Kitabı oku: «The Dawn of Day», sayfa 21

393

Dangerous Virtues. – “He forgets nothing, but forgives everything” – wherefore he shall be doubly detested, for he causes us double shame by his memory and his magnanimity.

394

Without Vanity. – Passionate people think little of what others may think; their state of mind raises them above vanity.

395

Contemplation. – In some thinkers the contemplative state peculiar to a thinker is always the consequence of a state of fear, in others always of desire. In the former, contemplation thus seems allied to the feeling of security, in the latter to the feeling of surfeit – in other words, the former are spirited in their mood, the latter over-satiated and neutral.

396

Hunting. – The one is hunting for agreeable truths, the other for disagreeable ones. But even the former takes greater pleasure in the hunt than in the booty.

397

Education. – Education is a continuation of procreation, and very often a kind of supplementary varnishing of it.

398

How to recognise the Choleric. – Of two persons who are struggling together, or who love and admire one another, the more choleric will always be at a disadvantage. The same remark applies to two nations.

399

Self-Excuse. – Many men have the best possible right to act in this or that way; but as soon as they begin to excuse their actions we no longer believe that they are right – and we are mistaken.

400

Moral Pampering. – There are tender, moral natures who are ashamed of all their successes and feel remorse after every failure.

401

Dangerous Unlearning. – We begin by unlearning to love others, and end by finding nothing lovable in ourselves.

402

Another form of Toleration. – “To remain a minute too long on red-hot coals and to be burnt a little does no harm either to men or to chestnuts. The slight bitterness and hardness makes the kernel all the sweeter.” – Yes, this is your opinion, you who enjoy the taste! You sublime cannibals!

403

Different Pride. – Women turn pale at the thought that their lover may not be worthy of them; Men turn pale at the thought that they may not be worthy of the women they love. I speak of perfect women, perfect men. Such men, who are self-reliant and conscious of power at ordinary times, grow diffident and doubtful of themselves when under the influence of a strong passion. Such women, on the other hand, though always looking upon themselves as the weak and devoted sex, become proud and conscious of their power in the great exception of passion, – they ask: “Who then is worthy of me?”

404

When we seldom do Justice. – Certain men are unable to feel enthusiasm for a great and good cause without committing a great injustice in some other quarter: this is their kind of morality.

405

Luxury. – The love of luxury is rooted in the depths of a man's heart: it shows that the superfluous and immoderate is the sea wherein his soul prefers to float.

406

To Immortalise. – Let him who wishes to kill his opponent first consider whether by doing so he will not immortalise him in himself.

407

Against our Character. – If the truth which we have to utter goes against our character – as very often happens – we behave as if we had uttered a clumsy falsehood, and thus rouse suspicion.

408

Where a great deal of Gentleness is Needed. – Many natures have only the choice of being either public evil-doers or secret sorrow-bearers.

409

Illness. – Among illness are to be reckoned the premature approach of old age, ugliness, and pessimistic opinions – three things that always go together.

410

Timid People. – It is the awkward and timid people who easily become murderers: they do not understand slight but sufficient means of defence or revenge, and their hatred, owing to their lack of intelligence and presence of mind, can conceive of no other expedient than destruction.

411

Without Hatred. – You wish to bid farewell to your passion? Very well, but do so without hatred against it! Otherwise you have a second passion. – The soul of the Christian who has freed himself from sin is generally ruined afterwards by the hatred for sin. Just look at the faces of the great Christians! they are the faces of great haters.

412

Ingenious and Narrow-Minded. – He can appreciate nothing beyond himself, and when he wishes to appreciate other people he must always begin by transforming them into himself. In this, however, he is ingenious.

413

Private and Public Accusers. – Watch closely the accuser and inquirer, – for he reveals his true character; and it is not rare for this to be a worse character than that of the victim whose crime he is investigating. The accuser believes in all innocence that the opponent of a crime and criminal must be by nature of good character, or at least must appear as such – and this is why he lets himself go, that is to say, he drops his mask.

