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Chapter 1 FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHEFriedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 in Röcken (Saxony), Germany. He studied philology at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig, and in 1869 was appointed to the chair of classical philology at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Ill health led him to resign his professorship ten years later. His works include The Birth of Tragedy, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, The Case of Wagner, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Nietzsche contra Wagner, and Ecce Homo. He died in 1900. The Will to Power, a selection from his notebooks, was published posthumously.WALTER KAUFMANNWalter Kaufmann was born in Freiburg, Germany, in 1921, came to the United States in 1939, and studied at Williams College and Harvard University. In 1947 he joined the faculty of Princeton University, where he became a professor of philosophy. He held many visiting professorships, including Fulbright grants at Heidelberg and Jerusalem. His books include Critique of Religion and Philosophy, From Shakespeare to Existentialism, The Faith of a Heretic, Cain and Other Poems, Hegel, Tragedy and Philosophy, and Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, as well as verse translations of Goethe’s Faust and Twenty German Poets. He translated all of the books by Nietzsche listed in the biographical note above. He died in 1980. ContentsINTRODUCTION BY PETER GAYA NOTE ON THIS EDITIONINTRODUCTION BY THE EDITORACKNOWLEDGMENTSBASIC WRITINGS OF NIETZSCHETHE BIRTH OF TRAGEDYDedicationContentsChapter 1 - Translator’s IntroductionSeventy-Five Aphorisms from Five VolumesContentsChapter 1 - Human, All-Too-Human (1878)BEYOND GOOD AND EVILDedicationContentsTranslator’s PrefacePrefaceContentsPart One - On the Prejudices of PhilosophersPart Two - The Free SpiritPart Three - What is ReligiousPart Four - Epigrams and InterludesPart Five - Natural History of MoralsPart Six - We ScholarsPart Seven - Our VirtuesPart Eight - Peoples and FatherlandsPart Nine - What is NobleFrom High Mountains: AftersongON THE GENEALOGY OF MORALSContentsEditor’s IntroductionPrefaceChapter 1 - First Essay: “Good and Evil,” “Good and Bad”Chapter 2 - Second Essay: “Guilt,” “Bad Conscience,” and the LikeChapter 3 - Third Essay: What Is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?THE CASE OF WAGNERDedicationContentsTranslator’s IntroductionChapter 1 - The Case of WagnerChapter 2 - From Nietzsche’s Correspondence About: The Case of WagnerECCE HOMODedicationContentsEditor’s IntroductionA Note on the Publication of Ecce HomoPrefaceChapter 1 - Why I Am So WiseChapter 2 - Why I Am So CleverChapter 3 - Why I Write Such Good BooksChapter 4 - The Birth of TragedyChapter 5 - The Untimely OnesChapter 6 - Human, All-Too-Human With Two SequelsChapter 7 - Dawn Thoughts About Morality as a PrejudiceChapter 8 - The Gay Science (“la gaya scienza”)Chapter 9 - Thus Spoke Zarathustra A Book for All and NoneChapter 10 - Beyond Good and Evil Prelude to a Philosophy of the FutureChapter 11 - Genealogy of Morals A PolemicChapter 12 - Twilight of the Idols How One Philosophizes with a HammerChapter 13 - The Case of Wagner A Musician’s ProblemChapter 14 - Why I Am a DestinyAppendix: Variants from Nietzsche’s DraftsBibliographical NoteCOMMENTARYREADING GROUP GUIDE I NTRODUCTION BY P ETER G AY A N OTE ON T HIS E DITION I NTRODUCTION BY THE E DITOR A CKNOWLEDGMENTS T HE B IRTH OF T RAGEDY Dedication Contents Chapter 1 - Translator’s Introduction TheBIRTH OF TRAGEDYOr:Hellenism And PessimismbyFRIEDRICH NIETZSCHENew EditionWith an Attempt at a Self-Criticism1 Attempt at a Self-CriticismWhatever may be at the bottom of this questionable book, it must have been an exceptionally significant and fascinating question, and deeply personal at that: the time in which it was written, in spite of which it was written, bears witness to that—the exciting time of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71. As the thunder of the battle of Wörth was rolling over Europe, the muser and riddlefriend who was to be the father of this book sat somewhere in an Alpine nook, very bemused and beriddled, hence very concerned and yet unconcerned, and wrote down his thoughts about the Greeks—the core of the strange and almost inaccessible book to which this belated preface (or postscript) shall now be added. A few weeks later—and he himself was to be found under the walls of Metz, still wedded to the question marks that he had placed after the alleged “cheerfulness” of the Greeks and of Greek art. Eventually, in that month of profoundest suspense when the peace treaty was being debated at Versailles, he, too, attained peace with himself and, slowly convalescing from an illness contracted at the front, completed the final draft of The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music.—Out of music? Music and tragedy? Greeks and the music of tragedy? Greeks and the art form of pessimism? The best turned out, most beautiful, most envied type of humanity to date, those most apt to seduce us to life, the Greeks—how now? They of all people should have needed tragedy? Even more—art? For what—Greek art?You will guess where the big question mark concerning the value of existence had thus been raised. Is pessimism necessarily a sign of decline, decay, degeneration, weary and weak instincts—as it once was in India and now is, to all appearances, among us, “modern” men and Europeans? Is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual predilection for the hard, gruesome, evil, problematic aspect of existence, prompted by well-being, by overflowing health, by the fullness of existence? Is it perhaps possible to suffer precisely from overfullness? The sharp-eyed courage that tempts and attempts, that craves the frightful as the enemy, the worthy enemy, against whom one can test one’s strength? From whom one can learn what it means “to be frightened”? What is the significance of the tragic myth among the Greeks of the best, the strongest, the most courageous period? And the tremendous phenomenon of the Dionysian—and, born from it, tragedy—what might they signify?