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Do I need after all that, still expressly have to state that they will also be free, very free spirits, these philosophers of the future - although it’s also certain that they will not be merely free spirits but something more, higher, greater, and fundamentally different that does not wish to be misunderstood and confused with something else? But as I say this, I feel a duty almost as much to them as to us who are their heralds and precursors, we free spirits! - the duty to blow away an old stupid prejudice and misunderstanding about us both, something which for too long has made the idea "free spirit" as impenetrable as a fog. In all the countries of Europe and in America as well there is now something which drives people to misuse this name, a very narrow, confined, chained-up type of spirit which wants something rather like the opposite to what lies in our intentions and instincts - to say nothing of the fact that, so far as those emerging new philosophers are concerned, such spirits definitely must be closed windows and bolted doors. To put the matter briefly and seriously, they belong with the levellers, these falsely named "free spirits"- as eloquent and prolific writing slaves of democratic taste and its "modern ideas": collectively people without solitude, without their own solitude, coarse brave lads whose courage or respectable decency should not be denied. But they are simply unfree and ridiculously superficial, above all with their basic tendency to see in the forms of old societies up to now the cause for almost all human misery and failure, a process which turns the truth happily on its head! What they would like to strive for with all their powers is the universal, green, pasture-happiness of the herd, with security, absence of danger, comfort, an easing of life for everyone. The two songs and doctrines they sing most frequently are called "Equality of Rights" and "pity for all things that suffer"- and they assume that suffering itself is something we must do away with. We who are their opposites, we who have opened our eyes and consciences for the question where and how up to now the plant "Man" has grown most powerfully to the heights, we think that this has happened every time under the opposite conditions, that for that to happen the danger of his situation first had to grow enormously, his power of invention and pretence (his "spirit"-) had to develop under lengthy pressure and compulsion into something refined and audacious, his will for living had to intensify into an unconditional will for power: - we think that hardness, violence, slavery, danger in the alleys and in the hearts, seclusion, stoicism, the art of attempting, and devilry of all kinds, that everything evil, fearful, tyrannical, predatory, snake-like in human beings serves well for the ennobling of the species "Man," as much as its opposite does: - in fact, when we say only this much we have not said enough, and we find ourselves at any rate with our speaking and silence at a point at the other end of all modern ideology and things desired by the herd, perhaps as their exact opposites? Is it any wonder that we "free spirits" are not the most talkative spirits? That we do not want to give away every detail of what a spirit can free itself and in what direction it may then perhaps be driven? And so far as the meaning of the dangerous formula "beyond good and evil" is concerned, with which we at least protect ourselves from being confused with others, we are something quite different from "libres-penseurs," "liberi pensatori," "Freidenker," and whatever else all these good advocates of "modern ideas" love to call themselves.⁸ Having been at home in many countries of the spirit, or at least a guest, having slipped away again and again from the musty comfortable corners into which preference and prejudice, youth, descent, contingencies of men and books, or even exhaustion from wandering around seem to have banished us, full of malice against the enticement of dependency, which lies hidden in honours, or gold, or offices, or sensuous enthusiasm, thankful even for poverty and richly changing sickness, because they always free us from some rule or other and its "prejudice," thankful to god, devil, sheep, and worm in us, curious to a fault, researchers all the way to cruelty, with fingers spontaneously working for the unimaginable, with teeth and stomachs for the most indigestible things, ready for any job which demands astuteness and keen senses, ready for any exploit, thanks to an excess of "free will," with front-souls and back-souls whose final intentions no one can easily see, with foregrounds and backgrounds which no foot may move through to the end, hidden under a cloak of light, conquerors, whether we appear like heirs and spendthrifts, stewards and collectors from dawn to dusk, miserly with our wealth and our crammed drawers, economical in learning and forgetting, resourceful in coming up with schemes, sometimes proud of tables of categories, sometimes pedants, sometimes night owls at work, even in broad daylight, in fact, when necessary, even scarecrows - and nowadays that’s necessary: that is, to the extent that we are born the sworn jealous friends of loneliness, of our own most profound midnight and noon loneliness: - we are that kind of men, we free spirits! And perhaps you also are something like that, you who are coming, you new philosophers?

