Ecce Homo: Complete Works, Volume SeventeenNietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
PhilosophyPhilosophy
Ecce Homo: Complete Works, Volume Seventeen
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900; Philosophers -- Germany -- Biography
"The emancipation of women,"--this is the instinctive hatred of
physiologically botched--that is to say, barren--women for those of
their sisters who are well constituted: the fight against "man" is
always only a means, a pretext, a piece of strategy. By trying to rise
to "Woman _per se_," to "Higher Woman," to the "Ideal Woman," all they
wish to do is to lower the general level of women's rank: and there are
no more certain means to this end than university education, trousers,
and the rights of voting cattle. Truth to tell, the emancipated are
the anarchists in the "eternally feminine" world, the physiological
mishaps, the most deep-rooted instinct of whom is revenge. A whole
species of the most malicious "idealism"--which, by the bye, also
manifests itself in men, in Henrik Ibsen for instance, that typical
old maid--whose object is to poison the clean conscience, the natural
spirit, of sexual love.... And in order to leave no doubt in your minds
in regard to my opinion, which, on this matter, is as honest as it
is severe, I will reveal to you one more clause out of my moral code
against vice--with the word "vice" I combat every kind of! opposition
to Nature, or, if you prefer fine words, idealism. The clause reads:
"Preaching of chastity is a public incitement to unnatural practices.
All depreciation of the sexual life, all the sullying of it by means
of the concept 'impure,' is the essential crime against Life--is the
essential crime against the Holy Spirit of Life."
In order to give you some idea of myself as a psychologist, let me
take this curious piece of psychological analysis out of the book
_Beyond Good and Evil,_ in which it appears. I forbid, by the bye, any
guessing as to whom I am describing in this passage. "The genius of
the heart, as that great anchorite possesses it, the divine tempter
and born Pied Piper of consciences, whose voice knows how to sink into
the inmost depths of every soul, who neither utters a word nor casts a
glance, in which some seductive motive or trick does not lie: a part
of whose masterliness is that he understands the art of seeming--not
what he is, but that which will place a fresh constraint upon his
followers to press ever more closely upon him, to follow him ever more
enthusiastically and whole-heartedly.... The genius of the heart,
which makes all loud and self-conceited things hold their tongues and
lend their ears, which polishes all rough souls and makes them taste a
new longing--to lie placid as a mirror, that the deep heavens may be
reflected in them.... The genius of the heart which teaches the clumsy
and too hasty hand to hesitate and grasp more tenderly; which scents
the hidden and forgotten treasure, the pearl of goodness and sweet
spirituality, beneath thick black ice, and is a divining rod for every
grain of gold, long buried and imprisoned in heaps of mud and sand....
The genius of the heart, from contact with which every man goes away
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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