{"collection":"philosophy-ethics","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/wikisource_Nietzsche_the_thinker_Chapter_XIII/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/wikisource_Nietzsche_the_thinker_Chapter_XIII","id":"wikisource_Nietzsche_the_thinker_Chapter_XIII","license":"Public Domain / CC-BY-SA (see source)","rights_basis":"wikisource_site_inclusion_policy","source":"wikisource","source_url":"https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Nietzsche_the_thinker/Chapter_XIII","summary":null,"tags":["Subpages"],"text":"THIRD PERIOD\n\nCHAPTER XIII\n\nGENERAL CHARACTER OF THE PERIOD, AND VIEW OF THE WORLD\n\nI\n\nIn the spring of 1879 Nietzsche resigned his professorship at Basel. Already\u2014some three years earlier\u2014he had been obliged to give up his work at the P\u00e4dagogium there. There were intervals of exuberant animal spirits, but as a whole his life appears to have been one of suffering. He was not teaching to his satisfaction\u2014he confesses this in his letter of resignation. Moreover, the thought came over him at times that his strength, supposing that he could turn it to account, lay in writing rather than in teaching\u2014in any case that he was coming to have views of his own and that he ought to be developing them. Questions of this sort had disturbed his academic serenity before. Twice\u2014in 1874 and even as early as 1870\u2014he had been tempted to renounce his university work: his free time was too little, and he could not say his best \"to the boys.\" But now a grave illness precipitated matters, and he definitively put an end to his teaching career. The University granted him a pension of 3,000 francs a year, and with this and a little income of his own (the whole amounting to around $1,000.00) he began that entirely private life as a thinker which ended with his apoplectic stroke ten years later. The intervening years were spent mostly in the south of Europe\u2014as stated in the opening chapter. It was a lonely existence for the most part; he sorely missed the presence and sympathy of friends. Indeed, he had already lost many of his early friends, so unusual was the course his thinking had taken. He found refuge with books and with solitary nature\u2014and, I might add, with people in the humbler walks of life; his sister remarks that in Genoa during the winter of 1880 and 1881 he perhaps first came to know the common people, finding much that was lovable in them, and they showing a kind of affectionate reverence for him. Something in his manner of life at this time is hinted at in a private memorandum. His ideal, he says, is \"an independence that does not offend the eye, a softened and veiled pride, one that equalizes things with others (sich abzahlt an die Anderen) by not competing for their honors and enjoyments, and not minding ridicule. This shall ennoble my habits of life: to be never common and always courteous, not to be covetous, but to strive quietly and keep in the upper air; to be frugal, even niggardly toward myself, but unexacting (milde) toward others. Light sleep, a free quiet step, no alcohol, no princes or other notabilities, no women or newspapers, no honors, no intercourse except with the highest spirits and now and then with the common people\u2014this is as indispensable as the sight of vigorous and healthy vegetation\u2014foods easiest had, which do not take one into the press of greedy and smacking crowds, if possible self-prepared foods, or those not needing preparation.\"a\n\nAt least six or seven of these years belong to the third period of Nietzsche's life\u2014though fixing a date for its beginning is a more or less arbitrary thing. Some scholars put Dawn of Day (1881) and Joyful Science (1882) into it, others class these works with those of the second period, while still others\u2014and with probably the greatest show of reason\u2014think that they mark the transition from one period to the other. The fact is that there is no break, no catastrophic change, such as occurred in 1876. All we can truthfully say is that gradually the tone becomes more positive, that, while criticism continues or is even sharper than ever, constructive thinking appears more and more, and an approach to a comprehensive world-view.\n\nThe books unquestionably belonging to this period include the two which are the best known, or rather most quoted, of all of Nietzsche works, Thus spake Zarathustra (1883-5) and Beyond Good and Evil (1885-6); also Towards the Genealogy of Morals (1887), Twilight of the Idols (1888), The Antichristian (1888) \"The Case of Wagner\" and \"Nietzsche contra Wagner\" (both 1888, and little more than pamphlets). Besides these, are the autobiographical notes (not originally meant for publication) entitled Ecce Homo, and voluminous material for a contemplated and never achieved systematic work, Will to Power\u2014material which has been more or less successfully put together by later hands and now appears under that title (second and much improved edition, 1906). There are also three posthumous volumes of private notes and unfinished sketches.