Why I Am So Clever Read online

  7

  War is another thing. I am by nature warlike. To attack is among my instincts. To be able to be an enemy, to be an enemy – that perhaps presupposes a strong nature, it is in any event a condition of every strong nature. It needs resistances, consequently it seeks resistances: the aggressive pathos belongs as necessarily to strength as the feeling of vengefulness and vindictiveness does to weakness. Woman, for example, is vengeful: that is conditioned by her weakness, just as is her susceptibility to others’ distress. – The strength of one who attacks has in the opposition he needs a kind of gauge; every growth reveals itself in the seeking out of a powerful opponent – or problem: for a philosopher who is warlike also challenges problems to a duel. The undertaking is to master, not any resistances that happen to present themselves, but those against which one has to bring all one’s strength, suppleness and mastery of weapons – to master equal opponents … Equality in face of the enemy – first presupposition of an honest duel. Where one despises one cannot wage war; where one commands, where one sees something as beneath one, one has not to wage war. – My practice in warfare can be reduced to four propositions. Firstly: I attack only causes that are victorious – under certain circumstances I wait until they are victorious. Secondly: I attack only causes against which I would find no allies, where I stand alone – where I compromise only myself … I have never taken a step in public which was not compromising: that is my criterion of right action. Thirdly: I never attack persons – I only employ the person as a strong magnifying glass with which one can make visible a general but furtive state of distress which is hard to get hold of. That was how I attacked David Strauss, more precisely the success with German ‘culture’ of a senile book – I thus caught that culture red-handed … That was how I attacked Wagner, more precisely the falseness, the hybrid instincts of our ‘culture’ which confuses the artful with the rich, the late with the great. Fourthly: I attack only things where any kind of personal difference is excluded, where there is no background of bad experience. On the contrary, to attack is with me a proof of good will, under certain circumstances of gratitude. I do honour, I confer distinction when I associate my name with a cause, a person: for or against – that is in this regard a matter of indifference to me. If I wage war on Christianity I have a right to do so, because I have never experienced anything disagreeable or frustrating from that direction – the most serious Christians have always been well disposed towards me. I myself, an opponent of Christianity de rigueur, am far from bearing a grudge against the individual for what is the fatality of millennia. –

  8

  May I venture to indicate one last trait of my nature which creates for me no little difficulty in my relations with others? I possess a perfectly uncanny sensitivity of the instinct for cleanliness, so that I perceive physiologically – smell – the proximity or – what am I saying? – the innermost parts, the ‘entrails’, of every soul … I have in this sensitivity psychological antennae with which I touch and take hold of every secret: all the concealed dirt at the bottom of many a nature, perhaps conditioned by bad blood but whitewashed by education, is known to me almost on first contact. If I have observed correctly, such natures unendurable to my sense of cleanliness for their part also sense the caution of my disgust: they do not thereby become any sweeter-smelling … As has always been customary with me – an extreme cleanliness in relation to me is a presupposition of my existence, I perish under unclean conditions – I swim and bathe and splash continually as it were in water, in any kind of perfectly transparent and glittering element. This makes traffic with people no small test of my patience; my humanity consists, not in feeling for and with man, but in enduring that I do feel for and with him … My humanity is a continual self-overcoming. – But I have need of solitude, that is to say recovery, return to myself, the breath of a free light playful air … My entire Zarathustra is a dithyramb on solitude or, if I have been understood, on cleanliness … Fortunately not on pure folly. – He who has eyes for colours will call it diamond. – Disgust at mankind, at the ‘rabble’, has always been my greatest danger … Do you want to hear the words in which Zarathustra speaks of redemption from disgust?

  Yet what happened to me? How did I free myself from disgust? Who rejuvenated my eyes? How did I fly to the height where the rabble no longer sit at the well?

  Did my disgust itself create wings and water-diving powers for me? Truly, I had to fly to the extremest height to find again the fountain of delight!

  Oh, I have found it, my brothers! Here, in the extremest height, the fountain of delight gushes up for me! And here there is a life at which no rabble drinks with me!

  You gush up almost too impetuously, fountain of delight! And in wanting to fill the cup, you often empty it again.

  And I still have to learn to approach you more discreetly: my heart still flows towards you all too impetuously: –

  my heart, upon which my summer burns, a short, hot, melancholy, over-joyful summer: how my summer-heart longs for your coolness!

  Gone is the lingering affliction of my spring! Gone the snowflakes of my malice in June! Summer have I become entirely, and summer-noonday –

  – a summer at the extremest height with cold fountains and blissful stillness: oh come, my friends, that the stillness may become more blissful yet!

