The Portable Nietzsche

by Friedrich Nietzsche

We should not rashly take a well-phrased point for Nietzsche’s ultimate position, but we often stand to gain if we ask ourselves why it should not be ours.

An anthologist can easily re-create Nietzsche in his own image, even as writers of lives of Jesus present us, perhaps as often as not, with wishful self-portraits.

Doubtless Nietzsche has attracted crackpots and villains, but perhaps the percentage is no higher than in the case of Jesus.

“If books were judged by the bad uses man can put them to, what book has been more...

In any case, no other German writer of equal stature has been so thoroughly opposed to all proto-nazism—which Nietzsche encountered in Wagner’s ideological tracts, in his sister’s husband, Bernhard Förster, and in various publications of his time. If some Nazi writers cited him nevertheless, it was at the price of incredible misquotation and exegetical acrobatics, which defy comparison with all the similar devices that Nietzsche himself castigated in the name of the philological conscience. His works were rejected as a series of poses; parenthetical statements were quoted as meaning the opposite of what they plainly mean in context; and views he explicitly rejected were brazenly attributed to him.

Nietzsche’s orientation, as he himself insisted once more in Ecce Homo, was fundamentally anti-political.

Nietzsche is close not only to the man who was the grandfather of so much in modern English and American philosophy, David Hume, but also to this modern philosophy itself.

Thus Nietzsche, once stupidly denounced as the mind that caused the First World War, might well become a major aid to international understanding:

Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.

The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful than the truths of little men.

When one speaks of humanity, the idea is fundamental that this is something which separates and distinguishes man from nature. In reality, however, there is no such separation: “natural” qualities and those called truly “human” are inseparably grown together.

Subject object orientation familiar from Eastern philosophy and evident in later Heidegger

we do not at all demand stories about the world process, for we consider it a swindle to talk about it. That my life has no aim is evident even from the accidental nature of its origin; that I can posit an aim for myself is another matter. But a state has no aim; we alone give it this aim or that.

The history of the state is the history of the egoism of the masses and of the blind desire to exist;

What, indeed, does man know of himself! Can he even once perceive himself completely, laid out as if in an illuminated glass case?

The political defeat of Greece was the greatest failure of culture: for it has brought with it the revolting theory that one can foster culture only when one is armed to the teeth and wears boxing gloves. The rise of Christianity was the second great failure: raw power there and the dull intellect here became victors over the aristocratic genius among the nations. Being a Hellenophile means: being an enemy of raw power and dull intellects. In this way Sparta was the ruin of Hellas, for she forced Athens to become active in a federation and to throw herself entirely into politics.

The European man and the abolition of nations. Trade and industry, books and letters, the way in which all higher culture is shared, the rapid change of house and scenery, the present nomadic life of everyone who is not a landowner—these circumstances necessarily produce a weakening, and finally the abolition, of nations, at least in Europe; and as a consequence of continual intermarriage there must develop a mixed race, that of the European man. . . . It is not the interest of the many (of peoples), as is often claimed, but above all the interest of certain royal dynasties and also of certain classes in commerce and society, that drives to nationalism.

Once one has recognized this, one should declare oneself without embarrassment as a good European and work actively for the amalgamation of nations.

And to say it once more. Public opinions—private lazinesses.

Clever people may learn as much as they wish of the results of science—still one will always notice in their conversation, and especially in their hypotheses, that they lack the scientific spirit; they do not have that instinctive mistrust of the aberrations of thought which through long training are deeply rooted in the soul of every scientific person. They are content to find any hypothesis at all concerning some matter; then they are all fire and flame for it and think that is enough. To have an opinion means for them to fanaticize for it and thenceforth to press it to their hearts as a conviction.

If all goes well, the time will come when, to develop oneself morally-rationally, one will take up the memorabilia of Socrates rather than the Bible,

We must abjure the doctrine of the army as a means of self-defense just as completely as the desire for conquests.

The more peaceful a community has become, the more cowardly the citizens become; the less accustomed they are to standing pain, the more will worldly punishments suffice as deterrents,

In highly civilized peoples, finally, even punishments should become highly superfluous deterrents; the mere fear of shame, the trembling of vanity, is so continually effective that immoral actions are left undone.

Doubtful. To accept a faith just because it is customary, means to be dishonest, to be cowardly, to be lazy. And do dishonesty, cowardice, and laziness then appear as the presupposition of morality?

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?

This would be the right state of mind: the workers in Europe should declare that henceforth as a class they are a human impossibility, and not only, as is customary, a harsh and purposeless establishment. They should introduce an era of a vast swarming out from the European beehive, the like of which has never been experienced, and with this act of emigration in the grand manner protest against the machine, against capital, and against the choice with which they are now threatened, of becoming of necessity either slaves of the state or slaves of a revolutionary party.

I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted. I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now, was inspired by “instinct.” Not only is his over-all tendency like mine—making knowledge the most powerful affect —but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world order, the unegoistic, and evil. Even though the divergencies are admittedly tremendous, they are due more to the difference in time, culture, and science. In summa: my lonesomeness, which, as on very high mountains, often made it hard for me to breathe and made my blood rush out, is now at least a twosomeness. Strange.

The Madman. Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly, “I seek God! I seek God!” As many of those who do not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Why, did he get lost? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glances. “Whither is God” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? What was holies...

Who will give you the necessary strength? Nobody yet has had this strength.”

[341] The greatest stress. How, if some day or night a demon were to sneak after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything immeasurably small or great in your life must return to you—all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over, and you with it, a dust grain of dust.” Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or did you once experience a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, “You are a god, and never have I heard anything more godly.” If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you, as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you want this once more and innumerable times more?” would weigh upon your actions as the greatest stress. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

“I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?

“All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape.

“Verily, a polluted stream is man. One must be a sea to be able to receive a polluted stream without becoming unclean. Behold, I teach you the overman: he is this sea; in him your great contempt can go under.

“What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt.

How weary I am of my good and my evil!

overman—a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping. “What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under.

“I love those who do not know how to live, except by going under, for they are those who cross over.

When Zarathustra had spoken these words he beheld the people again and was silent. “There they stand,” he said to his heart; “there they laugh. They do not understand me; I am not the mouth for these ears.

“I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.

“Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man.

“No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse. “ ‘Formerly, all the world was mad,’ say the most refined, and they blink.

“They do not understand me: I am not the mouth for these ears. I seem to have lived too long in the mountains;

“An insight has come to me: companions I need, living ones—not dead companions and corpses whom I carry with myself wherever I want to. Living companions I need, who follow me because they want to follow themselves—wherever

“To lure many away from the herd, for that I have come. The people and the herd shall be angry with me: Zarathustra wants to be called a robber by the shepherds.

I found life more dangerous among men than among animals;

“Thou shalt” is the name of the great dragon. But the spirit of the lion says, “I will.”

The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred “Yes.” For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred “Yes” is needed: the spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world.

Many sick people have always been among the poetizers and God-cravers; furiously they hate the lover of knowledge and that youngest among the virtues, which is called “honesty.”

Those who become sick today are overcome by that evil which is evil today: they want to hurt with that which hurts them.

your ears do not want to accept this: it harms your good people, you say to me. But what matter your good people to me? Much about your good people nauseates me; and verily, it is not their evil.