What Nietzsche Taught

tle it was to have been issued in a later edition of this earlier work, it differs greatly, not only from "The Dawn of Day," but from everything else Nietzsche e

books. Nietzsche was at Naumburg at the time of writing this work. A long-standing stomach malady had suddenly shown signs of leaving him, and the period during which he wrote "The Joyful Wisdom" was one of the happiest of his life. Heretofore a sombre seriousness had marked both his thoughts and the expression of them. In the two volumes of "Human, All-

is looked upon as a man who was entirely consumed with rancour and hatred-a man unconscious of the comic side of existence-a thinker with whom pessimism was chronic. But this is only a half truth, a conclusion founded on partial evidence. Nietzsche's very earnestness at times defeated his own ends. "The Joyful Wisdom" is one of the most fundamentally hilarious books ever written. It deals with life as a supreme bit of humour. Yet there is little in it to provoke laughter. Nietzsche's humour is deeper than the externals. One finds no super

e conception, the sudden fruit of his entire research given to the world in a unified body. To the contrary, it is an amassing of data, a constant building up of ideas. No one book contains his entire teachings, logically thought out and carefully organised. Rather is his philosophy an intricate structure which begins with his earliest essays and does not reach completion until the end of "The Will to Power." Each book has some specific place in his thought: each book assumes a position relative to all th

ble in this new book. It is therefore of considerable importance to the student in forming a just estimate of Nietzsche. Here the hater has departed; the idol-smasher has laid down his weapons; the analyst has become the satyr; the logician has turned poet; the blasphemer has become the child. Only occasionally does the pendulum swing toward the sombre Apollonian pole: the Dionysian ideal of joy is dominant. The month of

d interest. There are criticisms of German and Southern culture; valuations of modern authors; views on the developments of art; theories of music; analyses of Schopenhauer and an explanation of his vogue; judgments of the ancient and the modern t

t, in the strictest sense of the word, a "philosopher," but rather a critically intellectual force. This diagnosis might carry weight had not Nietzsche avowedly built his philosophical structure on a repudiation of abstract thinking. This misunderstanding of him arose from the adherents of rational thinking overlooking the fact that, where the older philosophers had de

ological, brief remarks on man's emotional nature, apothegms dealing with human attributes, bits of racy philosophical gossip, religious and scientific maxims, and the like. Sometimes thes

he individual. Nietzsche reverses Schiller's famous doctrine expressed in "Die Braut von Messina": "Life is not of all good the highest." He sees no good over and beyond that of human relationships. The normal instinc

ater than the other material and added with an introduction in a later edition of the book. These addenda, while less spe

chosen those passages which are more general in tone. The connection between the various aphorisms is here even slighter than is Nietzsche's wont, and for that reason no attempt has been made to present a continuous pe

of (one's

OM "THE JOY

them always at one problem, each and all of them: to do tha

,-to do this the best have not hitherto had enough of the sense of truth, and the most en

trongest impulse: not to be tempted to inexpedient activities by its impulses-that is its wisdom and inspiration. In comparison with the ignoble nature the higher natur

ankind the most: they always rekindled the sleeping passions

associations each of these ideas evokes!-and y

stroyed is strengthening to the strong indi

g

ivately injurious to the individual; it is praise of impulses which deprive man of his noblest self-love, and the power to take the best care of himself.... The "neighbour" praises unselfishness because he profits by it! If the neighbour were "u

towards all that becomes weak and old in

interesting; if they had had the nobility of the newly-born in their looks and bearing, there would perhaps have been no socialism in the masses of the people. For these are r

tures-that is, when one does not want to suppress the passions themselves, but only their language and demeanour, one nevertheless realises

the same amount of egois

mpulse as such, on account of its refinement,-t

s be the ultimate form and refinement in which nob

es, so as to seem quite fragile ornaments to which even a grain of dust does harm; their exis

ready evil. And then! To be hurled as with an awful thunderbolt into reality and knowledge with marriage-and indeed by him whom they most love and esteem: to have to encounter love and shame in contradiction, yea, to have to[Pg 122] feel rapture, abandonment, duty, sympathy, and fright at the unexpected proximity of God and animal, and whatever else besides! all at once!-There, in fact, a psychic entanglement has been effected which is quite unequalled! Even the sympathetic curiosity of the wisest discerner of men does not suffice to divine how this or that woman gets along with the solution of this enigma and the enigma of this solution; what dreadful, far-reaching suspicio

