A NIETZSCHE READER

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE was born near Leipzig in 1844, the son of a Lutheran clergyman. He attended the famous Pforta School, then went to university at Bonn and at Leipzig, where he studied philology and read Schopenhauer. When he was only twenty-four he was appointed to the chair of classical philology at Basle University; he stayed there until his health forced him into retirement in 1879. While at Basle he made and broke his friendship with Wagner, participated as an ambulance orderly in the Franco-Prussian War, and published The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Untimely Meditations (1873–6) and the first part of Human, All Too Human (1878; two supplements entitled Assorted Opinions and Maxims and The Wanderer and his Shadow followed in 1879 and 1880 respectively). From 1880 until his final collapse in 1889, except for brief interludes, he divorced himself from everyday life and, supported by his university pension, he lived mainly in France, Italy and Switzerland. The Dawn appeared in 1881 followed by The Gay Science in the autumn of 1882. Thus Spoke Zarathustra was written between 1883 and 1885, and his last completed books were Ecce Homo, an autobiography, and Nietzsche contra Wagner. He became insane in 1889 and remained in a condition of mental and physical paralysis until his death in 1900.

R. J. HOLLINGDALE translated eleven of Nietzsche’s books and published two books about him; he also translated works by, among others, Schopenhauer, Goethe, E. T. A. Hoffman, Lichtenberg and Theodor Fontane, many of these for Penguin Classics. He was the honorary president of the British Nietzsche Society. R. J. Hollingdale died on 28 September 2001. In its obituary The Times described him as ‘Britain’s foremost postwar Nietzsche specialist’ and the Guardian paid tribute to his ‘inspired gift for German translation’. Richard Gott wrote that he ‘brought fresh generations – through fluent and intelligent translation – to read and relish Nietzsche’s inestimable thought’.

Professor Richard Schacht, Executive Director of the North American Nietzsche Society, said that ‘Hollingdale and Walter Kaufmann, his sometime collaborator, deserve much of the credit for Nietzsche’s rehabilitation during the third quarter of the twentieth century. It is hard to imagine what Nietzsche’s fate in the English-speaking world would have been without them. All of us in Nietzsche studies today are in Hollingdale’s debt’.

A Nietzsche Reader

Selected and translated with an
Introduction by R.J. HOLLINGDALE

PENGUIN BOOKS

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This translation first published in 1977

Reprinted with a new Chronology and Further Reading 2003

33

Introduction, selection and translation copyright © R.J. Hollingdale, 1977

All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

9780141921716

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

FURTHER READING

KEY TO TITLE INITIALS

PREFACE

PART ONE

Philosophy and Philosophers

Logic, Epistemology, Metaphysics

Morality

Art and Aesthetics

Psychological Observations

Religion

PART TWO

Nihilism

Anti-Nihilism

PART THREE

Will to Power

Superman

Eternal Recurrence

POSTSCRIPTS

A Short Lexicon

Maxims and Reflections

‘The genius of the heart …’

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHRONOLOGY

INTRODUCTION

A Nietzsche Reader is a compendium of Nietzsche’s philosophizing; it offers the reader an overview of that terrain in the hope that he/she will afterwards want to explore it. I have selected from Nietzsche’s writings passages which I think essential for an understanding of him – in the knowledge that no selection can do justice to the work as a whole, and that any selection must to a greater or less extent be a simplification and thus to some extent a falsification of it. This selection from Nietzsche is not presented as a substitute for studying all of Nietzsche: its ambition is to lure on to that undertaking.

A generalizing introduction is, I hope, unnecessary: the compendium ought to explain itself. A passage-by-passage commentary ought likewise to be unnecessary: it ought to be its own commentary – Nietzsche commenting on himself. But two kinds of explanation are called for: explanation of the method of selection and of the principle of selection. The method first.

