Corpus · The Gay Science · Full-text route

German Tones and the Fool’s Cap

Optional full-text route · Station 12 of 35

Read: Book II, §§104–107, in full, from the original 1882 edition. Begin at §104 and read to the end of Book II. Stop before the heading of Book III.
Allow: About 45–65 minutes, including the passages, this guide, rereading, and a short written response. This is an editorial estimate, not a measured reading time. The four sections total about 1,600 words in the free edition; §104 is the longest.

Preferred translation: Walter Kaufmann. Free alternative (Thomas Common, The Joyful Wisdom): begin at §104 · §106 · §107.

Quotations on this page follow Common’s free translation, including his section titles. Kaufmann’s wording differs, and none of it is quoted here; this lesson has not been compared with Kaufmann’s text. Where a word drives the interpretation, this page notes the German, from the Projekt Gutenberg-DE text.

Before you read

Station 11 heard the Revolution in German music. These four sections close Book II. §104 listens to the German language itself and hears something new in it. §105 watches Germans in passion. §106 is a dialogue about music as a means of persuasion. §107, the book’s thanks to art, ends Book II.

§107 is the first assignment of Reading 2, which gives it a full close reading. This station reads it as the end of a sequence: it comes directly after Book II’s long series of warnings about art’s seductions.

The main question: Why might an honest investigator still need art—after Book II has shown so many ways that art seduces?

Keep using the marks: P, H, V, and ? for Nietzsche’s own hedge only. §104 hedges some of its claims and states others as certain; let the marks follow its wording.

What to notice

1. Tone and character. §104 claims that the tone people adopt reaches their words and finally their thoughts. Test it against your own speech.
2. Who speaks in §106? The innovator and the disciple disagree. Do not assign the innovator’s view to Nietzsche automatically.
3. The last sentence of Book II. Whom does it address, and what does it ask them to stop feeling?

Close reading

The tone of the German language

§104 tells a history in two stages. First, the Germans, “with their reverence for everything that came from the court,” took the chancery style as their model in writing, then spoke as they wrote, “and the affectation at last became natural.” “Perhaps nothing quite similar has ever happened elsewhere” (German Vielleicht): mark it H and ?. The next claim is hedged differently. The speaker introduces it with “I believe” (Ich glaube): that the sound of German “in the Middle Ages, and especially after the Middle Ages, was extremely rustic and vulgar.” Mark it H and ? as well.

Second, a new tone is spreading. “Something mocking, cold, indifferent, and careless in the voice: that is what at present sounds ‘noble’ to the Germans.” The speaker hears it in officials, teachers, women, and trades-people, and even in “little girls.” Its inventor is “the Prussian officer,” modest in his profession but “the most immodest and inelegant figure in old Europe” when he speaks. The drill-grounds at the city gates are full of “presumption, furious imperiousness, and mocking coldness.” Then the section asks: “Could the Germans actually be a musical people?” §104, a musical people?

The key claim is general: “habituation to definite tones extends deeply into the character:—people soon have the words and modes of expression, and finally also the thoughts which just suit these tones!” Mark it P. It is a psychological hypothesis you can test. Around it, the section moves between certainty and hedging. It states flatly that “the Germans martialise themselves at present in the tone of their language” (“It is certain,” German Sicher ist): no ? there. It is only “probable” that Germans trained to speak martially will write martially (German wahrscheinlich), and “Perhaps they already write in the officers’ style; perhaps I only read too little” (Vielleicht … vielleicht). Mark those ?. Then it returns to certainty: “But one thing I know all the surer.” The ? belongs only where one of these words hedges a claim, not to the section’s tone as a whole.

The section ends with politics. The German public declarations heard abroad are inspired not by German music but by “that new tone of tasteless arrogance,” audible “in every speech of the foremost German statesman,” even when he speaks through “his imperial mouth-piece.” The section names no one. In 1882 the phrase most naturally points to the Reich chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, and the mouth-piece to speeches made in the emperor’s name; that identification is this guide’s inference. The last words are: “but the Germans endure it,—they endure themselves.” Mark it V: a writer’s criticism of the political culture of the new German Reich, made in its early years. §104, the statesman’s tone

Germans in passion

§105 says that a German in real passion behaves “very awkwardly and uglily, and as if destitute of rhythm and melody”—unless he rises to the sublimity some passions allow. “Then even the German becomes beautiful.” German artists long “to get beyond, or at least to look beyond the ugliness and awkwardness—into a better, easier, more southern, more sunny world.” Their convulsions are signs that “they would like to dance”: “these poor bears in whom hidden nymphs and satyrs, and sometimes still higher divinities, carry on their game!” §105, the poor bears

Mark it P and V. It is a national generalization, and a comic one. Compare station 9’s §77, which set southern and northern taste against each other. The image of dance will return; keep it in view.

