266

"We can only truly respect highly the man who is not seeking himself". Goethe to Rat Schlosser.

267

There is a saying among the Chinese that mothers really teach their children: siao-sin, "Make your heart small!" This is the essential and basic tendency of late civilizations: I have no doubt that an ancient Greek would recognize this self-diminution in us contemporary Europeans as well - and for that reason alone we would already go "against his taste."

268

Ultimately, what does it mean to be ignoble? - Words are sound signals for ideas, but ideas are more or less firm image signs for sensations which return frequently and occur together, for groups of sensations. To understand each other, it is not yet sufficient that people use the same words; they must use the same words also for the same form of inner experiences; ultimately they must hold their experience in common with each other. That's why human beings belonging to a single people understand each other better among themselves than associations of different peoples, even when they themselves use the same language; or rather, when human beings have lived together for a long time under similar conditions (climate, soil, danger, needs, work), then something arises out of that which "understands itself," a people. In all souls, a similar number of frequently repeating experiences have won the upper hand over those which come more rarely; people understand each other on the basis of the former, quickly and with ever-increasing speed - the history of language is the history of a process of abbreviation. On the basis of this rapid understanding, people bind with one another, closely and with ever-increasing closeness. The greater the danger, the greater the need quickly and easily to come to agreement over what needs to be done; not to misunderstand each other when in danger is what people simply cannot do without in their interactions. With every friendship or love affair people still make this test: nothing of that sort lasts as soon as people reach the point where, with the same words, one of the two feels, means, senses, wishes, or fears something different from the other one. (The fear of the "eternal misunderstanding": that is the benevolent genius which so often prevents people of different sexes from over-hasty unions, to which their senses and hearts urge them - and not some Schopenhauerish "genius of the species"!-). Which groups of sensations within the soul wake up most rapidly, seize the word, give the order - that decides about the whole rank ordering of its values, that finally determines its tables of goods. The assessments of value in a man reveal something about the structure of his soul and where it looks for its conditions of life, its essential needs. Now, assume that need has always brought together only such people as could indicate with similar signs similar needs, similar experiences, then it would generally turn out that the easy ability to communicate need, that is, in the last analysis, familiarity with only average and common experiences, must have been the most powerful of all the forces which have so far determined things among human beings. People who are more similar and more ordinary were and always have been at an advantage; the more exceptional, more refined, rarer, and more difficult to understand easily remain isolated; in their isolation they are subject to accidents and rarely propagate themselves. People have to summon up huge counter-forces to cross this natural, all-too-natural progressus in simile [advance into similarity], the further training of human beings into what's similar, ordinary, average, herd-like - into what's common.

