literary transcript

 

 

Friedrich Nietzsche's

TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS

or How to Philosophize with a Hammer

 

 

Translated, with commentary, by R.J. Hollingdale

 

______________________

 

 

Foreword

 

To stay cheerful when involved in a gloomy and exceedingly responsible business is no inconsiderable art: yet what could be more necessary than cheerfulness?  Nothing succeeds in which high spirits play no part.  Only excess of strength is proof of strength. - A revaluation of all values, this question-mark so black, so huge it casts a shadow over him who sets it up - such a destiny of a task compels one every instant to run out into the sunshine so as to shake off a seriousness grown all too oppressive.  Every expedient for doing so is justified, every 'occasion' a joyful occasion. ['jeder "Fall" ein Glucksfall'.  'Fall' means case, 'Glucksfall' a piece of good luck.  As well as being a play on words there seems to be a reference intended to 'Der Fall Wagner' (The Wagner Case), Nietzsche's witty attack on Wagner completed immediately before 'Twilight' was begun and which was also announced, ironically of course, as a 'relief' from a sterner task.]  Above all, war.  War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.  A maxim whose origin I withhold from learned curiosity has long been my motto:

 

                       increscunt animi, virescit volnere virtus. [The spirit grows, strength is restored by wounding.]

 

      Another form of recovery, in certain cases even more suited to me, is to sound out idols.... There are more idols in the world than there are realities: that is my 'evil eye' for the world, that is also my 'evil ear'.... For once to pose questions here with a hammer and perhaps to receive for answer that famous hollow sound which speaks of inflated bowels - what a delight for one who has ears behind his ears - for an old psychologist and pied piper like me, in presence of whom precisely that which would like to stay silent has to become audible ...

      This book too [Like 'The Wagner Case', presumably.] - the title betrays it - is above all a relaxation, a sunspot, an escapade into the idle hours of a psychologist.  Perhaps also a new war?  And are new idols sounded out? ... this little book is a grand declaration of war; and as regards the sounding-out of idols, this time they are not idols of the age but eternal idols which are here touched with the hammer as with a tuning fork - there are no more ancient idols in existence.... Also none more hollow.... That does not prevent their being the most believed in; and they are not, especially in the most eminent case, called idols ...

 

                                            FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Turin, 30 September 1888

on the day the first book of the

Revaluation of all Values was completed.

 

____________________

 

 

Maxims and Arrows

 

      1.  Idleness is the beginning of all psychology.  What? could psychology be - a vice?

 

      2.  Even the bravest of us rarely has the courage for what he really knows ...

 

      3.  To live alone one must be an animal or a god - says Aristotle.  There is yet a third case: one must be both - a philosopher.

 

      4.  'All truth is simple.' - Is this not a compound lie? -

 

      5.  Once and for all, there is a great deal I do not want to know. - Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge.

 

      6.  It is by being 'natural' that one best recovers from one's unnaturalness, from one's spirituality ...

 

      7.  Which is it? is man only God's mistake or God only man's mistake? -

 

      8.  From the military school of life. - What does not kill me makes me stronger.

 

      9.  Help thyself: then everyone will help thee too.  Principle of Christian charity.

 

      10.  Let us not be cowardly in face of our actions!  Let us not afterwards leave them in the lurch! - Remorse of conscience is indecent.

 

      11.  Can an ass be tragic? - To be crushed by a burden one can neither bear nor throw off? ... The case of the philosopher.

 

      12.  If we possess our why of life we can put up with almost any how. - Man does not strive after happiness; only the Englishman does that.

 

      13.  Man created woman - but what out of?  Out of a rib of his God, of his 'ideal' ...

 

      14.  What? you are seeking? you want to multiply yourself by ten, by a hundred? you are seeking followers? - Seek noughts! ['Suche Nullen!'  "Nullen" means nobodies, ciphers, as well as noughts - 'Seek nobodies!'  The aphorism is a pun: 'If you want to multiply yourself by 100 (have followers) get noughts (nobodies) behind you!]

 

      15.  Posthumous men - like me, for instance - are not so well understood as timely ['zeitgamasse'.  Nietzsche's conception of himself as 'unzeitgamass' (untimely, inopportune, independent of the age) is reflected in the chapter title 'Expeditions of an Untimely Man' ('Streifzuge eines Unzeitgemassen'), which itself refers back to 'Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen' (Untimely Meditations), the collective title of the four essays published 1873-6 and intended for others left incomplete.] men, but they are listened to better.  More precisely: we are never understood - and hence our authority ...

 

      16.  Among women. - 'Truth? Oh, you don't know the truth, do you!  Is it not an outrage on all our pudeurs?' -

 

      17.  This is an artist as an artist should be, modest in his requirements: there are only two things he really wants, his bread and his art - panem et Circen ... [bread and 'Circe', in place of 'panem et circenses' = bread and circuses.]

 

      18.  He who does not know how to put his will into things at least puts a meaning into them: that is, he believes there is a will in them already (principle of 'belief').

 

      19.  What? you have chosen virtue and the heaving bosom, yet at the same time look with envy on the advantages enjoyed by those who live for the day? - But with virtue one renounces 'advantage' ... (laid at the door of an anti-Semite).

 

      20.  The complete woman perpetrates literature in the same way as she perpetrates a little sin: as an experiment, in passing, looking around to see if someone notices and so that someone may notice ...

 

      21.  To get into only those situations in which illusory virtues are of no use, but in which, like the tightrope-walker on his rope, one either falls or stands - or gets off ...

 

      22.  'Bad men have no songs'. [Refers to a popular adage deriving from Johann Gottfried Seume's poem 'Die Gesange'.] - How is it the Russians have songs?

 

      23.  'German spirit': ['Geist'.  All the meanings contained in this word cannot be conveyed in a single English word: what is meant is spirit, mind, intellect, intelligence.  I have translated it as 'spirit', 'spiritual' when the most inclusive sense seems indicated, as 'intellect', 'intellectual' when this seems more appropriate.] for eighteen years [i.e. since the establishment of the 'Reich'.] a contradictio in adjecto. [contradiction in terms.]

 

      24.  In order to look for beginnings one becomes a crab.  The historian looks backwards; at last he also believes backwards.

 

      25.  Contentment protects one even from catching a cold.  Has a woman who knew she was well dressed every caught a cold? - I am assuming she was hardly dressed at all.

 

      26.  I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them.  The will to a system is a lack of integrity.

 

      27.  Women are considered deep - why? because one can never discover any bottom to them.  Women are not even shallow.

 

      28.  If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her; and if she does not possess them she runs away herself.

 

      29.  'How much the conscience formerly had to bite on! ['Gewisensbisse' (conscience-bites) is the ordinary term for pangs of conscience.] what good teeth it had! - And today? what's the trouble?' - A dentist's question.

 

      30.  One seldom commits only one rash act.  In the first rash act one always does too much.  For just that reason one usually commits a second - and then one does too little ...

 

      31.  When it is trodden on a worm will curl up. ['Der getretene Wurm krummt sich' plays upon the German equivalent of 'Even a worm will turn'.] That is prudent.  It thereby reduces the chance of being trodden on again.  In the language of morals: humility. -

 

      32.  Hatred of lies and dissembling may arise out of a sensitive notion of honour; the same hatred may arise out of cowardice, in as much as lying is forbidden by divine command.  Too cowardly to tell lies ...

 

      33.  How little is needed for happiness!  The note of a bagpipe. - Without music life would be a mistake.  The German even thinks of God as singing songs. [Refers to the traditional misreading of a line in Ernst Moritz Arndt's patriottic song 'Des deutschen Vaterland': "So weit die deutsche Zunge klingt, Und Gott in Himmel Lieder singt".  "Gott" is dative: Wherever the German tongue resounds And sings songs to God in Heaven - but is humorously understood as nominative: And God in Heaven sings songs.]

 

      34.  On ne peut penser et écrire qu'assis [One can think and write only when sitting down.] (G. Flaubert). - Now I have you, nihilist!  Assiduity ['das Sitzfleish': etymologically 'the posterior' (sitting-flesh).  "Assiduity", from 'sedere' = to sit, is cognate.  Hence the contrast with 'walking' ideas.]  is the sin against the holy spirit.  Only ideas won by walking have any value.

 

      35.  There are times when we are like horses, we psychologists, and grow restive: we see our own shadow moving up and down before us.  The psychologist has to look away from himself in order to see at all.

 

      36.  Whether we immoralists do virtue any harm? - As little as anarchists do princes.  Only since they have been shot at do they again sit firmly on their thrones.  Moral: one must shoot at morals.

 

      37.  You run on ahead? - Do you do so as a herdsman? or as an exception?  A third possibility would be as a deserter.... First question of conscience.

 

      38.  Are you genuine? or only an actor?  A representative? or that which is represented? - Finally you are no more than an imitation of an actor.... Second question of conscience.

 

      39.  The disappointed man speaks. - I sought great human beings, I never found anything but the apes of their ideal.

 

      40.  Are you one who looks on? or who sets to work? - or who looks away, turns aside.... Third question of conscience.

 

      41.  Do you want to accompany? or go on ahead? or go off alone? ... One must know what one wants and that one wants. - Fourth question of conscience.

 

      42.  For me they were steps, I have climbed up upon them - therefore I had to pass over them.  But they thought I wanted to settle down on them ...

 

      43.  What does it matter that I am proved right!  I am too much in the right. - And he who laughs best today will also laugh last.

 

      44.  Formula of my happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal ...

 

 

 

The Problem of Socrates

 

1

 

IN every age the wisest have passed the identical judgement on life: it is worthless.... Everywhere and always their mouths have uttered the same sound - a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness with life, full of opposition to life.  Even Socrates said as he died: 'To live - that means to be a long time sick: I owe a cock to the saviour Asclepius'. [According to Plato ('Phaedo'), Socrates' last words were: "Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?"  One gave a cock to Asclepius on recovering from an illness: Socrates seems to be saying that life is, or his life has been, an illness.]  Even Socrates had had enough of it. - What does that prove?  What does it point to? - Formerly one would have said ( - of, and did say, and loudly enough, and our pessimists [Specifically the followers of Schopenhauer, among whom Nietzsche himself was numbered in his young days.] most of all!): 'Here at any rate there must be something true!  The consensus sapientium [Unanimity of the wise.] is proof of truth.' - Shall we still speak thus today? are we allowed to do so?  'Here at any rate there must be something sick' - this is our retort: one ought to take a closer look at them, these wisest of every age!  Were they all of them perhaps no longer steady on their legs? belated? tottery? décadents?  Does wisdom perhaps appear on earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion? ...

 

 

2

 

This irreverent notion that the great sages are declining types first dawned on me in regard to just the case in which learned and unlearned prejudice is most strongly opposed to it: I recognized Socrates and Plato as symptoms of decay, as agents of the dissolution of Greece, as pseudo-Greek, as anti-Greek (Birth of Tragedy, 1872). [Nietzsche's first published book.]  That consensus sapientium - I saw more and more clearly - proves least of all that they were right about what they were in accord over: it proves rather that they themselves, these wisest men, were in some way in physiological accord since they stood - had to stand - in the same negative relation to life.  Judgements, value judgements concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms - in themselves such judgements are stupidities.  One must reach out and try to grasp this astonishing finesse, that the value of life cannot be estimated.  Not by a living man, because he is a party to the dispute, indeed its object, and not the judge of it; not by the dead one, for another reason. - For a philosopher to see a problem in the value of life thus even constitutes an objection to him, a question-mark as to his wisdom, a piece of unwisdom. - What? and all these great wise men - they have not only been décadents, they have not even been wise? - But I shall get back to the problem of Socrates.

 

 

3

 

Socrates belonged, in his origins, to the lowest orders: Socrates was rabble.  One knows, one sees for oneself, how ugly he was.  But ugliness, an objection in itself, is among Greeks almost a refutation.  Was Socrates a Greek at all?  Ugliness is frequently enough the sigh of a thwarted development, a development retarded by interbreeding.  Otherwise it appears as a development in decline.  Anthropologists among criminologists tell us the typical criminal is ugly: monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animo. [a monster in face, a monster in soul.]  But the criminal is a décadent.  Was Socrates a typical criminal? - At least the famous physiognomist's opinion which Socrates' friends found so objectionable would not contradict this idea.  A foreigner passing through Athens who knew how to read faces told Socrates to his face that he was a monstrum - that he contained within him every kind of foul vice and lust.  And Socrates answered merely: 'You know me, sir!' -

 

 

4

 

It is not only the admitted dissoluteness and anarchy of his instincts which indicates décadence in Socrates: superfetation of the logical and that barbed malice which distinguishes him also point in that direction.  And let us not forget those auditory hallucinations which, as 'Socrates' demon', have been interpreted in a religious sense.  Everything about him is exaggerated, buffo, caricature, everything is at the same time hidden, reserved, subterranean. - I seek to understand out of what idiosyncrasy that Socratic equation reason = virtue = happiness derives: that bizarrest of equations and one which has in particular all the instincts of the older Hellenes against it.

 

 

5

 

With Socrates Greek taste undergoes a change in favour of dialectics: what is really happening when that happens?  It is above all the defeat of a nobler taste; with dialectics the rabble gets on top.  Before Socrates, the dialectical manner was repudiated in good society: it was regarded as a form of bad manners, one was compromised by it.  Young people were warned against it.  And all such presentation of one's reasons was regarded with mistrust.  Honest things, like honest men, do not carry their reasons exposed in this fashion.  It is indecent to display all one's goods.  What has first to have itself proved is of little value.  Wherever authority is still part of accepted usage and one does not 'give reasons' but commands, the dialectician is a kind of buffoon: he is laughed at, he is not taken seriously. - Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously: what was really happening when that happened?

 

 

6

 

One chooses dialectics only when one has no other expedient.  One knows that dialectics inspire mistrust, that they are not very convincing.  Nothing is easier to expunge that the effect of a dialectician, as is proved by the experience of every speech-making assembly.  Dialectics can be only a last-ditch weapon in the hands of those who have no other weapon left.  One must have to enforce one's rights: otherwise one makes no use of it.  That is why the Jews were dialecticians; Reynard the Fox was a dialectician: what? and Socrates was a dialectician too? -

 

 

7

 

- Is Socrates' irony an expression of revolt? of the ressentiment of the rabble? does he, as one of the oppressed, enjoy his own form of ferocity in the knife-thrust of the syllogism? does he revenge himself on the aristocrats he fascinates? - As a dialectician one is in possession of a pitiless instrument; with its aid one can play the tyrant; one compromised by conquering.  The dialectician leaves it to his opponent to demonstrate he is not an idiot: he enrages, he at the same time makes helpless.  The dialectician devitalizes his opponent's intellect. - What? is dialectics only a form of revenge in the case of Socrates?

 

 

8

 

I have intimated the way in which Socrates could repel: it is therefore all the more necessary to explain the fact that he exercised fascination. - That he discovered a new kind of agon, that he was the first fencing-master in it for the aristocratic circles of Athens, is one reason.  He fascinated because he touched on the agonal instincts of the Hellenes - he introduced a variation into the wrestling-matches among the youths and young men.  Socrates was also a great erotic.

 

 

9

 

But Socrates divined even more.  He saw behind his aristocratic Athenians; he grasped that his case, the idiosyncrasy of his case, was already no longer exceptional.  The same kind of degeneration was everywhere silently preparing itself: the old Athens was coming to an end. - And Socrates understood that all the world had need of him - his expedient, his cure, his personal art of self-preservation.... Everywhere the instincts were in anarchy; everywhere people were but five steps from excess: the monstrum in animo was the universal danger.  'The instincts want to play the tyrant; we must devise a counter-tyrant who is stronger'.... When that physiognomist had revealed to Socrates what he was, a cave of every evil lust, the great ironist uttered a phrase that provides the key to him.  'That is true,' he said, 'but I have become master of them all.'  How did Socrates become master of himself? - His case was after all only the extreme case, only the most obvious instance of what had at that time begun to be the universal exigency: that no-one was any longer master of himself, that the instincts were becoming mutually antagonistic.  He exercised fascination at this extreme case - his fear-inspiring ugliness expressed it for every eye to see: he fascinated even more, it goes without saying, as the answer, as the solution, as the apparent cure for this case. -

 

 

10

 

If one needs to make a tyrant of reason, as Socrates did, then there must exist no little danger of something else playing the tyrant.  Rationality was at that time divined as a saviour; neither Socrates nor his 'invalids' were free to be rational or not, as they wished - it was de rigueur, it was their last expedient.  The fanaticism with which the whole of Greek thought throws itself at rationality betrays a state of emergency: one was in peril, one had only one choice: either to perish or - be absurdly rational.... The moralism of the Greek philosophers from Plato downwards is pathologically conditioned: likewise their estimation of dialectics.  Reason = virtue = happiness means merely: one must imitate Socrates and counter the dark desires by producing a permanent daylight - the daylight of reason.  One must be prudent, clear, bright at any cost: every yielding to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downwards ...

