The Portable Nietzsche (81 page)

1

The more a psychologist—a born and inevitable psychologist and unriddler of souls—applies himself to the more exquisite cases and human beings, the greater becomes the danger that he might suffocate of pity. He
needs
hardness and cheerfulness more than anyone else. For the corruption, the destruction, of the higher men is the rule: it is terrible constantly to have such a rule before one's eyes. The manifold torture of the psychologist who has discovered this corruption, who discovers this whole inner haplessness of the higher man, this eternal “too late” in every sense, first in one case and then
almost
always again through the whole of history—one day this may perhaps bring about his own corruption.

In almost every psychologist one will perceive a telltale preference for association with everyday, well-ordered people: this reveals that he always requires a cure, that he needs a kind of escape and forgetting, away from all that with which his insights, his incisions, his
craft
, burden his conscience. He is characterized by fear of his memory. He is easily silenced by the judgments of others; he listens with an immobile face as they venerate, admire, love, and transfigure where he has
seen
—or he even conceals his silence by explicitly agreeing with some foreground opinion. Perhaps the paradox of his situation is so horrible that the “educated,” on their part, learn the greatest veneration precisely where he has learned the greatest pity coupled with the greatest contempt.

And who knows whether what happened in all great cases was not simply this—that one adored a god, and that the god was merely a poor sacrificial animal. Success has always been the greatest liar—and the
work
, the
deed
too, is a success. The great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer is disguised by his creations, concealed beyond recognition; it is the work, of the artist as of the philosophers, that invents the man who has created it, who is
supposed
to have created it. “Great men,” as they are venerated, are subsequent pieces of wretched minor fiction: in the world of historical values, counterfeit
rules
.

 

2

Those great poets, for example, men like Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopardi, Kleist, Gogol—I do not dare mention far greater names, but I mean them—are and must be men of the moment, sensual, absurd, fivefold, irresponsible, and sudden in mistrust and trust; with souls in which they must usually conceal some fracture; often taking revenge with their works for some inner contamination, often seeking with their high flights to escape into forgetfulness from an all-too-faithful memory; idealists from the vicinity of
swamps—
what torture are these great artists and all the so-called higher men for him who has guessed their true nature! We are all advocates of the mediocre. It is easy to understand that it is woman—clairvoyant in the world of suffering, and, unfortunately, also desirous far beyond her strength to help and to save—who so readily accords these men those outbreaks of infinite pity on which the mass, particularly the venerating mass, then lavish inquisitive and self-satisfied interpretations. This pity regularly deceives itself about its own strength: woman would like to believe that love can achieve
everything—
it is her characteristic superstition. Alas, whoever knows the heart will guess how poor, helpless, arrogant, and mistaken is even the best, the profoundest love—how it even destroys rather than saves.

 

3

The spiritual nausea and haughtiness of every human being who has suffered deeply—how deeply one can suffer almost determines the order of rank—his shuddering certainty, which permeates and colors him through and through, that by virtue of his suffering he
knows more
than the cleverest and wisest could possibly know, and that he knows his way and has once been at home in many distant, terrifying worlds of which “
you
know nothing”—this spiritual and silent haughtiness, this pride of the elect of cognition, of the “initiated,” of the almost sacrificed, finds all kinds of disguise necessary to protect itself against contact with officious and pitying hands, and against everything that is not a peer in suffering. Deep suffering makes noble; it separates.

One of the finest disguises is Epicureanism, and a certain ostentatious courage of taste which takes suffering glibly and wards off everything sad and deep. There are “cheerful people” who employ cheerfulness in order to be misunderstood—they
want
to be misunderstood. There are “scientific spirits” who employ science because it gives a cheerful appearance, and because scientism suggests that a man is superficial—they
want
to seduce others to such a false inference. There are free, impudent spirits who would like to conceal and deny that at bottom they are broken, incurable hearts—the case of Hamlet: and then even foolishness can be the mask for an unblessed all-too-certain certainty.

1

I have often asked myself whether I am not more heavily obligated to the hardest years of my life than to any others. As my inmost nature teaches me, whatever is necessary—as seen from the heights and in the sense of a
great
economy—is also the useful par excellence: one should not only bear it, one should love it.
Amor
fati:
that is my inmost nature. And as for my long sickness, do I not owe it indescribably more than I owe to my health? I owe it a
higher
health—one which is made stronger by whatever does not kill it.
I also owe my philosophy to it.
Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit, as the teacher of great suspicion which turns every U into an X, a real, genuine X, that is, the letter before
the penultimate
one. Only great pain, that long, slow pain in which we are burned with green wood, as it were—pain which takes its time—only this forces us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths and to put away all trust, all good-naturedness, all that would veil, all mildness, all that is medium— things in which formerly we may have found our humanity. I doubt that such a pain makes us “better,” but I know that it makes us more
profound.

Whether we learn to pit our pride, our scorn, our will power against it, equaling the American Indian who, however tortured, evens the score with his torturer by the malice of his tongue; or whether we withdraw from pain into that Nothing, into mute, rigid, deaf resignation, self-forgetting, self-extinction: out of such long and dangerous exercises of self-mastery one emerges as a different person, with a few
more
question marks—above all, with the will to question more persistently, more deeply, severely, harshly, evilly, and quietly than has ever been questioned on this earth before. The trust in life is gone; life itself has become a problem. Yet one should not jump to the conclusion that with all this a man has necessarily become dusky, a barn owl. Even the love of life is still possible—only, one loves differently. It is the love for a woman who raises doubts in us.

