Beyond Good and Evil
If you're ready for some deep stuff -- get a drink, settle down, and read below. While you wrestle with the ideas and confusing syntax, really think about the character and nature of our Professor Snape ...
The below are excerpts from Friederich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. I supply no comments between excerpts because I feel they speak for themselves.
A Note : I am not a trained philosopher. I have not studied all of Nietzsche's works in depth. I am merely an amateur. I however love his Beyond Good and Evil, mainly for its main point -- that there is something beyond the arbitrary divisions of Good and Evil -- the nature of the human self cannot be divided so easily.
29.
Very few people are capable of being independent; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever tries it, however justified, without having to, proves that he is probably not only strong but bold to the point of recklessness. For he walks into a labyrinth; he increases a thousandfold the dangers which are inherent in life anyway. And not the smallest of his dangers is that no one can witness how and where he loses his way, falls into solitude, or is torn to pieces by some troglodytic minotaur of conscience. When such a man perishes, it happens so far from human understanding that other men have no feeling for it, no fellow feeling. But there is no return for him -- not even a return to human compassion!--
40.
Everything deep loves masks; the deepest things have a veritable hatred of image and likeness. Might not contrariety be the only proper disguise to clothe the modesty of a god? A question worth asking. It would be surprising if some mystic hadn't at some time ventured upon it. There are events of such delicate nature that one would do well to bury them in gruffness and make them unrecognizable. There are deeds of love and extravagant magnanimity after which nothing is more advisable than to take a stick and beat up the eye-witness of them, to cloud his memory. There are people who know how to cloud and abuse their own memories in order to get revenge on their sole accomplice: modesty is inventive. The things of which one is most ashamed are by no means the worst things; not only cunning is found beneath a mask; there is much goodness in guile.
I can imagine that a man who had something precious and vulnerable to hide might roll through life rough and round like an old green heavily hooped wine cask: the subtlety of his modesty would demand it. The destinies and delicate decisions of a man who is deeply ashamed happen to him on paths that few ever reach and of whose existence his nearest and dearest must know nothing. The danger to his life is hidden from their eyes, as is his life-security when he regains it. Such a concealed one, who instinctively uses speech for silence and withholding, and whose excuses for not communication are inexhaustible, wants and encourages a mask of himself to wander about in the hearts and minds of his friends. And if he doesn't want it, one day his eyes will be opened to the fact that the mask is there anyway, and that it is good so. Every deep thinker needs a mask; even more, around every deep thinker a mask constantly grows, thanks to the continually wrong, ie, superficial, interpretations of his every word, his every step, his every sign of life.--
41.
One must test oneself to see it one is meant for independence and for command. And one must do it at the right time. Never avoid your tests, though they may be the most dangerous game you can play, and in the end are merely tests at which you are the only witness and the sole judge. Never remain tied up with a person -- not even the most believed. Every person is a prison and a tight corner. Never remain tied up with the fatherland -- not even when it most suffers and needs help (it is somewhat less difficult to untie one's heart for a victorious fatherland). Never remain tied up with compassion-- not even compassion for a superior for a superior human being into whose rare torture and helplessness chance had given us an insight. Nor with a science, not even if it lures us with the most precious findings that seem to have been stored up for us alone.
Never tied up with our own emancipation, that delicious bird-like distance and strangeness which soars ever higher and sees more and more spread out below; the danger of things that fly. Nor with our own virtues which would sacrifice the whole of us to some one thing, to our hospitality, for example. This is the danger of dangers to the superior and lavish souls who spend themselves extravagantly and almost indifferently, turning the virtue of liberality into vice. One must know how to conserve oneself. That is the most rigorous test of independence.
44
...We opposed thinkers, who have opened our eyes and our consequences to the question, "How and where has the plant 'man' flourished most strongly so far?', we imagine that it has happened every time under the opposite conditions: that the peril of man's position had to grow to enormity; that his power of invention and dissembling (his 'mind') had to develop subtly and boldness under long pressure and compulsion; that his life-will had to be stepped up to an unconditional power-will.
We imagine that hardness, violence, slavery, peril in the street and in the heart, concealment, Stoicism, temptation, and deviltry of every sort, everything evil, frightful, tyrannical, brutal, and snake-like in man, serves as well for the advancement of the species 'man' as their opposite...
153.
What is done out of love always happens beyond good and evil.
173.
