This assignment needs you to prepare at least 3 questions or comments. Read the article, transcribe the kinds of things you might write in the margins as notes to yourself as you’re working through the reading.

The Gay Science ('La gaya scienza')

This house is my own and here I dwell, I've never aped nothing from no one and -laugh at each master, mark me well, who at himself has not poked fun.

Over my front door.

The title is a translation into German (in our edition, into English) of the Proven~al subtitle. Gaya scienza ('joyful, cheerful, or gay science') was a term used by the troubadours in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries to refer to the art of poetry. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche writes that he has used the term gaya scienza here to designate the specific unity of 'singer, knight, and free spirit' which was characteristic of early Proven~al culture.

Book One

I

The teachers of the purpose of existence. - Whether I regard human beings with a good or with an evil eye, I always find them engaged in a single task, each and everyone of them: to do what benefits the preservation of the human race. Not from a feeling of love for the race, but simply because within them nothing is older, stronger, more inexorable and invincible than this instinct - because this instinct constitutes the essence of our species and herd. One might quickly enough, with the usual myopia from five steps away, divide one's neighbours into useful and harmful, good and evil; but on a large-scale assessment, upon further reflection on the whole, one grows suspicious of this tidying and separating and finally abandons it. Even the most harmful person may actually be the most useful when it comes to the preservation of the species; for he nurtures in himself or through his effects on others drives without which humanity would long since have become feeble or rotten. Hatred, delight in the misfortunes of others, the lust to rob and rule, and whatever else is called evil: all belong to the amazing economy of the preservation of the species, an economy which is certainly costly, wasteful, and on the whole most foolish - but still proven to have preserved our race so far. I no longer know whether you, my dear fellow man and neighbour, are even capable of living in a way which is damaging to the species, i.e. 'unreasonably' and 'badly'. What might have harmed the species may have become extinct many thousands of years ago and may by now belong to the things that are no longer possible even for God. Pursue your best or your worst desires, and above all, perish! In both cases you are probably still in some way a promoter and benefactor of humanity and are thus entitled to your eulogists - as well as to your mockers! But you will never find someone who could completely mock you, the individual, even in your best qualities, someone who could bring home to you as far as truth allows your boundless, fly- and frog-like wretchedness! To laugh at oneself as one would have to laugh in order to laugh from the whole truth - for that, not even the best have had enough sense of truth, and the most gifted have had far too little genius! Perhaps even laughter still has a future - when the proposition 'The species is everything, an individual is always nothing' has become part of humanity and this ultimate liberation and irresponsibility is accessible to everyone at all times. Perhaps laughter

27

The Gay Science

will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain. At present, things are still quite different; at present, the comedy of existence has not yet 'become conscious' of itself; at present, we still live in the age of tragedy, in the age of moralities and religions. What is the meaning of the ever-new appear- ance of these founders of moralities and religions, of these instigators of fights about moral valuations, these teachers of pangs of conscience and religious wars? What is the meaning of these heroes on this stage? For these have been the heroes thus far; and everything else, even if at times it was all that we could see and was far too near, has always served only to set the stage for these heroes, whether as machinery and backdrop or in the role of confidant and servant. (The poets, for example, were always the servants of some kind of morality.) It is obvious that these tragedies, too, work in the interest of the species, even if they should believe that they are working in the interest of God, as God's emissaries. They, too, promote the life of the species by promoting the faith in life. 'Life is worth living', each of them shouts, 'there is something to life, there is something behind life, beneath it; beware!' This drive, which rules the highest as well as the basest of human beings - the drive for the preservation of the species - erupts from time to time as reason and passion of mind; it is then surrounded by a resplendent retinue of reasons and tries with all its might to make us forget that fundamentally it is drive, instinct, stupidity, lack of reasons. Life ought to be loved, because -! Man ought to advance himself and his neighbour, because -! What names all these Oughts and Becauses have been given and may yet be given in the future! The ethical teacher makes his appearance as the teacher of the purpose of existence in order that what happens necessa- rily and always, by itself and without a purpose, shall henceforth seem to be done for a purpose and strike man as reason and an ultimate commandment; to this end he invents a second, different existence and takes by means of his new mechanics the old, ordinary existence off its old, ordinary hinges. To be sure, in no way does he want us to laugh at existence, or at ourselves - or at him; for him, an individual is always an individual, something first and last and tremendous; for him there are no species, sums, or zeroes. Foolish and fanciful as his inventions and valuations may be, badly as he may misjudge the course of nature and deny its conditions - and all ethical systems hitherto have been so foolish and contrary to nature that humanity would have perished from

