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Title: Twilight of the Idols Author: Friedrich Nietzsche Date: 1895 Language: en Topics: nihilist, philosophy Source: Retrieved on May 8, 2009 from http://www.handprint.com/SC/NIE/GotDamer.html Notes: Text prepared from the original German (Die Götzen-Dämmerung) and the translations by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale
Maintaining cheerfulness in the midst of a gloomy task, fraught with
immeasurable responsibility, is no small feat; and yet what is needed
more than cheerfulness? Nothing succeeds if prankishness has no part in
it. Excess strength alone is the proof of strength.
A revaluation of all values: this question mark, so black, so huge that
it casts a shadow over the man who puts it down — such a destiny of a
task compels one to run into the sunlight at every opportunity to shake
off a heavy, all-too-heavy seriousness. Every means is proper to do
this; every “case” is a case of luck. Especially, war. War has always
been the great wisdom of all spirits who have become too introspective,
too profound; even in a wound there is the power to heal. A maxim, the
origin of which I withhold from scholarly curiosity, has long been my
motto:
Increscunt animi, virescit volnere virtus.
[“The spirits increase, vigor grows through a wound.”]
Another mode of convalescence (in certain situations even more to my
liking) is sounding out idols. There are more idols than realities in
the world: that is my “evil eye” upon this world; that is also my “evil
ear.” Finally to pose questions with a hammer, and sometimes to hear as
a reply that famous hollow sound that can only come from bloated
entrails — what a delight for one who has ears even behind his ears, for
me, an old psychologist and pied piper before whom just that which would
remain silent must finally speak out.
This essay — the title betrays it — is above all a recreation, a spot of
sunshine, a leap sideways into the idleness of a psychologist. Perhaps a
new war, too? And are new idols sounded out? This little essay is a
great declaration of war; and regarding the sounding out of idols, this
time they are not just idols of the age, but eternal idols, which are
here touched with a hammer as with a tuning fork: there are no idols
that are older, more assured, more puffed-up — and none more hollow.
That does not prevent them from being those in which people have the
most faith; nor does one ever say “idol,” especially not in the most
distinguished instance.
Turin, September 30, 1888, on the day when the first book of the
Revaluation of All Values was completed.
Friedrich Nietzsche
vice?
what he already knows.
out the third case: one must be both — a philosopher.
moderation in knowledge as in other things.
from our spirituality.
man’s?
stronger.
love.
in the lurch afterward! The bite of conscience is indecent.
nor throw off? The case of the philosopher.
how. Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does.
“ideal.”
You seek followers? Seek zeros!
ones, but heard better. More precisely: we are never understood — hence
our authority.
kill our modesty?”
wants only two things, his bread and his art — panem et Circen [“bread
and Circe”].
some meaning into them: that means, he has the faith that they already
obey a will. (Principle of “faith”.)
enviously at the advantages of those without scruples? But virtue
involves renouncing “advantages.” (Inscription for an anti-Semite’s
door.)
small sin: as an experiment, in passing, looking around to see if
anybody notices it — and to make sure that somebody does.
virtues, but where, like the tightrope walker on his rope, one either
stands or falls — or gets away.
songs?
backward; eventually he also believes backward.
who knew herself to be well dressed ever caught a cold? I am assuming
that she was barely dressed.
lack of integrity.
depths. But women aren’t even shallow.
manly virtues, she runs away herself.
excellent teeth it had! And today — what is lacking?” A dentist’s
question.
always does too much. So one usually perpetrates another one — and now
one does too little.
lessens the probability of being stepped on again. In the language of
morality: humility.
provoked. But the same hatred can arise from cowardice, since lies are
forbidden by divine commandment: in that case, we are too cowardly to
lie.
music, life would be an error. The German imagines that even God sings
songs.
except when seated] (G. Flaubert). There I have caught you, nihilist!
The sedentary life is the very sin against the Holy Spirit. Only
thoughts reached by walking have value.
become skittish: we see our own shadow looming up before us. A
psychologist must turn his eyes from himself to see anything at all.
princes. Only because the latter are shot at do they once more sit
securely on their thrones. Moral: morality must be shot at.
third case would be as a fugitive. First question of conscience.
is represented? In the end, perhaps you are merely a copy of an actor.
Second question of conscience.
away and walks off? Third question of conscience.
must know what one wants and that one wants. Fourth question of
conscience.
always found only the imitators of their ideals.
I had to pass over them. Yet they thought that I wanted to retire on
them.
laughs best today will also laugh last.
conclusion: it is no good. Always and everywhere one has heard the same
sound from their mouths — a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy,
full of weariness of life, full of resistance to life. Even Socrates
said, as he died: “To live — that means to be sick a long time: I owe
Asclepius the Savior a rooster.” Even Socrates was tired of life. What
does that prove? What does it demonstrate? At one time, one would have
said (and it has been said loud enough by our pessimists): “At least
something must be true here! The consensus of the sages must show us the
truth.” Shall we still talk like that today? May we? “At least something
must be sick here,” we retort. These wisest men of all ages — they
should first be scrutinized closely. Were they all perhaps shaky on
their legs? tottery? decadent? late? Could it be that wisdom appears on
earth as a raven, attracted by a little whiff of carrion?
occurred to me precisely in a case where it is most strongly opposed by
both scholarly and unscholarly prejudice: I realized that Socrates and
Plato were symptoms of degeneration, tools of the Greek dissolution,
pseudo-Greek, anti-Greek (Birth of Tragedy, 1872). The consensus of the
sages — I recognized this ever more clearly — proves least of all that
they were right in what they agreed on: it shows rather that they
themselves, these wisest men, shared some physiological attribute, and
because of this adopted the same negative attitude to life — had to
adopt it. Judgments, judgments of value about life, for it or against
it, can in the end never be true: they have value only as symptoms, they
are worthy of consideration only as symptoms; in themselves such
judgments are meaningless. One must stretch out one’s hands and attempt
to grasp this amazing subtlety, that the value of life cannot be
estimated. Not by the living, for they are an interested party, even a
bone of contention, and not impartial judges; not by the dead, for a
different reason. For a philosopher to object to putting a value on life
is an objection others make against him, a question mark concerning his
wisdom, an un-wisdom. Indeed? All these great wise men — they were not
only decadents but not wise at all. But let us return to the problem of
Socrates.
plebeian. We are told, and can see in sculptures of him, how ugly he
was. But ugliness, in itself an objection, is among the Greeks almost a
refutation. Was Socrates a Greek at all? Ugliness is often enough the
expression of a development that has been crossed, thwarted in some way.
Or it appears as declining development. The anthropological
criminologists tell us that the typical criminal is ugly: monstrum in
fronte, monstrum in animo [monstrous in appearance, monstrous in
spirit]. But the criminal is a decadent. Was Socrates a typical
criminal? At least that would be consistent with the famous judgment of
the physiognomist that so offended the friends of Socrates. This
foreigner told Socrates to his face that he was a monstrum — that he
harbored in himself all the worst vices and appetites. And Socrates
merely answered: “You know me, sir!”
and anarchy of his instincts, but also by the overdevelopment of his
logical ability and his characteristic thwarted sarcasm. Nor should we
forget those auditory hallucinations which, as “the daimonion of
Socrates,” have been given a religious interpretion. Everything about
Socrates is exaggerated, buffo, a caricature; everything is at the same
time concealed, ulterior, underground. I want to understand what
idiosyncrasy begot that Socratic idea that reason and virtue equal
happiness — that most bizarre of all equations which is, moreover,
opposed to every instinct of the earlier Greeks.
really happened there? Above all, a noble taste is vanquished; with
dialectics the plebs come to the top. Before Socrates, argumentative
conversation was repudiated in good society: it was considered bad
manners, compromising. The young were warned against it. Furthermore,
any presentation of one’s motives was distrusted. Honest things, like
honest men, do not have to explain themselves so openly. What must first
be proved is worth little. Wherever authority still forms part of good
bearing, where one does not give reasons but commands, the logician is a
kind of buffoon: one laughs at him, one does not take him seriously.
Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously: what really
happened there?
knows that one arouses mistrust with it, that it is not very persuasive.
Nothing is easier to nullify than a logical argument: the tedium of long
speeches proves this. It is a kind of self-defense for those who no
longer have other weapons. Unless one has to insist on what is already
one’s right, there is no use for it. The Jews were argumentative for
that reason; Reynard the Fox also — and Socrates too?
ressentiment? Does he, as one oppressed, enjoy his own ferocity in the
knife thrusts of his argument? Does he avenge himself on the noble
audience he fascinates? As a dialectician, he holds a merciless tool in
his hand; he can become a tyrant by means of it; he compromises those he
conquers. The dialectician leaves it to his opponent to prove that he is
not an idiot: he enrages and neutralizes his opponent at the same time.
The dialectician renders the intellect of his opponent powerless.
Indeed, in Socrates, is dialectic only a form of revenge?
all the more necessary to explain how he could fascinate. That he
discovered a new kind of contest, that he became its first fencing
master for the noble circles of Athens, is one point. He fascinated by
appealing to the competitive impulse of the Greeks — he introduced a
variation into the wrestling match between young men and youths.
Socrates was a great erotic.
saw that his own case, his idiosyncrasy, was no longer exceptional. The
same kind of degeneration was quietly developing everywhere: old Athens
was coming to an end. And Socrates understood that the world needed him
— his method, his cure, his personal artifice of self-preservation.
Everywhere the instincts were in anarchy, everywhere one was within
sight of excess: monstrum in animo was the common danger. “The impulses
want to play the tyrant; one must invent a counter-tyrant who is
stronger.” After the physiognomist had revealed to Socrates who he was —
a cave of bad appetites — the great master of irony let slip another
clue to his character. “This is true,” he said, “but I mastered them
all.” How did Socrates become master over himself? His case was, at
bottom, merely the extreme case, only the most striking instance of what
was then beginning to be a epidemic: no one was any longer master over
himself, the instincts turned against themselves. He fascinated, being
an extreme case; his awe inspiring ugliness proclaimed him as such to
all who could see: he fascinated, of course, even more as an answer, a
solution, an apparent cure for this disease.
did, the danger cannot be slight that something else threatens to play
the tyrant. Rationality was hit upon as a savior; neither Socrates nor
his “patients” had any choice about being rational: it was necessary, it
was the last resort. The fanaticism with which all Greek reflection
throws itself upon rationality betrays a desperate situation; there was
danger, there was but one choice: either to perish or — to be absurdly
rational. The moralism of the Greek philosophers from Plato on is
pathologically conditioned; so is their reverence for logical argument.
Reason equals virtue and happiness, that means merely that one must
imitate Socrates and counter the dark appetites with a permanent
daylight — the daylight of reason. One must be clever, clear, bright at
any price: any concession to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads
downward.
a physician, a savior. Is it necessary to go on to demonstrate the error
in his faith in “rationality at any price”? It is a self-deception on
the part of philosophers and moralists if they believe that they are
extricating themselves from decadence by waging war against it.
Extrication lies beyond their strength: what they choose as a means, as
salvation, is itself but another expression of decadence; they change
the form of decadence, but they do not get rid of decadence itself.
Socrates was a misunderstanding; any improvement morality, including
Christianity, is a misunderstanding. The most blinding daylight;
rationality at any price; life, bright, cold, cautious, conscious,
without instinct, in opposition to the instincts — all this was a kind
of disease, merely a disease, and by no means a return to “virtue,” to
“health,” to happiness. To have to fight the instincts — that is the
definition of decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness equals
instinct.
self-deceivers? Was this what he said to himself in the end, in the
wisdom of his courage to die? Socrates wanted to die: not Athens, but he
himself chose the hemlock; he forced Athens to sentence him. “Socrates
is no physician,” he said softly to himself, “here death alone is the
physician. Socrates himself has only been sick a long time.”
For example, their lack of historical sense, their hatred of the very
idea of becoming, their Egypticism. They think that they show their
respect for a subject when they dehistoricize it sub specie aeternitas —
when they turn it into a mummy. Everything that philosophers handled
over the past thousands of years turned into concept mummies; nothing
real escaped their grasp alive. Whenever these venerable concept
idolators revere something, they kill it and stuff it; they suck the
life out of everything they worship. Death, change, old age, as well as
procreation and growth, are to their minds objections — even
refutations. Whatever has being does not become; whatever becomes does
not have being. Now they all believe, desperately even, in what has
being. But since they never grasp it, they seek for reasons why it is
kept from them. “There must be mere appearance, there must be some
deception which prevents us from perceiving that which has being: where
is the deceiver?”“We have found him,” they cry jubilantly; “it is the
senses! These senses, so immoral in other ways too, deceive us
concerning the true world. Moral: let us free ourselves from the
deception of the senses, from becoming, from history, from lies; history
is nothing but faith in the senses, faith in lies. Moral: let us say No
to all who have faith in the senses, to all the rest of mankind; they
are all ‘mob.’ Let us be philosophers! Let us be mummies! Let us
represent monotono-theism by adopting the manner of a gravedigger! And
above all, away with the body, this wretched idée fixe of the senses,
disfigured by all the fallacies of logic, refuted, even impossible,
although it is impudent enough to behave as if it were real!”
rest of the philosophic crowd rejected the testimony of the senses
because it showed multiplicity and change, he rejected their testimony
because it represented things as if they had permanence and unity.
Heraclitus too did the senses an injustice. They lie neither in the way
the Eleatics believed, nor as he believed — they do not lie at all. What
we make of their testimony, that alone introduces lies; for example, the
lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence.
“Reason” is the reason we falsify the testimony of the senses. Insofar
as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie.
But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being
is an empty fiction. The “apparent” world is the only one: the “true”
world is merely added by a lie.
senses! This nose, for example, of which no philosopher has yet spoken
with reverence and gratitude, is actually the most delicate instrument
so far at our disposal: it is able to detect tiny chemical
concentrations that even elude a spectroscope. Today we possess science
precisely to the extent to which we have decided to accept the testimony
of the senses — to the extent to which we sharpen them further, arm
them, and have learned to think them through. The rest is miscarriage
and not-yet-science — in other words, metaphysics, theology, psychology,
epistemology — or formal science, a doctrine of signs, such as logic and
that applied logic which is called mathematics. In them reality is not
encountered at all, not even as a problem — no more than the question of
the value of such a sign-convention as logic.
consists in confusing the last and the first. They place that which
comes at the end — unfortunately! for it ought not to come at all!
namely, the “highest concepts,” which means the most general, the
emptiest concepts, the last smoke of evaporating reality — in the
beginning, as the beginning. This again is nothing but their way of
showing reverence: the higher may not grow out of the lower, may not
have grown at all. Moral: whatever is of the first rank must be causa
sui. Origin out of something else is considered an objection, a
questioning of value. All the highest values are of the first rank; all
the highest concepts, that which has being, the unconditional, the good,
the true, the perfect — all these cannot have become and must therefore
be causes. All these, moreover, cannot be unlike each other or in
contradiction to each other. Thus they arrive at their stupendous
concept, “God.” That which is last, thinnest, and emptiest is put first,
as the cause, as ens realissimum. Why did humanity have to take
seriously the brain afflictions of these sick web-spinners? We have paid
dearly for it!
conceive the problem of error and appearance. (I say “we” for
politeness’ sake.) In the past, alteration, change, any becoming at all,
were taken as proof of mere appearance, as an indication that there must
be something which led us astray. Today, in contrast, precisely insofar
as the prejudice of reason forces us to posit unity, identity,
permanence, substance, cause, thinghood, being, we see ourselves somehow
caught in error, compelled into error — so certain are we, on the basis
of rigorous examination, that this is where the error lies.It is no
different in this case than with the movement of the sun: there our eye
is the constant advocate of error, here it is our language. In its
origin language belongs to the age of the most rudimentary psychology.
