Ecce Homo

by Friedrich Nietzsche

– He who knows how to breathe the air of my writings knows that it is an air of the heights, a robust air. One has to be made for it, otherwise there is no small danger one will catch cold. The ice is near, the solitude is terrible – but how peacefully all things lie in the light! how freely one breathes! how much one feels beneath one!

How much truth can a spirit bear, how much truth can a spirit dare? that became for me more and more the real measure of value. Error (– belief in the ideal –) is not blindness, error is cowardice … Every acquisition, every step forward in knowledge is the result of courage, of severity towards oneself, of cleanliness with respect to oneself

With a voice that speaks across millennia, it is not only the most exalted book that exists, the actual book of the air of the heights – the entire fact man lies at a tremendous distance beneath it – it is also the profoundest, born out of the innermost abundance of truth, an inexhaustible well into which no bucket descends without coming up filled with gold and goodness.

The figs are falling from the trees, they are fine and sweet: and as they fall their red skins split. I am a north wind to ripe figs. Thus, like figs, do these teachings fall to you, my friends: now drink their juice and eat their sweet flesh! It is autumn all around and clear sky and afternoon

A being who is typically morbid cannot become healthy, still less can he make himself healthy; conversely, for one who is typically healthy being sick can even be an energetic stimulant to life, to more life.

Thus in fact does that long period of sickness seem to me now: I discovered life as it were anew, myself included, I tasted all good and even petty things in a way that others could not easily taste them – I made out of my will to health, to life, my philosophy

When I look for my profoundest opposite, the incalculable pettiness of the instincts, I always find my mother and my sister – to be related to such canaille would be a blasphemy against my divinity.

Those who keep silent almost always lack subtlety and politeness of the heart; silence is an objection, swallowing down necessarily produces a bad character – it even ruins the stomach. All those given to silence are dyspeptic. – One will see that I would not like to see rudeness undervalued, it is the most humane form of contradiction by far and, in the midst of modern tendermindedness, one of our foremost virtues. – If one is rich enough, it is even fortunate to be in the wrong. A god come to earth ought to do nothing whatever but wrong: to take upon oneself, not the punishment, but the guilt – only that would be godlike.

And nothing burns one up quicker than the affects of ressentiment. Vexation, morbid susceptibility, incapacity for revenge, the desire, the thirst for revenge, poison-brewing in any sense – for one who is exhausted this is certainly the most disadvantageous kind of reaction: it causes a rapid expenditure of nervous energy, a morbid accretion of excretions, for example of gall into the stomach. ressentiment is the forbidden in itself for the invalid – his evil: unfortunately also his most natural inclination.

ressentiment, born of weakness, to no one more harmful than to the weak man himself

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.

Lately I stood at the bridge in the brown night. From afar there came a song: a golden drop, it swelled across the trembling surface. Gondolas, lights, music – drunken it swam out into the gloom … My soul, a stringed instrument, touched by invisible hands sang to itself in reply a gondola song, and trembled with gaudy happiness. – Was anyone listening?

For assuming that the task, the vocation, the destiny of the task exceeds the average measure by a significant degree, there would be no greater danger than to catch sight of oneself with this task. That one becomes what one is presupposes that one does not have the remotest idea what one is. From this point of view even the blunders of life – the temporary sidepaths and wrong turnings, the delays, the ‘modesties’, the seriousness squandered on tasks which lie outside the task – have their own meaning and value.

In the meantime the organizing ‘idea’ destined to rule grows and grows in the depths – it begins to command, it slowly leads back from sidepaths and wrong turnings, it prepares individual qualities and abilities which will one day prove themselves indispensable as means to achieving the whole – it constructs the ancillary capacities one after the other before it gives any hint of the dominating task, of the ‘goal’, ‘objective’, ‘meaning’.

The magnitude of its higher protection was shown in the fact I have at no time had the remotest idea what was growing within me – that all my abilities one day leapt forth suddenly ripe, in their final perfection.

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity. Not merely to endure that which happens of necessity, still less to dissemble it – all idealism is untruthfulness in the face of necessity – but to love it

Ultimately, no one can extract from things, books included, more than he already knows. What one has no access to through experience one has no ear for.

When I picture a perfect reader, I always picture a monster of courage and curiosity, also something supple, cunning, cautious, a born adventurer and discoverer.

‘The preaching of chastity is a public incitement to anti-nature. Every expression of contempt for the sexual life, every befouling of it through the concept “impure”, is the crime against life – is the intrinsic sin against the holy spirit of life.’

