Page 165 - beyond-good-and-evil

slain at all, it lives, it flourishes, it has only been— transfig-
ured. That which constitutes the painful delight of tragedy
is cruelty; that which operates agreeably in so-called tragic
sympathy, and at the basis even of everything sublime, up
to the highest and most delicate thrills of metaphysics, ob-
tains its sweetness solely from the intermingled ingredient
of cruelty. What the Roman enjoys in the arena, the Chris-
tian in the ecstasies of the cross, the Spaniard at the sight
of the faggot and stake, or of the bull-fight, the present-day
Japanese who presses his way to the tragedy, the workman
of the Parisian suburbs who has a homesickness for bloody
revolutions, the Wagnerienne who, with unhinged will, ‘un-
dergoes’ the performance of ‘Tristan and Isolde’—what all
these enjoy, and strive with mysterious ardour to drink in,
is the philtre of the great Circe ‘cruelty.’ Here, to be sure, we
must put aside entirely the blundering psychology of former
times, which could only teach with regard to cruelty that it
originated at the sight of the suffering of OTHERS: there is
an abundant, super-abundant enjoyment even in one’s own
suffering, in causing one’s own suffering—and wherever
man has allowed himself to be persuaded to self-denial in
the RELIGIOUS sense, or to self-mutilation, as among the
Phoenicians and ascetics, or in general, to desensualisation,
decarnalisation, and contrition, to Puritanical repentance-
spasms, to vivisection of conscience and to Pascal- like
SACRIFIZIA DELL’ INTELLETO, he is secretly allured and
impelled forwards by his cruelty, by the dangerous thrill
of cruelty TOWARDS HIMSELF.—Finally, let us consider
that even the seeker of knowledge operates as an artist and

1 Beyond Good and Evil