39

No one will readily consider a doctrine true simply because it makes us happy or virtuous, except perhaps the gentle "idealists," who go into raptures about the good, the true, and the beautiful and allow all sorts of colourful, clumsy, and good-natured desirable things to swim around in confusion in their pond. Happiness and virtue are no arguments. But people, even prudent people, do like to forget that causing unhappiness and evil are by the same token no counterarguments. Something could well be true, although it is at the same time harmful and dangerous to the highest degree. In fact, it could even be part of the fundamental composition of existence that people are destroyed when they fully recognize this point - so that the strength of a spirit might be measured by how much it could still endure of the "truth," or put more clearly, by the degree it would have to have the truth diluted, sweetened, muffled, or falsified. But there is no doubt about the fact that evil and unhappy people are more favoured and have a greater probability of success in discovering certain parts of the truth, to say nothing of the evil people who are happy - a species which moralists are silent about. Perhaps toughness and cunning provide more favourable conditions for the development of the strong, independent spirit and the philosopher than that gentle, refined, conciliatory good nature and that art of taking things lightly which people value in a scholar, and value rightly. If we assume, first of all, that the notion of a "philosopher" is not restricted to the philosopher who writes books - or even puts his own philosophy into books! - A final characteristic in the picture of the free-spirited philosopher is provided by Stendhal. Because of German taste I don’t wish to overlook emphasizing him: - for he goes against German taste. This last great psychologist states the following: "To be a good philosopher it is necessary to be dry, clear, without illusions. A banker who has made a fortune has one part of the character required to make discoveries in philosophy, that is to say, to see clearly into what is."⁷

40

Everything profound loves masks. The most profound things of all even have a hatred for images and allegories. Shouldn’t the right disguise in which the shame of a god walks around be something exactly opposite? A questionable question: it would be strange if some mystic or other had not already ventured something like that on his own. There are processes of such a delicate sort that people do well to bury them in something crude and make them unrecognizable. There are actions of love and of extravagant generosity, after which there is nothing more advisable than to grab a stick and give an eyewitness a good thrashing: - in so doing we cloud his memory. Some people know how to befuddle or batter their own memories in order at least to take revenge on this single witness: - shame is resourceful. It is not the worst things that make people feel the worst shame. Behind a mask there is not only malice - there is so much goodness in cunning. I could imagine that a person who had something valuable and vulnerable to hide might roll through his life as coarse and round as an old green wine barrel with strong hoops. The delicacy of his shame wants it that way. For a person whose shame is profound runs into his fate and delicate decisions on pathways which few people ever reach and of whose existence those closest to him and his most intimate associates are not permitted to know. His mortal danger hides itself from their eyes, just as much as his confidence in life does, once he regains it. A person who is concealed in this way, who from instinct uses speaking for silence and keeping quiet and who is tireless in avoiding communication, wants and demands that, instead of him, a mask of him wanders around in the hearts and heads of his friends. And suppose he does not want that mask: one day his eyes will open to the fact that nonetheless there is a mask of him there - and that that’s a good thing. Every profound spirit needs a mask; even more, around every profound spirit a mask is continuously growing, thanks to the constantly false, that is, shallow interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives.- 

41

A person has to test himself, to see that he is meant for independence and command - and he must do this at the right time. He should not evade his tests, although they are perhaps the most dangerous game he can play, tests which in the end are made only with ourselves as witnesses and with no other judges. Not to get stuck on a single person: - not even on the someone one loves the most. Every person is a prison - a cranny as well. And don’t remain stuck on one’s fatherland: - not even if it is enduring the greatest suffering and in the greatest need of assistance - it is less difficult to disentangle one’s heart from a victorious fatherland. Don’t get stuck on pity, even in the case of higher men whose rare torment and helplessness some fortuitous circumstance has allowed us to see. Don’t get stuck on a science, not even if it tempts us with the most precious discoveries apparently reserved explicitly for us. Don’t get stuck on one’s own detachment, on that sensual distancing and strangeness of a bird which constantly flies further up into the heights in order always to see more beneath it: - the danger of man in flight. Don’t get stuck on our own virtues and let our totality become a sacrifice to some particular detail in us, for example, our "hospitality," the danger of dangers for lofty and rich souls, who spread themselves around lavishly, almost indifferently, and push the virtue of liberality into a vice. One must know how to preserve oneself: the sternest test of independence.

42

A new sort of philosopher is emerging: I venture to baptize them with a name which is not without danger. As I figure them out - to the extent that they let themselves be figured out, for it belongs to their type to want to remain something of an enigma - these philosophers of the future may have a right, perhaps also a wrong, to be described as attempters. This name itself is finally merely an attempt and, if you will, a temptation.

43

Are they new friends of the "truth," these emerging philosophers? That seems plausible enough: for all philosophers up to this point have loved their truths. But they certainly will not be dogmatists. It must go against their pride as well as their taste if their truth is still supposed to be some truth for everyman: and that’s been the secret wish and deeper meaning of all dogmatic efforts up to now. "My opinion is my opinion: someone else has no casual right to it" - that’s what such a philosopher of the future will perhaps say. One must rid oneself of the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. "Good" is no longer good when one’s neighbour utters it. And how could there even be a "common good"! That expression contradicts itself: what can be common always has only little value. In the end things must stand as they stand and have always stood: great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and shudders for the refined, and, to sum up all this in brief, everything rare for the rare.-