The Great Health

[adventurer]

A visionary piece from Nietzsche, The Gay Science:

The great health.— Being new, nameless, hard to understand, we premature births of an as yet unproven future need for a new goal also a new means—namely, a new health, stronger, more seasoned, tougher, more audacious, and gayer than any previous health. Whoever has a soul that craves to have experienced the whole range of values and desiderata to date, and to I have sailed around all the coasts of this ideal "mediterranean"; j whoever wants to know from the adventures of his own most j authentic experience how a discoverer and conqueror of the j ideal feels, and also an artist, a saint, a legislator, a sage, a scholar, a pious man, a soothsayer,156 and one who stands divinely apart in the old style—needs one thing above every- j thing else: the great health—that one does not merely have but also acquires continually, and must acquire because one gives it up again and again, and must give it up.



And now, after we have long been on our way in this manner, we argonauts of the ideal, with more daring perhaps than is j prudent, and have suffered shipwreck and damage often enough, but are, to repeat it, healthier than one likes to permit us, i dangerously healthy, ever again healthy—it will seem to us as if, as a reward, we now confronted an as yet undiscovered country whose boundaries nobody has surveyed yet, something beyond all the lands and nooks of the ideal so far, a world so | overrich in what is beautiful, strange, questionable, terrible, and divine that our curiosity as well as our craving to possess it has got beside itself—alas, now nothing will sate us any more!



After such vistas and with such a burning hunger in our conscience and science,157 how could we still be satisfied with present-day man? It may be too bad but it is inevitable that we find it difficult to remain serious when we look at his worthiest goals and hopes, and perhaps we do not even bother to look any more.



Another ideal runs ahead of us, a strange, tempting, dangerous ideal to which we should not wish to persuade anybody because we do not readily concede the right to it to anyone: the ideal of a spirit who plays naively—that is, not deliberately but from overflowing power and abundance—with all that was hitherto called holy, good, untouchable, divine; for whom those supreme things that the people naturally accept as their value standards, signify danger, decay, debasement, or at least recreation, blindness, and temporary self-oblivion; the ideal of a human, superhuman well-being and benevolence158 that will often appear inhuman—for example, when it confronts all earthly seriousness so far, all solemnity in gesture, word, tone, eye, morality, and task so far, as if it were their most incarnate and involuntary parody—and in spite of all of this, it is perhaps only with him that great seriousness really begins, that the real question mark is posed for the first time, that the destiny of the soul changes, the hand moves forward, the tragedy begins.