\n\n\u00a0\n\nII\n\nThe most general mark of the period is confidence\u2014one might say, joy: the book which may be taken as a herald of it is entitled Joyful Science (Die fr\u00f6hliche Wissenschaft). Nietzsche is now quite emerging from the gloom and depression that had ensued on the overthrow of his first ideals. He had momentarily lost his goal; he is now sure of one. He needed a cure from his early romanticism, he had had too much sweet, too rich a diet; but he has got it\u2014and is well again (in soul, at least). Chastened, disciplined, he feels once more ready for battle. As our fathers, he says, brought sacrifices of wealth and blood, rank and country to Christianity, so will we sacrifice, not for our doubts or unbelief, but for our faith.\n\nNietzsche once said, in referring to Human, All-too-Human, \"It is necessary to take up this whole positivism into myself, and none the less be a bearer of idealism.\" By positivism he means positive knowledge, i.e., the attitude which insists on actual facts, as distinguished from fancies and speculations. We have seen something of his passion for verity in the previous period, his wish to face facts, however bare, comfortless, or empty of higher significance they might be; and we are not to imagine that he ever becomes an uncritical idealist again\u2014he has no lapses such as are common among those who become tired of doubt; in Dawn of Day, with his face setting in the new direction, he speaks of \"idealizing\" as reprovingly as ever he had when his positivistic attitude was at its height. And yet this attitude takes now a secondary place, for he feels that it is not equal to the whole of life. Philosophy is to his mind something more than science, or even criticism and critical science, counter as this view was to the prevailing opinion in his day. He advances a variety of considerations at different times and in different connections\u2014I state them here in my own order. In the first place, certain knowledge is not always to be had, and in action we have often to go on chances and possibilities\u2014indeed there is a certain weakness in always wanting to know, in not being ready for risks. Secondly, facts of themselves are miscellaneous, scattering\u2014it is really a bric-\u00e0-brac of conceptions that so-called positivism is bringing to market today; they need to be interpreted, related, put in order. The special sciences cannot make themselves independent of philosophy, which is a general view from a height above them, involving an \"Ueberblick, Umblick, Niederblick.\" Philosophers have usually been against their time, and now there is a duty incumbent on them to oppose the tendency to put every one into a corner and speciality. \"What I wish is that the genuine concept of the philosopher shall not entirely perish in Germany.\" b Nietzsche even goes to the length of questioning whether there are any bare facts separable from interpretation of some kind, whether it is possible, as some propose, to stand by the facts simply and not go beyond them\u2014he does not think much of the idea of putting philosophy \"upon a strictly scientific basis.\"\n\nMoreover, facts have to be valued as well as ascertained\u2014and it appears to be his opinion that the ultimate canon for interpreting, relating, and ordering is derived from the valuing process. The valuing attitude is sharply contrasted with the \"scientific\" one. It is not a mere mirroring of the facts, and Nietzsche draws a satirical picture of the \"objective\" man who mirrors everything and is nothing\u2014presque rien. It involves choosing, preferring, judging of facts\u2014that is, a standard which is independent of them and is projected by the mind. Zarathustra accordingly is represented as having left the house of scholars who only want to observe; the present age seems to him one of polyglot knowledge, not one of belief and creative capacity. This prostrating oneself before facts, without standards by which to judge of them, has become a sort of cultus\u2014Nietzsche admits that Taine is an example of it. The only explanation of it is that men have been long happy in the unreal and are now surfeited with it. Positivism is a rebound against Romanticism, the work of undeceived romanticists. But to love the real, irrespective of its quality and character, is to be tasteless. Zarathustra does not like those to whom each and every thing is good and this world the best world\u2014he honors rather refractory, fastidious tongues and stomachs that have learned to say \"I,\" and \"Yes\" and \"No.