Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche (most life changing books txt) 📕

and soul, they will love to make use of experiments in a new, and perhaps wider and more dangerous sense? In their passion for knowledge, will they have to go further in daring and painful attempts than the sensitive and pampered taste of a democratic century can approve of?⁠—There is no doubt these coming ones will be least able to dispense with the serious and not unscrupulous qualities which distinguish the critic from the skeptic: I mean the certainty as to standards of worth, the conscious employment of a unity of method, the wary courage, the standing-alone, and the capacity for self-responsibility, indeed, they will avow among themselves a delight in denial and dissection, and a certain considerate cruelty, which knows how to handle the knife surely and deftly, even when the heart bleeds. They will be sterner (and perhaps not always towards themselves only) than humane people may desire, they will not deal with the “truth” in order that it may “please” them, or “elevate” and “inspire” them⁠—they will rather have little faith in “truth” bringing with it such revels for the feelings. They will smile, those rigorous spirits, when anyone says in their presence, “That thought elevates me, why should it not be true?” or, “That work enchants me, why should it not be beautiful?” or, “That artist enlarges me, why should he not be great?” Perhaps they will not only have a smile, but a genuine disgust for all that is thus rapturous, idealistic, feminine, and hermaphroditic, and if anyone could look into their inmost hearts, he would not easily find therein the intention to reconcile “Christian sentiments” with “antique taste,” or even with “modern parliamentarism” (the kind of reconciliation necessarily found even among philosophers in our very uncertain and consequently very conciliatory century). Critical discipline, and every habit that conduces to purity and rigour in intellectual matters, will not only be demanded from themselves by these philosophers of the future, they may even make a display thereof as their special adornment⁠—nevertheless they will not want to be called critics on that account. It will seem to them no small indignity to philosophy to have it decreed, as is so welcome nowadays, that “philosophy itself is criticism and critical science⁠—and nothing else whatever!” Though this estimate of philosophy may enjoy the approval of all the Positivists of France and Germany (and possibly it even flattered the heart and taste of Kant: let us call to mind the titles of his principal works), our new philosophers will say, notwithstanding, that critics are instruments of the philosopher, and just on that account, as instruments, they are far from being philosophers themselves! Even the great Chinaman of Königsberg was only a great critic. 211

I insist upon it that people finally cease confounding philosophical workers, and in general scientific men, with philosophers⁠—that precisely here one should strictly give “each his own,” and not give those far too much, these far too little. It may be necessary for the education of the real philosopher that he himself should have once stood upon all those steps upon which his servants, the scientific workers of philosophy, remain standing, and must remain standing he himself must perhaps have been critic, and dogmatist, and historian, and besides, poet, and collector, and traveler, and riddle-reader, and moralist, and seer, and “free spirit,” and almost everything, in order to traverse the whole range of human values and estimations, and that he may be able with a variety of eyes and consciences to look from a height to any distance, from a depth up to any height, from a nook into any expanse. But all these are only preliminary conditions for his task; this task itself demands something else⁠—it requires him to create values. The philosophical workers, after the excellent pattern of Kant and Hegel, have to fix and formalize some great existing body of valuations⁠—that is to say, former determinations of value, creations of value, which have become prevalent, and are for a time called “truths”⁠—whether in the domain of the logical, the political (moral), or the artistic. It is for these investigators to make whatever has happened and been esteemed hitherto, conspicuous, conceivable, intelligible, and manageable, to shorten everything long, even “time” itself, and to subjugate the entire past: an immense and wonderful task, in the carrying out of which all refined pride, all tenacious will, can surely find satisfaction. The real philosophers, however, are commanders and lawgivers; they say: “Thus shall it be!” They determine first the Whither and the Why of mankind, and thereby set aside the previous labour of all philosophical workers, and all subjugators of the past⁠—they grasp at the future with a creative hand, and whatever is and was, becomes for them thereby a means, an instrument, and a hammer. Their “knowing” is creating, their creating is a law-giving, their will to truth is⁠—Will to Power.⁠—Are there at present such philosophers? Have there ever been such philosophers? Must there not be such philosophers some day?⁠ ⁠…

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It is always more obvious to me that the philosopher, as a man indispensable for the morrow and the day after the morrow, has ever found himself, and has been obliged to find himself, in contradiction to the day in which he lives; his enemy has always been the ideal of his day. Hitherto all those extraordinary furtherers of humanity whom one calls philosophers⁠—who rarely regarded themselves as lovers of wisdom, but rather as disagreeable fools and dangerous interrogators⁠—have found their mission, their hard, involuntary, imperative mission (in the end, however, the greatness of their mission), in being the bad conscience of their age. In putting the vivisector’s knife to the breast of the very virtues of their age, they have betrayed their own secret; it has been for the sake of a new greatness of man, a new untrodden path to his aggrandizement. They have always disclosed how much hypocrisy, indolence, self-indulgence, and self-neglect, how much falsehood was concealed under the most