Whether
it is hedonism or pessimism, utilitarianism or eudaemonism,--- all these ways
of thinking, which measure the value of things in accordance with pleasure and
pain, which are mere epiphenomena, wholly secondary, are ways of
thinking that stay in the foreground, and naïvetés, on which everyone, conscious
of creative powers and an artistic conscience, will look down not
without derision, nor without pity. Pity with you-- that, of course, is
not pity in your sense: it is not pity with social ‘distress,’ with ‘society’
and its sick and unfortunate members, with those addicted to vice and maimed
from the start, even though the ground around us is littered with them; it is
even less pity with the grumbling, sorely pressed, rebellious slave strata, who
long for dominion, calling it ‘freedom.’ Our pity is a higher and more farsighted
pity: we see how man makes himself smaller, how you make him
smaller, and there are moments when we regard your pity with a great anxiety,
when we resist this pity, when we find your seriousness more dangerous than any
frivolity.
You want
to abolish suffering? And we… would rather have it higher and
worse than ever. The discipline of suffering, of great suffering, do you
not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man
so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness, which cultivates its strength,
its shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in
enduring, persevering, interpreting, exploiting suffering, and whatever has
been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, and greatness,
was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great
suffering? In man, creature and creator are united. And that your pity
is for the creature in man, for what must be formed, broken, forged,
torn, burnt, made incandescent, and purified,--- that which necessarily must
and should suffer?
And our
pity,-- do you not comprehend for whom our converse pity is when it
resists your pity as the worst of all pamperings and weaknesses? Thus, it is
pity versus pity… (Jenseits, 225.)
To be continued…
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