from
The Gay Science:
124.
In the Horizon of the Infinite. We have left the land and
have gone aboard ship! We have broken down the bridge behind us, nay,
more, the land behind us! Well, little ship! look out! Beside thee is
the ocean; it is true it does not always roar, and sometimes it spreads
out like silk and gold and a gentle reverie. But times will come when
thou wilt feel that it is infinite, and that there is nothing more
frightful than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt itself free, and
now strikes against the walls of this cage! Alas, if home sickness for
the land should attack thee, as if there had been more freedom there,
and there is no “land ” any longer!
125.
The Madman. Have you ever heard of the madman who on a
bright morning lighted a lantern and ran to the market-place calling out
unceasingly: “I seek God! I seek God! ” As there were many people
standing about who did not believe in God, he caused a great deal of
amusement. Why! is he lost? said one. Has he strayed away like a child?
said another. Or does he keep himself hidden? Is he afraid of us? Has he
taken a sea-voyage? Has he emigrated? the people cried out laughingly,
all in a hubbub. The insane man jumped into their midst and transfixed
them with his glances. “Where is God gone? ” he called out. “I mean to
tell you! We have killed him — you and I! We are all his murderers! But
how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us
the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we
loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do
we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Back wards,
sideways, forewards, in all directions? Is there still an above and
below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty
space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on
continually, darker and darker? Shall we not have to light lanterns in
the morning? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are
burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? for even Gods
putrefy! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How
shall we console our selves, the most murderous of all murderers? The
holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has
bled to death under our knife, who will wipe the blood from us? With
what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games
shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for
us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy
of it? There never was a greater event, and on account of it, all who
are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto!”
Here the madman was silent and looked again at his hearers; they also
were silent and looked at him in surprise. At last he threw his lantern
on the ground, so that it broke in pieces and was extinguished. “I come
too early,” he then said, “I am not yet at the right time. This
prodigious event is still on its way, and is travelling, it has not yet
reached men’s ears. Lightning and thunder need time, the light of the
stars needs time, deeds need time, even after they are done, to be seen
and heard. This deed is as yet further from them than the furthest star,
and yet they have done it!” It is further stated that the madman made
his way into different churches on the same day, and there intoned his
Requiem aeternam deo. When led out and called to account, he always gave
the reply: “What are these churches now, if they are not the tombs and
monuments of God?”
240.
On the Sea–Shore. I would not build myself a house (it is an
element of my happiness not to be a house-owner!). If I had to do so,
however, I should build it, like many of the Romans, right into the sea,
I should like to have some secrets in common with that beautiful
monster.
276.
For the New Year. I still live, I still think; I must still
live, for I must still think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. To-day
everyone takes the liberty of expressing his wish and his favourite
thought: well, I also mean to tell what I have wished for myself today,
and what thought first crossed my mind this year, a thought which ought
to be the basis, the pledge and the sweetening of all my future life! I
want more and more to perceive the necessary characters in things as the
beautiful: I shall thus be one of those who beautify things. Amor fati:
let that henceforth be my love! I do not want to wage war with the
ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the
accusers. Looking aside, let that be my sole negation! And all in all,
to sum up: I wish to be at any time hereafter only & yea-sayer!
277.
