Part 4 — Epigrams and Interludes

Part 4 strips the prose away and gives the method in its most concentrated form: one hundred and twenty-five numbered sections, the majority a single sentence. Nietzsche is working here at the level of the crystallized observation — the thought compressed to the point at which expansion is the reader's work, not the author's. "He who is a thorough teacher takes things seriously — even himself — only in relation to his pupils." "Knowledge for its own sake — that is the last snare laid by morality: we are thereby completely entangled in morals once more." "The charm of knowledge would be small, were it not that so much shame has to be overcome on the way to it."

Several of the most-quoted lines in Nietzsche's entire body of work appear in this section. "Love of one person only is a barbarity, for it is exercised at the expense of all others. Love of God also!" is a compressed argument against the moral sentimentalization of exclusivity that most commentators take paragraphs to make. "One is punished most for one's virtues" rewards a slow reading: Nietzsche means not that virtue brings social penalty (though it often does) but that what we call virtues are the very things that most reliably get us into trouble with ourselves.

The part is also a test of the reader's patience and attention. Some sections seem merely clever; they reward a return. "There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness." The line has been excerpted ten thousand times. In context it is doing something specific: Nietzsche is making a point about the inseparability of Apollonian and Dionysian drives, the impossibility of pure reason and pure unreason as categories. Reading Part 4 as a collection of quotations is reading it wrong. Reading it as a sequence — as a movement through psychological states — is reading it as Nietzsche intended.