We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness
the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language — in plain
talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere reason sees a doer and
doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the
ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the
ego-substance upon all things — only thereby does it first create the
concept of “thing.” Everywhere “being” is projected by thought, pushed
underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a
derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great
calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that
will is a capacity. Today we know that it is only a word.Very much
later, in a world which was in a thousand ways more enlightened,
philosophers, to their great surprise, became aware of the sureness, the
subjective certainty, in our handling of the categories of reason: they
concluded that these categories could not be derived from anything
empirical — for everything empirical plainly contradicted them. Whence,
then, were they derived?And in India, as in Greece, the same mistake was
made: “We must once have been at home in a higher world (instead of a
very much lower one, which would have been the truth); we must have been
divine, because we have reason!” Indeed, nothing has yet possessed a
more naive power of persuasion than the error concerning being, as it
has been formulated by the Eleatics, for example. After all, every word
and every sentence we say speak in its favor. Even the opponents of the
Eleatics still succumbed to the seduction of their concept of being:
Democritus, among others, when he invented his atom. “Reason” in
language — oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are
not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.
insight into four theses. In that way I facilitate comprehension; in
that way I provoke contradiction.First proposition. The reasons for
which “this” world has been characterized as “apparent” are the very
reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality is
absolutely indemonstrable.Second proposition. The criteria which have
been bestowed on the “true being” of things are the criteria of
not-being, of naught, the “true world” has been constructed out of
contradiction to the actual world: indeed an apparent world, insofar as
it is merely a moral-optical illusion.Third proposition. To invent
fables about a world “other” than this one has no meaning at all, unless
an instinct of slander, detraction, and suspicion against life has
gained the upper hand in us: in that case, we avenge ourselves against
life with a phantasmagoria of “another,” a “better” life.Fourth
proposition. Any distinction between a “true” and an “apparent” world —
whether in the Christian manner or in the manner of Kant (in the end, an
underhanded Christian) — is only a suggestion of decadence, a symptom of
the decline of life. That the artist esteems appearance higher than
reality is no objection to this proposition. For “appearance” in this
case means reality once more, only by way of selection, reinforcement,
and correction. The tragic artist is no pessimist: he is precisely the
one who says Yes to everything questionable, even to the terrible — he
is Dionysian.
he lives in it, he is it.(The oldest form of the idea, relatively
sensible, simple, and persuasive. A circumlocution for the sentence, “I,
Plato, am the truth.”)
pious, the virtuous man (“for the sinner who repents”).(Progress of the
idea: it becomes more subtle, insidious, incomprehensible — it becomes
female, it becomes Christian. )
very thought of it — a consolation, an obligation, an imperative.(At
bottom, the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism. The idea has
become elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian.)
unattained, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or
obligating: how could something unknown obligate us?(Gray morning. The
first yawn of reason. The cockcrow of positivism.)
even obligating — an idea which has become useless and superfluous —
consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it!(Bright day; breakfast;
return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato’s embarrassed blush;
pandemonium of all free spirits.)
apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished
the apparent one.(Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the
longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)
drag down their victim with the weight of stupidity — and a later, very
much later phase when they wed the spirit, when they “spiritualize”
themselves. Formerly, in view of the element of stupidity in passion,
war was declared on passion itself, its destruction was plotted; all the
old moral monsters are agreed on this: il faut tuer les passions. The
most famous formula for this is to be found in the New Testament, in
that Sermon on the Mount, where, incidentally, things are by no means
looked at from a height. There it is said, for example, with particular
reference to sexuality: “If thy eye offend thee, pluck it out.”
Fortunately, no Christian acts in accordance with this precept.
Destroying the passions and cravings, merely as a preventive measure
against their stupidity and the unpleasant consequences of this
stupidity — today this itself strikes us as merely another acute form of
stupidity. We no longer admire dentists who “pluck out” teeth so that
they will not hurt any more.To be fair, it should be admitted, however,
that on the ground out of which Christianity grew, the concept of the
“spiritualization of passion” could never have been formed. After all,
the first church, as is well known, fought against the “intelligent” in
favor of the “poor in spirit.” How could one expect from it an
intelligent war against passion? The church fights passion with excision
in every sense: its practice, its “cure,” is castratism. It never asks:
“How can one spiritualize, beautify, deify a craving?” It has at all
times laid the stress of discipline on extirpation (of sensuality, of
pride, of the lust to rule, of avarice, of vengefulness). But an attack
on the roots of passion means an attack on the roots of life: the
practice of the church is hostile to life.
extirpation — is instinctively chosen by those who are too weak-willed,
too degenerate, to be able to impose moderation on themselves; by those
who are so constituted that they require La Trappe, to use a figure of
speech, or (without any figure of speech) some kind of definitive
declaration of hostility, a cleft between themselves and the passion.
Radical means are indispensable only for the degenerate; the weakness of
the will — or, to speak more definitely, the inability not to respond to
a stimulus — is itself merely another form of degeneration. The radical
hostility, the deadly hostility against sensuality, is always a symptom
to reflect on: it entitles us to suppositions concerning the total state
of one who is excessive in this manner.This hostility, this hatred, by
the way, reaches its climax only when such types lack even the firmness
for this radical cure, for this renunciation of their “devil.” One
should survey the whole history of the priests and philosophers,
including the artists: the most poisonous things against the senses have
been said not by the impotent, nor by ascetics, but by the impossible
ascetics, by those who really were in dire need of being ascetics.
great triumph over Christianity. Another triumph is our spiritualization
of hostility. It consists in a profound appreciation of the value of
having enemies: in short, it means acting and thinking in the opposite
way from that which has been the rule. The church always wanted the
destruction of its enemies; we, we immoralists and Antichristians, find
our advantage in this, that the church exists. In the political realm
too, hostility has now become more spiritual — much more sensible, much
more thoughtful, much more considerate. Almost every party understands
how it is in the interest of its own self-preservation that the
opposition should not lose all strength; the same is true of power
politics. A new creation in particular — the new Reich, for example —
needs enemies more than friends: in opposition alone does it feel itself
necessary, in opposition alone does it become necessary.Our attitude to
the “internal enemy” is no different: here too we have spiritualized
hostility; here too we have come to appreciate its value. The price of
fruitfulness is to be rich in internal opposition; one remains young
only as long as the soul does not stretch itself and desire peace.
Nothing has become more alien to us than that desideratum of former
times, “peace of soul,” the Christian desideratum; there is nothing we
envy less than the moralistic cow and the fat happiness of the good
conscience. One has renounced the great life when one renounces war.In
many cases, to be sure, “peace of soul” is merely a misunderstanding —
something else, which lacks only a more honest name. Without further ado
or prejudice, a few examples. “Peace of soul” can be, for one, the
gentle radiation of a rich animality into the moral (or religious)
sphere. Or the beginning of weariness, the first shadow of evening, of
any kind of evening. Or a sign that the air is humid, that south winds
are approaching. Or unrecognized gratitude for a good digestion
(sometimes called “love of man”). Or the attainment of calm by a
convalescent who feels a new relish in all things and waits. Or the
state which follows a thorough satisfaction of our dominant passion, the
well-being of a rare repletion. Or the senile weakness of our will, our
cravings, our vices. Or laziness, persuaded by vanity to give itself
moral airs. Or the emergence of certainty, even a dreadful certainty,
after long tension and torture by uncertainty. Or the expression of
maturity and mastery in the midst of doing, creating, working, and
willing — calm breathing, attained “freedom of the will.” Twilight of
the Idols — who knows? perhaps also only a kind of “peace of soul.”I
reduce a principle to a formula. Every naturalism in morality — that is,
every healthy morality — is dominated by an instinct of life, some
commandment of life is fulfilled by a determinate canon of “shalt” and
“shalt not”; some inhibition and hostile element on the path of life is
thus removed. Anti-natural morality — that is, almost every morality
which has so far been taught, revered, and preached — turns, conversely,
against the instincts of life: it is condemnation of these instincts,
now secret, now outspoken and impudent. When it says, “God looks at the
heart,” it says No to both the lowest and the highest desires of life,
and posits God as the enemy of life. The saint in whom God delights is
the ideal eunuch. Life has come to an end where the “kingdom of God”
begins.
has become almost sacrosanct in Christian morality, one has,
fortunately, also comprehended something else: the futility,
apparentness, absurdity, and mendaciousness of such a revolt. A
condemnation of life by the living remains in the end a mere symptom of
a certain kind of life: the question whether it is justified or
unjustified is not even raised thereby. One would require a position
outside of life, and yet have to know it as well as one, as many, as all
who have lived it, in order to be permitted even to touch the problem of
the value of life: reasons enough to comprehend that this problem is for
us an unapproachable problem. When we speak of values, we speak with the
inspiration, with the way of looking at things, which is part of life:
life itself forces us to posit values; life itself values through us
when we posit values. From this it follows that even that anti-natural
morality which conceives of God as the counter-concept and condemnation
of life is only a value judgment of life — but of what life? of what
kind of life? I have already given the answer: of declining, weakened,
weary, condemned life. Morality, as it has so far been understood — as
it has in the end been formulated once more by Schopenhauer, as
“negation of the will to life” — is the very instinct of decadence,
which makes an imperative of itself. It says: “Perish!” It is a
condemnation pronounced by the condemned.
to be such and such!” Reality shows us an enchanting wealth of types,
the abundance of a lavish play and change of forms — and some wretched
loafer of a moralist comments: “No! Man ought to be different.” He even
knows what man should be like, this wretched bigot and prig: he paints
himself on the wall and comments, “Ecce homo!” But even when the
moralist addresses himself only to the single human being and says to
him, “You ought to be such and such!” he does not cease to make himself
ridiculous. The single human being is a piece of fatum from the front
and from the rear, one law more, one necessity more for all that is yet
to come and to be. To say to him, “Change yourself!” is to demand that
everything be changed, even retroactively. And indeed there have been
consistent moralists who wanted man to be different, that is, virtuous —
they wanted him remade in their own image, as a prig: to that end, they
negated the world! No small madness! No modest kind of
immodesty!Morality, insofar as it condemns for its own sake, and not out
of regard for the concerns, considerations, and contrivances of life, is
a specific error with which one ought to have no pity — an idiosyncrasy
of degenerates which has caused immeasurable harm.We others, we
immoralists, have, conversely, made room in our hearts for every kind of
understanding, comprehending, and approving. We do not easily negate; we
make it a point of honor to be affirmers. More and more, our eyes have
opened to that economy which needs and knows how to utilize everything
that the holy witlessness of the priest, the diseased reason in the
priest, rejects — that economy in the law of life which finds an
advantage even in the disgusting species of the prigs, the priests, the
virtuous. What advantage? But we ourselves, we immoralists, are the
answer.
error than mistaking the effect for the cause: I call it the real
corruption of reason. Yet this error is one of the most unchanging
habits of mankind: we even worship it under the name of “religion” or
“morality.” Every single principle from religion or morality contains
it; priests and moral legislators are the originators of this corruption
of reason.Here is an example. Everybody knows Cornaro’s famous book in
which he recommends a meager diet for a long and happy life — a virtuous
life, too. Few books have been read so widely; even now thousands of
copies are sold in England every year. I do not doubt that scarcely any
book (except the Bible) has done as much harm, has shortened as many
lives, as this well intentioned oddity. Why? Because Cornaro mistakes
the effect for the cause. The worthy Italian thought his diet was the
cause of his long life, whereas the precondition for a long life, the
extraordinary slowness of his metabolism, was the cause of his slender
diet. He was not free to eat little or much; his frugality was not a
matter of “free will” — he made himself sick when he ate more. But
whoever has a rapid metabolism not only does well to eat properly, but
needs to. A scholar in our time, with his rapid consumption of nervous
energy, would simply destroy himself on Cornaro’s diet. Crede experto —
believe me, I’ve tried.
founded is: “Do this and that, refrain from this and that — and then you
will be happy! And if you don’t...” Every morality, every religion, is
based on this imperative; I call it the original sin of reason, the
immortal unreason. In my mouth, this formula is changed into its
opposite — the first example of my “revaluation of all values.” An
admirable human being, a “happy one,” instinctively must perform certain
actions and avoid other actions; he carries these impulses in his body,
and they determine his relations with the world and other human beings.
In a formula: his virtue is the effect of his happiness. A long life,
many descendants — these are not the rewards of virtue: instead, virtue
itself is that slowing down of the metabolism which leads, among other
things, to a long life, many descendants — in short, to Cornaro’s
virtue.Religion and morality say: “A people or a society are destroyed
by license and luxury.” My revalued reason says: when a people
degenerates physiologically, when it approaches destruction, then the
result is license and luxury (that is, the craving for ever stronger and
more frequent stimulation necessary to arouse an exhausted nature). This
young man easily turns pale and faints; his friends say: that is because
of this or that disease. I say: he became diseased, he could not resist
the disease, because of his pre-existing impoverished life or hereditary
exhaustion. The newspaper reader says: this party destroys itself by
making such a mistake. My higher politics says: a party that makes such
a mistake has already reached its end; it has lost its sureness of
instinct. Every mistake (in every sense of the word) is the result of a
degeneration of instinct, a disintegration of the will: one could almost
equate what is bad with whatever is a mistake. All that is good is
instinctive — and hence easy, necessary, uninhibited. Effort is a
failing: the god is typically different from the hero. (In my language:
light feet are the first attribute of divinity.)
knew what a cause was; but how did we get this knowledge — or more
precisely, our faith that we had this knowledge? From the realm of the
famous “inner facts,” of which not a single one has so far turned out to
be true. We believe that we are the cause of our own will: we think that
here at least we can see a cause at work. Nor did we doubt that all the
antecedents of our will, its causes, were to be found in our own
consciousness or in our personal “motives.” Otherwise, we would not be
responsible for what we choose to do. Who would deny that his thoughts
have a cause, and that his own mind caused the thoughts?Of these “inward
facts” that seem to demonstrate causality, the primary and most
persuasive one is that of the will as cause. The idea of consciousness
(“spirit”) or, later, that of the ego (the “subject”) as a cause are
only afterbirths: first the causality of the will was firmly accepted as
proved, as a fact, and these other concepts followed from it.But we have
reservations about these concepts. Today we no longer believe any of
this is true. The “inner world” is full of phantoms and illusions: the
will being one of them. The will no longer moves anything, hence it does
not explain anything — it merely accompanies events; it can also be
completely absent. The so-called motives: another error. Merely a
surface phenomenon of consciousness, something shadowing the deed that
is more likely to hide the causes of our actions than to reveal them.