28

Book One

everyone had it gained power over humanity - all the same! Every time 'the hero' appeared on stage, something new was attained: the gruesome counterpart of laughter, that profound shock that many individuals feel at the thought: 'Yes, living is worth it! Yes, I am worthy of living!' Life and I and you and all of us became interesting to ourselves once again for a while. There is no denying that in the long run each of these great teachers of a purpose was vanquished by laughter, reason and nature: the brief tragedy always changed and returned into the eternal comedy of existence, and the 'waves of uncountable laughter' - to cite Aeschylus! - must in the end also come crashing down on the greatest of these tragedians. Despite all this corrective laughter, human nature on the whole has surely been altered by the recurring emergence of such teachers of the purpose of existence - it has acquired one additional need, the need for the repeated appearance of such teachers and such teachings of a 'purpose'. Man has gradually become a fantastic animal that must fulfil one condition of existence more than any other animal: man must from time to time believe he knows why he exists; his race cannot thrive without a periodic trust in life - without faith in the reason in life! And ever again the human race will from time to time decree: 'There is something one is absolutely forbidden henceforth to laugh at.' And the most cautious friend of man will add: 'Not only laughter and gay wisdom but also the tragic, with all its sublime unreason, belongs to the means and necessities of the preservation of the species.' And therefore! Therefore! Therefore! Oh, do you understand me, my brothers? Do you understand this new law of ebb and flood? We, too, have our time!

2

Intellectual conscience. - I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it anew each time; I do not want to believe it although I can grasp it as with my hands: the great majority lacks an intellectual conscience - indeed, it has often seemed to me as if someone requiring such a conscience would be as lonely in the most densely populated cities as he would be in the desert. Everyone looks at you with strange

1 A mistranslation of lines 89-90 of Prometheus Bound formerly ascribed to the fifth-century (B c) Athenian dramatist Aeschylus. The lines actually read: 'countless laughter of the sea waves'.

29

The Gay Science

eyes and goes on handling their scales, calling this good and that evil; nobody as much as blushes when you notice that their weights are underweight - nor do they become indignant with you; perhaps they laugh at your doubts. I mean: to the great majority it is not contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly without first becoming aware of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterwards: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this 'great majority'. But what are goodheartedness, refinement, and genius to me when the person possessing these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his believing and judging and when he does not consider the desire for certainty to be his inmost craving and deepest need - as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower! I discovered in certain pious people a hatred of reason and I was well disposed towards them for that: at least this betrayed their bad intellectual conscience! But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors2 and the whole marvellous uncertainty and ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and rapture of questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even being faintly amused by him - that is what I feel to be contemptible, and this is the feeling I look for first in anyone. Some folly keeps persuading me that every person has this feeling, simply as human. That is my type of injustice.

3

Noble and common. - For common natures all noble, magnanimous feelings appear to be inexpedient and therefore initially incredible: they give a wink when they hear of such things and seem to want to say, 'Surely there must be some advantage involved; one cannot see through every wall' - they are suspicious of the noble person, as if he were furtively seeking his advantage. If they become all too clearly convinced of the absence of selfish intentions and gains, they view the noble person as a kind of fool: they despise him in his pleasure and laugh at the sparkle in his eye. 'How could one enjoy being at a disadvantage? How could one want with open eyes to be disadvantaged? Some disease of reason must be linked to the noble affection' - thus they think and look

2 'the discordant harmony of things'; from Horace, Epistles 1.12.19

30

The Gay Science

that he wanted to think - it was probably a rare occurrence! - , that he now wanted to become wiser and was preparing himself for a thought: one would set one's face as for prayer and stop walking; yes, one stood still for hours on the street once the thought 'arrived' - on one or two legs. The dignity of the matter required it!

