Kitabı oku: «The Dawn of Day», sayfa 25

535

Truth Requires Power. – Truth in itself is no power at all, in spite of all that flattering rationalists are in the habit of saying to the contrary. Truth must either attract power to its side, or else side with power, for otherwise it will perish again and again. This has already been sufficiently demonstrated, and more than sufficiently!

536

The Thumbscrew. – It is disgusting to observe with what cruelty every one charges his two or three private virtues to the account of others who may perhaps not possess them, and whom he torments and worries with them. Let us therefore deal humanely with the “sense of honesty,” although we may possess in it a thumbscrew with which we can worry to death all these presumptuous egoists who even yet wish to impose their own beliefs upon the whole world – we have tried this thumbscrew on ourselves!

537

Mastery. – We have reached mastery when we neither mistake nor hesitate in the achievement.

538

The Moral Insanity of Genius. – In a certain category of great intellects we may observe a painful and partly horrible spectacle: in their most productive moments their flights aloft and into the far distance appear to be out of harmony with their general constitution and to exceed their power in one way or another, so that each time there remains a deficiency, and also in the long run a defectiveness in the entire machinery, which latter is manifested among those highly intellectual natures by various kinds of moral and intellectual symptoms more regularly than by conditions of bodily distress.

Thus those incomprehensible characteristics of their nature – all their timidity, vanity, hatefulness, envy, their narrow and narrowing disposition – and that too personal and awkward element in natures like those of Rousseau and Schopenhauer, may very well be the consequences of a periodical attack of heart disease; and this in its turn may be the result of a nervous complaint, and this latter the consequence of —¹⁶

So long as genius dwells within us we are full of audacity, yea, almost mad, and heedless of health, life, and honour; we fly through the day as free and swift as an eagle, and in the darkness we feel as confident as an owl. – But let genius once leave us and we are instantly overcome by a feeling of the most profound despondency: we can no longer understand ourselves; we suffer from everything that we experience and do not experience; we feel as if we were in the midst of shelterless rocks with the tempest raging round us, and we are at the same time like pitiful childish souls, afraid of a rustle or a shadow. – Three-fourths of all the evil committed in the world is due to timidity; and this is above all a physiological process.

539

Do you know what you Want? – Have you never been troubled by the fear that you might not be at all fitted for recognising what is true? by the fear that your senses might be too dull, and even your delicacy of sight far too blunt? If you could only perceive, even once, to what extent your volition dominates your sight! How, for example, you wished yesterday to see more than some one else, while to-day you wish to see it differently! and how from the start you were anxious to see something which would be in conformity with or in opposition to anything that people thought they had observed up to the present. Oh, those shameful cravings! How often you keep your eyes open for what is efficacious, for what is soothing, just because you happen to be tired at the moment! Always full of secret predeterminations of what truth should be like, so that you – you, forsooth! – might accept it! or do you think that to-day, because you are as frozen and dry as a bright winter morning, and because nothing is weighing on your mind, you have better eyesight! Are not ardour and enthusiasm necessary to do justice to the creations of thought? – and this indeed is what is called sight! as if you could treat matters of thought any differently from the manner in which you treat men. In all relations with thought there is the same morality, the same honesty of purpose, the same arrière-pensée, the same slackness, the same faint-heartedness – your whole lovable and hateful self! Your physical exhaustion will lend the things pale colours whilst your feverishness will turn them into monsters! Does not your morning show the things in a different light from the evening? Are you not afraid of finding in the cave of all knowledge your own phantom, the veil in which truth is wrapped up and hidden from your sight? Is it not a dreadful comedy in which you so thoughtlessly wish to take part?

540

Learning. – Michelangelo considered Raphael's genius as having been acquired by study, and upon his own as a natural gift: learning as opposed to talent; though this is mere pedantry, with all due respect to the great pedant himself. For what is talent but a name for an older piece of learning, experience, exercise, appropriation, and incorporation, perhaps as far back as the times of our ancestors, or even earlier! And again: he who learns forms his own talents, only learning is not such an easy matter and depends not only upon our willingness, but also upon our being able to learn at all.

