The following is an excerpt from “Beyond Good and Evil” by Friedrich Nietzsche.

44

Need I still say expressly after all this that they, too, will be free, very free spirits, these philosophers of the future - though just as certainly they will not be merely free spirits but something more, higher, greater, and thoroughly different that does not want to be misunderstood and mistaken for something else. But saying this I feel an obligation - almost as much to them as to ourselves who are their heralds and precursors, we free spirits - to sweep away a stupid old prejudice and misunderstanding about the lot of us: all too long it has clouded the concept “free spirit” like a fog.

In all the countries of Europe, and in America, too, there now is something that abuses this name: a very narrow, imprisoned, chained type of spirits who want just about the opposite of what accords with our intentions and instincts - not to speak of the fact that regarding the new philosophers who are coming up they must assuredly be closed windows and bolted doors. They belong, briefly and sadly, among the levelers - these falsely so-called “free spirits” - being eloquent and prolifically scribbling slaves of the democratic taste and its “modern ideas”; they are all human beings without solitude, without their own solitude, clumsy good fellows whom one should not deny either courage or respectable decensy - only they are unfree and ridiculously superficial, above all in their basic inclination to find in the forms of the old society as it has existed so far just about the cause of all mhuman misery and failure - which is a way of standing truth happily upon her head! What they would like to strive for with all their powers is the universal green-pasture happiness of th eherd, with security, lack of danger, comfort, and an easier life for everyone; the two songs and doctrines which they repeat most often are “equality of rights” and “sympathy for all that suffers” - and suffering itself they take for something that must be abolished.

We opposite men, having opened our eyes and conscience to the question where and how the plant “man” has so far grown most vigorously to a height - we think this has happened every time under the opposite conditions, that to this end the dangerous power of invention and simulation (his “spirit”) had to develop under prolonged pressure and constraint into refinement and audacity, his life-will had to be enhanced into and unconditional power-will. We think that hardness, forcefulness, slavery, danger in the alley and the heart, life in hiding, stoicism, the art of experiment and devilry of every kind, that everything evil, terrible, tyrannical in man, everything in him that is kin to beasts of prey and serpents serves the enhancement of the species “man” as much as its opposite does. Indeed, we do not even say enough when we say only that much; and at any rate we are at this point, in what we say and keep silent about, at the other end from all modern ideology and herd desiderata - as their antipodes perhaps?

Is it any wonder that we “free spirits” are not exactly the most communicative spirits? that we do not want to betray in every particular from what a spirit can liberate himself and to what he may be driven? And as for the meaning of the dangerous formula “beyond good and evil,” with which we at least guard against being mistaken for others: we are something different from “librespenseurs,” “liberi pensatori,” “Freidenker (freethinker) and whatever else all these goodly advocates of “modern ideas” like to call themselves.

At home, or at least having been guests, in many countries of the spirit; having escaped again and again from the musty agreeable nooks into which preference and prejudice, youth, origin, the accidents of people and books or even exhaustion from wandering seem to have banished us; full of malice against the lures of dependence that lie hidden in honors, or money, or offices, or enthusiasms of the senses; grateful even to need and vacillating sickness because they always ris us from some rule and its “prejudice,” grateful to god, devil, sheep, and worm in us; curious to a vice, investigators to the point of cruelty, with uninhibited fingers for the unfathomable, with teeth and stomachs for the most indigestible, ready for every feat that requires a sense of acuteness and acute snese, ready for every venture, thanks to an excess of “free will,” with fore- and back-souls into whose ultimate intentions nobody can look so easily, with fore- and backgrounds which no foot is likely to explore to the end; concealed under cloaks of light, conquerors even if we look like heirs and prodigals, arrangers and collectors from morning till late, misers of our riches and our crammed drawers, economical in learning and forgetting, inventive in schemas, occasionally proud of tables and categories, occasionally pedants, occasiononally night owls of work even in broad daylight; yes, when it is necessary even scarecrows - and today it is necessary; namely, insofar as we are born, sworn, jealous frineds of solitude, of our own most profound, most midnightly, most middaily solitude: that is the type of man we are, we free spirits! And perhaps you have something of this too, you that are coming? you new philosophers? -