\" The trouble with our science today is its ideallessness, its lack of a great love. For it is man's task to set himself an end, and thereby a standard of value\u2014above all is this the task of man at his highest, of the philosopher. The sciences are preliminary and preparatory to this supreme functioning\u2014the solving the problem of value, the determining the order of precedence in values. Genuine philosophers say, \"So should things be\"\u2014they are commanders and legislators; they determine the Whither? and For what? of man, laying creative hands on the future, and turning all that is or was into means and instrument. Nietzsche puts it boldly, \"Their 'knowing' is creating, their creating is a legislating, their will to truth is\u2014will to power.\" c That is (stating the matter in my own language), we human beings can observe, but we can also strive for that which is past all observing, since it is the projection of our minds and imagination, and belongs as yet among the viewless and, strictly speaking, non-existent things of the world. We can look at existence, whether ourselves or reality outside us, as so much matter, \u1f54\u03bb\u03b7, on which we are to impress a higher form. Science at its best is necessarily fragmentary\u2014and equally so is history; if we limit ourselves to their report of things, we leave out the whole area of possibility. To quote Nietzsche's own words: \"Man is something fluid and plastic\u2014we can make out of him what we will.\" Again, \"In man is creature and creator in one: there is matter, fragment, superfluity, clay, excrement, unreason, chaos\u2014but also creator, former, the hardness of the hammer, the contemplativeness of a God, and the glory of the seventh day.\" Instead of Schopenhauer's doctrine of redemption from existence, Zarathustra (Nietzsche) gives us a doctrine of the re-creation of existence. Every fragmentary \"it was\" is to be changed into a \"so I would have it\": the doctrine rests on a belief in the changeability of the world and in the power of men to make change.\n\nAccordingly we feel\u2014not always, but as a rule\u2014an atmosphere of great faith in this last period. We know our powers, he says, not our power\u2014we should regard ourselves as a variable quantity whose capacity of performance might be of the highest under favorable circumstances. \"Raphael without hands,\" i.e., genius without the happy conditions that lend it power to execute,\u2014may it not be the rule rather than the exception? The world\u2014particularly the human world\u2014is a bottomless rich sea. Things which have been long weak and embryonic may at last come to light; unconscious possibilities in fathers may stand revealed in their children or children's children\u2014we all have hidden gardens and plantations within us, or, to use another metaphor, are volcanoes which may some day have an hour of eruption; even in the souls of Germans, \"these poor bears,\" lurk \"hidden nymphs and wood-gods\" and \"still higher divinities.\" Nietzsche is as far as ever from deriving our higher powers or qualities (after the manner of Kant or Schopenhauer) from a metaphysical source; but they are real all the same\u2014he once speaks of the hero who is hidden in every man, and he can imagine transgressors giving themselves up to justice. Though our unrealized possibilities are a chaos rather than a cosmos, a kind of milky way or labyrinth, his faith is plainly that order, suns and stars, may come out of them. If man is sicklier and more uncertain than any other animal, it is just because he makes so many changes\u2014because of the undefined range of his possibilities. He the great experimenter with himself, the unsatisfied, who enters the lists for the last supremacy with animals, nature, and Gods; he the still unconquered, the eternally expectant, whose own inner force urges him on and gives him no rest\u2014how could he not be liable to maladies such as nothing else in nature knows? We know what is or was, not what may be or might have been. Nietzsche touches on Plato's reforming thoughts and attempts to carry them into effect in Sicily\u2014he thinks it conceivable that he should have succeeded, even as the legislation of Mohammed went into effect among his Arabs, and the still stranger thoughts of Christianity prevailed in another quarter: a few accidents less and a few accidents more, and there might have been a Platonizing of Southern Europe\u2014though as things turned out, Plato has come to be known as a fantast and utopian (harder names perhaps having been used in ancient Athens).\n\nNaturally along with the larger outlook is a fresh appreciation of poetry. He thinks that poets might do more than paint an Arcady, nor should it be necessary for them to employ their imagination in falsifying reality; it is their high mission to open to us the realm of the possible. Starting with suggestions from the course of evolution in the past, they might with bold fantasy anticipate what will or may be\u2014picture virtues such as have never been on earth, and higher races of men. \"All our poetry is so restricted, earthly (kleinb\u00fcrgerlich-erdenhaft).