327

A fable.  The Don Juan of knowledge: no philosopher or poet has yet discovered him. He does not love the things he knows, but has spirit and appetite for and enjoyment of the chase and intrigues of knowledge  up to the highest and remotest stars of knowledge!  until at last there remains to him nothing of knowledge left to hunt down except the absolutely detrimental; he is like the drunkard who ends by drinking absinthe and aqua fortis¹²⁴. Thus in the end he lusts after Hell  it is the last knowledge that seduces him. Perhaps it too proves a disillusionment, like all knowledge! And then he would have to stand to all eternity transfixed to disillusionment and himself become a stone guest, with a longing for a supper of knowledge which he will never get!  for the whole universe has not a single morsel left to give to this hungry man.

328

What idealist theories seem to indicate.  The place one is most certain to find idealist theories is with unreflective practical men; for their reputation requires an idealist lustre. They reach for them instinctively and have no feeling of hypocrisy as they do so: as little as an Englishman feels a hypocrite with his Christianness and his sanctimonious Sunday. Conversely: contemplative natures who have to keep a rein on their imagination and avoid the reputation of being dreamers are satisfied only with rigorous realistic theories: they reach for them with the same instinctive need and without any loss of honesty.

329

The slanderers of cheerfulness.  People who have been deeply injured by life are all suspicious of cheerfulness, as though it were childlike and childish and betrayed a kind of irrationality at the sight of which one can only be moved to pity, as one would be at the sight of a dying child continuing to play with its toys. Such people discover under every rose a disguised and hidden grave; festivities, carousels, joyful music seem to them like the determined self-deception of a man fatally sick determined to consume one last minute of the intoxication of life. But this judgment of cheerfulness is nothing other than its refraction on the dark background of sickness and weariness: it is itself something moving, irrational, inspiring of pity, indeed even something childlike and childish, but deriving from that second childhood which succeeds old age and is the forerunner of death.

330

Not enough!  It is not enough to prove something, one has also to seduce or elevate people to it. That is why the man of knowledge should learn how to speak his wisdom: and often in such a way that it sounds like folly!

331

Rights and limits.  Asceticism is the right discipline for those who have to exterminate their sensual drives because the latter are raging beasts of prey. But only for those!