The Portable Nietzsche (11 page)

 

[173]

The eulogists of work
. Behind the glorification of “work” and the tireless talk of the “blessings of work” I find the same thought as behind the praise of impersonal activity for the public benefit: the fear of everything individual. At bottom, one now feels when confronted with work—and what is invariably meant is relentless industry from early till late—that such work is the best police, that it keeps everybody in harness and powerfully obstructs the development of reason, of covetousness, of the desire for independence. For it uses up a tremendous amount of nervous energy and takes it away from reflection, brooding, dreaming, worry, love, and hatred; it always sets a small goal before one's eyes and permits easy and regular satisfactions. In that way a society in which the members continually work hard will have more security: and security is now adored as the supreme goddess. And now—horrors!—it is precisely the “worker” who has become dangerous. “Dangerous individuals are swarming all around. And behind them, the danger of dangers: the individual.

 

[179]

As little state as possible
. All political and economic arrangements are not worth it, that precisely the most gifted spirits should be permitted, or even obliged, to manage them: such a waste of spirit is really worse than an extremity. These are and remain fields of work for the lesser heads, and other than lesser heads should not be at the service of this workshop: it were better to let the machine go to pieces again. . . . At such a price, one pays far too dearly for the “general security”; and what is most insane, one also produces the very opposite of the general security, as our dear century is undertaking to prove—as if it had never been proved before. To make society secure against thieves and fireproof and infinitely comfortable for every trade and activity, and to transform the state into Providence in the good and bad sense—these are low, mediocre, and not at all indispensable goals, for which one should not strive with the highest means and instruments anywhere in existence, the means one ought to reserve for the highest and rarest ends. Our time, however much it talks of economy, is a squanderer: it squanders what is most precious, the spirit.

 

[193]

Esprit and morality
. The Germans, who know the secret of being boring with spirit, knowledge, and feeling, and who have accustomed themselves to feel boredom as moral, fear the French esprit lest it prick out the eyes of morality—fear and yet are charmed, like the little bird before the rattlesnake. Of the famous Germans, perhaps none had more
esprit
than Hegel; but for all that, he too feared it with a great German fear, which created his peculiar bad style. The essence of this style is that a core is wrapped around, and wrapped around again and again, until it scarcely peeks out, bashful and curious—as “young women look through their veils,” to quote the old woman-hater, Aeschylus; that core, however, is a witty, often pert perception about the most spiritual things, a delicate and daring connection of words, such as belongs in the company of thinkers, as a side dish of science—but in those wrappings it presents itself as abstruse science itself, and by all means as the most highly moral boredom. Thus the Germans had their permissible form of
esprit,
and they enjoyed it with such extravagant delight that Schopenhauer's good, very good, intelligence froze at the mere sight: all his life he stormed against the spectacle offered him by the Germans, but never could explain it to himself.

 

[197]

The hostility of the Germans to the Enlightenment.
Let us reconsider the contribution to culture in general made by the Germans of the first half of this century with their spiritual labor, and let us first take the German philosophers. They have reverted to the first and most ancient stage of speculation, for they have been satisfied with concepts instead of explanations, like the thinkers of dreamy ages; they revived a prescientific kind of philosophy. Second, there are the German historians and romantics: their general effort was directed toward gaining a place of honor for more ancient, primitive feelings, and especially Christianity, the folk soul, folk sagas, folk language, medievalism, Oriental aesthetics, Indianism. Third, there are the natural scientists: they fought against the spirit of Newton and Voltaire and sought, like Goethe and Schopenhauer, to restore the idea of a divine or devilish nature and its entirely ethical and symbolical significance.

