surfeit, sympathy, gloom, and loneliness—is certainly not a man of higher taste. But provided he does not take all this weight and lack of enthusiasm freely upon himself, always keeps away from it, and stays, as mentioned, hidden, quiet, and proud in his castle, well, one thing is certain: he is not made for, not destined for, knowledge. For if he were, he would one day have to say to himself, “The devil take my good taste! The rule-bound man is more interesting than the exception—than I am, the exception!”— and he would make his way down, above all, “inside.” The study of the average man—long, serious, and requiring much disguise, self-control, familiarity, bad company—all company is bad company except with one’s peers—that constitutes a necessary part of the life story of every philosopher, perhaps the most unpleasant, foul-smelling part, the richest in disappointments. But if he’s lucky, as is appropriate for a fortunate child of knowledge, he encounters real short cuts and ways of making his task easier—I’m referring to the so-called cynics, those who, as cynics, simply recognize the animal, the meanness, the “rule-bound man” in themselves and, in the process, still possess that degree of intellectual quality and urge to have to talk about themselves and people like them before witnesses;—now and then they even wallow in books, as if in their very own dung. Cynicism is the single form in which common souls touch upon what honesty is, and the higher man should open his ears to every cruder and more refined cynicism and think himself lucky every time a shameless clown or a scientific satyr announces himself directly in front of him. There are even cases where enchantment gets mixed into the disgust: for example, in those places where, by some vagary of nature, genius is bound up with such an indiscreet billy-goat and ape—as in the Abbé Galiani, the most profound, sharp-sighted, and perhaps also the foulest man of his century—he was much deeper than Voltaire and consequently a good deal quieter.16 More frequently it happens that, as I’ve intimated, the scientific head is set on an ape’s body, a refined and exceptional understanding in a common soul—among doctors and moral physiologists, for example, that’s not an uncommon occurrence. And where anyone speaks without bitterness and quite harmlessly of men as a belly with two different needs and a head with one, everywhere someone constantly sees, looks for, and wants to see only hunger, sexual desires, and vanity, as if these were the real and only motivating forces in human actions, in short, wherever people speak “badly” of human beings—not even in a nasty way—there the lover of knowledge should pay fine and diligent attention; he should, in general, direct his ears to wherever people talk without indignation. For the indignant man and whoever is always using his own teeth to tear himself apart or lacerate himself (or, as a substitute for that, the world, or God, or society) may indeed, speaking morally, stand higher than the laughing and self-satisfied satyr, but in every other sense he is the more ordinary, the more trivial, the more uninstructive case. And no one lies as much as the indignant man.
27
It is difficult to be understood, particularly when one thinks and lives gangastrotogati [like the flow of the river Ganges], among nothing but people who think and live differently, namely kurmagati [like the movements of a tortoise] or, in the best cases “following the gait of frogs” mandeikagati—I’m simply doing everything to make myself difficult to be understood?—and people should appreciate from their hearts the good will in some subtlety of interpretation. But so far as “good friends” are concerned, those who are always too comfortable and believe they have a particular right as friends to a life of comfort, one does well to start by giving them a recreation room and playground of misunderstanding:— so one has to laugh—or else to get rid of them altogether, these good friends—and also to laugh!
28
The most difficult thing about translating from one language into another is the tempo of its style, which is rooted in the character of the race—physiologically speaking, in the average tempo of its “metabolism.” There are honestly intended translations which, as involuntarily coarse versions of the original, are almost misrepresentations, simply because its brave and cheerful tempo, which springs over and neutralizes everything dangerous in things and words, cannot be translated. A German is almost incapable of presto [quick tempo] in his language and thus, as you can reasonably infer, is also incapable of many of the most delightful and most daring nuances of free and free-spirited thinking. Just as the buffoon and satyr are foreign to him, in body and conscience, so Aristophanes and Petronius are untranslatable for him. Everything solemn, slow moving, ceremonially massive, all lengthy and boring varieties in style are developed among the Germans in a lavish diversity. You must forgive me for the fact that even Goethe’s prose, with its mixture of stiffness and daintiness, is no exception, as a mirror image of the “good old time” to which it belongs, and as an expression of German taste in an age when there still was a “German taste,” a rococo taste in moribus et artibus [in customs and the arts].17 Lessing is an exception, thanks to his play-actor’s nature, which understood a great deal and knew how to do many things. He was not the translator of Bayle for nothing and was happy to take refuge in Diderot’s or Voltaire’s company—and even happier among the Roman writers of comic drama. In tempo, Lessing also loved free-spiritedness, the flight from Germany. But how could the German language—even in the prose of a Lessing—imitate the tempo of Machiavelli, who in his Prince allows one to breathe the fine dry air of Florence and cannot not help presenting the most serious affairs in a boisterous allegrissimo [very quick tempo], perhaps not without a malicious artistic feeling about what a contrast he was risking—long, difficult, hard, dangerous ideas, and a galloping tempo and the very best, most high-spirited of moods.18 Finally, who could even venture a German translation of Petronius, who was the master of the presto—more so than any great musician so far—in invention, ideas, words. Ultimately what is so important about all the swamps of the sick, nasty world, even “the ancient world,” when someone like him has feet of wind, drive, and breath, the liberating scorn of a wind which makes everything healthy, as he makes everything run! And so far as Aristophanes is concerned, that transfiguring, complementary spirit for whose sake we excuse all Hellenism for having existed, provided that we have understood in all profundity everything that needs to be forgiven and transfigured;—I don’t know what allows me to dream about Plato’s secrecy and sphinx-like nature more than that petit fait [small fact], which fortunately has been preserved, that under the pillow on his death bed people found no “Bible,” nothing Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic—but something by Aristophanes. How could even a Plato have endured life—a Greek life, to which he said no—without an Aristophanes! —
29
It’s the business of very few people to be independent:— that is a right of the strong. And whoever attempts it—even with the best right to it, but without being compelled to—shows by that action that he is probably not only strong but exuberantly daring. He is entering a labyrinth; he is increasing a thousand-fold the dangers which life already brings with it, not the least of which is the fact that no one’s eyes see how and where he goes astray, gets isolated, and is torn to pieces by some cavern-dwelling Minotaur of conscience.19 Suppose such a person comes to a bad end, that happens so far away from men’s understanding that they feel nothing and have no sympathy:— and he cannot go back any more! He cannot even go back to human pity! —
30
Our loftiest insights must—and should!—ring out like foolishness, under some circumstances like crimes, when in some forbidden way they come to the ears of those for whom they are not suitable and who are not predestined to hear them. The exoteric and the esoteric views, as people earlier differentiated them among philosophers, with Indians as with Greeks, Persians, and Muslims, in short, wherever people believed in a hierarchy and not in equality and equal rights—this differentiation does not arise so much from the fact that the exoteric view stands outside and looks, assesses, measures, and judges from the outside, not from the inside: the more essential point is that the exoteric view sees the matter looking up from underneath, but the esoteric sees it looking
