A people who crumble somewhere and become weak, but remain strong and healthy on the whole, are able to accept the infection of the new and absorb it to their advantage. In the case of the individual the task of education is this: to put him on his path so firmly and surely that, as a whole, he can never again be diverted. Then, however, the educator must wound him, or utilize the wounds destiny inflicts upon him; and when pain and need have thus developed, something new and noble can then be inoculated in the wounded spots. His whole nature will absorb this, and later, in its fruits, show the ennoblement.
Concerning the state, Machiavelli says that “the form of government is of very little importance, although the half-educated think otherwise. The great goal of statesmanship should be duration, which outweighs everything else because it is far more valuable than freedom.” Only where the greatest duration is securely established and guaranteed is continual development and ennobling inoculation at all possible. Of course, authority, the dangerous companion of all duration, will usually try to resist this process.
[265]
Reason in the schools. The schools have no more important task than to teach rigorous thinking, cautious judgment, and consistent inference; therefore they should leave alone whatever is not suitable for these operations: religion, for example. After all, they can be sure that later on man’s fogginess, habit, and need will slacken the bow of an all-too-taut thinking. But as far as the influence of the schools reaches, they should enforce what is essential and distinctive in man: “reason and science, man’s very highest power”—so Goethe, at least, judges.
The great scientist von Baer sees the superiority of Europeans over Asiatics in their trained ability to give reasons for what they believe—something of which the latter are wholly incapable. Europe has gone through the school of consistent, critical thinking; Asia still does not know how to distinguish between truth and poetry, and is not conscious of whether its convictions are derived from personal observation and methodical thinking or from fantasies.
Europe was made Europe by reason in the schools; in the Middle Ages Europe was on the way to becoming a piece and an appendix of Asia again—by losing the scientific sense that it owed to the Greeks.
[271]
The art of drawing inferences. The greatest progress men have made lies in their learning how to draw correct inferences. That is by no means something natural, as Schopenhauer assumes when he says: “Of inference, all are capable; of judgment, only a few.” It has been learned only late, and it still has not gained dominance. False inferences are the rule in earlier times; and the mythology of all peoples, their magic and their superstition, their religious cults, their laws, are inexhaustible mines of proof for this proposition.
[281]
Higher culture is necessarily misunderstood. He who has but two strings on his instrument—like the scholars who, in addition to the urge for knowledge, have only the religious urge, instilled by education—does not understand those who can play on more strings. It is of the essence of the higher, multi-stringed culture that it is always misinterpreted by the lower culture—as happens, for example, when art is considered a disguised form of religion. Indeed, people who are only religious understand even science as a search of the religious feeling, just as deaf-mutes do not know what music is, if it is not visible movement.
[298]
The most dangerous party member. In every party there is one member who, by his all-too-devout pronouncement of the party principles, provokes the others to apostasy.
[303]
Why one contradicts. One often contradicts an opinion when it is really only the tone in which it has been presented that is unsympathetic.
[361]
The experience of Socrates. When one has become a master in some field one has usually, for that very reason, remained a complete amateur in most other things; but one judges just the other way around, as Socrates had already found out. This is what makes association with masters disagreeable.8
[380]
From the mother. Everyone carries in himself an image of woman derived from the mother; by this he is determined to revere women generally, or to hold them in low esteem, or to be generally indifferent to them.
[390]
Friendship with women. Women can form a friendship with a man very well; but to preserve it—to that end a slight physical antipathy must probably help.
[406]
Marriage as a long conversation. When marrying, one should ask oneself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this woman into your old age? Everything .else in marriage is transitory, but the most time during the association belongs to conversation.
[407]
Girls’ dreams. Inexperienced girls flatter themselves with the notion that it is within their power to make a man happy; later they learn that it means holding a man in low esteem to assume that only a girl is needed to make him happy. The vanity of women demands that a man be more than a happy husband.
[408]
Faust and Gretchen dying out. According to the very good insight of a scholar, the educated men of contemporary Germany resemble a mixture of Mephistopheles and Wagner, but certainly not Faust, whom our grandfathers, at least in their youth, still felt stirring within. Thus there are two reasons—to continue this proposition—why the Gretchens are not suitable for them. And since they are no longer desired, they apparently die out.