 

2

What is strangest is this: afterward one has a different taste—a
second
taste. Out of such abysses, also out of the abyss of great suspicion, one returns newborn, having shed one's skin, more ticklish and sarcastic, with a more delicate taste for joy, with a more tender tongue for all good things, with gayer senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times more subtle than one has ever been before.

How repulsive pleasure is now, that crude, musty, brown pleasure as it is understood by those who like pleasure, our “educated” people, our rich people, and our rulers! How sarcastically we listen now to the big county-fair boom-boom with which the “educated” person and city dweller today permits art, books, and music to rape him and provide “spiritual pleasures”—with the aid of spirituous liquors! How the theatrical scream of passion now hurts our ears, how strange to our taste the whole romantic uproar and tumult of the senses have become, which the educated rabble loves, and all its aspirations after the elevated, inflated, and exaggerated! No, if we who have recovered still need art, it is another kind of art—a mocking, light, fleeting, divinely untroubled, divinely artificial art, which, like a pure flame, licks into unclouded skies. Above all, an art for artists,
for artists only!
We know better afterward what above all is needed for this: cheerfulness,
any
cheerfulness, my friends. There are a few things we now know too well, we knowing ones: oh, how we learn now to forget well, and to be good at
not
knowing, as artists!

And as for our future, one will hardly find us again on the paths of those Egyptian youths who endanger temples by night, embrace statues, and want by all means to unveil, uncover, and put into a bright light whatever is kept concealed for good reasons.
⁶²
No, this bad taste, this will to truth, to “truth at any price,” this youthful madness in the love of truth, have lost their charm for us: for that we are too experienced, too serious, too gay, too burned, too
deep
. We no longer believe that truth remains truth when the veils are withdrawn—we have lived enough not to believe this. Today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and “know” everything.
Tout comprendre
—
c'est tout mépriser.
⁶³

“Is it true that God is present
everywhere?”
a little girl asked her mother; “I think that's indecent”—a hint for philosophers! One should have more respect for the bashfulness with which nature has hidden behind riddles and iridescent uncertainties. Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons for not letting us see her reasons? Perhaps her name is—to speak Greek—
Baubo?

Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial—
out of profundity.
And is not this precisely what we are again coming back to, we daredevils of the spirit who have climbed the highest and most dangerous peak of present thought and looked around from up there—we who have looked
down
from there? Are we not, precisely in this respect, Greeks? Adorers of forms, of tones, of words? And therefore
—artists?

Early in January 1889 Nietzsche, then in Turin, saw a coachman flog a horse, rushed toward the horse, and collapsed with his arms around it. He was carried home, and, after recovering consciousness, wrote and mailed a number of letters which mirror the sudden outbreak of his madness. They are the last meaningful things he wrote.

The men referred to in the letter to Burckhardt had been in the news recently. Prado and Chambige had been tried for murder in November 1888, in Paris and Algeria, respectively; and in a letter to Strindberg, Nietzsche had written on December 7: “Prado was superior to his judges and even to his lawyers in his self-control,
esprit
, and prankishness.” Lesseps, of course, is the man who had built the Suez Canal. Alphonse Daudet had recently published
L'Immortel,
a satirical attack on Les Quarante (that is, the French Academy). The hero of this work is called Astier, and this may help to account for the word “Astu” in the letter. In a letter to Overbeck, on November 13, Nietzsche had mentioned the funeral of Conte Robilant, “the most venerable type of the Piedmontese nobility and incidentally, as is known, a son of King Carlo Alberto.” Antonelli, finally, was papal Secretary of State under Pius IX.
⁶⁴

Burckhardt took this letter to Overbeck, who went to Turin to bring his friend home. After a short spell in an asylum he was released in care of his mother; and after her death, his sister moved him to Weimar—the city of Goethe and Schiller—as part of her attempt to start a Nietzsche cult. He died on August 25, 1900.

Turin, January 4, 1889

To my maestro Pietro.

Sing me a new song: the world is transfigured and all the heavens are full of joy.

The Crucified

January 6, 1889
⁶⁵

Dear Professor,

In the end I would much rather be a Basel professor than God; but I have not dared push my private egoism so far as to desist for its sake from the creation of the world. You see, one must make sacrifices however and wherever one lives.

But I have reserved myself a small student's room, situated opposite the Palazzo Carignano (in which I was born as Vittorio Emanuele), which also permits me to hear from the desk the magnificent music below, in the Galleria Subalpina. I pay twenty-five francs, including service, buy my tea, and do all my shopping myself, suffer from torn shoes, and thank heaven every moment for the old world for which men have not been simple and quiet enough.

Since I am sentenced to while away the next eternity with bad jokes, I have my writing here, which really does not leave anything to be desired—very nice and not at all exhausting. The post office is five steps from here, so I mail my letters myself to play the great
feuilletonist
of the
grande monde
. Of course, I maintain close relations with
Figaro
; and in order to get an idea how harmless I can be, listen to my first two bad jokes.

Do not take the Prado case too hard. I am Prado; I am also father Prado; I dare say that I am Lesseps too. I wanted to give my Parisians, whom I love, a new notion: that of a decent criminal. I am also Chambige—also a decent criminal.
Second joke:
I salute the immortal one; Monsieur Daudet belongs to the
quarante.
Astu.