LITMIR.BIZ

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an ape’s body, a refined and exceptional understanding in a common soul—among doctors and moral physiologists, for example, that’s not an uncommon occurrence. And where anyone speaks without bitterness and quite harmlessly of men as a belly with two different needs and a head with one, everywhere someone constantly sees, looks for, and wants to see only hunger, sexual desires, and vanity, as if these were the real and only motivating forces in human actions, in short, wherever people speak “badly” of human beings—not even in a nasty way—there the lover of knowledge should pay fine and diligent attention; he should, in general, direct his ears to wherever people talk without indignation. For the indignant man and whoever is always using his own teeth to tear himself apart or lacerate himself (or, as a substitute for that, the world, or God, or society) may indeed, speaking morally, stand higher than the laughing and self-satisfied satyr, but in every other sense he is the more ordinary, the more trivial, the more uninstructive case. And no one lies as much as the indignant man.

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      It is difficult to be understood, particularly when one thinks and lives gangastrotogati [like the flow of the river Ganges], among nothing but people who think and live differently, namely kurmagati [like the movements of a tortoise] or, in the best cases “following the gait of frogs” mandeikagati—I’m simply doing everything to make myself difficult to be understood?—and people should appreciate from their hearts the good will in some subtlety of interpretation. But so far as “good friends” are concerned, those who are always too comfortable and believe they have a particular right as friends to a life of comfort, one does well to start by giving them a recreation room and playground of misunderstanding:— so one has to laugh—or else to get rid of them altogether, these good friends—and also to laugh!

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      The most difficult thing about translating from one language into another is the tempo of its style, which is rooted in the character of the race—physiologically speaking, in the average tempo of its “metabolism.” There are honestly intended translations which, as involuntarily coarse versions of the original, are almost misrepresentations, simply because its brave and cheerful tempo, which springs over and neutralizes everything dangerous in things and words, cannot be translated. A German is almost incapable of presto [quick tempo] in his language and thus, as you can reasonably infer, is also incapable of many of the most delightful and most daring nuances of free and free-spirited thinking. Just as the buffoon and satyr are foreign to him, in body and conscience, so Aristophanes and Petronius are untranslatable for him. Everything solemn, slow moving, ceremonially massive, all lengthy and boring varieties in style are developed among the Germans in a lavish diversity. You must forgive me for the fact that even Goethe’s prose, with its mixture of stiffness and daintiness, is no exception, as a mirror image of the “good old time” to which it belongs, and as an expression of German taste in an age when there still was a “German taste,” a rococo taste in moribus et artibus [in customs and the arts].¹⁷ Lessing is an exception, thanks to his play-actor’s nature, which understood a great deal and knew how to do many things. He was not the translator of Bayle for nothing and was happy to take refuge in Diderot’s or Voltaire’s company—and even happier among the Roman writers of comic drama. In tempo, Lessing also loved free-spiritedness, the flight from Germany. But how could the German language—even in the prose of a Lessing—imitate the tempo of Machiavelli, who in his Prince allows one to breathe the fine dry air of Florence and cannot not help presenting the most serious affairs in a boisterous allegrissimo [very quick tempo], perhaps not without a malicious artistic feeling about what a contrast he was risking—long, difficult, hard, dangerous ideas, and a galloping tempo and the very best, most high-spirited of moods.¹⁸ Finally, who could even venture a German translation of Petronius, who was the master of the presto—more so than any great musician so far—in invention, ideas, words. Ultimately what is so important about all the swamps of the sick, nasty world, even “the ancient world,” when someone like him has feet of wind, drive, and breath, the liberating scorn of a wind which makes everything healthy, as he makes everything run! And so far as Aristophanes is concerned, that transfiguring, complementary spirit for whose sake we excuse all Hellenism for having existed, provided that we have understood in all profundity everything that needs to be forgiven and transfigured;—I don’t know what allows me to dream about Plato’s secrecy and sphinx-like nature more than that petit fait [small fact], which fortunately has been preserved, that under the pillow on his death bed people found no “Bible,” nothing Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic—but something by Aristophanes. How could even a Plato have endured life—a Greek life, to which he said no—without an Aristophanes! —

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      It’s the business of very few people to be independent:— that is a right of the strong. And whoever attempts it—even with the best right to it, but without being compelled to—shows by that action that he is probably not only strong but exuberantly daring. He is entering a labyrinth; he is increasing a thousand-fold the dangers which life already brings with it, not the least of which is the fact that no one’s eyes see how and where he goes astray, gets isolated, and is torn to pieces by some cavern-dwelling Minotaur of conscience.¹⁹ Suppose such a person comes to a bad end, that happens so far away from men’s understanding that they feel nothing and have no sympathy:— and he cannot go back any more! He cannot even go back to human pity! —

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      Our loftiest insights must—and should!—ring out like foolishness, under some circumstances like crimes, when in some forbidden way they come to the ears of those for whom they are not suitable and who are not predestined to hear them. The exoteric and the esoteric views, as people earlier differentiated them among philosophers, with Indians as with Greeks, Persians, and Muslims, in short, wherever people believed in a hierarchy and not in equality and equal rights—this differentiation does not arise so much from the fact that the exoteric view stands outside and looks, assesses, measures, and judges from the outside, not from the inside: the more essential point is that the exoteric view sees the matter looking up from underneath, but the esoteric sees it looking down from above! There are heights of the soul viewed from which even tragedy ceases to work its tragic effect, and if we gathered all the sorrow of the world into one sorrow, who could dare to decide if a glance at it would necessarily seduce and compel us to pity and thus to a doubling of that sorrow? . . . What serves the higher kind of men as nourishment or refreshment must be almost poison to a very different and lower kind of man. The virtues of the common man would perhaps amount to vices and weaknesses in a philosopher; it could be possible that a higher kind of person, if he is degenerating and nearing his end, only then acquires characteristics for whose sake people in the lower world, into which he has sunk, would find it necessary to honour him as a saint from now on. There are books which have an opposite value for the soul and for health, depending on whether the lower soul, the lower vitality, or the higher and more powerful soul makes use of them: with the first group, the books are dangerous, shattering, disintegrating; with the second group, they are a herald’s summons which provokes the bravest to show their courage. Books for the whole world always smell foul: the stink of small people clings to them. Where the folk eat and drink, even where they worship, the place usually stinks. One should not go into churches if one wants to breathe clean air.

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      In their young years, people worship and despise still without that art of subtlety which constitutes the greatest gain in life. And it’s reasonable enough that they must atone, with some difficulty, for having bombarded men and things in such a way with Yes and No. Everything is arranged so that the worst of all tastes, the taste for the absolute, will be terribly parodied and misused until people learn to put some art into their feelings and even prefer risking an attempt with artificiality, as the real artists of life do. The anger and reverence typical of the young do not seem to ease up until they have sufficiently distorted men and things so that they can vent themselves on them.—Youth is in itself already something fraudulent and deceptive. Later, when the young soul, tortured by nothing but disappointments, finally turns back against itself suspiciously,

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