The Joyful Wisdom 12

The Joyful Wisdom 12

Against Remorse._—The thinker sees in his own actions attempts and

questionings to obtain information about something or other; success and

failure are _answers_ to him first and foremost. To vex himself,

however, because something does not succeed, or to feel remorse at

all—he leaves that to those who act because they are commanded to do so,

and expect to get a beating when their gracious master is not satisfied

with the result.

 

 

42.

 

_Work and Ennui._—In respect to seeking work for the sake of the pay,

almost all men are alike at present in civilised countries; to all of

them work is a means, and not itself the end; on which account they are

not very select in the choice of the work, provided it yields an

abundant profit. But still there are rarer men who would rather perish

than work without _delight_ in their labour: the fastidious people,

difficult to satisfy, whose object is not served by an abundant profit,

unless the work itself be the reward of all rewards. Artists and

contemplative men of all kinds belong to this rare species of human

beings; and also the idlers who spend their life in hunting and

travelling, or in love affairs and adventures. They all seek toil and

trouble in so far as these are associated with pleasure, and they want

the severest and hardest labour, if it be necessary. In other respects,

however, they have a resolute indolence, even should impoverishment,

dishonour, and danger to health and life be associated therewith. They

are not so much afraid of ennui as of labour without pleasure; indeed

they require much ennui, if _their_ work is to succeed with them. For

the thinker and for all inventive spirits ennui is the unpleasant "calm"

of the soul which precedes the happy voyage and the dancing breezes; he

must endure it, he must _await_ the effect it has on him:—it is

precisely _this_ which lesser natures cannot at all experience! It is

common to scare away ennui in every way, just as it is common to labour

without pleasure. It perhaps distinguishes the Asiatics above the

Europeans, that they are capable of a longer and profounder repose; even

their narcotics operate slowly and require patience, in contrast to the

obnoxious suddenness of the European poison, alcohol.

 

 

43.

 

_What the Laws Betray._—One makes a great mistake when one studies the

penal laws of a people, as if they were an __EXPRESSION__ of its character;

the laws do not betray what a people is, but what appears to them

foreign, strange, monstrous, and outlandish. The laws concern themselves

with the exceptions to the morality of custom; and the severest

punishments fall on acts which conform to the customs of the

neighbouring peoples. Thus among the Wahabites, there are only two

mortal sins: having another God than the Wahabite God, and—smoking (it

is designated by them as "the disgraceful kind of drinking"). "And how

is it with regard to murder and adultery?"—asked the Englishman with

astonishment on learning these things. "Well, God is gracious and

pitiful!" answered the old chief.—Thus among the ancient Romans there

was the idea that a woman could only sin mortally in two ways: by

adultery on the one hand, and—by wine-drinking on the other. Old Cato

pretended that kissing among relatives had only been made a custom in

order to keep women in control on this point; a kiss meant: did her

breath smell of wine? Wives had actually been punished by death who were

surprised taking wine: and certainly not merely because women under the

influence of wine sometimes unlearn altogether the art of saying No; the

Romans were afraid above all things of the orgiastic and Dionysian

spirit with which the women of Southern Europe at that time (when wine

was still new in Europe) were sometimes visited, as by a monstrous

foreignness which subverted the basis of Roman sentiments; it seemed to

them treason against Rome, as the embodiment of foreignness.

 

 

44.

 

_The Believed Motive._—However important it may be to know the motives

according to which mankind has really acted hitherto, perhaps the

_belief_ in this or that motive, and therefore that which mankind has

assumed and imagined to be the actual mainspring of its activity

hitherto, is something still more essential for the thinker to know. For

the internal happiness and misery of men have always come to them

through their belief in this or that motive,—_not_ however, through that

which was actually the motive! All about the latter has an interest of

secondary rank.

 

 

45.

