Trajectory (plain list)
The free spirit
From the Joyful Science’s free spirits through Beyond Good and Evil’s discipline of honesty to the late claim that emancipation becomes destiny.
1882 · Introduces
The Joyful Science · §180 · The Good Time for Free Spirits
The Joyful Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882/87)
A good time for free spirits named in the Joyful Science — lightness as a spiritual weather.
_The Good Time for Free Spirits._—Free Spirits take liberties even with regard to Science—and meanwhile they are allowed to do so,—while the Church still remains!—In so far they have now their good time.
Sources: gutenberg:52881
1883 · Develops
Thus Spoke Zarathustra · Z-prologue-4
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85)
Zarathustra’s love of the free spirit and free heart — poetic companion to BGE’s technical type.
Zarathustra, however, looked at the people and wondered. Then he spake thus: Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING and a DOWN-GOING. I love those that know not how to live except as down-goers, for they are the over…
Sources: gutenberg:1998
1886 · Develops
Beyond Good and Evil · §44
Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
We free spirits: not the democratic freethinker, but precursors of philosophers of the future.
Need I say expressly after all this that they will be free, VERY free spirits, these philosophers of the future--as certainly also they will not be merely free spirits, but something more, higher, greater, and fundamentally different, which does not wish to be misunderstood and mistaken? But while I say this, I feel under OBLIGATION almost as much to them as to ourselves (we free spirits who are their heralds and forerunners), to sweep away from ourselves altogether a stupid …
Brauche ich nach alledem noch eigens zu sagen, dass auch sie freie, sehr freie Geister sein werden, diese Philosophen der Zukunft, - so gewiss sie auch nicht bloss freie Geister sein werden, sondern etwas Mehreres, Höheres, Grösseres und Gründlich-Anderes, das nicht verkannt und verwechselt werden will? Aber, indem ich…
Sources: gutenberg:4363 · gutenberg:7204
1886 · Develops
Beyond Good and Evil · §230
Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
The spirit’s honesty as cruelty toward itself — free spirit as discipline, not comfort.
Perhaps what I have said here about a "fundamental will of the spirit" may not be understood without further details; I may be allowed a word of explanation.--That imperious something which is popularly called "the spirit," wishes to be master internally and externally, and to feel itself master; it has the will of a multiplicity for a simplicity, a binding, taming, imperious, and essentially ruling will. Its requirements and capacities here, are the same as those assigned by…
Vielleicht versteht man nicht ohne Weiteres, was ich hier von einem "Grundwillen des Geistes" gesagt habe: man gestatte mir eine Erläuterung. - Das befehlerische Etwas, das vom Volke "der Geist" genannt wird, will in sich und um sich herum Herr sein und sich als Herrn fühlen: es hat den Willen aus der Vielheit zur Einf…
Sources: gutenberg:4363 · gutenberg:7204
1886 · Develops
Beyond Good and Evil · §41
Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
Free spirit as ordeal: subjecting oneself to tests of independence and command.
One must subject oneself to one's own tests that one is destined for independence and command, and do so at the right time. One must not avoid one's tests, although they constitute perhaps the most dangerous game one can play, and are in the end tests made only before ourselves and before no other judge. Not to cleave to any person, be it even the dearest--every person is a prison and also a recess. Not to cleave to a fatherland, be it even the most suffering and necessitous-…
Man muss sich selbst seine Proben geben, dafür dass man zur Unabhängigkeit und zum Befehlen bestimmt ist; und dies zur rechten Zeit. Man soll seinen Proben nicht aus dem Wege gehn, obgleich sie vielleicht das gefährlichste Spiel sind, das man spielen kann, und zuletzt nur Proben, die vor uns selber als Zeugen und vor k…
Sources: gutenberg:4363 · gutenberg:7204
1886 · Develops
Beyond Good and Evil · §61
Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
The philosopher “as WE free spirits understand him” — responsibility, not mere emancipation.
