The Portable Nietzsche (8 page)

It is somewhat the same with the individual: rarely is degeneration, a crippling, even a vice or any physical or moral damage, unaccompanied by some gain on the other side. The sicker man in a warlike and restless tribe, for example, may have more occasion to be by himself and may thus become calmer and wiser; the one-eyed will have one stronger eye; the blind will see more deeply within, and in any case have a keener sense of hearing. So the famous
struggle for existence
does not seem to me to be the only point of view from which to explain the progress or the strengthening of a human being or a race. Rather, two things must come together: first, the increase of stable power through close spiritual ties such as faith and communal feeling; then, the possibility of reaching higher goals through the appearance of degenerate types and, as a consequence, a partial weakening and wounding of the stable power: it is precisely the weaker natures who, being more delicate and freer, make progress possible.

A people who crumble somewhere and become weak, but remain strong and healthy on the whole, are able to accept the infection of the new and absorb it to their advantage. In the case of the individual the task of education is this: to put him on his path so firmly and surely that, as a whole, he can never again be diverted. Then, however, the educator must wound him, or utilize the wounds destiny inflicts upon him; and when pain and need have thus developed, something new and noble can then be inoculated in the wounded spots. His whole nature will absorb this, and later, in its fruits, show the ennoblement.

Concerning the state, Machiavelli says that “the form of government is of very little importance, although the half-educated think otherwise. The great goal of statesmanship should be
duration
, which outweighs everything else because it is far more valuable than freedom.” Only where the greatest duration is securely established and guaranteed is continual development and ennobling inoculation at all possible. Of course, authority, the dangerous companion of all duration, will usually try to resist this process.

 

[265]

Reason in the schools
. The schools have no more important task than to teach rigorous thinking, cautious judgment, and consistent inference; therefore they should leave alone whatever is not suitable for these operations: religion, for example. After all, they can be sure that later on man's fogginess, habit, and need will slacken the bow of an all-too-taut thinking. But as far as the influence of the schools reaches, they should enforce what is essential and distinctive in man: “reason and science, man's
very highest
power”—so Goethe, at least, judges.

The great scientist von Baer sees the superiority of Europeans over Asiatics in their trained ability to give reasons for what they believe—something of which the latter are wholly incapable. Europe has gone through the school of consistent, critical thinking; Asia still does not know how to distinguish between truth and poetry, and is not conscious of whether its convictions are derived from personal observation and methodical thinking or from fantasies.

Europe was made Europe by reason in the schools; in the Middle Ages Europe was on the way to becoming a piece and an appendix of Asia again—by losing the scientific sense that it owed to the Greeks.

 

[271]

The art of drawing inferences
. The greatest progress men have made lies in their learning how to draw correct inferences. That is by no means something natural, as Schopenhauer assumes when he says: “Of inference, all are capable; of judgment, only a few.” It has been learned only late, and it still has not gained dominance. False inferences are the rule in earlier times; and the mythology of all peoples, their magic and their superstition, their religious cults, their laws, are inexhaustible mines of proof for this proposition.

 

[281]

Higher culture is necessarily misunderstood
. He who has but two strings on his instrument—like the scholars who, in addition to the urge for knowledge, have only the religious urge, instilled by education—does not understand those who can play on more strings. It is of the essence of the higher, multi-stringed culture that it is always misinterpreted by the lower culture—as happens, for example, when art is considered a disguised form of religion. Indeed, people who are only religious understand even science as a search of the religious feeling, just as deaf-mutes do not know what music is, if it is not visible movement.

 

[298]

The most dangerous party member
. In every party there is one member who, by his all-too-devout pronouncement of the party principles, provokes the others to apostasy.

 

[303]

Why one contradicts
. One often contradicts an opinion when it is really only the tone in which it has been presented that is unsympathetic.

 

[361]

The experience of Socrates.
When one has become a master in some field one has usually, for that very reason, remained a complete amateur in most other things; but one judges just the other way around, as Socrates had already found out. This is what makes association with masters disagreeable.
⁸

 

[380]

From the mother
. Everyone carries in himself an image of woman derived from the mother; by this he is determined to revere women generally, or to hold them in low esteem, or to be generally indifferent to them.

 

[390]

Friendship with women
. Women can form a friendship with a man very well; but to preserve it—to that end a slight physical antipathy must probably help.

 

[406]

Marriage as a long conversation
. When marrying, one should ask oneself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this woman into your old age? Everything .else in marriage is transitory, but the most time during the association belongs to conversation.

 

[407]

Girls' dreams.
Inexperienced girls flatter themselves with the notion that it is within their power to make a man happy; later they learn that it means holding a man in low esteem to assume that only a girl is needed to make him happy. The vanity of women demands that a man be more than a happy husband.

 

[408]

Faust and Gretchen dying out
. According to the very good insight of a scholar, the educated men of contemporary Germany resemble a mixture of Mephistopheles and Wagner, but certainly not Faust, whom our grandfathers, at least in their youth, still felt stirring within. Thus there are two reasons—to continue this proposition—why the Gretchens are not suitable for them. And since they are no longer desired, they apparently die out.