[424]
Something about the future of marriage. Those noble free-spirited women who have made the education and elevation of the female sex their task should not overlook one consideration: marriage, according to its highest conception as a friendship between the souls of two human beings of different sex, in other words, as it is hoped for in the future, concluded for the purpose of begetting and educating a new generation—such a marriage, which uses the sensual, as it were, only as a rare means to a greater end, probably requires, I fear, a natural aid: concubinage. If, for reasons of the husband’s health, the wife should also serve for the sole satisfaction of the sexual need, then the choice of a wife will be decisively influenced by a false consideration that is contrary to the aims suggested; the production of offspring becomes accidental, and a good education highly improbable. A good wife—who is supposed to be friend, helper, bearer of children, mother, head of the family, manager, and who may even have to stand at the head of her own business or office, quite apart from her husband—cannot at the same time be a concubine: generally, this would be asking too much of her. Thus the future might see a contrary development to what occurred in Periclean Athens: the men, who at that time found little more than concubines in their wives, turned to the Aspasias because they desired the attractions of a companionship that would liberate head and heart, as only the grace and spiritual suppleness of women can provide. All human institutions, like marriage, permit only a limited degree of practical idealization; failing that, crude remedies become immediately necessary.
[444]
War. Against war one can say: It makes the victor stupid, the vanquished malignant. In favor of war: Through both of these effects it barbarizes and thereby makes more natural; it is a sleep or a winter for culture, and man emerges from it stronger for good and evil.
[462]
My utopia. In a better arrangement of society hard labor and the troubles of life will be meted out to those who suffer least from them; hence, to the most obtuse, and then, step by step, up to those who are most sensitive to the highest and most sublimated kinds of suffering and who thus still suffer when life is made easiest.
[465]
Resurrection of the spirit. On the political sickbed a people is usually rejuvenated and rediscovers its spirit, after having gradually lost it in seeking and preserving power. Culture owes its peaks to politically weak ages.
[475]
The European man and the abolition of nations. Trade and industry, books and letters, the way in which all higher culture is shared, the rapid change of house an
d scenery, the present nomadic life of everyone who is not a landowner—these circumstances necessarily produce a weakening, and finally the abolition, of nations, at least in Europe; and as a consequence of continual intermarriage there must develop a mixed race, that of the European man. . . . It is not the interest of the many (of peoples), as is often claimed, but above all the interest of certain royal dynasties and also of certain classes in commerce and society, that drives to nationalism. Once one has recognized this, one should declare oneself without embarrassment as a good European and work actively for the amalgamation of nations. In this process the Germans could be helpful by virtue of their long proven skill as interpreters and mediators among peoples.
Incidentally, the whole problem of the Jews exists only in nation states, for here their energy and higher intelligence, their accumulated capital of spirit and will, gathered from generation to generation through a long schooling in suffering, must become so preponderant as to arouse mass envy and hatred. In almost all contemporary nations, therefore—in direct proportion to the degree to which they act up nationalistically—the literary obscenity is spreading of leading the Jews to slaughter as scapegoats of every conceivable public and internal misfortune. As soon as it is no longer a matter of preserving nations, but of producing the strongest possible European mixed race, the Jew is just as useful and desirable an ingredient as any other national remnant. Unpleasant, even dangerous, qualities can be found in every nation and every individual: it is cruel to demand that the Jew be an exception. In him, these qualities may even be dangerous and revolting to an unusual degree; and perhaps the young stock-exchange Jew is altogether the most disgusting invention of mankind. In spite of that, I should like to know how much one must forgive a people in a total accounting when they have had the most painful history of all peoples, not without the fault of all of us, and when one owes to them the noblest man (Christ), the purest sage (Spinoza), the most powerful book, and the most effective moral law in the world. Moreover, in the darkest times of the Middle Ages, when the Asiatic cloud masses had gathered heavily over Europe, it was Jewish free-thinkers, scholars, and physicians who clung to the banner of enlightenment and spiritual independence in the face of the harshest personal pressures and defended Europe against Asia. We owe it to their exertions, not least of all, that a more natural, more rational, and certainly unmythical explanation of the world was eventually able to triumph again, and that the bond of culture which now links us with the enlightenment of Greco-Roman antiquity remained unbroken. If Christianity has done everything to orientalize the Occident, Judaism has helped significantly to occidentalize it again and again: in a certain sense this means as much as making Europe’s task and history a continuation of the Greek.
[482]
And to say it once more. Public opinions—private lazinesses.
[483]
Enemies of truth. Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
[536]
The value of insipid opponents. At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.