The philosopher, as WE free spirits understand him--as the man of the greatest responsibility, who has the conscience for the general development of mankind,--will use religion for his disciplining and educating work, just as he will use the contemporary political and economic conditions. The selecting and disciplining influence--destructive, as well as creative and fashioning--which can be exercised by means of religion is manifold and varied, according to the sort of people…
Der Philosoph, wie wir ihn verstehen, wir freien Geister als der Mensch der umfänglichsten Verantwortlichkeit, der das Gewissen für die Gesammt-Entwicklung des Menschen hat: dieser Philosoph wird sich der Religionen zu seinem Züchtungs- und Erziehungswerke bedienen, wie er sich der jeweiligen politischen und wirthschaf…
Sources: gutenberg:4363 · gutenberg:7204
1886 · Develops
Beyond Good and Evil · §203
Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
Free spirits against the democratic dwindling of type — breeding conditions named aloud.
We, who hold a different belief--we, who regard the democratic movement, not only as a degenerating form of political organization, but as equivalent to a degenerating, a waning type of man, as involving his mediocrising and depreciation: where have WE to fix our hopes? In NEW PHILOSOPHERS--there is no other alternative: in minds strong and original enough to initiate opposite estimates of value, to transvalue and invert "eternal valuations"; in forerunners, in men of the fut…
Wir, die wir eines andren Glaubens sind -, wir, denen die demokratische Bewegung nicht bloss als eine Verfalls-Form der politischen Organisation, sondern als Verfalls-, nämlich Verkleinerungs-Form des Menschen gilt, als seine Vermittelmässigung und Werth-Erniedrigung: wohin müssen wir mit unsren Hoffnungen greifen? - N…
Sources: gutenberg:4363 · gutenberg:7204
1886 · Develops
Beyond Good and Evil · §227
Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
Honesty as the free spirits’ remaining virtue — perfected with perversity and love.
Honesty, granting that it is the virtue of which we cannot rid ourselves, we free spirits--well, we will labour at it with all our perversity and love, and not tire of "perfecting" ourselves in OUR virtue, which alone remains: may its glance some day overspread like a gilded, blue, mocking twilight this aging civilization with its dull gloomy seriousness! And if, nevertheless, our honesty should one day grow weary, and sigh, and stretch its limbs, and find us too hard, and wo…
Redlichkeit, gesetzt, dass dies unsre Tugend ist, von der wir nicht loskönnen, wir freien Geister - nun, wir wollen mit aller Bosheit und Liebe an ihr arbeiten und nicht müde werden, uns in unsrer Tugend, die allein uns übrig blieb, zu "vervollkommnen": mag ihr Glanz einmal wie ein vergoldetes blaues spöttisches Abendl…
Sources: gutenberg:4363 · gutenberg:7204
1887 · Revises
The Joyful Science · §347 · Believers and their Need of Belief
The Joyful Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882/87)
Belief and the need for belief: free spirit tested against the hunger that makes faith necessary.
_Believers and their Need of Belief._—How much _faith_ a person requires in order to flourish, how much "fixed opinion" he requires which he does not wish to have shaken, because he _holds_ himself thereby—is a measure of his power (or more plainly speaking, of his weakness). Most people in old Europe, as it seems to me, still need Christianity at present, and on that account it still finds belief. For such is man: a theological dogma might be refuted to him a thousand times,…
Sources: gutenberg:52881
1887 · Revises
On the Genealogy of Morality · III §24
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)
Hard cut: for some time past there have been no free spirits — they still believe in truth.
And now look at the other side, at those rare cases, of which I spoke, the most supreme idealists to be found nowadays among philosophers and scholars. Have we, perchance, found in them the sought-for _opponents_ of the ascetic ideal, its _anti-idealists_? In fact, they _believe_ themselves to be such, these "unbelievers" (for they are all of them that): it seems that this idea is their last remnant of faith, the idea of being opponents of this ideal, so earnest are they on t…
Sources: gutenberg:52319
1888 · Comments on
Ecce Homo · Why I Am a Fatality §1
Ecce Homo (1888)
The free spirit’s path ends in the claim to be dynamite — no longer merely emancipated, but fateful.
I know my destiny. There will come a day when my name will recall the memory of something formidable--a crisis the like of which has never been known on earth, the memory of the most profound clash of consciences, and the passing of a sentence upon all that which theretofore had been believed, exacted, and hallowed. I am not a man, I am dynamite. And with it all there is nought of the founder of a religion in me. Religions are matters for the mob; after coming in contact with…
Sources: gutenberg:52190