Die Götzen-Dämmerung
- Twilight of the Idols
Friedrich Nietzsche [ 1895 ]
PREFACE
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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. |
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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: |
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Increscunt animi, virescit volnere virtus.
["The spirits increase, vigor grows through a wound."] |
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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. |
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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. |
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Turin, September 30, 1888, on the day when the first book
of the Revaluation of All Values was completed.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE |
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MAXIMS AND ARROWS
1 |
Idleness is the beginning of all psychology. What? Is psychology
a vice? |
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2 |
Even the most courageous among us only rarely has the courage
to face what he already knows. |
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3 |
To live alone one must be a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving
out the third case: one must be both--a philosopher. |
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4 |
"All truth is simple." Is that not a double lie? |
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5 |
I want, once and for all, not to know many things. Wisdom requires
moderation in knowledge as in other things. |
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6 |
In our own wild nature we find the best recreation from our un-nature,
from our spirituality. |
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7 |
What? Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake
of man's? |
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8 |
Out of life's school of war: What does not destroy me, makes
me stronger. |
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9 |
Help yourself, then everyone will help you. Principle of brotherly
love. |
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10 |
Not to perpetrate cowardice against one's own acts! Not to leave
them in the lurch afterward! The bite of conscience is indecent. |
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11 |
Can an ass be tragic? To perish under a burden one can neither
bear nor throw off? The case of the philosopher. |
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12 |
If we have our own why in life, we shall get along with almost
any how. Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman
does. |
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13 |
Man has created woman--out of what? Out of a rib of his god--of
his "ideal." |
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14 |
What? You search? You would multiply yourself by ten, by a hundred?
You seek followers? Seek zeros! |
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15 |
Posthumous men--I, for example--are understood worse than timely
ones, but heard better. More precisely: we are never understood--hence
our authority. |
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16 |
Among women: "Truth? Oh, you don't know truth! Is it not
an attempt to kill our modesty?" |
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17 |
That is the kind of artist I love, modest in his needs: he really
wants only two things, his bread and his art--panem et Circen
["bread and Circe"]. |
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18 |
Whoever does not know how to lay his will into things, at least
lays some meaning into them: that means, he has the faith that
they already obey a will. (Principle of "faith".) |
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19 |
What? You chose virtue and took pride in your virtue, and yet
you leer enviously at the advantages of those without scruples?
But virtue involves renouncing "advantages." (Inscription
for an anti-Semite's door.) |
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20 |
The perfect woman indulges in literature just as she indulges
in a small sin: as an experiment, in passing, looking around
to see if anybody notices it--and to make sure that somebody
does. |
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21 |
To venture into many situations where one cannot get by with
sham virtues, but where, like the tightrope walker on his rope,
one either stands or falls--or gets away. |
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22 |
"Evil men have no songs." How is it, then, that the
Russians have songs? |
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23 |
"German spirit": for the past eighteen years a contradiction
in terms. |
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24 |
By searching out origins, one becomes a crab. The historian looks
backward; eventually he also believes backward. |
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25 |
Being pleased with oneself protects even against the cold. Has
a woman who knew herself to be well dressed ever caught a cold?
I am assuming that she was barely dressed. |
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26 |
I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system
is a lack of integrity. |
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27 |
Women are considered profound. Why? Because we never fathom their
depths. But women aren't even shallow. |
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28 |
If a woman has only manly virtues, we run away; and if she has
no manly virtues, she runs away herself. |
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29 |
"How much has conscience had to chew on in the past! And
what excellent teeth it had! And today--what is lacking?"
A dentist's question. |
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30 |
One rarely falls into a single error. Falling into the first
one, one always does too much. So one usually perpetrates another
one--and now one does too little. |
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31 |
When stepped on, a worm doubles up. That is clever. In that way
he lessens the probability of being stepped on again. In the
language of morality: humility. |
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32 |
We hate lies and hypocrisy because our sense of honor is easily
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. |
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33 |
How little is required for pleasure! The sound of a bagpipe.
Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines that
even God sings songs. |
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34 |
On ne peut penser et ecrire qu'assis [One cannot think and write
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. |
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35 |
There are cases in which we are like horses, we psychologists,
and become skittish: we see our own shadow looming up before
us. A psychologist must turn his eyes from himself to see anything
at all. |
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36 |
Are we immoralists harming virtue? No more than anarchists harm
princes. Only because the latter are shot at do they once more
sit securely on their thrones. Moral: morality must be shot at. |
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37 |
You run ahead? Are you doing it as a shepherd? Or as an exception?
