Beyond Good and Evil | Page 7

but that another impulse, here as elsewhere, has only made
use of knowledge (and mistaken knowledge!) as an instrument. But whoever considers
the fundamental impulses of man with a view to determining how far they may have here
acted as INSPIRING GENII (or as demons and cobolds), will find that they have all
practiced philosophy at one time or another, and that each one of them would have been
only too glad to look upon itself as the ultimate end of existence and the legitimate
LORD over all the other impulses. For every impulse is imperious, and as SUCH,
attempts to philosophize. To be sure, in the case of scholars, in the case of really
scientific men, it may be otherwise--"better," if you will; there there may really be such a
thing as an "impulse to knowledge," some kind of small, independent clock-work, which,
when well wound up, works away industriously to that end, WITHOUT the rest of the
scholarly impulses taking any material part therein. The actual "interests" of the scholar,
therefore, are generally in quite another direction--in the family, perhaps, or in
money-making, or in politics; it is, in fact, almost indifferent at what point of research his
little machine is placed, and whether the hopeful young worker becomes a good
philologist, a mushroom specialist, or a chemist; he is not CHARACTERISED by
becoming this or that. In the philosopher, on the contrary, there is absolutely nothing
impersonal; and above all, his morality furnishes a decided and decisive testimony as to
WHO HE IS,--that is to say, in what order the deepest impulses of his nature stand to
each other.
7. How malicious philosophers can be! I know of nothing more stinging than the joke
Epicurus took the liberty of making on Plato and the Platonists; he called them
Dionysiokolakes. In its original sense, and on the face of it, the word signifies "Flatterers
of Dionysius"--consequently, tyrants' accessories and lick-spittles; besides this, however,
it is as much as to say, "They are all ACTORS, there is nothing genuine about them" (for

Dionysiokolax was a popular name for an actor). And the latter is really the malignant
reproach that Epicurus cast upon Plato: he was annoyed by the grandiose manner, the
mise en scene style of which Plato and his scholars were masters--of which Epicurus was
not a master! He, the old school-teacher of Samos, who sat concealed in his little garden
at Athens, and wrote three hundred books, perhaps out of rage and ambitious envy of
Plato, who knows! Greece took a hundred years to find out who the garden-god Epicurus
really was. Did she ever find out?
8. There is a point in every philosophy at which the "conviction" of the philosopher
appears on the scene; or, to put it in the words of an ancient mystery:
Adventavit asinus, Pulcher et fortissimus.
9. You desire to LIVE "according to Nature"? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words!
Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly
indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and
barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power--how COULD
you live in accordance with such indifference? To live--is not that just endeavouring to be
otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited,
endeavouring to be different? And granted that your imperative, "living according to
Nature," means actually the same as "living according to life"--how could you do
DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and
must be? In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you: while you pretend to read
with rapture the canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the contrary, you
extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! In your pride you wish to dictate your
morals and ideals to Nature, to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist
that it shall be Nature "according to the Stoa," and would like everything to be made after
your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification and generalism of Stoicism! With all your
love for truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic
rigidity to see Nature FALSELY, that is to say, Stoically, that you are no longer able to
see it otherwise-- and to crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the
Bedlamite hope that BECAUSE you are able to tyrannize over yourselves--Stoicism is
self-tyranny--Nature will also allow herself to be tyrannized over: is not the Stoic a
PART of Nature? . . . But this is an old and everlasting story: what happened in old times
with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself.
It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot