All these ways of thinking that measure pleasure and suffering, that is, certain accessory states, are primitive and naive ways of thinking, which anyone who feels in possession of creative forces and an artistic consciousness will look at with an air of contempt, but not without compassion. Your compassion, yes! But it is not compassion as you understand it, it is not compassion for social misery, for society, for its patients and its victims, for its addicts and those defeated from the beginning who lie in pieces around us, and even less compassion for hoards of slaves grumblers, oppressed and seditious, who aspire to the dominion they call 'freedom'. Our compassion is much higher; we see that man becomes smaller, that you diminish him! Moments in which we contemplate your compassion with indescribable anguish and avoid such compassion, moments in which we find your seriousness more dangerous than any other frivolity, you see, possibly - and there is no 'possibly' more stupid than this - the moment to suppress the Suffering? It even seems that there is a desire to reduce things to a more acute degree and to a worse outcome than they have been until now.
Well-being, as you understand it, does not represent an end, but, at least for us, the end! It means a state that ends up making man ridiculous and despicable — that makes him desire perdition. The school of pain, of great pain — don't you know that this school allowed man to achieve certain attitudes? That tension of the soul in misfortune, coming from one's own strength, the chills that run through one when witnessing a great ruin, the ingenuity, the bravery that is demonstrated in enduring, in persevering, in interpreting, in enjoying misfortune, all of this that soul gained in depth, secrecy, dissimulation, spirit, cunning, greatness, has it not perhaps been conquered under the sign of pain, in the school of great pain?
In man the creature and the creator are brought together, in man there is matter, that is, the incomplete, the superfluous, that is, the clay, the mud, the absurd, the chaos, but in man there is also the breath that creates , which shapes, that is, the hardness of the hammer, that is, the spectator, the divine contemplation of the seventh day. Observe the contrast between your compassion, which is the revolt of the 'creature within man', that is, that which must be molded, stamped, beaten like iron, refined, passed through fire and purified - that which must and is constrained to suffer, and our compassion? Can you not guess what our compassion rebels against, what rebels against yours, because yours represents the sum of all weakness? And then, compassion against compassion!
But, as we have already said, there are higher problems than those that have as their object pleasure and suffering and compassion and any philosophy that should deal exclusively with this would always be childish.
>Nietzsche, aphorism 225 from "Beyond Good and Evil"