7

Something for the industrious. - Anyone who now wishes to make a study of moral matters opens up for himself an immense field of work. All kinds of passions have to be thought through separately, pursued separately through ages, peoples, great and small individuals; their entire reason and all their evaluations and modes of illuminating things must be revealed! So far, all that has given colour to existence still lacks a history: where could you find a history of love, of avarice, of envy, of conscience, of piety, of cruelty? Even a comparative history of law or even of punishment is so far lacking entirely. Has anyone done research on the different ways of dividing up the day or of the consequences of a regular schedule of work, festivals, and the rest? Do we know the moral effects of foods? Is there a philosophy of nutrition? (The incessantly erupting clamour for and against vegetarianism proves that there is still no such philosophy!) Has anyone collected people's experiences of living together - in monasteries, for example? Has anyone depicted the dialectic of marriage and friendship? The customs of scholars, busi- nessmen, artists, artisans - have they found their thinkers? There is so much in them to think about! Everything that humans have viewed until now as the 'conditions of their existence' and all the reason, passion, and superstition that such a view involves - has this been researched exhaustively? To observe how differently the human drives have grown and still could grow depending on the moral climate - that alone involves too much work for even the most industrious; it would require whole generations, and generations of scholars who would collaborate systematically, to exhaust the points of view and the material. The same applies to the demonstration of the reasons for the variety of moral climates ('why does the sun of one fundamental moral judgement and primary value-standard shine here - and another one there?'). Yet another new project would be to determine the erroneousness of all these reasons and the whole essence of moral judgements to date. If all

34

Book One

these jobs were done, the most delicate question of all would emerge in the foreground: whether science is able to furnish goals of action after having proved that it can take such goals away and annihilate them; and then an experimenting would be in order, in which every kind of heroism could find satisfaction - an experimenting that might last for centuries and eclipse all the great projects and sacrifices of history to date. So far, science has not yet built its cyclops-buildings;5 but the time for that will come, too.

8

Unconscious virtues. - All qualities of a person of which he is conscious - and especially those he supposes to be visible and plain to others also - are subject to laws of development entirely different from those qualities which are unknown or badly known to him, which conceal themselves by means of their subtlety even from the eye of a rather subtle observer and which know how to hide as if behind nothing at all. This might be compared to the subtle sculptures on the scales of reptiles: it would be a mistake to take them for ornaments or weapons, since one sees them only with a microscope, i.e. with an artificially sharpened eye, which similar animals for whom they might signify something like ornaments or weapons simply lack. Our visible moral qualities, and especially those that we believe to be visible, take their course; and the invisible ones, which have the same names but are neither ornaments nor weapons with regard to others, also take their course: probably a totally different one, with lines and subtleties and sculptures that might amuse a god with a divine microscope. For example, we have our diligence, our ambition, our acuteness - all the world knows about them - and in addition, we probably also have our industry, our ambition, our acute- ness; but for these reptile scales, no microscope has yet been invented! At this point the friends of instinctive morality will say: 'Bravo! At least he considers unconscious virtues to be possible - and that's enough for us.' Oh, how little you are satisfied with!

5 The Cyclopes, in ancient mythology, were one-eyed giants. Though represented in Homer as wild creatures, they elsewhere appear as workmen of superhuman power, and were credited with building massive ancient fortifications such as those of Tiryns.

