351

  In Honour of Priestly Natures

  I think that philosophers have always felt themselves to be quite distant from what the people take for wisdom (and who nowadays isn’t one of the ‘people’?): the piety and gentleness of the country vicar, the prudent and calm disposition which resembles nothing so much as the moderate temperament of a cow which lies in the meadow and gazes at life seriously and ruminatively – probably because philosophers were not ‘people’ enough, not country vicar enough, for that kind of thing. Also, a philosopher would most likely be the last person to be persuaded of the people’s ability to understand something of his more distant concerns, let alone grasp something of the passion with which he pursues them. It is the great passion of the knowledge-seeker who lives, and must continually live, within a thundercloud of the loftiest problems and the most difficult responsibilities (and which is therefore something entirely different from merely observing life with a dispassionate gaze, with detachment, certainty and objectivity). The people revere a very different kind of man when they form their own ideal of the ‘sage’, and they are a thousand times justified in rendering homage with the highest eulogies and honours to precisely that kind of man – namely, the gentle, simple-minded seriousness of the chaste priestly natures and all who are related to them. It is to them that praise is rendered in the popular reverence for wisdom. And who else is more deserving of the people’s gratitude than a man who is one of them and comes from them, but who is dedicated to them, chosen to be sacrificed for their sake – who believes that he is sacrificed for God’s sake – to whom all can pour their hearts out with impunity, to whom they can unburden their minds of their secrets, their anxieties or worse (for the man who ‘communicates himself’ casts off a part of himself, and once he has ‘confessed’ he forgets). Such men satisfy a great need; for sewers filled with pure and purifying waters are needed for washing away spiritual as well as bodily filth, and strong, humble, pure hearts filled with rapid streams of love are needed which are prepared to sacrifice themselves for such a service of the non-public hygiene – for it is a sacrifice, the priest is and remains a human sacrifice …

  The people regard such men of ‘faith’, serious individuals who have become silent and been sacrificed to them, as wise – that is, as men who have come to possess knowledge, as men who possess ‘certainty’ in contrast to their own uncertainty. Who would want to deprive them of their reputation for that and the reverence that goes with it?

  But surely it is fair for philosophers to regard the priest as one of the ‘people’ and not as a man of knowledge, especially because they themselves do not believe in the existence of ‘men of knowledge’, and already detect a whiff of the ‘people’ in this very belief and superstition. In ancient Greece it was left to the play-actors of the spirit, with their overweening arrogance, to call themselves ‘wise’; it was modesty which led to the invention of the word ‘philosopher’ – the modesty of such monsters of pride and high-handedness as Pythagoras, as Plato –

  352

  To What Extent Is Morality Almost Indispensable?

  The naked man is generally a shameful sight – I am talking about European men (and by no means about European women!). Suppose that the people at a delightful dinner party were through some magician’s trick suddenly to find themselves exposed and unclothed, I imagine that this would not only dampen spirits and dull the strongest appetite – it seems that we Europeans cannot afford to dispense with the masquerade known as clothes. But are there not equally good reasons for the clothing of ‘moral men’, the way they disguise themselves with moral formulae and notions of propriety, the whole favourable concealment of our actions with notions of duty, virtue, public-spiritedness, respectability and self-denial? Not that I am suggesting that human malice and perfidy – in short, the wicked wild beast in us – should be disguised: on the contrary, it is precisely the fact that we are tame animals which is the shameful sight, and which requires the clothing of morality – the fact that the ‘inner man’ in Europe is not nearly wicked enough ‘to let himself be seen’ in his wickedness (to be beautiful in his wickedness). The European clothes himself in morality because he has become a sick, sickly, crippled animal who has good reasons to be ‘tame’, because he is almost deformed, something scarce half made up,9 weak and awkward …

  It is not the formidableness of the beast of prey that renders moral clothing necessary, but the gregarious animal with its profound mediocrity, anxiety and boredom. Admit it! Morality dresses up the European in more distinguished, more important, more handsome apparel – in ‘divine’ apparel –