— And again: that of which tragedy died, the Socratism of morality, the dialectics, frugality, and cheerfulness of the theoretical man—how now? might not this very Socratism be a sign of decline, of weariness, of infection, of the anarchical dissolution of the instincts? And the “Greek cheerfulness” of the later Greeks—merely the afterglow of the sunset? The Epicureans’ resolve against pessimism—a mere precaution of the afflicted? And science itself, our science—indeed, what is the significance of all science, viewed as a symptom of life? For what—worse yet, whence—all science? How now? Is the resolve to be so scientific about everything perhaps a kind of fear of, an escape from, pessimism? A subtle last resort against—truth? And, morally speaking, a sort of cowardice and falseness? Amorally speaking, a ruse? O Socrates, Socrates, was that perhaps your secret? O enigmatic ironist, was that perhaps your—irony?2What I then got hold of, something frightful and dangerous, a problem with horns but not necessarily a bull, in any case a new problem—today I should say that it was the problem of science itself, science considered for the first time as problematic, as questionable. But the book in which my youthful courage and suspicion found an outlet—what an impossible book had to result from a task so uncongenial to youth! Constructed from a lot of immature, overgreen personal experiences, all of them close to the limits of communication, presented in the context of art—for the problem of science cannot be recognized in the context of science—a book perhaps for artists who also have an analytic and retrospective penchant (in other words, an exceptional type of artist for whom one might have to look far and wide and really would not care to look); a book full of psychological innovations and artists’ secrets, with an artists’ metaphysics in the background; a youthful work full of the intrepid mood of youth, the moodiness of youth, independent, defiantly self-reliant even where it seems to bow before an authority and personal reverence; in sum, a first book, also in every bad sense of that label. In spite of the problem which seems congenial to old age, the book is marked by every defect of youth, with its “length in excess” and its “storm and stress.” On the other hand, considering its success (especially with the great artist to whom it addressed itself as in a dialogue, Richard Wagner), it is a proven book, I mean one that in any case satisfied “the best minds of the time.”1 In view of that, it really ought to be treated with some consideration and taciturnity. Still, I do not want to suppress entirely how disagreeable it now seems to me, how strange it appears now, after sixteen years—before a much older, a hundred times more demanding, but by no means colder eye which has not become a stranger to the task which this audacious book dared to tackle for the first time: to look at science in the perspective of the artist, but at art in that of life.3To say it once more: today I find it an impossible book: I consider it badly written, ponderous, embarrassing, image-mad and image-confused, sentimental, in places saccharine to the point of effeminacy, uneven in tempo, without the will to logical cleanliness, very convinced and therefore disdainful of proof, mistrustful even of the propriety of proof, a book for initiates, “music” for those dedicated to music, those who are closely related to begin with on the basis of common and rare aesthetic experiences, “music” meant as a sign of recognition for close relatives in artibus2—an arrogant and rhapsodic book that sought to exclude right from the beginning the profanum vulgus3 of “the educated” even more than “the mass” or “folk.” Still, the effect of the book proved and proves that it had a knack for seeking out fellow-rhapsodizers and for luring them on to new secret paths and dancing places. What found expression here was anyway—this was admitted with as much curiosity as antipathy—a strange voice, the disciple of a still “unknown God,” one who concealed himself for the time being under the scholar’s hood, under the gravity and dialectical ill humor of the German, even under the bad manners of the Wagnerian. Here was a spirit with strange, still nameless needs, a memory bursting with questions, experiences, concealed things after which the name of Dionysus was added as one more question mark. What spoke here—as was admitted, not without suspicion—was something like a mystical, almost maenadic soul that stammered with difficulty, a feat of the will, as in a strange tongue, almost undecided whether it should communicate or conceal itself. It should have sung, this “new soul”—and not spoken!4 What I had to say then—too bad that I did not dare say it as a poet: perhaps I had the ability. Or at least as a philologist: after all, even today practically everything in this field remains to be discovered and dug up by philologists! Above all, the problem that there is a problem here—and that the Greeks, as long as we lack an answer to the question “what is Dionysian?” remain as totally uncomprehended and unimaginable as ever.54Indeed, what is Dionysian?