35

Book Two

57

To the realists. - You sober people who feel armed against passion and phantastical conceptions and would like to make your emptiness a matter of pride and an ornament - you call yourself realists and insinuate that the world really is the way it appears to you: before you alone reality stands unveiled, and you yourselves are perhaps the best part of it - oh, you beloved images of Sais! 1 But aren't you too in your unveiled condition still most passionate and dark creatures, compared to fish, and still all too similar to an artist in love? And what is 'reality' to an artist in love! You still carry around the valuations of things that originate in the passions and loves of former centuries! Your sobriety still contains a secret and inextirpable drunkenness! Your love of 'reality', for example - oh, that is an old, ancient 'love'! In every experience, in every sense impression there is a piece of this old love; and some fantasy, some prejudice, some irrationality, some ignorance, some fear, and whatever else, has worked on and contributed to it. That mountain over there! That cloud over there! What is 'real' about that? Subtract just once the phantasm and the whole human contribution from it, you sober ones! Yes, if you could do that! If you could forget your background, your past, your nursery school - all of your humanity and animality! There is no 'reality' for us - and not for you either, you sober ones - we are not nearly as strange to one another as you think, and perhaps our good will to transcend drunkenness is just as respectable as your belief that you are altogether incapable of drunkenness.

58

Only as creators! - This has caused me the greatest trouble and still does always cause me the greatest trouble: to realize that what things are called is unspeakably more important than what they are. The reputation, name, and appearance, the worth, the usual measure and weight of a thing - originally almost always something mistaken and arbitrary, thrown over things like a dress and quite foreign to their nature and even to their skin - has, through the belief in it and its growth from generation to generation, slowly grown onto and into the thing and has

I See above, 'Preface', footnote 5, p. 8.

The Gay Science

become its very body: what started as appearance in the end nearly always becomes essence and effectively acts as its essence! What kind of a fool would believe that it is enough to point to this origin and this misty shroud of delusion in order to destroy the world that counts as 'real', so- called 'reality'! Only as creators can we destroy! - But let us also not forget that in the long run it is enough to create new names and valuations and appearances of truth in order to create new 'things'.

59

We artists. - When we love a woman, we easily come to hate nature because of all the repulsive natural functions to which every woman is subject; we prefer not to think about it at all, but when our soul for once brushes against these matters, it shrugs impatiently and, as just said, casts a contemptuous look at nature: we feel insulted; nature seems to intrude on our property and with the most profane hands at that. In cases like this one refuses to hear anything about physiology and decrees secretly to oneself, 'I will hear nothing of the idea that the human being is anything other than soul and form!' 'The human being under the skin' is an abomination and unthinkable to all lovers, a blasphemy against God and love. Now, the way lovers still feel about nature and naturalness is how every worshipper of God and his 'holy omnipotence' formerly felt: in everything that was said about nature by astronomers, geologists, physiologists, and doctors, he saw an intrusion on his choicest property and thus an attack - and a shameless one at that! Even the 'law of nature' sounded to him like a slander against God; he would basically much rather have seen all of mechanics traced back to moral acts of will and choice - but since no one could do him that service, he concealed nature and mechanics from himself as best he could and lived in a dream. Oh, these people of former times knew how to dream and didn't even need to fall asleep first! - and we men of today also still know it all too well, despite all our good will towards waking and the day! We need only to love, to hate, to desire, simply to feel - at once the spirit and power of the dream comes over us, and we climb with open eyes, impervious to all danger, up the most dangerous paths, onto the roofs and towers of fantasy, and without any vertigo, as though born to climb - we sleepwalkers of the day! We artists! We who conceal naturalness! We who are moon- and God-struck! We untiring wan-

The Gay Science

the female character is related: these are male mothers. - Among animals the male sex is considered the beautiful one.

73

Holy cruelty. - A man holding a newborn in his hand approached a holy man. 'What should I do with this child?' he asked; 'it is wretched, misshapen, and doesn't have life enough to die'. 'Kill it!' shouted the holy man with a terrible voice; 'kill it and hold it in your arms for three days and three nights to create a memory for yourself: thus you will never again beget a child when it is not time for you to beget'. When the man had heard this, he walked away disappointed; and many people reproached the holy man because he had advised a cruelty; for he had advised killing the child. 'But is it not crueller to let it live?' said the holy man.