Jealousy often prevents this in an artist, or that pride which, when it experiences any strange feeling, at once assumes an attitude of defence instead of an attitude of scholarly receptiveness. Raphael, like Goethe, lacked this pride, on which account they were great learners, and not merely the exploiters of those quarries which had been formed by the manifold genealogy of their forefathers. Raphael vanishes before our eyes as a learner in the midst of that assimilation of what his great rival called his “nature”: this noblest of all thieves daily carried off a portion of it; but before he had appropriated all the genius of Michelangelo he died – and the final series of his works, because it is the beginning of a new plan of study, is less perfect and good, for the simple reason that the great student was interrupted by death in the midst of his most difficult task, and took away with him that justifying and final goal which he had in view.

541

How we should turn to Stone. – By slowly, very, very slowly, becoming hard like a precious stone, and at last lie still, a joy to all eternity.

542

The Philosopher and Old Age. – It is not wise to permit evening to act as a judge of the day; for only too often in this case weariness becomes the judge of success and good will. We should also take the greatest precautions in regard to everything connected with old age and its judgment upon life, more especially since old age, like the evening, is fond of assuming a new and charming morality, and knows well enough how to humiliate the day by the glow of the evening skies, twilight and a peaceful and wistful silence. The reverence which we feel for an old man, especially if he is an old thinker and sage, easily blinds us to the deterioration of his intellect, and it is always necessary to bring to light the hidden symptoms of such a deterioration and lassitude, that is to say, to uncover the physiological phenomenon which is still concealed behind the old man's moral judgments and prejudices, in case we should be deceived by our veneration for him, and do something to the disadvantage of knowledge. For it is not seldom that the illusion of a great moral renovation and regeneration takes possession of the old man. Basing his views upon this, he then proceeds to express his opinions on the work and development of his life as if he had only then for the first time become clearsighted – and nevertheless it is not wisdom, but fatigue, which prompts his present state of well-being and his positive judgments.

The most dangerous indication of this weariness is above all the belief in genius, which as a rule only arises in great and semi-great men of intellect at this period of their lives: the belief in an exceptional position, and exceptional rights. The thinker who thus believes himself to be inspired by genius henceforth deems it permissible for him to take things more easily, and takes advantage of his position as a genius to decree rather than to prove. It is probable, however, that the need felt by the weary intellect for alleviation is the main source of this belief – it precedes it in time, though appearances may indicate the contrary.

At this time too, as the result of the love which all weary and old people feel for enjoyment, such men as those I am speaking of wish to enjoy the results of their thinking instead of again testing them and scattering the seeds abroad once more. This leads them to make their thoughts palatable and enjoyable, and to take away their dryness, coldness, and want of flavour; and thus it comes about that the old thinker apparently raises himself above his life's work, while in reality he spoils it by infusing into it a certain amount of fantasy, sweetness, flavour, poetic mists, and mystic lights. This is how Plato ended, as did also that great and honest Frenchman, Auguste Comte, who, as a conqueror of the exact sciences, cannot be matched either among the Germans or the Englishmen of this century.

There is a third symptom of fatigue: that ambition which actuated the great thinker when he was young, and which could not then find anything to satisfy it, has also grown old, and, like one that has no more time to lose, it begins to snatch at the coarser and more immediate means of its gratification, means which are peculiar to active, dominating, violent, and conquering dispositions. From this time onwards the thinker wishes to found institutions which shall bear his name, instead of erecting mere brain-structures. What are now to him the ethereal victories and honours to be met with in the realm of proofs and refutations, or the perpetuation of his fame in books, or the thrill of exultation in the soul of the reader? But the institution, on the other hand, is a temple, as he well knows – a temple of stone, a durable edifice, which will keep its god alive with more certainty than the sacrifices of rare and tender souls.¹⁷

