" Whether it be hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism, or eudaemonism, all those modes of thinking which measure the worth of things according to PLEASURE and PAIN, that is, according to accompanying circumstances and secondary considerations, are plausible modes of thought and naivetes, which every one conscious of CREATIVE powers and an artist's conscience will look down upon with scorn, though not without sympathy. Sympathy for you! - to be sure, that is not sympathy as you understand it: it is not sympathy for social "distress," for "society" with its sick and misfortuned, for the hereditarily vicious and defective who lie on the ground around us; still less is it sympathy for the grumbling, vexed, revolutionary slave-classes who strive after power - they call it "freedom." OUR sympathy is a loftier and further-sighted sympathy: - we see how MAN dwarfs himself, how YOU dwarf him! and there are moments when we view YOUR sympathy with an indescribable anguish, when we resist it, - when we regard your seriousness as more dangerous than any kind of levity. You want, if possible - and there is not a more foolish "if possible" - TO DO AWAY WITH SUFFERING; and we? - it really seems that WE would rather have it increased and made worse than it has ever been! Well-being, as you understand it - is certainly not a goal; it seems to us an END; a condition which at once renders man ludicrous and contemptible - and makes his destruction DESIRABLE! The discipline of suffering, of great suffering - do you not know that it is this discipline alone that has produced all the elevations of humanity so far? The tension of soul in misfortune which communicates to it its energy, its shuddering in view of rack and ruin, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpreting, and exploiting misfortune, and whatever depth, mystery, disguise, spirit, artifice, or greatness has been bestowed upon the soul - has it not been bestowed through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?"
Frederich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil
Chapter 7
Frederich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil
Chapter 7