74

The unsuccessful. - Those poor women are always unsuccessful who, in the presence of the one they love, become restless and insecure and talk too much: for men are most surely seduced by a certain secret and phlegmatic tenderness.

75

The third sex. - 'A small man is a paradox, but still a man; but small women seem to me, when compared to tall women, to belong to another sex', said an old dancing master. A small woman is never beautiful- said old Aristotle. 7

The greatest danger. - Had there not always been a majority of men who felt the discipline of their heads - their 'rationality' - to be their pride, their obligation, their virtue, and who were embarrassed or ashamed by all fantasizing and debauchery of thought, being the friends of 'healthy common sense', humanity would have perished long ago! The greatest

7 Aristotle doesn't actually say exactly this, but see his Nichomachean Ethics I 123b.6-8 and Rhetoric 136Ia. 6-7·

Book Two

danger that hovered and still hovers over humanity is the outbreak of madness - that is, the outbreak of arbitrariness in feeling, seeing, and hearing; the enjoyment in the lack of discipline of the head, the joy in human unreason. The opposite of the world of the madman is not truth and certainty but the generality and universal bindingness of a faith; in short, the non-arbitrary in judgement. And man's greatest labour so far has been to reach agreement about very many things and to lay down a law of agreement - regardless of whether these things are true or false. This is the discipline of the head which has preserved humanity - but the counter-drives are still so powerful that it is basically with little confidence that one may speak of the future of humanity. The picture of things still moves and shifts continually, and perhaps more and faster from now on than ever before; continually, the most select minds bristle at this universal bindingness - the explorers of truth above all! Con- tinually this faith, as a commonplace belief shared by everyone, breeds nausea and a new lust in subtler minds; and the slow tempo for all spiritual processes which this faith makes necessary, this imitation of the tortoise that is recognized as the norm here, would by itself be sufficient to turn artists and poets into deserters: it is these impatient minds in whom a veritable delight in madness breaks out, because madness has such a cheerful tempo! What is needed, then, are virtuous intellects - oh, I'll use the most unambiguous word - what is needed is virtuous stupidity; what is needed are unwavering beat-keepers of the slow spirit, so that the believers of the great common faith stay together and go on dancing their dance: it is an exigency of the first order which commands and demands. We others are the exception and the danger - we stand eternally in need of defence! - Now there is certainly something to be said for the exception, provided it never wants to become the rule.

77

The animal with a good conscience. - The vulgar element in everything that pleases in Southern Europe - be it Italian opera (e.g. Rossini and Bellini)8 or the Spanish adventure novel (most readily accessible to us in

8 Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868) wrote thirty-six operas in the years between 18IO and 1829, then retired, devoting the remaining forty years of his life to culinary pleasures in Paris. Vincenzo Bellini's (1801-35) most famous opera is Norma. The music of Rossini and Bellini was very highly regarded by Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), the modern philosopher who influenced the young Nietzsche most deeply.

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our aesthetic and moral judgements apply to it! It also has no drive to self-preservation or any other drives; nor does it observe any laws. Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one who commands, no one who obeys, no one who transgresses. Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for only against a world of purposes does the word 'accident' have a meaning. Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is only a form of what is dead, and a very rare form. Let us beware of thinking that the world eternally creates new things. There are no eternally enduring substances; matter is as much of an error as the god of the Eleatics. 1 But when will we be done with our caution and care? When will all these shadows of god no longer darken us? When will we have completely de-deified nature? When may we begin to naturalize humanity with a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?

