—

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      Do I need after all that still expressly to state that they will also be free, very free spirits, these philosophers of the future—although it’s also certain that they will not be merely free spirits but something more, higher, greater, and fundamentally different that does not wish to be misunderstood and confused with something else? But as I say this, I feel a duty almost as much to them as to us who are their heralds and precursors, we free spirits!—the duty to blow away an old stupid prejudice and misunderstanding about us both, something which for too long has made the idea “free spirit” as impenetrable as a fog. In all the countries of Europe and in America as well there is now something which drives people to misuse this name, a very narrow, confined, chained-up type of spirit which wants something rather like the opposite to what lies in our intentions and instincts—to say nothing of the fact that, so far as those emerging new philosophers are concerned, such spirits definitely must be closed windows and bolted doors. To put the matter briefly and seriously, they belong with the levellers, these falsely named “free spirits”—as eloquent and prolific writing slaves of democratic taste and its “modern ideas”: collectively people without solitude, without their own solitude, coarse brave lads whose courage or respectable decency should not be denied. But they are simply unfree and ridiculously superficial, above all with their basic tendency to see in the forms of old societies up to now the cause for almost all human misery and failure, a process which turns the truth happily on its head! What they would like to strive for with all their powers is the universal, green, pasture-happiness of the herd, with security, absence of danger, comfort, an easing of life for everyone. The two songs and doctrines they sing most frequently are called “Equality of Rights” and “pity for all things that suffer”— and they assume that suffering itself is something we must do away with. We who are their opposites, we who have opened our eyes and consciences for the question where and how up to now the plant “Man” has grown most powerfully to the heights, we think that this has happened every time under the opposite conditions, that for that to happen the danger of his situation first had to grow enormously, his power of invention and pretence (his “spirit”—) had to develop under lengthy pressure and compulsion into something refined and audacious, his will for living had to intensify into an unconditional will for power:— we think that hardness, violence, slavery, danger in the alleys and in the hearts, seclusion, stoicism, the art of attempting, and devilry of all kinds, that everything evil, fearful, tyrannical, predatory, snake-like in human beings serves well for the ennobling of the species “Man,” as much as its opposite does:— in fact, when we say only this much we have not said enough, and we find ourselves at any rate with our speaking and silence at a point at the other end of all modern ideology and things desired by the herd, perhaps as their exact opposites? Is it any wonder that we “free spirits” are not the most talkative spirits? That we do not want to give away every detail of what a spirit can free itself and in what direction it may then perhaps be driven? And so far as the meaning of the dangerous formula “beyond good and evil” is concerned, with which we at least protect ourselves from being confused with others, we are something quite different from “libres-penseurs,” “liberi pensatori,” “Freidenker,” and whatever else all these good advocates of “modern ideas” love to call themselves.²² Having been at home in many countries of the spirit, or at least a guest, having slipped away again and again from the musty comfortable corners into which preference and prejudice, youth, descent, contingencies of men and books, or even exhaustion from wandering around seem to have banished us, full of malice against the enticement of dependency, which lies hidden in honours, or gold, or offices, or sensuous enthusiasm, thankful even for poverty and richly changing sickness, because they always free us from some rule or other and its “prejudice,” thankful to god, devil, sheep, and worm in us, curious to a fault, researchers all the way to cruelty, with fingers spontaneously working СКАЧАТЬ