Selection is made from Nietzsche’s philosophical works: that is, from the series Human, All Too Human (1878) to The Anti-Christ (1888), plus the autobiography Ecce Homo (1888). The works published before Human, the Nachlass and all other writings are excluded. The grounds for this limitation seem to me compelling and to reinforce one another. Firstly: the chief purpose of the Nietzsche Reader is to present Nietzsche as a philosopher, and it is in the series of books referred to that his philosophical opinions are primarily to be discovered. Secondly: a subsidiary purpose is to present Nietzsche as a stylist, and again it is in the series referred to that he so appears – these are the mature compositions upon which he in a stylistic sense worked. Third: the present book is intended to be readable straight through: if the selection has been made correctly it is only by reading it straight through that you will derive the maximum benefit from it: but the intrusion of any material other than Nietzsche’s mature writings would act against this intention (the Nachlass especially, being stylistically no more than notes and jottings, would cause the reader constantly to stumble). Fourth: limitation of space makes rigorous selection a necessity, and in this process the writings of the second rank select themselves out. Fifth: I agree with Karl Schlechta that it is ‘a demand of intellectual tact to understand an author primarily as he wanted himself to be publicly understood’ and in the present context this means limiting oneself to those works Nietzsche published or intended for publication. Sixth and last: the works from Human to Ecce Homo lend themselves well to excerpting; the immature works before Human do not. A volume of ‘representative extracts’ would presumably have to include something from The Birth of Tragedy: the purpose of the present volume does not require it.

The construction of the book is as slight as the presuppositions behind it permit. In Part One Nietzsche is seen as for a great part of the time he ought to be seen: as a ‘problem philosopher’ within the Western philosophical tradition treating of the conventional subjects of Western philosophy and speculation. Part Three presents the development and enunciation of his specific philosophy of ‘will to power’ and its consequences and ramifications. The short Part Two is the mid-point of his thought: the overcoming of the consequences of nihilistic and destructive speculation through a resolve to find a new mode of transcendence. Within each of the sections into which the parts are divided the selections are ordered strictly chronologically. The reasons for this are, firstly, that Nietzsche’s philosophy is not a series of conclusions but essentially a developing body of thought (and a chronological presentation preserves this development); secondly, that a chronological presentation also preserves the development of his style, the final phase of which is so vastly different from the first that their juxtaposition is not to be thought of except for the purpose (not pursued here) of demonstrating this difference. As a natural consequence of the development of his thinking the proportion of later to earlier work within each section gradually increases: so that, although not explicitly ordered chronologically, the book as a whole possesses a chronological movement.

The Preface offers a selection of Nietzsche’s dicta on how his work should be read; the Postscripts offer a selection of opinions and maxims on miscellaneous topics excluded from the three main parts. These too are ordered chronologically.

Three points in squared brackets indicate an omission; three points without brackets are Nietzsche’s own punctuation and do not indicate an omission.

The construction of Nietzsche upon which the selection and arrangement of the present anthology are based is – within the briefest possible compass – as follows. I see his distinctive contribution to European thought to lie in his perception that Western man was facing a radical change in his relationship with ‘truth’: a change that would come about when he recognized that the metaphysical, religious, moral and rational truths which were formerly both backbone and substance of the Western tradition were in fact errors. This conclusion is, or will be, a consequence of the pretension of such truths to absoluteness, a pretension which is being undercut by the evolutionism of Hegel and Darwin. Modern man is acquiring the idea of ‘becoming’ as his ruling idea: and if everything evolves, then ‘truth’, too, evolves – so that, if ‘truth’ is synonymous with absolute truth true for all time and for everybody, a loss of belief in the truth of truth is on the way. ‘Everything evolves’ will come to mean ‘nothing is true’.

In place of this paradoxical formulation Nietzsche proposes to say that truth is a matter of perspective. A metaphysical, religious, moral or rational statement can be called true only for the perspective of the mind which views it: viewed absolutely, any statement of this sort is false.

The truths subverted by evolutionism are being replaced by scientific truth: the experimentally verifiable statements of empirical science. But of these Nietzsche says, firstly, that they are not, as they pretend to be, objective – that is, discoveries about the world – but a human arrangement (Zurecht-machung) and interpretation of an essentially structureless and irrational universe so that it can be ‘understood’ and lived in; secondly, that scientific statements are statements only of fact (or alleged fact) and never judgemental, value and meaning being outside the sphere of science – so that one effect of the substitution of scientific truth for other kinds of truth is to deprive the world of meaning. Science answers the question Why? only as if it meant ‘from what cause’: when it means ‘to what end?’ the question Why? now remains unanswered.

The consciousness that ‘life’ is a phenomenon that cannot be explained, and the world and mankind facts without meaning, is coming: and Nietzsche undertakes the experiment of an anticipatory account of this nihilist state of mind.

The subsequently most notorious part of this account is his delineation of moral nihilism. There is no ‘moral law’, no ‘moral world-order’: ‘moral meaning’, being a value, eludes scientific investigation, since science cannot establish values. Empirical method can discover why morality exists (what causes it), but thus demonstrates that moral ‘truths’ are true only from a particular perspective: that ‘there are moralities but no morality’. But this disintegration of the moral order is only an aspect of Nietzsche’s elimination of all order.

