What Is Noble? : Part 7

Beyond Good and Evil
by Friedrich Nietzsche, Helen Zimmern (Translator)

(Page 15 of 18)

279. Men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have a mode of seizing upon happiness as though they would choke and strangle it, out of jealousy - ah, they know only too well that it will flee from them!

280. "Bad! Bad! What? Does he not - go back?" Yes! But you misunderstand him when you complain about it. He goes back like every one who is about to make a great spring.

281. - "Will people believe it of me? But I insist that they believe it of me: I have always thought very unsatisfactorily of myself and about myself, only in very rare cases, only compulsorily, always without delight in 'the subject,' ready to digress from 'myself,' and always without faith in the result, owing to an unconquerable distrust of the POSSIBILITY of self- knowledge, which has led me so far as to feel a CONTRADICTIO IN ADJECTO even in the idea of 'direct knowledge' which theorists allow themselves: - this matter of fact is almost the most certain thing I know about myself. There must be a sort of repugnance in me to BELIEVE anything definite about myself. - Is there perhaps some enigma therein? Probably; but fortunately nothing for my own teeth. - Perhaps it betrays the species to which I belong? - but not to myself, as is sufficiently agreeable to me."

282. - "But what has happened to you?" - "I do not know," he said, hesitatingly; "perhaps the Harpies have flown over my table." - It sometimes happens nowadays that a gentle, sober, retiring man becomes suddenly mad, breaks the plates, upsets the table, shrieks, raves, and shocks everybody - and finally withdraws, ashamed, and raging at himself - whither? for what purpose? To famish apart? To suffocate with his memories? - To him who has the desires of a lofty and dainty soul, and only seldom finds his table laid and his food prepared, the danger will always be great - nowadays, however, it is extraordinarily so. Thrown into the midst of a noisy and plebeian age, with which he does not like to eat out of the same dish, he may readily perish of hunger and thirst - or, should he nevertheless finally "fall to," of sudden nausea. - We have probably all sat at tables to which we did not belong; and precisely the most spiritual of us, who are most difficult to nourish, know the dangerous DYSPEPSIA which originates from a sudden insight and disillusionment about our food and our messmates - the AFTER-DINNER NAUSEA.

283. If one wishes to praise at all, it is a delicate and at the same time a noble self-control, to praise only where one DOES NOT agree - otherwise in fact one would praise oneself, which is contrary to good taste: - a self-control, to be sure, which offers excellent opportunity and provocation to constant MISUNDERSTANDING. To be able to allow oneself this veritable luxury of taste and morality, one must not live among intellectual imbeciles, but rather among men whose misunderstandings and mistakes amuse by their refinement - or one will have to pay dearly for it! - "He praises me, THEREFORE he acknowledges me to be right" - this asinine method of inference spoils half of the life of us recluses, for it brings the asses into our neighbourhood and friendship.

284. To live in a vast and proud tranquility; always beyond ... To have, or not to have, one's emotions, one's For and Against, according to choice; to lower oneself to them for hours; to SEAT oneself on them as upon horses, and often as upon asses: - for one must know how to make use of their stupidity as well as of their fire. To conserve one's three hundred foregrounds; also one's black spectacles: for there are circumstances when nobody must look into our eyes, still less into our "motives." And to choose for company that roguish and cheerful vice, politeness. And to remain master of one's four virtues, courage, insight, sympathy, and solitude. For solitude is a virtue with us, as a sublime bent and bias to purity, which divines that in the contact of man and man - "in society" - it must be unavoidably impure. All society makes one somehow, somewhere, or sometime - "commonplace."

285. The greatest events and thoughts - the greatest thoughts, however, are the greatest events - are longest in being comprehended: the generations which are contemporary with them do not EXPERIENCE such events - they live past them. Something happens there as in the realm of stars. The light of the furthest stars is longest in reaching man; and before it has arrived man DENIES - that there are stars there. "How many centuries does a mind require to be understood?" - that is also a standard, one also makes a gradation of rank and an etiquette therewith, such as is necessary for mind and for star.

286. "Here is the prospect free, the mind exalted." [FOOTNOTE: Goethe's "Faust," Part II, Act V. The words of Dr. Marianus.] - But there is a reverse kind of man, who is also upon a height, and has also a free prospect - but looks DOWNWARDS.

287. What is noble? What does the word "noble" still mean for us nowadays? How does the noble man betray himself, how is he recognized under this heavy overcast sky of the commencing plebeianism, by which everything is rendered opaque and leaden? - It is not his actions which establish his claim - actions are always ambiguous, always inscrutable; neither is it his "works." One finds nowadays among artists and scholars plenty of those who betray by their works that a profound longing for nobleness impels them; but this very NEED of nobleness is radically different from the needs of the noble soul itself, and is in fact the eloquent and dangerous sign of the lack thereof. It is not the works, but the BELIEF which is here decisive and determines the order of rank - to employ once more an old religious formula with a new and deeper meaning - it is some fundamental certainty which a noble soul has about itself, something which is not to be sought, is not to be found, and perhaps, also, is not to be lost. - THE NOBLE SOUL HAS REVERENCE FOR ITSELF. -

Source: "Beyond Good and Evil," as published in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (1909-1913).

About the Author

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 - August 25, 1900) was a German philosopher. His writing included critiques of religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy, and science. His style of writing was distinctive, displaying a fondness for aphorism and paradox. Nietzsche's influence remains substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism and postmodernism.