269

The more a psychologist - a born and inevitable psychologist and analyst of the soul - turns himself towards exceptional examples and human beings, the greater the danger to him of suffocation from pity. He has to be hard and cheerful, more so than another man. For the corruption and destruction of loftier men, of the stranger type of soul, is the rule: it is terrible to have such a rule always before one's eyes. The multifaceted torture of the psychologist who has uncovered this destructiveness, who once discovers and then almost always rediscovers throughout all history this entire inner "hopelessness" of the loftier people, this eternal "too late!" in every sense, can perhaps one day come to the point where he turns with bitterness against his own lot and attempts self-destruction - where he "corrupts" himself. With almost every psychologist we will see a revealing inclination for and delight in associating with ordinary and well-adjusted people: that indicates that he always needs healing, that he requires some sort of refuge and forgetting, far from what his insights and incisions, his "trade," has laid on his conscience. Fear of his memory is characteristic of him. He is easily reduced to silence before the judgments of others; he listens with an unmoving face as people revere, admire, love, and transfigure where he has seen, or he even hides his silence, while he expressly agrees with some foreground point of view or other. Perhaps the paradox of his situation gets so terrible that the crowd, the educated, and the enthusiasts learn great admiration precisely where he has learned great pity as well as great contempt - the admiration for "great men" and miraculous animals for whose sake people bless and honour the fatherland, the earth, the value of humanity, and themselves, those to whom they draw the attention of the young and whom they use as role models in their education . . . And who knows whether in all great examples up to this point the very same thing has not happened: the crowd worshipped a god - and the "god" was only a poor sacrificial animal! Success has always been the greatest liar, and the "work" itself is a success; the great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer is disguised in his creation to the point where he is unrecognizable; the "work" of the artist and the philosopher first invents the man who has created it or is supposed to have created it; the "great men," as they are honoured, are small inferior works of fiction in the background; in the world of historical values counterfeit is king. These great poets, for example, this Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopardi, Kleist, Gogol (I don't dare mention greater names, but I have them in mind) - perhaps have to be the way they are now: men of the moment, enthusiastic, sensuous, childish, careless and sudden with trust and mistrust; with souls in which some fracture or other normally has to be concealed; often taking revenge in their works for an inner slur, often seeking with their flights upward to forget some all-too-true memory, often lost in the mud and almost infatuated, until they become like will o' the wisps around a swamp and pretend that they are stars - then the populace may well call them idealists - often struggling against a long disgust, with a recurring ghost of unbelief which makes them cold and forces them to yearn for gloria [glory] and to gobble up "belief in themselves" from the hands of intoxicated flatterers - what torture are these great artists and the loftier human beings in general for the man who has once guessed who they are! It is so understandable that these artists should so readily experience from woman - who is clairvoyant in the world of suffering and who unfortunately also seeks to help and to save far beyond her powers - those eruptions of unlimited and most devoted pity which the crowd, above all the worshipping masses, does not understand and which it showers with curious and complacent interpretations. This pity regularly deceives itself about its power; woman may believe that love can do everything - that's a belief essential to her. Alas, anyone who knows about the heart can guess how poor, stupid, helpless, presumptuous, mistaken, more easily destroyed than saved even the best and most profound love is! It is possible that beneath the sacred story and disguise of the life of Jesus there lies hidden one of the most painful examples of the martyrdom of knowledge about love: the martyrdom of the most innocent and most desiring heart, which was never satisfied with any human love, which demanded love, to be loved and nothing else, with hardness, with madness, with fearful outbreaks against those who denied him love; the history of a poor man unsatisfied and insatiable with love, who had to invent hell in order to send there those who did not wish to love him - and who finally, having grown to understand human love, had to invent a God who is entirely love, who is capable of total love - who takes pity on human love because it is so pathetic, so unknowing! Anyone who feels this way, who knows about love in this way - seeks death. - But why dwell on such painful things? Assuming we don't have to.-

270

The spiritual arrogance and disgust of every man who has suffered deeply - how profoundly men can suffer almost determines their order of rank - his chilling certainty, with which he is thoroughly soaked and coloured, that thanks to his suffering he knows more than the cleverest and wisest can know, that he has known and at some point been "at home" in many terrible far-off worlds, about which "you know nothing!" . . . this spiritual and silent arrogance of the sufferer, this pride of the one chosen to know, of the "initiate," of the one who has almost been sacrificed, finds all kinds of disguises necessary to protect himself from contact with prying and compassionate hands and, in general, from everything which is not his equal in pain. Profound suffering ennobles; it separates. One of the most sophisticated forms of disguise is Epicureanism and a certain future courageousness in taste adopted as a show, which takes suffering lightly and resists everything sad and deep. There are "cheerful men" who use cheerfulness because it makes them misunderstood - they want to be misunderstood. There are "scientific men" who use science because that provides a cheerful appearance and because being scientific enables one to infer that the man is superficial - they want to tempt people to a false conclusion. There are free, impudent spirits who would like to hide and deny that they are broken, proud, incurable hearts; and now and then even foolishness is a mask for an unholy, all-too-certain knowledge. Hence, it follows that it's part of a more sophisticated humanity to have reverence "for the mask" and not to pursue psychology and curiosity in the wrong place.