110

Origin of knowledge. - Through immense periods of time, the intellect produced nothing but errors; some of them turned out to be useful and species-preserving; those who hit upon or inherited them fought their fight for themselves and their progeny with greater luck. Such erro- neous articles of faith, which were passed on by inheritance further and further, and finally almost became part of the basic endowment of the species, are for example: that there are enduring things; that there are identical things; that there are things, kinds of material, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in and for itself. Only very late did the deniers and doubters of such propositions emerge; only very late did truth emerge as the weakest form of knowledge. It seemed that one was unable to live with it; that our organism was geared for its opposite: all its higher functions, the perceptions of sense and generally every kind of sensa- tion, worked with those basic errors that had been incorporated since time immemorial. Further, even in the realm of knowledge those propositions became the norms according to which one determined 'true' and 'untrue' - down to the most remote areas of pure logic. Thus

1 Group of philosophers in the early fifth century Be who argued that the world of change was a mere appearance of an underlying unchanging being

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Book Three

the strength of knowledge lies not in its degree of truth, but in its age, its embeddedness, its character as a condition of life. Where life and knowledge seem to contradict each other, there was never any serious fight to begin with; denial and doubt were simply considered madness. Those exceptional thinkers, like the Eleatics, who still posited and clung to the opposites of the natural errors, believed in the possibility of also living this opposite: they invented the sage as the man of unchange- ability, impersonality, universality of intuition, as one and all at the same time, with a special capacity for that inverted knowledge; they had the faith that their knowledge was at the same time the principle of life. But in order to be able to claim all this, they had to deceive themselves about their own state: they had fictitiously to attribute to themselves imper- sonality and duration without change; they had to misconstrue the nature of the knower, deny the force of impulses in knowledge, and generally conceive reason as a completely free, self-originated activity. They closed their eyes to the fact that they, too, had arrived at their propositions in opposition to what was considered valid or from a desire for tranquillity or sole possession or sovereignty. The subtler develop- ment of honesty and scepticism finally made also these people impos- sible; even their life and judgements proved dependent on the ancient drives and fundamental errors of all sentient existence. This subtler honesty and scepticism arose wherever two conflicting propositions seemed to be applicable to life because both were compatible with the basic errors, and thus where it was possible to argue about the greater or lesser degree of usefulness for life; also wherever new propositions showed themselves to be not directly useful, but at least also not harmful, as expressions of an intellectual play impulse, and innocent and happy like all play. Gradually the human brain filled itself with such judgements and convictions; and ferment, struggle, and lust for power developed in this tangle. Not only utility and delight, but also every kind of drive took part in the fight about the 'truths'; the intellectual fight became an occupation, attraction, profession, duty, dignity - knowledge and the striving for the true finally took their place as a need among the other needs. Henceforth, not only faith and conviction, but also scrutiny, denial, suspicion, and contradiction were a power; all 'evil' instincts were subordinated to knowledge and put in its service and took on the lustre of the permitted, honoured, useful and finally the eye and the innocence of the good. Thus knowledge became a part of life and, as

I II

The Gay Science

life, a continually growing power, until finally knowledge and the ancient basic errors struck against each other, both as life, both as power, both in the same person. The thinker - that is now the being in whom the drive to truth and those life-preserving errors are fighting their first battle, after the drive to truth has proven itself to be a life- preserving power, too. In relation to the significance of this battle, everything else is a matter of indifference: the ultimate question about the condition of life is posed here, and the first attempt is made here to answer the question through experiment. To what extent can truth stand to be incorporated? - that is the question; that is the experiment.