‘The genius of the heart as it is possessed by that great hidden one, the tempter god and born pied piper of consciences whose voice knows how to descend into the underworld of every soul, who says no word and gives no glance in which there lies no touch of enticement, to whose mastery belongs knowing how to seem – not what he is but what to those who follow him is one constraint more to press ever closer to him, to follow him ever more inwardly and thoroughly … The genius of the heart who makes everything loud and self-satisfied fall silent and teaches it to listen, who smooths rough souls and gives them a new desire to savour – the desire to lie still as a mirror, that the deep sky may mirror itself in them … The genius of the heart who teaches the stupid and hasty hand to hesitate and grasp more delicately; who divines the hidden and forgotten treasure, the drop of goodness and sweet spirituality under thick and opaque ice, and is a divining-rod for every grain of gold which has lain long in the prison of much mud and sand … The genius of the heart from whose touch everyone goes away richer, not favoured and surprised, not as if blessed and oppressed with the goods of others, but richer in himself, newer to himself than before, broken open, blown upon and sounded out by a thawing wind, more uncertain perhaps, more delicate, more fragile, more broken, but full of hopes that as yet have no names, full of new will and current, full of new ill will and counter current …’

I was the first to see the real antithesis – the degenerated instinct which turns against life with subterranean vengefulness (– Christianity, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, in a certain sense already the philosophy of Plato, the whole of idealism as typical forms) and a formula of supreme affirmation born out of fullness, of superfluity, an affirmation without reservation even of suffering, even of guilt, even of all that is strange and questionable in existence … This ultimate, joyfullest, boundlessly exuberant Yes to life is not only the highest insight, it is also the profoundest, the insight most strictly confirmed and maintained by truth and knowledge.

beyond pity and terror, to realize in oneself the eternal joy of becoming – the joy which also encompasses joy in destruction

brings to light what is dangerous, what gnaws at and poisons life, in our way of carrying on science –: life sick with this inhuman clockwork and mechanism, with the ‘impersonality’ of the worker, with the false economy of ‘division of labour’. The goal gets lost, culture – the means, the modern way of carrying on science, barbarized … In this essay the ‘historical sense’ of which this century is so proud is recognized for the first time as a sickness, as a typical sign of decay.

Here my essay was represented as an event, a turning-point, a first calling of oneself to order, as the best of all signs, as a real return of German seriousness and German passion in spiritual things.

My paradise is ‘beneath the shadow of my sword’

With a torch in hand which gives no trembling light I illuminate with piercing brightness this underworld of the ideal.

Any kind of life, the most unfavourable conditions, sickness, poverty – all seemed preferable to that unworthy ‘selflessness’ into which I had first got out of ignorance, out of youth, in which I had subsequently remained out of lethargy, out of so-called ‘sense of duty’.

My eyes alone put an end to all bookwormishness, in plain terms philology: I was redeemed from the ‘book’, for years at a time I read nothing – the greatest favour I have ever done myself! – That deepest self, as it were buried and grown silent under a constant compulsion to listen to other selves (– and that is what reading means!) awoke slowly, timidly, doubtfully – but at length it spoke again. I have never been so happy with myself as in the sickest and most painful periods of my life: one has only to look at ‘Daybreak’ or perhaps the ‘Wanderer and his Shadow’ to grasp what this ‘return to myself’ was: a highest kind of recovery itself! … The other kind merely followed from this. –

In the end it was I myself who was this sea-beast: almost every sentence in the book was thought, tracked down among that confusion of rocks near to Genoa where I was alone and still shared secrets with the sea.

But the priest wants precisely the degeneration of the whole, of mankind: that is why he conserves the degenerate part – at this price he dominates mankind … What is the purpose of those lying concepts, the ancillary concepts of morality ‘soul’, ‘spirit’, ‘free will’, ‘God’, if it is not the physiological ruination of mankind? … When one directs seriousness away from self-preservation, enhancement of bodily strength, when one makes of greensickness an ideal, of contempt for the body ‘salvation of the soul’, what else is it but a recipe for décadence? – Loss of centre of gravity, resistance to the natural instincts, in a word ‘selflessness’ – that has hitherto been called morality … With ‘Daybreak’ I first took up the struggle against the morality of unselfing. –

I shall now tell the story of Zarathustra. The basic conception of the work, the idea of eternal recurrence, the highest formula of affirmation that can possibly be attained – belongs to the August of the year 1881: it was jotted down on a piece of paper with the inscription: ‘6,000 feet beyond man and time’.

