Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Schopenhauer as educatorone who disrupts their child's play in this way must be wicked. Theyare tempted to cry to such a man what Faust said to Mephistopheles:'So to the eternal active and creative power you oppose the cold handof the Devil'; ' and he who would live according to Schopenhauerwould probably seem more like a Mephistopheles than · a Faust -s,eem, that is, to purblind modern eyes, which always see in denialthe mark of evil. But there is a kind of denying and destroying that isthe discharge of that mighty longing fo r sanctification and salvationand as the first philosophical teacher of which Schopenhauer cameamong us desanctified and truly secularized men. All that exists thatcan be denied deserves to be denied; and being truthful means: tobelieve in an existence that can in no way be denied and which isitself true and without fal sehood. That is why the truthful man feelsthat the meaning of his activity is metaphysical, explicable throughthe laws of another and higher life, and in the profoundest senseaffirmative: however much all that he does may appear to be destructiveof the laws of this life and a crime against them. So it is thatall his acts must become an uninterrupted suffering; but he knowswhat Meister Eckhart also knows: 'The beast that bears you fastest toperfection is suffering.' I would think that anyone who st such alife's course before his soul must feel his heart open and a fiercedesire arise within him to be such a Schopenhauerean man: that is tosay, strangely composed about himself and his own welfare, in hisknowledge full of blazing, consuming fire and far removed from thecold and contemptible neutrality of the so-called scientific man,exalted high above all sullen and ill-humoured reflection, alwaysoffering himself as the first sacrifice to perceived truth and permeatedwith the awareness of what sufferings must spring from histruthfulness. He will, to be sure, destroy his earthly happinessthrough his courage; he will have to be an enemy to those he lovesand to the institutions which have produced him; he may not sparemen or things, even though he suffers when they suffer; he will bemisunderstood and for long thought an ally of powers he abhors;however much he may strive after justice he is bound, according tothe human limitations of his insight, to be unjust: but he may consolehimself with the words once employed by his great teacher,Schopenhauer: 'A happy life is impossible: the highest that man canattain to is a heroic one. He leads it who, in whatever shape or form,struggles against great diffi culties for something that is to the benefitC ln Fa ust, Part I Scene 3.153