A third case would be as a fugitive. First question of conscience. |
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38 |
Are you genuine? Or merely an actor? A representative? Or that
which is represented? In the end, perhaps you are merely a copy
of an actor. Second question of conscience. |
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40 |
Are you one who looks on? Or one who lends a hand? Or one who
looks away and walks off? Third question of conscience. |
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41 |
Do you want to walk along? Or walk ahead? Or walk by yourself?
One must know what one wants and that one wants. Fourth question
of conscience. |
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39 |
The disappointed one speaks. I searched for great human beings;
I always found only the imitators of their ideals. |
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42 |
Those were steps for me, and I have climbed up over them: to
that end I had to pass over them. Yet they thought that I wanted
to retire on them. |
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43 |
What does it matter if I am right? I am much too right. And he
who laughs best today will also laugh last. |
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44 |
The formula of my happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a
goal. |
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THE PROBLEM OF SOCRATES
1 |
About life, the wisest men of all ages have come to the same
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? |
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2 |
The irreverent idea that the great sages are types of decline
first 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. |
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3 |
By birth, Socrates belonged to the lowest class: Socrates was
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!" |
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4 |
Socrates' decadence is suggested not only by the admitted wantonness
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. |
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5 |
With Socrates, Greek taste changes in favor of logical argument.
What 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? |
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6 |
One chooses logical argument only when one has no other means.
One 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? |
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7 |
Is the irony of Socrates an expression of revolt? Of plebeian
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? |
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8 |
I have explained how it was that Socrates could repel: it is
therefore 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. |
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9 |
But Socrates guessed even more. He saw through the noble Athenians;
he 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. |
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10 |
When one finds it necessary to turn reason into a tyrant, as
Socrates 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. |
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11 |
I have explained how Socrates fascinated his audience: he seemed
to be 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. |
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12 |
Did he himself understand this, this most brilliant of all 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." |
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"REASON" IN PHILOSOPHY
1 |
You ask me which of the philosophers' traits are really idiosyncrasies?
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 de-historicize
it, sub specie aeternitas--when they turn it into a mummy. All
that philosophers have handled for thousands of years have been
concept-mummies; nothing real escaped their grasp alive. When
these honorable idolators of concepts worship something, they
kill it and stuff it; they threaten the life 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?" |
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"We have found him," they cry ecstatically; "it
is the senses! These senses, which are 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 expression 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!" |
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2 |
With the highest respect, I except the name of Heraclitus. When
the rest of the philosophic folk rejected the testimony of the
senses because they showed multiplicity and change, he rejected
their testimony because they showed 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 cause
of our falsification of 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. |
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3 |
And what magnificent instruments of observation we possess in
our 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
minimal differences of motion which even a spectroscope cannot
detect. 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. |
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4 |
The other idiosyncrasy of the philosophers is no less dangerous;
it 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 mankind have to take seriously
the brain afflictions of sick web-spinners? They have paid dearly
for it! |
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5 |
At long last, let us contrast the very different manner in which
we conceive the problem of error and appearance. (I say "we"
for politeness' sake.) Formerly, 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, conversely,
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. |
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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 in the age of
the most rudimentary form of 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 it 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. |
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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? |
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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, for 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. |
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6 |
It will be appreciated if I condense so essential and so new
an insight into four theses. In that way I facilitate comprehension;
in that way I provoke contradiction. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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HOW THE "TRUE WORLD" FINALLY BECAME A
FABLE. The History of an Error
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1. The true world--attainable for the sage, the pious, the virtuous
man; he lives in it, he is it. |
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(The oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, and
persuasive. A circumlocution for the sentence, "I, Plato,
am the truth.") |
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2. The true world--unattainable for now, but promised for the
sage, the pious, the virtuous man ("for the sinner who repents"). |
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(Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, insidious, incomprehensible--it
becomes female, it becomes Christian. ) |
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3. The true world--unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable;
but the very thought of it--a consolation, an obligation, an
imperative. |
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(At bottom, the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism.