 

 

11

 

I have intimated the way in which Socrates exercised fascination: he seemed to be a physician, a saviour.  Is it necessary to go on to point out the error which lay in his faith in 'rationality at any cost'? - It is self-deception on the part of philosophers and moralists to imagine that by making war on décadence they therewith elude décadence themselves.  This is beyond their powers: what they select as an expedient, as a deliverance, is itself only another expression of décadence - they alter its expression, they do not abolish the thing itself.  Socrates was a misunderstanding: the entire morality of improvement, the Christian included, has been a misunderstanding.... The harshest daylight, rationality at any cost, life bright, cold, circumspect, conscious, without instinct, in opposition to the instincts, has itself been no more than a form of sickness, another form of sickness - and by no means a way back to 'virtue', to 'health', to happiness.... To have to combat one's instincts - that is the formula for décadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness and instinct are one. -

 

 

12

 

- Did he himself grasp that, this shrewdest of all self-deceivers?  Did he at last say that to himself in the wisdom of his courage for death?... Socrates wanted to die - it was not Athens, it was he who handed himself the poison cup, who compelled Athens to hand him the poison cup.... 'Socrates is no physician,' he said softly to himself: 'death alone is a physician here.... Socrates himself has only been a long time sick ...'

 

 

 

'Reason' in Philosophy

 

1

 

YOU ask me about the idiosyncrasies of philosophers? ... There is their lack of historical sense, their hatred of even the ideal of becoming, their Egyptianism.  They think they are doing a thing honour when they dehistoricize it, sub specie aeterni [from the viewpoint of eternity.] - when they make a mummy of it.  All that philosophers have handled for millennia has been conceptual mummies; nothing actual has escaped from their hands alive.  They kill, they stuff, when they worship, these conceptual idolaters - they become a mortal danger to everything when they worship.  Death, change, age, as well as procreation and growth, are for them objections - refutations even.  What is, does not become; what becomes, is not.... Now they all believe, even to the point of despair, in that which is.  But since they cannot get hold of it, they look for reasons why it is being withheld from them.  'It must be an illusion, a deception which prevents us from perceiving that which is: where is the deceiver to be found?' - 'We've got it,' they cry in delight, 'it is the senses!  These senses, which are so immoral as well, it is they which deceive us about the real world.  Moral: escape from sense-deception, from becoming, from history, from falsehood - history is nothing but belief in the senses, belief in falsehood.  Moral: denial of all that believes in the senses, of all the rest of mankind: all of that is mere "people".  Be a philosopher, be a mummy, represent monotono-theism by a gravedigger-mimicry! - And away, above all, with the body, that pitiable idée fixe of the senses! infected with every error of logic there is, refuted, impossible even, notwithstanding it is impudent enough to behave as if it actually existed!' ...

 

 

2

 

I set apart with high reverence the name of Heraclitus.  When the rest of the philosopher crowd rejected the evidence of the senses because these showed plurality and change, he rejected their evidence because they showed things as if they possessed duration and unity.  Heraclitus too was unjust to the senses, which lie neither in the way the Eleatics [The school of Parmenides of Elea (fifth century B.C.), who denied the logical possibility of change and motion and argued that the only logical possibility was unchanging being.] believe nor as he believed - they do not lie at all.  It is what we make of their evidence that first introduces a lie into it, for example the lie of unity, the lie of materiality, of substance, of duration.... 'Reason' is the cause of our falsification of the evidence of the senses.  Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, change, they do no lie.... But Heraclitus will always be right in this, that being is an empty fiction.  The 'apparent' world is the only one: the 'real' world has only been lyingly  added ...

 

 

3

 

- And what subtle instruments for observation we possess in our senses!  This nose, for example, of which no philosopher has hitherto spoken with respect and gratitude, is nonetheless the most delicate tool we have at our command: it can detect minimal differences in movement which even the spectroscope cannot detect.  We possess scientific knowledge today to precisely the extent that we have decided to accept the evidence of the senses - to the extent that we have learned to sharpen and arm them and to think them through to their conclusions.  The rest is abortion and not-yet-science: which is to say metaphysics, theology, psychology, epistemology.  Or science of formulae, sigh-systems: such as logic and that applied logic, mathematics.  In these reality does not appear at all, not even as a problem; just as little as does the question what value a system of conventional signs such as constitutes logic can possibly possess.

 

 

4

 

The other idiosyncrasy of philosophers is no less perilous: it consists in mistaking the last for the first.  They put that which comes at the end - unfortunately! for it ought not to come at all! - the 'highest concepts', that is to say the most general, the emptiest concepts, the last fumes of evaporating reality, at the beginning as the beginning.  It is again only the expression of their way of doing reverence: the higher must not be allowed to grow out of the lower, must not be allowed to have grown at all.... Moral: everything of the first rank must be causa sui. [the cause of itself.] Origin in something else counts as an objection, as casting a doubt on value.  All supreme values are of the first rank, all the supreme concepts - that which is, the unconditioned, the good, the true, the perfect - all that cannot have become, must therefore be causa sui.  But neither can these supreme concepts be incommensurate with one another, be incompatible with one another.... Thus they acquired their stupendous concept 'God'.... The last, thinnest, emptiest is placed at the first, as cause in itself, as ens realissimum.... [the most real being.] That mankind should have taken seriously the brainsick fancies of morbid cobweb-spinners! - And it has paid dearly for doing so! ...

 

 

5

 

- Let us, in conclusion, set against this the very different way in which we (- I say 'we' out of politeness ...) view the problem of error and appearance.  Change, mutation, becoming in general were formerly taken as proof of appearance, as a sign of the presence of something which led us astray.  Today, on the contrary, we see ourselves as it were entangled in error, necessitated to error, to precisely the extent that our prejudice in favour of reason compels us to posit unity, identity, duration, substance, cause, materiality, being; however sure we may be, on the basis of a strict reckoning, that error is to be found here.  The situation is the same as with the motions of the sun: in that case error has our eyes, in the present case our language as a perpetual advocate.  Language belongs in its origin to the age of the most rudimentary form of psychology: we find ourselves in the midst of a rude fetishism when we call to mind the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language - which is to say, of reason.  It is this which sees everywhere deed and doer; this which believes in will as cause in general; this which believes in the 'ego', in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and which projects its belief in the ego-substance on to all things - only thus does it create the concept 'thing'.... Being is everywhere thought in, foisted on, as cause; it is only from the conception 'ego' that there follows, derivatively, the concept 'being'.... At the beginning stands the great fateful error that the will is something which produces an effect - that will is a faculty.... Today we know it is merely a word.... Very much later, in a world a thousand times more enlightened, the security, the subjective certainty with which the categories of reason [The context makes it clear that this Kantian-sounding term is not being employed in the sense of Kant's twelve 'a priori' "categories", but simply to mean the faculty of reasoning.] could be employed came all of a sudden into philosopher's heads: they concluded that these could not have originated in the empirical world - indeed, the entire empirical world was incompatible with them.  Where then do they originate? - And in India as in Greece they committed the same blunder: 'We must once have dwelt in a higher world' - instead of in a very much lower one, which would have been the truth! - 'we must have been divine, for we possess reason!' ... Nothing, in fact, has hitherto had a more direct power of persuasion than the error of being as it was formulated by, for example, the Eleatics: for every word, every sentence we utter speaks in its favour! - Even the opponents of the Eleatics were still subject to the seductive influence of their concept of being: Democritus, among others, when he invented his atom.... 'Reason' in language: oh what a deceitful old woman!  I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar ...

 

 

6

 

It will be a matter for gratitude if I now compress so fundamental and new an insight into four theses: I shall thereby make it easier to understand, I shall thereby challenge contradiction.

      First proposition.  The grounds upon which 'this' world has been designated as apparent establish rather its reality - another kind of reality is absolutely undemonstrable.

      Second proposition.  The characteristics which have been assigned to the 'real being' of things are the characteristics of non-being, of nothingness - the 'real world' has been constructed out of the contradiction to the actual world: an apparent world indeed, insofar as it is no more than a moral-optical illusion.

      Third proposition.  To talk about 'another' world than this is quite pointless, provided that an instinct for slandering, disparaging and accusing life is not strong within us: in the latter case we revenge ourselves on life by means of the phantasmagoria of 'another', a 'better' life.

      Fourth proposition.  To divide the world in a 'real' and an 'apparent' world, whether in the manner of Christianity or in the manner of Kant (which is, after all, that of a cunning declining life.... That the artist places a higher value on appearance than on reality constitutes no objection to this proposition.  For 'appearance' here signifies reality once more, only selected, strengthened, corrected.... The tragic artist is not a pessimist - it is precisely he who affirms all that is questionable and terrible in existence, he is Dionysian ...

 

 

 

How the 'Real World' at last Became a Myth

 

HISTORY OF AN ERROR

 

1.  The real world, attainable to the wise, the pious, the virtuous man - he dwells in it, he is it.

(Oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, convincing.  Transcription of the proposition 'I, Plato, am the truth.') [the truth = 'Wahrheit', corresponding to 'wahre Welt' = real world.]

2.  The real world, unattainable for the moment, but promised to the wise, the pious, the virtuous man ('to the sinner who repents').

(Progress of the idea: it grows more refined, more enticing, more incomprehensible - it becomes a woman, it becomes Christian ...)

3.  The real world, unattainable, undemonstrable, cannot be promised, but even when merely thought of a consolation, a duty, an imperative.

(Fundamentally the same old sun, but shining through mist and scepticism; the idea grown sublime, pale, northerly, Königsbergian.) [i.e. the Kantian, from the northerly German city in which Kant was born and in which he lived and died.]

4.  The real world - unattainable?  Unattained, at any rate.  And if unattained also unknown.  Consequently also no consolation, no redemption, no duty: how could we have a duty towards something unknown?

(The grey of dawn.  First yawnings of reason.  Cockcrow of positivism.) [Here meaning empiricism, philosophy founded on observation and experiment.]

5.  The 'real world' - an idea no longer of any use, not even a duty any longer - an idea grown useless, superfluous, consequently a refuted idea: let us abolish it!

(Broad daylight; breakfast; return of cheerfulness and bon sens; Plato blushes for shame; all free spirits run riot.)

6.  We have abolished the real world: what world is left? the apparent world perhaps? ... But no! with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world!

(Midday; moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; zenith of mankind; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.) [Here begins Zarathustra.]

 

 

 

Morality as Anti-Nature

 

1

 

THERE is a time with all passions when they are merely fatalities, when they drag their victim down with the weight of their folly - and a later, very much later time when they are wedded with the spirit, when they are 'spiritualized'.  Formerly one made war on passion itself on account of the folly inherent in it: one conspired for its extermination - all the old moral monsters are unanimous that 'il faut tuer les passions'. [The passions must be killed.] The most famous formula for doing this is contained in the New Testament, in the Sermon on the Mount, where, by the way, things are not at all regarded from a lofty standpoint.  There, for example, it is said, with reference to sexuality, 'if the eye offend thee, pluck it out': fortunately no Christian desires merely in order to do away with their folly and its unpleasant consequences - this itself seems to us today merely an acute form of folly.  We no longer admire dentists who pull out the teeth to stop them from hurting.... On the other hand, it is only fair to admit that on the soil out of which Christianity grew the concept 'spiritualization of passion' could not possibly be conceived.  For the primitive Church, as is well known, fought against the 'intelligent' in favour of the 'poor in spirit': how could one expect from it an intelligent war against passion? - The Church combats the passions with excision in every sense of the word: its practice, its 'cure' is castration.  It never asks: 'How can one spiritualize, beautify, deify a desire?' - it has at all times laid the emphasis of its discipline on extirpation (of sensuality, of pride, of lust for power, of avarice, of revengefulness). - But to attack the passions at their roots means to attack life at its roots: the practice of the Church is hostile to life ...

 

 

2

 

The same expedient - castration, extirpation - is instinctively selected in a struggle against a desire by those who are too weak-willed, too degenerate to impose moderation upon it: by those natures which need La Trappe, [The abbey at Soligny from which the Trappist order - characterized by the severity of its discipline - takes it name.] to speak metaphorically (and not metaphorically - ), some sort of definitive declaration of hostility, a chasm between themselves and a passion.  It is only the degenerate who cannot do without radical expedients; weakness of will, more precisely the inability not to react to a stimulus, is itself merely another form of degeneration.  Radical hostility, mortal hostility towards sensuality is always a thought-provoking symptom: it justifies making certain conjectures as to the general condition of one who is excessive in this respect. - That hostility, that hatred reaches its height, moreover, only when such natures are no longer sufficiently sound even for the radical cure, for the renunciation of their 'devil'.  Survey the entire history of priests and philosophers, and that of artists as well: the most virulent utterances against the senses have not come from the impotent, nor from ascetics, but from those who found it impossible to be ascetics, from those who stood in need of being ascetics ...

 

 

3

 

The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity.  A further triumph is our spiritualization of enmity.  It consists in profoundly grasping the value of having enemies: in brief, in acting and thinking in the reverse of the way in which one formerly acted and thought.  The Church has at all times desired the destruction of its enemies: we, we immoralists and anti-Christians, see that it is to our advantage that the Church exists.... In politics, too, enmity has become much more spiritual - much more prudent, much more thoughtful, much more forbearing.  Almost every party grasps that it is in the interest of its own self-preservation that the opposing party should not decay in strength; the same is true of grand politics.  A new creation in particular, the new Reich for instance, has more need of enemies than friends: only in opposition does it feel itself necessary, only in opposition does it become necessary.... We adopt the same attitude towards the 'enemy within': there too we have spiritualized enmity, there too we have grasped its value.  One is fruitful only at the cost of being rich in contradictions; one remains young only on condition the soul does not relax, does not long for peace.... Nothing has grown more alien to us than that desideratum of former times 'peace of soul', the Christian desideratum; nothing arouses less envy in us than the moral cow and the fat contentment of the good conscience.... One has renounced grand life when one renounces war.... In many cases, to be sure, 'peace of soul' is merely a misunderstanding - something else that simply does not know how to give itself a more honest name.  Here, briefly and without prejudice, are a few of them.  'Peace of soul' can, for example, be the gentle radiation of a rich animality into the moral (or religious) domain.  Or the beginning of weariness, the first of the shadows which evening, every sort of evening, casts.  Or a sign that the air is damp, that south winds are on the way.  Or unconscious gratitude for a good digestion (sometimes called 'philanthropy').  Or the quiescence of the convalescent for whom all things have a new taste and who waits.... Or the condition which succeeds a vigorous gratification of our ruling passion, the pleasant feeling of a rare satiety.  Or the decrepitude of our will, our desires, our vices.  Or laziness persuaded by vanity to deck itself out as morality.  Or the appearance of a certainty, even a dreadful certainty, after the protracted tension and torture of uncertainty.  Or the expression of ripeness and mastery in the midst of action, creation, endeavour, volition, a quiet breathing, 'freedom of will' attained.... Twilight of the Idols: who knows? perhaps that too is only a kind of 'peace of soul' ...

 

 

4

 

- I formulate a principle.  All naturalism in morality, that is all healthy morality, is dominated by an instinct of life - some commandment of life is fulfilled through a certain canon of 'shall' and 'shall not', some hindrance and hostile element on life's road is thereby removed.  Anti-natural morality, that is, virtually every morality that has hitherto been taught, reverenced and preached, turns on the contrary precisely against the instincts of life - it is a now secret, now loud and impudent condemnation of these instincts.  By saying 'God sees into the heart' it denies the deepest and the highest desires of life and takes God for the enemy of life.... The saint in whom God takes pleasure is the ideal castrate.... Life is at an end where the 'kingdom of God' begins ...

 

 

5

 

If one has grasped the blasphemousness of such a rebellion against life as has, in Christian morality, become virtually sacrosanct, one has fortunately therewith grasped something else as well: the uselessness, illusoriness, absurdity, falsity of such a rebellion.  For a condemnation of life by the living is after all no more than a symptom of a certain kind of life: the question whether the condemnation is just or unjust has not been raised at all.  One would have to be situated outside life, and on the other hand to know it as thoroughly as any, as many, as all who have experienced it, to be permitted to touch on the problem of the value of life at all: sufficient reason for understanding that this problem is for us an inaccessible problem.  When we speak of values we do so under the inspiration and from the perspective of life: life itself evaluates through us when we establish values.... From this it follows that even that anti-nature of a morality which conceives God as the contrary concept to and condemnation of life is only a value judgement on the part of life - of what life? of what kind of life? - But I have already given the answer: of declining, debilitated, weary, condemned life.  Morality as it has been understood hitherto - as it was ultimately formulated by Schopenhauer as 'denial of the will to life' - is the instinct of décadence itself, which makes out of itself an imperative: it says: 'Perish!' - it is the judgement of the judged ...

