Beyond Good and Evil 207
However gratefully one may go to welcome an objective spirit — and who has not been sick to death of everything subjective and its accursed ipsissimosity! — in the end one has to learn to be cautious with one’s gratitude too and put a stop to the exaggerated way in which the depersonalization of the spirit is today celebrated as redemption and transfiguration, as if it were the end in itself: as is usually the case within the pessimist school, which also has good reason to accord the highest honours to ‘disinterested knowledge’. The objective man who no longer scolds or curses as the pessimist does, the ideal scholar in whom the scientific instinct, after thousandfold total and partial failure, for once comes to full bloom, is certainly one of the most precious instruments there are: but he belongs in the hand of one who is mightier. He is only an instrument, let us say a mirror — he is not an ‘end in himself’.
And the objective man is in fact a mirror: accustomed to submitting to whatever wants to be known, lacking any other pleasure than that provided by knowledge, by ‘mirroring’ — he waits until something comes along and then gently spreads himself out, so that not even the lightest footsteps and the fluttering of ghostly being shall be lost on his surface and skin. Whatever still remains to him of his ‘own person’ seems to him accidental, often capricious, more often disturbing: so completely has he become a passage and reflection of forms and events not his own. He finds it an effort to think about ‘himself’, and not infrequently he thinks about himself mistakenly; he can easily confused himself with another, he fails to understand his own needs and is in this respect alone unsubtle and negligent.
Perhaps he is troubled by his health or by the pettiness and stuffiness of his wife and friends, or by a lack of companions and company — yes, he forces himself to reflect on his troubles: but in vain! Already his thoughts are roaming, off to a more general case, and tomorrow he will know as little how to help himself as he did yesterday. He no longer knows how to take himself seriously, nor does he have the time for it: he is cheerful, not because he has no troubles but because he has no fingers and facility for dealing with his troubles.
His habitual going out to welcome everything and every experience, the sunny and ingenuous hospitality with which he accepts all he encounters, his inconsiderate benevolence, his perilous unconcernedness over Yes and No: alas, how often he has to suffer for these his virtues! — and as a human being in general he can all too easily become the caput mortuum of these virtues. If love and hatred are demanded of him, I mean love and hatred as God, woman and animal understand them —: he will do what he can and give what he can. But one ought not to be surprised if it is not very much — if he proves spurious, brittle, questionable and soft. His love and his hatred are artificial and more of a tour de force, a piece of vanity and exaggeration. For he is genuine only when he can be objective: only in his cheerful totalism can he remain ‘nature’ and ‘natural’.
His mirroring soul, for ever polishing itself, no longer knows how to affirm or how to deny; he does not command, neither does he destroy. ‘Je ne meprise presque rien’ — he sais with Liebniz: one should not overlook or underestimate the presque! Nor is he an exemplar; he neither leads nor follows; he sets himself altogether too far off to have any reason to take sides between good and evil.
When he was for so long confused with the philosopher, with the Caesarian cultivator and Gewaltmensch of culture, he was done much too great honour and what is essential in him was overlooked — he is an instrument, something of a slave, if certainly the sublimest kind of slave, but in himself he is nothing — presque rien!
The objective man is an instrument, a precious, easily damaged and tarnished measuring instrument and reflecting apparatus which ought to be respected and taken good care of; but he is not an end, a termination and ascent, a complementary man in whom the rest of existence is justified, a conclusion — and even less a beginning, a begetting and first cause, something solid, powerful and based firmly on itself that wants to be master: but rather only a delicate, empty, elegant, flexible mould which has first to wait for some content so as ‘to form’ itself by it — as a rule a man without content, a ‘selfless’ man. Consequently nothing for women either, in parenthesis. —