And as for the ego ... that has become a fable, a fiction, a play on
words! It has altogether ceased to think, feel, or will!What follows
from this? There are no mental causes at all. The whole of the allegedly
empirical evidence for mental causes has gone out the window. That is
what follows! And what a nice delusion we had perpetrated with this
“empirical evidence;” we interpreted the real world as a world of
causes, a world of wills, a world of spirits. The most ancient and
enduring psychology was at work here: it simply interpreted everything
that happened in the world as an act, as the effect of a will; the world
was inhabited with a multiplicity of wills; an agent (a “subject”) was
slipped under the surface of events. It was out of himself that man
projected his three most unquestioned “inner facts” — the will, the
spirit, the ego. He even took the concept of being from the concept of
the ego; he interpreted “things” as “being” in accordance with his
concept of the ego as a cause. Small wonder that later he always found
in things what he had already put into them. The thing itself, the
concept of thing is a mere extension of the faith in the ego as cause.
And even your atom, my dear materialists and physicists — how much
error, how much rudimentary psychology still resides in your atom! Not
to mention the “thing-in-itself,” the horrendum pudendum of
metaphysicians! The “spirit as cause” mistaken for reality! And made the
very measure of reality! And called God!
slipped after the fact under a particular sensation (for example, the
sensation following a far-off cannon shot) — often a whole little novel
is fabricated in which the dreamer appears as the protagonist who
experiences the stimulus. The sensation endures meanwhile as a kind of
resonance: it waits, so to speak, until the causal interpretation
permits it to step into the foreground — not as a random occurrence but
as a “meaningful event.” The cannon shot appears in a causal mode, in an
apparent reversal of time. What is really later (the causal
interpretation) is experienced first — often with a hundred details that
pass like lightning before the shot is heard. What has happened? The
representations which were produced in reaction to certain stimulus have
been misinterpreted as its causes.In fact, we do the same thing when
awake. Most of our general feelings — every kind of inhibition,
pressure, tension, and impulsion in the ebb and flow of our physiology,
and particularly in the state of the nervous system — excites our causal
instinct: we want to have a reason for feeling this way or that — for
feeling bad or good. We are never satisfied merely to state the fact
that we feel this way or that: we admit this fact only — become
conscious of it only — when we have fabricated some kind of explanation
for it. Memory, which swings into action in such cases without our
awareness, brings up earlier states of the same kind, together with the
causal interpretations associated with them — not their actual causes.
Of course, the faith that such representations or accompanying conscious
processes are the causes is also brought forth by memory. Thus
originates a habitual acceptance of a particular causal interpretation,
which, as a matter of fact, inhibits any investigation into the real
cause — it even excludes it.
something unknown relieves, comforts, and satisfies us, besides giving
us a feeling of power. With the unknown, one is confronted with danger,
discomfort, and care; the first instinct is to abolish these painful
states. First principle: any explanation is better than none. Because it
is fundamentally just our desire to be rid of an unpleasant uncertainty,
we are not very particular about how we get rid of it: the first
interpretation that explains the unknown in familiar terms feels so good
that one “accepts it as true.” We use the feeling of pleasure (“of
strength”) as our criterion for truth.A causal explanation is thus
contingent on (and aroused by) a feeling of fear. The “why?” shall, if
at all possible, result not in identifying the cause for its own sake,
but in identifying a cause that is comforting, liberating, and
relieving. A second consequence of this need is that we identify as a
cause something already familiar or experienced, something already
inscribed in memory. Whatever is novel or strange or never before
experienced is excluded. Thus one searches not just for any explanation
to serve as a cause, but for a specific and preferred type of
explanation: that which has most quickly and most frequently abolished
the feeling of the strange, new, and hitherto unexperienced in the past
— our most habitual explanations. Result: one type of causal explanation
predominates more and more, is concentrated into a system and finally
emerges as dominant — that is, as simply precluding other causes and
explanations. The banker immediately thinks of “business,” the Christian
of “sin,” and the girl of her love.
imaginary causes or “explanations” for disagreeable feelings. These
feelings are produced by beings that are hostile to us (evil spirits:
the most famous being the labeling of hysterical women as witches). They
are aroused by unacceptable acts (the feeling of “sin” or “sinfulness”
is slipped under a physiological discomfort; one always finds reasons
for feeling dissatisfied with oneself). They are produced as
punishments, as payment for something we should not have done, for
something we should not have desired (impudently generalized by
Schopenhauer into a principle in which morality appears as what it
really is — as the very poisoner and slanderer of life: “Every great
pain, whether physical or spiritual, declares what we deserve; for it
could not come to us if we did not deserve it.” World as Will and
Representation II, 666). They are the effects of ill-considered actions
that turn out badly. (Here the affects, the senses, are posited as
causes, as “guilty”; and physiological calamities are interpreted with
the help of other calamities as “deserved.”)We explain agreeable general
feelings as produced by our trust in God, and by our consciousness of
good deeds (the so-called “good conscience” — a physiological state
which at times looks so much like good digestion that it is hard to tell
them apart). They are produced by the successful termination of some
enterprise (a naive fallacy: the successful termination of some
enterprise does not by any means give a hypochondriac or a Pascal
agreeable general feelings). They are produced by faith, charity, and
hope — the Christian virtues.In fact, all these supposed causes are
actually effects, and as it were, translate pleasant or unpleasant
feelings into a misleading terminology. One is in a state of hope
because the basic physiological feeling is once again strong and rich;
one trusts in God because the feeling of fullness and strength gives a
sense of rest. Morality and religion belong entirely to the psychology
of error: in every single case, cause and effect are confused; or truth
is confused with the effects of believing something to be true; or a
state of consciousness is confused with its physiological origins.
idea of “free will”: we see it only too clearly for what it really is —
the foulest of all theological fictions, intended to make mankind
“responsible” in a religious sense — that is, dependent upon priests.
Here I simply analyze the psychological assumptions behind any attempt
at “making responsible.”Whenever responsibility is assigned, it is
usually so that judgment and punishment may follow. Becoming has been
deprived of its innocence when any acting-the-way-you-did is traced back
to will, to motives, to responsible choices: the doctrine of the will
has been invented essentially to justify punishment through the pretext
of assigning guilt. All primitive psychology, the psychology of will,
arises from the fact that its interpreters, the priests at the head of
ancient communities, wanted to create for themselves the right to punish
— or wanted to create this right for their God. Men were considered
“free” only so that they might be considered guilty — could be judged
and punished: consequently, every act had to be considered as willed,
and the origin of every act had to be considered as lying within the
consciousness (and thus the most fundamental psychological deception was
made the principle of psychology itself).Today, we immoralists have
embarked on a counter movement and are trying with all our strength to
take the concepts of guilt and punishment out of the world — to cleanse
psychology, history, nature, and social institutions and sanctions of
these ideas. And there is in our eyes no more radical opposition than
that of the theologians, who continue to infect the innocence of
becoming by means of the concepts of a “moral world-order,” “guilt,” and
“punishment.” Christianity is religion for the executioner.
— neither God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors, nor he
himself. (The nonsense of the last idea was taught as “intelligible
freedom” by Kant — and perhaps by Plato.) No one is responsible for a
man’s being here at all, for his being such-and-such, or for his being
in these circumstances or in this environment. The fatality of his
existence is not to be disentangled from the fatality of all that has
been and will be. Human beings are not the effect of some special
purpose, or will, or end; nor are they a medium through which society
can realize an “ideal of humanity” or an “ideal of happiness” or an
“ideal of morality.” It is absurd to wish to devolve one’s essence on
some end or other. We have invented the concept of “end”: in reality
there is no end.A man is necessary, a man is a piece of fatefulness, a
man belongs to the whole, a man is in the whole; there is nothing that
could judge, measure, compare, or sentence his being, for that would
mean judging, measuring, comparing, or sentencing the whole. But there
is nothing besides the whole. That nobody is held responsible any
longer, that the mode of being may not be traced back to a primary
cause, that the world does not form a unity either as a sensorium or as
“spirit” — that alone is the great liberation. With that idea alone we
absolve our becoming of any guilt. The concept of “God” was until now
the greatest objection to existence. We deny God, we deny the
responsibility that originates from God: and thereby we redeem the
world.
beyond good and evil and treat the illusion of moral judgment as beneath
him. This demand follows from an insight that I was the first to
articulate: that there are no moral facts. Moral and religious judgments
are based on realities that do not exist. Morality is merely an
interpretation of certain phenomena — more precisely, a
misinterpretation. Moral judgments, like religious ones, belong to a
stage of ignorance in which the very concept of the real, and the
distinction between what is real and imaginary, are still lacking.
“Truth” at this stage designates all sorts of things that we today call
“figments of the imagination.” Moral judgments are therefore never to be
taken literally: so understood, they are always merely absurd.
Semiotically, however, they remain invaluable: they reveal, at least for
those who can interpret them, the most valuable realities of cultures
and psychologies that did not know how to “understand” themselves.
Morality is only a language of signs, a group of symptoms: one must know
how to interpret them correctly to be able to profit from them.
“improve” men — this aim is above all what was called morality. Under
the same word, however, the most divergent tendencies have been
concealed. But “improvement” has meant both taming the beast called man,
and breeding a particular kind of man. Such zoological concepts are
required to express the realities — realities of which the typical
“improver,” the priest, admittedly neither knows anything nor wants to
know anything.To call the taming of an animal its “improvement” sounds
almost like a joke to our ears. Whoever knows what goes on in kennels
doubts that dogs are “improved” there. They are weakened, they are made
less harmful, and through the depressive effect of fear, through pain,
through wounds, and through hunger, they become sickly beasts. It is no
different with the tamed man whom the priest has “improved.” In the
early Middle Ages, when the church was indeed, above all, a kennel, the
most perfect specimens of the “blond beast” were hunted down everywhere;
and the noble Teutons, for example, were “improved.” But how did such an
“improved” Teuton look after he had been drawn into a monastery? Like a
caricature of man, a miscarriage: he had become a “sinner,” he was stuck
in a cage, tormented with all sorts of painful concepts. And there he
lay, sick, miserable, hateful to himself, full of evil feelings against
the impulses of his own life, full of suspicion against all that was
still strong and happy. In short, a “Christian.”Physiologically
speaking: in the struggle with beasts, making them sick may be the only
way to make them weak. The church understood this: it sickened and
weakened man — and by so doing “improved” him.
of breeding a particular race or type of man. The most magnificent
example of this is furnished by Indian morality, sanctioned as religion
in the form of “the law of Manu.” Here the objective is to breed no less
than four races within the same society: one priestly, one warlike, one
for trade and agriculture, and finally a race of servants, the Sudras.
Obviously, we are no longer dealing with animal tamers: a man that is a
hundred times milder and more reasonable is the only one who could even
conceive such a plan of breeding. One breathes a sigh of relief at
leaving the Christian atmosphere of disease and dungeons for this
healthier, higher, and wider world. How wretched is the New Testament
compared to Manu, how foul it smells!Yet this method also found it
necessary to be terrible — not in the struggle against beasts, but
against their equivalent — the ill-bred man, the mongrel man, the
chandala. And again the breeder had no other means to fight against this
large group of mongrel men than by making them sick and weak. Perhaps
there is nothing that goes against our feelings more than these
protective measures of Indian morality. The third edict, for example
(Avadana-Sastra I), “on impure vegetables,” ordains that the only
nourishment permitted to the chandala shall be garlic and onions, seeing
that the holy scripture prohibits giving them grain, fruit with grains,
water or fire. The same edict orders that the water they drink may not
be taken from rivers or wells, nor from ponds, but only from the
approaches to swamps and from holes made by the footsteps of animals.
They are also prohibited from washing their laundry and from washing
themselves, since the water they are conceded as an act of grace may be
used only to quench thirst. Finally, Sudra women are prohibited from
assisting chandala women in childbirth, just as chandala women are
prohibited from midwifing to each other.The success of such sanitary
police measures was inevitable: murderous epidemics, ghastly venereal
diseases, and thereupon again “the law of the knife,” ordaining
circumcision for male children and the removal of the internal labia for
female children. Manu himself says: “The chandalas are the fruit of
adultery, incest, and rape (crimes that follow from the fundamental
concept of breeding). For clothing they shall have only rags from
corpses; for dishes, broken pots; for adornment, old iron; for divine
services, only evil spirits. They shall wander without rest from place
to place. They are prohibited from writing from left to right, and from
using the right hand in writing: the use of the right hand and of
from-left-to-right is reserved for the virtuous, for the people of pure
blood.”
at its purest and most primordial; we learn that the concept of “pure
blood” is very far from being a harmless concept. On the other hand, it
becomes obvious in which people the chandala hatred against this Aryan
“humaneness” has has become a religion, eternalized itself, and become
genius — primarily in the Gospels, even more so in the Book of Enoch.