III

The origin of the logical. - What is the origin of logic in man's head? Surely it arose out of the illogical, the realm of which must originally have been immense. But innumerable beings drew inferences in a way different from that in which we do now perished; nonetheless, they might have been closer to the truth! He, for instance, who did not know how to find 'identity' often enough, both with regard to nourishment and to hostile animals - that is, he who subsumed too slowly and was too cautious in subsumption - had a slighter probability of survival than he who in all cases of similarity immediately guessed that they were identical. The predominant disposition, however, to treat the similar as identical - an illogical disposition, for there is nothing identical as such - is what first supplied all the foundations for logic. Similarly, in order for the concept of substance to originate, which is indispensable to logic though nothing real corresponds to it in the strictest sense, it was necessary that for a long time changes in things not be seen, not be perceived; the beings who did not see things exactly had a head start over those who saw everything 'in a flux'. As such, every great degree of caution in inferring, every sceptical disposition, is a great danger to life. No living being would be preserved had not the opposite disposition - to affirm rather than suspend judgement, to err and make things up rather than wait, to agree rather than deny, to pass judgement rather than be just - been bred to become extraordinarily strong. The course of logical thoughts and inferences in our brains today corresponds to a process and battle of drives that taken separately are all very illogical and unjust; we usually experience only the outcome

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of the battle: that is how quickly and covertly this ancient mechanism runs its course in us.

112

Cause and effect. - We call it 'explanation', but 'description' is what distinguishes us from older stages of knowledge and science. We are better at describing - we explain just as little as all our predecessors. We have uncovered a diverse succession where the naive man and investi- gator of older cultures saw only two different things, 'cause' and 'effect', as they said; we have perfected the picture of becoming but haven't got over, got behind the picture. The series of 'causes' faces us much more completely in each case; we reason, 'this and that must precede for that to follow' - but we haven't thereby understood anything. The specifically qualitative aspect for example of every chemical process, still appears to be a 'miracle', as does every locomotion; no one has 'explained' the push. And how could we explain! We are operating only with things that do not exist - with lines, surfaces, bodies, atoms, divisible times, divisible spaces. How is explanation to be at all possible when we first turn everything into a picture - our picture! It is enough to view science as an attempt to humanize things as faithfully as possible; we learn to describe ourselves more and more precisely as we describe things and their succession. Cause and effect: there is probably never such a duality; in truth a continuum faces us, from which we isolate a few pieces, just as we always perceive a movement only as isolated points, i.e. do not really see, but infer. The suddenness with which many effects stand out misleads us; it is a suddenness only for us. There is an infinite number of processes that elude us in this second of suddenness. An intellect that saw cause and effect as a continuum, not, as we do, as arbitrary division and dismemberment - that saw the stream of the event - would reject the concept of cause and effect and deny all determinedness.

113

On the doctrine of poisons. - So much has to come together in order for scientific thought to originate, and all these necessary forces have had to be separately invented, practised, cultivated! In their separateness they

II3

Book Three

and phantasms of your soul. Thus there are innumerable healths of the body; and the more one allows the particular and incomparable to rear its head again, the more one unlearns the dogma of the 'equality of men', the more the concept of a normal health, along with those of a normal diet and normal course of an illness, must be abandoned by our medical men. Only then would it be timely to reflect on the health and illness of the soul and to locate the virtue peculiar to each man in its health - which of course could look in one person like the opposite of health in another. Finally, the great question would still remain whether we can do without illness, even for the development of our virtue; and whether especially our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge do not need the sick soul as much as the healthy; in brief, whether the will to health alone is not a prejudice, a cowardice and a piece of most refined barbarism and backwardness.

121

Life not an argument. - We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we are able to live - by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith no one could endure living! But that does not prove them. Life is not an argument; the conditions of life might include error.

122

Moral scepticism in Christianity. - Christianity, too, has made a great contribution to enlightenment: it taught moral scepticism in an extre- mely trenchant and effective way - accusing, embittering, but with untiring patience and refinement; it annihilated in every single man the faith in his 'virtues'. It caused those great virtuous men, of whom there was no dearth in antiquity, to disappear forever from the face of the earth - those popular men who with a faith in their own perfection went about with the dignity of a toreador. When we now, educated in this Christian school of scepticism, read the moral books of antiquity, e.g. those of Seneca or Epictetus,4 we feel an amusing superiority and are full of secret insights and overviews, as if a child were speaking before

4 Two stoic philosophers: Seneca (first century AD) was a wealthy member of the Roman ruling class. Epictetus (late first/early second century) was a freed Greek slave.

117