The corollary to ‘nothing is true’ is ‘everything is permitted’, and in describing this state of things Nietzsche becomes the ‘prophet of great wars’ and herald of convulsions and disasters: his prognostications of decline, of a collapse of morale through a consciousness of purposelessness, also belong here.

The delineation of the nihilist world is a necessary preliminary to transcending it: but if the metaphysical is recognized as illusory and our world as the only world, a new mode of transcendence of this world will have to be non-metaphysical. Is a non-metaphysical transcendence possible? Nietzsche answers with his theory of ‘will to power’. He sought to explain the admired attributes and achievements of mankind as products of ‘sublimated will to power’ – of the capacity to transform the drive to power over the world and other men into power over oneself: he was thus compelled to advocate ‘strong will to power’ and to see in conflict and the aggressive instincts an essential component of the human psychical economy. He embodied this conception of a non-metaphysical transcendence in the Übermensch: the ‘superman’ who is at once the actuality and symbol of sublimated will to power and thus the supreme advocate of life-affirmation through acceptance of the totality of life, and especially of the suffering entailed in living, in which aspect he is also described as ‘the Dionysian man’. Dionysian acceptance of life is then put to the hardest test through the postulation of ‘the eternal recurrence of the same events’.

The continuing tension between the nihilist and the transcendent aspects of what had now become ‘Nietzsche’s philosophy’ prevent it, however, from hardening into a dogmatic doctrine – it remains to the end an experiment in reorientating oneself within a world of total uncertainty.

FURTHER READING

David B. Allison, Reading the New Nietzsche (2001)

MaudeMarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Morality (1990)

R. J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy (1965; 1999)

Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality (2002)

Bernd Magnus and Kathleen Higgins (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (1996)

Alexander Nehemas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (1985)

F. Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, introduction by M. Tanner (1982)

______, Dithyrambs of Dionysus, trans. with introduction and notes R. J. Hollingdale (1984; 2001)

______, Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, introduction by J. P. Stern (1983)

John Richardson and Brian Leiter (eds.), Nietzsche (2001)

Rudiger Safranski, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, trans. Shelley Frisch (2002)

Henry Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice (1990)

Tracy Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (1988)

KEY TO TITLE INITIALS

A		The Anti-Christ. Written in September 1888, published in 1895.
AOM		Assorted Opinions and Maxims. Published in 1879 as the First Supplement to Human, All Too Human; 2nd edition published in 1886.
BGE		Beyond Good and Evil. Published in 1886.
D		Daybreak. Published in 1881, 2nd edition published in 1886.
EH		Ecce Homo. Written in the autumn of 1888, published in 1908.
GM		On the Genealogy of Morals. Published in 1887.
GS		The Gay Science. Published in 1882, 2nd, expanded edition published in 1887.
HA		Human, All Too Human. Published in 1878, 2nd edition published in 1886.
T		Twilight of the Idols. Written in the summer of 1888, published in 1889.
W		The Wagner Case. Published in 1888.
WS		The Wanderer and his Shadow. Published in 1880 as the Second Supplement to Human, All Too Human; 2nd edition published in 1886.
Z		Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Parts I and II published in 1883, Part III published in 1884, Part IV written in 1885, published in 1892.

The numbers after the initials at the foot of each extract refer to the section of the book from which the extract is taken in each case.

PREFACE

1

Dangerous books. – Somebody remarked: ‘I can tell by my own reaction to it that this book is harmful.’ But let him only wait and perhaps one day he will admit to himself that this same book has done him a great service by bringing out the hidden sickness of his heart and making it visible. – Altered opinions do not alter a man’s character (or do so very little); but they do illuminate individual aspects of the constellation of his personality which with a different constellation of opinions had hitherto remained dark and unrecognizable.

[AOM 58]

2

Against the censurers of brevity. – Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field, and has as yet reflected on it not at all, sees in everything said briefly something embryonic, not without censuring the author for having served him up such immature and unripened fare.

[AOM 127]

3

The worst readers. – The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

[AOM 137]

4

Marks of the good writer. – Good writers have two things in common; they prefer to be understood rather than admired; and they do not write for knowing and over-acute readers.

[AOM 138]

5

Of all that is written I love only that which is written with blood. Write with blood: and you will discover that blood is spirit.

