tragic effect, and if we gathered all the sorrow of the world into one sorrow, who could dare to decide if a glance at it would necessarily seduce and compel us to pity and thus to a doubling of that sorrow? . . . What serves the higher kind of men as nourishment or refreshment must be almost poison to a very different and lower kind of man. The virtues of the common man would perhaps amount to vices and weaknesses in a philosopher; it could be possible that a higher kind of person, if he is degenerating and nearing his end, only then acquires characteristics for whose sake people in the lower world, into which he has sunk, would find it necessary to honour him as a saint from now on. There are books which have an opposite value for the soul and for health, depending on whether the lower soul, the lower vitality, or the higher and more powerful soul makes use of them: with the first group, the books are dangerous, shattering, disintegrating; with the second group, they are a herald’s summons which provokes the bravest to show their courage. Books for the whole world always smell foul: the stink of small people clings to them. Where the folk eat and drink, even where they worship, the place usually stinks. One should not go into churches if one wants to breathe clean air.
31
In their young years, people worship and despise still without that art of subtlety which constitutes the greatest gain in life. And it’s reasonable enough that they must atone, with some difficulty, for having bombarded men and things in such a way with Yes and No. Everything is arranged so that the worst of all tastes, the taste for the absolute, will be terribly parodied and misused until people learn to put some art into their feelings and even prefer risking an attempt with artificiality, as the real artists of life do. The anger and reverence typical of the young do not seem to ease up until they have sufficiently distorted men and things so that they can vent themselves on them.—Youth is in itself already something fraudulent and deceptive. Later, when the young soul, tortured by nothing but disappointments, finally turns back against itself suspiciously, still hot and wild, even in its suspicion and pangs of conscience, how it rages against itself from this point on, how it tears itself apart impatiently, how it takes revenge for its lengthy self-deception, just as if it had been a voluntary blindness! In this transition people punish themselves through their mistrust of their own feeling; they torment their enthusiasm with doubt; indeed, they already feel good conscience as a danger, as a veiling of the self, so to speak, and exhaustion of their finer honesty. Above all, people take sides, basically the side against “the young.”— A decade later, they understand that all this was also still—youth!
32
Throughout the lengthiest period of human history—we call it the prehistoric age—the value or the lack of value in an action was derived from its consequences. The action in itself was thus considered just as insignificant as its origin, but, in somewhat the same way as even today in China an honour or disgrace reaches back from the child to the parents, so then it was the backward working power of success or lack of success which taught people to consider an action good or bad. Let’s call this period the pre-moralistic period of humanity: the imperative “Know thyself!” was then still unknown. In the last ten millennia, by contrast, in a few large regions of the earth people have come, step by step, a great distance in allowing the value of an action to be determined, no longer by its consequences, but by its origin. As a whole, this was a great event, a considerable improvement in vision and standards, the unconscious influence of the ruling power of aristocratic values and of faith in “origins,” the sign of a period which one can designate moralistic in a narrower sense: with it the first attempt at self- knowledge was undertaken. Instead of the consequences, the origin: what a reversal of perspective! And this reversal was surely attained only after lengthy battles and variations! Of course, in the process a disastrous new superstition, a peculiar narrowing of interpretation, gained control. People interpreted the origin of an action in the most particular sense as an origin from an intention. People became unanimous in believing that the value of an action lay in the value of the intention behind it. The intention as the entire origin and prehistory of an action: in accordance with this bias people on earth have, almost right up to the most recent times, given moral approval, criticized, judged, and also practised philosophy. But today shouldn’t we have reached the point where we must once again make up our minds about a reversal and fundamental shift in values, thanks to a further inward contemplation and profundity in human beings? Are we not standing on the threshold of a period which we might at first designate negatively as beyond morality, today, when, at least among us immoralists, the suspicion stirs that the decisive value of an action may lie precisely in what is unintentional in it and that all its intentionality, everything which we can see in it, know, “become conscious of,” still belongs to its surface layer and skin— which, like every skin, indicates something but conceals even more? In short, we believe that the intention is only a sign and a symptom, something which still needs interpretation, and furthermore a sign which carries too many meanings and, thus, by itself alone means almost nothing. We think that morality, in the earlier sense, that is, a morality based on intentions, has been a prejudice, something rash and perhaps provisional, something along the lines of astrology and alchemy, but, in any case, something that must be overcome. The overpowering of morality, in a certain sense even the self-conquering of morality: let that be the name for that long secret work which remains reserved for the finest and most honest, and also the most malicious, consciences nowadays, as the living touchstones of the soul.
33
That is the only way: we must mercilessly put in question and bring before the court feelings of devotion, sacrificing for one’s neighbour, the entire morality of self-renunciation, and, in exactly the same way, the aesthetic of “disinterested contemplation,” according to which the castration of art seductively enough tries these days to create a good conscience for itself. There is much too much magic and sweetness in those feelings “for others,” “not for myself,” for us not to find it necessary to grow doubly mistrustful here and to ask, “Are these not perhaps—seductions?”— The fact that those feelings please—the person who has them and the one who enjoys their fruits, as well as the one who merely looks on—this still provides no argument for them. On the contrary, that demands immediate caution. So let’s be cautious!
34
No matter what philosophical standpoint people may adopt nowadays, from every point of view the falsity of the world in which we think we live is the most certain and firmest thing which our eyes are still capable of apprehending:— for that we find reason after reason, which would like to entice us into conjectures about a fraudulent principle in the “essence of things.” But anyone who makes our very thinking, that is, “the spirit,” responsible for the falsity of the world—an honourable solution which every conscious or unconscious advocatus dei [pleader for god] uses —: whoever takes this world, together with space, time, form, and movement as a false inference, such a person would at least have good ground finally to learn to be distrustful of all thinking itself. Wouldn’t it be the case that thinking has played the greatest of all tricks on us up to this point? And what guarantee would there be that thinking would not continue to do what it has always done? In all seriousness: the innocence of thinkers has something touching, something inspiring reverence, which permits them even today still to present themselves before consciousness with the request that it give them honest answers: for example, to the question whether it is “real,” and why it really keeps itself so absolutely separate from the outer world, and similar sorts of questions. The belief in “immediate certainties” is a moral naivete which brings honour to us philosophers—but we should not be “merely moral” men! Setting aside morality, this belief is a stupidity, which brings us little honour! It may be the case that in bourgeois life the constant willingness to suspect is considered a sign of a “bad character” and thus belongs among those things thought unwise. Here among us, beyond the bourgeois world and its affirmations and denials—what is there to stop us from being unwise and saying the philosopher has an absolute right to a “bad character,” as the being who up to this point on earth has