  353

  Of the Origin of Religions

  The actual inventiveness of founders of religions consists in the following: to establish a particular way of life and its daily customs which is to serve as a disciplina voluntatis while doing away with boredom; and then to give to that very way of life an interpretation by virtue of which it seems to be a good surrounded by a halo of supreme worthiness; so that in the end people will fight for it, and, under certain circumstances, even die for it. In fact, the second of these inventions is the more essential one; the first, the way of life, was usually there already, along with other ways of life, and unaware of the value which it embodies. The significance and originality of the founder of a religion is usually manifested in the fact that he observes this way of life, chooses it and divines for the first time to what ends it should be employed and how it might be interpreted. For example, Jesus (or Paul) encountered the life of the common people in the Roman province, a modest, virtuous, difficult life; he interpreted it, invested it with the highest significance and value. As a result, he possessed the courage to despise every other way of life, the quiet fanaticism of the Moravian Brethren,10 and a secret, subterranean self-confidence which grew ever stronger until it was finally ready to ‘overcome the world’ (that is, Rome and the upper classes throughout the empire). The Buddha also encountered the same kind of people scattered among all the classes and social strata of his nation, people who, owing to indolence, were good and kind (and above all inoffensive), and who, likewise owing to indolence, lived abstemiously, almost without a care. He understood that this sort of person, with all its vis inertiae, inevitably drifts into a belief which promises to prevent the recurrence of earthly travail (that is to say, labour and activity of any kind) – this ‘understanding’ was his genius. The founder of a religion possesses an infallible psychological knowledge of a specific, mediocre kind of personality, even though such people have not yet recognized that they belong together. It is he who brings them together: the founding of a religion is always one long festival of recognition.

  354

  Of the ‘Genius of the Species’11

  The problem of consciousness (or more properly: of becoming self-conscious) comes before us only when we begin to grasp the extent to which we could get along without it; physiology and ethology have made a start in this direction (though it has taken them two centuries to catch up with Leibniz’s prescient suspicions in this regard). For we could in fact think, feel, will and remember, we could likewise ‘act’ in every sense of the word, and nevertheless none of this need ever ‘enter consciousness’ (as we say figuratively). The whole of life would be possible without it seeing itself in a mirror, so to speak; just as even now the greater portion of this life goes on without this mirroring – and indeed even much of our cognitive, affective and volitional life, however offensive this may sound to an older philosopher. So why have consciousness at all, when it is in the main superfluous?

  Now it seems to me, if you will listen to my answer and its perhaps extravagant speculation, that the subtlety and strength of consciousness are always proportional to a man’s (or animal’s) capacity for communication, this capacity being in turn proportional to the need for communication; by which I do not mean that the individual who is master at communicating and making his needs known is necessarily the most dependent upon others for the satisfaction of these needs. But it seems to me to be so with respect to whole races and successions of generations, where need and hardship have long compelled men to communicate with and understand one another quickly and subtly; a surplus of the power and art of communication finally exists, a fortune (so to speak) has been accumulated which waits upon an heir to squander it lavishly (the so-called artists are these heirs, as are orators, preachers and authors: all of them men who come at the end of a long succession, ‘epigones’ in the best sense of the word and, as I said, squanderers by their very nature). If this observation is correct, then I may proceed to the conjecture that consciousness has developed only under the pressure of the need for communication – that from the very beginning it has been necessary and useful only between man and man (especially between those commanding and those obeying) and has only developed in proportion to its utility. Consciousness is actually nothing but a network of connections between man and man – only as such did it have to develop: a reclusive or predatory man would not have needed it. The fact that our actions, thoughts, emotions and movements even come into consciousness – at least a part of them – is the consequence of a terrible and prolonged imperative to which man was subject: as the most endangered animal, he needed help and protection; he needed his kin, he had to express his hardship, to know how to make himself intelligible – and for all this he needed ‘consciousness’ first and foremost, thus he had to ‘know’ for himself what he lacked, how he felt and what he thought. For, to say it again, like every living creature, man thinks all the time, but does not know it; the thinking of which we are conscious is only the smallest part of the whole, and, I might add, the most superficial part, the worst part – for this conscious thinking takes place in words, that is, in the signs of communication, and it is in this form that the origin of consciousness is disclosed. In short, the development of language and the development of consciousness (not of reason, rather, only of reason become self-conscious) go hand in hand. Let us add that it is not only language which serves as a bridge between man and man, but also the facial expressions, circumstances and gestures. What is more, our consciousness of our sense impressions, our ability to stabilize them and project them outside ourselves, has increased to the same extent as our need for communicating them to others through signs. The man who devises signs is at the same time the man who is always more acutely self-conscious; it is only as a social animal that man has learned to become conscious of himself – he is doing so still, and is doing so more and more.