Personal Providence. —— There is a certain climax in life,
at which, notwithstanding all our freedom, and however much we may have
denied all directing reason and goodness in the beautiful chaos of
existence, we are once more in great danger of intellectual bondage, and
have to face our hardest test. For now the thought of a personal
Providence first presents itself before us with its most persuasive
force, and has the best of advocates, apparentness, in its favour, now
when it is obvious that all and everything that happens to us always
turns out for the best. The life of every day and of every hour seems to
be anxious for nothing else but always to prove this proposition anew;
let it be what it will, bad or good weather, the loss of a friend, a
sickness, a calumny, the non-receipt of a letter, the spraining of one’s
foot, a glance into a shop-window, a counter argument, the opening of a
book, a dream, a deception: it shows itself immediately, or very soon
afterwards, as something “not permitted to be absent,” it is full of
profound significance and utility precisely for us! Is there a more
dangerous temptation to rid ourselves of the belief in the Gods of
Epicurus, those careless, unknown Gods, and believe in some anxious and
mean Divinity, who knows personally every little hair on our heads, and
feels no disgust in rendering the most wretched services? Well I mean in
spite of all this! we want to leave the Gods alone (and the serviceable
genii likewise), and wish to content ourselves with the assumption that
our own practical and theoretical skilfulness in explaining and
suitably arranging events has now reached its highest point. We do not
want either to think too highly of this dexterity of our wisdom, when
the wonderful harmony which results from playing on our instrument
sometimes surprises us too much: a harmony which sounds too well for us
to dare to ascribe it to ourselves. In fact, now and then there is one
who plays with us beloved Chance: he leads our hand occasionally, and
even the all-wisest Providence could not devise any finer music than
that of which our foolish hand is then capable.
290.
One Thing is Needful. To “give style” to one’s character
that is a grand and a rare art! He who surveys all that his nature
presents in its strength and in its weakness, and then fashions it into
an ingenious plan, until everything appears artistic and rational, and
even the weaknesses enchant the eye exercises that admirable art. Here
there has been a great amount of second nature added, there a portion of
first nature has been taken away: in both cases with long exercise and
daily labour at the task. Here the ugly, which does not permit of being
taken away, has been concealed, there it has been reinterpreted into the
sublime. Much of the vague, which re fuses to take form, has been
reserved and utilised for the perspectives: it is meant to give a hint
of the remote and immeasurable. In the end, when the work has been
completed, it is revealed how it was the constraint of the same taste
that organised and fashioned it in whole and in part: whether the taste
was good or bad is of less importance than one thinks, it is sufficient
that it was a taste! It will be the strong imperious natures which
experience their most refined joy in such constraint, in such
confinement and perfection under their own law; the passion of their
violent volition lessens at the sight of all disciplined nature, all
conquered and ministering nature: even when they have palaces to build
and gardens to lay out, it is not to their taste to allow nature to be
free. It is the reverse with weak characters who have not power over
themselves, and hate the restriction of style: they feel that if this
repugnant constraint were laid upon them, they would necessarily become
vulgarised under it: they become slaves as soon as they serve, they hate
service. Such intellects they may be intellects of the first rank are
always concerned with fashioning and interpreting themselves and their
surroundings as free nature wild, arbitrary, fantastic, confused and
surprising: and it is well for them to do so, because only in this
manner can they please themselves! For one thing is needful: namely,
that man should attain to satisfaction with himself be it but through
this or that fable and artifice: it is only then that man’s aspect is at
all endurable! He who is dissatisfied with himself is ever ready to
avenge himself on that account: we others will be his victims, if only
in having always to endure his ugly aspect. For the aspect of the ugly
makes one mean and sad.
300.
Prelude to Science. Do you believe then that the sciences
would have arisen and grown up if the sorcerers, alchemists, astrologers
and witches had not been their forerunners; those who, with their
promisings and foreshadowings, had first to create a thirst, a hunger,
and a taste for hidden and forbidden powers? Yea, that infinitely more
had to be promised than could ever be fulfilled, in order that something
might be fulfilled in the domain of knowledge? Perhaps the whole of
religion, also, may appear to some distant age as an exercise and a
prelude, in like manner as the prelude and preparation of science here
exhibit themselves, though not at all practised and regarded as such.
Perhaps religion may have been the peculiar means for enabling
individual men to enjoy but once the entire self-satisfaction of a God
and all his self-redeeming power. Indeed! one may ask would man have
learned at all to get on the tracks of hunger and thirst for himself,
and to extract satiety and fullness out of himself, without that
religious schooling and preliminary history? Had Prometheus first to
fancy that he had stolen the light, and that he did penance for the
theft, in order finally to discover that he had created the light, in
that he had longed for the light, and that not only man, but also God,
had been the work of his hands and the clay in his hands? All mere
creations of the creator? just as the illusion, the theft, the Caucasus,
the vulture, and the whole tragic Promethean of all thinkers?