 

 

6

 

Let us consider finally what naivety it is to say 'man ought to be thus and thus!'  Reality shows us an enchanting wealth of types, the luxuriance of a prodigal play and change of forms: and does some pitiful journeyman moralist say at the sight of it: 'No! man ought to be different'? ... He even knows how man ought to be, this bigoted wretch; he paints himself on the wall and says 'ecce homo'!... [Behold the man!] But even when the moralist merely turns to the individual and says to him: 'You ought to be thus and thus' he does not cease to make himself ridiculous.  The individual is, in his future and in his past, a piece of fate, one law more, one necessity more for everything that is and everything that will be.  To say to him 'change yourself' means to demand that everything should change, even in the past.... And there have indeed been consistent moralists who wanted man to be different, namely virtuous, who wanted him in their own likeness, namely that of a bigot: to that end they denied the world!  No mean madness!  No modest presumption! ... Insofar as morality condemns as morality and not with regard to the aims and objects of life, it is a specific error with which one should show no sympathy, an idiosyncrasy of the degenerate which has caused an unspeakable amount of harm! ... We others, we immoralists, have on the contrary opened wide our hearts to every kind of understanding, comprehension, approval.  We do not readily deny, we seek our honour in affirming.  We have come more and more to appreciate that economy which needs and knows how to use all that which the holy lunacy of the priest, the diseased reason of the priest rejects; that economy in the law of life which derives advantage even from the repellent species of the bigot, the priest, the virtuous man - what advantage? - But we ourselves, we immoralists, are the answer to that ...

 

 

 

The Four Great Errors

 

1

 

The error of mistaking cause for consequence. - There is no more dangerous error than that of mistaking the consequence for the cause: I call it reason's intrinsic form of corruption.  Nonetheless, this error is among the most ancient and most recent habits of mankind: it is even sanctified among us, it bears the names 'religion' and 'morality'.  Every proposition formulated by religion and morality contains it; priests and moral legislators are the authors of this corruption of reason. - I adduce an example.  Everyone knows the book of the celebrated Cornaro in which he recommends his meagre diet as a recipe for a long and happy life - a virtuous one, too.  Few books have been so widely read; even now many thousands of copies are printed in England every year.  I do not doubt that hardly any book (the Bible rightly excepted) has done so much harm, has shortened so many lives, as this curiosity, which was so well meant.  The reason: mistaking the consequence for the cause.  The worthy Italian saw in his diet the cause of his long life: while the prerequisite of long life, an extraordinarily slow metabolism, a small consumption, was the cause of his meagre diet.  He was not free to eat much or little as he chose, his frugality was not an act of 'free will': he became ill when he ate more.  But if one is not a bony fellow of this sort one does not merely do well, one positively needs to eat properly.  A scholar of our day, with his rapid consumption of nervous energy, would kill himself with Cornaro's regiment.  Credo experto. -

 

 

2

 

The most general formula at the basis of every religion and morality is: 'Do this and this, refrain from this and this - and you will be happy!  Otherwise....' Every morality, every religion is this imperative - I call it the great original sin of reason, immortal unreason.  In my mouth this formula is converted into its reverse - first example of my 'revaluation of all values': a well-constituted human being, a 'happy one', must perform certain actions and instinctively shrinks from other actions, he transports the order of which he is the physiological representative into his relations with other human beings and with things.  In a formula: his virtue is the consequence of his happiness.... Long life, a plentiful posterity is not the reward of virtue, virtue itself is rather just that slowing down of the metabolism which also has, among other things, a long life, a plentiful posterity, in short Cornarism, as its outcome. - The Church and morality say: 'A race, a people perishes through vice and luxury'.  My restored reason says: when a people is perishing, degenerating physiologically, vice and luxury (that is to say the necessity for stronger and stronger and more and more frequent stimulants, such as every exhausted nature is acquainted with) follow therefrom.  A young man grows prematurely pale and faded.  His friends say: this and that illness is to blame.  I say: that he became ill, that he failed to resist the illness, was already the consequence of an impoverished life, an hereditary exhaustion.  The newspaper reader says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this.  My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished - it is no longer secure in its instincts.  Every error, of whatever kind, is a consequence of degeneration of instinct, disintegration of will: one has thereby virtually defined the bad.  Everything good is instinct - and consequently easy, necessary, free.  Effort is an objection, the god is typically distinguished from the hero (in my language: light feet are the first attribute of divinity).

 

 

3

 

The error of a false causality. - We have always believed we know what a cause is: but whence did we derive our knowledge, more precisely our belief we possessed this knowledge?  From the realm of the celebrated 'inner facts', none of which has up till now been shown to be factual.  We believed ourselves to be causal agents in the act of willing; we at least thought we were there catching causality in the act.  It was likewise never doubted that all the antecedentia of an action, its causes, were to be sought in the consciousness and could be discovered there if one sought them - as 'motives': for otherwise one would not have been free to perform it, responsible for it.  Finally, who would have disputed that a thought is caused? that the ego causes the thought? ... Of these three 'inner facts' through which causality seemed to be guaranteed the first and most convincing was that of will as cause; the conception of a consciousness ('mind') as cause and later still that of the ego (the 'subject') as cause are merely after-products after causality had, on the basis of will, been firmly established as a given fact, as empiricism.... Meanwhile we have thought better.  Today we do not believe a word of it.  The 'inner world' is full of phantoms and false lights: the will is one of them.  The will no longer moves anything, consequently no longer explains anything - it merely accompanies events, it can also be absent.  The so-called 'motive': another error.   Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness, an accompaniment to an act, which conceals rather than exposed the antecedentia of the act.  And as for the ego!  It has become a fable, a fiction, a play on words: it has totally ceased to think, to feel and to will! ... What follows from this?  There are no spiritual causes at all!  The whole of the alleged empiricism which affirmed them has gone to the devil!  That is what follows! - And we had made a nice misuse of that 'empiricism', we had created the world on the basis of it as a world of causes, as a world of will, as a world of spirit.  The oldest and longest-lived psychology was at work here - indeed it has done nothing else: every event was to it an action, every action the effect of a will, the world became for it a multiplicity of agents, an agent ('subject') foisted itself upon every event.  Man projected his three 'inner facts', that in which he believed more firmly than in anything else, will, spirit, ego, outside himself - he derived the concept 'being' only from the concept 'ego', he posited 'things' as possessing being according to his own image, according to his concept of the ego as cause.  No wonder he later always discovered in things only that which he had put into them! - The thing itself, to say it again, the concept 'thing' is merely a reflection of the belief in the ego as cause.... And even your atom, messieurs mechanists and physicists, how much error, how much rudimentary psychology, still remains in your atom! - To say nothing of the 'thing in itself', [In Kant's philosophy the causes of sensations are called 'things in themselves'.  The thing in itself is unknowable: the sensations we actually experience are produced by the operation of our subjective mental apparatus.] that horrendum pudendum [ugly shameful part.] of the metaphysicians!  The error of spirit as cause mistaken for reality!  And made the measure of reality!  And called God! -

 

 

4

 

The error of imaginary causes. - To start from the dream: on to a certain sensation, the result for example of a distant cannon-shot, a cause is subsequently foisted (often a whole little novel in which precisely the dreamer is the chief character).  The sensation, meanwhile, continues to persist, as a kind of resonance: it waits, as it were, until the cause-creating drive permits it to step into the foreground - now no longer as a chance occurrence but as 'meaning'.  The cannon-shot enters in a causal way, in an apparent inversion of time.  That which comes later, the motivation, is experienced first, often with a hundred details which pass like lightning, the shot follows.... What has happened?  The ideas engendered by a certain condition have been misunderstood as the cause of that condition. - We do just the same thing, in fact, when we are awake.  Most of our general feelings - every sort of restraint, pressure, tension, explosion in the play and counter-play of our organs, likewise and especially the condition of the nervus sympathicus - excite our cause-creating drive: we want to have a reason for feeling as we do - for feeling well or for feeling ill.  It never suffices us simply to establish the mere fact that we feel as we do: we acknowledge this fact - become conscious of it - only when we have furnished it with a motivation of some kind. - The memory, which in such a case becomes active without our being aware of it, calls up earlier states of a similar kind and the causal interpretations which have grown out of them - not their causality.  To be sure, the belief that these ideas, the accompanying occurrences in the consciousness, were causes is also brought up by the memory.  Thus there arises an habituation to a certain causal interpretation which in truth obstructs and even prohibits an investigation of the cause.

 

 

5

 

Psychological explanation. - To trace something unknown back to something known is alleviating, soothing, gratifying and gives moreover a feeling of power.  Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend the unknown - the first instinct is to eliminate these distressing states.  First principle: any explanation is better than none.  Because it is at bottom only a question of wanting to get rid of oppressive ideas, one is not exactly particular about what means one uses to get rid of them: the first idea which explains that the unknown is in fact the known does so much good that one 'holds it for true'.  Proof by pleasure ('by potency') as criterion of truth. - the cause-creating drive is thus conditioned and excited by the feeling of fear.  The question 'why?' should furnish, if at all possible, not so much the cause for its own sake as a certain kind of cause - a soothing, liberating, alleviating cause.  That something already known, experienced, inscribed in the memory is posited as cause is the first consequence of this need.  The new, the unexperienced, the strange is excluded from being cause. - Thus there is sought not only some kind of explanation as cause, but a selected and preferred kind of explanation, the kind by means of which the feeling of the strange, new, unexperienced is most speedily and most frequently abolished - the most common explanations. - Consequence: a particular kind of cause-ascription comes to preponderate more and more, becomes concentrated into a system and finally comes to dominate over the rest, that is to say simply to exclude other causes and explanations. - The banker thinks at once of 'business', the Christian of 'sin', the girl of her love.

 

 

6

 

The entire realm of morality and religion falls under this concept of imaginary causes. - 'Explanation' of unpleasant general feelings.  They arise from beings hostile to us (evil spirits: most celebrated case - hysterics misunderstood as witches).  They arise from actions we cannot approve of (the feeling of 'sin', of 'culpability' foisted upon a physiological discomfort - one always finds reasons for being discontented with oneself).  They arise as punishments, as payments for something we should not have done, should not have been (generalized in an impudent form by Schopenhauer into a proposition in which morality appears for what it is, the actual poisoner and calumniator of life: 'Every great pain, whether physical or mental, declares what it is we deserve; for it could not have come upon us if we had not deserved it.'  World as Will and Idea II 666)  They arise as the consequences of rash actions which have turned out badly ( - the emotions, the senses assigned as 'cause', as 'to blame'; physiological states of distress construed, with the aid of other states of distress, as 'deserved'). - 'Explanation' of pleasant general feelings.  They arise from trust in God.  They arise from the consciousness of good actions (the so-called 'good conscience', a physiological condition sometimes so like a sound digestion as to be mistaken for it).  They arise from the successful outcome of undertakings (- naive fallacy: the successful outcome of an undertaking certainly does not produce any pleasant general feelings in a hypochondriac or a Pascal).  They arise from faith, hope and charity - the Christian virtues. - In reality all these supposes explanations are consequential states and as it were translations of pleasurable and unpleasurable feelings into a false dialect: one is in a state in which one can experience hope because the physiological basic feeling is once more strong and ample; one trusts in God because the feeling of plenitude and strength makes one calm. - Morality and religion fall entirely under the psychology of error: in every single case cause is mistaken for effect; or the effect of what is believed true is mistaken for the truth; or a state of consciousness is mistaken for the causation of this state.

 

 

7

 

The error of free will. - We no longer have any sympathy today with the concept of 'free will': we know only too well what it is - the most infamous of all the arts of the theologian for making mankind 'accountable' in his sense of the word, that is to say for making mankind dependent on him.... I give here only the psychology of making men accountable. - Everywhere accountability is sought, it is usually the instinct for punishing and judging which seeks it.  One has deprived becoming of its innocence if being in this or that state is traced back to will, to intentions, to accountable acts: the doctrine of will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is of finding guilty.  The whole of the old-style psychology, the psychology of will, has as its precondition the desire of its authors, the priests at the head of the ancient communities, to create for themselves a right to ordain punishments - or their desire to create for God a right to do so.... Men were thought of as 'free' so that they could become guilty: consequently, every action had to be thought of as willed, the origin of every action as lying in the consciousness ( - whereby the most fundamental falsification in psychologicis was made into the very principle of psychology).... Today, when we have started to move in the reverse direction, when we immoralists especially are trying with all our might to remove the concept of guilt and the concept of punishment from the world and to purge psychology, history, nature, the social institutions and sanctions of them, there is in our eyes no more radical opposition than that of the theologians, who continue to infect the innocence of becoming with 'punishment' and 'guilt' by means of the concept of the 'moral world-order'.  Christianity is a hangman's metaphysics ...

 

 

8

 

What alone can our teaching be? - That no-one gives a human being his qualities: not God, not society, not his parents or ancestors, not he himself (- the nonsensical idea here last rejected was propounded, as 'intelligible freedom', by Kant, and perhaps also by Plato before him).  No-one is accountable for existing at all, or for being constituted as he is, or for living in the circumstances and surroundings in which he lives.  The fatality of his nature cannot be disentangled from the fatality of all that which has been and will be.  He is not the result of a special design, a will, a purpose; he is not the subject of an attempt to attain to an 'ideal of man' or an 'ideal of happiness' or an 'ideal of morality' - it is absurd to want to hand over his nature to some purpose or other.  We invented the concept 'purpose': in reality purpose is lacking.... One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole - there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole.... But nothing exists apart from the whole! - That no-one is any longer made accountable, that the kind of being manifested cannot be traced back to a causa prima, [first cause] that the world is a unity neither as sensorium nor as 'spirit', this alone is the great liberation - thus alone is the innocence of becoming restored.... The concept 'God' has hitherto been the greatest objection to existence.... We deny God; in denying God, we deny accountability: only by doing that do we redeem the world. -

 

 

 

The 'Improvers' of Mankind

 

1

 

One knows my demand of philosophers that they place themselves beyond good and evil - that they have the illusion of moral judgement beneath them.  This demand follows from an insight first formulated by me: that there are no moral facts whatever.  Moral judgement has this in common with religious judgement that it believes in realities which do not exist.  Morality is only an interpretation of certain phenomena, more precisely a misinterpretation.  Moral judgement belongs, as does religious judgement, to a level of ignorance at which even the concept of the real, the distinction between the real and the imaginary, is lacking: so that at such a level 'truth' denotes nothing but things which we today call 'imaginings'.  To this extent moral judgement is never to be taken literally: as such it never contains anything but nonsense.  But as semiotics it remains of incalculable value: it reveals, to the informed man at least, the most precious realities of cultures and inner worlds which did not know enough to 'understand' themselves.  Morality is merely sign-language, merely symptomatology: one must already know what it is about to derive profit from it.

 

 

2

 

A first example, merely an introduction.  In all ages one has wanted to 'improve' men: this above all is what morality has meant.  But one word can conceal the most divergent tendencies.  Both the taming of the beast man and the breeding of a certain species of man has been called 'improvement': only these zoological termini express realities - realities, to be sure, of which the typical 'improver', the priest, knows nothing - wants to know nothing.... To call the taming of an animal its 'improvement' is in our ears almost a joke.  Whoever knows what goes on in menageries is doubtful whether the beasts in them are 'improved'.  They are weakened, they are made less harmful, they become sickly beasts through the depressive emotion of fear, through pain, through injuries, through hunger. - It is no different with the tamed human being whom the priest has 'improved'.  In the early Middle Ages, when the Church was in fact above all a menageries, one everywhere hunted down the fairest specimens of the 'blond beast' [Nietzsche introduced this term in TOWARDS A GENEALOGY OF MORALS 1/11: it means man considered as an animal, and the first use of the term is immediately followed by a reference to 'the Roman, Arab, Teutonic, Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings' and to the Athenians of the age of Pericles as examples of men 'the animal' in whom 'has to get out again, has to go back to the wilderness.'  The uses of 'blond beast' are not fully intelligible apart from Nietzsche's psychology.] - one 'improved' and led into a monastery?  Like a caricature of a human being, like an abortion: he had become a 'sinner', he was in a cage, one had imprisoned him behind nothing but sheer terrifying concepts.... There he lay now, sick, miserable, filled with ill-will towards himself; full of hatred for the impulses towards life, full of suspicion of all that was still strong and happy.  In short, a 'Christian'.... In physiological terms: in the struggle with the beast, making it sick can be the only means of making it weak.  This the Church understood: it corrupted the human being, it weakened him - but it claimed to have 'improved' him ...

