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It has now already lasted ten years: no sound any longer reaches me—a land without rain. A man must have a vast amount of humanity at his disposal in order not to pine away in such drought.[8]
[8] For the benefit of those readers who are not acquainted with the circumstances of Nietzsche's life, it would be as well to point out that this is a purely personal plaint, comprehensible enough in the mouth of one who, like Nietzsche, was for years a lonely anchorite.—Tr.
1041.
My new road to an affirmative attitude.—Philosophy, as I have understood it and lived it up to the present, is the voluntary quest of the repulsive and atrocious aspects of existence. From the long experience derived from such wandering over ice and desert, I learnt to regard quite differently everything that had been philosophised hitherto: the concealed history of philosophy, the psychology of its great names came into the light for me. "How much truth can a spirit endure; for how much truth is it daring enough?"—this for me was the real measure of value. Error is a piece of cowardice ... every victory on the part of knowledge, is the result of courage, of hardness towards one's self, of cleanliness towards one's self.... The kind of experimental philosophy which I am living, even anticipates the possibility of the most fundamental Nihilism, on principle: but by this I do not mean that it remains standing at a negation, at a no, or at a will to negation. It would rather attain to the very reverse—to a Dionysian affirmation of the world, as it is, without subtraction, exception, or choice—it would have eternal circular motion: the same things, the same reasoning, and the same illogical concatenation. The highest state to which a philosopher can attain: to maintain a Dionysian attitude to Life—my formula for this is amor fati.
To this end we must not only consider those aspects of life which have been denied hitherto, as: necessary, but as desirable, and not only desirable to those aspects which have been affirmed hitherto (as complements or first prerequisites, so to speak), but for their own sake, as the more powerful, more terrible, and more veritable aspects of life, in which the latter's will expresses itself most clearly.
To this end, we must also value that aspect of existence which alone has been affirmed until now; we must understand whence this valuation arises, and to how slight an extent it has to do with a Dionysian valuation of Life: I selected and understood that which in this respect says "yea" (on the one hand, the instinct of the sufferer; on the other, the gregarious instinct; and thirdly, the instinct of the greater number against the exceptions).
Thus I divined to what extent a stronger kind of man must necessarily imagine—the elevation and enhancement of man in another direction: higher creatures, beyond good and evil, beyond those values which bear the stamp of their origin in the sphere of suffering, of the herd, and of the greater number—I searched for the data of this topsy-turvy formation of ideals in history (the concepts "pagan," "classical," "noble," have been discovered afresh and brought forward).
1042.