Part Three

The Religious Nature

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The human soul and its boundaries, the range of human inner experiences so far attained, the heights, depths, and extent of these experiences, the whole history of the soul up to this point and its still undrained possibilities: for a born psychologist and lover of the "great hunt" that is the predestined hunting ground. But how often must such a man say to himself in despair: "I'm just one man! Alas, only one man! And this is a huge wood, a primordial forest!" And so he wishes he could have few hundred helpers in the hunt and finely trained tracking dogs which he could drive into the history of the human soul in order to corner his wild animal there. A vain hope. He experiences over and over again, thoroughly and bitterly, how difficult it is to find helpers and hounds for all things which appeal to his curiosity. The problem he has in sending scholars out into new and dangerous hunting grounds, where courage, intelligence, and refinement are necessary in every sense, is that that's precisely the place where scholars are no longer useful, where the "great hunt" but also the great danger begins:- right there they lose their eyes and noses for hunting. In order to ascertain and to establish, for example, what sort of history the problem of knowledge and conscience in the soul of the homines religiosi [religious men] has had up to now, the individual would himself perhaps have to be as profound, as wounded, and as monstrous as the intellectual conscience of Pascal was:- and then it would still be necessary to have that expansive heaven of bright, malicious spirituality capable of surveying this teeming mass of dangerous and painful experiences from above, of ordering it, and of forcing it into formulas.¹ But who would perform this service for me? And who would have time to wait for such servants?- It's clear they arise too rarely. In all ages they are so unlikely! In the end, a person must do everything himself in order to know a few things himself: that means that one has much to do!- But at all events a curiosity of the sort I have remains the most pleasant of all burdens.- Forgive me. I wanted to say this: the love of the truth has its reward in heaven and even on earth.-

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The faith demanded and not rarely attained by early Christianity in the midst of a sceptical and southern world of free spirits that had behind and within it a centuries-long battle among philosophical schools, in addition to the education in tolerance provided by the imperium Romanum [Roman empire] - this faith is not that naive and gruff faith of the subordinate, something like the faith with which a Luther or a Cromwell or some other northern barbarian of the spirit hung onto his God and his Christianity.² That earlier faith resonates much more with Pascal's belief, which looks, in a terrifying way, something like a constant suicide of reason, a tenacious, long-lived, worm-like reason, which cannot be killed once and for all with a single blow. From the start Christian faith has been sacrifice: a sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all inherent certainty about the spirit, and at the same time slavery and self-mockery, self-mutilation. There is cruelty and a religious Phoenicianism in this faith, which one expects in a crumbling, multi-layered, and very spoilt conscience: its assumption is that the subjection of the spirit is indescribably painful , that the entire past and the habits of such a spirit resist the absurdissimum [the most extreme absurdity], which is how he encounters this "faith." Modern people, with their insensitivity to all Christian nomenclature, do not sense any more the ghastly superlative that lay in the paradox of the formula "God on the cross" for the taste of classical antiquity. To this point there has never yet been anywhere such an audacious reversal - anything as dreadful, questioning, and questionable, as this formula: it promised an inversion of all ancient values. - It is the Orient, the deep Orient, it is the oriental slave who in this way took his revenge on Rome and its noble and frivolous tolerance, on the Roman "catholicity" of faith: - and what always enraged the slaves about their masters and against their masters was not their faith but their freedom from faith, that half-stoic, smiling lack of concern about the seriousness of belief. "Enlightenment" fills people with rage, for the slave wants something absolute; he understands only the tyrannical, even in morality; he loves as he hates, without subtlety, to the depths, to the point of pain, to the point of sickness. His many hidden sufferings grow incensed against the noble taste, which seems to deny suffering. The scepticism against suffering, basically only an attitude of aristocratic morality, was also not the most insignificant factor in the origin of the last great slave revolt, which began with the French Revolution.