  For this is our height and our home: we live too nobly and boldly here for all unclean men and their thirsts.

  Only cast your pure eyes into the well of my delight, friends! You will not dim its sparkle! It shall laugh back at you with its purity.

  We build our nest in the tree Future: eagles shall bring food to us solitaries in their beaks!

  Truly, food in which no unclean men could join us! They would think they were eating fire and burn their mouths.

  Truly, we do not prepare a home here for unclean men! Their bodies and their spirits would call our happiness a cave of ice!

  So let us live above them like strong winds, neighbours of the eagles, neighbours of the snow, neighbours of the sun: that is how strong winds live.

  And like a wind will I one day blow among them and with my spirit take away the breath of their spirit: thus my future will have it.

  Truly, Zarathustra is a strong wind to all flatlands; and he offers this advice to his enemies and to all that spews and spits: take care not to spit against the wind! …

  Why I Am so Clever

  1

  Why do I know a few more things? Why am I so clever altogether? I have never reflected on questions that are none – I have not squandered myself. – I have, for example, no experience of actual religious difficulties. I am entirely at a loss to know to what extent I ought to have felt ‘sinful’. I likewise lack a reliable criterion of a pang of conscience: from what one hears of it, a pang of conscience does not seem to me anything respectable … I should not like to leave an act in the lurch afterwards, I would as a matter of principle prefer to leave the evil outcome, the consequences, out of the question of values. When the outcome is evil one can easily lose the true eye for what one has done: a pang of conscience seems to me a kind of ‘evil eye’. To honour to oneself something that went wrong all the more because it went wrong – that rather would accord with my morality. – ‘God’, ‘immortality of the soul’, ‘redemption’, ‘the Beyond’, all of them concepts to which I have given no attention and no time, not even as a child – perhaps I was never childish enough for it? – I have absolutely no knowledge of atheism as an outcome of reasoning, still less as an event: with me it is obvious by instinct. I am too inquisitive, too questionable, too high spirited to rest content with a crude answer. God is a crude answer, a piece of indelicacy against us thinkers – fundamentally even a crude prohibition to us: you shall not think! … I am interested in quite a different way in a question upon which the ‘salvation of mankind’ depends far more than it does upon any kind of quaint curiosity of the theologians: the question of nutriment. One can for convenience’ sake formulate it thus: �
�how to nourish yourself so as to attain your maximum of strength, of virtù in the Renaissance style, of moraline-free virtue?’ – My experiences here are as bad as they possibly could be; I am astonished that I heard this question so late, that I learned ‘reason’ from these experiences so late. Only the perfect worthlessness of our German education – its ‘idealism’ – can to some extent explain to me why on precisely this point I was backward to the point of holiness. This ‘education’ which from the first teaches one to lose sight of realities so as to hunt after altogether problematic, so-called ‘ideal’ objectives, ‘classical education’ for example – as if it were not from the first an utterly fruitless undertaking to try to unite ‘classical’ and ‘German’ in one concept! It is, moreover, mirth-provoking – just think of a ‘classically educated’ Leipziger! – Until my very maturest years I did in fact eat badly – in the language of morals ‘impersonally’, ‘selflessly’, ‘altruistically’, for the salvation of cooks and other fellow Christians. With the aid of Leipzig cookery, for example, which accompanied my earliest study of Schopenhauer (1865), I very earnestly denied my ‘will to live’. To ruin one’s stomach so as to receive inadequate nutriment – the aforesaid cookery seems to me to solve this problem wonderfully well. (It is said that 1866 produced a change in this domain –.) But German cookery in general – what does it not have on its conscience! Soup before the meal (in Venetian cookery books of the sixteenth century still called alla tedesca); meat cooked to shreds, greasy and floury vegetables; the degeneration of puddings to paperweights! If one adds to this the downright bestial dinner-drinking habits of the ancient and by no means only the ancient Germans one will also understand the origin of the German spirit – disturbed intestines … The German spirit is an indigestion, it can have done with nothing. – But to the English diet too, which compared with the Germans, even with the French, is a kind of ‘return to nature’, that is to say to cannibalism, my own instinct is profoundly opposed; it seems to me to give the spirit heavy feet – the feet of Englishwomen … The best cookery is that of Piedmont. Alcoholic drinks are no good for me; a glass of wine or beer a day is quite enough to make life for me a ‘Vale of Tears’ – Munich is where my antipodes live. Granted I was a little late to grasp this – I experienced it really from childhood onwards. As a boy I believed wine-drinking to be, like tobacco-smoking, at first only a vanity of young men, later a habit. Perhaps the wine of Naumburg is in part to blame for this austere judgement. To believe that wine makes cheerful I would have to be a Christian, that is to say believe what is for precisely me an absurdity. Oddly enough, while I am put extremely out of sorts by small, much diluted doses of alcohol, I am almost turned into a sailor when it comes to strong doses. Even as a boy I showed how brave I was in this respect. To write a long Latin essay in a single night’s sitting and then go on to make a fair copy of it, with the ambition in my pen to imitate in severity and concision my model Sallust, and to pour a quantity of grog of the heaviest calibre over my Latin, was even when I was a pupil of venerable Schulpforta in no way opposed to my physiology, nor perhaps to that of Sallust – however much it might have been to venerable Schulpforta … Later, towards the middle of life, I decided, to be sure, more and more strictly against any sort of ‘spirituous’ drink: an opponent of vegetarianism from experience, just like Richard Wagner, who converted me, I cannot advise all more spiritual natures too seriously to abstain from alcohol absolutely. Water suffices … I prefer places in which there is everywhere opportunity to drink from flowing fountains (Nice, Turin, Sils); a small glass runs after me like a dog. In vino veritas: it seems that here too I am again at odds with all the world over the concept ‘truth’ – with me the spirit moves over the water … A couple more signposts from my morality. A big meal is easier to digest than one too small. That the stomach comes into action as a whole, first precondition of a good digestion. One has to know the size of one’s stomach. For the same reason those tedious meals should be avoided which I call interrupted sacrificial feasts, those at the table d’hôte. – No eating between meals, no coffee: coffee makes gloomy. Tea beneficial only in the morning. Little, but strong: tea very detrimental and sicklying o’er the whole day if it is the slightest bit too weak. Each has here his own degree, often between the narrowest and most delicate limits. In a very agaçant climate it is inadvisable to start with tea: one should start an hour earlier with a cup of thick oil-free cocoa. – Sit as little as possible; credit no thought not born in the open air and while moving freely about – in which the muscles too do not hold a festival. All prejudices come from the intestines. – Assiduity – I have said it once before – the actual sin against the holy spirit. –

