Like a dimmed lighthouse

I’ll hide

~

till the world turns away

and sees it’s reflection

drifting

nearby

The gay science, 346 Our question mark. – But you do not understand this? lndeed, people will have trouble understanding us. We are searching for words, perhaps also for ears. Who are we anyway? lf we simply called ourselves godless (to use an old expression), or unbelievers, or even immoralists, we would not think that these words came near to describing us: we are all three of them, at too advanced a stage for anyone to comprehend – for you to comprehend, my curious gentlemen -how it feels. No! No longer with the bitterness and passion of the one who has torn himself away and must turn his unbelief into another faith, a goal, a martyrdom! We have become hard-boiled, cold, and tough in the realization that the way of the world is not at all divine – even by human standards it is not rational, merciful, or just. We know it: the world we live in is ungodly, immoral, ‘inhuman’; for far too long we have interpreted it falsely and mendaciously, though according to our wish and will for veneration, that is, according to a need. For man is a venerating animal! But he is also a mistrustful one; and that the world is not worth what we thought is about the most certain thing our mistrust has finally gotten hold of. The more mistrust, the more philosophy. We take care not to claim that the world is worth less; indeed, it would seem laughable to us today if man were to aim at inventing values that were supposed to surpass the value of the real world. That is exactly what we have turned away from, as from an extravagant aberration of human vanity and unreason that for long was not recognized as such. It found its final expression in modem pessimism, and an older and stronger expression in the teaching of Buddha; but also Christianity includes it, more doubtfully and ambiguously, to be sure, but not for that reason less seductively. The whole attitude of ‘man against the world’, of man as a ‘world-negating’ principle, of man as the measure of the value of things, as judge of the world who finally places existence itself on his scales and finds it too light – the monstrous stupidity of this attitude has finally dawned on us and we are sick of it; we laugh we soon as we encounter the juxtaposition of ‘man and world’, separated by the sublime presumptuousness of the little word ‘and!’ But by laughing, haven’t we simply taken contempt for man one step further? And thus also pessimism, the contempt for that existence which is knowable to us? Have we not exposed ourselves to the suspicion of an opposition – an opposition between the world in which until now we were at home with our venerations – and which may have made it possible for us to endure life – and another world that we ourselves are: a relentless, fundamental, deepest suspicion concerning ourselves that is steadily gaining more and worse control over us Europeans and that could easily confront coming generations with the terrible Either/Or: ‘Either abolish your venerations or – yourselves!’ The latter would be nihilism; but would not the former also be – nihilism? That is our question mark.

Friedrich Nietzsche