 

 

3

 

Let us take the other aspect of so-called morality, the breeding of a definite race and species.  The most grandiose example of this is provided by Indian morality, sanctioned, as the Law of Manu', into religion.  Here the proposed task is to breed no fewer than four races simultaneously: a priestly, a warrior, and a trading and farming race, and finally a menial race, the Sudras.  Here we are manifestly no longer among animal-tamers: a species of human being a hundred times more gentle and rational is presupposed even to conceive the plan of such a breeding.  One draws a breath of relief when coming out of the Christian sick-house and dungeon atmosphere into this healthier, higher, wider world.  How paltry the 'New Testament' is compared with Manu, how ill it smells! - But this organization too need to be dreadful - this time in struggle not with the beast but with its antithesis, with the non-bred human being, the hotchpotch human being, the Chandala. [The 'untouchables' excluded from the caste system.]  And again it had no means of making him sick - it was the struggle with the 'great majority'.  Perhaps there is nothing which outrages our feelings more than these protective measures of Indian morality.  The third edict, for example (Avadana-Shastra 1), that 'concerning unclean vegetables', ordains that the only nourishment permitted the Chandala shall be garlic and onions, in view of the fact that the holy scripture forbids one to given them corn or seed-bearing fruits or water or fire.  The same edict lays it down that the water they need must not be taken from rivers or springs or pools, but only from the entrances to swamps and holes made by the feet of animals.   They are likewise forbidden to wash their clothes or to wash themselves, since the water allowed them as an act of charity must be used only for quenching the thirst.  Finally, the Sudra women are forbidden to assist the Chandala in childbirth, and the latter are likewise forbidden to assist one another.... - The harvest of such hygienic regulations did not fail to appear: murderous epidemics, hideous venereal diseases and, as a consequence, 'the law of the knife' once more, ordaining circumcision for the male and removal of the labia minora for the female children. - Manu himself says: 'The Chandala are the fruit of adultery, incest and crime' ( - this being the necessary consequence of the concept 'breeding').  'They shall have for clothing only rags from corpses, for utensils broken pots, for ornaments old iron, for worship only evil spirits; they shall wander from place to place without rest.  They are forbidden to write from left to right and to use the right hand for writing: the employment of the right hand and of the left-to-right motion is reserved for the virtuous, for people of race.' -

 

 

4

 

These regulations are instructive enough: in them we find for once Aryan humanity, quite pure, quite primordial - we learn that the concept 'pure blood' is the opposite of a harmless concept.  It becomes clear, on the other hand, in which people the hatred, the Chandala hatred for this 'humanity' has been immortalized, where it has become religion, where it has become genius.... From this point of view, the Gospels are documents of the first rank; the Book of Enoch even more so. - Christianity, growing from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as a product of this soil, [This is one of the major themes of THE ANTI-CHRIST.] represents the reaction against that morality of breeding, of race, of privilege - it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence: Christianity the revaluation of all Aryan values, the victory of Chandala values, the evangel preached to the poor and lowly, the collective rebellion of everything downtrodden, wretched, ill-constituted, underprivileged against the 'race' - undying Chandala revenge as the religion of love ...

 

 

5

 

The morality of breeding and the morality of taming are, in the means they employ to attain their ends, entirely worthy of one another: we may set down as our chief proposition that to make morality one must have the unconditional will to the contrary.  This is the great, the uncanny problem which I have pursued furthest: the psychology of the 'improvers' of mankind.  A small and really rather modest fact, that of so-called pia fraus, [pious fraud] gave me my first access to this problem: pia fraus, the heritage of all philosophers and priests who have 'improved' mankind.  Neither Manu nor Plato, neither Confucius nor the Jewish and Christian teachers, ever doubted their right to tell lies.  Nor did they doubt their possession of other rights.... Expressed in a formula one might say: every means hitherto employed with the intention of making mankind moral has been thoroughly immoral. -

 

 

 

What the Germans Lack

 

1

 

Among Germans today it is not enough to possess spirit: one must also possess the presumption to possess it ...

      Perhaps I know the Germans, perhaps I might even venture to address a few words to them.  The new Germany represents a great quantity of inherited and inculcated ability, so that it may for a time be allowed even a lavish expenditure of its accumulated store of energy.  It is not a high culture that has here gained ascendancy, even less a fastidious taste, a noble 'beauty' of the instincts, but more manly virtues than any other country of Europe can exhibit.  A good deal of courage and respect for oneself, a good deal of self-confidence in social dealings and in the performance of reciprocal duties, a good deal of industriousness, a good deal of endurance - and an inherited moderation which requires the goad rather than the brake.  I also add that here people can still obey without being humiliated by obeying.... And no-one despises his adversary ...

      You will see I want to be just to the Germans: I would not like to be untrue to myself in this - so I must also tell them what I object to.  Coming to power is a costly business: power makes stupid.... The Germans - once they were called the nation of thinkers: do they still think at all?  Nowadays the Germans are bored with intellect, the Germans mistrust intellect, politics devours all seriousness for really intellectual things - Deutschland, Deutschland über alles was, I fear, the end of German philosophy.... 'Are there any German philosophers? are there are German poets? are there any good German books?' - people ask me abroad.  I blush; but with the courage which is mine even in desperate cases I answer: 'Yes, Bismarck!' - Dare I go so far as to confess which books are read nowadays? ... Confounded instinct of mediocrity! -

 

 

2

 

- Who has not pondered sadly over what the German spirit could be!  But this nation has deliberately made itself stupid, for practically a thousand years: nowhere else are the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, so viciously abused.  Lately even a third has been added, one which is capable by itself of completely obstructing all delicate and audacious flexibility of spirit: music, our constipated, constipating German music. - How much dreary heaviness, lameness, dampness, sloppiness, how much beer there is in the German intellect!  How can it possibly happen that young men who dedicated their existence to the most spiritual goals lack all sense of the first instinct of spirituality, the spirit's instinct for self-preservation - and drink beer? ... The alcoholism of scholarly youth perhaps does not constitute a question-mark in regard to their erudition - one can be even a great scholar without possessing any spirit at all - but from any other point of view it remains a problem. - Where does one not find that bland degeneration which beer produces in the spirit!  Once, in a case that has become almost famous, I laid my finger on such an instance of degeneration - the degeneration of our first German freethinker, the shrewd David Strauss, into the author of an ale-house gospel and a 'new faith'.... It was no vain vow he made in verse to the 'gracious brunette' [beer] - fidelity unto death ...

 

 

3

 

- I have said of the German spirit that it is growing coarser, that it is growing shallow.  Is that sufficient? - Fundamentally, it is something quite different which appals me: how German seriousness, German profundity, German passion in spiritual things is more and more on the decline.  It is the pathos and not merely the intellectual aspect which has altered. - I come in contact now and then with German universities: what an atmosphere prevails among its scholars, what a barren spirituality, grown how contented and lukewarm!  It would be a profound misunderstanding to adduce German science as an objection here, as well as being proof one had not read a word I have written.  For seventeen years I have not wearied of exposing the despiritualizing influence of our contemporary scientific pursuits.  The harsh Helot condition to which the tremendous extent of science has condemned every single person today is one of the main reasons why education and educators appropriate to fuller, richer, deeper natures are no longer forthcoming.  Our culture suffers from nothing more than it suffers from the superabundance of presumptuous journeymen and fragments of humanity; our universities are, against their will, the actual forcing-houses for this kind of spiritual instinct-atrophy.  And all Europe already has an idea of this - grand politics deceives no-one.... Germany counts more and more as Europe's flatland. - I am still looking for a German with whom I could be serious after my fashion - how much more for one with whom I might be cheerful! - Twilight of the Idols: ah, who today could grasp from how profound a seriousness a hermit is here relaxing! - The most incomprehensible thing about us is our cheerfulness ...

 

 

4

 

If one makes a reckoning, it is obvious not only that German culture is declining, the sufficient reason [A philosophical term meaning an explanation of something adequate to explaining it fully. Schopenhauer's doctoral thesis was ON THE FOURFOLD ROOT OF THE PRINCIPLE OF SUFFICIENT REASON, and Nietzsche sometimes (as here) uses the term in a humorously inappropriate context.] for it is obvious too.  After all, no-one can spend more than he has - that is true of individuals, it is also true of nations.  If one spends oneself on power, grand politics, economic affairs, world commerce, parliamentary institutions, military interests - if one expends in this direction the quantum of reason, seriousness, will, self-overcoming that one is, then there will be a shortage in the other direction.  Culture and the state - one should not deceive oneself over this - are antagonists: the 'cultural state' is merely a modern idea.  The one lives off the other, the one thrives at the expense of the other.  All great cultural epochs are epochs of political decline: that which is great in the cultural sense has been unpolitical, even anti-political.... Goethe's heart opened up at the phenomenon Napoleon - it closed up to the 'Wars of Liberation'.... The moment Germany rises as a great power, France gains a new importance as a cultural power.  A great deal of current spiritual seriousness and passion has already emigrated to Paris; the question of pessimism, for instance, the Wagner question, virtually every psychological and artistic question, is speculated on with incomparably more subtlety and thoroughness there than in Germany - the Germans are even incapable of this kind of seriousness. - In the history of European culture the rise of the 'Reich' signifies one thing above all: a displacement of the centre of gravity.  The fact is known everywhere: in the main thing - and that is still culture - the Germans no longer come into consideration.  The question is asked: haven't you so much as one spirit who means something to Europe? in the way your Goethe, your Hegel, you Heinrich Heine, your Schopenhauer meant something?  That there is no longer a single German philosopher - there is no end of astonishment at that. -

 

 

5

 

The essential thing has gone out of the entire system of higher education in Germany: the end, as well as the means to the end.  That education, culture, itself is the end - and not 'the Reich' - that educators are required for the attainment of this end - and not grammar-school teachers and university scholars - that too has been forgotten.... There is a need for educators who are themselves educated; superior, noble spirits, who prove themselves every moment by what they say and by what they do not say: cultures grown ripe and sweet - and not the learned boors which grammar school and university offer youth today as 'higher nurses'.  Educators, the first prerequisite of education, are lacking (except for the exceptions of exceptions): hence the decline of German culture. - One of those rarest of exceptions is my honoured friend Jacob Burckhardt of Basel: it is to him above all that Basel owes its pre-eminence in the humanities. - What the 'higher schools' of Germany in fact achieve is a brutal breaking-in with the aim of making, in the least possible time, numberless young men fit to be utilized, utilized to the full and used up, in the state service.  'Higher education' and numberless - that is a contradiction to start with.  All higher education belongs to the exceptions alone: one must be privileged to have a right to so high a privilege.  Great and fine things can never be common property: pulchrum est paucorum hominum. [beauty is for the few] - What is the cause of the decline of German culture?  That 'higher education' is no longer a privilege - the democratism of 'culture' made 'universal' and common.... Not to overlook the fact that military privileges absolutely compel too great attendance at higher schools, which means their ruin. - No-one is any longer free in present-day Germany to give his children a noble education: our 'higher' schools are one and all adjusted - as regards their teachers, their curricula and their instructional aims - to the most dubious mediocrity.  And there reigns everywhere an indecent haste, as if something has been neglected if the young man of twenty-three is not yet 'finished and ready', does not yet know the answer to the 'chief question': which calling? - A higher kind of human being, excuse me for saying, doesn't think much of 'callings', the reason being he knows himself called.... He takes his time, he has plenty of time, he gives no thought whatsoever to being 'finished and ready' - at the age of thirty one is, as regards high culture, a beginner, a child. - Our overcrowded grammar schools, our overloaded, stupefied grammar-school teachers, are a scandal: one may perhaps have motives for defending this state of things, as the professors of Heidelberg recently did - there are no grounds for doing so.

 

 

6

 

To be true to my nature, which is affirmative and has dealings with contradiction and criticism only indirectly and when compelled, I shall straightaway set down the three tasks for the sake of which one requires educators.  One has to learn to see, one has to learn to think, one has to learn to speak and write: the end in all three is a noble culture. - Learning to see - habituating the eye to repose, to patience, to letting things come to it; learning to defer judgement, to investigate and comprehend the individual case in all its aspects.  This is the first preliminary schooling in spirituality: not to react immediately to a stimulus, but to have the restraining, stock-taking instincts in one's control.  Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what is called in unphilosophical language 'strong willpower': the essence of it is precisely not to 'will', the ability to defer decision.  All unspirituality, all vulgarity, is due to the incapacity to resist a stimulus - one has to react, one obeys every impulse.  In many instances, such a compulsion is already morbidity, decline, a symptom of exhaustion - almost everything which unphilosophical crudity designates by the name 'vice' is merely the physiological incapacity not to react. - A practical application of having learned to see: one will have to become slow, mistrustful, resistant as a learner in general.  In an attitude of hostile calm one will allow the strange, the novel of every kind to approach one first - one will draw one's hand back from it.  To stand with all doors open, to prostrate oneself submissively before every petty fact, to be ever itching to mingle with, plunge into other people and other things, in short our celebrated modern 'objectivity', is bad taste, is ignoble par excellence. -

 

 

7

 

Learning to think: our schools no longer have any idea what this means.  Even in our universities, even among students of philosophy themselves, the theory, the practice, the vocation of logic is beginning to die out.  Read German books: no longer the remotest recollection that a technique, a plan of instruction, a will to mastery is required for thinking - that thinking has to be learned in the way dancing has to be learned, as a form of dancing.... Who among Germans still knows from experience that subtle thrill which the possession of intellectual light feet communicates to all the muscles! - A stiffly awkward air in intellectual matters, a clumsy hand in grasping - this is in so great a degree German that foreigners take it for the German nature in general.  The German has no fingers for nuances.... That the Germans have so much endured their philosophers, above all that most deformed conceptual cripple there has ever been, the great Kant, offers a good deal of German amenableness. - For dancing in any form cannot be divorced from a noble education, being able to dance with the feet, with concepts, with words: do I still have to say that one has to be able to dance with the pen - that writing has to be learned? - But at this point I should become a complete enigma to German readers ...

 

 

 

Expeditions of an Untimely Man

 

1

 

My impossibles. - Senecca: or the toreador of virtue. - Rousseau: or the return to nature in impuris naturalibus. [in natural dirtiness] - Schiller: or the Moral-Trumpeter of Säckingen. [DER TROMPETER VON SACKINGEN (1853) by Joseph Viktor von Scheffel once enjoyed huge popularity in Germany; Viktor Nessler's opera based on it (1884) was also a popular success.] - Dante: or the hyena which poeticizes on graves. - Kant: or cant as intelligible character. - Victor Hugo: or the Pharaohs in the Sea of Absurdity. - Liszt: or the virtuoso - with women. ['oder die Schule der Gelaufigkeit - nach Weibern'. The joke is untranslatable: or the school of 'Gelaufigkeit' - after women. "Gelaufigkeit" means facility, skill (referring to Liszt's virtuosity as a pianist), but its root is "laufen" = to run; and "laufisch" means, among other things, lecherous.] - George Sand: or lactea ubertas, [milk in abundance] in English: the milch cow with the 'fine style'. - Michelet: or enthusiasm which strips off the jacket. - Carlyle: or pessimism as indigestion. - John Stuart Mill: or offensive clarity. - Les frères de Goncourt: or the two Ajaxes struggling with Homer.  Music by Offenbach.  Zola: or 'delight in stinking'. -

 

 

2

 

Renan. - Theology, or the corruption of reason by 'original sin' (Christianity).  Witness: Renan, who, whenever he risks a more general Yes or No, misses the point with painful regularity.  He would like, for instance, to couple together la science and la noblesse; but la science belongs to democracy, that is patently obvious.  He desires, with no little ambitiousness, to represent an aristocratism of the intellect: but at the same time he falls on his knees, and not only his knees, before its opposite, the évangile des humbles.... What avails all free-thinking, modernity, mockery and wry-necked flexibility, if one is still a Christian, Catholic and even priest in one's bowels!  Renan possesses his mode of inventiveness, just like a Jesuit or a father confessor, in devising means of seduction; his intellectuality does not lack the broad priestly smirk - like all priests, he becomes dangerous only when he loves.  Nobody can equal him in deadly adoration.... This spirit of Renan, an enervating spirit, is one fatality more for poor, sick, feeble-willed France. -

 

 

3

 

Sainte-Beuve. - Nothing masculine in him; full of petty sullen wrath against all masculine spirit.  Roams about, delicate, inquisitive, bored, eavesdropping - fundamentally a woman, with a woman's revengefulness and a woman's sensuousness.  As psychologist a genius of médisance; [scandal] inexhaustibly rich in means for creating it; no-one knows better how to mix poison with praise.  Plebeian in the lowest instincts and related to Rousseau's ressentiment: consequently a romantic - for beneath all romantisme there grunts and thirsts Rousseau's instinct for revenge.  A revolutionary, but kept tolerably in check by fear.  Constrained in presence of everything possessing strength (public opinion, the Academy, the Court, even Port-Royal). [The headquarters in Paris of Jansenism, the doctrine that the human will is constitutionally incapable of goodness, and that salvation is therefore by free and undeserved grace.  Sainte-Beuve wrote a celebrated history (1840-59) of the intellectual movement which grew up around Port-Royal.] Embittered against all that is great in men and things, against all that believes in itself.  Enough of a poet and semi-woman to feel greatness as power; constantly cringing, like the celebrated worm, because he constantly feels himself trodden on.  As a critic without standards, steadiness or backbone, possessing the palate for a large variety of things of the cosmopolitan libertin but lacking the courage even to admit his libertinage.  As an historian without philosophy, without the power of philosophical vision - for that reason rejecting, in all the main issues, the task of passing judgement, holding up 'objectivity' as a mask.  He comports himself differently, however, towards questions in which a delicate, experienced taste is the highest court of appeal: there he really does have the courage for himself, take pleasure in himself - there he is a master. - In some respects a preliminary form of Baudelaire. -

 

 

4

 

The Imatatio Christi [THE IMITATION OF CHRIST, a famous work attributed to the German mystic Thomas a Kempis (1379-1471).] is one of the books I cannot hold in my hand without experiencing a physiological resistance: it exhales a parfum of the 'eternal feminine' ['das Ewig-Weibliche', Goethe's coinage in the last lines of FAUST ("The eternal-feminine draws us aloft'), is often the object of Nietzsche's mockery, apparently because he cannot see any meaning in it.] for which one has to be French - or a Wagnerian.... This saint has a way of talking about love that makes even Parisiennes curious. - I am told that cunningest of Jesuits, A. Comte, who wanted to lead his Frenchmen to Rome via the détour of science, inspired himself with this book.  I believe it: 'the religion of the heart' ...

