[Footnote 1: Nietzsche, as is well known, devoted much time when a student at Leipzig to the study of three Greek philosophers, Theognis, Diogenes Laertius, and Democritus. This study first bore fruit in the case of a paper, _Zur Geschichte der Theognideischen Spruchsammlung_, which was subsequently published by the most influential journal of classical philology in Germany. Later, however, it enabled Nietzsche to enter for the prize offered by the University of Leipzig for an essay, _De fontibus Diogenis Laertii._ He was successful in gaining the prize, and the treatise was afterwards published in the _Rheinisches Museum,_ and is still quoted as an authority. It is to this essay, written when he was twenty-three years of age, that he here refers.--TR.]
[Footnote 2: The favourite uniform of the German Emperor, William II.--TR.]
[Footnote 3: In the latter years of his life, Nietzsche practically made Italy his home.--TR.]
[Footnote 4: See note on page 37.]
[Footnote 5: The German words are, _Einsamkeit_ and _Vielsamkeit._ The latter was coined by Nietzsche. The English word "multitude" should, therefore, be understood as signifying multifarious instincts and gifts, which in Nietzsche strove for ascendancy and caused him more suffering than any solitude. Complexity of this sort, held in check by a dominant instinct, as in Nietzsche's case, is of course the only possible basis of an artistic nature.--TR.]
WHY I WRITE SUCH EXCELLENT BOOKS
1
I am one thing, my creations are another. Here, before I speak of the books themselves, I shall touch upon the question of the understanding and misunderstanding with which they have met. I shall proceed to do this in as perfunctory a manner as the occasion demands; for the time has by no means come for this question. My time has not yet come either; some are born posthumously. One s day institutions will be needed in which men will live and teach, as I understand living and teaching; maybe, also, that by that time, chairs will be founded and endowed for the interpretation of _Zarathustra. _ But I should regard it as a complete contradiction of myself, if I expected to find ears and eyes for my truths to-day: the fact that no one listens to me, that no one knows how to receive at my hands to-day, is not only comprehensible, it seems to me quite the proper thing. I do not wish to be mistaken for another--and to this end I must not mistake myself. To repeat what I have already said, I can point to but few instances of ill-will in my life: and as for literary ill-will, I could mention scarcely a single example of it. On the other hand, I have met with far too much _pure foolery_!... It seems to me that to take up one of my books is one of the rarest honours that a man can pay himself--even supposing that he put his shoes from off his feet beforehand, not to mention boots.... When on one occasion Dr. Heinrich von Stein honestly complained that he could not understand a word of my _Zarathustra,_ I said to him that this was just as it should be: to have understood six sentences in that book--that is to say, to have lived them--raises a man to a higher level among mortals than "modern" men can attain. With this feeling of distance how could I even wish to be read by the "moderns" whom I know! My triumph is just the opposite of what Schopenhauer's was--I say "_Non_ legor, _non_ legar."--Not that I should like to underestimate the pleasure I have derived from the innocence with which my works have frequently been contradicted. As late as last summer, at a time when I was attempting, perhaps by means of my weighty, all-too-weighty literature, to throw the rest of literature off its balance, a certain professor of Berlin University kindly gave me to understand that I ought really to make use of a different form: no one could read such stuff as I wrote.--Finally, it was not Germany, but Switzerland that presented me with the two most extreme cases. An essay on _Beyond Good and Evil,_ by Dr. V. Widmann in the paper called the _Bund,_ under the heading "Nietzsche's Dangerous Book," and a general account of all my works, from the pen of Herr Karl Spitteler, also in the _Bund,_ constitute a maximum in my life--I shall not say of what.... The latter treated my _Zarathustra,_ for instance as "_advanced exercises in style_," and expressed the wish that later on I might try and attend to the question of substance as well; Dr. Widmann assured me of his respect for the courage I showed in endeavouring to abolish all decent feeling. Thanks to a little trick of destiny, every sentence in these criticisms seemed, with a consistency that I could but admire, to be an inverted truth. In fact it was most remarkable that all one had to do was to "transvalue all values," in order to hit the nail on the head with regard to me, instead of striking my head with