414

Voluntary Blindness. – There is a kind of enthusiastic and extreme devotion to a person or a party which reveals that in our inmost hearts we feel ourselves superior to this person or party, and for this reason we feel indignant with ourselves. We blind ourselves, as it were, of our own free will to punish our eyes for having seen too much.

415

Remedium Amoris.– That old radical remedy for love is now in most cases as effective as it always was: love in return.

416

Where is our worst Enemy? – He who can look after his own affairs well, and knows that he can do so, is as a rule conciliatory towards his adversary. But to believe that we have right on our side, and to know that we are incapable of defending it – this gives rise to a fierce and implacable hatred against the opponent of our cause. Let every one judge accordingly where his worst enemies are to be sought.

417

The Limits of all Humility. – Many men may certainly have attained that humility which says credo quia absurdum est, and sacrifices its reason; but, so far as I know, not one has attained to that humility which after all is only one step further, and which says creda quia absurdus sum.

418

Acting the Truth. – Many a man is truthful, not because he would be ashamed to exhibit hypocritical feelings, but because he would not succeed very well in inducing others to believe in his hypocrisy. In a word, he has no confidence in his talent as an actor, and therefore prefers honestly to act the truth.

419

Courage in a Party. – The poor sheep say to their bell-wether: “Only lead us, and we shall never lack courage to follow you.” But the poor bell-wether thinks in his heart: “Only follow me, and I shall never lack courage to lead you.”

420

Cunning of the Victim. – What a sad cunning there is in the wish to deceive ourselves with respect to the person for whom we have sacrificed ourselves, when we give him an opportunity in which he must appear to us as we should wish him to be!

421

Through Others. – There are men who do not wish to be seen except through the eyes of others: a wish which implies a great deal of wisdom.

422

Making Others Happy. – Why is the fact of our making others happy more gratifying to us than all other pleasures? – Because in so doing we gratify fifty cravings at one time. Taken separately they would, perhaps, be very small pleasures; but when put into one hand, that hand will be fuller than ever before – and the heart also.

Book V

423

In the Great Silence. – Here is the sea, here may we forget the town. It is true that its bells are still ringing the Angelus – that solemn and foolish yet sweet sound at the junction between day and night, – but one moment more! now all is silent. Yonder lies the ocean, pale and brilliant; it cannot speak. The sky is glistening with its eternal mute evening hues, red, yellow, and green: it cannot speak. The small cliffs and rocks which stretch out into the sea as if each one of them were endeavouring to find the loneliest spot – they too are dumb. Beautiful and awful indeed is this vast silence, which so suddenly overcomes us and makes our heart swell.

Alas! what deceit lies in this dumb beauty! How well could it speak, and how evilly, too, if it wished! Its tongue, tied up and fastened, and its face of suffering happiness – all this is but malice, mocking at your sympathy: be it so! I do not feel ashamed to be the plaything of such powers! but I pity thee, oh nature, because thou must be silent, even though it be only malice that binds thy tongue: nay, I pity thee for the sake of thy malice!

Alas! the silence deepens, and once again my heart swells within me: it is startled by a fresh truth – it, too, is dumb; it likewise sneers when the mouth calls out something to this beauty; it also enjoys the sweet malice of its silence. I come to hate speaking; yea, even thinking. Behind every word I utter do I not hear the laughter of error, imagination, and insanity? Must I not laugh at my pity and mock my own mockery? Oh sea, oh evening, ye are bad teachers! Ye teach man how to cease to be a man. Is he to give himself up to you? Shall he become as you now are, pale, brilliant, dumb, immense, reposing calmly upon himself? – exalted above himself?

424

For whom the Truth Exists. – Up to the present time errors have been the power most fruitful in consolations: we now expect the same effects from accepted truths, and we have been waiting rather too long for them. What if these truths could not give us this consolation we are looking for? Would that be an argument against them? What have these truths in common with the sick condition of suffering and degenerate men that they should be useful to them? It is, of course, no proof against the truth of a plant when it is clearly established that it does not contribute in any way to the recovery of sick people. Formerly, however, people were so convinced that man was the ultimate end of nature that they believed that knowledge could reveal nothing that was not beneficial and useful to man – nay, there could not, should not be, any other things in existence.