 

 

5

 

G. Eliot. - They have got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality: that is English consistency, let us not blame it on little blue-stockings à la Eliot.  In England, in response to every little emancipation from theology one has to reassert one's position in a fear-inspiring manner as a moral fanatic.  That is the penance one pays there. - With us it is different.  When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality.  For the latter is absolutely not self-evident: one must make this point clear again and again, in spite of English shallowpates.  Christianity is a system, a consistently thought-out and complete view of things.  If one breaks out of it a fundamental idea, the belief in God, one thereby breaks the whole thing to pieces: one has nothing of any consequence left in one's hands.  Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know what is good for him and what evil: he believes in God, who alone knows.  Christian morality is a command: its origin is transcendental; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticize; it possesses truth only if God is truth - it stands or falls with the belief in God. - If the English really do believe they know, of their own accord, 'intuitively', what is good and evil; if they consequently think they no longer have need of Christianity as a guarantee of morality; that is merely the consequence of the ascendancy of Christian evaluation and an expression of the strength and depth of this ascendancy: so that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, so that the highly conditional nature of its right to exist is no longer felt.  For the Englishman morality is not yet a problem ...

 

 

6

 

George Sand. - I have read the first Lettres d'un voyageur: like everything deriving from Rousseau false, artificial, fustian, exaggerated.  I cannot endure this coloured-wallpaper style; nor the vulgar ambition to possess generous feelings.  The worst, to be sure, is the female coquetting with male mannerisms, with the manners of ill-bred boys. - How cold she must have been withal, this insupportable authoress!  She wound herself up like a clock - and wrote.... Cold, like Hugo, like Balzac, like all Romantics as soon as they started writing!  And how complacently she liked to lie there, this prolific writing-cow, who had something German in the bad sense about her, like Rousseau her master, and who was in any case possible only with the decline of French taste! - But Renan respects her ...

 

 

7

 

Moral code of psychologists. - No colportage psychology!  Never observe for the sake of observing!  That produces a false perspective, a squint, something forces and exaggerated.  To experience from a desire to experience - that's no good.  In experiencing, one must not look back towards oneself, or every glance becomes an 'evil eye'.  A born psychologist instinctively guards against seeing for the sake of seeing; the same applies to the born painter.  He never works 'from nature' - he leaves it to his instinct, his camera obscura, to sift and strain 'nature', the 'case', the 'experience'....  He is conscious only of that arbitrary abstraction from the individual case. - What will be the result if one does otherwise?  Carries on colportage psychology in, for example, the manner of Parisian romanciers great and small?  It is that sort of thing which as it were lies in wait for reality, which brings a handful of curiosities home each evening... But just see what finally emerges - a pile of daubs, a mosaic at best, in any event something put together, restless, flashy.  The worst in this kind is achieved by the Goncourts: they never put three sentences together which are not simply painful to the eye, the psychologist's eye. - Nature, artistically considered, is no model.  It exaggerates, it distorts, it leaves gaps.  Nature is chance.  To study 'from nature' seems to me a bad sign: it betrays subjection, weakness, fatalism - this lying in the dust before petits faits [petty facts] is unworthy of a complete artist.  Seeing what is - that pertains to a different species of spirit, the anti-artistic, the prosaic.  One has to know who one is ...

 

 

8

 

Towards a psychology of the artist. - For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.  Intoxication must first have heightened the excitability of the entire machine: no art results before that happens.  All kinds of intoxication, however different their origin, have the power to do this: above all, the intoxication of sexual excitement, the oldest and most primitive form of intoxication.  Likewise the intoxication which comes in the train of all great desires, all strong emotions; the intoxication of feasting, of contest, of the brave deed, of victory, of all extreme agitation; the intoxication of cruelty; intoxication in destruction; intoxication under certain meteorological influences, for example the intoxication of spring; or under the influence of narcotics; finally the intoxication of the will, the intoxication of an overloaded and distended will. - The essence of intoxication is the feeling of plenitude and increased energy.  From out of this feeling one gives to things, one compels them to take, one rapes them - one calls this procedure idealizing.  Let us get rid of a prejudice here: idealization does not consist, as is commonly believed, in a subtracting or deducting of the petty and secondary.  A tremendous expulsion of the principal features rather is the decisive thing, so that thereupon the others too disappear.

 

 

9

 

In this condition one enriches everything out of one's own abundance: what one sees, what one desires, one sees swollen, pressing, strong, overladen with energy.  The man in this condition transforms things until they mirror his power - until they are reflections of his perfection.  This compulsion to transform into the perfect is - art.  Even all that which he is not becomes for him nonetheless part of his joy in himself; in art, man takes delight in himself as perfection. - It would be permissible to imagine an antithetical condition, a specific anti-artisticality of instinct - a mode of being which impoverishes and attenuates things and makes them consumptive.  And history is in fact rich in such anti-artists, in such starvelings of life, who necessarily have to take things to themselves, impoverish them, make them leaner.  This is, for example, the case with the genuine Christian, with Pascal for example: a Christian who is at the same time an artist does not exist.... Let no-one be childish and cite Raphael as an objection, or some homoeopathic Christian of the nineteenth century: Raphael said Yes, Raphael did Yes, consequently Raphael was not a Christian ...

 

 

10

 

What is the meaning of the antithetical concepts Apollinian and Dionysian, both conceived as forms of intoxication, which I introduced into aesthetics? [In the BIRTH OF TRAGEDY] - Apollinian intoxication alerts above all the eye, so that it acquires power of vision.  The painter, the sculptor, the epic poet are visionaries par excellence.  In the Dionysian state, on the other hand, the entire emotional system is alerted and intensified: so that it discharges all its powers of representation, imitation, transfiguration, transmutation, every kind of mimicry and play-acting, conjointly.  The essential thing remains the facility of the metamorphosis, the incapacity not to react (- in a similar way to certain types of hysteric, who also assume any role at the slightest instigation).  It is impossible for the Dionysian man not to understand any suggestion of whatever kind, he ignores no signal from the emotions, he possesses to the highest degree the instinct for understanding and divining, just as he possesses the art of communication to the highest degree.  He enters into every skin, into every emotion; he is continually transforming himself. - Music, as we understand it today, is likewise a collective arousal and discharging of the emotions, but for all that only a vestige of a much fuller emotional world of expression, a mere residuum of Dionysian histrionicism.  To make music possible as a separate art one had to immobilize a number of senses, above all the muscular sense (at least relatively: for all rhythm still speaks to our muscles to a certain extent): so that man no longer straightway imitates and represents bodily everything he feels.  Nonetheless, that is the true Dionysian normal condition, at least its original condition: music is the gradually-achieved specialization of this at the expense of the most closely related faculties.

 

 

11

 

The actor, the mime, the dancer, the musician, the lyric poet are fundamentally related in their instincts and essentially one, only gradually specialized and separated from one another - even to the point of opposition.  The lyric poet stayed untied longest with the musician, the actor with the dancer. - The architect represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollinian condition: here it is the mighty act of will, the will which moves mountains, the intoxication of the strong will, which demands artistic expression.  The most powerful men have always inspired the architects; the architect has always been influenced by power.  Pride, victory over weight and gravity, the will to power, seek to render themselves visible in a building; architecture is a kind of rhetoric of power, now persuasive, even cajoling in form, now bluntly imperious.  The highest feeling of power and security finds expression in that which possesses grand style.  Power which no longer requires proving; which disdains to please; which is slow to answer; which is conscious of no witnesses around it; which lives oblivious of the existence of any opposition; which reposes in itself, fatalistic, a law among laws: that is what speaks of itself in the form of grand style. -

 

 

12

 

I have read the life of Thomas Carlyle, that unwitting and involuntary farce, that heroical-moralistic interpretation of dyspepsia. - Carlyle, a man of strong words and attitudes, a rhetorician from necessity, continually agitated by the desire for a strong faith and the feeling of incapacity for it (- in this a typical Romantic!)  The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite.  If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of scepticism: one is secure enough, firm enough, fixed enough for it.  Carlyle deafens something within him by the fortissimo of his reverence for men of strong faith and by his rage against the less single-minded: he requires noise.  A continual passionate dishonesty towards himself - that is his proprium, because of that he is and will remain interesting. - To be sure, in England he is admired precisely on account of his honesty.... Well, that is English; and, considering the English are the nation of consummate cant, even appropriate and not merely understandable.  Fundamentally, Carlyle is an English atheist who wants to be honoured for not being one.

 

 

13

 

Emerson. - Much more enlightened, adventurous, multifarious, refined than Carlyle; above all, happier.... Such a man as instinctively feeds on pure ambrosia and leaves alone the indigestible in things.  Compared with Carlyle a man of taste. - Carlyle, who had a great affection for him, nevertheless said of him: 'He does not give us enough to bite on': which may be truly said, but not to the detriment of Emerson. - Emerson possesses that good-natured and quick-witted cheerfulness that discourages all earnestness; he has absolutely no idea how old he is or how young he will be - he could say of himself, in the words of Lope de Vega: 'yo me sucedo a mi mismo'. [I am my own successor.] His spirit is always finding reasons for being contented and even grateful; and now and then he verges on the cheerful transcendence of that worthy gentleman who, returning from an amorous rendezvous tamquam re bene gesta, said gratefully: 'Ut desint vires, tamen est laudanda voluptas.' [... that worthy genntleman who, returning from an amorous rendezvous as if things had gone well, said gratefully: 'Though the powerr be lacking, the lust is praiseworthy.' "Voluptas" replaces the usual "voluntas" = will.]

 

 

14

 

Anti-Darwin. - As regards the celebrated 'struggle for life', it seems to me for the present to have been rather asserted than proved.  It does occur, but as the exception; the general aspect of life is not hunger and distress, but rather wealth, luxury, even absurd prodigality - where there is a struggle it is a struggle for power.... One should not mistake Malthus for nature. - Supposing, however, that this struggle exists - and it does indeed occur - its outcome is the reverse of that desired by the school of Darwin, of that which one ought perhaps to desire with them: namely, the defeat of the stronger, the more privileged, the fortunate exceptions.  Species do not grow more perfect: the weaker dominate the strong again and again - the reason being they are the great majority, and they are also cleverer.... Darwin forgot the mind (- that is English!): the weak possess more mind.... To acquire mind one must need mind - one loses it when one no longer needs it.  He who possesses strength divests himself of mind ( - 'let it depart!' they think today in Germany, ' - the Reich will still be ours.' ...) [Refers to the last lines of Luther's hymn 'Ein' feste Burg' - where, however, what is to be let depart is the things of this world and the 'Reich' means the kingdom of Heaven.] One will see that under mind I include foresight, patience, dissimulation, great self-control, and all that is mimicry (this last includes a great part of what is called virtue).

 

 

15

 

Psychologist's casuistry.  This man is a human psychologist: what does he really study men for?  He wants to gain little advantages over them, or big ones too - he is a politician! ... This other man is also a human psychologist: and you say he wants nothing for himself, that he is 'impersonal'.  Take a closer look!  Perhaps he wants an even worse advantage: to feel himself superior to men, to have the right to look down on them, no longer to confuse himself with them.  This 'impersonal' man is a despiser of men: and the former is a more humane species, which may even be clear from his appearance.  At least he thinks himself equal to others, he involves himself with others ...

 

 

16

 

The psychological taste of the Germans seems to me to be called in question by a whole series of instances which modesty forbids me to enumerate.  There is one instance, however, which offers me a grand opportunity for establishing my thesis: I bear the Germans a grudge for their having blundered over Kant and his 'backdoor philosophy', as I call it - this was not the pattern of intellectual integrity. - Another thing I loathe to hear is an infamous 'and': the Germans say 'Goethe and Schiller' - I am afraid they say 'Schiller and Goethe'.... Don't people know this Schiller yet? - There are even worse 'ands'; I have heard 'Schopenhauer and Hartmann' with my own ears, though only among university professors, admittedly ...

 

 

17

 

The most spiritual human beings, assuming they are the most courageous, also experience by far the most painful tragedies: but it is precisely for this reason that they honour life, because it brings against them its most formidable weapons.

 

 

18

 

On the subject of 'intellectual conscience'. - Nothing seems to me to be rarer today than genuine hypocrisy.  I great suspect that this plant finds the mild atmosphere of our culture unendurable.  Hypocrisy has its place in the ages of strong belief: in which even when one is compelled to exhibit a different belief one does not abandon the belief one already has.  Today one does abandon it; or, which is even more common, one acquires a second belief - one remains honest in any event.  Beyond doubt, a very much larger number of convictions are possible today than formerly: possible, that means permitted, that means harmless.  That is the origin of self-tolerance. - Self-tolerance permits one to possess several convictions; these conciliate one another - they take care, as all the world does today, not to compromise themselves.  How does one compromise oneself today?  By being consistent.  By going in a straight line.  By being less than ambiguous.  By being genuine.... I greatly fear that modern man is simply too indolent for certain vices: so that they are actually dying out.  All evil which is dependent on strong will - and perhaps there is nothing evil without strength of will - is degenerating, in our tepid atmosphere, into virtue.... The few hypocrites I have known impersonated hypocrisy: they were, like virtually every tenth man nowadays, actors. -

 

 

19

 

Beautiful and ugly. ['Schon und hasslich' is the German translation of Macbeth's witches' "fair and foul".] - Nothing is so conditional, let us say circumscribed, as our feelings for the beautiful.  Anyone who tried to divorce it from man's pleasure in man would at once find the ground give way beneath him.  The 'beautiful in itself' is not even a concept, merely a phrase.  In the beautiful, man sets himself up as the standard of perfection; in select cases he worships himself in it.  A species cannot do otherwise than affirm itself alone in this manner.  Its deepest instinct, that of self-preservation and self-aggrandizement, is still visible in such sublimated forms.  Man believes that the world itself is filled with beauty - he forgets that it is he who has created it.  He alone has bestowed beauty upon the world - alas! only a very human, all too human beauty.... Man really mirrors himself in things, that which gives him back his own reflection he considers beautiful: the judgement 'beautiful' is his conceit of his species.... For a tiny suspicion whispers into the sceptic's ear: is the world actually made beautiful because man finds it so?  Man has humanized the world: that is all.  But there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to guarantee to us that man constitutes the model for the beautiful.  Who knows what figure he would cut in the eyes of a higher arbiter of taste?  Perhaps a presumptuous one? perhaps even risible? perhaps a little arbitrary? ... 'O Dionysus, divine one, why do you pull my ears?' Ariadne once asked her philosophical lover during one of those celebrated dialogues on Naxos. [Fragmentary sketches by Nietzsche published after his death, i.e. long after this reference to them.] 'I find a kind of humour in your ears, Ariadne: why are they not longer?'

 

 

20

 

Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivety rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics.  Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man - the domain of aesthetic judgement is therewith defined. - Reckoned physiologically, everything ugly weakens and afflicts man.  It recalls decay, danger, impotence; he actually suffers a loss of energy in its presence.  The effect of the ugly can be measured with a dynamometer.  Whenever man feels in any way depressed, he senses the proximity of something 'ugly'.  His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride - they decline with the ugly, they increase with the beautiful.... In the one case as in the other we draw a conclusion: its premises have been accumulated in the instincts in tremendous abundance.  The ugly is understood as a sign and symptom of degeneration: that which recalls degeneration, however remotely, produces in us the judgement 'ugly'.  Every token of exhaustion, of heaviness, of age, of weariness, every kind of unfreedom, whether convulsive or paralytic, above all the smell, colour and shape of dissolution, of decomposition, though it be attenuated to the point of being no more than a symbol - all this calls forth the same reaction, the value judgement 'ugly'.  A feeling of hatred then springs up; what is man then hating?  But the answer admits of no doubt: the decline of his type.  He hates then from out of the profoundest instinct of his species; there is horror, foresight, profundity, far-seeing vision in this hatred - it is the profoundest hatred there is.  It is for its sake that art is profound ...

