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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.]