1 Beyond Good and Evil
seriousness as more dangerous than any kind of levity. You
want, if possible—and there is not a more foolish ‘if pos-
sible’ —TO DO AWAY WITH SUFFERING; and we?—it
really seems that WE would rather have it increased and
made worse than it has ever been! Well-being, as you un-
derstand it—is certainly not a goal; it seems to us an END;
a condition which at once renders man ludicrous and con-
temptible—and makes his destruction DESIRABLE! The
discipline of suffering, of GREAT suffering—know ye not
that it is only THIS discipline that has produced all the
elevations of humanity hitherto? The tension of soul in mis-
fortune which communicates to it its energy, its shuddering
in view of rack and ruin, its inventiveness and bravery in
undergoing, enduring, interpreting, and exploiting misfor-
tune, and whatever depth, mystery, disguise, spirit, artifice,
or greatness has been bestowed upon the soul—has it not
been bestowed through suffering, through the discipline of
great suffering? In man CREATURE and CREATOR are
united: in man there is not only matter, shred, excess, clay,
mire, folly, chaos; but there is also the creator, the sculptor,
the hardness of the hammer, the divinity of the spectator,
and the seventh day—do ye understand this contrast? And
that YOUR sympathy for the ‘creature in man’ applies to
that which has to be fashioned, bruised, forged, stretched,
roasted, annealed, refined—to that which must necessarily
SUFFER, and IS MEANT to suffer? And our sympathy—do
ye not understand what our REVERSE sympathy applies to,
when it resists your sympathy as the worst of all pampering
and enervation?—So it is sympathy AGAINST sympathy!—