Page 144 - beyond-good-and-evil

ery one in a corner, in a ‘specialty,’ a philosopher, if there
could be philosophers nowadays, would be compelled to
place the greatness of man, the conception of ‘greatness,’
precisely in his comprehensiveness and multifariousness,
in his all-roundness, he would even determine worth and
rank according to the amount and variety of that which a
man could bear and take upon himself, according to the
EXTENT to which a man could stretch his responsibility
Nowadays the taste and virtue of the age weaken and atten-
uate the will, nothing is so adapted to the spirit of the age as
weakness of will consequently, in the ideal of the philoso-
pher, strength of will, sternness, and capacity for prolonged
resolution, must specially be included in the conception
of ‘greatness’, with as good a right as the opposite doctrine,
with its ideal of a silly, renouncing, humble, selfless human-
ity, was suited to an opposite age—such as the sixteenth
century, which suffered from its accumulated energy of will,
and from the wildest torrents and floods of selfishness In
the time of Socrates, among men only of worn-out instincts,
old conservative Athenians who let themselves go—‘for the
sake of happiness,’ as they said, for the sake of pleasure, as
their conduct indicated—and who had continually on their
lips the old pompous words to which they had long forfeited
the right by the life they led, IRONY was perhaps necessary
for greatness of soul, the wicked Socratic assurance of the
old physician and plebeian, who cut ruthlessly into his own
flesh, as into the flesh and heart of the ‘noble,’ with a look
that said plainly enough ‘Do not dissemble before me! here—
we are equal!’ At present, on the contrary, when throughout

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