25

After such a cheerful start, I’d like you to not to miss hearing a serious word: it’s directed at the most serious people. Be careful, you philosophers and friends of knowledge - protect yourself from martyrdom! From suffering "for the sake of the truth"! Even from defending yourselves! That corrupts all the innocence and refined neutrality in your consciences. It makes you stubborn against objections and red rags; it dulls your minds, brutalizes you, and puts you in a daze when, in the struggle with danger, malice, suspicion, expulsion, and even dirtier consequences of your hostility, you finally have to play out your role as the defenders of truth on earth, as though "the truth" were such a harmless and clumsy character as to require defenders! And as for you, you knights with the sorrowful countenances, my good gentlemen, you spiritual loafers and cobweb spinners! Ultimately you yourselves know well enough that it really doesn’t matter if you are the ones who are right. You also know that up to now no philosopher has been right and that a more praiseworthy truthfulness could lie in every small question mark which you set after your favourite words and cherished doctrines (and occasionally after yourselves), than in all the ceremonial gestures and trump cards before prosecutors and courts of justice! Better to stand aside! Run off to some secluded place! And retain your mask and your subtlety, so that people confuse you with someone else - or fear you a little! And for my sake don’t forget the garden, the garden with the golden trellis! And have people around you who are like a garden - or like music over water in the evening, when the day is already becoming a memory. Choose good solitude, the free, high-spirited, easy solitude, which gives you also a right to remain, in some sense or other, still good yourselves! How poisonous, how crafty, how bad every long war makes us, when it does not let us fight with open force! How personal a long fear makes us, a long attention on our enemies, on potential enemies! These social outcasts, these men long persecuted and wickedly hunted down - as well as the compulsory recluses, the Spinozas or Giordano Brunos¹ - in the end always become, maybe under a spiritual masquerade and perhaps without realizing it themselves, sophisticated avengers and makers of poisons (just dig into the foundation of Spinoza’s ethics and theology) - to say nothing of the foolishness of moral indignation, which in a philosopher is the unmistakable sign that his philosophical humour has run away from him. The martyrdom of a philosopher, his "sacrifice for the truth," brings forcefully to light how much of the agitator and actor he contains within himself. And if people have looked at him with only an artistic curiosity up to this point, then, in the case of several philosophers, we can naturally understand the dangerous wish to see him also in his degeneration (degenerated into a "martyr," into a brawler on the stage and in tribunals). But with such a wish, people must be clear about what they are going to see in every case - only a satyr play, only a farcical epilogue, only continuing proof that the long, real tragedy is over, assuming that every philosophy in its origin was a long tragedy.