  Obviously, my idea is that consciousness is actually not a part of man’s individual existence at all, but rather a part of his communal or gregarious nature; from which it follows that it is only in relation to communal and gregarious utility that it develops with any subtlety; and that consequently each of us, no matter how hard we try to understand ourselves as individuals, no matter how hard we try to follow the maxim ‘know thyself’, will never bring into consciousness any more than what is non-individual in us, our ‘ordinariness’ – that our thought itself is continuously being outvoted, so to speak, by the character of consciousness, by the mandate of the ‘genius of the species’ it contains, and translated back into the perspective of the herd. Without a doubt, basically all of our actions are incomparably personal, unique and infinitely individual; but as soon as we translate them into consciousness, they no longer seem to be …

  In my opinion, this is the proper understanding of phenomenalism and perspectivism: the nature of animal consciousness implies that the world of which we are able to become conscious is only a superficial world, a world of signs, a generalized and vulgarized world – that everything which becomes conscious thereby becomes shallow, thin, relatively stupid, general, a sign, a characteristic of the herd; that all consciousness is associated with a great and fundamental corruption, falsification, superficiality and generalization. Finally, the growth of consciousness is dangerous, and whoever lives among the most conscious Europeans even knows that it is a disease. As one might have guessed, it is not the antithesis of subject and object which concerns me here; I leave that distinction to the epistemologists who have remained entangled in the snares of grammar (the metaphysics of the people). Even less is it the antithesis of the ‘thing in itself’ and the phenomenon; for we do not ‘know’ enough to be entitled to make such a distinction. We have absolutely no organ for knowledge, for ‘truth’; we ‘know’ (or believe, or imagine) exactly as much as may be useful to us, exactly as much as promotes the interests of the human herd or species; and even what is called ‘useful’ here is ultimately only what we believe to be useful, what we imagine to be useful, but perhaps is precisely the most fatal stupidity which will some day lead to our destruction.

  355

  The Origin of Our Conception of Knowledge

  I take this explanation from the street. I heard someone saying ‘he knew me’, so I asked myself: for most people, what passes for knowledge? What do they want when they seek ‘knowledge’? Nothing more than to reduce something strange to something familiar. And we philosophers – do we really regard knowledge as anything more than that? The familiar, that is, what we are accustomed to, what no longer surprises us, the commonplace, any kind of rule which we are unable to break, anything and everything in which we feel at home – what? Is our need for knowledge not merely this need for the familiar? The desire to discover in everything strange, unusual or questionable something which no longer troubles us? Might it not be the case that the instinct of fear is what enjoins us to seek knowledge? Might it not be the case that the knowledge-seeker’s sense of triumph is nothing but a restored sense of security? This philosopher12 imagined the world was ‘known’ when he had reduced it to the ‘Idea’; alas, was it not because the Idea was so familiar to him? Because he had so much less to fear from the ‘Idea’?

  Oh, how undemanding our knowledge-seekers are! Just look at their principles, at their solutions to the riddle of the world in this regard! Whenever they rediscover something in things, under things or behind things that is unfortunately very familiar to us, for example, our multiplication table, or our logic, or our willing and desiring, they are immediately pleased! For ‘whatever is familiar is known’: in this they all agree. Even the most cautious among them thinks that the familiar is at least more easily known than the strange; for example, that it is methodologically necessary to start with the ‘inner world’, with ‘the facts of consciousness’, because it is the world which is more familiar to us! Error of errors! The familiar is merely what we are accustomed to, and what we are accustomed to is the most difficult of all to ‘know’ – that is to say, to regard as a problem, to regard as strange, distant, ‘external’ …

  The great certainty of the natural sciences in comparison with psychology and the critique of the elements of consciousness – unnatural sciences, one might almost say – rests precisely on the fact that they take what is strange as their object; while it is almost something contradictory and absurd to want to take what is not strange as an object …

  356

  The Way in Which Europe Is Becoming Ever More ‘Artistic’

  In our transitional period, when so many things no longer have the power to compel obedience, the cares of life compel almost all male Europeans to assume a definite role, their so-called profession; some are allowed to exercise discretion (a discretion more apparent than real, however) as regards which role, but most have it chosen for them. The result is strange enough: almost all Europeans confound themselves with their role as they grow older; they themselves are the victims of their own ‘splendid performance’ and have forgotten the extent to which chance, caprice and arbitrariness dictated the choice of ‘profession’ at the time – and how many other roles they might have played; but now it is too late! If we look below the surface, we see that their character is actually a further development of their role, their nature a further development of their artifice. There were ages in which people believed with a dull confidence, even with a sense of piety, that they were predestined for just this business, for just this way of earning a living, and refused to acknowledge the element of chance in it, the role played by the utterly arbitrary. With the help of this faith, estates, guilds and the hereditary privileges of tradesmen succeeded in erecting those immense and broad-based edifices of society which characterized the Middle Ages, and which may still boast of at least one thing: durability (and on this earth, duration is a value of the highest order!). But conversely, there are ages, genuinely democratic ages, when this faith is increasingly forgotten and replaced by another particular faith, the bold Athenian faith first observed in the age of Pericles, the contemporary American belief, which is increasingly becoming the European belief as well. These are ages when the individual becomes convinced that he can do almost anything, that he can play almost any role; when everyone experiments with himself, improvises, experiments anew, experiments with relish; when all nature ceases and becomes art …

 

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