...Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger.
Preparatory human beings.- I welcome all signs that a more virile, warlike; age is about to begin, which will restore honor to courage above all. For this age shall prepare the way for one yet higher, and it shall gather the strength that this higher age will require some day-the age that will carry heroism into the search for knowledge and that will wage wars for the sake of ideas and their consequences. To this end we now need many preparatory courageous human beings who cannot very well leap out of nothing, any more than out of the sand and slime of present-day civilization and metropolitanism-human beings who know how to be silent, lonely, resolute, and content and constant in invisible activities; human beings who are bent on seeking in all things for what in them must be overcome; human beings distinguished as much by cheerfulness, patience, unpre-tentiousness, and contempt for all great vanities as by magna-nimity in victory and forbearance regarding the small vanities of the vanquished; human beings whose judgment concern-ing all victors and the share of chance in every victory and fame is sharp and free; human beings with their own festivals, their own working days, and their own periods of mourning, accustomed to command with assurance but instantly ready to obey when that is called for-equally proud, equally serving their own cause in both cases; more endangered human beings, more fruitful human beings, happier beings! For believe me:
the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is - to live dangerously. Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into un-charted seas. Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer. At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due; it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!
The attraction of everything problematic, the delight in an x, however, is so great in such more spiritual, more spiritualized men that this delight flares up again and again like a bright blaze over all the distress of what is problematic, over all the danger of uncertainty, and even over the jealousy of the lover. We know a new happiness.
Work and boredom.- Looking for work in order to be paid:
in civilized countries today almost all men are at one in doing that. For all of them work is a means and not an end in itself. Hence they are not very refined in their choice of work, if only it pays well. But there are, if only rarely, men who would rather perish than work without any pleasure in their work. They are choosy, hard to satisfy, and do not care for ample rewards, if the work itself is not the reward of rewards. Artists and con-templative men of all kinds belong to this rare breed, but so do even those men of leisure who spend their lives hunting, traveling, or in love affairs and adventures. All of these desire work and misery if only it is associated with pleasure, and the hardest, most difficult work if necessary. Otherwise, their idle-ness is resolute, even if it spells impoverishment, dishonor, and danger to life and limb. They do not fear boredom as much as work without pleasure; they actually require a lot of boredom if their work is to succeed. For thinkers and all sensitive spirits, boredom is that disagreeable "windless calm" of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds. They have to bear it and must wait for its effect on them. Precisely this is what lesser natures cannot achieve by any means. To ward off bore-dom at any cost is vulgar, no less than work without pleasure. Perhaps Asians are distinguished above Europeans by a capacity for longer, deeper calm; even their opiates have a slow effect and require patience, as opposed to the disgusting suddenness of the European poison, alcohol.
We artists.- When we love a woman, we easily conceive a hatred for nature on account of all the repulsive natural func-tions to which every woman is subject. We prefer not to think of all this; but when our soul touches on these matters for once, it shrugs as it were and looks contemptuously at nature: we feel insulted; nature seems to encroach on our possessions, and with the profanest hands at that. Then we refuse to pay any heed to physiology and decree secretly: "I want to hear noth-ing about the fact that a human being is something more than soy and form." "The human being under the skin" is for all lovers a horror and unthinkable, a blasphemy against God and love.
Well, as lovers still feel about nature and natural functions, every worshiper of God and his "holy omnipotence" formerly felt; everything said about nature by astronomers, geologists, physiologists, or physicians, struck him as an encroachment into his precious possessions and hence as an attack-and a shame-less one at that. Even "natural law" sounded to him like a slander against God; really he would have much preferred to see all of mechanics derived from acts of a moral will or an arbitrary will. But since nobody was able to render him this service, he ignored nature and mechanics as best he could and lived in a dream. Oh, these men of former times knew how to dream and did not find it necessary to go to sleep first. And we men of today still master this art all too well, despite all of our good will toward the day and staying awake. It is quite enough to love, to hate, to desire, simply to feel-and right away the spirit and power of the dream overcome us, and with our eyes open, coldly contemptuous of all danger, we climb up on the most hazardous paths to scale the roofs and spires of fantasy-without any sense of dizziness, as if we had been born to climb, we somnambulists of the day! We artists! We ignore what is natural. We are moonstruck and God-struck. We wander, still as death, unwearied, on heights that we do not see as heights but as plains, as our safety.2