Christianity, sprung from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as a
growth on this soil, represents the counter-movement to any morality of
breeding, of race, privilege: it is the anti-Aryan religion par
excellence. Christianity — the revaluation of all Aryan values, the
victory of chandala values, the gospel preached to the poor and base,
the general revolt of all the downtrodden, the wretched, the failures,
the less favored, against “race”: the undying chandala hatred is
disguised as a religion of love.
means they use, entirely worthy of each other: we may proclaim it as a
supreme principle that to make men moral one must have the unconditional
resolve to act immorally. This is the great, the uncanny problem which I
have been pursuing the longest: the psychology of the “improvers” of
mankind. A small, and at bottom modest, fact — that of the so-called pia
fraus [holy lie] — offered me the first insight into this problem: the
pia fraus, the heirloom of all philosophers and priests who “improved”
mankind. Neither Manu nor Plato nor Confucius nor the Jewish and
Christian teachers have ever doubted their right to lie. They have not
doubted that they had very different rights too. Expressed in a formula,
one might say: all the means by which one has so far attempted to make
mankind moral were through and through immoral.
it, one must have the arrogance to have spirit.Perhaps I know the
Germans, perhaps I may even tell them some truths. The new Germany
represents a large quantum of fitness, both inherited and acquired by
training, so that for a time it may expend its accumulated store of
strength, even squander it. It is not a high culture that has thus
become the master, and even less a delicate taste, a noble “beauty” of
the instincts; but more virile virtues than any other country in Europe
can show. Much cheerfulness and self-respect, much assurance in social
relations and in the reciprocality of duties, much industriousness, much
perseverance — and an inherited moderation which needs the spur rather
than the brake. I add that here one still obeys without feeling that
obedience humiliates. And nobody despises his opponent.One will notice
that I wish to be just to the Germans: I do not want to break faith with
myself here. I must therefore also state my objections to them. One pays
heavily for coming to power: power makes stupid. The Germans — once they
were called the people of thinkers: do they think at all today? The
Germans are now bored with the spirit, the Germans now mistrust the
spirit; politics swallows up all serious concern for really spiritual
matters. Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles — I fear that was the end
of German philosophy.“Are there any German philosophers? Are there
German poets? Are there good German books?” they ask me abroad. I blush;
but with the courage which I maintain even in desperate situations I
reply: “Well, Bismarck.” Would it be permissible for me to confess what
books are read today? Accursed instinct of mediocrity!
about that! But this people has deliberately made itself stupid, for
nearly a millennium: nowhere have the two great European narcotics,
alcohol and Christianity, been abused more dissolutely. Recently even a
third has been added — one that alone would be suffficient to dispatch
all fine and bold fiexibility of the spirit — music, our constipated,
constipating German music.How much disgruntled heaviness, lameness,
dampness, dressing gown — how much beer there is in the German
intelligence! How is it at all possible that young men who dedicate
their lives to the most spiritual goals do not feel the first instinct
of spirituality, the spirit’s instinct of self-preservation — and drink
beer? The alcoholism of young scholars is perhaps no question mark
concerning their scholarliness — without spirit one can still be a great
scholar — but in every other respect it remains a problem. Where would
one not find the gentle degeneration which beer produces in the spirit?
Once, in a case that has almost become famous, I put my finger on such a
degeneration — the degeneration of our number-one German free spirit,
the clever David Strauss, into the author of a beer-bench gospel and
“new faith.” It was not for nothing that he had made his vow to the
“fair brunette” [dark beer] in verse — loyalty unto death.
becoming shallower. Is that enough? At bottom, it is something quite
different that alarms me: how German seriousness, German depth, German
passion in spiritual matters are declining more and more. The verve has
changed, not just the intellectuality. Here and there I come into
contact with German universities: what an atmosphere prevails among
their scholars, what desolate spirituality — and how contented and
lukewarm it has become! It would be a profound misunderstanding if one
wanted to adduce German science against me-it would also be proof that
one has not read a word I have written. For seventeen years I have never
tired of calling attention to the despiritualizing influence of our
current science-industry. The hard helotism to which the tremendous
range of the sciences condemns every scholar today is a main reason why
those with a fuller, richer, profounder disposition no longer find a
congenial education and congenial educators. There is nothing of which
our culture suffers more than of the superabundance of pretentious
jobbers and fragments of humanity; our universities are, against their
will, the real hothouses for this kind of withering of the instincts of
the spirit. And the whole of Europe already has some idea of this —
power politics deceives nobody. Germany is considered more and more as
Europe’s flatland. I am still looking for a German with whom I might be
able to be serious in my own way — and how much more for one with whom I
might be cheerful! Twilight of the Idols: who today would comprehend
from what seriousness a philosopher seeks recreation here? Our
cheerfulness is what is most incomprehensible about us.
culture is declining but that there is sufficient reason for that. In
the end, no one can spend more than he has: that is true of an
individual, it is true of a people. If one spends oneself for power, for
power politics, for economics, world trade, parliamentarianism, and
military interests — if one spends in the direction the quantum of
understanding, seriousness, will, and self-overcoming which one
represents, then it will be lacking for the other direction.Culture and
the state — one should not deceive one-self about this — are
antagonists: “Kultur-Staat” is merely a modern idea. One lives off the
other, one thrives at the expense of the other. All great ages of
culture are ages of political decline: what is great culturally has
always been unpolitical, even anti-political. Goethe’s heart opened at
the phenomenon of Napoleon — it closed at the “Wars of Liberation.” At
the same moment when Germany comes up as a great power, France gains a
new importance as a cultural power. Even today much new seriousness,
much new passion of the spirit, have migrated to Paris; the question of
pessimism, for example, the question of Wagner, and almost all
psychological and artistic questions are there weighed incomparably more
delicately and thoroughly than in Germany — the Germans are altogether
incapable of this kind of seriousness. In the history of European
culture the rise of the “Reich” means one thing above all: a
displacement of the center of gravity. It is already known everywhere:
in what matters most — and that always remains culture — the Germans are
no longer worthy of consideration. One asks: Can you point to even a
single spirit who counts from a European point of view, as your Goethe,
your Hegel, your Heinrich Heine, your Schopenhauer counted? That there
is no longer a single German philosopher — about that there is no end of
astonishment.
most: the end as well as the means to the end. That education, that
Bildung, is itself an end — and not “the Reich” — and that educators are
needed to that end, and not secondary-school teachers and university
scholars — that has been forgotten. Educators are needed who have
themselves been educated, superior, noble spirits, proved at every
moment, proved by words and silence, representing culture which has
grown ripe and sweet — not the learned louts whom secondary schools and
universities today offer our youth as “higher wet nurses.” Educators are
lacking, not counting the most exceptional of exceptions, the very first
condition of education: hence the decline of German culture. One of this
rarest of exceptions is my venerable friend, Jacob Burckhardt in Basel:
it is primarily to him that Basel owes its pre-eminence in
humaneness.What the “higher schools” in Germany really achieve is a
brutal training, designed to prepare huge numbers of young men, with as
little loss of time as possible, to become usable, abusable, in
government service. “Higher education” and huge numbers — that is a
contradiction to start with. All higher education belongs only to the
exception: one must be privileged to have a right to so high a
privilege. All great, all beautiful things can never be common property:
pulchrum est paucorum hominum. What contributes to the decline of German
culture? That “higher education” is no longer a privilege — the
democratism of Bildung, which has become “common” — too common. Let it
not be forgotten that military privileges really compel an all-too-great
attendance in the higher schools, and thus their downfall.In present-day
Germany no one is any longer free to give his children a noble
education: our “higher schools” are all set up for the most ambiguous
mediocrity, with their teachers, curricula, and teaching aims. And
everywhere an indecent haste prevails, as if something would be lost if
the young man of twenty-three were not yet “finished,” or if he did not
yet know the answer to the “main question”: which calling? A higher kind
of human being, if I may say so, does not like “callings,” precisely
because he knows himself to be called. He has time, he takes time, he
does not even think of “finishing”: at thirty one is, in the sense of
high culture, a beginner, a child. Our overcrowded secondary schools,
our overworked, stupefied secondary-school teachers, are a scandal: for
one to defend such conditions, as the professors at Heidelberg did
recently, there may perhaps be causes — reasons there are none.
affirmative and deals with contradiction and criticism only as a means,
only involuntarily — the three tasks for which educators are required.
One must learn to see, one must learn to think, one must learn to speak
and write: the goal in all three is a noble culture. Learning to see —
accustoming the eye to calmness, to patience, to letting things come up
to it; postponing judgment, learning to go around and grasp each
individual case from all sides. That is the first preliminary schooling
for spirituality: not to react at once to a stimulus, but to gain
control of all the inhibiting, excluding instincts. Learning to see, as
I understand it, is almost what, unphilosophically speaking, is called a
strong will: the essential feature is precisely not to “will” — to be
able to suspend decision. All unspirituality, all vulgar commonness,
depend on the inability to resist a stimulus: one must react, one
follows every impulse. In many cases, such a compulsion is already
pathology, decline, a symptom of exhaustion — almost everything that
unphilosophical crudity designates with the word “vice” is merely this
physiological inability not to react. A practical application of having
learned to see: as a learner, one will have become altogether slow,
mistrustful, recalcitrant. One will let strange, new things of every
kind come up to oneself, inspecting them with hostile calm and
withdrawing one’s hand. To have all doors standing open, to lie
servilely on one’s stomach before every little fact, always to be
prepared for the leap of putting oneself into the place of, or of
plunging into, others and other things — in short, the famous modern
“objectivity” — is bad taste, is ignoble par excellence.
Even in the universities, even among the real scholars of philosophy,
logic as a theory, as a practice, as a craft, is beginning to die out.
One need only read German books: there is no longer the remotest
recollection that thinking requires a technique, a teaching curriculum,
a will to mastery — that thinking wants to be learned like dancing, as a
kind of dancing. Who among Germans still knows from experience the
delicate shudder which light feet in spiritual matters send into every
muscle? The stiff clumsiness of the spiritual gesture, the bungling hand
at grasping — that is German to such a degree that abroad one mistakes
it for the German character as such. The German has no fingers for
nuances.That the Germans have been able to stand their philosophers at
all, especially that most deformed concept-cripple of all time, the
great Kant, provides not a bad notion of German grace. For one cannot
subtract dancing in every form from a noble education — to be able to
dance with one’s feet, with concepts, with words: need I still add that
one must be able to dance with the pen too — that one must learn to
write? But at this point I should become completely enigmatic for German
readers.
the return to nature in impuris naturalibus [in natural filth].
Schiller: or the Moral-Trumpeter of Säckingen. Dante: or the hyena who
writes poetry in tombs. Kant: or cant as an intelligible character.
Victor Hugo: or the pharos at the sea of nonsense. Liszt: or the school
of smoothness — with women. George Sand: or lactea ubertas — in
translation, the milk cow with “a beautiful style.” Michelet: or the
enthusiasm which takes off its coat. Carlyle: or pessimism as a poorly
digested dinner. John Stuart Mill: or insulting clarity. Les frères de
Goncourt: or the two Ajaxes in battle with Homer — music by Offenbach.
Zola: or “the delight in stinking.”
(Christianity). Witness Renan who, whenever he risks a Yes or No of a
more general nature scores a miss with painful regularity. He wants for
example, to weld together la science and la noblesse: but la science
belongs with democracy; what could be plainer? With no little ambition,
he wishes to represent an aristocracy of the spirit: yet at the same
time he is on his knees before its very counter-doctrine, the evangile
des humbles — and not only on his knees. To what avail is all
free-spiritedness, modernity, mockery, and wry-neck suppleness, if in
one’s guts one is still a Christian, a Catholic — in fact, a priest!
Renan is most inventive, just like a Jesuit and father confessor, when
it comes to seduction; his spirituality does not even lack the broad fat
popish smile — like all priests, he becomes dangerous only when he
loves. Nobody can equal him when it comes to adoring in a manner
endangering life itself. This spirit of Renan’s, a spirit which is
enervated, is one more calamity for poor, sick, will-sick France.
virile spirits. Wanders around, cowardly, curious, bored, eavesdropping
— a female at bottom, with a female’s lust for revenge and a female’s
sensuality. As a psychologist, a genius of médisance [slander],
inexhaustibly rich in means to that end; no one knows better how to mix
praise with poison. Plebeian in the lowest instincts and related to the
ressentiment of Rousseau: consequently, a romantic — for underneath all
romantisme lie the grunting and greed of Rousseau’s instinct for
revenge. A revolutionary, but still pretty well harnessed by fear.
Without freedom when confronted with anything strong (public opinion,
the Academy, the court, even Port Royal). Embittered against everything
great in men and things, against whatever believes in itself. Poet and
half-female enough to sense the great as a power; always writhing like
the famous worm because he always feels stepped upon. As a critic,
without any standard, steadiness, and backbone, with the cosmopolitan
libertine’s tongue for a medley of things, but without the courage even
to confess his libertinage. As a historian, without philosophy, without
the power of the philosophical eye — hence declining the task of judging
in all significant matters, hiding behind the mask of “objectivity.” It
is different with his attitude to all things in which a fine, well-worn
taste is the highest tribunal: there he really has the courage to stand
by himself and delight in himself — there he is a master. In some
respects, a preliminary version of Baudelaire.
hand without a physiological reaction: it exudes a perfume of the
Eternal-Feminine which is strictly for Frenchmen — or Wagnerians. This
saint has a way of talking about love which arouses even Parisian women
to curiosity. I am told that that cleverest of Jesuits, Auguste Comte,
who wanted to lead his Frenchmen to Rome via the detour of science,
found his inspiration in this book. I believe it: “the religion of the
heart.”
more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. That is an
English consistency; we do not wish to hold it against little moralistic
females à la Eliot. In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every
little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably
awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance
they pay there.We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian
faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s
feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be
exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads. Christianity
is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking
one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole:
nothing necessary remains in one’s hands. Christianity presupposes that
man does not know, cannot know, what is good for him, what evil: he
believes in God, who alone knows it. Christian morality is a command;
its origin is transcendent; it is beyond all criticism, all right to
criticism; it has truth only if God is the truth — it stands and falls
with faith in God.When the English actually believe that they know
“intuitively” what is good and evil, when they therefore suppose that
they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we
merely witness the effects of the dominion of the Christian value
judgment and an expression of the strength and depth of this dominion:
such that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, such that
the very conditional character of its right to existence is no longer
felt. For the English, morality is not yet a problem.
that is descended from Rousseau, false, fabricated, bellows,
exaggerated. I cannot stand this motley wallpaper style any more than
the mob aspiration for generous feelings. The worst feature, to be sure,
is the female’s coquetry with male attributes, with the manners of
naughty boys. How cold she must have been throughout, this insufferable
artist! She wound herself up like a clock — and wrote. Cold, like Hugo,
like Balzac, like all the romantics as soon as they took up poetic
invention. And how self-satisfied she may have lain there all the while,
this fertile writing-cow who had in her something German in the bad
sense, like Rousseau himself, her master, and who in any case was
possible only during the decline of French taste! But Renan reveres her.
Never to observe in order to observe! That gives a false perspective,
leads to squinting and something forced and exaggerated. Experience as
the wish to experience does not succeed. One must not eye oneself while
having an experience; else the eye becomes “an evil eye.” A born
psychologist guards instinctively against seeing in order to see; the
same is true of the born painter. He never works “from nature”; he
leaves it to his instinct, to his camera obscura, to sift through and
express the “case,” “nature,” that which is “experienced.” He is
conscious only of what is general, of the conclusion, the result: he
does not know arbitrary abstractions from an individual case.What
happens when one proceeds differently? For example, if, in the manner of
the Parisian novelists, one goes in for backstairs psychology and deals
in gossip, wholesale and retail? Then one lies in wait for reality, as
it were, and every evening one brings home a handful of curiosities. But
note what finally comes of all this: a heap of splotches, a mosaic at
best, but in any case something added together, something restless, a
mess of screaming colors. The worst in this respect is accomplished by
the Goncourts; they do not put three sentences together without really
hurting the eye, the psychologist’s eye.Nature, estimated artistically,
is no model. It exaggerates, it distorts, it leaves gaps. Nature is
chance. To study “from nature” seems to me to be a bad sign: it betrays
submission, weakness, fatalism; this lying in the dust before petit
faits [little facts] is unworthy of a whole artist. To see what is —
that is the mark of another kind of spirit, the anti-artistic, the
factual. One must know who one is.
is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is
indispensable: frenzy. Frenzy must first have enhanced the excitability
of the whole machine; else there is no art. All kinds of frenzy, however
diversely conditioned, have the strength to accomplish this: above all,
the frenzy of sexual excitement, this most ancient and original form of
frenzy. Also the frenzy that follows all great cravings, all strong
affects; the frenzy of feasts, contests, feats of daring, victory, all
extreme movement; the frenzy of cruelty; the frenzy in destruction, the
frenzy under certain meteorological influences, as for example the
frenzy of spring; or under the influence of narcotics; and finally the
frenzy of will, the frenzy of an overcharged and swollen will. What is
essential in such frenzy is the feeling of increased strength and
fullness. Out of this feeling one lends to things, one forces them to
accept from us, one violates them — this process is called idealizing.