Perhaps all this leads to the conclusion that truth as an entity and a coherent whole exists only for those natures who, like Aristotle, are at once powerful and harmless, joyous and peaceful: just as none but these would be in a position to seek such truths; for the others seek remedies for themselves – however proud they may be of their intellect and its freedom, they do not seek truth. Hence it comes about that these others take no real joy in science, but reproach it for its coldness, dryness, and inhumanity. This is the judgment of sick people about the games of the healthy. – Even the Greek gods were unable to administer consolation; and when at length the entire Greek world fell ill, this was a reason for the destruction of such gods.

425

We Gods in Exile. – Owing to errors regarding their descent, their uniqueness, their mission, and by claims based upon these errors, men have again and again “surpassed themselves”; but through these same errors the world has been filled with unspeakable suffering, mutual persecution, suspicion, misunderstanding, and an even greater amount of individual misery. Men have become suffering creatures in consequence of their morals, and the sum-total of what they have obtained by those morals is simply the feeling that they are far too good and great for this world, and that they are enjoying merely a transitory existence on it. As yet the “proud sufferer” is the highest type of mankind.

426

The Colour-Blindness of Thinkers. – How differently from us the Greeks must have viewed nature, since, as we cannot help admitting, they were quite colour-blind in regard to blue and green, believing the former to be a deeper brown, and the latter to be yellow. Thus, for instance, they used the same word to describe the colour of dark hair, of the corn-flower, and the southern sea; and again they employed exactly the same expression for the colour of the greenest herbs, the human skin, honey, and yellow raisins: whence it follows that their greatest painters reproduced the world they lived in only in black, white, red, and yellow. How different and how much nearer to mankind, therefore, must nature have seemed to them, since in their eyes the tints of mankind predominated also in nature, and nature was, as it were, floating in the coloured ether of humanity! (blue and green more than anything else dehumanise nature). It is this defect which developed the playful facility that characterised the Greeks of seeing the phenomena of nature as gods and demi-gods – that is to say, as human forms.

Let this, however, merely serve as a simile for another supposition. Every thinker paints his world and the things that surround him in fewer colours than really exist, and he is blind to individual colours. This is something more than a mere deficiency. Thanks to this nearer approach and simplification, he imagines he sees in things those harmonies of colours which possess a great charm, and may greatly enrich nature. Perhaps, indeed, it was in this way that men first learnt to take delight in viewing existence, owing to its being first of all presented to them in one or two shades, and consequently harmonised. They practised these few shades, so to speak, before they could pass on to any more. And even now certain individuals endeavour to get rid of a partial colour-blindness that they may obtain a richer faculty of sight and discernment, in the course of which they find that they not only discover new pleasures, but are also obliged to lose and give up some of their former ones.

427

The Embellishment of Science. – In the same way that the feeling that “nature is ugly, wild, tedious – we must embellish it (embellir la nature)” – brought about rococo horticulture, so does the view that “science is ugly, difficult, dry, dreary and weary, we must embellish it,” invariably gives rise to something called philosophy. This philosophy sets out to do what all art and poetry endeavour to do, viz., giving amusement above all else; but it wishes to do this, in conformity with its hereditary pride, in a higher and more sublime fashion before an audience of superior intellects. It is no small ambition to create for these intellects a kind of horticulture, the principal charm of which – like that of the usual gardening – is to bring about an optical illusion (by means of temples, perspective, grottos, winding walks, and waterfalls, to speak in similes), exhibiting science in a condensed form and in all kinds of strange and unexpected illuminations, infusing into it as much indecision, irrationality, and dreaminess as will enable us to walk about in it “as in savage nature,” but without trouble and boredom.

Those who are possessed of this ambition even dream of making religion superfluous – religion, which among men of former times served as the highest kind of entertainment. All this is now running its course, and will one day attain its highest tide. Even now hostile voices are being raised against philosophy, exclaiming: “Return to science, to nature, and the naturalness of science!” and thus an age may begin which may discover the most powerful beauty precisely in the “savage and ugly” domains of science, just as it is only since the time of Rousseau that we have discovered the sense for the beauty of high mountains and deserts.