The greatest danger.- If the majority of men had not always considered the discipline of their minds-their "rationality"-a matter of pride, an obligation, and a virtue, feeling insulted or embarrassed by all fantasies and debaucheries of thought because they saw themselves as friends of "healthy common sense," humanity would have perished long ago. The greatest danger that always hovered over humanity and still hovers over it is the eruption of madness-which means the eruption of arbitrariness in feeling, seeing, and hearing, the enjoyment of the mind's lack of discipline, the joy in human unreason." Not truth and certainty are the opposite of the world of the madman, but the universality and the universal binding force of a faith; in sum, the non-arbitrary character of judgments. And man's greatest labor so far has been to reach agreement about very many things and to submit to a law of agreement-regardless of whether these things are true or false. This is the discipline of the mind that mankind has received; but the con-trary impulses are still so powerful that at bottom we cannot speak of the future of mankind with much confidence. The image of things still shifts and shuffles continually, and perhaps even more so and faster from now on than ever before. Con-tinually, precisely the most select spirits bristle at this universal binding force-the explorers of truth above all. Continually this faith, as everybody's faith, arouses nausea and a new lust in subtler minds; and the slow tempo that is here demanded for all spiritual processes, this imitation of the tortoise, which is here recognized as the norm, would be quite enough to turn artists and thinkers into apostates:14 It is in these impatient spirits that a veritable delight in madness erupts because mad-ness has such a cheerful tempo. Thus the virtuous intellects are needed - oh, let me use the most unambiguous word - what is needed is virtuous stupidity, stolid metronomes for the slow spirit, to make sure that the faithful of the great shared faith stay together and continue their dance. It is a first-rate need that commands and demands this. We others are the exception and the danger-and we need eternally to be defended. -Well, there actually are things to be said in favor of the exception, provided that it never wants to become the rule115
Different types of dangerous lives.- You have no idea what you are living through; you rush through life as if you were drunk and now and then fall down some staircase. But thanks to your drunkenness you never break a limb;, your muscles are too relaxed and your brain too benighted for you to find the stones of these stairs as hard as we do. For us life is more dangerous: we are made of glass; woe unto us if we merely bump ourselves! And all is lost if we fall
The danger of the happiest.- To have refined senses, includ-ing the sense of taste; to be accustomed to the most exquisite things of the spirit as if they were simply the right and most convenient nourishment; to enjoy a strong, bold, audacious soul; to go through life with a calm eye and firm step, always prepared to risk all-festively, impelled by the longing for undiscovered worlds and seas, people and gods; to harken to all cheerful music as if it were a sign that bold men, soldiers, seafarers were probably seeking their brief rest and pleasure there-and in the most profound enjoyment of the moment, to be overcome by tears and the whole crimson melancholy of the happy: who would not wish that all this might be his posses-sion, his state! This was the happiness of Homer! The state of him that gave the Greeks their gods-no, who invented his own gods for himself! But we should not overlook this: With this Homeric happiness in one's soul one is also more capable of suffering than any other creature under the sun. This is the only price for which one can buy the most precious shell that the waves of existence have ever yet washed on the shore. As its owner one becomes ever more refined in pain and ultimately too refined; any small dejection and nausea was quite enough in the end to spoil life for Homer. He had been unable to guess a foolish little riddle posed to him by some fishermen.26 Yes, little riddles are the danger that confronts those who are happiest.-
In media vita.49— No, life has not disappointed me. On the contrary, I find it truer,50 more desirable and mysterious every year—ever since the day when the great liberator came to me: the idea that life could be an experiment of the seeker for knowledge—and not a duty, not a calamity, not trickery. —And knowledge itself: let it be something else for others; for example, a bed to rest on, or the way to such a bed, or a diversion, or a form of leisure—for me it is a world of dangers and victories in which heroic feelings, too, find places to dance and play. "Life as a means to knowledge"—with this principle in one's heart one can live not only boldly but even gaily, and laugh gaily, too. And who knows how to laugh anyway and live well if he does not first know a good deal about war and victory?
And now, after we have long been on our way in this manner, we argonauts of the ideal, with more daring perhaps than is j prudent, and have suffered shipwreck and damage often enough, but are, to repeat it, healthier than one likes to permit us, i dangerously healthy, ever again healthy—it will seem to us as if, as a reward, we now confronted an as yet undiscovered country whose boundaries nobody has surveyed yet, something beyond all the lands and nooks of the ideal so far, a world so | overrich in what is beautiful, strange, questionable, terrible, and divine that our curiosity as well as our craving to possess it has got beside itself—alas, now nothing will sate us any more!
After such vistas and with such a burning hunger in our conscience and science,157 how could we still be satisfied with present-day man? It may be too bad but it is inevitable that we find it difficult to remain serious when we look at his worthiest goals and hopes, and perhaps we do not even bother to look any more.
Another ideal runs ahead of us, a strange, tempting, dangerous ideal to which we should not wish to persuade anybody because we do not readily concede the right to it to anyone: the ideal of a spirit who plays naively—that is, not deliberately but from overflowing power and abundance—with all that was hitherto called holy, good, untouchable, divine; for whom those supreme things that the people naturally accept as their value standards, signify danger, decay, debasement, or at least recreation, blindness, and temporary self-oblivion; the ideal of a human, superhuman well-being and benevolence158 that will often appear inhuman—for example, when it confronts all earthly seriousness so far, all solemnity in gesture, word, tone, eye, morality, and task so far, as if it were their most incarnate and involuntary parody—and in spite of all of this, it is perhaps only with him that great seriousness really begins, that the real question mark is posed for the first time, that the destiny of the soul changes, the hand moves forward, the tragedy begins.
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