The idea has become elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian.) |
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4. The true world--unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And
being unattained, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling,
redeeming, or obligating: how could something unknown obligate
us? |
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(Gray morning. The first yawn of reason. The cockcrow of positivism.) |
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5. The "true" world--an idea which is no longer good
for anything, not even obligating--an idea which has become useless
and superfluous--consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish
it! |
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(Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens and cheerfulness;
Plato's embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits.) |
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6. The true world--we have abolished. What world has remained?
The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have
also abolished the apparent one. |
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(Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error;
high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.) |
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MORALITY AS ANTI-NATURE
1 |
All passions have a phase when they are merely disastrous, when
they 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. |
|
2 |
The same means in the fight against a craving--castration, 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. |
|
3 |
The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it represents
a 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. |
|
5 |
Once one has comprehended the outrage of such a revolt against
life as 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. |
|
6 |
Let us finally consider how naive it is altogether to say: "Man
ought 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. |
|
|
THE FOUR GREAT ERRORS
1 |
The error of confusing cause and effect. There is no more
insidious 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. |
|
2 |
The most general formula on which every religion and morality
is 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.) |
|
3 |
The error of a false causality. Humans have always believed
that they 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! |
|
4 |
The error of imaginary causes. To begin with dreams: a
cause is 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. |
|
5 |
The psychological explanation: to extract something familiar
from 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. |
|
6 |
The whole realm of morality and religion belongs in this category
of 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. |
|
7 |
The error of free will. Today we no longer have any tolerance
for the 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. |
|
8 |
What alone can be our doctrine? That no one gives a man his qualities--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. |
|
|
THE "IMPROVERS" OF MANKIND
1 |
My demand of the philosopher is well known: that he take his
stand 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. |
|
2 |
A first, tentative example: at all times morality has aimed to
"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. |
|
3 |
Let us consider the other method for "improving" mankind,
the method 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." |
|
4 |
These regulations are instructive enough: we encounter Aryan
humanity 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. |
|
5 |
The morality of breeding, and the morality of taming, are, in
the 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. |
|
|
WHAT THE GERMANS LACK
1 |
Among Germans today it is not enough to have spirit: one must
arrogate 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! |
|
2 |
What the German spirit might be--who has not had his melancholy
ideas 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. |
|
3 |
I was speaking of the German spirit: it is becoming cruder, it
is 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. |
|
4 |
Even a rapid estimate shows that it is not only obvious that
German 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. |
|
5 |
The entire system of higher education in Germany has lost what
matters 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. |
|
6 |
I put forward at once--lest I break with my style, which is 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. |
|
7 |
Learning to think: in our schools one no longer has any idea
of this. 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. |
|
|
SKIRMISHES OF AN UNTIMELY MAN
1 |
My impossible ones. -- Seneca: or the toreador
of virtue. Rousseau: or 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." |
|
2 |
Renan. -- Theology: or the corruption of reason by 'original
sin" (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. |
|
3 |
Sainte Beuve. -- Nothing of virility, full of petty wrath
against all 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. |
|
4 |
De imitatione Christi is one of those books which I cannot
hold in my 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." |
|
5 |
G. Eliot. -- They are rid of the Christian God and now
believe all the 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. |
|
6 |
George Sand. -- I read the first Lettres d'un voyageur:
like everything 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. |
|
7 |
Moral for psychologists. -- Not to go in for backstairs
psychology. 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. |
|
8 |
Toward a psychology of the artist. -- If there is to be
art, if there 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. |
|
9 |
In this state one enriches everything out of one's own fullness:
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. |
|
10 |
What is the meaning of the conceptual opposites which I have
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. |
|
11 |
The actor, the mime, the dancer, the musician, and the lyric
poet are 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. |
|
12 |
I have been reading the life of Thomas Carlyle, this unconscious
and 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. |
|
13 |
Emerson. -- Much more enlightened, more roving, more manifold,
subtler 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]. |
|
14 |
Anti-Darwin. -- As for the famous "struggle for existence,"
so far it 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). |
|
15 |
Casuistry of Psychologists. -- This man knows human nature;
why does he 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. |
|
16 |
The psychological tact of the Germans seems very questionable
to me, 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." |
|
17 |
The most spiritual human beings, if we assume that they are the