One does not hate as long as one has a low esteem of someone, but only when one esteems him as an equal or superior.
201.
...A superior, independent intellect, a will to stand alone, even a superior rationality, are felt to be dangers; everything that lifts the individual above the herd and causes fear in the neighbor is from now on called evil; the fair-minded, unassuming disposition that adapts and equalizes, all mediocrity of desires comes to be called and honored by the name of morality....
219.
The making of moral judgements and condemnations is the favorite revenge of those of limited mind on those whose mind is less so; it is also a story of compensation for having been ill-favored by nature; but ultimately it is an opportunity to get a mind and to become more subtle. For malice spiritualizes people. It does them good at the bottom of their hearts to know that there is a standard by which they and those who seem to them over-endowed with intellectual goods and privileges are measured alike. They battle for 'equity before God' and for this they almost need to have faith in God. Among them are the strongest opponents of atheism. If someone were to say to them that 'superior intellectual capacity cannot be compared with any sort of honesty and respectability of a merely mortal man," it would set them to raving. I shall be very careful to say no such thing. Instead I should like to flatter them with my proposition that superior intellectual capacity is itself only the final offshoot of moral qualities; that it is a synthesis of all those conditions reputed of a 'merely mortal' man, after they have one by one been earned through long discipline and practice, perhaps on the part of whole chains of generations, that superior intellectual ability consists of the spiritualization of justice and of the kindly severity which knows its task: to uphold the order of rank in the world, among things as well as among men.
229.
...-We should relearn our lesson on cruelty and open our eyes. We should finally learn impatience with the immodest and fat errors that are virtuously and impudently making their way among us, such as the error in regard to tragedy, for example, which has never been forcefed by new and old philosophers alike. Practically everything that we call 'superior culture' rests on the intellectualization and deepening of cruelty : this is my proposition. This is the wild beast that was not slaughtered at all; it lives; it flourishes; it has only been--deified. What constitutes the painful delight of tragedy is cruelty; what is pleasurable in so-called tragic pity, and basically in everything sublime right up to the highest and subtlest thrills of metaphysics, gets its sweetness from nothing other than the added ingredient of cruelty...
...Naturally we must get rid of the old ridiculous psychology which knew no better than to teach that cruelty only arises at the sight of someone else's suffering. There is a rich, an over-rich pleasure in one's own suffering, in making oneself suffer.
...there he is secretly lured and propelled by his cruelty, by the dangerous thrills of cruelty inflicted on himself. Ultimately, we must consider that even the man of insight -- insofar as insight is paid for by the mind's opposition to its own inclinations, and often by its opposition to one's heart's desires, by its forcing one to say 'no' where one would like to say "Yes", to love, to adore -- that such a man, too, operated as an artist and a transfigure of cruelty. Any depth, and thoroughness is already a violation, a desire to hurt the basic will of man's mind whose trend is constantly toward illusion, toward the surface. In any desire of the mind to penetrate deeply and with understanding there is already a drop of cruelty.
230.
...And finally there is that precarious willingness of the mind to deceive other minds and to disguise itself; that constant pressure and impulsion of a creative, image-making, change-able power: in this, the mind enjoys its many masks, its cunning; also the feeling of its own security, for it is best defended and concealed by its Proteus-skills, Counter to this will to illusion, to simplification, to the mask, to the cloak, in short this will to surfaces (for every surface is a cloak) operated that sublime impulse of the man of insight, that spirit which takes and wants to take things deeply, complicatedly, and thoroughly. This the cruelty characteristic of the intellectual conscience and taste. Every courageous thinker will acknowledge it in himself, provided that he has trained and sharpened his eyes for it long enough, as is proper, and is accustomed to rigorous discipline and to rigorous words as well. He will say "There is something cruel about the tendency of my mind," regardless of the virtuous and amiable people who will try to dissuade him!
231.
Learning transforms us. It does what all nutrition does, namely much more than merely 'maintain,' as the physiologists know. But fundamentally, 'way down below' in us, there is something unteachable, a bedrock of intellectual destiny, of predestined decision, of answers to predestined, selected questions. In the presence of every cardinal problem there speaks an unchangeable 'This is myself.' On the problem man-woman, for example, a thinker cannot relearn anything but only learn to the end -- only discover fully what is 'in him.' At certain times we find certain solutions to problems which create a strong faith in us in particular; one will perhaps call them one's convictions. Later, one sees in them only the footprints leading to self-understanding, the signposts pointing to the problem which we are, more correctly, to the great stupidity which we are, to our intellectual destiny, to the unteachable 'way down below.'--
Considering this excessive courtesy which I have just committed against myself, I shall perhaps be permitted to speak aloud several truths about woman 'as such.' I assume that everyone now understands how much these truths are only -- my truths. --
260.