tistic products, if that higher art, the

n, is that he believed in Brutus and cast not a shadow of s

or knowledge; we must now[Pg 123] and then be joyful in our folly, that we may continue to be joyful in our wisdom! And just because we are heavy and serious men in our ultimate depth, and are rather weights than men, there is nothing that doe

e to blame or praise the universe! Let us be on our guard against ascribing to it heartlessness and unreason, or their opposites; it is neither perfect, nor beautiful, nor noble; nor does it seek to be anything of the kind, it does not at all attempt to imitate man! It is altogether unaffected by our ?sthetic and moral judgments! Neither has it any self-preservative instinct, nor instinct at all; it also knows no law. Let us be on our guard against saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one who commands, no

to the animals and nature; fourthly, he always devised new tables of values, and accepted them for a time as eternal and unconditioned, so that at one time this, and at another time that h

erd-instinct in t

y failed. It is necessary to know thy aim, thy horizon, thy powers, thy impulses, thy errors, and especia

ofound; the truth is that they do not ev

felt as pleasure or pain, is the affair of the interpreting intellect, which, to be sure, operates thereby for the most part unconsciously to us, and[Pg 125] one and the same excitation may

any thoughts of their own, and to whom an elevati

istianity prevails or has prevailed, is a

e-I mean in one over which the gloomy and sublime thu

s need of slavery. Where there is slavery the individuals are but few,

e discovered it; that is because human

which the near appears large and momentous, while in the dist

und to the multitude strives for obscurity. The multitude thinks everything profound of w

sentiments-always, however, ob

e mischief, but with

ue:-not, however, to the more refined souls whose virtue consists of a profound distrust of themselves and of

witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchcraft, t

the idea of death! I would fain do something to make the idea of

ain into honour! For it has to prepare the way for a yet higher age, and gather the force which the latter will one day r

tice to our own nature, and to all nature! There are enough of men who may yield to their impulses gracefully and carelessly: but they do not do so, for fear of that imaginary "evil thing" in nature! That is the cause why there is so little nobility to be found among men

to get a cue to his hitherto unknown partiality. But the ability to contradict, the attainment of good conscience in hostility to the accustomed, the traditional and the hallowed,-tha

ther hand I am favourable to those moral systems which stimulate me to do something, and to do it again from morning till e

f-preservatives of a species. Were it not so, pain would long ago have been done away wit

intellectual conscience.... But we who are different, who are thirsty for reason, want to look as carefully into our experiences, as in the

g

something else may also succeed, perhaps unawares: we may have been altered by him! Let us rather see to it that our own influence on all that is to come

ve well, who did not first understand t

ecomes "serious"! And "where there is laughing and gaiety, thinking cannot be worth anyt

under all circumstances call this and that your "duty" and your "conscience": the knowledge how mor

urpose we must become the best students and discoverers of all the laws and necessities in the world. We must be physicists in order to be c

our value and volition m

g

, the godless and anti-metaphysical, still take our fire from the conflagration kindled by a belief a millennium

inguishing characteristic of sovereignty and power. That is to say, the less a person knows how to command, the more urgent is his de

ion of the true, fundamental instinct of life, which aims at the extension of power, and

in proportion to the necessity for communication.... Consciousness generally has only been developed under the pressure of the necessity for communication, -that from the first

rcumstances a nobler insti

im. The first kind of cause is a quantum of stored-up force, which waits to be used in some manner, for some purpose; the second kind of cause, on the contrary, is something quite unimportant in comparison with the first

equisites of feminine love; granted, however, that there should also be men to whom on their side the demand for complete devotion is not unfamiliar,-well, they are really-not men. A man who loves like a woman becomes thereby a slave: a woman, however, who loves like a woman becomes thereby a more perfect woman.... Woman wants to be taken and accepted as a possession, she wishes to be merged in the conceptions[Pg 131] of "possession" and "possessed"; consequently she wants one who takes, who does not offer and give himself away, but who reversely is rather to be made richer in "himself"-by the increase of power, happiness and faith which the woman herself gives to him. Woman gives herself, man takes her.-I do not think one will get over this natural contrast by any social contract, or with the very best will to do justice, ho

before witnesses. Under the latter there is also to be included the apparently monologic art which involves the belief in God, the wh

the stupidest,[Pg 132] that is to say, the most destitute of significance, of all possible world-in

d future-we require for a new end also a new means, namely, a new healthiness, s

is to say involuntarily and from overflowing abundance and power) with everything that has hitherto been called holy, good, inviolable, divine; to whom the loftiest conception which the people have reasonably made their measure of value,