It is not easy to understand the blood of another: I hate the reading idler.

He who knows the reader does nothing further for the reader. Another century of readers – and spirit itself will stink.

That everyone is allowed to learn to read will in the long run ruin not only writing but thinking, too.

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart.

In the mountains the shortest route is from peak to peak: but for that you must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks: and those to whom they are addressed should be big and tall of stature.

The air thin and pure, danger near and the spirit full of a joyful wickedness: these things go well together.

I want hobgoblins around me, for I am courageous. Courage which scares away phantoms creates hobgoblins for itself – courage wants to laugh.

I no longer feel as you do: this cloud which I see under me, this blackness and heaviness I laugh at – precisely this is your thundercloud.

You look up when you desire to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted.

Who of you can at once laugh and be exalted?

He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary.

Courageous, untroubled, mocking, violent – that is what wisdom wants us to be: wisdom is a woman and loves only a warrior. […]

[ZI Of Reading and Writing]

6

[…] It is not for nothing that one has been a philologist, perhaps one is a philologist still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading: – in the end one also writes slowly. Nowadays it is not only my habit, it is also to my taste – a malicious taste, perhaps? – no longer to write anything which does not reduce to despair every sort of man who is ‘in a hurry’. For philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow – it is a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But for precisely this reason it is more necessary than ever today, by precisely this means does it entice and enchant us the most, in the midst of an age of ‘work’, that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to ‘get everything done’ at once, including every old or new book: – this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers … My patient friends, this book desires for itself only perfect readers and philologists: learn to read me well! –

[D Preface (1886)]

7

On the question of intelligibility. – One does not want only to be understood when one writes but just as surely not to be understood. It is absolutely no objection to a book if anyone finds it unintelligible: perhaps that was part of its author’s intention – he did not want to be understood by ‘anyone’. When it wants to communicate itself, every nobler spirit and taste also selects its audience; in selecting them it also debars ‘the others’. All the more subtle rules of style have their origin here: they hold at arm’s length, they create distance, they forbid ‘admission’, understanding – while at the same time they alert the ears of those who are related to us through their ears. But between ourselves and with reference to my own case – I want neither my ignorance nor the ebullience of my temperament to hinder my being intelligible to you, my friends: however much my ebullience may compel me to get hold of a thing quickly if I am to get hold of it at all. For I regard profound problems as I do a cold bath – quick in, quick out. That one thereby fails to get down deep enough, fails to reach the depths, is the superstition of hydrophobics, of the enemies of cold water; they speak without experience. Oh! Great cold makes one quick! – And by the way: does a thing really remain unintelligible and unrecognized if it is touched, viewed, illumined simply in passing? Does one absolutely have to sit down on it first? to have brooded on it as on an egg? […] There are, at the very least, truths of a peculiar timidity and ticklishness which one can seize hold of only suddenly – which one must surprise or leave alone … My brevity has finally another value: within such questions as engage my attention I have to say many things briefly so that they may be heard even more briefly. For as an immoralist one must guard against corrupting innocence – I mean the asses and old maids of both sexes who have got nothing from life except their innocence; more, my writings ought to inspire and uplift them and encourage them to virtue. […] So much as regards brevity; my ignorance, of which I make no secret even to myself, is a worse matter. There are times when I am ashamed of it; also, to be sure, times when I am ashamed of being ashamed. Perhaps we philosophers are all of us ill-equipped when it comes to knowledge: science is expanding, the most scholarly of us are on the point of discovering that they know too little. Still, it would be even worse if things were otherwise – if we knew too much; our task is and remains above all not to take ourselves for what we are not. We are something other than scholars; though the fact cannot be got round that, among other things, we are also scholarly. We have other requirements, another way of growing, another way of digesting: we need more, we also need less. For how much nourishment a spirit requires there is no formula; but if its taste is for independence, for rapid coming and going, for wandering, perhaps for adventures to which only the swiftest are equal, then it prefers to live free on a light diet than unfree and stuffed. Not fat, but the greatest suppleness and strength is what a good dancer wants from his food – and I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his ‘divine service’…

[GS 381 (1887)]

