Nietzsche opens the chapter with a laugh at all of us. "O sancta simplicitas," he writes: holy simplicity. People make the world clear, easy, and simple, and that comfort rests on a will not to know. Then the tone turns serious. He warns philosophers against suffering "for the truth's sake." A martyr grows stubborn, theatrical, and deaf to objections, so the role spoils the very honesty it claims to defend. Better, he says, to keep a citadel of privacy, and to accept that a quick mind will be misread by slower ones. Even translation fails him here. What gets lost between languages is the tempo of a style, and German, he complains, cannot move at the fast, malicious pace of Aristophanes or Petronius.
Independence, he goes on, is the business of the very few. Whoever tries it enters a labyrinth with no witness and no road back, and if he is lost there, nobody will see how it happened. Deep insights sound like folly, even like crime, when they reach the wrong ears. Youth, he adds, loves and hates without nuance, and only later learns to distrust its own taste for the unconditional. He then sketches a short history of moral judgement. For most of history an act was judged by its results. Later it was judged by its intention. Now, he suggests, intention itself looks like a surface, and a third stage is starting, one he calls extra-moral. Self-sacrifice and the sweet feelings of living "for others" are no longer exempt from questions.
The hinge comes in the middle. Everything we think, he says, sits inside a perspective, and there is no clean view from nowhere. Suppose nothing is given to us except our drives and passions. Could the world, seen from inside, be will to power and nothing else? He offers the idea as an experiment, not a creed. He also warns how easily a text disappears under its interpretation, as the French Revolution did for the admirers who watched it from far away. Happiness and virtue, he adds, are no arguments. A true thing may hurt, and the strength of a mind may be measured by how much truth it can stand.
Then come the masks. "Everything that is profound loves the mask," because depth needs shelter from rough handling. A free spirit must test himself in private: no clinging to a person, a fatherland, pity, a science, or even his own virtues. Nietzsche names the coming philosophers attempters. They will love truth, but they will not be dogmatists. "My opinion is MY opinion," one of them says, and nobody else has an easy right to it. So the free spirit cannot be the modern leveller who wants comfort and equal pasture for everyone. Nietzsche claims the name for himself and his readers, then says the philosophers of the future will be something more. He does not yet say what.