341.
The Heaviest Burden. What if a demon” crept after thee into
thy loneliest loneliness some day or night, and said to thee: “This
life, as thou livest it at present, and hast lived it, thou must live it
once more, and also innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in
it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh, and
all the unspeakably small and great in thy life must come to thee again,
and all in the same series and sequence and similarly this spider and
this moonlight among the trees, and similarly this moment, and I myself.
The eternal sand-glass of existence will ever be turned once more, and
thou with it, thou speck of dust!”
Wouldst thou not throw thyself down and gnash thy teeth, and curse
the demon that so spake? Or hast thou once experienced a tremendous
moment in which thou wouldst answer him: “Thou art a God, and never did I
hear anything so divine!” If that thought acquired power over thee as
thou art, it would transform thee, and perhaps crush thee; the question
with regard to all and everything: “Dost thou want this once more, and
also for innumerable times?” would lie as the heaviest burden upon thy
activity! Or, how wouldst thou have to become favourably inclined to
thyself and to life, so as to long for nothing more ardently than for
this last eternal sanctioning and sealing?
343.
What our Cheerfulness Signifies. The most important of more
recent events — that “God is dead,” that the belief in the Christian God
has become unworthy of belief — already begins to cast its first
shadows over Europe. To the few at least whose eye, whose suspecting
glance, is strong enough and subtle enough for this drama, some sun
seems to have set, some old, profound confidence seems to have changed
into doubt: our old world must seem to them daily more darksome,
distrustful, strange and “old.” In the main, however, one may say that
the event itself is far too great, too remote, too much beyond most
people’s power of apprehension, for one to suppose that so much as the
report of it could have reached them; not to speak of many who already
knew what had taken place, and what must all collapse now that this
belief had been undermined, because so much was built upon it, so much
rested on it, and had become one with it: for example, our entire
European morality. This lengthy, vast and uninterrupted process of
crumbling, destruction, ruin and overthrow which is now imminent: who
has realised it sufficiently today to have to stand up as the teacher
and herald of such a tremendous logic of terror, as the prophet of a
period of gloom and eclipse, the like of which has probably never taken
place on earth before? . . . Even we, the born riddle-readers, who wait
as it were on the mountains posted twixt today and tomorrow, and engirt
by their contradiction, we, the firstlings and premature children of the
coming century, into whose sight especially the shadows which must
forthwith envelop Europe should already have come how is it that even
we, with out genuine sympathy for this period of gloom, contemplate its
advent without any personal solicitude or fear? Are we still, perhaps,
too much under the immediate effects of the event and are these effects,
especially as regards our selves, perhaps the reverse of what was to be
expected not at all sad and depressing, but rather like a new and
indescribable variety of light, happiness, relief, enlivenment,
encouragement, and dawning day? . . . In fact, we philosophers and “free
spirits” feel ourselves irradiated as by a new dawn by the report that
the “old God is dead”; our hearts overflow with gratitude, astonishment,
presentiment and expectation. At last the horizon seems open once more,
granting even that it is not bright; our ships can at last put out to
sea in face of every danger; every hazard is again permitted to the
discerner; the sea, our sea, again lies open before us; perhaps never
before did such an “open sea” exist.
from Ecce Homo:
“On this perfect day, when everything is ripening and not only the grape
turns brown, the eye of the sun just fell upon my life: I looked back, I looked
forward, and never saw so many and such good things at once. It was not for
nothing that I buried my forty-fourth year today; I had the right to bury it;
whatever was life in it has been saved, is immortal. The first book of the
Revaluation of All Values, the Songs of Zarathustra, the Twilight of the Idols,
my attempt to philosophize with a hammer—all presents of this year, indeed of
its last quarter! How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life?—and so I
tell my life to myself."