 

 

21

 

Schopenhauer. - Schopenhauer, the last German of any consequence (- who is a European event like Goethe, like Hegel, like Heinrich Heine, and not merely a parochial, a 'national' one), is for a psychologist a case of the first order: namely, as a mendacious attempt of genius to marshal, in aid of a nihilistic total devaluation of life, the very counter-instances, the great self-affirmations of the 'will to love', the exuberant forms of life.  He interpreted in turn art, heroism, genius, beauty, grand sympathy, knowledge, the will to truth, tragedy, as phenomena consequent upon the 'denial' of or the thirst to deny the 'will' - the greatest piece of psychological false-coinage in history, Christianity alone excepted.  Looked at more closely he is in this merely the heir of the Christian interpretation: but with this difference, that he knew how to make what Christianity had rejected, the great cultural facts of mankind, and approve of them from a Christian, that is to say nihilistic, point of view (- namely as roads to 'redemption', as preliminary forms of 'redemption', as stimulants of the thirst for 'redemption' ...).

 

 

22

 

To take a particular instance: Schopenhauer speaks of beauty with a melancholy ardour - why, in the last resort?  Because he sees in it a bridge upon which one may pass over, or acquire a thirst to pass over.... It is to him redemption from the 'will' for minutes at a time - it lures on to redemption for ever.... He values it especially as redeemer from the 'focus of the will', from sexuality - in beauty he sees the procreative impulse denied.... Singular saint!  Someone contradicts you, and I fear it is nature.  To what end is there beauty at all in the sounds, colours, odours, rhythmic movements of nature? what makes beauty appear? - Fortunately a philosopher also contradicts him.  No less an authority than the divine Plato (- so Schopenhauer himself calls him) maintains a different thesis: that all beauty incites to procreation - that precisely this is the proprium of its effect, from the most sensual regions up into the most spiritual ...

 

 

23

 

Plato goes further.  He says, with an innocence for which one must be Greek and not 'Christian', that there would be no Platonic philosophy at all if Athens had not possessed such beautiful youths: it was the sight of them which first plunged the philosopher's soul into an erotic whirl and allowed it no rest until it had implanted the seed of all high things into so beautiful a soil.  Another singular saint! - one doesn't believe one's ears, even supposing one believes Plato.  One sees, at least, that philosophizing was different in Athens, above all public.  Nothing is less Greek than the conceptual cobweb-spinning of a hermit, amor intellectualis dei [intellectual love of God] in the manner of Spinoza.  Philosophy in the manner of Plato should rather be defined as an erotic contest, as a further development and inward intensification of the old agonal gymnastics and their presuppositions.... What finally emerged from this philosophical eroticism of Plato?  A new artistic form of the Greek agon, dialectics. - I further recall, opposing Schopenhauer and to the honour of Plato, that the entire higher culture and literature of classical France also grew up on the soil of sexual interest.  One may seek everywhere in it for gallantry, sensuality, sexual context, 'woman' - one will never seek in vain ...

 

 

24

 

L'art pour l'art. [Art for art's sake] - The struggle against purpose in art is always a struggle against the moralizing tendency in art, against the subordination of art to morality.  L'art pour l'art means: 'the devil take morality!' - But this very hostility betrays that moral prejudice is still dominant.  When one has excluded from art the purpose of moral preaching and human improvement it by no means follows that art is completely purposeless, goalless, meaningless, in short 'l'art pour l'art - a snake biting its own tail.  'Rather no purpose at all than a moral purpose!' - thus speaks mere passion.  A psychologist asks on the other hand: what does all art do? does it not praise? does it not glorify? does it not select? does it not highlight?  By doing all this it strengthens or weakens certain valuations.... Is this no more than an incidental? an accident?  Something in which the instinct of the artist has no part whatever?  Or is it not rather the prerequisite for the artist's being an artist at all.... Is his basic instinct directed towards art, or is it not rather directed towards the meaning of art, which is life? towards a disideratum of life? - Art is the great stimulus to life: how could it be thought purposeless, aimless, l'art pour l'art?  One question remains: art also brings to light much that is ugly, hard, questionable in life - does it not thereby seem to suffer from life? - And there have indeed been philosophers who lent it this meaning: Schopenhauer taught that the whole object of art was to 'liberate from the will', and he revered tragedy because its greatest function was to 'dispose one to resignation'. - But this - as I have already intimated - is pessimist's perspective and 'evil eye' - : one must appeal to the artists themselves.  What does the tragic artist communicate of himself?  Does he not display precisely the condition of fearlessness in the face of the fearsome and questionable? - This condition itself is a high desideratum: he who knows it bestows on it the highest honours.  He communicates it, he has to communicate it if he is an artist, a genius of communication.  Bravery and composure in the face of a powerful enemy, great hardship, a problem that arouses aversion - it is this victorious condition which the tragic artist singles out, which he glorifies.  In the fact of tragedy the warlike in our soul celebrates its Saturnalias; whoever is accustomed to suffering, whoever seeks out suffering, the heroic man extols his existence by means of tragedy - for him alone does the tragic poet pour this draught of sweetest cruelty. -

 

 

25

 

To put up with men, to keep open house in one's heart - this is liberal, but no more than liberal.  One knows hearts which are capable of noble hospitality, which have curtained windows and closed shutters: they keep their best rooms empty.  Why do they so? - Because they await guests with whom one does not have to 'put up' ...

 

 

26

 

We no longer have a sufficiently high estimate of ourselves when we communicate.  Our true experiences are not garrulous.   They could not communicate themselves if they wanted to: they lack words.  We have already grown beyond whatever we have words for.  In all talking there lies a grain of contempt.  Speech, it seems, was devised only for the average, medium, communicable.  The speaker has already vulgarized himself by speaking. - From a moral code for deaf-mutes and other philosophers.

 

 

27

 

'This picture is enchanting fair!'... [The opening line of an aria in Mozart's THE MAGIC FLUTE.] The literary woman, unsatisfied, agitated, desolate in heart and entrails, listening every minute with painful curiosity to the imperative which whispers from the depths of her organism 'aut liberi aut libri': [children or books] the literary woman, cultured enough to understand the voice of nature even when it speaks Latin, and on the other hand vain enough and enough of a goose to say secretly to herself in French je me verrai, je me lirai, je m'extasierai et je dirai: Possible, que j'aie eu tant d'esprit?' ... [I shall look at myself, I shall read myself, I shall delight myself and I shall say: Can I really have had so much wit?]

 

 

28

 

The 'impersonal' take the floor. - 'We find nothing easier than being wise, patient, superior.  We drip with the oil of forbearance and sympathy, we are absurdly just, we forgive everything.  For that very reason we ought to discipline ourselves a little; for that very reason we ought to cultivate a little emotion, a little emotional vice, from time to time.  It may be hard for us; and among ourselves we may perhaps laugh at the appearance we thus present.  But what of that!  We no longer have any other mode of self-overcoming available to us: this is our asceticism, our penance'.... Becoming personal - the virtue of the 'impersonal' ...

 

 

29

 

From a doctorate exam. - 'What is the task of all higher education?' - To turn a man into a machine. - 'By what means?' - He has to learn how to feel bored. - 'How is that achieved?' - Through the concept of duty. - 'Who is his model?' - The philologist: he teaches how to grind. ['ochsen': to work hard, slave - also to cram, study hard.] - 'Who is the perfect man?' - The civil servant. - 'Which philosophy provides the best formula for the civil servant?' ' Kant's: the civil servant as thing in itself set as judge over the civil servant as appearance. -

 

 

30

 

The right to stupidity. - The wearied and slow-breathing worker, good-natured, letting things take their course: this typical figure, who is now, in the Age of Work (and of the 'Reich'! - ), encountered in all classes of society, is today laying claim even to art, including the book and above all the journal - how much more to the beauties of nature, to Italy.... The man of the evening, with the 'wild instincts lulled to sleep' of which Faust speaks, [In Goethe's FAUST, Part 1, Scene 3.] requires the health resort, the seaside, the glaciers, Bayreuth.... [The seat of the Wagner Festival.] In ages like this, art has a right to pure folly [Parsifal, eponymous hero of Wagner's last opera, is described as a pure, i.e. chaste, fool ('reine Tor') whose naivety is proof against temptation of every kind.  Nietzsche considered the plot of PARSIFAL preposterous and persistently uses the phrase 'reine Torheit' (pure folly) in the sense of 'complete' folly.] - as a kind of holiday for the spirit, the wits and the heart.  Wagner understood that.  Pure folly is a restorative ...

 

 

31

 

Another problem of diet. - The means by which Julius Caesar defended himself against sickliness and headache: tremendous marches, the simplest form of living, uninterrupted sojourn in the open air, continuous toil - these, broadly speaking, are the universal preservative and protective measures against the extreme vulnerability of that subtle machine working at the highest pressure which is called genius. -

 

 

32

 

The immoralist speaks. - Nothing offends a philosopher's taste more than man when he expresses desires.... When the philosopher sees man only in his activity, when he sees this bravest, cunningest, toughest of animals straying even into labyrinthine calamities, how admirable man seems to him!  He encourages him.... But the philosopher despises desiring man, and the 'desirable' man too - he despises all the desiderata, all the ideals of man.  If a philosopher could be a nihilist, he would be one because he finds nothingness behind all the ideals of men.  Or not even nothingness merely - but only the worthless, the absurd, the sick, the cowardly, the weary, dregs of all kinds from the cup of his life after he has drained it.... How does it come about that man, so admirable as a reality, deserves no respect when he expresses desires?  Does he have to atone for being so able as a reality?  Does he have to compensate for his activity, for the exertion of will and hand involved in all activity, with a relaxation of the imaginary and absurd? - The history of his desiderata has hitherto been the partie honteuse [shameful part] of man: one should take care not to read too long in it.  What justifies man is his reality - it will justify him eternally.  How much more valuable an actual man is compared with any sort of merely desired, dreamed of, odious lie of a man? with an sort of ideal man? ... And it is only the ideal man who offends the philosopher's taste.

 

 

33

 

The natural value of egoism. - The value of egoism depends on the physiological value of him who possesses it: it can be very valuable, it can be worthless and contemptible.  Every individual may be regarded as representing the ascending or descending line of life.  When one has decided which, one has thereby established a canon for the value of his egoism.  If he represents the ascending line his value is in fact extraordinary - and for the sake of the life-collective, which with him takes a step forward, the care expended on his preservation, on the creation of optimum conditions for him, may even be extreme.  For the individual, the 'single man', as people and philosophers have hitherto understood him, is an error: he does not constitute a separate entity, an atom, a 'link in the chain', something merely inherited from the past - he constitutes the entire single 'man' up to and including himself.... If he represents the descending development, decay, chronic degeneration, sickening (- sickness is, broadly speaking, already a phenomenon consequent upon decay, not the cause of it), then he can be accorded little value, and elementary fairness demands that he take away as little as possible from the well-constituted.  He is no better than a parasite on them ...

 

 

34

 

Christian and anarchist. - When the anarchist, as the mouthpiece of a declining strata of society, demands with righteous indignation 'his rights', 'justice', 'equal rights', he is only acting under the influence of his want of culture, which prevents his understanding why he is really suffering - in what respect he is impoverished, in life.... A cause-creating drive is powerful within him: someone must be to blame for his feeling vile.... His 'righteous indignation' itself already does him good; every poor devil finds pleasure in scolding - it gives him a little of the intoxication of power.  Even complaining and wailing can give life a charm for the sake of which one endures it: there is a small does of revenge in every complaint, one reproaches those who are different for one's feeling vile, sometimes even with one's being vile, as if they had perpetrated an injustice or possessed an impermissible privilege.  'If I am canaille, you ought to be so too': on the basis of this logic one makes revolutions. - Complaining is never of any use: it comes from weakness.  Whether one attributes one's feeling vile to others or to oneself - the Socialist does the former, the Christian for example the latter - makes no essential difference.  What is common to both, and unworthy in both, is that someone has to be to blame for the fact that one suffers - in short, that the sufferer prescribes for himself the honey of revenge as a medicine for his suffering.  The objectives of this thirst for revenge as a thirst for pleasure vary according to circumstances: the sufferer finds occasions everywhere for cooling his petty revengefulness - if he is a Christian, to say it again, he finds them in himself.... The Christian and the anarchist - both are décadents. - And when the Christian condemns, calumniates and befouls society: even the 'Last Judgement' is still the sweet consolation of revenge - the revolution, such as the Socialist worker too anticipates, only conceived of as somewhat more distant.... Even the 'Beyond' - why a Beyond if not as a means of befouling the Here-and-Now? ...

 

 

35

 

A criticism of décadence morality. - An 'altruistic' morality, a morality under which egoism languishes - is under all circumstances a bad sign.  This applies to individuals, it applies especially to peoples.  The best are lacking when egoism begins to be lacking.  To choose what is harmful to oneself, to be attracted by 'disinterested' motives, almost constitutes the formula for décadence.  'Not to seek one's own advantage' - that is merely amoral figleaf for a quite different, namely physiological fact: 'I know longer know how to find my advantage'.... Desegregation of the instincts! - Man is finished when he becomes altruistic. - Instead of saying simply 'I am no longer worth anything', the moral lie in the mouth of the décadent says: 'Nothing is worth anything - life is not worth anything'.... Such a judgement represents, after all, a grave danger, it is contagious - on the utterly morbid soil of society it soon grows up luxuriously, now in the form of religion (Christianity), now in that of philosophy (Schopenhauerism).  In some circumstances the vapours of such a poison-tree jungle sprung up out of putrefaction can poison life for years ahead, for thousands of years ahead ...

 

 

36

 

A moral code for physicians. - The invalid is a parasite on society.  In a certain state it is indecent to go on living.  To vegetate on in cowardly dependence on physicians and medicaments after the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost ought to entail the profound contempt of society.  Physicians, in their turn, ought to be the communicators of this contempt - not prescriptions, but every day a fresh dose of disgust with their patients.... To create a new responsibility, that of the physician, in all cases in which the highest interest of life, of ascending life, demands the most ruthless suppression and sequestration of degenerating life - for example in determining the right to reproduce, the right to be born, the right to live.... To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.  Death of one's own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there, likewise an actual evaluation of what has been desired and what achieved in life, an adding-up of life - all of this in contrast to the pitiable and horrible comedy Christianity has made of the hour of death.  One should never forget of Christianity that it has abused the weakness of the dying to commit conscience-rape and even the mode of death to formulate value judgements on men and the past! - Here, every cowardice of prejudice notwithstanding, it is above all a question of establishing the correct, that is physiological evaluation of so-called natural death: which is, after all, also only an 'unnatural' death, an act of suicide.  One perishes by no-one but oneself.  Only 'natural' death is death for the most contemptible reasons, an unfree death, a death at the wrong time, a coward's death.  From love of life one ought to desire to die differently from this: freely, consciously, not accidentally, not suddenly overtaken.... Finally, a piece of advice for messieurs the pessimists and other décadents.  We have no power to prevent ourselves being born: but we can rectify this error - for it is sometimes an error.  When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.... Society - what am I saying! life itself derives more advantage from that than from any sort of 'life' spent in renunciation, green-sickness and other virtues - one has freed others from having to endure one's sight, one has removed an objection from life.... Pessimism, pur, vert, [pure, raw] proves itself only by the self-negation of messieurs the pessimists: one must take their logic a step further, and not deny life merely in 'will and idea', as Schopenhauer did - one must first of all deny Schopenhauer.... Pessimism, by the by, however contagious it may be, nevertheless does not add to the morbidity of an age or a race in general: it is the expression of this morbidity.  One succumbs to it as one succumbs to cholera: one's constitution must already be sufficiently morbid.  Pessimism does not of itself make a single additional décadent; I recall that statistics show that the years in which cholera rages do not differ from other years in the total number of deaths.