 

_Epicurus._—Yes, I am proud of perceiving the character of Epicurus

differently from anyone else perhaps, and of enjoying the happiness of

the afternoon of antiquity in all that I hear and read of him:—I see his

eye gazing out on a broad whitish sea, over the shore-rocks on which the

sunshine rests, while great and small creatures play in its light,

secure and calm like this light and that eye itself. Such happiness

could only have been devised by a chronic sufferer, the happiness of an

eye before which the sea of existence has become calm, and which can no

longer tire of gazing at the surface and at the variegated, tender,

tremulous skin of this sea. Never previously was there such a moderation

of voluptuousness.

 

 

46.

 

_Our Astonishment._—There is a profound and fundamental satisfaction in

the fact that science ascertains things that _hold their ground_, and

again furnish the basis for new researches:—it could certainly be

otherwise. Indeed, we are so much convinced of all the uncertainty and

caprice of our judgments, and of the everlasting change of all human

laws and conceptions, that we are really astonished _how persistently_

the results of science hold their ground! In earlier times people knew

nothing of this changeability of all human things; the custom of

morality maintained the belief that the whole inner life of man was

bound to iron necessity by eternal fetters:—perhaps people then felt a

similar voluptuousness of astonishment when they listened to tales and

fairy stories. The wonderful did so much good to those men, who might

well get tired sometimes of the regular and the eternal. To leave the

ground for once! To soar! To stray! To be mad!—that belonged to the

paradise and the revelry of earlier times; while our felicity is like

that of the shipwrecked man who has gone ashore, and places himself with

both feet on the old, firm ground—in astonishment that it does not rock.

 

 

47.

 

_The Suppression of the Passions._—When one continually prohibits the

__EXPRESSION__ of the passions as something to be left to the "vulgar," to

coarser, bourgeois, and peasant natures—that is, when one does not want

to suppress the passions themselves, but only their language and

demeanour, one nevertheless realises _therewith_ just what one does not

want: the suppression of the passions themselves, or at least their

weakening and alteration,—as the court of Louis XIV. (to cite the most

instructive instance), and all that was dependent on it, experienced.

The generation _that followed_, trained in suppressing their __EXPRESSION__,

no longer possessed the passions themselves, but had a pleasant,

superficial, playful disposition in their place,—a generation which was

so permeated with the incapacity to be ill-mannered, that even an injury

was not taken and retaliated, except with courteous words. Perhaps our

own time furnishes the most remarkable counterpart to this period: I see

everywhere (in life, in the theatre, and not least in all that is

written) satisfaction at all the _coarser_ outbursts and gestures of

passion; a certain convention of passionateness is now desired,—only not

the passion itself! Nevertheless _it_ will thereby be at last reached,

and our posterity will have a _genuine savagery_, and not merely a

formal savagery and unmannerliness.

 

 

48.

 

_Knowledge of Distress._—Perhaps there is nothing by which men and

periods are so much separated from one another, as by the different

degrees of knowledge of distress which they possess; distress of the

soul as well as of the body. With respect to the latter, owing to lack

of sufficient self-experience, we men of the present day (in spite of

our deficiencies and infirmities), are perhaps all of us blunderers and

visionaries in comparison with the men of the age of fear—the longest of

all ages,—when the individual had to protect himself against violence,

and for that purpose had to be a man of violence himself. At that time a

man went through a long schooling of corporeal tortures and privations,

and found even in a certain kind of cruelty toward himself, in a

voluntary use of pain, a necessary means for his preservation; at that

time a person trained his environment to the endurance of pain; at that

time a person willingly inflicted pain, and saw the most frightful

things of this kind happen to others, without having any other feeling

than for his own security. As regards the distress of the soul, however,

I now look at every man with respect to whether he knows it by

experience or by description; whether he still regards it as necessary

to simulate this knowledge, perhaps as an indication of more refined

culture; or whether, at the bottom of his heart, he does not at all

believe in great sorrows of soul, and at the naming of them has in his

mind a similar experience as at the naming of great corporeal

sufferings, such as tooth-aches, and stomach-aches. It is thus, however,