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Up to this point, wherever religious neurosis has appeared on earth, we find it tied up with three dangerous dietary rules: isolation, fasting, and sexual abstinence - although it would be impossible to determine with certainty what in this may be cause and what may be effect and whether there might be in general a relationship between cause and effect here. This final doubt is justified by the fact that among its most regular symptoms, both with savage and docile peoples, belongs also the most sudden and most dissolute sensuousness which then, just as suddenly, turns into spasms of repentance and a denial of the world and of the will: we could interpret both perhaps as masked epilepsy? But nowhere should people resist interpretations more than here. About no type up to this point has such a glut of absurdity and superstition proliferated. No other type so far seems to have interested human beings, even the philosophers, more than this one. It's high time to become a little cool on this issue, to learn caution, or better yet, to look away, to go away. Even in the background of the most recent philosophy, the work of Schopenhauer, there stands, almost as the essential problem, this dreadful question mark of the religious crisis and awakening. How is denial of the will possible? How is the saint possible? - This seems, in fact, to have been the question which prompted Schopenhauer to become a philosopher and to begin. Hence, it was a result really worthy of Schopenhauer that his most convinced follower (perhaps also his last, where Germany is concerned), namely, Richard Wagner³, brought his own life's work to an end at this very point and finally led out onto the stage the living physical embodiment of that fearful and eternal type as Kundry, type vécu [a real-life type], at the very time when the psychiatrists of almost all the countries of Europe had an opportunity to study it up close, in every place where the religious neurosis - or as I call it, "the religious nature" - had its most recent epidemic outbreak and paraded around as the "Salvation Army." But if we ask ourselves what has really been so wildly interesting in the whole phenomenon of the saint for people of all types and ages, even for philosophers, then undoubtedly it is the appearance of a miracle which is associated with it, that is, the immediate succession of opposites, of conditions of the soul which are valued in morally opposed ways. People thought here they could get a grip on the fact that all of a sudden a "bad man" became a "saint," a good man. On this point, psychology so far has suffered a shipwreck. Didn't that happen primarily because psychology subordinated itself to the control of morality, because it itself believed in opposite moral evaluations and saw, allowed, and interpreted these opposites into the text and the facts? How's that? The "miracle" is only a failure of interpretation? A lack of philology?-

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It seems that Catholicism is much more inwardly bound up with the Latin races than all of Christianity is in general for us northerners and that, as a result, in Catholic countries unbelief means something entirely different from what it means in Protestant countries - namely, a form of rebellion against the spirit of the race; whereas, among us it means rather a turning back to the spirit (or non spirit) of the race. We northerners undoubtedly stem from races of barbarians, and this also holds with respect to our talent for religion. We are badly equipped for it. One can make the Celtic people an exception to that, and for this reason they also provided the best soil for the start of the Christian infection in the north: - in France the Christian ideal bloomed only as much as the pale northern sun permitted. How strangely devout for our taste even these recent French sceptics still are, to the extent they have some Celtic blood in their ancestry! How Catholic, how un-German, August Comte's sociology smells to us, with its Roman logic of the instincts! How Jesuitical that charming and clever cicerone [tour guide] from Port Royal, Sainte-Beuve, in spite of all his hostility to the Jesuits! And then there's Ernest Renan: how inaccessible to us northerners the language of such a Renan sounds, in which at every moment some nothingness of religious tension destroys the equilibrium of his soul, which is, in a more refined sense, sensual and reclining comfortably! One should repeat after him these beautiful sentences - and how much malice and high spirits at once arise in response in our probably less beautiful and harder, that is, more German souls: "Let us then boldly assert that religion is a product of the normal man, that man is most in touch with truth when he is most religious and most assured of an infinite destiny . . . When he is good he wants virtue to correspond to an eternal order, when he contemplates things in a disinterested manner he finds death revolting and absurd. How can we not assume that it is in those former moments that man sees best? . . ."⁴ These sentences are so entirely antithetical to my ears and habits that when I found them my initial rage wrote beside them "la niaiserie religieuse par excellence!" [the finest example of religious stupidity] - until my later anger grew to like them, these sentences which turn the truth on its head! It is so nice, so distinguished, to have one's very own antithesis!