547

The tyrants of the spirit.  The march of science is now no longer crossed by the accidental fact that men live for about seventy years, as was for all too long the case. Formerly, a man wanted to reach the far end of knowledge during this period of time and the methods of acquiring knowledge were evaluated in accordance with this universal longing. The small single questions and experiments were counted contemptible: one wanted the shortest route; one believed that, because everything in the world seemed to be accommodated to man, the knowability of things was also accommodated to a human timespan. To solve everything at a stroke, with a single word  that was the secret desire: the task was thought of in the image of the Gordian knot or in that of the egg of Columbus; one did not doubt that in the domain of knowledge too it was possible to reach one's goal in the manner of Alexander¹⁵⁰ or Columbus and to settle all questions with a single answer. 'There is a riddle to be solved': thus did the goal of life appear to the eye of the philosopher; the first thing to do was to find the riddle and to compress the problem of the world into the simplest riddle-form. The boundless ambition and exultation of being the 'unriddler of the world' constituted the thinker's dreams: nothing seemed worth-while if it was not the means of bringing everything to a conclusion for him! Philosophy was thus a kind of supreme struggle to possess the tyrannical rule of the spirit  that some such very fortunate, subtle, inventive, bold and mighty man was in reserve  one only!  was doubted by none, and several, most recently Schopenhauer, fancied themselves to be that one.  From this it follows that by and large the sciences have hitherto been kept back by the moral narrowness of their disciples and that henceforth they must be carried on with a higher and more magnanimous basic feeling. 'What do I matter!'  stands over the door of the thinker of the future.

548

Victory over strength.  If we consider all that has hitherto been revered as 'superhuman mind', as 'genius', we come to the sad conclusion that the intellectuality of mankind must on the whole have been something very low and paltry: it has hitherto required so little mind to feel at once considerably superior to it! Oh, the cheap fame of the 'genius'! How quickly his throne is established, how quickly worship of him becomes a practice! We are still on our knees before strength   after the ancient custom of slaves  and yet when the degree of worthiness to be revered is fixed, only the degree of rationality in strength is decisive: we must assess to what extent precisely strength has been overcome by something higher, in the service of which it now stands as means and instrument! But for such an assessment there are still far too few eyes, indeed the assessment of the genius is still usually regarded as a sacrilege. And so perhaps the most beautiful still appears only in the dark, and sinks, scarcely born, into eternal night  I mean the spectacle of that strength which employs genius not for works but for itself as a work; that is, for its own constraint, for the purification of its imagination, for the imposition of order and choice upon the influx of tasks and impressions. The great human being is still, in precisely the greatest thing that demands reverence, invisible like a too distant star: his victory over strength remains without eyes to see it and consequently without song and singer. The order of rank of greatness for all past mankind has not yet been determined.

549

'Flight from oneself'.  Those men given to intellectual spasms  Byron and Alfred de Musset¹⁵¹ are examples  who are impatient and gloomily inclined towards themselves and in all they do resemble rampaging horses, and who derive from their own works, indeed, only a shortlived fire and joy which almost bursts their veins and then a desolation and sourness made more wintry by the contrast it presents  how should such men endure to remain within themselves! They long to dissolve into something 'outside'; if one is a Christian and is possessed by such a longing one's goal is to be dissolved into God, to 'become wholly at one with him'; if one is Shakespeare one is satisfied only with being dissolved into images of the most passionate life; if one is Byron one longs for action, because action draws us away from ourself even more than do thoughts, feelings or works. And so could all impulse to action perhaps be at bottom flight from oneself?  Pascal would ask. And the proposition might indeed be demonStrated in the case of the supreme examples known to us of the impulse to action: for consider  in the light of the experience of psychiatry, as is only proper  that four of the most active men of all time were epileptics (namely Alexander, Caesar, Mohammed and Napoleon), just as Byron was also subject to this complaint.

550

Knowledge and beauty.  If, as they still do, people as it were reserve their reverence and feeling of happiness for works of imagination and dissembling, we ought not to wonder if the opposite of imagination and dissembling makes them feel cold and disconsolate. The delight produced by even the smallest definite piece of real progress in knowledge, which science as it is now bestows so abundantly and already upon so many  this delight is for the present not credited by all those who have accustomed themselves to finding delight only in relinquishing reality and plunging into the depths of appearance. These believe reality is ugly: but they do not reflect that knowledge of even the ugliest reality is itself beautiful, nor that he who knows much is in the end very far from finding ugly the greater part of that reality whose discovery has always brought him happiness. For is anything 'beautiful in itself'? The happiness of the man of knowledge enhances the beauty of the world and makes all that exists sunnier; knowledge casts its beauty not only over things but in the long run into things  may future mankind bear witness to the truth of this proposition! In the meantime let us recall an experience of olden time: two men as fundamentally different as Plato and Aristotle were in agreement as to what constituted supreme happiness, not only for them or for mankind but in itself, even for gods of the highest empyrean¹⁵²: they found it in knowledge, in the activity of a well-trained inquisitive and inventive mind (not, that is to say, in 'intuition', as German theologians and semi-theologians do; not in visions, as mystics do; and likewise not in creating, as all practical people do). Descartes and Spinoza came to a similar conclusion: how they must all have enjoyed knowledge! And what a danger their honesty faced of becoming a panegyrist of things!

551

Of future virtues.  How comes it that the more comprehensible the world has grown the more solemnities of every kind have decreased? Is it that fear was so much the basic element of that reverence which overcame us in the presence of everything unknown and mysterious and taught us to fall down before the incomprehensible and plead for mercy? And has the world not lost some of its charm for us because we have grown less fearful? With this diminution of our fearfulness has our own dignity and solemnity, our own fearsomeness, not also diminished? Perhaps we have less respect for the world and for ourselves since we have come to think of it and of ourselves more courageously? Perhaps there will come a time when this courage in thinking will have grown so great that, as the supreme form of arrogance, it will feel itself above man and things  when the sage will, as the most courageous man, also be the man who sees himself and existence farthest beneath him?  This species of courage, which is not far from being an extravagant generosity, has hitherto been lacking in mankind.  Oh if the poets would only be again what they were once supposed to have been: seers who tell us something of the possible! Now that actuality and the past are and have to be taken more and more out of their hands  for the age of harmless false-coinage is at an end! If only they would let us feel in advance something of the virtues of the future! Or of virtues that will never exist on earth, though they could exist somewhere in the universe  of purple-glowing galaxies and whole Milky Ways of beauty! Astronomers of the ideal, where are you?