 

 

37

 

Whether we have grown more moral. - As was only to be expected, the whole ferocity of the moral stupidity which, as is well known, is considered morality as such in Germany, has launched itself against my concept 'beyond good and evil': I could tell some pretty stories about it.  Above all, I was invited to reflect on the 'undeniable superiority' of our age in moral judgement, our real advance in this respect: compared with us, a Cesare Borgia was certainly not to be set up as a 'higher man', as a kind of superman, in the way I set him up.... A Swiss editor, that of the 'Bund', went so far - not without expressing his admiration of the courage for so hazardous an enterprise - as to 'understand' that the meaning of my work lay in a proposal to abolish all decent feeling.  Much obliged! [Sehr verbunden!' - a play on the name of the 'Bund'.] - by way of reply I permit myself to raise the question whether we have really grown more moral.  That all the world believes so is already an objection to it.... We modern men, very delicate, very vulnerable and paying and receiving consideration in a hundred ways, imagine in fact that this sensitive humanity which we represent, this achieved unanimity in forbearance, in readiness to help, in mutual trust, is a positive advance, that with this we have gone far beyond the men of the Renaissance.  But every age thinks in this way, has to think in this way.  What is certain is that we would not dare to place ourselves in Renaissance circumstances, or even imagine ourselves in them: our nerves could not endure that reality, not to speak of our muscles.  This incapacity, however, demonstrates, not an advance, but only a different, a more belated constitution, a weaker, more delicate, more vulnerable one, out of which is necessarily engendered a morality which is full of consideration.  If we think away our delicacy and belatedness, our physiological ageing, then our morality of 'humanization' too loses its value at once - no morality has any value in itself - : we would even despise it.  On the other hand, let us be in no doubt that we modern men, with our thick padding of humanity which dislikes to give the slightest offence, would provide the contemporaries of Cesare Borgia with a side-splitting comedy.  We are, in fact, involuntarily funny beyond all measure, we with our modern 'virtues'.... The decay of our hostile and mistrust-arousing instincts - and that is what constitutes our 'advance' - represents only one of the effects attending our general decay of vitality: it costs a hundred times more effort, more foresight, to preserve so dependent, so late an existence as we are.  Here everyone helps everyone else, here everyone is to a certain degree an invalid and everyone a nurse.  This is then called 'virtue' - : among men who knew a different kind of life, a fuller, more prodigal, more overflowing life, it would be called something else: 'cowardice', perhaps, 'pitiableness', 'old woman's morality'.... Our softening of customs - this is my thesis, my innovation if you like - is a consequence of decline; stern and frightful customs can, conversely, be a consequence of a superabundance of life.  For in the latter case much may be risked, much demanded and much squandered.  What was formerly a spice of life would be poison to us.... We are likewise too old, too belated, to be capable of indifference - also a form of strength: our morality of pity, against which I was the first to warn, that which one might call l'impressionism morale, is one more expression of the physiological over-excitability pertaining to everything décadent.  That movement which with Schopenhauer's morality of pity attempted to present itself as scientific - a very unsuccessful attempt! - is the actual décadence movement in morality; as such it is profoundly related to Christian morality.  Strong ages, noble cultures, see in pity, in 'love of one's neighbour', in a lack of self and self-reliance, something contemptible. - Ages are to be assessed according to their positive forces - and by this assessment the age of the Renaissance, so prodigal and so fateful, appears as the last great age, and we, we moderns with our anxious care for ourselves and love of our neighbour, with our virtues of work, of unpretentiousness, of fair play, of scientificality - acquisitive, economical, machine-minded - appear as a weak age.... Our virtues are conditioned, are demanded by our weakness.... 'Equality', a certain actual rendering similar of which the theory of 'equal rights' is only the expression, belongs essentially to decline: the chasm between man and man, class and class, the multiplicity of types, the will to be oneself, to stand out - that which I call pathos of distance - characterizes every strong age.  The tension, the range between the extremes is today growing less and less - the extremes themselves are finally obliterated to the point of similarity.... All our political theories and state constitutions, the 'German Reich' certainly not excluded, are consequences, necessary effects of decline; the unconscious influence of décadence has gained ascendancy even over the ideals of certain of the sciences.  My objection to the whole of sociology in England and France is that it knows from experience only the decaying forms of society and takes its own decaying instincts with perfect innocence as the norm of sociological value judgement.  Declining life, the diminution of all organizing power, that is to say the power of separating, of opening up chasms, of ranking above and below, formulates itself in the sociology of today as the ideal.... Our Socialists are décadents, but Mr Herbert Spencer is also a décadent - he sees in the victory of altruism something desirable! ...

 

 

38

 

My conception of freedom. - The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it - what it costs us.  I give an example.  Liberal institutions immediately cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: subsequently there is nothing more thoroughly harmful to freedom than liberal institutions.  One knows, indeed, what they bring about: they undermine the will to power, they are the levelling of mountain and valley exalted to a moral principle, they make small, cowardly and smug - it is the herd animal which triumphs with them every time.  Liberalism: in plain words, reduction to the herd animal.... As long as they are still being fought for, these same institutions produce quite different effects; they then in fact promote freedom mightily.  Viewed more closely, it is war which produces these effects, war for liberal institutions which as war permits the illiberal instincts to endure.  And war is a training in freedom.  For what is freedom?  That one has the will to self-responsibility.  That one preserves the distance which divides us.  That one has become more indifferent to hardship, toil, privation, even to life.  That one is ready to sacrifice men to one's cause, oneself not excepted.  Freedom means that the manly instincts that delight in war and victory have gained mastery over the other instincts - for example, over the instinct for 'happiness'.  The man who has become free - and how much more the mind that has become free - spurns the contemptible sort of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers.  Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats.  The free man is a warrior. - How is freedom measured, in individuals as in nations?  By the resistance which has to be overcome, by the effort it costs to stay aloft.  One would have to seek the highest type of free man where the greatest resistance is constantly being overcome: five steps from tyranny, near the threshold of the danger of servitude.  This is true psychologically when one understands by 'tyrants' pitiless and dreadful instincts, to combat which demands the maximum of authority and discipline towards oneself - finest type Julius Caesar - ; it is also true politically: one has only to look at history.  The nations which were worth something, which became worth something, never became so under liberal institutions: it was great danger which made of them something deserving reverence, danger which first teaches us to know our resources, our virtues, our shield and spear, our spirit - which compels us to be strong.... First principle: one must need strength, otherwise one will never have it. - Those great forcing-houses for strong human beings, for the strongest kind there has ever been, the aristocratic communities of the pattern of Rome and Venice, understood freedom in precisely the sense in which I understand the word 'freedom': as something one has and does not have, something one wants, something one conquers ...

 

 

39

 

Criticism of modernity. - Our institutions are no longer fit for anything: everyone is unanimous about that.  But the fault lies not in them but in us.  Having lost all the instincts out of which institutions grow, we are losing the institutions themselves, because we are no longer fit for them.  Democracy has always been the declining form of the power to organize: I have already, in Human, All Too Human, characterized modern democracy, together with its imperfect manifestations such as the 'German Reich', as the decaying form of the state.  For institutions to exist there must exist the kind of will, instinct, imperative which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to centuries-long responsibility, to solidarity between succeeding generations backwards and forwards in infinitum.  If this will is present, there is established something such as the imperium Romanum: or such as Russia, the only power today which has durability in it, which can wait, which can still promise something - Russia, the antithesis of that pitiable European petty-state politics and nervousness which with the foundation of the German Reich has entered a critical phase.... The entire West has lost those instincts out of which institutions grow, out of which the future grows: perhaps nothing goes so much against the grain of its 'modern spirit' as this.  One lives for today, one lives very fast - one lives very irresponsibly: it is precisely this which one calls 'freedom'.  That which makes institutions institutions is despised, hated, rejected: whenever the word 'authority' is so much as heard one believes oneself in danger of a new slavery.   The décadence in the valuating instinct of our politicians, our political parties, goes so deep that they instinctively prefer that which leads to dissolution, that which hastens the end.... Witness modern marriage.  It is obvious that all sense has gone out of modern marriage: which is, however, no objection to marriage but to modernity.  The rationale of marriage lay in the legal sole responsibility of the man: marriage thereby had a centre of gravity, whereas now it limps with both legs.  The rationale of marriage lay in its indissolubility in principle: it thereby acquired an accent which could make itself heard against the accidents of feeling, passion and the moment.  It lay likewise in the responsibility of the families for the selection of mates.  With the increasing indulgence of love matches one has simply eliminated the foundation of marriage, that alone which makes it an institution.  One never establishes an institution on the basis of an idiosyncrasy, one does not, as aforesaid, establish marriage on the basis of 'love' - one establishes it on the basis of the sexual drive, the drive to own property (wife and child considered as property), the drive to dominate which continually organizes the smallest type of domain, the family, which needs children and heirs so as to retain, in a physiological sense as well, an achieved measure of power, influence, wealth, so as to prepare for protracted tasks, for a solidarity of instinct between the centuries.  Marriage as an institution already includes in itself the affirmation of the largest, the most enduring form of organization: if society as a whole cannot stand security for itself to the most distant generations, then marriage has really no meaning. - Modern marriage has lost its meaning - consequently it is being abolished.

 

 

40

 

The labour question. - The stupidity, fundamentally the instinct degeneration which is the cause of every stupidity today, lies in the existence of a labour question at all.  About certain things one does not ask questions: first imperative of instinct. - I simply cannot see what one wishes to do with the European worker now one has made a question of him.  He finds himself far too well placed not to go on asking for more, or to ask more and more impudently.  After all, he has the great majority on his side.  There is absolutely no hope left that a modest and self-sufficient kind of human being, a type of Chinaman, should here form itself into a class: and this would have been sensible, this was actually a necessity.  What has one done? - Everything designed to nip in the bud even the prerequisites for it - through the most irresponsible thoughtlessness one has totally destroyed the instincts by virtue of which the worker becomes possible as a class, possible for himself.  The worker has been made liable for military service, he has been allowed to form unions and to vote: no wonder the worker already feels his existence to be a state of distress (expressed in moral terms as a state of injustice).  But what does one want? - to ask it again.  If one wills an end, one must also will the means to it: if one wants slaves, one is a fool if one educates them to be masters. -

 

 

41

 

'Freedom as I do not mean it.... [Alludes to Max von Schenkendorf's poem 'Freiheit, die ich meine' (Freedom as I mean it).] ' - In times like these, to have to rely on one's own instincts is one fatality more.  These instincts contradict, disturb and destroy one another; I have already defined the modern as physiological self-contradiction.  The rationale of education would seem to require that at least one of these instinct-systems should be paralysed beneath an iron pressure, so as to permit another to come into force, become strong, become master.  Today the only way of making the individual possible would be by pruning him: possible, that is to say complete.... The reverse of what actually happens: the claim to independence, to free development, to laisser aller, is advanced more heatedly by precisely those for whom no curb could be too strong - this applies in politicis, it applies in art.  But this is a symptom of décadence: our modern concept 'freedom' is one more proof of degeneration of instinct. -

 

 

42

 

When faith is needed. - Nothing is rarer among moralists and saints than integrity; perhaps they say the opposite, perhaps they even believe it.  For when faith is more useful, effective, convincing than conscious hypocrisy, hypocrisy instinctively and forthwith becomes innocent: first principle for the understanding of great saints.  In the case of philosophers too, a different kind of saint, their entire trade demands that they concede only certain truths: namely those through which their trade receives public sanction - in Kantian terms, truths of practical reason.  They know what they have to prove, they are practical in that - they recognize one another by their agreement over 'truths'. - 'Thou shalt not lie' - in plain words: take care, philosopher, not to tell the truth ...

 

 

43

 

In the ear of the Conservatives. - What was formerly not known, what is known today or could be known - a reversion, a turning back in any sense and to any degree, is quite impossible.  We physiologists at least known that.  But all priests and moralists have believed it was possible - they have wanted to take mankind back, force it back, to an earlier standard of virtue.  Morality has always been a bed of Procrustes.  Even politicians have in this matter imitated the preachers of virtue: even today there are parties whose goal is a dream of the crabwise retrogression of all things.  But no-one is free to be a crab.  There is nothing for it: one has to go forward, which is to say step by step further into décadence (- this is my definition of modern 'progress' ...).  One can retard this development and, through retardation, dam and gather up degeneration itself and make it more vehement and sudden: more one cannot do. -

 

 

44

 

My conception of the genius. - Great men, like great epochs, are explosive material in whom tremendous energy has been accumulated; their prerequisite has always been, historically and physiologically, that a protracted assembling, accumulating, economizing and preserving has preceded them - that there has been no explosion for a long time.  If the tension in the mass has grown too great the merest accidental stimulus suffices to call the 'genius', the 'deed', the great destiny, into the world.  Of what account then are circumstances, the epoch, the Zeitgeist, public opinion! - Take the case of Napoleon.  The France of the Revolution, and even more pre-Revolution France, would have brought forth the type antithetical to Napoleon: it did bring it forth, moreover.  And because Napoleon was different, the heir of a stronger, longer, older civilization than that which was going up in dust and smoke in France, he became master here, he alone was master here.  Great human beings are necessary, the epoch in which they appear is accidental; that they almost always become master of their epoch is only because they are stronger, because they are older, because a longer assembling of force has preceded them.  The relationship between a genius and his epoch is the same as that between strong and weak, and as that between old and young: the epoch is always relatively much younger, less substantial, more immature, less sure of itself, more childish. - That they have very different ideas on this subject in France today (in Germany too, but that is of no consequence), that there the theory of milieu, a real neurotic's theory, has become sacrosanct and almost scientific and finds credence even among physiologists - that fact has an 'ill odour' and gives one sadly to think. - The same ideas are believed in England too, but no-one will lose any sleep over that.  The Englishman has only two possible ways of coming to terms with the genius and 'great man': either the democratic way in the manner of Buckle or the religious way in the manner of Carlyle. - The danger which lies in great human beings and great epochs is extraordinary; sterility, exhaustion of every kind follow in their footsteps.  The great human being is a terminus; the great epoch, the Renaissance for example, is a terminus.  The genius - in his works, in his deeds - is necessarily a prodigal: his greatness lies in the fact that he expends himself.... The instinct of self-preservation is as it were suspended; the overwhelming pressure of the energies which emanate from him forbids him any such care and prudence.  One calls this 'sacrifice'; one praises his 'heroism' therein, his indifference to his own interests, his devotion to an idea, a great cause, a fatherland: all misunderstandings.... He flows out, he overflows, he uses himself up, he does not spare himself - with inevitability, fatefully, involuntarily, as a river's bursting its banks is involuntary.  But because one owes a great deal to such explosive beings one has bestowed a great deal upon them in return, for example a species of higher morality.... For that is the nature of human gratitude: it misunderstands its benefactors. -

 

 

45

 

The criminal and what is related to him. - The criminal type is the type of the strong human being under unfavourable conditions, a strong human being made sick.  What he lacks is the wilderness, a certain freer and more perilous nature and form of existence in which all that is attack and defence in the instinct of the strong human being comes into its own.  His virtues have been excommunicated by society; the liveliest drives within him forthwith blend with the depressive emotions, with suspicion, fear, dishonour.  But this is almost the recipe for physiological degeneration.  He who has to do in secret what he does best and most likes to do, with protracted tension, caution, slyness, becomes anaemic; and because he has never harvested anything from his instincts but danger, persecution, disaster, his feelings too turn against these instincts - he feels them to be a fatality.  It is society, our tame, mediocre, gelded society, in which a human being raised in nature, who comes from the mountains or from adventures of the sea, necessarily degenerates into a criminal.  Or almost necessarily: for there are cases in which such a human being proves stronger than society: the Corsican Napoleon is the most famous case.  In regard to the problem before us the testimony of Dostoyevsky is of importance - Dostoyevsky, the only psychologist, by the way, from whom I had anything to learn: he is one of the happiest accidents of my life, even more so than my discovery off Stendhal.  This profound human being, who was ten times justified in despising the superficial Germans, found the Siberian convicts in whose midst he lived for a long time, nothing but the worst criminals for whom no return to society was possible, very different from what he himself had expected - he found them to be carved out of about the best, hardest and most valuable timber growing anywhere on Russian soil.  Let us generalize the case of the criminal: let us think of natures which, for whatever reason, lack public approval, which know they are not considered beneficial or useful, that Chandala feeling that one is considered not an equal but as thrust out, as unworthy, as a source of pollution.  The colour of the subterranean is on the thoughts and actions of such natures; everything in them becomes paler than in those upon whose existence the light of day reposes.  But virtually every form of existence which we treat with distinction today formerly lived in this semi-gravelike atmosphere: the scientific nature, the artist, the genius, the free spirit, the actor, the merchant, the great discoverer.... As long as the priest was considered the highest type every valuable kind of human being was disvalued.... The time is coming - I promise it - when he will be considered the lowest, as our Chandala, as the most mendacious, as the most indecent kind of human being.... I draw attention to the fact that even now, under the mildest rule of custom which has ever obtained on earth or at any rate in Europe, every kind of apartness, every protracted, all too protracted keeping under, every uncommon, untransparent form of existence, brings men close to that type of which the criminal is the perfection.  All innovators of the spirit bear for a time the pallid, fatalistic sign of the Chandala on their brow: not because they are felt to be so, but because they themselves feel the terrible chasm which divides them from all that is traditional and held in honour.  Almost every genius knows as one of the phases of his development the 'Catilinarian existence', a feeling of hatred, revengefulness and revolt against everything which already is, which is no longer becoming.... Catiline - the antecedent form of every Caesar. -

 

 

46

 

Here is the prospect free. [Quotation from the closing scene of FAUST, Part Two.] - When a philosopher keeps silent, it can be loftiness of soul; when he contradicts himself, it can be love; a politeness which tells lies is possible in men of knowledge.  Not without subtlety was it said: il est indigne des grands coeurs de répandre le trouble qu'ils ressentent: [It is unworthy of great spirits to spread abroad the agitation they feel] only one has to add that not to fear the unworthiest things can likewise be greatness of soul.  A woman who loves sacrifices her honour; a man of knowledge who 'loves' sacrifices perhaps his humanity; a god who loved became a Jew ...

 

 

47

 

Beauty no accident. - Even the beauty of a race or a family, the charm and benevolence of their whole demeanour, is earned by labour: like genius, it is the final result of the accumulatory labour of generations.  One must have made great sacrifices to good taste, one must for its sake have done many things, left many things undone - the French seventeenth century is admirable in both - one must have possessed in it a selective principle in respect of one's society, residence, dress, sexual gratification, one must have preferred beauty to advantage, habit, opinion, indolence.  Supreme rule of conduct: even when alone one must not 'let oneself go'. - Good things are costly beyond measure: and the law still holds that he who has them is different from him who obtains them.  Everything good is inheritance: what is not inherited is imperfect, is a beginning.... In Athens at the time of Cicero, who expressed his surprise at it, the men and youths were of far superior beauty to the women: but what labour and exertion in the service of beauty the male sex of that place had for centuries demanded of themselves! - For one must not mistake the method involved here: a mere disciplining of thoughts and feelings is virtually nothing (- here lies the great mistake of German culture, which is totally illusory): one first has to convince the body.  The strict maintenance of a significant and select demeanour, an obligation to live only among men who do not 'let themselves go', completely suffices for becoming significant and select: in two or three generations everything is already internalized.  It is decisive for the future of nations and of mankind that one should inaugurate culture in the right place - not in the 'soul' (as has been the fateful superstition of priests and quasi-priests): the right place is the body, demeanour, diet, physiology: the rest follows.... This is why the Greeks remain the supreme cultural event of history - they knew, they did what needed to be done; Christianity, which despised the body, has up till now been mankind's greatest misfortune. -

 

 

48

 

Progress in my sense. - I too speak of a 'return to nature', although it is not really a going-back but a going-up - up into a high, free, even frightful nature and naturalness, such as plays with great tasks, is permitted to play with them.... To speak in a parable: Napoleon was a piece of 'return to nature' as I understand it (for example in rebus tacticis, [in respect of tactics] even more, as military men know, in strategy). - But Rousseau - where did he really want to return to?  Rousseau, this first modern man, idealist and canaille in one person; who needed moral 'dignity' in order to endure his own aspect; sick with unbridled vanity and unbridled self-contempt.  Even this abortion recumbent on the threshold of the new age wanted a 'return to nature' - where, to ask it again, did Rousseau want to return to? - I hate Rousseau even in the Revolution: it is the world-historical expression of this duplicity of idealist and canaille.  The bloody farce enacted by this Revolution, its 'immorality', does not concern me much: what I hate is its Rousseauesque morality - the so-called 'truths' of the Revolution through which it is still an active force and persuades everything shallow and mediocre over to its side.  The doctrine of equality! ... But there exists no more poisonous poison: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, while it is the end of justice.... 'Equality for equals, inequality for unequals' - that would be the true voice of justice: and, what follows from it, 'Never make equal what is unequal'. - That such dreadful and bloody happenings have surrounded this doctrine of equality has given this 'modern idea' par excellence a kind of glory and lurid glow, so that the Revolution as a spectacle has seduced even the noblest spirits.  That is, however, no reason for esteeming it any more highly. - I see only one who experienced it as it has to be experienced - with disgust - Goethe ...

 

 

49

 

Goethe - not a German event but a European one: a grand attempt to overcome the eighteenth century through a return to nature, through a going-up to the naturalness of the Renaissance, a kind of self-overcoming on the part of that century. - He bore within him its strongest instincts: sentimentality, nature-idolatry, the anti-historical, the idealistic, the unreal and revolutionary (- the last is only a form of the unreal).  He called to his aid history, the natural sciences, antiquity, likewise Spinoza, above all, practical activity; he surrounded himself with nothing but closed horizons; he did not sever himself from life, he placed himself within it; nothing could discourage him and he took as much as possible upon himself, above himself, within himself.  What he aspired to was totality; he strove against the separation of reason, sensuality, feeling, will (- preached in the most horrible scholasticism by Kant, the antipodes of Goethe); he disciplined himself to a whole, he created himself.... Goethe was, in an epoch disposed to the unreal, a convinced realist: he affirmed everything which was related to him in this respect - he had no greater experience than that ens realissimum called Napoleon.  Goethe conceived of a strong, highly cultured human being, skilled in all physical accomplishments, who, keeping himself in check and having reverence for himself, dares to allow himself the whole compass and wealth of naturalness, who is strong enough for this freedom; a man of tolerance, not out of weakness, but out of strength, because he knows how to employ to his advantage what would destroy an average nature; a man to whom nothing is forbidden, except it be weakness, whether that weakness be called vice or virtue.... A spirit thus emancipated stands in the midst of the universe with a joyful and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only what is separate and individual may be rejected, that in the totality everything is redeemed and affirmed - he no longer denies.  But such a faith is the highest of all possible faiths: I have baptised it with the name Dionysus. -

 

 

50

 

One could say that in a certain sense the nineteenth century has also striven for what Goethe as a person strove for: universality in understanding and affirmation, amenability to experience of whatever kind, reckless realism, reverence for everything factual.  How does it happen that the total result is not a Goethe but a chaos, a nihilistic sigh, a not knowing which way to turn, an instinct of weariness which in praxis continually tries to reach back to the eighteenth century? (- for example as romanticism of feeling, as altruism and hyper-sentimentality, as feminism in taste, as Socialism in politics).  In the nineteenth century, especially in its closing decades, not merely a strengthened, brutalized eighteenth century, that is to say a century of décadence?  So that Goethe would have been, not merely for Germany but for all Europe, merely an episode, a beautiful 'in vain'? - But one misunderstands great human beings if one views them from the paltry perspective of public utility.  That one does not know how to make any use of it perhaps even pertains to greatness ...

 

 

51

 

Goethe is the last German before whom I feel reverence: he would have felt three things which I feel - we are also in agreement over the 'Cross'.... [Refers to Goethe's VENETIAN EPIGRAMS, in which the Cross is one of four things which Goethe says he cannot endure.] I am often asked why it is I write in German: nowhere am I worse read than in the Fatherland.  But who knows, after all, whether I even wish to be read today? - To create things upon which time tries its teeth in vain; in form and in substance to strive after a little immortality - I have never been modest enough to demand less of myself.  The aphorism, the apophthegm, in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of 'eternity'; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book - what everyone else does not say in a book.... I have given mankind the profoundest book it possesses, my Zarathustra: I shall shortly give it the most independent. [i.e. the REVALUATION OF ALL VALUES.]

 

 

 

What I Owe to the Ancients

 

1

 

In conclusion, a word on that world into which I have sought to find a way, into which I have perhaps found a new way - the ancient world.  My taste, which may be called the opposite of a tolerant taste, is even here far from uttering a wholesale Yes: in general it dislikes saying Yes, it would rather say No, most of all it prefers to say nothing at all.... This applies to entire cultures, it applies to books - it also applies to towns and countrysides.  It is really only quite a small number of books of antiquity which count for anything in my life; the most famous are not among them.  My sense of style, of the epigram as style, was awoken almost instantaneously on coming into contact with Sallust.  I have not forgotten the astonishment of my honoured teacher Corssen when he had to give top marks to his worst Latin scholar - I had done all in a single blow.  Compact, severe, with as much substance as possible, a cold malice towards 'fine words', also towards 'fine feelings' - in that I knew myself.  One will recognize in my writings, even in my Zarathustra, a very serious ambition for Roman style, for the 'aera perennius' [more enduring than brass] in style - I had the same experience on first coming into contact with Horace.  From that day to this no poet has given me the same artistic delight as I derived from the very first from an Horatian ode.  In certain languages what is achieved here is not even desirable.  This mosaic of words in which every word, as sound, as locus, as concept, pours fourth its power to left and right and over the whole, this minimum in the range and number of signs which achieves a maximum of energy of these signs - all this is Roman and, if one will believe me, noble par excellence.  All other poetry becomes by comparison somewhat too popular - a mere emotional garrulousness ...

 

 

2

 

I received absolutely no such strong impressions from the Greeks; and, not to mince words, they cannot be to us what the Romans are.  One does not learn from the Greeks - their manner is too strange, it is also too fluid to produce an imperative, a 'classical' effect.  Who would ever have learned to write from a Greek!  Who would ever have learned it without the Romans! ... Let no-one offer me Plato as an objection.  In respect to Plato I am a thorough sceptic and have always been unable to join in the admiration of Plato the artist which is traditional among scholars.  After all, I have here the most refined judges of taste of antiquity themselves on my side.  It seems to me that Plato mixes together all forms of style; he is therewith in the matter of style a first décadent: he has on his conscience something similar to the Cynics who devised the Satura Menippea. [Menippus (third century B.C.), of the Cynic school of philosophy, produced a number of satires no longer extant.] For the Platonic dialogue, that frightfully self-satisfied and childish kind of dialectics, to operate as a stimulus one must never have read any good French writers - Fontenelle, for example.  Plato is boring. - Ultimately my mistrust of Plato extends to the very bottom of him: I have him deviated so far from all the fundamental instincts of the Hellenes, so morally infected, so much an antecedent Christian - he already has the concept 'good' as the supreme concept - that I should prefer to describe the entire phenomenon 'Plato' by the harsh term 'higher swindle' or, if you prefer, 'idealism', than by any other.  It has cost us dear that this Athenian went to school with the Egyptians (- or with the Jews in Egypt?...).  In the great fatality of Christianity, Plato is that ambiguity and fascination called the 'ideal' which made it possible for the nobler natures of antiquity to misunderstand themselves and to step on to the bridge which led to the 'Cross'.... And how much there still is of Plato in the concept 'Church', in the structure, system, practice of the Church! - My recreation, my preference, my cure from all Platonism has always been Thucydides.  Thucydides, and perhaps the Principe of Machiavelli, are related to me closely by their unconditional will not to deceive themselves and to see reason in reality - not in 'reason', still less in 'morality'.... For the deplorable embellishment of the Greeks with the colours of the ideal which the 'classically educated' youth carries away with him into life as the reward of his grammar-school drilling there is no more radical cure than Thucydides.  One must turn him over line by line and read his hidden thoughts as clearly as his words: there are few thinkers so rich in hidden thoughts.  Sophist culture, by which I mean realist culture, attains in him its perfect expression - this invaluable movement in the midst of the morality-and-ideal swindle of the Socratic schools which was then breaking out everywhere.  Greek philosophy as the décadence of the Greek instinct; Thucydides as the grand summation, the last manifestation of that strong, stern, hard matter-of-factness instinctive to the older Hellenes.  Courage in fact of reality ultimately distinguishes such natures as Thucydides and Plato: Plato is a coward in face of reality - consequently he flees into the ideal; Thucydides has himself under control - consequently he retains control over things ...

 

 

3

 

From scenting out 'beautiful souls', [From the title of Book VII of Goethe's novel WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP: 'Confessions of a Beautiful Soul'.] 'golden means' and other perfections of the Greeks, from admiring in them such things as their repose in grandeur, their ideal disposition, their sublime simplicity - from this 'sublime simplicity', a niaiserie allemande [German foolishness] when all is said and done, I was preserved by the psychologist in me.  I saw their strongest instinct, the will to power, I saw them trembling at the intractable force of this drive - I saw all their institutions evolve out of protective measures designed for mutual security against the explosive material within them.  The tremendous internal tension then discharged itself in fearful and ruthless external hostility: the city states tore one another to pieces so that the citizens of each of them might find peace within himself.  One needed to be strong: danger was close at hand - it lurked everywhere.  The splendid supple physique, the reckless realism and immoralism which pertains to the Hellene was a necessity, not a 'natural quality'.  It was produced, it was not there from the beginning.  And one employed festivals and arts for no other purpose than to feel oneself dominant, to show oneself dominant: they are means for making oneself feared.... To judge the Greeks by their philosophers, in the German manner, perchance to employ the philistinism of the Socratic schools as a clue to what is fundamentally Hellenic! ... But the philosophers are the décadents of Hellenism, the counter-movement against the old, the noble taste (- against the agonal instinct, against the polis, against the value of the race, against the authority of tradition).  The Socratic virtues were preached because the Greeks had lost them: excitable, timid, fickle, comedians every one, they had more than enough reason to let morality be preached to them.  Not that it would have done any good: but big words and fine attitudes are so suited to décadents ...

 

 

4

 

I was the first to take seriously that wonderful phenomenon which bears the name Dionysus as a means to understanding the older Hellenic instinct, an instinct still exuberant and even overflowing: it is explicable only as an excess of energy.  Whoever has investigated the Greeks, such as that profoundest student of their culture now living, Jacob Burckhardt of Basel, realizes at once the value of this line of approach: Burckhardt inserted a special section on the said phenomenon into his Culture of the Greeks.  For the opposite of this, one should take a look at the almost laughable poverty of instinct displayed by German philologists whenever they approach the Dionysian.  The celebrated Lobeck especially, who crept into this world of mysterious states with the honest self-confidence of a dried-up bookworm and by being nauseously frivolous and childish persuaded himself he was being scientific - Lobeck intimated, with a great display of erudition, that these curiosities were of no consequence.  To be sure, the priests might have communicated a number of valuable pieces of information to the participants in such orgies - that wine arouses desire, for example, that man can live on fruit if need be, that plants bloom in spring and wither in autumn.  As regards that strange wealth of rites, symbols and myths of orgiastic origin with which the antique world was quite literally overrun, Lobeck finds in them an occasion for becoming a trifle more ingenious.  'When the Greeks had nothing else to do,' he says (Aglaophamus I, 672), 'they used to laugh, jump, race about or, since man sometimes feels a desire for this, they used to sit down and weep and wail.  Others later came along and sought some reason for all this striking behaviour; and thus those countless myths and legends arose to explain these practices.  On the other hand, one believed that the droll activities which now took place on festival days necessarily pertained to festival celebration and retained them as an indispensable part of divine worship.' - This is contemptible chatter and no-one is likely to take a Lobeck seriously for a moment.  We are affected quite differently when we probe the concept 'Greek' which Winckelmann and Goethe constructed for themselves and find it incompatible with that element out of which Dionysian art evolved - the orgy.  I have, in fact, no doubt that Goethe would have utterly excluded anything of this kind from the possibilities of the Greek soul.  Consequently Goethe did not understand the Greeks.  For it is only in the Dionysian mysteries, in the psychology of the Dionysian condition, that the fundamental fact of the Hellenic instinct expresses itself - its 'will to life'.  What did the Hellene guarantee to himself with these mysteries?  Eternal life, the eternal recurrence of life; the future promised and consecrated in the past; the triumphant Yes to life beyond death and change; true life as collective continuation of life through procreation, through the mysteries of sexuality.  It was for this reason that the sexual symbol was to the Greeks the symbol venerable as such, the intrinsic profound meaning of all antique piety.  Every individual detail in the act of procreation, pregnancy, birth, awoke the most exalted and solemn feelings.  In the teachings of the mysteries, pain is sanctified: the 'pains of childbirth' sanctify pain in general - all becoming and growing, all that guarantees the future, postulates pain.... For the eternal joy in creating to exist, for the will to life eternally to affirm itself, the 'torment of childbirth' must also exist eternally.... All this is contained in the word Dionysus: I know of no more exalted symbolism than the Greek symbolism, the symbolism of the Dionysian.  The profoundest instinct of life, the instinct for the future of life, for the eternity of life, is in this word experienced religiously - the actual road to life, procreation, as the sacred road.... It was only Christianity, with ressentiment against life in its foundations, which made of sexuality something impure: it threw filth on the beginning, on the prerequisite of our life ...

 

 

5

 

The psychology of the orgy as an overflowing feeling of life and energy within which even pain acts as a stimulus provided me with the key to the concept of the tragic feeling, which was misunderstood as much by Aristotle as it especially was by our pessimists.  Tragedy is so far from providing evidence for pessimism among the Hellenes in Schopenhauer's sense that it has to be considered the decisive repudiation of that idea and the counter-verdict to it.  Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems, the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types - that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I recognized as the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet.  Not so as to get rid of pity and terror, not so as to purify oneself of a dangerous emotion through its vehement discharge - it was thus Aristotle understood it - : but, beyond pity and terror, to realize in oneself the eternal joy of becoming - that joy which also encompasses joy in destruction.... And with that I again return to the place from which I set out - the Birth of Tragedy was my first revaluation of all values: with that I again plant myself in the soil out of which I draw all that I will and can - I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus - I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence ... [For Nietzsche's theory that all events recur eternally and its emotional significance in providing the most extreme formula of life-affirmation, see THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA, Part III ('Of the Vision and the Riddle', 'The Convalescent' and 'The Seven Seals') and Part IV ([The Intoxicated Song').]

 

 

 

The Hammer Speaks

 

‘Why so hard?’ the charcoal once said to the diamond; ‘for are we not close relations?’

      Why so soft? O my brothers, thus I ask them: for are you not – my brothers?

      Why so soft, unresisting and yielding?  Why is there so much denial and abnegation in your hearts?  So little fate in your glances?

      And if you will not be fates, if you will not be inexorable: how can you – conquer with me?

      And if your hardness will not flash and cut and cut to pieces: how can you one day – create with me?

      For all creators are hard.  And it must seem bliss to you to press your hand upon millennia as upon wax,

      Bliss to write upon the will of millennia as upon metal – harder than metal, nobler than metal.  Only the noblest is perfectly hard.

      This new law-table do I put over you, O my brothers: Become hard! [From Thus Spoke Zarathustra,, Part III, 'Of Old and New Law-Tables', with minor variants.]

 

 

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