Let us get rid of a prejudice here: idealizing does not consist, as is
commonly held, in subtracting or discounting the petty and
inconsequential. What is decisive is rather a tremendous drive to bring
out the main features so that the others disappear in the process.
whatever one sees, whatever one wills, is seen swelled, taut, strong,
overloaded with strength. A man in this state transforms things until
they mirror his power — until they are reflections of his perfection.
This having to transform into perfection is — art. Even everything that
he is not yet, becomes for him an occasion of joy in himself; in art man
enjoys himself as perfection.It would be permissible to imagine an
opposite state, a specific anti-artistry by instinct — a mode of being
which would impoverish all things, making them thin and consumptive.
And, as a matter of fact, history is rich in such anti-artists, in such
people who are starved by life and must of necessity grab things, eat
them out, and make them more meager. This is, for example, the case of
the genuine Christian — of Pascal, for example: a Christian who would at
the same time be an artist simply does not occur. One should not be
childish and object by naming Raphael or some homeopathic Christian of
the nineteenth century: Raphael said Yes, Raphael did Yes; consequently,
Raphael was no Christian.
introduced into aesthetics, Apollinian and Dionysian, both conceived as
kinds of frenzy? The Apollinian frenzy excites the eye above all, so
that it gains the power of vision. The painter, the sculptor, the epic
poet are visionaries par excellence. In the Dionysian state, on the
other hand, the whole affective system is excited and enhanced: so that
it discharges all its means of expression at once and drives forth
simultaneously the power of representation, imitation, transfiguration,
transformation, and every kind of mimicking and acting. The essential
feature here remains the ease of metamorphosis, the inability not to
react (similar to certain hysterical types who also, upon any
suggestion, enter into any role). It is impossible for the Dionysian
type not to understand any suggestion; he does not overlook any sign of
an affect; he possesses the instinct of understanding and guessing in
the highest degree, just as he commands the art of communication in the
highest degree. He enters into any skin, into any affect: he constantly
transforms himself.Music, as we understand it today, is also a total
excitement and a total discharge of the affects, but even so only the
remnant of a much fuller world of expression of the affects, a mere
residue of the Dionysian histrionicism. To make music possible as a
separate art, a number of senses, especially the muscle sense, have been
immobilized (at least relatively, for to a certain degree all rhythm
still appeals to our muscles); so that man no longer bodily imitates and
represents everything he feels. Nevertheless, that is really the normal
Dionysian state, at least the original state. Music is the
specialization of this state attained slowly at the expense of those
faculties which are most closely related to it.
basically related in their instincts and, at bottom, one — but gradually
they have become specialized and separated from each other, even to the
point of mutual opposition. The lyric poet remained united with the
musician for the longest time; the actor, with the dancer.The architect
represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollinian state: here it is the
great act of will, the will that moves mountains, the frenzy of the
great will which aspires to art. The most powerful human beings have
always inspired architects; the architect has always been under the
spell of power. His buildings are supposed to render pride visible, and
the victory over gravity, the will to power. Architecture is a kind of
eloquence of power in forms — now persuading, even flattering, now only
commanding. The highest feeling of power and sureness finds expression
in a grand style. The power which no longer needs any proof, which
spurns pleasing, which does not answer lightly, which feels no witness
near, which lives oblivious of all opposition to it, which reposes
within itself, fatalistically, a law among laws — that speaks of itself
as a grand style.
involuntary farce, this heroic-moralistic interpretation of dyspeptic
states. Carlyle: a man of strong words and attitudes, a rhetor from
need, constantly lured by the craving for a strong faith and the feeling
of his incapacity for it (in this respect, a typical romantic!). The
craving for a strong faith is no proof of a strong faith, but quite the
contrary. If one has such a faith, then one can afford the beautiful
luxury of skepticism: one is sure enough, firm enough, has ties enough
for that. Carlyle drugs something in himself with the fortissimo of his
veneration of men of strong faith and with his rage against the less
simple-minded: he requires noise. A constant passionate dishonesty
against himself-that is his proprium; in this respect he is and remains
interesting. Of course, in England he is admired precisely for his
honesty. Well, that is English; and in view of the fact that the English
are the people of consummate cant, it is even as it should be, and not
only comprehensible. At bottom, Carlyle is an English atheist who makes
it a point of honor not to be one.
than Carlyle; above all, happier. One who instinctively nourishes
himself only on ambrosia, leaving behind what is indigestible in things.
Compared with Carlyle, a man of taste. Carlyle, who loved him very much,
nevertheless said of him: “He does not give us enough to chew on” —
which may be true, but is no reflection on Emerson. Emerson has that
gracious and clever cheerfulness which discourages all seriousness; he
simply does not know how old he is already and how young he is still
going to be; he could say of himself, quoting Lope de Vega, “Yo me
sucedo a mi mismo” [I am my own heir]. His spirit always finds reasons
for being satisfied and even grateful; and at times he touches on the
cheerful transcendency of the worthy gentleman who returned from an
amorous rendezvous, tamquiam re bene gesta [as if he had accomplished
his mission]. “Ut desint vires,” he said gratefully, “tamen est laudanda
voluptas” [Though the power is lacking, the lust is nevertheless
praiseworthy].
seems to me to be asserted rather than proved. It occurs, but as an
exception; the total appearance of life is not the extremity, not
starvation, but rather riches, profusion, even absurd squandering — and
where there is struggle, it is a struggle for power. One should not
mistake Malthus for nature.Assuming, however, that there is such a
struggle for existence — and, indeed, it occurs — its result is
unfortunately the opposite of what Darwin’s school desires, and of what
one might perhaps desire with them — namely, in favor of the strong, the
privileged, the fortunate exceptions. The species do not grow in
perfection: the weak prevail over the strong again and again, for they
are the great majority — and they are also more intelligent. Darwin
forgot the spirit (that is English!); the weak have more spirit. One
must need spirit to acquire spirit; one loses it when one no longer
needs it. Whoever has strength dispenses with the spirit (“Let it go!”
they think in Germany today; “the Reich must still remain to us”). It
will be noted that by “spirit” I mean care, patience, cunning,
simulation, great self-control, and everything that is mimicry (the
latter includes a great deal of so-called virtue).
really study people? He wants to seize little advantages over them — or
big ones, for that matter — he is a politician. That one over there also
knows human nature, and you say that he seeks no profit for himself,
that he is thoroughly “impersonal.” Look more closely! Perhaps he even
wants a worse advantage to feel superior to other human beings, to be
able to look down on them, and no longer to mistake himself for one of
them. This “impersonal” type as a despiser of human beings, while the
first type is the more humane species, appearances notwithstanding. At
least he places himself on the same plane, he places himself among them.
in view of quite a number of cases which modesty prevents me from
enumerating. In one case I shall not lack a great occasion to
substantiate my thesis: I bear the Germans a grudge for having made such
a mistake about Kant and his “backdoor philosophy,” as I call it — for
that was not the type of intellectual integrity. The other thing I do
not like to hear is a notorious “and”: the Germans say “Goethe and
Schiller” — I am afraid they say “Schiller and Goethe.” Don’t they know
this Schiller yet? And there are even worse “ands”; with my own ears I
have heard, if only among university professors, “Schopenhauer and
Hartmann.”
courageous, also experience by far the most painful tragedies: but just
for that reason they honor life because it pits its greatest opposition
against them.
than genuine hypocrisy. I greatly suspect that the soft air of our
culture is insalubrious for this plant. Hypocrisy belongs in the ages of
strong faith when, even though constrained to display another faith, one
did not abandon one’s own faith. Today one does abandon it; or, even
more commonly, one adds a second faith — and in either case one remains
honest. Without a doubt, a very much greater number of convictions is
possible today than formerly: “possible” means permissible, which means
harmless. This begets tolerance toward oneself.Tolerance toward oneself
permits several convictions and they get along with each other: they are
careful, like all the rest of the world, not to compromise themselves.
How does one compromise oneself today? If one is consistent. If one
proceeds in a straight line. If one is not ambiguous enough to permit
five conflicting interpretations. If one is genuine.I fear greatly that
modern man is simply too comfortable for some vices, so that they die
out by default. All evil that is a function of a strong will — and
perhaps there is no evil without strength of will — degenerates into
virtue in our tepid air. The few hypocrites whom I have met imitated
hypocrisy: like almost every tenth person today, they were actors.
or, let us say, narrower — than our feeling for beauty. Whoever would
think of it apart from man’s joy in man would immediately lose any
foothold. “Beautiful in itself” is a mere phrase, not even a concept. In
the beautiful, man posits himself as the measure of perfection; in
special cases he worships himself in it. A species cannot do otherwise
but thus affirm itself alone. Its lowest instinct, that of
self-preservation and self-expansion, still radiates in such
sublimities. Man believes the world itself to be overloaded with beauty
— and he forgets himself as the cause of this. He alone has presented
the world with beauty — alas! only with a very human, all-too-human
beauty. At bottom, man mirrors himself in things; he considers
everything beautiful that reflects his own image: the judgment
“beautiful” is the vanity of his species. For a little suspicion may
whisper this question into the skeptic’s ear: Is the world really
beautified by the fact that man thinks it beautiful? He has humanized
it, that is all. But nothing, absolutely nothing, guarantees that man
should be the model of beauty. Who knows what he looks like in the eyes
of a higher judge of beauty? Daring perhaps? Perhaps even amusing?
Perhaps a little arbitrary?“O Dionysus, divine one, why do you pull me
by my ears?” Ariadne once asked her philosophic lover during one of
those famous dialogues on Naxos. “I find a kind of humor in your ears,
Ariadne: why are they not even longer?”
naïveté, which is its first truth. Let us immediately add the second:
nothing is ugly except the degenerating man — and with this the realm of
aesthetic judgment is circumscribed. Physiologically, everything ugly
weakens and saddens man. It reminds him of decay, danger, impotence; it
actually deprives him of strength. One can measure the effect of the
ugly with a dynamometer. Wherever man is depressed at all, he senses the
proximity of something “ugly.” His feeling of power, his will to power,
his courage, his pride — all fall with the ugly and rise with the
beautiful. In both cases we draw an inference: the premises for it are
piled up in the greatest abundance in instinct. The ugly is understood
as a sign and symptom of degeneration: whatever reminds us in the least
of degeneration causes in us the judgment of “ugly.” Every suggestion of
exhaustion, of heaviness, of age, of weariness; every kind of lack of
freedom, such as cramps, such as paralysis; and above all, the smell,
the color, the form of dissolution, of decomposition — even in the
ultimate attenuation into a symbol — all evoke the same reaction, the
value judgment, “ugly.” A hatred is aroused — but whom does man hate
then? There is no doubt: the decline of his type. Here he hates out of
the deepest instinct of the species; in this hatred there is a shudder,
caution, depth, farsightedness — it is the deepest hatred there is. It
is because of this that art is deep.
(who represents a European event like Goethe, like Hegel, like Heinrich
Heine, and not merely a local event, a “national” one), is for a
psychologist a first-rate case: namely, as a maliciously ingenious
attempt to adduce in favor of a nihilistic total depreciation of life
precisely the counter-instances, the great self-affirmations of the
“will to life,” life’s forms of exuberance. He has interpreted art,
heroism, genius, beauty, great sympathy, knowledge, the will to truth,
and tragedy, in turn, as consequences of “negation” or of the “will’s”
need to negate — the greatest psychological counterfeit in all history,
not counting Christianity. On closer inspection, he is at this point
merely the heir of the Christian interpretation: only he knew how to
approve that which Christianity had repudiated, the great cultural facts
of humanity — albeit in a Christian, that is, nihilistic, manner
(namely, as ways of “redemption,” as anticipations of “redemption,” as
stimuli of the need for “redemption”).
fervor. Why? Because he sees in it a bridge on which one will go
farther, or develop a thirst to go farther. Beauty is for him a
momentary redemption from the “will” — a lure to eternal redemption.
Particularly, he praises beauty as the redeemer from “the focal point of
the will,” from sexuality — in beauty he sees the negation of the drive
toward procreation. Queer saint! Somebody seems to be contradicting you;
I fear it is nature. To what end is there any such thing as beauty in
tone, color, fragrance, or rhythmic movement in nature? What is it that
beauty evokes? Fortunately, a philosopher contradicts him too. No lesser
authority than that of the divine Plato (so Schopenhauer himself calls
him) maintains a different proposition: that all beauty incites
procreation, that just this is the proprium of its effect, from the most
sensual up to the most spiritual.
Greek, not a “Christian,” that there would be no Platonic philosophy at
all if there were not such beautiful youths in Athens: it is only their
sight that transposes the philosopher’s soul into an erotic trance,
leaving it no peace until it lowers the seed of all exalted things into
such beautiful soil. Another queer saint! One does not trust one’s ears,
even if one should trust Plato. At least one guesses that they
philosophized differently in Athens, especially in public. Nothing is
less Greek than the conceptual web-spinning of a hermit — amor
intellectualis dei [intellectual love of God] after the fashion of
Spinoza. Philosophy after the fashion of Plato might rather be defined
as an erotic contest, as a further development and turning inward of the
ancient agonistic gymnastics and of its presuppositions. What ultimately
grew out of this philosophic eroticism of Plato? A new art form of the
Greek agon: dialectics. Finally, I recall — against Schopenhauer and in
honor of Plato — that the whole higher culture and literature of
classical France too grew on the soil of sexual interest. Everywhere in
it one may look for the amatory, the senses, the sexual contest, “the
woman” — one will never look in vain.
against the moralizing tendency in art, against its subordination to
morality. L’art pour l’art means, “The devil take morality!” But even
this hostility still betrays the overpowering force of the prejudice.
