Alifbépé ~ ا ب پ

It seems to me more and more that the philosopher, as a necessary man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself, and always had to find himself, in opposition to his today: the ideal of the day was always his enemy. Hitherto all these extraordinary promoters of man, who are called philosophers, and who rarely have felt themselves to be friends of wisdom, but rather disagreeable fools and dangerous question marks, have found their task, their hard, unwanted, inescapable task, but finally also the greatness of their task, in being the bad conscience of their time. By applying the knife vivisectionally to the very virtues of the time they betrayed their own secret: to know of a new greatness of man, of a new untrodden way to his enhancement. Each time they have uncovered how much hypocrisy, comfortableness, letting oneself go and letting oneself drop, how many lies, were concealed under the most honored type of their contemporary morality, how much virtue was outlived. Each time they said: “We must proceed there, that way, where today you are least at home.”

Confronted with a world of “modem ideas,” which would banish everybody into a comer and a “specialty,” a philosopher if there could be any philosophers today would be forced to define the greatness of man, the concept of “greatness,” in terms precisely of man’s comprehensiveness and multiplicity, his wholeness in manifoldness: he would even determine worth and rank according to how much and how many things a person could bear and take upon himself, how far a person could extend his responsibility. Today the taste and virtue of the time weaken and thin out the will; nothing is more timely than weakness of the will. Therefore, according to the philosopher’s ideal, it is precisely strength of will, hardness, and the capacity for long-range decisions which must form part of the concept of “greatness” with as much justification as the opposite doctrine, and the ideal of a dumb, renunciatory, humble, selfless humanity was suitable for an opposite age, one which, like the sixteenth century, suffered from its accumulated will power and the most savage floods and tidal waves of selfishness.

At the time of Socrates, among men of fatigued instincts, among the conservatives of ancient Athens who let themselves go “for happiness,” as they said; for pleasure, as they behaved and who at the same time still used the old ornate words to which their life had long ceased to entitle them, irony was perhaps necessary for greatness of soul that Socratic sarcastic assurance of the old physician and plebian who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as well as into the flesh and heart of the “nobility,” with a glance that said unmistakably: “Don’t try to deceive me by dissimulation. Here we are equal.”

Today, conversely, when only the herd animal is honored and dispenses honors in Europe, and when “equality of rights” could all too easily be converted into an equality in violating rights by that I mean, into a common war on all that is rare, strange, or privileged, on the higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility, and on the wealth of creative power and mastery today the concept of “greatness” entails being noble, wanting to be by oneself, being capable of being different, standing alone, and having to live independently; and the philosopher will betray something of his own ideal when he posits: “He shall be the greatest who can be the loneliest, the most hidden, the most deviating, the human being beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, he that is overrich in will. Precisely this should be called greatness: to be capable of being as manifold as whole, as wide as full.” And to ask this once more: today is greatness possible?

(February 17.1881) from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (section 212, translated by Walter Kaufmann)

How Nietzsche Revolutionized Ethics - essay by Walter Kaufmann

Nietzsche contra Wagner - by Friedrich Nietzsche (Walter Kaufmann’s Translation)

Twilight of the Idols - by Friedrich Nietzsche (Walter Kaufmann’s Translation)

Preface
Maxims and Arrows
The Problem of Socrates
“Reason” in Philosophy
How the “True World” Finally Became a Fable
Morality as Anti-Nature
The Four Great Errors
The “Improvers” of Mankind
What the Germans Lack
Skirmishes of an Untimely Man
What I Owe to the Ancients
The Hammer Speaks

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