[579]
Not suitable as a party member. Whoever thinks much is not suitable as a party member: he soon thinks himself right through the party.
[635]
On the whole, scientific methods are at least as important as any other result of research: for it is upon the insight into method that the scientific spirit depends: and if these methods were lost, then all the results of science could not prevent a renewed triumph of superstition and nonsense. Clever people may learn as much as they wish of the results of science—still one will always notice in their conversation, and especially in their hypotheses, that they lack the scientific spirit; they do not have that instinctive mistrust of the aberrations of thought which through long training are deeply rooted in the soul of every scientific person. They are content to find any hypothesis at all concerning some matter; then they are all fire and flame for it and think that is enough. To have an opinion means for them to fanaticize for it and thenceforth to press it to their hearts as a conviction. If something is unexplained, they grow hot over the first notion that comes into their heads and looks like an explanation—which results progressively in the worst consequences, especially in the sphere of politics. For that reason everyone should now study at least one science from the bottom up: then he will know what method means and how important is the utmost circumspection. . . .
FROM Mixed Opinions and Maxims
EDITOR’S NOTE
In 1879 Nietzsche brought out another collection of aphorisms under this title, as a sequel to Human, All-Too-Human, published the year before.
[77]
Dissipation. The mother of dissipation is not joy but joylessness.
[95]
“Love.” The most subtle artifice that distinguishes Christianity from other religions is a word: it speaks of love. Thus it became the lyrical religion (whereas in both their other creations the Semites presented the world with heroic-epic religions). There is something so ambiguous and suggestive about the word love, something that speaks to memory and to hope, that even the lowest intelligence and the coldest heart still feel something of the glimmer of this word. The cleverest woman and the most vulgar man recall the relatively least selfish moments of their whole life, even if Eros has taken only a low flight with them; and for those countless ones who miss love, whether from their parents or their children or their beloved, and especially for people with sublimated sexuality, Christianity has always been a find.
[129]
Readers of aphorisms. The worst readers of aphorisms are the author’s friends if they are intent on guessing back from the general to the particular instance to which the aphorism owes its origin; for with such pot-peeking they reduce the author’s whole effort to nothing; so that they deservedly gain, not a philosophic outlook or instruction, but—at best, or at worst—nothing more than the satisfaction of vulgar curiosity.
[141]
Sign of rank. All poets and writers who are in love with the superlative want more than they are capable of.
[202]
Jokes. A joke is the epigram on the death of a feeling.
[231]
Humaneness in friendship and mastership. “If thou wilt go toward morning, then I will go toward evening”: to feel this way is a high sign of humaneness in a closer association: without this feeling, every friendship, every discipleship and pupilship, becomes at one time or another hypocrisy.
[248]
Way to a Christian virtue. Learning from one’s enemies is the best way toward loving them; for it makes us grateful to them.
[271]
Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life. The stage of life at which a philosopher found his doctrine reverberates through it; he cannot prevent this, however far above time and hour he may feel. Thus Schopenhauer’s philosophy remains the reflection of ardent and melancholy youth—it is no way of thinking for older people. And Plato’s philosophy recalls the middle thirties, when a cold and a hot torrent often roar toward each other, so that a mist and tender little clouds form—and under favorable circumstances and the rays of the sun, an enchanting rainbow.
[301]
The party man. The true party man learns no longer —he only experiences and judges; while Solon, who was never a party man but pursued his goal alongside and above the parties, or against them, is characteristically the father of that plain maxim in which the health and inexhaustibility of Athens is contained: “I grow old and always continue to learn.”
[357]
Unfaithfulness, a condition of mastership. Nothing avails: every master has but one disciple, and that one becomes unfaithful to him, for he too is destined for mastership.
[408]
The journey to Hades. I too have been in the underworld, like Odysseus, and I shall yet return there often; and not only sheep have I sacrificed to be able to talk with a few of the dead, but I have not spared my own blood. F
our pairs did not deny themselves to me as I sacrificed: Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. With these I must come to terms when I have long wandered by myself; they shall tell me whether I am right or wrong; to them I want to listen when, in the process, they tell each other whether they are right or wrong. . . .
FROM The Wanderer and His Shadow
EDITOR’S NOTE
This collection of aphorisms was first published in 1880, as the final sequel to Human, All-Too-Human.
[38]
The bite of conscience. The bite of conscience, like the bite of a dog into a stone, is a stupidity.