  2

  Most closely related to the question of nutriment is the question of place and climate. No one is free to live everywhere; and he who has great tasks to fulfil which challenge his entire strength has indeed in this matter a very narrow range of choice. The influence of climate on the metabolism, its slowing down, its speeding up, extends so far that a blunder in regard to place and climate can not only estrange anyone from his task but withhold it from him altogether: he never catches sight of it. His animalic vigor never grows sufficiently great for him to attain to that freedom overflowing into the most spiritual domain where he knows: that I alone can do … A never so infinitesimal sluggishness of the intestines grown into a bad habit completely suffices to transform a genius into something mediocre, something ‘German’; the German climate alone is enough to discourage strong and even heroic intestines. The tempo of the metabolism stands in an exact relationship to the mobility or lameness of the feet of the spirit; the ‘spirit’ itself is indeed only a species of this metabolism. Make a list of the places where there are and have been gifted men, where wit, refinement, malice are a part of happiness, where genius has almost necessarily made its home: they all possess an excellent dry air. Paris, Provence, Florence, Jerusalem, Athens – these names prove something: that genius is conditioned by dry air, clear sky – that is to say by rapid metabolism, by the possibility of again and again supplying oneself with great, even tremendous quantities of energy. I have in mind a case in which a spirit which might have become significant and free became instead narrow, withdrawn, a grumpy specialist, merely through a lack of instinctive subtlety in choice of climate. And I myself could in the end have become this case if sickness had not compelled me to reason, to reflect on reason in reality. Now, when from long practice I read climatic and meteorological effects off from myself as from a very delicate and reliable instrument and even on a short journey, from Turin to Milan for instance, verify on myself physiologically the change in degrees of humidity, I recall with horror the uncanny fact that my life up to the last ten years, the years when my life was in danger, was spent nowhere but in wrong places downright forbidden to me. Naumburg, Schulpforta, Thuringia in general, Leipzig, Basel, Venice – so many ill-fated places for my physiology. If I have no welcome memories at all of my whole childhood and youth, it would be folly to attribute this to so-called ‘moral’ causes – the undeniable lack of adequate company, for instance: for this lack exists today as it has always existed without preventing me from being brave and cheerful. Ignorance in physiologis – accursed ‘idealism’ – is the real fatality in my life, the superfluous and stupid in it, something out of which nothing good grows, for which there is no compensation, no counter-reckoning. It is as a consequence of this ‘idealism’ that I elucidate to myself all the blunders, all the great deviations of instinct and ‘modesties’ which led me away from the task of my life, that I became a philologist for example – why not at least a physician or something else that opens the eyes? In my time at Basel my entire spiritual diet, the division of the day included, was a perfectly senseless abuse of extraordinary powers without any kind of provision for covering this consumption, without even reflection on consumption and replacement. Any more subtle selfishness, any protection by a commanding instinct was lacking, it was an equating of oneself w
ith everyone else, a piece of ‘selflessness’, a forgetting of one’s distance – something I shall never forgive myself. When I was almost done for, because I was almost done for, I began to reflect on this fundamental irrationality of my life – ‘idealism’. It was only sickness that brought me to reason.