Another ideal runs ahead of us, a strange, seductive, dangerous ideal to which we do not want to convert anyone because we do not easily admit that anyone has a right to it: the ideal of a spirit who naively, that is to say impulsively and from overflowing plenitude and power, plays with everything hitherto called holy, good, untouchable, divine; for whom the highest things by which the people reasonably enough take their standards would signify something like a danger, a corruption, a degradation, or at least a recreation, a blindness, a temporary self-forgetfulness; the ideal of a human-super-human well-being and well-wishing which will often enough seem inhuman, for example when it is set beside the whole of earthly seriousness hitherto, beside every kind of solemnity in gesture, word, tone, glance, morality and task as their most corporal involuntary parody – and with which, in spite of all that, perhaps the great seriousness first arises, the real question-mark is first set up, the destiny of the soul veers round, the clock-hand moves on, the tragedy begins …’

The concept of revelation, in the sense that something suddenly, with unspeakable certainty and subtlety, becomes visible, audible, something that shakes and overturns one to the depths, simply describes the fact. One hears, one does not seek; one takes, one does not ask who gives; a thought flashes up like lightning, with necessity, unfalteringly formed – I have never had any choice.

This is my experience of inspiration; I do not doubt that one has to go back thousands of years to find anyone who could say to me ‘it is mine also’. –

Apart from these ten-day works the years during and above all after Zarathustra were a state of distress without equal. One pays dearly for being immortal: one has to die several times while alive.

the soul which possesses the longest ladder and can descend the deepest, the most spacious soul, which can run and stray and roam the farthest into itself, the most necessary soul, which out of joy hurls itself into chance, the existing soul which plunges into becoming, the possessing soul which wants to partake in desire and longing – the soul fleeing from itself which retrieves itself in the widest sphere, the wisest soul, to which foolishness speaks sweetest, the soul that loves itself the most, in which all things have their current and counter-current and ebb and flow –

No more to will and no more to evaluate and no more to create! ah, that this great lassitude may ever stay far from me! In knowing and understanding, too, I feel only my will’s delight in begetting and becoming; and if there be innocence in my knowledge it is because will to begetting is in it. This will lured me away from God and gods; for what would there be to create if gods – existed! But again and again it drives me to mankind, my ardent, creative will; thus it drives the hammer to the stone. Ah you men, I see an image sleeping in the stone, the image of my visions! Ah, that it must sleep in the hardest, ugliest stone! Now my hammer rages fiercely against its prison. Fragments fly from the stone: what is that to me? I will complete it: for a shadow came to me – the most silent, the lightest of all things came to me! The beauty of the superman came to me as a shadow: what are the gods to me now!

The task for the immediately following years was as clear as it could be. Now that the affirmative part of my task was done, it was the turn of the denying, the No-saying and No-doing part: the revaluation of existing values themselves, the great war – the evocation of a day of decision. Included here is the slow search for those related to me, for such as out of strength would offer me their hand for the work of destruction. – From now on all my writings are fish-hooks: perhaps I understand fishing as well as anyone? … If nothing got caught I am not to blame. There were no fish

All this is recuperative: who could in the end divine what kind of recuperation is needed after such an expenditure of goodness as Zarathustra is? … Speaking theologically – pay heed, for I rarely speak as a theologian – it was God himself who at the end of his labour lay down as a serpent under the Tree of Knowledge: it was thus he recuperated from being God … He had made everything too beautiful … The Devil is merely the idleness of God on that seventh day …

The concept politics has then become completely absorbed into a war of spirits, all the power-structures of the old society have been blown into the air – they one and all reposed on the lie: there will be wars such as there have never yet been on earth.

and he who wants to be a creator in good and evil has first to be a destroyer and break values. Thus the greatest evil belongs with the greatest good: this, however, is the creative good.

The self-overcoming of morality through truthfulness, the self-overcoming of the moralist into his opposite – into me – that is what the name Zarathustra means in my mouth.

The good – cannot create, they are always the beginning of the end – – they crucify him who writes new values on new law-tables, they sacrifice the future to themselves, they crucify the whole human future! The good – have always been the beginning of the end … And whatever harm the world-calumniators may do, the harm the good do is the most harmful harm.

When a décadence-species of man has risen to the rank of the highest species of man, this can happen only at the expense of its antithetical species, the species of man strong and certain of life. When the herd-animal is resplendent in the glow of the highest virtue, the exceptional man must be devalued to the wicked man.