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
In order to understand this type, you must first be quite clear
concerning its fundamental physiological condition: this condition
is what I call _great healthiness._ In regard to this idea I cannot
make my meaning more plain or more personal than I have done already
in one of the last aphorisms (No. 382) of the fifth book of the _Gaya
Scienza_: "We new, nameless, and unfathomable creatures," so reads
the passage, "we firstlings of a future still unproved--we who have a
new end in view also require new means to that end, that is to say,
a new healthiness, a stronger, keener, tougher, bolder, and merrier
healthiness than any that has existed heretofore. He who longs to
feel in his own soul the whole range of values and aims that have
prevailed on earth until his day, and to sail round all the coasts
of this ideal 'Mediterranean Sea'; who, from the adventures of his
own inmost experience, would fain know how it feels to be a conqueror
and discoverer of the ideal;--as also how it is with the artist, the
saint, the legislator, the sage, the scholar, the man of piety and the
godlike anchorite of yore;--such a man requires one thing above all
for his purpose, and that is, _great healthiness_--such healthiness as
he not only possesses, but also constantly acquires and must acquire,
because he is continually sacrificing it again, and is compelled to
sacrifice it! And now, therefore, after having been long on the way,
we Argonauts of the ideal, whose pluck is greater than prudence would
allow, and who are often shipwrecked and bruised, but, as I have said,
healthier than people would like to admit, dangerously healthy, and for
ever recovering our health--it would seem as if we had before us, as
a reward for all our toils, a country still undiscovered, the horizon
of which no one has yet seen, a beyond to every country and every
refuge of the ideal that man has ever known, a world so overflowing
with beauty, strangeness, doubt, terror, and divinity, that both our
curiosity and our lust of possession are frantic with eagerness. Alas!
how in the face of such vistas, and with such burning desire in our
conscience and consciousness, could we still be content with _the man
of the present day_? This is bad indeed; but, that we should regard
his worthiest aims and hopes with ill-concealed amusement, or perhaps
give them no thought at all, is inevitable. Another ideal now leads
us on, a wonderful, seductive ideal, full of danger, the pursuit of
which we should be loath to urge upon any one, because we are not so
ready to acknowledge any one's _right to it:_ the ideal of a spirit who
plays ingenuously (that is to say, involuntarily, and as the outcome
of superabundant energy and power) with everything that, hitherto,
has been called holy, good, inviolable, and divine; to whom even the
loftiest thing that the people have with reason made their measure of
value would be no better than a danger, a decay, and an abasement, or
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account