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.The project is to traverse with quite novel questions, and as though with new eyes, the enormous, distant, and so well hidden land of morality—of morality that has actually existed, actually been lived; and does this not mean virtually to discover this land for the first time?If I considered in this connection the above-mentioned Dr.Rée, among others, it was because I had no doubt that the very nature of his inquiries would compel him to adopt a better method for reaching answers.Have I deceived myself in this? My desire, at any rate, was to point out to so sharp and disinterested an eye as his a better direction in which to look, in the direction of an actual history of morality, and to warn him in time against gazing around haphazardly in the blue after the English fashion.For it must be obvious which color is a hundred times more vital for a genealogist of morals than blue: namely gray, that is, what is documented, what can actually be confirmed and has actually existed, in short the entire long hieroglyphic record, so hard to decipher, of the moral past of mankind!This was unknown to Dr.Rée; but he had read Darwin—so that in his hypotheses, and after a fashion that is at least entertaining, the Darwinian beast and the ultramodern unassuming moral milksop who “no longer bites” politely link hands, the latter wearing an expression of a certain good-natured and refined indolence, with which is mingled even a grain of pessimism and weariness, as if all these things—the problems of morality—were really not worth taking quite so seriously.But to me, on the contrary, there seems to be nothing more worth taking seriously, among the rewards for it being that some day one will perhaps be allowed to take them cheerfully.For cheerfulness—or in my own language gay science-—is a reward: the reward of a long, brave, industrious, and subterranean seriousness, of which, to be sure, not everyone is capable.But on the day we can say with all our hearts, “Onwards! our old morality too is part of the comedy!” we shall have discovered a new complication and possibility for the Dionysian drama of “The Destiny of the Soul”—and one can wager that the grand old eternal comic poet of our existence will be quick to make use of it!8If this book is incomprehensible to anyone and jars on his ears, the fault, it seems to me, is not necessarily mine.It is clear enough, assuming, as I do assume, that one has first read my earlier writings and has not spared some trouble in doing so: for they are, indeed, not easy to penetrate.5 Regarding my Zarathustra, for example, I do not allow that anyone knows that book who has not at some time been profoundly wounded and at some time profoundly delighted by every word in it; for only then may he enjoy the privilege of reverentially sharing in the halcyon element out of which that book was born and in its sunlight clarity, remoteness, breadth, and certainty.In other cases, people find difficulty with the aphoristic form: this arises from the fact that today this form is not taken seriously enough.An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been “deciphered” when it has simply been read; rather, one has then to begin its exegesis, for which is required an art of exegesis.I have offered in the third essay of the present book an example of what I regard as “exegesis” in such a case—an aphorism is prefixed to this essay, the essay itself is a commentary on it.To be sure, one thing is necessary above all if one is to practice reading as an art in this way, something that has been unlearned most thoroughly nowadays—and therefore it will be some time before my writings are “readable”—something for which one has almost to be a cow and in any case not a “modern man”: rumination.Sils-Maria, Upper Engadine,July 18871Matthew 6:21.2Goethe’s Faust, lines 3781f.3Diametrically: literally, by the whole heavens.4Nietzsche always gives page references to the first editions.I have substituted section numbers, which are the same in all editions and translations; most of the sections cited are offered in my translations.For Nietzsche’s relation to Rée, see Rudolph Binion, Frau Lou, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1968.5See also the end of Nietzsche’s Preface to the new edition of The Dawn, written in the fall of 1886: “… to read well, that means reading slowly, deeply, with consideration and caution …” The last four words do not adequately render rück- und vorsichtig, which can also mean, looking backward and forward—i.e., with a regard for the context, including also the writer’s earlier and later works.Cf.Beyond Good and Evil, my note on section 250.Yet Arthur Danto voices a very common assumption when he says on the first page of the first chapter of his Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York, Macmillan, 1965): “No one of them [i.e., Nietzsche’s books] presupposes an acquaintance with any other…his writings may be read in pretty much any order, without this greatly impeding the comprehension of his ideas.” This is as wrong as Danto’s claim on the same page that “it would be difficult even for a close reader to tell the difference between those works he [Nietzsche] saw through the press [e.g., the Genealogy] and those [sic] pieced together by his editors [i.e., The Will to Power] [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]