Wandering through the many fine and coarse moralities which have hitherto ruled on earth, as well as those which still rule, I found certain features regularly occurring together and bound up with one another. Finally they revealed two basic types to me, and a basic difference leaped to my eye. There is master-morality and slave-morality: I add immediately that in all higher and mixed cultures there are also attempts at a mediation between these two and even more frequently a mixup of them and a mutual misunderstanding; at times in fact a relentless juxtaposition even within the psyche of a single individual. The moral value-differentiation arose either among a ruling type which was pleasantly conscious of its difference from the ruled -- or else among the ruled, the slaves and the dependents of all kinds, In the first case, when the rulers determine the concept "good," it is the elevated and proud conditions of the psyche which are felt to be what excels and determines the order of rank. The distinguished human being divorces himself from the being in whom the opposite of such elevated and proud conditions is expressed. He despises them. One may note immediately that in the first type of morality the antithesis "good vs. bad" means "distinguished vs. despicable"; the antithesis"good vs. evil" has a different origin. What is despised is the coward, the timid man, and the petty man, he who thinks in terms of narrow utility; likewise the suspicious man with his cowed look, the one who humiliates himself, the dog-type who lets himself be mistreated, the begging flatterer, and above all the liar: it is the basic faith of all aristocrats that the common people are liars...
...The distinguished man honors himself in the mighty, including those who have power over themselves; those who know when to talk and when to keep silent; those who take delight in being rigorous and hard with themselves and who have respect for anything rigorous and hard. "Wotan placed a hard heart in my breast," says an old Scandinavian saga: this is the proper poetic expression for the soul of a proud Viking. Such a type of man is proud not to have been made for compassion; hence the hero of the saga adds a warning: "Whoever has not a hard heart when young will never get it at all." Distinguished and courageous men with such thoughts are at the opposite end from that morality which sees the characteristic function of morality in pity or in doing for others of déserrésment. Belief in oneself, pride in oneself, basic hostility and irony against "selflessness" is as sure a part of distinguished morality as an easy disdain and cautious attitude toward the fellow-feelings and the "warm-heart."
278.
Wanderer, who are you? I see you going your way, without scorn, without love, with unfathomable eyes, damp and sad like a plummet which has returned to the light from every depth without finding satisfaction. What was it seeking down below? I see your breast which does not heave, your lips that hide your nausea, your hands which are slow to touch anything -- who are you? What were you doing? Come rest here; this place is hospitable for everyman; regain your strength! Whoever you may be, what would you like? What will serve to refresh you? Just name it: I offer you all that I have.
"To refresh myself? To refresh myself? Oh you inquisitive man, what are you saying? But give me....please give me..."
What? What? Tell me!
"Another mask! A second mask!"--
279.
Men of profound sadness give themselves away when they are happy. They have a way of seizing happiness as though they wanted to crush it and choke it--out of jealousy. Ah, they know only too well that it will run away from them!
281.
"Will people believe me?--But I demand that they believe me: I myself have never thought will of myself and about myself; I have thought of myself only in rare cases; only when forced; always ready to digress from 'myself', always without faith in the result -- thanks to an irresistible distrust against the very possibility of self-recognition. It has lead me so far as to sense a contradiction in terms in even the concept 'immediate self-knowledge' that the theoreticians permit themselves. This whole fact is almost the surest thing I know about myself. There must be an unwillingness in me to believe any definite thing about myself. Is there a riddle in that? Probably, but fortunately not one which I have to solve. Perhaps it reveals the species to which I belong -- but not to me; and I like it that way --"
If you made it this far, I commend you. If you skipped over some parts, I understand. If you read it all in one shot I am amazed. If you even understood some of it--well then, I am astonished. The important thing about this is I feel these excepts tell so much about human nature -- and the fact Nietzsche chooses to use the 'free thinker' as his mode for a discussion of morality is astonishing. Even more astonishing when one realizes how much of these generic traits seem Snapeian. Of course, any interpretations, comments, disputes, confusions, anything -- email me.