t: an immense and
wonderful task, in the carrying out of which all refined pride, all
tenacious will, can surely find satisfaction. THE REAL PHILOSOPHERS,
HOWEVER, ARE COMMANDERS AND LAW-GIVERS; they say: "Thus SHALL it be!"
They determine first the Whither and the Why of mankind, and thereby
set aside the previous labour of all philosophical workers, and all
subjugators of the past--they grasp at the future with a creative
hand, and whatever is and was, becomes for them thereby a means, an
instrument, and a hammer. Their "knowing" is CREATING, their creating
is a law-giving, their will to truth is--WILL TO POWER.--Are there at
present such philosophers? Have there ever been such philosophers? MUST
there not be such philosophers some day? ...

212. It is always more obvious to me that the philosopher, as a man
INDISPENSABLE for the morrow and the day after the morrow, has ever
found himself, and HAS BEEN OBLIGED to find himself, in contradiction
to the day in which he lives; his enemy has always been the ideal of his
day. Hitherto all those extraordinary furtherers of humanity whom one
calls philosophers--who rarely regarded themselves as lovers of wisdom,
but rather as disagreeable fools and dangerous interrogators--have found
their mission, their hard, involuntary, imperative mission (in the end,
however, the greatness of their mission), in being the bad conscience of
their age. In putting the vivisector's knife to the breast of the very
VIRTUES OF THEIR AGE, they have betrayed their own secret; it has been
for the sake of a NEW greatness of man, a new untrodden path to
his aggrandizement. They have always disclosed how much hypocrisy,
indolence, self-indulgence, and self-neglect, how much falsehood was
concealed under the most venerated types of contemporary morality, how
much virtue was OUTLIVED, they have always said "We must remove hence to
where YOU are least at home" In the face of a world of "modern ideas,"
which would like to confine every 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 virt