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In those recent ages which may be proud of their humanity, there remains so much residual fear, so much superstitious fear of the "wild cruel beasts," animals which those more humane ages are particularly proud of having overcome, that even palpable truths stay unspoken for hundreds of years, as if by some agreement, because they look as if they might help those wild beasts, which have been finally slaughtered, come back to life again. Perhaps I am daring something if I allow one such truth to escape me: let others catch it again and give it so much "milk of the devout ways of thinking" to drink until it lies still and forgotten in its old corner. - People should learn to think differently about cruelty and open their eyes. They should finally learn to get impatient, so that such presumptuous, fat errors no longer brazenly wander around as virtues, the way they've been fed to us, for example, by old and new philosophers in connection with tragedy. Almost everything which we call "higher culture" rests on the spiritualization and intensification of cruelty - that's my claim. That "wild beast" hasn't been killed at all: it's alive, it's flourishing. Only it has turned itself into - a god. What constitutes the painful delight in tragedy is cruelty. What has a pleasing effect in so-called tragic pity, and basically even in everything awe-inspiring right up to the highest and most delicate trembling of metaphysics, gets its sweetness only from the additional ingredient of cruelty to the mixture. What the Roman in the arena, Christ in the raptures of the cross, the Spaniard at the sight of a burning at the stake or a bull fight, the Japanese today who crowds into tragedies, the Parisian suburban worker who feels nostalgic for a bloody revolution, the female fan of Wagner who, with her will unhinged, lets herself "submit to" Tristan and Isolde - what all these people enjoy and try to drink down with mysterious enthusiasm is the spicy liquor of the great Circe, "cruelty." In saying this, we must of course chase off the foolish psychology of former times, which, so far as cruelty is concerned, knew only how to teach us that it arose at the sight of someone else's suffering. There is a substantial over-abundant enjoyment also with one's own suffering, with making oneself suffer - and wherever people let themselves be convinced about self-denial in a religious sense or about self-mutilation, as with the Phoenicians and ascetics, or in general about depriving themselves of sensual experience and the flesh, about remorse, Puritan pangs of repentance, about a vivisection of the conscience, and about a Pascalian sacrifizio dell'intelletto [sacrifice of the intellect], they are secretly seduced and pushed on by cruelty, by that dangerous thrill of cruelty turned against themselves. Finally, people should consider that even the knowledgeable man, when he compels his spirit to acknowledge things against his spirit's inclinations and often enough also against his heart's desires - that is, to say No where he'd like to affirm something, to love, to worship - rules as an artist and a transformer of cruelty. In fact, every attempt to be profound and thorough is a forceful violation, a willingness to do harm to the basic will of the spirit, which always wants what's apparent and superficial - even in that desire to know there is a drop of cruelty.