286

"Here the view is free, the spirit elevated." - But there is a reverse kind of person who is also on the heights and also has a free view - but who looks down.

287

What is noble? What does the word "noble" still mean to us nowadays? What reveals the noble human being, how do people recognize him, under this heavy, oppressive sky at the beginning of the rule of the rabble, which is making everything opaque and leaden? - It is not the actions which prove him - actions are always ambiguous, always inscrutable -; nor is it the "works." Among artists and scholars today we find a sufficient number of those who through their works reveal how a profound desire for what is noble drives them: but this very need for what is noble is fundamentally different from the needs of the noble soul itself and is really the eloquent and dangerous indication that such a soul is lacking. It's not the works; it's the belief which decides here, which here establishes the order of rank, to take up once more an old religious formula with a new and more profound understanding: some basic certainty which a noble soul has about itself, something which does not allow itself to be sought out or found or perhaps even to be lost. The noble soul has reverence for itself.-

288

There are human beings who have spirit in an inevitable way. They may toss and turn as they wish and hold their hands in front of their tell-tale eyes (- as if the hand were not a give away!-): finally it always comes out that they have something which they are hiding, that is, spirit. One of the most sophisticated ways to deceive, at least for as long as possible, and to present oneself successfully as stupider than one is - what in common life is often as desirable as an umbrella - is called enthusiasm, including what belongs with it, for example, virtue. For, as Galiani, who must have known, says:- vertu est enthousiasme [virtue is enthusiasm].

289

In the writings of a hermit we always hear something of the echo of desolation, something of the whispers and the timid gazing around of isolation; from his strongest words, even from his screaming, still resounds a new and dangerous kind of silence, of concealment. Whoever has sat down, year in and year out, day and night, alone in an intimate dispute and conversation with his soul, whoever has become a cave bear or digger for treasure or guardian of treasure and dragon in his own cavern - it can be a labyrinth but also a gold mine - such a man's very ideas finally take on a distinct twilight colouring and smell as much of mould as they do of profundity, something incommunicable and reluctant, which blows cold wind over everyone passing by. The hermit does not believe that a philosopher - assuming that a philosopher has always first been a hermit - has ever expressed his real and final opinion in his books. Don't people write books expressly to hide what they have stored inside them? - In fact, he will have doubts whether a philosopher could generally have "real and final" opinions, whether in his case behind every cave there does not still lie, and must lie, an even deeper cavern - a more comprehensive, stranger, richer world beyond the surface, an abyss behind every reason, under every "foundation." Every philosophy is a foreground-philosophy - that is the judgment of a hermit: "There is something arbitrary about the fact that he remained here, looked back, looked around, that at this point he set his shovel aside and did not dig more deeply - there is also something suspicious about it." Every philosophy also hides a philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding place, every word is also a mask.

290

Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than being misunderstood. In the latter case, perhaps his vanity suffers, but the former hurts his heart, his sympathy, which always says, "Alas, why do you want to have it as hard as I did?"