A BOOK FOR FREE SPIRITS
BY
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
TRANSLATED BY ALEXANDER HARVEY
CHICAGO
CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY
1908
Copyright 1908
By Charles H. Kerr & Company
[5]
It is often enough, and always with great surprise, intimated to me thatthere is something both ordinary and unusual in all my writings, fromthe "Birth of Tragedy" to the recently published "Prelude to aPhilosophy of the Future": they all contain, I have been told, snaresand nets for short sighted birds, and something that is almost aconstant, subtle, incitement to an overturning of habitual opinions andof approved customs. What!? Everything is merely—human—all too human?With this exclamation my writings are gone through, not without acertain dread and mistrust of ethic itself and not without a dispositionto ask the exponent of evil things if those things be not simplymisrepresented. My writings have been termed a school of distrust, stillmore of disdain: also, and more happily, of courage, audacity even. Andin fact, I myself do not believe that anybody ever looked into the worldwith a distrust as deep as mine, seeming, as I do, not simply the timelyadvocate of the devil, but, to employ theological terms, an enemy andchallenger of God; and whosoever has experienced any of the consequencesof such deep distrust, anything of the chills[6] and the agonies ofisolation to which such an unqualified difference of standpoint condemnshim endowed with it, will also understand how often I must have soughtrelief and self-forgetfulness from any source—through any object ofveneration or enmity, of scientific seriousness or wanton lightness;also why I, when I could not find what I was in need of, had to fashionit for myself, counterfeiting it or imagining it (and what poet orwriter has ever done anything else, and what other purpose can all theart in the world possibly have?) That which I always stood most in needof in order to effect my cure and self-recovery was faith, faith enoughnot to be thus isolated, not to look at life from so singular a point ofview—a magic apprehension (in eye and mind) of relationship andequality, a calm confidence in friendship, a blindness, free fromsuspicion and questioning, to two sidedness; a pleasure in externals,superficialities, the near, the accessible, in all things possessed ofcolor, skin and seeming. Perhaps I could be fairly reproached with much"art" in this regard, many fine counterfeitings; for example, that,wisely or wilfully, I had shut my eyes to Schopenhauer's blind willtowards ethic, at a time when I was already clear sighted enough on thesubject of ethic; likewise that I had deceived myself concerning RichardWagner's incurable romanticism,...