8

If this writing is unintelligible to anyone and jars on his ears the fault is, it seems to me, not necessarily mine. It is clear enough, assuming, as I do assume, that one has read my earlier writings and has not spared some effort in doing so: for they are not easily accessible. As regards my Zarathustra, for example, I count no one as being familiar with it who has not at some time been profoundly wounded and at some time profoundly enraptured by every word in it: for only then may he enjoy the privilege of reverentially participating in the halcyon element out of which that work was born, in its sunlit brightness, remoteness, breadth and certainty. In other cases the aphoristic form creates difficulty: it arises from the fact that today this form is not taken sufficiently seriously. An aphorism, properly stamped and moulded, has not been ‘deciphered’ when it has simply been read; one has then rather to begin its exegesis, for which is required an art of exegesis. […] To be sure, to practise reading as an art in this fashion one thing above all is needed, precisely the thing which has nowadays been most thoroughly unlearned – and that is why it will be some time before my writings are ‘readable’ – a thing for which one must be almost a cow and in any event not a ‘modern man’: rumination…

[GM Preface 8]

9

[…] I am often asked why I really write in German: nowhere am I read worse than in the Fatherland. But who knows, after all, whether I even wish to be read today? – To create things upon which time tries its teeth in vain; in form and in substance to strive for a little immortality – I have never been modest enough to demand less of myself. The aphorism, the apophthegm, are the forms of ‘eternity’; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book – what everyone else does not say in a book. […]

[T Expeditions of an Untimely Man 51]

10

[…] The conditions under which one understands me and then necessarily understands – I know them all too well. One must be honest in intellectual matters to the point of harshness to so much as endure my seriousness, my passion. One must be accustomed to living on mountains – to seeing the wretched ephemeral chatter of politics and national egoism beneath one. One must have become indifferent, one must never ask whether truth is useful or whether it is a fatality … A preference, born of strength, for questions for which no one today has the courage; courage for the forbidden; predestination for the labyrinth. An experience out of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for the most distant things. A new conscience for truths which have hitherto remained dumb. And the will to economy in the grand style; to keeping one’s force, one’s enthusiasm in bounds … Reverence for oneself; love for oneself; unconditional freedom with respect to oneself …

Very well! These alone are my readers, my rightful readers, my predestined readers: what do the rest matter? – The rest are merely mankind. – One must be superior to mankind in force, in loftiness of soul – in contempt …

[A Foreword]

11

I am one thing, my writings are another. – Here, before I speak of these writings themselves, I shall touch on the question of their being understood or not being understood. I shall do so as perfunctorily as is fitting: for the time for this question has certainly not yet come. My time has not yet come, some are born posthumously. – One day or other institutions will be needed in which people live and teach as I understand living and teaching: perhaps even chairs for the interpretation of Zarathustra will then be established. But it would be a complete contradiction of myself if I expected ears and hands for my truths already today: that I am not heard today, that no one today knows how to take from me, is not only comprehensible, it even seems to me right. I do not want to be taken for what I am not – and that requires that I do not take myself for what I am not […] It seems to me that to take a book of mine into his hands is one of the rarest distinctions anyone can confer upon himself – I even assume he removes his shoes when he does so – not to speak of boots … When Doctor Heinrich von Stein once honestly complained that he understood not one word of my Zarathustra, I told him that was quite in order: to have understood, that is to say experienced, six sentences of that book would raise one to a higher level of mortals than ‘modern’ man could attain to. How could I, with this feeling of distance, even want the ‘modern men’ I know – to read me! […] Not that I should like to underestimate the pleasure which the innocence in the rejection of my writings has given me. This very summer just gone, at a time when, with my own weighty, too heavily weighty literature, I was perhaps throwing all the rest of literature off its balance, a professor of Berlin University kindly gave me to understand that I ought really to avail myself of a different form: no one read stuff like mine. – In the end it was not Germany but Switzerland which offered the two extreme cases. An essay of Dr V. Widmann in the Bund on Beyond Good and Evil under the title ‘Nietzsche’s Dangerous Book’, and a general report on my books as a whole on the part of Herr Karl Spitteler, also in the Bund, constitute a maximum in my life – of what I take care not to say … The latter, for example, dealt with my Zarathustra as an advanced exercise in style, with the request that I might later try to provide some content; Dr Widmann expressed his respect for the courage with which I strive to abolish all decent feelings. – Through a little trick of chance every sentence here was, with a consistency I had to admire, a truth stood on its head: remarkably enough, all one had to do was to ‘revalue all values’ in order to hit the nail on the head with regard to me – instead of hitting my head with a nail … All the more reason for me to attempt an explanation. – Ultimately, no one can extract from things, books included, more than he already knows. What one has no access to through experience one has no ear for. Now let us imagine an extreme case: that a book speaks of nothing but events which lie outside the possibility of general or even of rare experience – that it is the first language for a new range of experiences. In this case simply nothing will be heard, with the acoustical illusion that where nothing is heard there is nothing … This is in fact my average experience and, if you like, the originality of my experience. Whoever believed he had understood something of me had dressed up something out of me after his own image – not uncommonly an antithesis of me, for instance an ‘idealist’; whoever had understood nothing of me denied that I came into consideration at all. […]