The whole great tendency of the Germans ran counter to the Enlightenment, and to the revolution of society which, by a crude misunderstanding, was considered its consequence: piety toward everything still in existence sought to transform itself into piety toward everything that has ever existed, only to make heart and spirit full once again and to leave no room for future goals and innovations. The cult of feeling was erected in place of the cult of reason; and the German musicians, as the artists of the invisible, the enthusiastic, the fabulous, and the pining, helped to build the new temple with more success than all the artists of words and thoughts. Even if we admit that a vast amount of good was spoken and investigated in detail and that many things are now judged more fairly than ever before, we must still say of this development as a whole: it was no slight universal danger, under the semblance of full and final knowledge of the past, to subordinate knowledge to feeling altogether and—to speak with Kant, who thus determined his own task—“to open the way again for faith by showing knowledge its limits.”

Let us breathe free air again: the hour of this danger has passed. And strangely, those very spirits which were so eloquently conjured up by the Germans have in the long run become most harmful to the intentions of the conjurers. History, the understanding of origin and development, sympathy with the past, the renewed passion of feeling and knowledge, after they all seemed for a time helpful apprentices of this obscurantist, enthusiastic, and atavistic spirit, changed their nature one fine day and now soar with the broadest wings past their old conjurers and upward, as new and stronger geniuses of that very Enlightenment against which they were conjured up. This Enlightenment we must now advance further—unconcerned with the fact that there has been a “great revolution” against it, and then a “great reaction” again; indeed that both still exist: all this is mere play of the waves compared to that truly great tide in which we drift and want to drift.

 

[202]

Promoting health
. We have scarcely begun to reflect on the physiology of the criminal, and yet we are already confronted with the indisputable realization that there is no essential difference between criminals and the insane—presupposing that one believes that the customary way of moral thinking is the way of thinking of spiritual health. No faith, however, is still as firmly believed as this, and so we should not shrink from drawing its consequences by treating the criminal as an insane person: above all, not with haughty mercy but with the physician's good sense and good will. A change of air, different company, temporary disappearance, perhaps being alone and having a new occupation, are what he needs. Good! Perhaps he himself considers it to his advantage to live in custody for a while to find protection against himself and a burdensome tyrannical urge. Cood! One should present him quite clearly with the possibility and the means of a cure (the extirpation, reshaping, and sublimation of that drive); also, in a bad case, with the improbability of a cure; and one should offer the incurable criminal, who has become a horror to himself, the opportunity to commit suicide. Reserving this as the most extreme means of relief, one should not neglect anything to give back to the criminal, above all, confidence and a free mind; one should wipe pangs of conscience from his soul as some uncleanliness and give him pointers as to how he might balance and outbid the harm be may have done to one person by a good turn to another, or perhaps to society as a whole. All this with the utmost consideration. And above all, anonymity or a new name and frequent change of place, so that the irreproachability of his reputation and his future life be endangered as little as possible.

Today, to be sure, he who has been harmed always wants his revenge, quite apart from the question of how this harm might be undone again, and he turns to the courts for its sake; for the present this maintains our abominable penal codes, with their shopkeeper's scales and the desire to balance guilt and punishment. But shouldn't we be able to get beyond this? How relieved the general feeling of life would be if, together with the belief in guilt, we could also get rid of the ancient instinct of revenge, and if we even considered it a fine cleverness in a happy person to pronounce a blessing over his enemies, with Christianity, and if we benefited those who had offended us. Let us remove the concept of sin from the world—and let us soon send the concept of punishment after it. May these banished monsters live somewhere else henceforth, not among men, if they insist on living at all and do not perish of their own disgust.

Meanwhile let us consider that the loss which society and individuals suffer from the criminal is just like the loss they suffer from the sick: the sick spread worry and discontent; they do not produce but consume the earnings of others; they require wardens, physicians, and amusement; and they live on the time and energy of the healthy. Nevertheless one would now designate as inhuman anyone who for these reasons would want to avenge himself against the sick. Formerly, to be sure, this was done; in crude stages of civilization, and even now among some savage peoples, the sick are, in fact, treated as criminals, as a danger to the community, and as the dwelling of some demonic being which has entered them in consequence of some guilt: every sick person is a guilty person. And we—shouldn't we be mature enough for the opposite view? Shouldn't we be able to say: every “guilty” person is a sick person?

