BEHOLD THE MAN original: "ECCE HOMO"

HOW ONE BECOMES – WHAT ONE IS

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PREFACE

IN ANTICIPATION THAT I MUST SHORTLY APPROACH humanity with the heaviest demand ever made upon it, it seems indispensable to me to say who I am. At bottom, one ought to know it: for I have not "left myself unwitnessed." But the disproportion between the greatness of my task and the littleness of my contemporaries has manifested itself in the fact that I have neither been heard nor even seen. I live on my own credit; is it perhaps merely a prejudice that I live? . . . I need only speak to any "educated" person who comes to the Upper Engadine in the summer to convince myself that I do not live . . . Under these circumstances, there is a duty against which my habit, and even more the pride of my instincts, revolts: namely, to say: Hear me! For I am such and such. Above all, do not confuse me with anyone else!

I am, for instance, by no means a bogeyman, no monster of morality — I am even a nature in opposition to the kind of person whom one has hitherto revered as virtuous. Between us, it seems to me that this belongs precisely to my pride.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Preface, Upper Engadine, bogeyman, monster of morality, nature in opposition