On the Genealogy of Morality (Chap. 4.8)

You see that these philosophers are not unprejudiced witnesses to and judges of the value of ascetic ideals! They think about themselves — what concern to them is “the saint”! In this matter they think about what is most immediately indispensable to them: freedom from compulsion, disturbance, fuss, from business, duties, worries: a bright light in the head, dance, the leap and flight of ideas; good air—thin, clear, free, dry—like the air at high altitudes, with which everything in animal being grows more spiritual and acquires wings; calm in all basement areas; all dogs nicely tied up in chains; no hostile barking and shaggy rancour; no gnawing worm of wounded ambition; modest and humble inner organs busy as windmills but at a distance; the heart in an alien place, beyond, in the future, posthumous—all in all, so far as the ascetic ideal is concerned, they think of the cheerful asceticism of some deified animal which has become independent, roaming above life rather than being at rest. We know what the three great catch phrases of the ascetic ideal are: poverty, humility, chastity. Now look closely at the lives of all great, prolific, inventive spirits—over and over again you’ll rediscover all three there to a certain degree. Not at all— this is self-evident—as if it were something to do with their “virtues” —what does this kind of man have to do with virtues?—but as the truest and most natural conditions of their best existence, their most beautiful fecundity. At the same time, it is indeed entirely possible that their dominating spirituality at first had to set aside an unbridled and sensitive pride or the reins of a wanton sensuality or that they perhaps had difficulty enough maintaining their will for the “desert” against an inclination for luxury, for something very exquisite, as well as against a lavish liberality of heart and hand. But their spirituality did it, simply because it was the dominating instinct, which achieves its own demands in relation to all the other instincts—it still continues to do so. If it did not, then it would simply not dominate. Hence, this has nothing to do with “virtue.” Besides, the desert I just mentioned, into which the strong spirits with an independent nature withdraw and isolate themselves—O how different it seems from the desert educated people dream about!—for in some circumstances these educated people are themselves this desert. And certainly no actor of the spirit could simply endure it—for them it is not nearly romantic and Syrian enough, not nearly enough of a theatrical desert! It’s true there’s no lack of camels there, but that’s the only similarity between them. Perhaps a voluntary obscurity, a detour away from one’s self, a timidity about noise, admiration, newspapers, influence; a small official position, a daily routine, something which hides more than it brings to light, contact now and then with harmless, cheerful wildlife and birds whose sight is relaxing, a mountain for company, not a dead one but one with eyes (that means with lakes); in some circumstances even a room in a full, nondescript inn, where one is sure to be confused for someone else and can talk to anyone with impunity—that’s what a “desert” is here. O, it’s lonely enough, believe me! When Heraclitus withdrew into the courtyard and colonnades of the immense temple of Artemis, that was a worthier “desert,” I admit. Why do we lack such temples? (—Perhaps we do not lack them. I’ve just remembered my most beautiful room for study, the Piazza San Marco, assuming it’s in the spring, and in the morning, too, between ten and twelve o’clock).* But what Heraclitus was getting away from is still the same thing we go out of our way to escape nowadays: the noise and the democratic chatter of the Ephesians, their politics, their news about the “empire” (you understand I mean the Persians), their market junk of “today”— for we philosophers need peace and quiet from one thing above all— from everything to do with “today.” We honour what is still, cold, noble, distant, past, in general everything at the sight of which the soul does not have to defend itself or tie itself up—something with which a person can speak without having to speak aloud. People should just listen to the sound which a spirit has when it is talking. Every spirit has its own sound, loves its own sound. The man over there, for example, must be a real agitator, I mean a hollow head, a hollow pot [Hohlkopf, Hohltopf]); no matter what goes into him, everything comes back out of him dull and thick, weighed down with the echo of a huge emptiness. That man over there rarely speaks in anything other than a hoarse voice. Has he perhaps imagined himself hoarse? That might be possible—ask the physiologists—but whoever thinks in words thinks as a speaker and not as a thinker (it reveals that fundamentally he does not think of things or think factually, but only in relation to things, that he really is thinking of himself and his listeners). A third man over there speaks with an insistent familiarity, he steps in too close to our bodies, he breathes over us—instinctively we shut our mouths, even though he is speaking to us through a book. The sound of his style tells us the reason for that—he has no time, he has little faith in himself, he’ll have his say today or never again. But a spirit which is sure of itself, speaks quietly. He’s looking for seclusion. He lets people wait for him. We recognize a philosopher by the following: he walks away from three glittering and garish things—fame, princes, and women. That doesn’t mean that they might not come to him. He shrinks from light which is too bright. Hence, he shies away from his time and its “day.” In that he’s like a shadow: the lower the sun sinks, the bigger he becomes. So far as his “humility” is concerned, he endures a certain dependence and obscurity, as he endures the darkness. More than that, he fears being disturbed by lightning and recoils from the unprotected and totally isolated and abandoned tree on which all bad weather can discharge its mood, all moods discharge their bad weather. His “maternal” instinct, the secret love for what is growing in him, directs him to places where his need to think of himself is removed, in the same sense that the maternal instinct in women has up to now generally kept her in a dependent situation. Ultimately they demand little enough, these philosophers. Their motto is “Whoever owns things is owned”—not, as I must say again and again, from virtue, from an admirable desire for modest living and simplicity, but because their highest master demands that of them, demands astutely and unrelentingly. He cares for only one thing and for that gathers up and holds everything—time, power, love, interest. This sort of man doesn’t like to be disturbed by hostile things and by friendships; he easily forgets or scoffs. To him martyrdom seems something in bad taste—“to suffer for the truth”—he leaves that to the ambitious and the stage heroes of the spirit and anyone else who has time enough for it (—they themselves, the philosophers, have something to do for the truth). They use big words sparingly. It’s said that they resist using even the word “truth”: it sounds boastful. . . . Finally, as far as “chastity” concerns philosophers, this sort of spirit apparently keeps its fertility in something other than in children; perhaps they also keep the continuity of their names elsewhere, their small immortality (among philosophers in ancient India people spoke with even more presumption, “What’s the point of offspring to the man whose soul is the world?”). There’s no sense of chastity there out of some ascetic scruple and hatred of the senses, just as it has little to do with chastity when an athlete or jockey abstains from women. It’s more a matter of what their dominating instinct wants, at least during its great pregnant periods. Every artist knows how damaging the effects of sexual intercourse are to states of great spiritual tension and preparation. The most powerful and most instinctual artists among them don’t acquire this knowledge primarily by experience, by bad experience—no, it’s simply that “maternal” instinct of theirs which here makes the decision ruthlessly to benefit the developing work among all the other stores and supplies of energy, of animal vitality. The greater power then uses up the lesser. Incidentally, apply this interpretation now to the above-mentioned case of Schopenhauer: the sight of the beautiful evidently worked in him as the stimulus for the main power in his nature (the power of reflection and the deep look), so that this then exploded and suddenly became master of his consciousness. In the process, we should in no way rule out the possibility that that characteristic sweetness and abundance typical of the aesthetic condition could originate precisely from the ingredient “sensuality” (just as from the same source is derived that “idealism” characteristic of sexually mature young girls)—so that thus, with the onset of the aesthetic condition, sensuality is not shoved out, as Schopenhauer believed, but is transformed and does not enter the consciousness any more as sexual stimulation. (I will come back to this point of view at another time, in connection with the even more delicate problems of the physiology of aesthetics, so untouched up to this point, so unanalyzed).

Piazza San Marco: the main city square in Venice.