the nail.... I am more particularly anxious therefore to discover an explanation. After all, no one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access. To take an extreme case, suppose a book contains simply incidents which lie quite outside the range of general or even rare experience--suppose it to be the _first_ language to express a whole series of experiences. In this case nothing it contains will really be heard at all, and, thanks to an acoustic delusion, people will believe that where nothing is heard there is nothing to hear.... This, at least, has been my usual experience, and proves, if you will, the originality of my experience. He who thought he had understood something in my work, had as a rule adjusted something in it to his own image--not infrequently the very opposite of myself, an "idealist," for instance. He who understood nothing in my work, would deny that I was worth considering at all.--The word "Superman," which designates a type of man that would be one of nature's rarest and luckiest strokes, as opposed to "modern" men, to "good" men, to Christians and other Nihilists,--a word which in the mouth of Zarathustra, the annihilator of morality, acquires a very profound meaning,--is understood almost everywhere, and with perfect innocence, in the light of those values to which a flat contradiction was made manifest in the figure of Zarathustra--that is to say, as an "ideal" type, a higher kind of man, half "saint" and half "genius." ... Other learned cattle have suspected me of Darwinism on account of this word: even the "hero cult" of that great unconscious and involuntary swindler, Carlyle,--a cult which I repudiated with such roguish malice,--was recognised in my doctrine. Once, when I whispered to a man that he would do better I to seek for the Superman in a Cæsar Borgia than in a Parsifal, he could not believe his ears. The fact that I am quite free from curiosity in regard to criticisms of my books, more particularly when they appear in newspapers, will have to be forgiven me. My friends and my publishers know this, and never speak to me of such things. In one particular case, I once saw all the sins that had been committed against a single book--it was _Beyond Good and Evil;_ I could tell you a nice story about it. Is it possible that the _National-Zeitung_--a Prussian paper (this comment is for the sake of my foreign readers--for my own part, I beg to state, I read only _Le Journal des Débats_)--really and seriously regarded the book as a "sign of the times," or a genuine and typical example of Tory philosophy,[1] for which the _Kreuz-Zeitung_ had not sufficient courage?...
2
This was said for the benefit of Germans: for everywhere else I have my readers--all of them exceptionally intelligent men, characters that have won their spurs and that have been reared in high offices and superior duties; I have even real geniuses among my readers. In Vienna, in St Petersburg, in Stockholm, in Copenhagen, in Paris, and New York--I have been discovered everywhere: I have not yet been discovered in Europe's flatland--Germany.... And, to make a confession, I rejoice much more heartily over those who do not read me, over those who have neither heard of my name nor of the word philosophy. But whithersoever I go, here in Turin, for instance, every face brightens and softens at the sight of me. A thing that has flattered me more than anything else hitherto, is the fact that old market-women cannot rest until they have picked out the sweetest of their grapes for me. To this extent must a man be a philosopher.... It is not in vain that the Poles are considered as the French among the Slavs. A charming Russian lady will not be mistaken for a single moment concerning my origin. I am not successful at being pompous, the most I can do is to appear embarrassed.... I can think in German, I can feel in German--I can do most things; but this is beyond my powers.... My old master Ritschl went so far as to declare that I planned even my philological treatises after the manner of a Parisian novelist--that I made them absurdly thrilling. In Paris itself people are surprised at "_toutes mes audaces et finesses_";--the words are Monsieur Taine's;--I fear that even in the highest forms of the dithyramb, that salt will be found pervading my work which never becomes insipid, which never becomes "German"--and that is, wit.... I can do nought else. God help me! Amen.--We all know, some of us even from experience, what a "long-ears" is. Well then, I venture to assert that I have the smallest ears that have ever been seen. This fact is not without interest to women--it seems to me they feel that I understand them better!... I am essentially the anti-ass, and on this account alone a monster in the world's history--in Greek, and not only in Greek, I am the _Antichrist._