Why I Am So Clever

Selected excerpts from Friedrich Nietzsche’s autobiography, Ecce Homo , written 1888 but not published until 1908 after his death. (From chapter titled “Why I Am So Clever”.)

Preface

“Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else.”

1

Why do I know a few things more than other people? Why in fact am I so clever? .... I should hate to leave an action of mine in the lurch; I prefer to disregard adverse outcomes, the consequences, out of the question of the value of an action. When faced by unpleasant consequences one is too ready to abandon the proper standpoint from which an action ought to be considered. A prick of conscience strikes me as a sort of "evil eye”. To honour our failures precisely because it has failed - this is much more in keeping with my morality. ”God”, "the immortality of the soul”, "salvation”, "the beyond” - even as a child I had no time for such notions, I do not waste any time upon them - maybe I was never childish enough for that? I have not come to know atheism as a result of logical reasoning and still less as an event in my life: in me it is a matter of instinct. ... God is a too palpably clumsy answer; an answer which shows a lack of delicacy towards us thinkers - fundamentally, even a crude prohibition to us: you shall not think! I am much more interested in another question - a question upon which the "salvation of humanity” depends to a far greater degree than it does upon any piece of theological curiosity: I refer to nutrition. For ordinary purposes it may be formulated as follows: "How precisely must you feed yourself so as to be able to attain to the maximum of strength, of virtue in the Renaissance style - of virtue free from moralic acid”? My experiences in regard to this matter have been as bad as they possibly could be; I am surprised that I set myself this question so late in life and that it took me so long to draw "rational” conclusions from these experiences. Only the absolute worthlessness of German education - its "idealism” - can to some extent explain how it was that precisely in this matter I was so backward that my ignorance was almost saintly. This "education” which from first to last teaches one to lose sight of actual things and to hunt after thoroughly problematic and so-called ideal aims as for instance "classical education” - as if it were not hopeless from the start to try to unite "classical” and "German” in one concept. It is even a little comical - try and imagine a "classically educated” citizen of Leipzig! Indeed I can say that up to a very mature age my food was entirely bad - expressed morally it was "impersonal”, "selfless”, "altruistic” for the salvation of cooks and all other fellow Christians. It was through the cooking in vogue at Leipzig for instance together with my first study of Schopenhauer (1865) that I earnestly renounced my "Will to Live”. To spoil one’s stomach by absorbing insufficient nourishment - this problem seemed to my mind solved with admirable felicity by the above mentioned cookery. (It is said that in the year 1866 changes were introduced into this department.) But as to German cookery in general - what has it not got on its conscience! Soup before the meal (still called alla tedesca in the Venetian cookery books of the sixteenth century); meat boiled to shreds, vegetables cooked with fat and flour; the degeneration of puddings into paper-weights!

2

Next to the question of nutrition is that of locality and climate. Nobody is so constituted as to be able to live everywhere and anywhere; … When I had well-nigh reached the end of my tether simply because I was almost done for, I began to reflect upon this fundamental irrationality in my life - ”Idealism”. It was only illness that brought me to reason.

3

After the choice of nutrition and the choice of climate and locality the third matter regarding which mistakes must be avoided is the choice of the manner in which one recovers one’s strength. Here again, according to the extent to which a spirit is sui generis constraints are set as to the limits of what is available - that is, what is useful to him. For myself, reading in general is among my means of recuperation; consequently it belongs to that which gives me rest from myself, that enables me to wander among strange sciences and strange souls - in fact among things about which I am not seriously interested. Indeed it is while reading that I recover from my seriousness. ... I must go back six months to catch myself with a book in my hand. What was it? An excellent study by Victor Brochard upon the Greek sceptics in which my Laertiana was used to advantage. The sceptics! the only honourable type among that two-faced and sometimes quintuple-faced crowd of the philosophers!

Stendhal is one of the happiest accidents of my life - for everything that marks an epoch in my life has been brought to me by accident and never by a recommendation. He is quite priceless with his anticipating psychologist’s eye; with his grasp of facts which is reminiscent of the same art in the greatest of all masters of facts (ex ungue Napoleonem); and finally not least as an honest atheist - a specimen which is both rare and difficult to discover in France - with all respects to Prosper Merimee! Maybe I am even envious of Stendhal? He robbed me of the best atheistic joke which I of all people could have made: "God’s only excuse is that He does not exist”.