[EH Why I Write Such Excellent Books 1]

12

I know my privileges as a writer to some extent: in individual cases it has also been put to me how greatly habituation to my writings ‘ruins’ taste. One can simply no longer endure other books, philosophical ones least of all. To enter this noble and delicate world is an incomparable distinction – to do so one absolutely must not be a German; it is in the end a distinction one has to have earned. But he who is related to me through loftiness of will experiences when he reads me real ecstasies of learning: for I come from heights no bird has ever soared to, I know abysses into which no foot has ever yet strayed. I have been told it is impossible to put a book of mine down – I even disturb the night’s rest … There is altogether no prouder and at the same time more exquisite kind of book than my books – they attain here and there the highest thing that can be attained on earth, cynicism; one needs the most delicate fingers as well as the bravest fists if one is to master them. Any infirmity of soul excludes one from them once and for all, any dyspepsia, even, does so: one must have no nerves, one must have a joyful belly. Not only does the poverty, the hole-and-corner air of a soul exclude it from them – cowardice, uncleanliness, secret revengefulness in the entrails does so far more: a word from me drives all bad instincts into the face. I have among my acquaintances several experimental animals on whom I bring home to myself the various, very instructively various reactions to my writings. Those who want to have nothing to do with their contents, my so-called friends for example, become ‘impersonal’: they congratulate me on having ‘done it’ again – progress is apparent, too, in a greater cheerfulness of tone … The completely vicious ‘spirits’, the ‘beautiful souls’, the thoroughly and utterly mendacious have no idea at all what to do with these books – consequently they see the same as beneath them, the beautiful consistency of all ‘beautiful souls’. The horned cattle among my acquaintances, mere Germans if I may say so, give me to understand they are not always of my opinion, though they are sometimes … I have heard this said even of Zarathustra … Any ‘feminism’ in a person, or in a man, likewise closes the gates on me: one will never be able to enter this labyrinth of daring knowledge. One must never have spared oneself, harshness must be among one’s habits, if one is to be happy and cheerful among nothing but hard truths. When I picture a perfect reader, I always picture a monster of courage and curiosity, also something supple, cunning, cautious, a born adventurer and discoverer. […]

[EH Why I Write Such Excellent Books 3]

13

I know my fate. One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something frightful – of a crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience, of a decision evoked against everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sanctified. I am not a man, I am dynamite. – And with all that there is nothing in me of a founder of a religion – religions are affairs of the rabble, I have need of washing my hands after contact with religious people … I do not want ‘believers’, I think I am too malicious to believe in myself, I never speak to masses … I have a terrible fear I shall one day be pronounced holy: one will guess why I bring out this book beforehand, it is intended to prevent people from making mischief with me … I do not want to be a saint, rather even a buffoon … Perhaps I am a buffoon … And nonetheless, or rather not nonetheless – for there has hitherto been nothing more mendacious than saints – the truth speaks out of me. – But my truth is dreadful: for hitherto the lie has been called truth. – Revaluation of all values: that is my formula for an act of supreme coming-to-oneself on the part of mankind which in me has become flesh and genius. It is my fate to have to be the first decent human being, to know myself in opposition to the mendaciousness of millennia … I was the first to discover the truth, in that I was the first to sense – smell – the lie as lie … My genius is in my nostrils … I contradict as has never been contradicted and am nonetheless the opposite of a negative spirit. I am a bringer of good tidings such as there has never been, I know tasks from such a height that any conception of them has hitherto been lacking; only after me is it possible to hope again. With all that I am necessarily a man of fatality. For when truth steps into battle with the lie of millennia we shall have convulsions, an earthquake spasm, a transposition of valley and mountain such as has never been dreamed of. The concept politics has then become completely absorbed into a war of spirits, all the power-structures of the old society have been blown into the air – they one and all reposed on the lie: there will be wars such as there have never yet been on earth. Only after me will there be grand politics on earth. –

[EH Why I am a Destiny 1]