When the purpose of moral preaching and of improving man has been
excluded from art, it still does not follow by any means that art is
altogether purposeless, aimless, senseless — in short, l’art pour l’art,
a worm chewing its own tail. “Rather no purpose at all than a moral
purpose!” — that is the talk of mere passion. A psychologist, on the
other hand, asks: what does all art do? does it not praise? glorify?
choose? prefer? With all this it strengthens or weakens certain
valuations. Is this merely a “moreover”? an accident? something in which
the artist’s instinct had no share? Or is it not the very presupposition
of the artist’s ability? Does his basic instinct aim at art, or rather
at the sense of art, at life? at a desirability of life? Art is the
great stimulus to life: how could one understand it as purposeless, as
aimless, as l’art pour l’art?One question remains: art also makes
apparent much that is ugly, hard, and questionable in life; does it not
thereby spoil life for us? And indeed there have been philosophers who
attributed this sense to it: “liberation from the will” was what
Schopenhauer taught as the overall end of art; and with admiration he
found the great utility of tragedy in its “evoking resignation.” But
this, as I have already suggested, is the pessimist’s perspective and
“evil eye.” We must appeal to the artists themselves. What does the
tragic artist communicate of himself? Is it not precisely the state
without fear in the face of the fearful and questionable that he is
showing? This state itself is a great desideratum, whoever knows it,
honors it with the greatest honors. He communicates it — must
communicate it, provided he is an artist, a genius of communication.
Courage and freedom of feeling before a powerful enemy, before a sublime
calamity, before a problem that arouses dread — this triumphant state is
what the tragic artist chooses, what he glorifies. Before tragedy, what
is warlike in our soul celebrates its Saturnalia; whoever is used to
suffering, whoever seeks out suffering, the heroic man praises his own
being through tragedy — to him alone the tragedian presents this drink
of sweetest cruelty.
liberal, but that is merely liberal. One recognizes those hearts which
are capable of noble hospitality by the many draped windows and closed
shutters: they keep their best rooms empty. Why? Because they expect
guests with whom one does not “put up.”
communicate. Our true experiences are not at all garrulous. They could
not communicate themselves even if they tried: they lack the right
words. We have already gone beyond whatever we have words for. In all
talk there is a grain of contempt. Language, it seems, was invented only
for what is average, medium, communicable. By speaking the speaker
immediately vulgarizes himself. — Out of a morality for deaf-mutes and
other philosophers.
unsatisfied, excited, her heart and entrails void, ever listening, full
of painful curiosity, to the imperative which whispers from the depths
of her organism, aut liberi aut libri [either children or books] — the
literary female: educated enough to understand the voice of nature even
when it speaks Latin, and yet vain enough and goose enough to speak
secretly with 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 see myself, I shall read myself, I shall go into ecstasies, and I
shall say: is it possible that I should have had so much wit?”]
wise, patient, and superior. We drip with the oil of forgiveness and
sympathy, we are absurdly just, we pardon everything. For that very
reason we ought to be a little more strict with ourselves; for that very
reason we ought to breed a little affect in ourselves from time to time,
a little vice of an affect. It may be hard on us; and among ourselves we
may even laugh at the sight we thus offer. But what can be done about
it? No other way of self-overcoming is left to us any more: this is our
asceticism, our penance.” Developing personal traits: the virtue of the
“impersonal.”
education?” To turn men into machines. “What are the means?” Man must
learn to be bored. “How is that accomplished?” By means of the concept
of duty. “Who serves as the model?” The philologist: he teaches
grinding. “Who is the perfect man?” The civil servant. “Which philosophy
offers the highest formula for the civil servant?” Kant’s: the civil
servant as a thing-in-itself, raised up to be judge over the civil
servant as phenomenon.
genial, and lets things go as they may — this typical figure,
encountered today, in the age of labor (and of the “Reich”!), in all
classes of society, claims art, no less, as his proper sphere, including
books and, above all, magazines — and even more the beauties of nature,
Italy. The man of the evening, with his “savage drives gone to sleep”
(as Faust says), needs a summer resort, the seashore, glaciers,
Bayreuths. In such ages art has a right to pure foolishness — as a kind
of vacation for spirit, wit, and feeling. Wagner understood that. Pure
foolishness restores.
himself against sickliness and headaches: tremendous marches, the most
frugal way of life, uninterrupted sojourn in the open air, continuous
exertion — these are, in general, the universal rules of preservation
and protection against the extreme vulnerability of that subtle machine,
working under the highest pressure, which we call genius.
than man, insofar as man desires. If he sees man in action, even if he
sees this most courageous, most cunning, most enduring animal lost in
labyrinthian distress — how admirable man appears to him! He still likes
him. But the philosopher despises the desiring man, also the “desirable”
man — and altogether all desirabilities, all ideals of man. If a
philosopher could be a nihilist, he would be one because he finds
nothing behind all the ideals of man. Or not even nothing — but only
what is abject, absurd, sick, cowardly, and weary, all kinds of dregs
out of the emptied cup of his life. Man being so venerable in his
reality, how is it that he deserves no respect insofar as he desires?
Must he atone for being so capable in reality? Must he balance his
activity, the strain on head and will in all his activity, by stretching
his limbs in the realm of the imaginary and the absurd?The history of
his desirabilities has so far been the partie honteuse of man: one
should beware of reading in it too long. What justifies man is his
reality — it will eternally justify him. How much greater is the worth
of the real man, compared with any merely desired, dreamed-up, foully
fabricated man? with any ideal man? And it is only the ideal man who
offends the philosopher’s taste.
person who has it: it can be worth a great deal, and it can be unworthy
and contemptible. Every individual may be scrutinized to see whether he
represents the ascending or the descending line of life. Having made
that decision, one has a canon for the worth of his self-interest. If he
represents the ascending line, then his worth is indeed extraordinary —
and for the sake of life as a whole, which takes a step farther through
him, the care for his preservation and for the creation of the best
conditions for him may even be extreme. The single one, the
“individual,” as hitherto understood by the people and the philosophers
alike, is an error after all: he is nothing by himself, no atom, no
“link in the chain,” nothing merely inherited from former times; he is
the whole single line of humanity up to himself. If he represents the
descending development, decay, chronic degeneration, and sickness
(sicknesses are, in general, the consequences of decay, not its causes),
then he has small worth, and the minimum of decency requires that he
take away as little as possible from those who have turned out well. He
is merely their parasite.
the declining strata of society, demands with a fine indignation what is
“right,” “justice,” and “equal rights,” he is merely under the pressure
of his own uncultured state, which cannot comprehend the real reason for
his suffering — what it is that he is poor in: life. A causal instinct
asserts itself in him: it must be somebody’s fault that he is in a bad
way.Also, the “fine indignation” itself soothes him; it is a pleasure
for all wretched devils to scold: it gives a slight but intoxicating
sense of power. Even plaintiveness and complaining can give life a charm
for the sake of which one endures it: there is a fine dose of revenge in
every complaint; one charges one’s own bad situation, and under certain
circumstances even one’s own badness, to those who are different, as if
that were an injustice, a forbidden privilege. “If I am canaille, you
ought to be too” — on such logic are revolutions made.Complaining is
never any good: it stems from weakness. Whether one charges one’s
misfortune to others or to oneself — the socialist does the former; the
Christian, for example, the latter — really makes no difference. The
common and, let us add, the unworthy thing is that it is supposed to be
somebody’s fault that one is suffering; in short, that the sufferer
prescribes the honey of revenge for himself against his suffering. The
objects of this need for revenge, as a need for pleasure, are mere
occasions: everywhere the sufferer finds occasions for satisfying his
little revenge. If he is a Christian — to repeat it once more — he finds
them in himself. The Christian and the anarchist are both decadents.
When the Christian condemns, slanders, and besmirches “the world,” his
instinct is the same as that which prompts the socialist worker to
condemn, slander, and besmirch society. The “last judgment” is the sweet
comfort of revenge — the revolution, which the socialist worker also
awaits, but conceived as a little farther off. The “beyond” — why a
beyond, if not as a means for besmirching this world?
morality in which self-interest wilts away — remains a bad sign under
all circumstances. This is true of individuals; it is particularly true
of nations. The best is lacking when self-interest begins to be lacking.
Instinctively to choose what is harmful for oneself, to feel attracted
by “disinterested” motives, that is virtually the formula of decadence.
“Not to seek one’s own advantage” — that is merely the moral fig leaf
for quite a different, namely, a physiological, state of affairs: “I no
longer know how to find my own advantage.” Disintegration of the
instincts! Man is finished when he becomes altruistic. Instead of saying
naively, “I am no longer worth anything,” the moral lie in the mouth of
the decadent says, “Nothing is worth anything, life is not worth
anything.” Such a judgment always remains very dangerous, it is
contagious: throughout the morbid soil of society it soon proliferates
into a tropical vegetation of concepts — now as a religion
(Christianity), now as a philosophy (Schopenhauerism). Sometimes the
poisonous vegetation which has grown out of such decomposition poisons
life itself for millennia with its fumes.
certain state it is indecent to live longer. To go on vegetating in
cowardly dependence on physicians and machinations, after the meaning of
life, the right to life, has been lost, that ought to prompt a profound
contempt in society. The physicians, in turn, would have to be the
mediators of this contempt — not prescriptions, but every day a new dose
of nausea with their patients. To create a new responsibility, that of
the physician, for all cases in which the highest interest of life, of
ascending life, demands the most inconsiderate pushing down and aside of
degenerating life — for example, for the right of procreation, for the
right to be born, for the right to live.To die proudly when it is no
longer possible to live proudly. Death freely chosen, death at the right
time, brightly and cheerfully accomplished amid children and witnesses:
then a real farewell is still possible, as the one who is taking leave
is still there; also a real estimate of what one has achieved and what
one has wished, drawing the sum of one’s life — all in opposition to the
wretched and revolting comedy that Christianity has made of the hour of
death. One should never forget that Christianity has exploited the
weakness of the dying for a rape of the conscience; and the manner of
death itself, for value judgments about man and the past.Here it is
important to defy all the cowardices of prejudice and to establish,
above all, the real, that is, the physiological, appreciation of
so-called natural death — which is in the end also “unnatural,” a kind
of suicide. One never perishes through anybody but oneself. But usually
it is death under the most contemptible conditions, an unfree death,
death not at the right time, a coward’s death. From love of life, one
should desire a different death: free, conscious, without accident,
without ambush.Finally, some advice for our dear pessimists and other
decadents. It is not in our hands to prevent our birth; but we can
correct this mistake — for in some cases it is a mistake. When one does
away with oneself, one does the most estimable thing possible: one
almost earns the right to live. Society — what am I saying? — life
itself derives more advantage from this than from any “life” of
renunciation, anemia, and other virtues: one has liberated the others
from one’s sight; one has liberated life from an objection. Pessimism,
pur, vert, is proved only by the self-refutation of our dear pessimists:
one must advance a step further in its logic and not only negate life
with “will and representation,” as Schopenhauer did — one must first of
all negate Schopenhauer. Incidentally, however contagious pessimism is,
it still does not increase the sickliness of an age, of a generation as
a whole: it is an expression of this sickliness. One falls victim to it
as one falls victim to cholera: one has to be morbid enough in one’s
whole predisposition. Pessimism itself does not create a single decadent
more; I recall the statistics which show that the years in which cholera
rages do not differ from other years in the total number of deaths.
good and evil” — as was to be expected — the whole ferocity of moral
hebetation, mistaken for morality itself in Germany, as is well known,
has gone into action: I could tell fine stories about that. Above all I
was asked to consider the “undeniable superiority” of our age in moral
judgment, the real progress we have made here: compared with us, a
Cesare Borgia is by no means to be represented after any manner as a
“higher man,” a kind of overman. A Swiss editor of the Bund went so far
that he “understood” the meaning of my work — not without expressing his
respect for my courage and daring — to be a demand for the abolition of
all decent feelings. Thank you! In reply, I take the liberty of raising
the question whether we have really become more moral. That all the
world believes this to be the case merely constitutes an objection.We
modern men, very tender, very easily hurt, and offering as well as
receiving consideration a hundredfold, really have the conceit that this
tender humanity which we represent, this attained unanimity in
sympathetic regard, in readiness to help, in mutual trust, represents
positive progress; and that in this respect we are far above the men of
the Renaissance. But that is how every age thinks, how it must think.
What is certain is that we may not place ourselves in renaissance
conditions, not even by an act of thought: our nerves would not endure
that reality, not to speak of our muscles. But such incapacity does not
prove progress, only another, later constitution, one which is weaker,
frailer, more easily hurt, and which necessarily generates a morality
rich in consideration. Were we to think away our frailty and lateness,
our physiological senescence, then our morality of “humanization” would
immediately lose its value too (in itself, no morality has any value) —
it would even arouse disdain. On the other hand, let us not doubt that
we moderns, with our thickly padded humanity, which at all costs wants
to avoid bumping into a stone, would have provided Cesare Borgia’s
contemporaries with a comedy at which they could have laughed themselves
to death. Indeed, we are unwittingly funny beyond all measure with our
modern “virtues.”The decrease in instincts which are hostile and arouse
mistrust — and that is all our “progress” amounts to — represents but
one of the consequences attending the general decrease in vitality: it
requires a hundred times more trouble and caution to make so conditional
and late an existence prevail. Hence each helps the other; hence
everyone is to a certain extent sick, and everyone is a nurse for the
sick. And that is called “virtue.” Among men who still knew life
differently — fuller, more squandering, more overflowing — it would have
been called by another name: “cowardice” perhaps, “wretchedness,” “old
ladies’ morality.”Our softening of manners — that is my proposition;
that is, if you will, my innovation — is a consequence of decline; the
hardness and terribleness of morals, conversely, can be a consequence of
an excess of life. For in that case much may also be dared, much
challenged, and much squandered. What was once the spice of life would
be poison for us.To be indifferent — that too is a form of strength —
for that we are likewise too old, too late. Our morality of sympathy,
against which I was the first to issue a warning — that which one might
call l’impressionisme morale — is just another expression of that
physiological overexcitability which is characteristic of everything
decadent. That movement which tried to introduce itself scientifically
with Schopenhauer’s morality of pity — a very unfortunate attempt! — is
the real movement of decadence in morality; as such, it is profoundly
related to Christian morality. Strong ages, noble cultures, all consider
pity, “neighbor-love,” and the lack of self and self-assurance as
something contemptible. Ages must be measured by their positive strength
— and then that lavishly squandering and fatal age of the Renaissance
appears as the last great age; and we moderns, with our anxious
self-solicitude and neighbor-love, with our virtues of work, modesty,
legality, and scientism — accumulating, economic, machinelike — appear
as a weak age. Our virtues are conditional on, are provoked by, our
weaknesses. “Equality” as a certain factual increase in similarity,
which merely finds expression in the theory of “equal rights,” is an
essential feature of decline. The cleavage between man and man, status
and status, the plurality of types, the will to be oneself, to stand out
— what I call the pathos of distance, that is characteristic of every
strong age. The strength to withstand tension, the width of the tensions
between extremes, becomes ever smaller today; finally, the extremes
themselves become blurred to the point of similarity.All our political
theories and constitutions — and the “German Reich” is by no means an
exception — are consequences, necessary consequences, of decline; the
unconscious effect of decadence has assumed mastery even over the ideals
of some of the sciences. My objection against the whole of sociology in
England and France remains that it knows from experience only the forms
of social decay, and with perfect innocence accepts its own instincts of
decay as the norm of sociological value-judgments. The decline of life,
the decrease in the power to organize — that is, to separate, tear open
clefts, subordinate and superordinate — all this has been formulated as
the ideal in contemporary sociology. Our socialists are decadents, but
Mr. Herbert Spencer is a decadent too: he considers the triumph of
altruism desirable.
lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what
it costs us. I shall give an example. Liberal institutions cease to be
liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and
no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. Their
effects are known well enough: they undermine the will to power; they
level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small,
cowardly, and hedonistic — every time it is the herd animal that
triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization.These
same institutions produce quite different effects while they are still
being fought for; then they really promote freedom in a powerful way. On
closer inspection it is war that produces these effects, the war for
liberal institutions, which, as a war, permits illiberal instincts to
continue. And war educates for freedom. For what is freedom? That one
has the will to assume responsibility for oneself. That one maintains
the distance which separates us. That one becomes more indifferent to
difficulties, hardships, privation, even to life itself. That one is
prepared to sacrifice human beings for one’s cause, not excluding
oneself. Freedom means that the manly instincts which delight in war and
victory dominate over other instincts, for example, over those of
“pleasure.” The human being who has become free — and how much more the
spirit who has become free — spits on the contemptible type of
well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females,
Englishmen, and other democrats. The free man is a warrior.How is
freedom measured in individuals and peoples? According to the resistance
which must be overcome, according to the exertion required, to remain on
top. The highest type of free men should be sought where the highest
resistance is constantly overcome: five steps from tyranny, close to the
threshold of the danger of servitude. This is true psychologically if by
“tyrants” are meant inexorable and fearful instincts that provoke the
maximum of authority and discipline against themselves; most beautiful
type: Julius Caesar. This is true politically too; one need only go
through history. The peoples who had some value, attained some value,
never attained it under liberal institutions: it was great danger that
made something of them that merits respect. Danger alone acquaints us
with our own resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons, our spirit,
and forces us to be strong. First principle: one must need to be strong
— otherwise one will never become strong.Those large hothouses for the
strong — for the strongest kind of human being that has so far been
known — the aristocratic commonwealths of the type of Rome or Venice,
understood freedom exactly in the sense in which I understand it: as
something one has or does not have, something one wants, something one
conquers.
that there is universal agreement. However, it is not their fault but
ours. Once we have lost all the instincts out of which institutions
grow, we lose institutions altogether because we are no longer good for
them. Democracy has ever been the form of decline in organizing power:
in Human, All-Too-Human (I, 472) I already characterized modern
democracy, together with its hybrids such as the “German Reich,” as the
form of decline of the state. In order that there may be institutions,
there must be a kind of will, instinct, or imperative, which is
anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to
authority, to responsibility for centuries to come, to the solidarity of
chains of generations, forward and backward ad infinitum. When this will
is present, something like the imperium Romanum is founded; or like
Russia, the only power today which has endurance, which can wait, which
can still promise something — Russia, the concept that suggests the
opposite of the wretched European nervousness and system of small
states, which has entered a critical phase with the founding of the
German Reich.The whole of the West no longer possesses the instincts out
of which institutions grow, out of which a future grows: perhaps nothing
antagonizes its “modern spirit” so much. One lives for the day, one
lives very fast, one lives very irresponsibly: precisely this is called
“freedom.” That which makes an institution an institution is despised,
hated, repudiated: one fears the danger of a new slavery the moment the
word “authority” is even spoken out loud. That is how far decadence has
advanced in the value-instincts of our politicians, of our political
parties: instinctively they prefer what disintegrates, what hastens the
end.Witness modern marriage. All rationality has clearly vanished from
modern marriage; yet that is no objection to marriage, but to modernity.
The rationality of marriage — that lay in the husband’s sole juridical
responsibility, which gave marriage a center of gravity, while today it
limps on both legs. The rationality of marriage — that lay in its
indissolubility in principle, which lent it an accent that could be
heard above the accident of feeling, passion, and what is merely
momentary. It also lay in the family’s responsibility for the choice of
a spouse. With the growing indulgence of love matches, the very
foundation of marriage has been eliminated, that which alone makes an
institution of it. Never, absolutely never, can an institution be
founded on an idiosyncrasy; one cannot, as I have said, found marriage
on “love” — it can be founded on the sex drive, on the property drive
(wife and child as property), on the drive to dominate, which
continually organizes for itself the smallest structure of domination,
the family, and which needs children and heirs to hold fast —
physiologically too — to an attained measure of power, influence, and
wealth, in order to prepare for long-range tasks, for a solidarity of
instinct between the centuries. Marriage as an institution involves the
affirmation of the largest and most enduring form of organization: when
society cannot affirm itself as a whole, down to the most distant
generations, then marriage has altogether no meaning. Modern marriage
has lost its meaning — consequently one abolishes it.
instinct, which is today the cause of all stupidities — is that there is
a labor question at all. Certain things one does not question: that is
the first imperative of instinct. I simply cannot see what one proposes
to do with the European worker now that one has made a question of him.
He is far too well off not to ask for more and more, not to ask more
immodestly. In the end, he has numbers on his side. The hope is gone
forever that a modest and self-sufficient kind of man, a Chinese type,
might here develop as a class: and there would have been reason in that,
it would almost have been a necessity. But what was done? Everything to
nip in the bud even the preconditions for this: the instincts by virtue
of which the worker becomes possible as a class, possible in his own
eyes, have been destroyed through and through with the most
irresponsible thoughtlessness. The worker was qualified for military
service, granted the right to organize and to vote: is it any wonder
that the worker today experiences his own existence as distressing —
morally speaking, as an injustice? But what is wanted? I ask once more.
If one wants an end, one must also want the means: if one wants slaves,
then one is a fool if one educates them to be masters.
one’s instincts is one calamity more. Our instincts contradict, disturb,
destroy each other; I have a ready defined what is modern as
physiological self-contradiction. Rationality in education would require
that under iron pressure at least one of these instinct systems be
paralyzed to permit another to gain in power, to become strong, to
become master. Today the individual still has to be made possible by
being pruned: possible here means whole. The reverse is what happens:
the claim for independence, for free development, for laisser aller is
pressed most hotly by the very people for whom no reins would be too
strict. This is true in politics, this is true in art. But that is a
symptom of decadence: our modern conception of “freedom” is one more
proof of the degeneration of the instincts.
than honesty. Perhaps they say the contrary, perhaps they even believe
it. For when a faith is more useful, more effective, and more persuasive
than conscious hypocrisy, then hypocrisy soon turns instinctively into
innocence: first principle for the understanding of great saints. The
philosophers are merely another kind of saint, and their whole craft is
such that they admit only certain truths — namely those for the sake of
which their craft is accorded public sanction — in Kantian terms, truths
of practical reason. They know what they must prove; in this they are
practical. They recognize each other by their agreement about “the
truths.” “Thou shalt not lie”: in other words, beware, my dear
philosopher, of telling the truth.
known, or might be known, today: a reversion, a return in any sense or
degree is simply not possible. We physiologists know that. Yet all
priests and moralists have believed the opposite — they wanted to take
mankind back, to screw it back, to a former measure of virtue. Morality
was always a bed of Procrustes. Even the politicians have aped the
preachers of virtue at this point: today too there are still parties
whose dream it is that all things might walk backwards like crabs. But
no one is free to be a crab. Nothing avails: one must go forward — step
by step further into decadence (that is my definition of modern
“progress”). One can check this development and thus dam up
degeneration, gather it and make it more vehement and sudden: one can do
no more.
in which a tremendous force is stored up; their precondition is always,
historically and physiologically, that for a long time much has been
gathered, stored up, saved up, and conserved for them — that there has
been no explosion for a long time. Once the tension in the mass has
become too great, then the most accidental stimulus suffices to summon
into the world the “genius,” the “deed,” the great destiny. What does
the environment matter then, or the age, or the “spirit of the age,” or
“public opinion”!Take the case of Napoleon. Revolutionary France, and
even more, prerevolutionary France, would have brought forth the
opposite type; in fact, it did. Because Napoleon was different, the heir
of a stronger, older, more ancient civilization than the one which was
then perishing in France, he became the master there, he was the only
master. Great men are necessary, the age in which they appear is
accidental; that they almost always become masters over their age is
only because they are stronger, because they are older, because for a
longer time much was gathered for them. The relationship between a
genius and his age is like that between strong and weak, or between old
and young: the age is relatively always much younger, thinner, more
immature, less assured, more childish.That in France today they think
quite differently on this subject (in Germany too, but that does not
matter), that the milieu theory, which is truly a neurotic’s theory, has
become sacrosanct and almost scientific and has found adherents even
among physiologists — that “smells bad” and arouses sad reflections. It
is no different in England, but that will not grieve anybody. For the
English there are only two ways of coming to terms with the genius and
the “great man”: either democratically in the manner of Buckle or
religiously in the manner of Carlyle.The danger that lies in great men
and ages is extraordinary; exhaustion of every kind, sterility, follow
in their wake. The great human being is a finale; the great age — the
Renaissance, for example — is a finale. The genius, in work and deed, is
necessarily a squanderer: that he squanders himself, that is his
greatness! The instinct of self-preservation is suspended, as it were:
the overpowering pressure of outflowing forces forbids him any such care
or caution. People call this “self-sacrifice” and praise his “heroism,”
his indifference to his own well-being, his devotion to an idea, a great
cause, a fatherland: without exception, misunderstandings. He flows out,
he overflows, he uses himself up, he does not spare himself — and this
is a calamitous involuntary fatality, no less than a river’s flooding
the land. Yet, because much is owed to such explosives, much has also
been given them in return: for example, a kind of higher morality. After
all, that is the way of human gratitude: it misunderstands its
benefactors.
type of the strong human being under unfavorable circumstances: a strong
human being made sick. He lacks the wilderness, a somehow freer and more
dangerous environment and form of existence, where everything that is
weapons and armor in the instinct of the strong human being has its
rightful place. His virtues are ostracized by society; the most vivid
drives with which he is endowed soon grow together with the depressing
affects — with suspicion, fear, and dishonor. Yet this is almost the
recipe for physiological degeneration. Whoever must do secretly, with
long suspense, caution, and cunning, what he can do best and would like
most to do, becomes anemic; and because he always harvests only danger,
persecution, and calamity from his instincts, his attitude to these
instincts is reversed too, and he comes to experience them
fatalistically. It is society, our tame, mediocre, emasculated society,
in which a natural human being, who comes from the mountains or from the
adventures of the sea, necessarily degenerates into a criminal. Or
almost necessarily; for there are cases in which such a man proves
stronger than society: the Corsican, Napoleon, is the most famous
case.The testimony of Dostoevski is relevant to this problem —
Dostoevski, the only psychologist, incidentally, from whom I had
something to learn; he ranks among the most beautiful strokes of fortune
in my life, even more than my discovery of Stendhal. This profound human
being, who was ten times right in his low estimate of the superficial
Germans, lived for a long time among the convicts in Siberia — hardened
criminals for whom there was no way back to society — and found them
very different from what he himself had expected: they were carved out
of just about the best, hardest, and most valuable wood that grows
anywhere on Russian soil.Let us generalize the case of the criminal: let
us think of men so constituted that for one reason or another, they lack
public approval and know that they are not felt to be beneficent or
useful — that chandala feeling that one is not considered equal, but an
outcast, unworthy, contaminating. All men so constituted have a
subterranean hue to their thoughts and actions; everything about them
becomes paler than in those whose existence is touched by daylight. Yet
almost all forms of existence which we consider distinguished today once
lived in this half tomblike atmosphere: the scientific character, the
artist, the genius, the free spirit, the actor, the merchant, the great
discoverer. As long as the priest was considered the supreme type, every
valuable kind of human being was devaluated. The time will come, I
promise, when the priest will be considered the lowest type, our
chandala the most mendacious, the most indecent kind of human being.I
call attention to the fact that even now — under the mildest regimen of
morals which has ever ruled on earth, or at least in Europe — every
deviation, every long, all-too-long sojourn below, every unusual or
opaque form of existence, brings one closer to that type which is
perfected in the criminal. All innovators of the spirit must for a time
bear the pallid and fatal mark of the chandala on their foreheads — not
because they are considered that way by others, but because they
themselves feel the terrible cleavage which separates them from
everything that is customary or reputable. Almost every genius knows, as
one stage of his development, the “Catilinarian existence” — a feeling
of hatred, revenge, and rebellion against everything which already is,
which no longer becomes. Catiline — the form of pre-existence of every
Caesar.
philosopher is silent, it may be love when he contradicts himself; and
he who has knowledge maybe polite enough to lie. It has been said, not
without delicacy: II est indigne des grand coeurs de repandre le trouble
qu’ils ressentent [It is unworthy of great hearts to pour out the
disturbance they feel]. But one must add that not to be afraid of the
most unworthy may also be greatness of soul. A woman who loves,
sacrifices her honor; a knower who “loves” may perhaps sacrifice his
humanity; a God who loved became a Jew.
and graciousness in all gestures, is won by work: like genius, it is the
end result of the accumulated work of generations. One must have made
great sacrifices to good taste, one must have done much and omitted
much, for its sake — seventeenth-century France is admirable in both
respects — and good taste must have furnished a principle for selecting
company, place, dress, sexual satisfaction; one must have preferred
beauty to advantage, habit, opinion, and inertia. Supreme rule of
conduct: before oneself too, one must not “let oneself go.” The good
things are immeasurably costly; and the law always holds that those who
have them are different from those who acquire them. All that is good is
inherited: whatever is not inherited is imperfect, is a mere
beginning.In Athens, in the time of Cicero (who expresses his surprise
about this), the men and youths were far superior in beauty to the
women. But what work and exertion in the service of beauty had the male
sex there imposed on itself for centuries! For one should make no
mistake about the method in this case: a breeding of feelings and
thoughts alone is almost nothing (this is the great misunderstanding
underlying German education, which is wholly illusory), one must first
persuade the body. Strict perseverance in significant and exquisite
gestures together with the obligation to live only with people who do
not “let themselves go” — that is quite enough for one to become
significant and exquisite, and in two or three generations all this
becomes inward. It is decisive for the lot of a people and of humanity
that culture should begin in the right place — not in the “soul” (as was
the fateful superstition of the priests and half-priests): the right
place is the body, the gesture, the diet, physiology; the rest follows
from that. Therefore the Greeks remain the first cultural event in
history: they knew, they did, what was needed; and Christianity, which
despised the body, has been the greatest misfortune of humanity so far.
it is really not a going back but a going up — an ascent to the high,
free, even terrible nature and naturalness where great tasks are
something one plays with, one may play with. To put it metaphorically:
Napoleon was a piece of “return to nature,” as I understand the phrase
(for example, in rebus tacticis; even more, as military men know, in
matters of strategy).But Rousseau — to what did he really want to
return? Rousseau, this first modern man, idealist and rabble in one
person — one who needed moral “dignity” to be able to stand his own
sight, sick with unbridled vanity and unbridled self-contempt. This
miscarriage, couched on the threshold of modern times, also wanted a
“return to nature”; to ask this once more, to what did Rousseau want to
return? I still hate Rousseau in the French Revolution: it is the
world-historical expression of this duality of idealist and rabble. The
bloody farce which became an aspect of the Revolution, its “immorality,”
is of little concern to me: what I hate is its Rousseauan morality — the
so-called “truths” of the Revolution through which it still works and
attracts everything shallow and mediocre. The doctrine of equality!