most 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. |
|
18 |
On the "intellectual conscience." -- Nothing
seems rarer to me today 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. |
|
19 |
Beautiful and ugly ["fair and foul"]. -- Nothing
is more conditional--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?" |
|
20 |
Nothing is beautiful, except man alone: all aesthetics rests
upon this 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. |
|
21 |
Schopenhauer. -- Schopenhauer, the last German worthy
of consideration (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"). |
|
22 |
I take a single case. Schopenhauer speaks of beauty with a melancholy
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. |
|
23 |
Plato goes further. He says with an innocence possible only for
a 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. |
|
24 |
L'art pour l'art. -- The fight against purpose in art
is always a fight 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. |
|
25 |
To put up with people, to keep open house with one's heart--that
is 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." |
|
26 |
We no longer have sufficiently high esteem for ourselves when
we 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. |
|
27 |
"This picture is enchantingly beautiful...!" The literary
female: 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?"] |
|
28 |
The "impersonal" get a word in. -- "Nothing
is easier for us than to be 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." |
|
29 |
From a doctoral examination. -- "What is the task
of all higher 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. |
|
30 |
The right to stupidity. -- The weary laborer who breathes
slowly, looks 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. |
|
31 |
Another problem of diet. -- The means by which Julius
Caesar defended 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. |
|
32 |
The immoralist speaks. -- Nothing offends the philosopher's
taste more 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. |
|
33 |
The natural value of egoism. -- Self-interest is worth
as much as the 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. |
|
34 |
Christian and anarchist. -- When the anarchist, as the
mouthpiece of 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? |
|
35 |
Critique of the morality of decadence. -- An "altruistic"
morality--a 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. |
|
36 |
Morality for physicians. -- The sick man is a parasite
of society. In a 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. |
|
37 |
Whether we have become more moral. -- Against my conception
of "beyond 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. |
|
38 |
My conception of freedom. -- The value of a thing sometimes
does not 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. |
|
39 |
Critique of modernity. -- Our institutions are no good
any more: on 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. |
|
40 |
The Labor question. -- The stupidity--at bottom, the degeneration
of 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. |
|
41 |
"Freedom which I do not mean." -- In times like
these, abandonment to 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. |
|
42 |
Where faith is needed. -- Nothing is rarer among moralists
and saints 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. |
|
43 |
Whispered to the conservatives. -- What was not known
formerly, what is 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. |
|
44 |
My conception of genius. -- Great men, like great ages,
are explosives 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. |
|
45 |
The criminal and what is related to him. -- The criminal
type is the 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. |
|
46 |
Here the view is free. -- It may be nobility of the soul
when a 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. |
|
47 |
Beauty no accident. -- The beauty of a race or a family,
their grace 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. |
|
48 |
Progress in my sense. -- I too speak of a "return
to nature," although 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. |
|
49 |
Goethe--not a German event, but a European one: a magnificent
attempt 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. |
|
50 |
One might say that in a certain sense the nineteenth century
also 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. |
|
51 |
Goethe is the last German for whom I feel any reverence: he would
have 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. |
|
|
WHAT I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS
1 |
In conclusion, a word about that world to which I sought 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. |
|
2 |
From the Greeks I have not at all felt similarly strong impressions,
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. |
|
3 |
To sniff out "beautiful souls," "golden means,"
and other perfections 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. |
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As the key to understanding the older, inexhaustibly rich and
even 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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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The psychology of the orgiastic as an overflowing feeling of
life and 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. |
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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. |
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THE HAMMER SPEAKS
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"Why so hard?" the kitchen coal once said to the diamond.
"After all, are we not close kin?" |
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Why so soft? O my brothers, thus I ask you: are you not after
all my brothers? |
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Why so soft, so pliant and yielding? Why is there so much denial,
self-denial, in your hearts? So little destiny in your eyes? |
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And if you do not want to be destinies and inexorable ones, how
can you one day triumph with me? |
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And if your hardness does not wish to flash and cut through,
how can you one day create with me? |
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For all creators are hard. And it must seem blessedness to you
to impress your hand on millennia as on wax. |
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Blessedness to write on the will of millennia as on bronze--harder
than bronze, nobler than bronze. Only the noblest is altogether
hard. |
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This new tablet, O my brothers, I place over you: Become hard! |
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--Zarathustra, III: On Old and New Tablets, 29. |
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