\" He waits for seers who will tell us of the possible, astronomers of the ideal who will reveal to us purple-glowing constellations and whole milky ways of the beautiful. First after the death of religion [in the old sense] can invention in the realm of the Divine again luxuriate\u2014and perhaps just because we can no longer flee to God, the sea within ourselves may rise higher. He knows the charm, too, of poets who but imperfectly express the vision of their souls, who give us foretastes of the vision rather than the vision itself: it is the charm of suggestiveness\u2014a very different charm and a much wholesomer one than that upon which George Eliot dilates in \"A Minor Prophet,\" where imperfection becomes almost dear for its own sake.\n\nTo sum up: if science, knowledge of the actual whatever becomes of ideals, may be taken as the characteristic note of the second period, science and the ideal are the note of the third. Close observation of reality and an unblanched face before it continue, but there is a fresh sense that the actual is only a part of the totality of things. Science is simply a negative test\u2014we must not have ideals which are inconsistent with it. Accordingly Nietzsche is happy again\u2014but with an ennobled, purified happiness. Frau Andreas-Salom\u00e9 thinks that the land of his future expectations was not really a new one, but the old one from which he originally set out\u2014and in a deep sense this is true; but she admits that the products of the new period were more or less shaped by the experiences of the intervening years. \"Certain great perspectives of the spiritual and moral horizon are my strongest springs of life,\" he wrote her, after referring to the fearful existence of renunciation he had been obliged to lead. \"I also have morning-dawns \u2026 what I no longer believed \u2026appears now possible\u2014as the golden morning dawn on the horizon of all my future life.\"\n\n\u00a0\n\nIII\n\nThough the general outlines of the world are much the same to Nietzsche as in the preceding period, conceptions of possibility and change and man's power play, as just intimated, an ever larger part. One might almost say that he becomes optimist. He had earlier said, \"Away with the wearisomely hackneyed terms, optimism and pessimism!\" He maintained that they stood for theological contentions, and that no one cared any longer for the theologians\u2014except the theologians themselves. Good and bad have only human references\u2014the world itself is neither good nor bad (not to say best and worst), and we should stop both glorifying it and reviling it in this way. But favorable or unfavorable judgments of the world may be based on other grounds, and he inclines more and more to a favorable judgment. The world comes to seem good to him just as it is, without any intrinsic order, or inherent purpose, or moral governance\u2014good, that is, as a place one is willing and glad to live in. Indeed, he approximates to religious feeling about it\u2014at least he uses religious language. His mouthpiece, Zarathustra, says, \"To blaspheme against the earth is now the most dreadful thing.\" Even change and accident are regarded with a semireligious veneration. All becoming is to Zarathustra a \"dance of Gods,\" a \"wantonness of Gods.\" The earth is likened to a dice-table\u2014one which Gods have spread out, and on which they play with men; it trembles from the throws they make and their creative new words. We hear of the \"heaven of accident\" standing over all things\u2014and to teach that accident has so high and ruling a place in the world is not to revile, but to bless. In The Antichristian, after saying that indignation at the general aspect of things is, along with pessimism, the privilege of the Tschandala [the lowest class of men], Nietzsche uses this remarkable language: \"The world is perfect\u2014so speaks the instinct of the most spiritual men, the affirmative instinct\u2014imperfection, what lies beneath us of every kind, distance, the pathos of distance, the Tschandala himself belongs to this perfection.\"\n\nThis does not mean that Nietzsche has altered in the slightest his estimate of things from a moral standpoint\u2014that he is not still pessimist, as most would understand that term. \"We are seethed,\" he says, \"in the view, and have become cold and hard in it, that things do not go on at all divinely in the world, or even according to human measure rationally, mercifully, or justly; we know it, the world in which we live, is undivine, unmoral, 'unhuman'\"\u2014that it is not valuable in the way we have believed is the surest result we have. Injury, violence, stealing, killing inhere in all life. He honors Schopenhauer (in contrast with men like Schiller, W. von Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Schelling) for seeing the world as it is, and the deviltry of it. He feels himself an heir of the veracity and old-fashioned piety of Luther, who recognized that reason could not of itself make out a just and merciful government of the world, and of Kant, who saw that morality could not be based on nature and history, since immorality ruled there; d both, that is, had to put