There is no more poisonous poison anywhere: for it seems to be preached
by justice itself, whereas it really is the termination of justice.
“Equal to the equal, unequal to the unequal” — that would be the true
slogan of justice; and also its corollary: “Never make equal what is
unequal.” That this doctrine of equality was surrounded by such gruesome
and bloody events, that has given this “modern idea” par excellence a
kind of glory and fiery aura so that the Revolution as a spectacle has
seduced even the noblest spirits. In the end, that is no reason for
respecting it any more. I see only one man who experienced it as it must
be experienced, with nausea — Goethe.
to overcome the eighteenth century by a return to nature, by an ascent
to the naturalness of the Renaissance — a kind of self-overcoming on the
part of that century. He bore its strongest instincts within himself:
the sensibility, the idolatry of nature, the anti-historic, the
idealistic, the unreal and revolutionary (the latter being merely a form
of the unreal). He sought help from history, natural science, antiquity,
and also Spinoza, but, above all, from practical activity; he surrounded
himself with limited horizons; he did not retire from life but put
himself into the midst of it; he if was not fainthearted but took as
much as possible upon himself, over himself, into himself. What he
wanted was totality; he fought the mutual extraneousness of reason,
senses, feeling, and will (preached with the most abhorrent
scholasticism by Kant, the antipode of Goethe); he disciplined himself
to wholeness, he created himself.In the middle of an age with an unreal
outlook, Goethe was a convinced realist: he said Yes to everything that
was related to him in this respect — and he had no greater experience
than that ens realissimum [most real being] called Napoleon. Goethe
conceived a human being who would be strong, highly educated, skillful
in all bodily matters, self-controlled, reverent toward himself, and who
might dare to afford the whole range and wealth of being natural, being
strong enough for such freedom; the man of tolerance, not from weakness
but from strength, because he knows how to use to his advantage even
that from which the average nature would perish; the man for whom there
is no longer anything that is forbidden — unless it be weakness, whether
called vice or virtue.Such a spirit who has become free stands amid the
cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only the
particular is loathesome, and that all is redeemed and affirmed in the
whole — he does not negate anymore. Such a faith, however, is the
highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name of
Dionysus.
strove for all that which Goethe as a person had striven for:
universality in understanding and in welcoming, letting everything come
close to oneself, an audacious realism, a reverence for everything
factual. How is it that the overall result is no Goethe, but a chaos, a
nihilistic sigh, an utter bewilderment, an instinct of weariness which
in practice continually drives toward a recourse to the eighteenth
century? (For example, as a romanticism of feeling, as altruism and
hypersentimentality, as feminism in taste, as socialism in politics.) Is
not the nineteenth century, especially at its close, merely an
intensified, brutalized eighteenth century, that is, a century of
decadence? So that Goethe would have been — not merely for Germany, but
for all of Europe — a mere interlude, a beautiful “in vain”? But one
misunderstands great human beings if one views them from the miserable
perspective of some public use. That one cannot put them to any use,
that in itself may belong to greatness.
felt three things which I feel — we also understand each other about the
“cross.”I am often asked why, after all, I write in German: nowhere am I
read worse than in the Fatherland. But who knows in the end whether I
even wish to be read today? To create things on which time tests its
teeth in vain; in form, in substance, to strive for a little immortality
— I have never yet been modest enough to demand less of myself. The
aphorism, the apothegm, in which I am the first among the Germans to be
a master, are the forms of “eternity”; it is my ambition 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 most profound book it
possesses, my Zarathustra; shortly I shall give it the most independent.
interpretations, for which I have perhaps found a new interpretation —
the ancient world. My taste, which may be the opposite of a tolerant
taste, is in this case very far from saying Yes indiscriminately: it
does not like to say Yes; better to say No, but best of all to say
nothing. That applies to whole cultures, it applies to books — also to
places and landscapes. In the end there are very few ancient books that
count in my life: the most famous are not among them. My sense of style,
of the epigram as a style, was awakened almost instantly when I came
into contact with Sallust. Compact, severe, with as much substance as
possible, a cold sarcasm toward “beautiful words” and “beautiful
sentiments” — here I found myself. And even in my Zarathustra one will
recognize my very serious effort to achieve a Roman style, for the aere
perennius [more enduring than bronze] in style.Nor was my experience any
different in my first contact with Horace. To this day, no other poet
has given me the same artistic delight that a Horatian ode gave me from
the first. In certain languages that which Horace has achieved could not
even be attempted. This mosaic of words, in which every word — as sound,
as place, as concept — pours out its strength right and left and over
the whole, this minimum in the extent and number of the signs, and the
maximum thereby attained in the energy of the signs — all that is Roman
and, if you will believe me, noble par excellence. All the rest of
poetry becomes, in contrast, something too popular — mere sentimental
blather.
and to be blunt, they cannot mean as much to me us the Romans. We do not
learn from the Greeks — their manner is too foreign and too fluid to
create a commanding, “classical” effect. Who could ever have learned to
write from a Greek? Who could ever have learned to write without the
Romans?Please do not throw Plato at me. I am a complete skeptic about
Plato, and I have never been able to join in the customary scholarly
admiration for Plato the artist. The subtlest judges of taste among the
ancients themselves are here on my side. Plato, it seems to me, throws
all stylistic forms together and is thus a first-rate decadent in style:
his responsibility is thus comparable to that of the Cynics, who
invented the satura Menippea. To be attracted to the Platonic dialogue,
this horribly self-satisfied and childish kind of dialectic, one must
never have read good French writers — Fontenelle, for example. Plato is
boring. In the end, my mistrust of Plato goes deep: he represents such
an aberration from all the basic Greek instincts, is so moralistic, so
pseudo-Christian (he already takes the concept of “the good” as the
highest concept) that I would prefer the harsh phrase “higher swindle”
or, if it sounds better, “idealism” for the whole phenomenon of Plato.
We have paid dearly for the fact that this Athenian got his schooling
from the Egyptians (or from the Jews in Egypt?). In that great calamity
called Christianity, Plato represents that ambiguity and fascination,
called an “ideal,” which made it possible for the nobler spirits of
antiquity to misunderstand themselves and to set foot on the bridge
leading to the Cross. And how much Plato there still is in the concept
“church,” in the construction, system, and practice of the church!My
recreation, my preference, my cure from all Platonism has always been
Thucydides. Thucydides and, perhaps, Machiavelli’s Il Principe are most
closely related to me by the unconditional will not to delude oneself,
but to see reason in reality — not in “reason,” still less in
“morality.” For that wretched distortion of the Greeks into a cultural
ideal, which the “classically educated” youth carries into life as a
reward for all his classroom lessons, there is no more complete cure
than Thucydides. One must follow him line by line and read no less
clearly between the lines: there are few thinkers who say so much
between the lines. With him the culture of the Sophists, by which I mean
the culture of the realists, reaches its perfect expression — this
inestimable movement amid the moralistic and idealistic swindle set
loose on all sides by the Socratic schools. Greek philosophy: the
decadence of the Greek instinct. Thucydides: the great sum, the last
revelation of that strong, severe, hard factuality which was instinctive
with the older Greeks. In the end, it is courage in the face of reality
that distinguishes a man like Thucydides from a man like Plato: Plato is
a coward before reality, consequently he flees into the ideal;
Thucydides has control of himself, consequently he also maintains
control of things.
in the Greeks, or to admire their triumphant calm, their ideal cast of
mind, their noble simplicity — my psychological skills protected me
against such “noble simplicity,” a niaiserie allemande in any case. I
saw their strongest instinct, the will to power: I saw them tremble
before the indomitable force of this drive — I saw how all their
institutions developed as protections against this inner impulsion. The
tremendous inward tension that resulted discharged itself in terrible
and ruthless hostility toward the outside world: the city-states tore
each other apart as the citizens tried to find resolution to this will
to power they all felt. One needed to be strong: danger was near, it
lurked everywhere. The magnificent physical suppleness, the audacious
realism and immoralism which distinguished the Greek constituted a need,
not “nature.” It was an outcome, it was not there from the start. And
with festivals and the arts they also aimed at nothing other than to
feel on top, to show themselves on top. These are means of glorifying
oneself, and in certain cases, of inspiring fear of oneself.How could
one possibly judge the Greeks by their philosophers, as the Germans have
done, or use the Philistine moralism of the Socratic schools as a clue
to what was basically Hellenic! After all, the philosophers are the
decadents of Greek culture, the counter-movement against the ancient,
noble taste (against the agonistic instinct, against the polis, against
the value of race, against the authority of descent). The Socratic
virtues were preached because the Greeks had lost them: excitable,
timid, fickle comedians every one of them, they had a few reasons too
many for having morals preached to them. Not that it did any good — but
big words and attitudes suit decadents so well.
overflowing Greek instinct, I was the first to take seriously that
wonderful phenomenon which bears the name of Dionysus, which is only
explicable in terms of an excess of force. Whoever followed the Greeks,
like that most profound student of their culture in our time, Jacob
Burckhardt in Basel, knew immediately that something had been achieved
thereby; and Burckhardt added a special section on this phenomenon to
his Civilization of the Greeks. To see the counter example, one should
look at the almost amusing poverty of instinct among the German
philologists when they approach the Dionysian. The famous Lobeck, above
all, crawled into this world of mysterious states with all the venerable
sureness of a worm dried up between books, and persuaded himself that it
was scientific of him to be glib and childish to the point of nausea —
and with the utmost erudition, Lobeck gave us to understand that all
these curiosities really did not amount to anything. In fact, the
priests could have told the participants in such orgies some not
altogether worthless things; for example, that wine excites lust, that
men can sometimes live on fruit, that plants bloom in the spring and
wither in the fall. And the astonishing wealth of rites, symbols, and
myths of orgiastic origin, with which the ancient world is literally
overrun, gave Lobeck an opportunity to become still more ingenious. “The
Greeks,” he said (Aglaophamus I, 672), “when they had nothing else to
do, laughed, jumped, and ran around; or, since man sometimes feels that
urge too, they sat down, cried, and lamented. Others came later on and
sought some reason for this spectacular behavior; and thus there
originated, as explanations for these customs, countless traditions
concerning feasts and myths. On the other hand, it was believed that
this droll ado, which took place on the feast days after all, must also
form a necessary part of the festival and therefore it was maintained as
an indispensable feature of the religious service.” This is contemptible
prattle; a Lobeck simply cannot be taken seriously for a moment.I have
quite a different feeling toward the concept “Greek” that was developed
by Winckelmann and Goethe; to me it is incompatible with the orgiastic
element out of which Dionysian art grows. In fact I believe that Goethe
excluded as a matter of principle any orgiastic feelings from his
concept of the Greek spirit. Consequently Goethe did not understand the
Greeks. For it is only in the Dionysian mysteries, in the psychology of
the Dionysian state, that the basic fact of the Hellenic instinct finds
expression — its “will to life.” What was it that the Hellene guaranteed
himself by means of these mysteries? Eternal life, the eternal return of
life, the future promised and hallowed in the past; the triumphant Yes
to life beyond all death and change; true life as the continuation of
life through procreation, through the mysteries of sex. For the Greeks a
sexual symbol was therefore the most sacred symbol, the real profundity
in the whole of ancient piety. Every single element in the act of
procreation, of pregnancy, and of birth aroused the highest and most
solemn feelings. In the doctrine of the mysteries, pain is pronounced
holy: the pangs of the woman giving birth consecrate all pain; and
conversely all becoming and growing — all that guarantees a future —
involves pain. That there may be the eternal joy of creating, that the
will to life may eternally affirm itself, the agony of the woman giving
birth must also be there eternally.All this is meant by the word
Dionysus: I know no higher symbolism than this Greek symbolism of the
Dionysian festivals. Here the most profound instinct of life, that
directed toward the future of life, the eternity of life, is experienced
religiously — and the way to life, procreation, as the holy way. It was
Christianity, with its heartfelt resentment against life, that first
made something unclean of sexuality: it threw filth on the origin, on
the essential fact of our life.
strength, where even pain still has the effect of a stimulus, gave me
the key to the concept of tragic feeling, which had been misunderstood
both by Aristotle and even more by modern pessimists. Tragedy is so far
from being a proof of the pessimism (in Schopenhauer’s sense) of the
Greeks that it may, on the contrary, be considered a decisive rebuttal
and counterexample. Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and most
painful episodes, the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustible
vitality even as it witnesses the destruction of its greatest heros —
that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I guessed to be the bridge
to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not in order to be liberated from
terror and pity, not in order to purge oneself of a dangerous affect by
its vehement discharge — which is how Aristotle understood tragedy — but
in order to celebrate oneself the eternal joy of becoming, beyond all
terror and pity — that tragic joy included even joy in destruction.And
with that I again touch on my earliest point of departure: The Birth of
Tragedy was my first revaluation of all values. And on that point I
again stand on the earth out of which my intention, my ability grows —
I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus — I, the teacher of the
eternal recurrence.
“Why so hard?” the kitchen coal once said to the diamond. “After all,
are we not close kin?”
Why so soft? O my brothers, thus I ask you: are you not after all my
brothers?
Why so soft, so pliant and yielding? Why is there so much denial,
self-denial, in your hearts? So little destiny in your eyes?
And if you do not want to be destinies and inexorable ones, how can you
one day triumph with me?
And if your hardness does not wish to flash and cut through, how can you
one day create with me?
For all creators are hard. And it must seem blessedness to you to
impress your hand on millennia as on wax.
Blessedness to write on the will of millennia as on bronze — harder than
bronze, nobler than bronze. Only the noblest is altogether hard.
This new tablet, O my brothers, I place over you: Become hard!
— Zarathustra, III: On Old and New Tablets, 29.