Beyond Good and Evil
a one comes to grief, it is so far from the comprehension of
men that they neither feel it, nor sympathize with it. And he
cannot any longer go back! He cannot even go back again to
the sympathy of men!
- Our deepest insights must—and should—appear as
follies, and under certain circumstances as crimes, when
they come unauthorizedly to the ears of those who are not
disposed and predestined for them. The exoteric and the
esoteric, as they were formerly distinguished by philoso-
phers—among the Indians, as among the Greeks, Persians,
and Mussulmans, in short, wherever people believed in gra-
dations of rank and NOT in equality and equal rights—are
not so much in contradistinction to one another in respect
to the exoteric class, standing without, and viewing, esti-
mating, measuring, and judging from the outside, and not
from the inside; the more essential distinction is that the
class in question views things from below upwards—while
the esoteric class views things FROM ABOVE DOWN-
WARDS. There are heights of the soul from which tragedy
itself no longer appears to operate tragically; and if all the
woe in the world were taken together, who would dare to
decide whether the sight of it would NECESSARILY se-
duce and constrain to sympathy, and thus to a doubling
of the woe? ... That which serves the higher class of men
for nourishment or refreshment, must be almost poison
to an entirely different and lower order of human beings.
The virtues of the common man would perhaps mean vice
and weakness in a philosopher; it might be possible for a