428

Two Kinds of Moralists. – To see a law of nature for the first time, and to see it whole (for example, the law of gravity or the reflection of light and sound), and afterwards to explain such a law, are two different things and concern different classes of minds. In the same way, those moralists who observe and exhibit human laws and habits – moralists with discriminating ears, noses, and eyes – differ entirely from those who interpret their observations. These latter must above all be inventive, and must possess an imagination untrammelled by sagacity and knowledge.

429

The new Passion. – Why do we fear and dread a possible return to barbarism? Is it because it would make people less happy than they are now? Certainly not! the barbarians of all ages possessed more happiness than we do: let us not deceive ourselves on this point! – but our impulse towards knowledge is too widely developed to allow us to value happiness without knowledge, or the happiness of a strong and fixed delusion: it is painful to us even to imagine such a state of things! Our restless pursuit of discoveries and divinations has become for us as attractive and indispensable as hapless love to the lover, which on no account would he exchange for indifference, – nay, perhaps we, too, are hapless lovers! Knowledge within us has developed into a passion, which does not shrink from any sacrifice, and at bottom fears nothing but its own extinction. We sincerely believe that all humanity, weighed down as it is by the burden of this passion, are bound to feel more exalted and comforted than formerly, when they had not yet overcome the longing for the coarser satisfaction which accompanies barbarism.

It may be that mankind may perish eventually from this passion for knowledge! – but even that does not daunt us. Did Christianity ever shrink from a similar thought? Are not love and death brother and sister? Yes, we detest barbarism, – we all prefer that humanity should perish rather than that knowledge should enter into a stage of retrogression. And, finally, if mankind does not perish through some passion it will perish through some weakness: which would we prefer? This is the main question. Do we wish its end to be in fire and light, or in the sands?

430

Likewise Heroic. – To do things of the worst possible odour, things of which we scarcely dare to speak, but which are nevertheless useful and necessary, is also heroic. The Greeks were not ashamed of numbering even the cleansing of a stable among the great tasks of Hercules.

431

The Opinions of Opponents. – In order to measure the natural subtlety or weakness of even the cleverest heads, we must consider the manner in which they take up and reproduce the opinions of their adversaries, for the natural measure of any intellect is thereby revealed. The perfect sage involuntarily idealises his opponent and frees his inconsistencies from all defects and accidentalities: he only takes up arms against him when he has thus turned his opponent into a god with shining weapons.

432

Investigator and Attempter. – There is no exclusive method of knowing in science. We must deal with things tentatively, treating them by turns harshly or justly, passionately or coldly. One investigator deals with things like a policeman, another like a confessor, and yet a third like an inquisitive traveller. We force something from them now by sympathy and now by violence: the one is urged onward and led to see clearly by the veneration which the secrets of the things inspire in him, and the other again by the indiscretion and malice met with in the explanation of these secrets. We investigators, like all conquerors, explorers, navigators, and adventurers, are men of a daring morality, and we must put up with our liability to be in the main looked upon as evil.

433

Seeing with new Eyes. – Presuming that by the term “beauty in art” is always implied the imitation of something that is happy – and this I consider to be true – according as an age or a people or a great autocratic individuality represents happiness: what then is disclosed by the so-called realism of our modern artists in regard to the happiness of our epoch? It is undoubtedly its type of beauty which we now understand most easily and enjoy best of any. As a consequence, we are induced to believe that this happiness which is now peculiar to us is based on realism, on the sharpest possible senses, and on the true conception of the actual – that is to say, not upon reality, but upon what we know of reality. The results of science have already gained so much in depth and extent that the artists of our century have involuntarily become the glorifiers of scientific “blessings” per se.

434

Intercession. – Unpretentious regions are subjects for great landscape painters; remarkable and rare regions for inferior painters: for the great things of nature and humanity must intercede in favour of their little, mediocre, and vain admirers – whereas the great man intercedes in favour of unassuming things.