The Genealogy of Morals The Complete Works, Volume Thirteen, edited by Dr. Oscar Levy. · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
10.
There is in the same book, Aph. 12, an explanation of the _burden_ of unpopularity under which the earliest race of contemplative men had to live--despised almost as widely as they were first feared! Contemplation first appeared on earth in a disguised shape, in an ambiguous form, with an evil heart and often with an uneasy head: there is no doubt about it. The inactive, brooding, unwarlike element in the instincts of contemplative men long invested them with a cloud of suspicion: the only way to combat this was to excite a definite _fear_. And the old Brahmans, for example, knew to a nicety how to do this! The oldest philosophers were well versed in giving to their very existence and appearance, meaning, firmness, background, by reason whereof men learnt to _fear_ them; considered more precisely, they did this from an even more fundamental need, the need of inspiring in themselves fear and self-reverence. For they found even in their own souls all the valuations turned _against_ themselves; they had to fight down every kind of suspicion and antagonism against "the philosophic element in themselves."
Being men of a terrible age, they did this with terrible means: cruelty to themselves, ingenious self-mortification--this was the chief method of these ambitious hermits and intellectual revolutionaries, who were obliged to force down the gods and the traditions of their own soul, so as to enable themselves to _believe_ in their own revolution. I remember the famous story of the King Vicvamitra, who, as the result of a thousand years of self-martyrdom, reached such a consciousness of power and such a confidence in himself that he undertook to build a _new heaven_: the sinister symbol of the oldest and newest history of philosophy in the whole world. Every one who has ever built anywhere a "_new heaven_" first found the power thereto in his _own hell_.. .. Let us compress the facts into a short formula. The philosophic spirit had, in order to be _possible_ to any extent at all, to masquerade and disguise itself as one of the _previously fixed_ types of the contemplative man, to disguise itself as priest, wizard, soothsayer, as a religious man generally: the _ascetic ideal_ has for a long time served the philosopher as a superficial form, as a condition which enabled him to exist. .. .
To be able to be a philosopher he had to exemplify the ideal; to exemplify it, he was bound to _believe_ in it. The peculiarly etherealised abstraction of philosophers, with their negation of the world, their enmity to life, their disbelief in the senses, which has been maintained up to the most recent time, and has almost thereby come to be accepted as the ideal _philosophic attitude_--this abstraction is the result of those enforced conditions under which philosophy came into existence, and continued to exist; inasmuch as for quite a very long time philosophy would have been _absolutely impossible_ in the world without an ascetic cloak and dress, without an ascetic self-misunderstanding. Expressed plainly and palpably, the _ascetic priest_ has taken the repulsive and sinister form of the caterpillar, beneath which and behind which alone philosophy could live and slink about.. .. Has all that really changed? Has that flamboyant and dangerous winged creature, that "spirit" which that caterpillar concealed within itself, has it, I say, thanks to a sunnier, warmer, lighter world, really and finally flung off its hood and escaped into the light? Can we to-day point to enough pride, enough daring, enough courage, enough self-confidence, enough mental will, enough will for responsibility, enough freedom of the will, to enable the philosopher to be now in the world really--_possible_?
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