On the Genealogy of Morality (Chap. 4.7)

Let’s be careful not to make gloomy faces right away at that word “torture.” In this particular case there remain enough objections to take into account, enough to subtract—there even remains something to laugh about. For let’s not underestimate the fact that Schopenhauer, who in fact treated sexuality as a personal enemy (including its instrument, woman, this “instrumentum diaboli” [tool of the devil]), needed enemies in order to maintain his good spirits, that he loved grim, caustic, black-green words, that he got angry for the sake of getting passionately angry, that he would have become ill, would have become a pessimist (—and he wasn’t a pessimist, no matter how much he wanted to be one) without his enemies, without Hegel, woman, sensuousness, and the whole will for existence, for continuing on. Had that not been the case, Schopenhauer would not have kept going—on that we can wager. He would have run off. But his enemies held him securely; his enemies seduced him back to existence again and again. Just like the ancient cynics, his anger was his refreshment, his relaxation, his payment, his remedy for disgust, his happiness. So much with respect to the most personal features in the case of Schopenhauer. On the other hand, with him there is still something typical—and here we only come up against our problem once more. As long as there have been philosophers on earth and wherever there have been philosophers (from India to England, to name two opposite poles of talent in philosophy) there unquestionably have existed a genuine philosophical irritability with and rancour against sensuousness—Schopenhauer is only the most eloquent eruption of these and, if one has an ear for it, also the most captivating and delightful. In addition, there exist a real philosophical bias and affection favouring the whole ascetic ideal. No one should fool himself about or against that. As mentioned, both belong to the philosophical type: if both are missing in a philosopher then he is always only a “so-called philosopher”—of that we may be certain. What does that mean? For we must first interpret these facts of the case: in itself stands there eternally stupid, like every “thing in itself.” Every animal, including also la bête philosophe [the philosophical animal] instinctively strives for the optimal beneficial conditions in which it can let out all its power and attain the strongest feeling of its strength. Every animal in an equally instinctual way and with a refined sense of smell that “is loftier than all reason” abhors any kind of trouble maker and barrier which lies or which could lie in its way to these optimal conditions (—I’m not speaking about its path to “happiness,” but about its way to power, to action, to its most powerful deeds, and, in most cases, really about its way to unhappiness). Thus, the philosopher abhors marriage as well as what might persuade him into it—marriage is a barrier and a disaster along his route to the optimal. What great philosopher up to now has been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant, Schopenhauer—none of these got married. What’s more, we cannot even imagine them married. A married philosopher belongs in a comedy, that’s my principle. And Socrates, that exception, the malicious Socrates, it appears, ironically got married specifically to demonstrate this very principle. Every philosopher would speak as once Buddha spoke when someone told him of the birth of a son, “Rahula has been born to me. A shackle has been forged for me.” (Rahula here means “a little demon”). To every “free spirit” there must come a reflective hour, provided that previously he has had one without thought, of the sort that once came to this same Buddha—“Life in a house,” he thought to himself, “is narrow and confined, a polluted place. Freedom consists of abandoning the house”; “because he thought this way, he left the house.” The ascetic ideal indicates so many bridges to independence that a philosopher cannot, without an inner rejoicing and applause, listen to the history of all those decisive people who one day said “No” to all lack of freedom and went off to some desert or other, even assuming that such people were merely strong donkeys and entirely opposite to a powerful spirit. So what, then, does the ascetic ideal mean as far as a philosopher is concerned? My answer is—you will have guessed it long ago—the philosopher smiles when he sees in it an optimal set of conditions for the loftiest and boldest spirituality—in so doing, he does not deny “existence”; rather that’s how he affirms his existence and only his existence and does this perhaps to such a degree that he is not far from the wicked desire pereat mundus, fiat philosophia, fiat philosophus, fiam! [let the world perish, let philosophy exist, let the philosopher exist, let me exist!] . . .*

The Latin here is a reworking of the famous legal saying “Fiat Justitia et pereat mundus” [Let justice be done, though the world perish]. The saying is attributed to Ferdinand I (1503-1564), the Holy Roman Emperor, who adopted it as his motto.