(025) Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil”, One Paragraph at a Time
I’ve struggled immensely in all my attempts to read and comprehend Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil”. These blog posts are my attempt to better understand this material. I encourage any corrections or criticisms in the comments.
Chapter Two: The Free Spirit
25. After such a cheerful commencement, a serious word would fain be heard; it appeals to the most serious minds. Take care, ye philosophers and friends of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom! Of suffering “for the truth’s sake”! even in your own defense! It spoils all the innocence and fine neutrality of your conscience; it makes you headstrong against objections and red rags; it stupefies, animalizes, and brutalizes, when in the struggle with danger, slander, suspicion, expulsion, and even worse consequences of enmity, ye have at last to play your last card as protectors of truth upon earth — as though “the Truth” were such an innocent and incompetent creature as to require protectors!
Nietzsche warns “friends of knowledge” and philosophers of becoming martyrs for the sake of defending the truth. “The truth” is not a thing that needs to be defended, nor suffered for, and the willingness to do so commits one to become stupefied and brutal. In order that one should remain innocent and continue to possess a neutral conscience, one must refrain from being stubborn in the face of objections to one’s own truth.
and you of all people, ye knights of the sorrowful countenance, Messrs Loafers and Cobweb-spinners of the spirit! Finally, ye know sufficiently well that it cannot be of any consequence if YE just carry your point; ye know that hitherto no philosopher has carried his point, and that there might be a more laudable truthfulness in every little interrogative mark which you place after your special words and favourite doctrines (and occasionally after yourselves) than in all the solemn pantomime and trumping games before accusers and law-courts!
Nietzsche paints a picture of the dramatist scholars who spend their days attacking one another in an attempt to score points and become heroes for the ideas they represent.
But being right is not the point of philosophy. No philosopher was ever sufficiently right. And in fact, more of the “praiseworthy truthfulness” lies in the interrogation of extant doctrine and, more importantly, interrogation of ourselves and our own ideas.
Rather go out of the way! Flee into concealment! And have your masks and your ruses, that ye may be mistaken for what you are, or somewhat feared! And pray, don’t forget the garden, the garden with golden trellis-work! And have people around you who are as a garden — or as music on the waters at eventide, when already the day becomes a memory. Choose the GOOD solitude, the free, wanton, lightsome solitude, which also gives you the right still to remain good in any sense whatsoever! How poisonous, how crafty, how bad, does every long war make one, which cannot be waged openly by means of force! How PERSONAL does a long fear make one, a long watching of enemies, of possible enemies!
Nietzsche expresses the need for philosophers to “flea into concealment”, and to remain in a state of good solitude, free from too much external judgment. One must play with masks and ruses and assume mistaken identities in order to remain in a garden. The wars that are fought over truth can poison the soul of man, and turn him into a fearful wretch, constantly watching for possible enemies, unable to expose himself to new ideas.
These pariahs of society, these long-pursued, badly-persecuted ones — also the compulsory recluses, the Spinozas or Giordano Brunos — always become in the end, even under the most intellectual masquerade, and perhaps without being themselves aware of it, refined vengeance-seekers and poison-Brewers (just lay bare the foundation of Spinoza’s ethics and theology!), not to speak of the stupidity of moral indignation, which is the unfailing sign in a philosopher that the sense of philosophical humour has left him.
The compulsory recluses of society, as well as the badly persecuted pariahs, become resentful and vengeful in their philosophy, and perhaps without even becoming aware of it. These ideological vengeance-seekers are prone to moral indignation, which deprives them of the necessary sense of philosophical humor that man requires.
The martyrdom of the philosopher, his “sacrifice for the sake of truth,” forces into the light whatever of the agitator and actor lurks in him; and if one has hitherto contemplated him only with artistic curiosity, with regard to many a philosopher it is easy to understand the dangerous desire to see him also in his deterioration (deteriorated into a “martyr,” into a stage-and-tribune-bawler). Only, that it is necessary with such a desire to be clear WHAT spectacle one will see in any case — merely a satyric play, merely an epilogue farce, merely the continued proof that the long, real tragedy IS AT AN END, supposing that every philosophy has been a long tragedy in its origin.
The sacrifice of the dramatist-philosopher-martyr exposes the agitator and actor that lurks within him. The inevitable end to a long tragedy can be observed through the degeneration of the philosopher that suffers on behalf of defending the truth.