Music as advocate

§106 is a dialogue. An innovator wants a master of music to spread his ideas, “For by means of tones one can seduce men to every error and every truth: who could refute a tone?” The disciple asks whether he wants to be thought irrefutable. The innovator answers with an image: a doctrine becomes a tree only if it is believed for a long time, and it is believed only if thought irrefutable; storms and doubts test it, and a weak germ should perish. “But a germ is always merely annihilated,—not refuted!” §106, who could refute a tone?

The disciple replies that he believes in the cause so strongly that he “will say everything against it.” The innovator laughs, threatens him with a finger, and says: “This kind of discipleship … is the best, but it is dangerous, and not every kind of doctrine can stand it.” §106, the best discipleship

Put §106 beside station 11’s §99, where Wagner’s life calls, “do not follow me—but thyself!”, and beside station 9’s §84, where rhythm made thoughts seem truer. The innovator wants music’s power precisely because a tone cannot be argued with. The disciple offers the opposite: belief tested by objection. The section lets the innovator praise the disciple, and leaves open which kind of doctrine this book is.

Our ultimate gratitude

Now read §107 as the end of this sequence. Book II has shown art flattering the valuers (§85), drugging tired audiences (§86), making thoughts seem truer by rhythm (§84), and seducing “to every error and every truth” (§106). Only then does the book give thanks. Without art, the insight science now gives, “into delusion and error as conditions of intelligent and sentient existence,” would be “quite unendurable”: honesty “would have disgust and suicide in its train.” Art is its counterpoise, “Art, as the good-will to illusion.” §107, the good-will to illusion

Two points of wording. The German for “honesty” here is Redlichkeit, intellectual integrity; the word returns at the next station, in §114. And “illusion” translates Schein, which also means appearance, as in §54’s account of appearance. The good will is to appearance knowingly accepted, not to a lie told to others.

§107 also says: “As an æsthetic phenomenon existence is still endurable to us.” Compare The Birth of Tragedy §§5 and 24, where existence is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon. In 1882 the claim is more modest: existence is still endurable. Do not decide yet whether that is a retreat or a correction.

What is new on this route is the ending. We need “the fool’s cap and bells,” and all “soaring, dancing, mocking, childish and blessed Art,” to keep “the free dominion over things” and to avoid becoming “virtuous monsters and scarecrows.” §105’s poor bears wanted to dance; §107 asks the knower to. The last sentence addresses a “you”: “And as long as you are still ashamed of yourselves in any way, you still do not belong to us!” Book III will end on the same theme, with §275: “To be no longer ashamed of oneself” (station 19). §107, the last sentence of Book II

A difficulty

Can the same book distrust art’s persuasion and thank art for illusion?

§104 hears arrogance entering character through a tone. §106’s innovator wants music because no one can refute a tone. §84 warned that rhythm makes a thought seem truer. Yet §107 calls art “the good-will to illusion” and says honesty could not survive without it.

One answer is that the difference is direction. The art Book II distrusts works on others, to persuade or to drug; the art §107 praises is turned on ourselves, so that we can look down on, laugh at, and weep over our own seriousness. Another is that the line cannot be drawn so cleanly: the knower who rounds off and perfects “in imagination” is also persuading himself.

Decide which reading the text better supports. Name one sentence from §107 and one from §§104–106.

Check your understanding

Try answering before opening each suggested response.

Writing prompt

Write 200–250 words answering:

Is §107’s “good-will to illusion” consistent with the rest of Book II’s criticism of art?

• Quote no more than two short phrases.
• Use §106 or §104 as the test case.
• Say whether the “illusion” §107 praises is one we impose on others or one we knowingly accept for ourselves.

A successful response states §107’s claim accurately, uses the German Schein or the idea of appearance with care, and does not make §107 a general licence to deceive.

Continue

End of Book II.

Optional checkpoint: you have now read both sections of Reading 2 (§§54 and 107). Its full close reading of them is a useful review. Reading 2 belongs to the ten-session introduction, so its own Next link leads to Reading 3, not back to this route. Return here afterward.

Continue to station 13: God’s Shadows, Useful Errors, and the Herd →

Read next: Book III, §§108–116. Its question: what persists after a belief dies, and where do standards arise?

Previous station: station 11, §§99–103. Return to the route list in the book guide.

A reading guide from Reading Nietzsche · Revised September 27, 2026.

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