Human, All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirits, Part 1: Complete Works, Volume SixNietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
PhilosophyPhilosophy
Human, All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirits, Part 1: Complete Works, Volume Six
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
Human beings
About this time it may at last happen, under the sudden illuminations
of still disturbed and changing health, that the enigma of that great
emancipation begins to reveal itself to the free, and ever freer,
spirit,--that enigma which had hitherto lain obscure, questionable,
and almost intangible, in his memory. If for a long time he scarcely
dared to ask himself, "Why so apart? So alone? denying everything that
I revered? denying reverence itself? Why this hatred, this suspicion,
this severity towards my own virtues?"--he now dares and asks the
questions aloud, and already hears something like an answer to them--
"Thou shouldst become master over thyself and master also of thine own
virtues. Formerly _they_ were thy masters; but they are only entitled
to be thy tools amongst other tools. Thou shouldst obtain power over
thy pro and contra, and learn how to put them forth and withdraw them
again in accordance with thy higher purpose. Thou shouldst learn how
to take the proper perspective of every valuation--the shifting,
distortion, and apparent teleology of the horizons and everything that
belongs to perspective; also the amount of stupidity which opposite
values involve, and all the intellectual loss with which every pro
and every contra has to be paid for. Thou shouldst learn how much
_necessary_ injustice there is in every for and against, injustice
as inseparable from life, and life itself as _conditioned_ by the
perspective and its injustice. Above all thou shouldst see clearly
where the injustice is always greatest:--namely, where life has
developed most punily, restrictedly, necessitously, and incipiently,
and yet cannot help regarding _itself_ as the purpose and standard of
things, and for the sake of self-preservation, secretly, basely, and
continuously wasting away and calling in question the higher, greater,
and richer,--thou shouldst see clearly the problem of gradation of
rank, and how power and right and amplitude of perspective grow up
together. Thou shouldst----" But enough; the free spirit _knows_
henceforth which "thou shalt" he has obeyed, and also what he _can_ now
_do,_ what he only now--_may do_....
7.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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