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
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
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!
(
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 '
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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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