Beyond Good and Evilfor what you are, or somewhat feared! And pray, don’t forget
the garden, the garden with golden trellis-work! And have
people around you who are as a garden—or as music on the
waters at eventide, when already the day becomes a memo-
ry. Choose the GOOD solitude, the free, wanton, lightsome
solitude, which also gives you the right still to remain good
in any sense whatsoever! How poisonous, how crafty, how
bad, does every long war make one, which cannot be waged
openly by means of force! How PERSONAL does a long fear
make one, a long watching of enemies, of possible enemies!
These pariahs of society, these long-pursued, badly-perse-
cuted ones—also the compulsory recluses, the Spinozas or
Giordano Brunos—always become in the end, even under
the most intellectual masquerade, and perhaps without be-
ing themselves aware of it, refined vengeance-seekers and
poison-Brewers (just lay bare the foundation of Spinoza’s
ethics and theology!), not to speak of the stupidity of mor-
al indignation, which is the unfailing sign in a philosopher
that the sense of philosophical humour has left him. The
martyrdom of the philosopher, his ‘sacrifice for the sake of
truth,’ forces into the light whatever of the agitator and ac-
tor lurks in him; and if one has hitherto contemplated him
only with artistic curiosity, with regard to many a philoso-
pher it is easy to understand the dangerous desire to see
him also in his deterioration (deteriorated into a ‘martyr,’
into a stage-and- tribune-bawler). Only, that it is necessary
with such a desire to be clear WHAT spectacle one will see
in any case—merely a satyric play, merely an epilogue farce,
merely the continued proof that the long, real tragedy IS AT