Perhaps, too, at this period of his life the old thinker will for the first time meet with that love which is fitted for a god rather than for a human being, and his whole nature becomes softened and sweetened in the rays of such a sun, like fruit in autumn. Yes, he grows more divine and beautiful, this great old man, – and nevertheless it is old age and weariness which permit him to ripen in this way, to grow more silent, and to repose in the luminous adulation of a woman. Now it is all up with his former desire – a desire which was superior even to his own ego – for real disciples, followers who would carry on his thought, that is, true opponents. This desire arose from his hitherto undiminished energy, the conscious pride he felt in being able at any time to become an opponent himself, – nay, even the deadly enemy of his own doctrine, – but now his desire is for resolute partisans, unwavering comrades, auxiliary forces, heralds, a pompous train of followers. He is now no longer able to bear that dreadful isolation in which every intellect that advances beyond the others is compelled to live. From this time forward he surrounds himself with objects of veneration, companionship, tenderness, and love; but he also wishes to enjoy the privileges of all religious people, and to worship what he venerates most highly in his little community – he will even go as far as to invent a religion for the purpose of having a community.

Thus lives the wise old man, and in living thus he falls almost imperceptibly into such a deplorable proximity to priestly and poetic extravagances that it is difficult to recollect all his wise and severe period of youth, the former rigid morality of his mind, and his truly virile dread of fancies and misplaced enthusiasm. When he was formerly in the habit of comparing himself with the older thinkers, he did so merely that he might measure his weakness against their strength, and that he might become colder and more audacious towards himself; but now he only makes this comparison to intoxicate himself with his own delusions. Formerly he looked forward with confidence to future thinkers, and he even took a delight in imagining himself to be cast into the shade by their brighter light. Now, however, he is mortified to think that he cannot be the last: he endeavours to discover some way of imposing upon mankind, together with the inheritance which he is leaving to them, a restriction of sovereign thinking. He fears and reviles the pride and the love of freedom of individual minds: after him no one must allow his intellect to govern with absolute unrestriction: he himself wishes to remain for ever the bulwark on which the waves of ideas may break – these are his secret wishes, and perhaps, indeed, they are not always secret.

The hard fact upon which such wishes are based, however, is that he himself has come to a halt before his teaching, and has set up his boundary stone, his “thus far and no farther.” In canonising himself he has drawn up his own death warrant: from now on his mind cannot develop further. His race is run; the hour-hand stops. Whenever a great thinker tries to make himself a lasting institution for posterity, we may readily suppose that he has passed the climax of his powers, and is very tired, very near the setting of his sun.

543

We must not make Passion an Argument for Truth. – Oh, you kind-hearted and even noble enthusiasts, I know you! You wish to seem right in our eyes as well as in your own, but especially in your own! – and an irritable and subtle evil conscience so often spurs you on against your very enthusiasm! How ingenious you then become in deceiving your conscience, and lulling it to sleep! How you hate honest, simple, and clean souls; how you avoid their innocent glances! That better knowledge whose representatives they are, and whose voice you hear only too distinctly within yourselves when it questions your belief, – how you try to cast suspicion upon it as a bad habit, as a disease of the age, as the neglect and infection of your own intellectual health! It drives you on to hate even criticism, science, reason! You must falsify history to make it testify in your favour; you must deny virtues in case they should obscure those of your own idols and ideals.

Coloured images where arguments are needed! Ardour and power of expression! Silver mists! Ambrosian nights! well do you know how to enlighten and to darken – to darken by means of light! and indeed when your passion can no longer be kept within bounds the moment comes when you say to yourselves, “Now I have won for myself a good conscience, now I am exalted, courageous, self-denying, magnanimous; now I am honest!” How you long for these moments when your passion will confer upon you full and absolute rights, and also, as it were, innocence. How happy you are when engaged in battle and inspired with ecstasy or courage, when you are elated beyond yourself, when gnawing doubt has left you, and when you can even decree: “Any man who is not in ecstasy as we are cannot by any chance know what or where truth is.” How you long to meet with those who share your belief in this state – which is a state of intellectual depravity – and to set your own fire alight with their flames! Oh, for your martyrdom, your victory of the sanctified lie! Must you really inflict so much pain upon yourselves? —Must you?