4

I know of no more heartrending reading than Shakespeare: how a man must have suffered to be so much in need of playing the clown! Is Hamlet understood? It is not doubt but certitude that drives one mad. But in order to feel this one must be profound, one must be an abyss, a philosopher. We all fear the truth.

5

As I am speaking here of the recreations of my life I feel I must express a word or two of gratitude for that which has refreshed me by far the most heartily and most profoundly. This without the slightest doubt was my intimate association with Richard Wagner. All my other relationships I treat quite lightly; but I would not have the days I spent at Tribschen—those days of mutual confidences, of cheerfulness, of sublime flashes and of profound moments - taken from my life at any price. …

Wagner was by no means a good fellow. But I have already said quite enough on the subject of Wagner’s real nature (see Beyond Good and Evil Aphorism 269) and about those to whom he is most closely related. ... What is it that I have never forgiven Wagner? The fact that he condescended to the Germans - that he became a German Imperialist.

6

…The bond which unites us is the fact that we have suffered greater agony even at each other’s hands than most men are able to bear nowadays and this will always keep our names associated in the minds of men. For just as Wagner is merely a misunderstanding among Germans so in truth am I and ever will be.

7

I do not know how to draw any distinction between tears and music. I do not know how to think either of joy or of the south without a shudder of fear.

On the bridge I stood

Lately, in gloomy night.

Came a distant song:

In golden drops it rolled

Across the glittering scene.

Music, gondolas, lights—

Drunk, swam forth in the gloom. . . .

A stringed instrument, my soul,

Sang, imperceptibly moved,

A gondola song by stealth,

Gleaming with fullsome happiness.

Was anyone listening?

8

In all these things - in the choice of food place climate and recreation - the instinct of self-preservation is dominant and this instinct manifests itself with least ambiguity when it acts as an instinct of defence. ... Suppose I were to step out of my house and instead of the quiet and aristocratic city of Turin I were to find a German provincial town: my instinct would have to brace itself in order to repel all that which would pour in upon it from this flattened and cowardly world. Or suppose I were to find a large German city—that structure of vice in which nothing grows but where every single thing whether good or bad is dragged in. In such circumstances should I not be compelled to become a hedgehog? But to have prickles amounts to a squandering of strength; they even constitute a double luxury when, if we only chose to do so we could dispense with them and open our hands instead. Another form of prudence and self defence consists in trying to react as seldom as possible and to keep one’s self aloof from those circumstances and conditions wherein one would be condemned as it were to suspend one’s "freedom” and one’s initiative and become a mere reacting medium.

9

At this point I can no longer evade a direct answer to the question how one becomes what one is. And in giving it I shall have to touch upon that masterpiece in the art of self-preservation which is selfishness. Granting that one’s life-task - the determination and the fate of one’s life-task greatly exceeds the average measure of such things, nothing more dangerous could be conceived than to come face to face with one’s self with this life-task in hand. The fact that one becomes what one is presupposes that one has not the remotest idea of what one is. From this standpoint even the blunders of one’s life have their own meaning and value, the temporary deviations and aberrations, the moments of hesitation and of modesty, the earnestness wasted upon duties which lie outside the actual life-task.

10

You may be wondering why I should actually have related all these trivial and according to traditional accounts insignificant details to you; ... To this I reply that these trivial matters - diet, locality, climate and one’s mode of recreation, the whole casuistry of selfishness - are inconceivably more important than all that which has to-date been held in high esteem. It is precisely in this quarter that we must begin to learn anew. All those things which mankind has valued with such seriousness to the present day are not even real; they are mere creations of the imagination or more strictly speaking lies born of the bad instincts of diseased and in the deepest sense poisonous natures - all the concepts "God”, "soul”, "virtue”, "sin”, "the Beyond”, "truth”, "eternal life”. But the greatness of human nature, its "divinity” was sought in them. All questions of politics, of social order, of education have been falsified root and branch owing to the fact that the most injurious men have been taken for great men and that people were taught to despise the small things or rather the fundamental things of life. ... I do not reckon those so called "great” men even as human beings - for me they are the excrements of mankind, the products of sickness and of the instinct of revenge: they are nothing but monsters laden with rottenness, hopeless incurables who avenge themselves on life.

… I know of no other manner of dealing with great tasks than as play: this as a sign of greatness, is an essential prerequisite. ... Not just to endure necessity - or to merely pretend to endure; all idealism is untruthfulness in the face of necessity - but to love it.

Viktor Frankl- Finding Meaning in Pain