the Divine outside the world (a logic which our new \"immanent\" theologians might well ponder over). But, he in effect argues, because we are pessimists in this sense, because the world has not the particular value commonly ascribed to it, it does not follow that it is less valuable\u2014it may be more so. For what are the standards of value which are commonly set up? what is it that is deified? Goodness, justice, love. But what are goodness, justice, love but qualities by the help of which men get along together in societies, necessary rules for their association in flocks? What are we doing then but taking certain utilities of flock-life and making a God of them, an absolute standard by which the world is judged, so that it is good if it conforms to them and bad if it does not. It seems a presumptuous thing to Nietzsche, an extravagant aberration of human vanity and unreason\u2014indeed he finds something laughable in man's proposing to invent values that are to exceed the value of the actual world.\n\nHow the world is still valuable in his eyes after the downfall of moralistic faith, we have already seen in part and shall see more clearly later on. I may only say in general now that it is the possible outcome of existence, which justifies existence to his mind\u2014the type or types of life that may emerge. It is not that pleasure may preponderate over pain\u2014to considerations of pleasure and pain he gives a quite secondary place. Every sound individual, he thinks, refuses to judge life by these incidents. Pain might preponderate, and there be none the less a mighty will to life, a saying yes to it, a feeling even of the necessity of this preponderance. A measure of the will's power is its capacity to endure opposition, pain, and torture, and to turn them to advantage. With this in mind, he says, \"I do not reckon the evil and painful character of existence an objection to it, but hope that it will sometime be more evil and more painful than heretofore.\" He despises the \"pessimism of sensibility\" and calls it \"a sign of deep impoverishment of life\"; more than once he quotes Voltaire's lines,\n\n\"Un monstre gai vaut mieux\n\nQu'un sentimental ennuyeux.\"\n\nHe thus departs widely from Spencerian and all hedonistic measurements of the worth of life. When we come into the region and atmosphere of his thoughts, it is like passing into a new zone and climate. If we still call his view pessimism, we must admit that it is, to use his own phrase, \"Dionysiac pessimism,\" one that affirms life despite or even because of suffering and change and death, and so practically as good as optimism\u2014one might say better than the soft sweet thing which often goes by that name. He speaks of Dionysiac pessimism as his proprium and ipsissimum. e If nature, in her ceaseless flow of change and accident, gives a chance for greatness, it is to him enough.\n\n\u00a0\n\nIV\n\nSome details in his picture of the world may now be given, though they are not absolutely new. (1) Let us guard, he says, against conceiving of the world as a living or organic thing. Toward what should it develope? From what should it be nourished? How could it grow and increase? Living organic things are simply phenomena in it\u2014and late and rare phenomena. (2) Nor should we regard it as a machine\u2014a machine is something constructed for an end, and the world has no marks of being constructed in this way; we really do it too much honor in speaking of it as a machine. (3) We should guard against assuming that the regular cyclic movements of our and neighboring planets are everywhere\u2014there may be much ruder and more contradictory movements, our astral order being an exception, and chaos marking the world as a whole (chaos in the sense of an absence, not of necessity, but of order, organization, form, beauty). (4) There is no occasion for blaming or praising the world. We should avoid ascribing to it heartlessness and unreason or the opposite. It is neither perfect nor beautiful, nor noble, and has no wish to be\u2014it does not at all strive to imitate man and none of our \u00e6sthetic or moral judgments hit it. It has not even an impulse of self-preservation, or impulses of any kind. (5) It also knows no laws. Let us be on our guard against saying that there are laws in nature\u2014there are only necessities: there is no one who commands, no one who obeys, no one who transgresses. Moreover, since there are no ends in nature, there is strictly speaking no accident; only in a world of ends has the word \"accident\" a meaning. (6) Let us be on our guard against making death the antithesis of life\u2014the living is only a species of the dead, and a rare species. (7) Let us be on our guard against thinking that the world eternally creates new things (it is really a finite quantity, and sooner or later reaches the limits of its power). Moreover, it is important to stop speaking of the All as if it were a unity, a force, an absolute of some kind\u2014we easily come in this way to take it as a highest instance and to christen it \"God.