  3

  Selectivity in nutriment; selectivity in climate and place; – the third thing in which one may at no cost commit a blunder is selectivity in one’s kind of recreation. Here too the degree to which a spirit is sui generis makes ever narrower the bounds of what is permitted, that is to say useful to him. In my case all reading is among my recreations: consequently among those things which free me from myself, which allow me to saunter among strange sciences and souls – which I no longer take seriously. It is precisely reading which helps me to recover from my seriousness. At times when I am deeply sunk in work you will see no books around me: I would guard against letting anyone speak or even think in my vicinity. And that is what reading would mean … Has it really been noticed that in that state of profound tension to which pregnancy condemns the spirit and fundamentally the entire organism, any chance event, any kind of stimulus from without has too vehement an effect, ‘cuts’ too deeply? One has to avoid the chance event, the stimulus from without, as much as possible; a kind of self-walling-up is among the instinctual sagacities of spiritual pregnancy. Shall I allow a strange thought to climb secretly over the wall? – And that is what reading would mean … The times of work and fruitfulness are followed by the time of recreation: come hither, you pleasant, you witty, you clever books! Will they be German books? … I have to reckon back half a year to catch myself with a book in my hand. But what was it? – An excellent study by Victor Brochard, les sceptiques Grecs, in which my Laertiana are also well employed. The Sceptics, the only honourable type among the two- and five-fold ambiguous philosophical crowd! … Otherwise I take flight almost always to the same books, really a small number, those books which have proved themselves precisely to me. It does not perhaps lie in my nature to read much or many kinds of things: a reading room makes me ill. Neither does it lie in my nature to love much or many kinds of things. Caution, even hostility towards new books is rather part of my instinct than ‘tolerance’, ‘largeur du coeur’ and other forms of ‘neighbour love’ … It is really only a small number of older Frenchmen to whom I return again and again: I believe only in French culture and consider everything in Europe that calls itself ‘culture’ a misunderstanding, not to speak of German culture … The few instances of high culture I have encountered in Germany have all been of French origin, above all Frau Cosima Wagner, by far the first voice I have heard in questions of taste. – That I do not read Pascal but love him, as the most instructive of all sacrifices to Christianity, slowly murdered first physically then psychologically, the whole logic of this most horrible form of inhuman cruelty; that I have something of Montaigne’s wantonness in my spirit, who knows? perhaps also in my body; that my artist’s taste defends the names Molière, Corneille and Racine, not without wrath, against a disorderly genius such as Shakespeare: this does not ultimately exclude my finding the most recent Frenchmen also charming company. I cannot at all conceive in which century of history one could haul together such inquisitive and at the same time such delicate psychologists as one can in contemporary Paris: I name as a sample – for their number is by no means small, Messrs Paul Bourget, Pierre Loti, Gyp, Meilhac, Anatole France, Jules Lemaitre, or to pick out one of the stronger race, a genuine Latin to whom I am especially attached, Guy de Maupassant. Between ourselves, I prefer this generation even to their great teachers, who have all been ruined by German philosophy (M. Taine for example by Hegel, whom he has to thank for this misunderstanding of great human beings and ages). As far as Germany extends it ruins culture. It was only the war that ‘redeemed’ the spirit in France … Stendhal, one of the fairest accidents of my life – for whatever marks an epoch in my life has been brought to me by accident, never by a recommendation – is utterly invaluable with his anticipating psychologist’s eye, with his grasp of facts which reminds one of the proximity of the greatest man of the factual (ex ungue Napoleonem –); finally not least as an honest atheist, a rare, almost undiscoverable species in France – with all deference to Prosper Mérimée … Perhaps I am even envious of Stendhal? He robbed me of the best atheist joke which precisely I could have made: ‘God’s only excuse is that he does not exist’ … I myself have said somewhere: what has hitherto been the greatest objection to existence? God …