544

How Philosophy is now Practised. – I can see quite well that our philosophising youths, women, and artists require from philosophy exactly the opposite of what the Greeks derived from it. What does he who does not hear the continual exultation that resounds through every speech and counter-argument in a Platonic dialogue, this exultation over the new invention of rational thinking, know about Plato or about ancient philosophy? At that time souls were filled with enthusiasm when they gave themselves up to the severe and sober sport of ideas, generalisations, refutations, – that enthusiasm which perhaps those old, great, severe, and prudent contrapuntists in music have also known. At that time the Greek palate still possessed that older and formerly omnipotent taste: and by the side of this taste their new taste appeared to be enveloped in so much charm that the divine art of dialectic was sung by hesitating voices as if its followers were intoxicated with the frenzy of love. That old form of thinking, however, was thought within the bounds of morality, and for it nothing existed but fixed judgments and established facts, and it had no reasons but those of authority. Thinking, therefore, was simply a matter of repetition, and all the enjoyment of speech and dialogue could only lie in their form.

Wherever the substance of a thing is looked upon as eternal and universally approved, there is only one great charm, the charm of variable forms, that is, of fashion. Even in the poets ever since the time of Homer, and later on in the case of the sculptors, the Greeks did not enjoy originality, but its contrary. It was Socrates who discovered another charm, that of cause and effect, of reason and sequence, and we moderns have become so used to it, and have been brought up to the necessity of logic that we look upon it as the normal taste, and as such it cannot but be repugnant to ardent and presumptuous people. Such people are pleased by whatever stands out boldly from the normal: their more subtle ambition leads them to believe only too readily that they are exceptional souls, not dialectic and rational beings, but, let us say, “intuitive” beings gifted with an “inner sense,” or with a certain “intellectual perception.” Above all, however, they wish to be “artistic natures” with a genius in their heads, and a demon in their bodies, and consequently with special rights in this world and in the world to come – especially the divine privilege of being incomprehensible.

And people like these are “going in for” philosophy nowadays! I fear they will discover one day that they have made a mistake – what they are looking for is religion!

545

But we do not Believe you. – You would fain pass for psychologists, but we shall not allow it! Are we not to notice that you pretend to be more experienced, profound, passionate, and perfect than you actually are? – just as we notice in yonder painter that there is a trifling presumptuousness in his manner of wielding the brush, and in yonder musician that he brings forward his theme with the desire to make it appear superior to what it really is. Have you experienced history within yourselves, commotions, earthquakes, long and profound sadness, and sudden flashes of happiness? Have you acted foolishly with great and little fools? Have you really undergone the delusions and woe of the good people? and also the woe and the peculiar happiness of the most evil? Then you may speak to me of morality, but not otherwise!

546

Slave and Idealist. – The followers of Epictetus would doubtless not be to the taste of those who are now striving after the ideal. The constant tension of his being, the indefatigable inward glance, the prudent and reserved incommunicativeness of his eye whenever it happens to gaze upon the outer world, and above all, his silence or laconic speech: all these are characteristics of the strictest fortitude, – and what would our idealists, who above all else are desirous of expansion, care for this? But in spite of all this the Stoic is not fanatical. He detests the display and boasting of our idealists: his pride, however great it may be, is not eager to disturb others. It permits of a certain gentle approach, and has no desire to spoil anybody's good humour – nay, it can even smile. A great deal of ancient humanity is to be seen exemplified in this ideal. The most excellent feature about it, however, is that the thinker is completely free from the fear of God, strictly believes in reason, and is no preacher of penitence.

Epictetus was a slave: his ideal man is without any particular rank, and may exist in any grade of society, but above all he is to be sought in the deepest and lowest social classes, as the silent and self-sufficient man in the midst of a general state of servitude, a man who defends himself alone against the outer world, and is constantly living in a state of the highest fortitude. He is distinguished from the Christian especially, because the latter lives in hope in the promise of “unspeakable glory,” permits presents to be made to him, and expects and accepts the best things from divine love and grace, and not from himself. Epictetus, on the other hand, neither hopes nor allows his best treasure to be given him – he possesses it already, holds it bravely in his hand, and defies the world to take it away from him. Christianity was devised for another class of ancient slaves, for those who had a weak will and weak reason – that is to say, for the majority of slaves.