The Joyful Wisdom ("La Gaya Scienza")Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
PhilosophyPhilosophy
The Joyful Wisdom ("La Gaya Scienza")
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
Philosophy
The distinction between ethos and pathos in Aristotle is, broadly,
that between internal character and external circumstance.—P. V. C.
BOOK FIFTH
WE FEARLESS ONES
"Carcasse, tu trembles? Tu
tremblerais bien davantage, si
tu savais, où je te mène."—
_Turenne._
343.
_What our Cheerfulness Signifies._—The most important of more recent
events—that "God is dead," that the belief in the Christian God has
become unworthy of belief—already begins to cast its first shadows over
Europe. To the few at least whose eye, whose _suspecting_ glance, is
strong enough and subtle enough for this drama, some sun seems to have
set, some old, profound confidence seems to have changed into doubt: our
old world must seem to them daily more darksome, distrustful, strange
and "old." In the main, however, one may say that the event itself is
far too great, too remote, too much beyond most people's power of
apprehension, for one to suppose that so much as the report of it could
have _reached_ them; not to speak of many who already knew _what_ had
really taken place, and what must all collapse now that this belief had
been undermined,—because so much was built upon it, so much rested on
it, and had become one with it: for example, our entire European
morality. This lengthy, vast and uninterrupted process of crumbling,
destruction, ruin and overthrow which is now imminent: who has realised
it sufficiently to-day to have to stand up as the teacher and herald of
such a tremendous logic of terror, as the prophet of a period of gloom
and eclipse, the like of which has probably never taken place on earth
before?... Even we, the born riddle-readers, who wait as it were on the
mountains posted 'twixt to-day and to-morrow, and engirt by their
contradiction, we, the firstlings and premature children of the coming
century, into whose sight especially the shadows which must forthwith
envelop Europe _should_ already have come—how is it that even we,
without genuine sympathy for this period of gloom, contemplate its
advent without any _personal_ solicitude or fear? Are we still, perhaps,
too much under the _immediate effects_ of the event—and are these
effects, especially as regards _ourselves_, perhaps the reverse of what
was to be expected—not at all sad and depressing, but rather like a new
and indescribable variety of light, happiness, relief, enlivenment,
encouragement, and dawning day?... In fact, we philosophers and "free
spirits" feel ourselves irradiated as by a new dawn by the report that
the "old God is dead"; our hearts overflow with gratitude, astonishment,
presentiment and expectation. At last the horizon seems open once more,
granting even that it is not bright; our ships can at last put out to
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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