Whether it be hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism, or eudaemonism, all those modes of thinking which measure the worth of things according to pleasure and pain, that is, according to accompanying circumstances and secondary considerations, are plausible modes of thought and naivetés, which every one conscious of creative powers and an artist’s conscience will look down upon with scorn, though not without sympathy. Sympathy for you! To be sure, that is not sympathy as you understand it: it is not sympathy for social “distress,” for “society” with its sick and misfortuned, for the hereditarily vicious and defective who lie on the ground around us; still less is it sympathy for the grumbling, vexed, revolutionary slave-classes who strive after power—they call it “freedom.” Our sympathy is a loftier and further-sighted sympathy: we see how man dwarfs himself, how you dwarf him! And there are moments when we view your sympathy with an indescribable anguish, when we resist it, when we regard your seriousness as more dangerous than any kind of levity. You want, if possible—and there is not a more foolish “if possible”—to do away with suffering. And we? It really seems that we would rather have it increased and made worse than it has ever been! Well-being, as you understand it, is certainly not a goal; it seems to us an end; a condition which at once renders man ludicrous and contemptible—and makes his destruction desirable! The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—do you not know not that it is only this discipline that has produced all the elevations of humanity hitherto? The tension of soul in misfortune which communicates to it its energy, its shuddering in view of rack and ruin, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpreting, and exploiting misfortune, and whatever depth, mystery, disguise, spirit, artifice, or greatness has been bestowed upon the soul—has it not been bestowed through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? In man creature and creator are united: in man there is not only matter, shred, excess, clay, mire, folly, chaos; but there is also the creator, the sculptor, the hardness of the hammer, the divinity of the spectator, and the seventh day. Do you understand this contrast? And that your sympathy for the “creature in man” applies to that which has to be fashioned, bruised, forged, stretched, roasted, annealed, refined—to that which must necessarily suffer and is meant to suffer? And our sympathy—do you not understand what our reverse sympathy applies to, when it resists your sympathy as the worst of all pampering and enervation? So it is sympathy against sympathy! But to repeat it once more, there are higher problems than the problems of pleasure and pain and sympathy; and all systems of philosophy which deal only with these are pieces of naiveté.
— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Beyond Good and Evil (via
ludimagister)