 

[424]

Something about the future of marriage
. Those noble free-spirited women who have made the education and elevation of the female sex their task should not overlook one consideration: marriage, according to its highest conception as a friendship between the souls of two human beings of different sex, in other words, as it is hoped for in the future, concluded for the purpose of begetting and educating a new generation—such a marriage, which uses the sensual, as it were, only as a rare means to a greater end, probably requires, I fear, a natural aid:
concubinage.
If, for reasons of the husband's health, the wife should also serve for the sole satisfaction of the sexual need, then the choice of a wife will be decisively influenced by a false consideration that is contrary to the aims suggested; the production of offspring becomes accidental, and a good education highly improbable. A good wife—who is supposed to be friend, helper, bearer of children, mother, head of the family, manager, and who may even have to stand at the head of her own business or office, quite apart from her husband—cannot at the same time be a concubine: generally, this would be asking too much of her. Thus the future might see a contrary development to what occurred in Periclean Athens: the men, who at that time found little more than concubines in their wives, turned to the Aspasias because they desired the attractions of a companionship that would liberate head and heart, as only the grace and spiritual suppleness of women can provide. All human institutions, like marriage, permit only a limited degree of practical idealization; failing that, crude remedies become immediately necessary.

 

[444]

War. Against war one can say: It makes the victor stupid, the vanquished malignant. In favor of war: Through both of these effects it barbarizes and thereby makes more natural; it is a sleep or a winter for culture, and man emerges from it stronger for good and evil.

 

[462]

My utopia.
In a better arrangement of society hard labor and the troubles of life will be meted out to those who suffer least from them; hence, to the most obtuse, and then, step by step, up to those who are most sensitive to the highest and most sublimated kinds of suffering and who thus still suffer when life is made easiest.

 

[465]

Resurrection of the spirit.
On the political sickbed a people is usually rejuvenated and rediscovers its spirit, after having gradually lost it in seeking and preserving power. Culture owes its peaks to politically weak ages.

 

[475]

The European man and the abolition of nations.
Trade and industry, books and letters, the way in which all higher culture is shared, the rapid change of house and scenery, the present nomadic life of everyone who is not a landowner—these circumstances necessarily produce a weakening, and finally the abolition, of nations, at least in Europe; and as a consequence of continual intermarriage there must develop a mixed race, that of the European man. . . . It is not the interest of the many (of peoples), as is often claimed, but above all the interest of certain royal dynasties and also of certain classes in commerce and society, that drives to nationalism. Once one has recognized this, one should declare oneself without embarrassment as a
good European
and work actively for the amalgamation of nations. In this process the Germans could be helpful by virtue of their long proven skill as interpreters and mediators among peoples.

Incidentally, the whole problem of the
Jews
exists only in nation states, for here their energy and higher intelligence, their accumulated capital of spirit and will, gathered from generation to generation through a long schooling in suffering, must become so preponderant as to arouse mass envy and hatred. In almost all contemporary nations, therefore—in direct proportion to the degree to which they act up nationalistically—the literary obscenity is spreading of leading the Jews to slaughter as scapegoats of every conceivable public and internal misfortune. As soon as it is no longer a matter of preserving nations, but of producing the strongest possible European mixed race, the Jew is just as useful and desirable an ingredient as any other national remnant. Unpleasant, even dangerous, qualities can be found in every nation and every individual: it is cruel to demand that the Jew be an exception. In him, these qualities may even be dangerous and revolting to an unusual degree; and perhaps the young stock-exchange Jew is altogether the most disgusting invention of mankind. In spite of that, I should like to know how much one must forgive a people in a total accounting when they have had the most painful history of all peoples, not without the fault of all of us, and when one owes to them the noblest man (Christ), the purest sage (Spinoza), the most powerful book, and the most effective moral law in the world. Moreover, in the darkest times of the Middle Ages, when the Asiatic cloud masses had gathered heavily over Europe, it was Jewish free-thinkers, scholars, and physicians who clung to the banner of enlightenment and spiritual independence in the face of the harshest personal pressures and defended Europe against Asia. We owe it to their exertions, not least of all, that a more natural, more rational, and certainly unmythical explanation of the world was eventually able to triumph again, and that the bond of culture which now links us with the enlightenment of Greco-Roman antiquity remained unbroken. If Christianity has done everything to orientalize the Occident, Judaism has helped significantly to occidentalize it again and again: in a certain sense this means as much as making Europe's task and history a continuation of the Greek.

 

[482]

And to say it once more.
Public opinions—private lazinesses.

 

[483]

Enemies of truth.
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

 

[536]

The value of insipid opponents.
At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.

 

[579]

Not suitable as a party member
. Whoever thinks much is not suitable as a party member: he soon thinks himself right through the party.

 

[635]

On the whole, scientific methods are at least as important as any other result of research: for it is upon the insight into method that the scientific spirit depends: and if these methods were lost, then all the results of science could not prevent a renewed triumph of superstition and nonsense. Clever people may learn as much as they wish of the results of science—still one will always notice in their conversation, and especially in their hypotheses, that they lack the scientific spirit; they do not have that instinctive mistrust of the aberrations of thought which through long training are deeply rooted in the soul of every scientific person. They are content to find any hypothesis at all concerning some matter; then they are all fire and flame for it and think that is enough. To have an opinion means for them to fanaticize for it and thenceforth to press it to their hearts as a conviction. If something is unexplained, they grow hot over the first notion that comes into their heads and looks like an explanation—which results progressively in the worst consequences, especially in the sphere of politics. For that reason everyone should now study at least one science from the bottom up: then he will know what method means and how important is the utmost circumspection. . . .