\" We must split up the All, unlearn any particular respect for it, bring back feelings we have given to the unknown and the whole, and devote them to things next us, our own things. The All raises ever the old problems, \"How is evil possible?\" and so on. To speak bluntly, there is no All, the great sensorium or inventorium or storehouse of power is lacking. Nietzsche is thus altogether a pluralist. Such unities as we find are, to him, derived and created things, and lie in a larger sea of the chaotic. This is true not only of the world at large, but of an individual soul. Those thinkers in whom all the stars move in cyclic paths are not the deepest; he who looks into the vast space within himself and is aware of the milky ways there, knows also how irregular all milky ways are\u2014they lead into the chaos and labyrinth of existence. Nietzsche is accordingly distrustful of systematizers, and he conjectures their descent from registrars and office-secretaries, whose business it was to label things and put them in their pigeonholes. \"He is a thinker: that means that he understands how to take things more simply than they are.\" Particularly now, when science is just beginning its work, does system-building seem to him childishness. \"I am not narrow enough for a system\u2014and not even for my system.\" f\n\nBut though Nietzsche regards the world as a more or less chaotic, irregular thing, he avoids, as already stated, thinking of it as infinite, whether in extent or power\u2014such a view seems to him an unwarranted extravagance. Though immense and practically immeasurable, it is none the less a definite quantity, something capable neither of increase nor of diminution, surrounded by nothing, for there is nothing outside of it, terms of this sort being applicable only to relations within it and empty space being but a name. In no way does he more radically depart from modern, romantic, Christian notions and return to old Greek habits of thought, than in this view of a finite rather than infinite world. As Zarathustra sees it in a dream, the world is something measurable, weighable, compassable, divinable\u2014not, indeed, simple enough to put men's minds to sleep, and yet not enigmatic enough to scare away human love, a kind of humanly good thing, like a perfect apple, or a broad-boughed tree, or a treasure-box open for the delight of modest revering eyes. It is, indeed, of such measured scope that the things which once happened in it are likely, or even bound in the course of time, to happen again\u2014there cannot be ever new things. Sometime the possibilities of change will be exhausted, and then the new things will be old things over again. This becomes a special doctrine which we shall consider in the next chapter. Suffice it now to say that by this recurrence, and, supposing that time goes on forever, ever renewed recurrence of the past, a semblance of succession or order arises in the world, despite its chance nature\u2014or rather just because of this, for the recurrence is entirely a matter of accident and necessity, not the result of any design or ordering will.\n\nNietzsche's attitude to chaos and accident is a double one. Because of what may come out of it, and partly because it represents the actual conditions of existence which a brave man will accept anyway, he speaks at times of \"beautiful chaos,\" \"dear accident.\" In this mood amor fati is his motto. He writes on the opening of a new year, \"I will ever more learn to recognize the necessary in things as the beautiful,\u2014so shall I be one of those who make things beautiful: let this be from now on my love!\" Zarathustra calls (by a play on words which it is impossible to give the effect of in English) \"von Ohngef\u00e4hr,\" literally \"by chance,\" the oldest nobility in the world, and says that the heaven above him is so pure and high, just because there is no spider or spider-web of reason there, because it is a dancing-ground for divine accidents, a divine table for divine dice and dice-players. And yet we are not to infer that Nietzsche reveres chance or accident for itself, and sometimes we find him describing it as a giant to be fought. So far as man is concerned, it is at best an opportunity, a situation from which something may be wrested. He speaks of compelling accidents to dance in measure like the stars. He instances the way in which a master of musical improvising will, if he strikes an accidental note, turn it to account\u2014fitting it into the thematic framework and giving it a beautiful meaning and soul. He represents Zarathustra as superior to chance: the prophet uses it, boils it in his pot\u2014indeed, only in this way does it become his eatable meat. g Nietzsche is perfectly aware that those who do not know how to use chance, may find in it their undoing.","title":"Nietzsche the thinker/Chapter XIII","tradition":"philosophy-ethics","translated_text":null,"word_count":4966}