No, the hour for that has not yet come. The physicians are still lacking, above all, for whom what we have hitherto called practical morality must be transformed into a piece of their art and science of therapy; as yet, that hungry interest in these things is lacking, but some day it may appear in a manner not unlike the storm and stress of those old religious agitations; as yet, the churches are not in the hands of the promoters of health; as yet, to teach about the body and the diet is not one of the obligations of all lower and higher schools; as yet, there are no quiet organizations of those who have accepted the common obligation to renounce the help of courts and punishment and revenge against their evildoers; as yet, no thinker has had the courage to measure the health of a society and of individuals by the number of parasites they can stand. . . .

 

[205]

Of the people of Israel
. Among the spectacles to which the next century invites us is the decision on the fate of the European Jews. . . . Every Jew has in the history of his fathers and grandfathers a mine of examples of the coldest composure and steadfastness in terrible situations. . . .

There has been an effort to make them contemptible by treating them contemptibly for two thousand years and by barring them from access to all honors and everything honorable, thus pushing them that much deeper into the dirtier trades; and under this procedure they have certainly not become cleaner. But contemptible? They themselves have never ceased to believe in their calling to the highest things, and the virtues of all who suffer have never ceased to adorn them. The way in which they honor their fathers and their children and the rationality of their marriages and marital customs distinguish them above all Europeans. In addition, they knew how to create for themselves a feeling of power and eternal revenge out of those very trades which were abandoned to them (or to which they were abandoned); one must say, in excuse even of their usury, that without this occasional, agreeable, and useful torture of their despisers they could scarcely have persevered so long in respecting themselves. For our self-respect depends on our ability to repay the good as well as the bad. Moreover, their revenge does not easily push them too far; for they all have that freemindedness, of the soul too, to which frequent change of location, of climate, and of the customs of neighbors and oppressors educates man. . . .

And where shall this wealth of accumulated great impressions, which Jewish history constitutes for every Jewish family, this wealth of passions, virtues, decisions, renunciations, fights, and victories of all kinds—where shall it flow, if not eventually into great spiritual men and works? Then, when the Jews can point to such gems and golden vessels as their work, such as the European peoples with their shorter and less deep experience cannot produce and never could; when Israel will have transformed its eternal revenge into an eternal blessing for Europe; then that seventh day will come once again on which the ancient Jewish god may rejoice in himself, his creation, and his chosen people—and all of us, all of us want to rejoice with himl

 

[206]

The impossible class
. Poor, gay, and independent—that is possible together. Poor, gay, and a slave—that is possible too. And I would not know what better to say to the workers in factory slavery—provided they do not consider it altogether shameful to be used up as they are, like the gears of a machine, and in a sense as stopgaps of human inventiveness.

Phew! to believe that higher pay could abolish the
essence
of their misery—I mean their impersonal serfdom! Phew! to be talked into thinking that an increase in this impersonality, within the machinelike workings of a new society, could transform the shame of slavery into a virtue! Phew! to have a price for which one remains a person no longer but becomes a gear!

Are you co-conspirators in the current folly of nations, who want above all to produce as much as possible and to be as rich as possible? It would be your affair to present them with the counter-calculation: what vast sums of inner worth are thrown away for such an external goal. But where is your inner worth when you no longer know what it means to breathe freely? when you no longer have the slightest control over yourselves? when you all too frequently become sick of yourselves, as of a stale drink? when you listen to the newspapers and leer at your rich neighbor, made lustful by the rapid rise and fall of power, money, and opinions? when you no longer have any faith in philosophy, which wears rags, and in the candor of those who have no wants? when the voluntary idyllic life of poverty, without occupation or marriage, which might well suit the more spiritual among you, has become a laughingstock to you? Do your ears ring from the pipes of the socialistic pied pipers, who want to make you wanton with mad hopes? who bid you be
prepared
and nothing else, prepared from today to tomorrow so that you wait and wait for something from the outside, and live in every other respect as you have lived before—until this waiting turns into hunger and thirst and fever and madness, and finally the day of the
bestia triumphans
rises in all its glory?