—This book contains an answer: one “who knows” is talking, the initiate and disciple of his god. Now I should perhaps speak more cautiously and less eloquently about such a difficult psychological question as that concerning the origin of tragedy among the Greeks. The question of the Greek’s relation to pain, his degree of sensitivity, is basic: did this relation remain constant? Or did it change radically? The question is whether his ever stronger craving for beauty, for festivals, pleasures, new cults was rooted in some deficiency, privation, melancholy, pain? Supposing that this were true—and Pericles (or Thucydides) suggests as much in the great funeral oration—how should we then have to explain the origin of the opposite craving, which developed earlier in time, the craving for the ugly; the good, severe will of the older Greeks to pessimism, to the tragic myth, to the image of everything underlying existence that is frightful, evil, a riddle, destructive, fatal? What, then, would be the origin of tragedy? Perhaps joy, strength, overflowing health, overgreat fullness? And what, then, is the significance, physiologically speaking, of that madness out of which tragic and comic art developed—the Dionysian madness? How now? Is madness perhaps not necessarily the symptom of degeneration, decline, and the final stage of culture? Are there perhaps—a question for psychiatrists—neuroses of health? of the youth and youthfulness of a people? Where does that synthesis of god and billy goat in the satyr point? What experience of himself, what urge compelled the Greek to conceive the Dionysian enthusiast and primeval man as a satyr? And regarding the origin of the tragic chorus: did those centuries when the Greek body flourished and the Greek soul foamed over with health perhaps know endemic ecstasies? Visions and hallucinations shared by entire communities or assemblies at a cult? How now? Should the Greeks, precisely in the abundance of their youth, have had the will to the tragic and have been pessimists? Should it have been madness, to use one of Plato’s phrases, that brought the greatest blessings upon Greece? On the other hand, conversely, could it be that the Greeks became more and more optimistic, superficial, and histrionic precisely in the period of dissolution and weakness—more and more ardent for logic and logicizing the world and thus more “cheerful” and “scientific”? How now? Could it be possible that, in spite of all “modern ideas” and the prejudices of a democratic taste, the triumph of optimism, the gradual prevalence of rationality, practical and theoretical utilitarianism, no less than democracy itself which developed at the same time, might all have been symptoms of a decline of strength, of impending old age, and of physiological weariness? These, and not pessimism? Was Epicurus an optimist—precisely because he was afflicted?It is apparent that it was a whole cluster of grave questions with which this book burdened itself. Let us add the gravest question of all. What, seen in the perspective of life, is the significance of morality?5Already in the preface addressed to Richard Wagner, art, and not morality, is presented as the truly metaphysical activity of man. In the book itself the suggestive sentence is repeated several times, that the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon. Indeed, the whole book knows only an artistic meaning and crypto-meaning behind all events—a “god,” if you please, but certainly only an entirely reckless and amoral artist-god who wants to experience, whether he is building or destroying, in the good and in the bad, his own joy and glory—one who, creating worlds, frees himself from the distress of fullness and overfullness and from the affliction of the contradictions compressed in his soul.6 The world—at every moment the attained salvation of God, as the eternally changing, eternally new vision of the most deeply afflicted, discordant, and contradictory being who can find salvation only in appearance: you can call this whole artists’ metaphysics arbitrary, idle, fantastic; what matters is that it betrays a spirit who will one day fight at any risk whatever the moral interpretation and significance of existence. Here, perhaps for the first time, a pessimism “beyond good and evil”7 is suggested. Here that “perversity of mind” gains speech and formulation against which Schopenhauer never wearied of hurling in advance his most irate curses and thunderbolts: a philosophy that dares to move, to demote, morality into the realm of appearance—and not merely among “appearances” or phenomena (in the sense assigned to these words by Idealistic philosophers), but among “deceptions,” as semblance, delusion, error, interpretation, contrivance, art.Perhaps the depth of this antimoral propensity is best inferred from the careful and hostile silence with which Christianity is treated throughout the whole book—Christianity as the most prodigal elaboration of the moral theme to which humanity has ever been subjected. In truth, nothing could be more opposed to the purely aesthetic interpretation and justification of the world which are taught in this book than the Christian teaching, which is, and wants to be, only moral and which relegates art, every art, to the realm of lies; with its absolute standards, beginning with the truthfulness of God, it negates, judges, and damns art. Behind this mode of thought and valuation, which must be hostile to art if it is at all genuine, I never failed to sense a hostility to life—a furious, vengeful antipathy to life itself: for all of life is based on semblance, art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of perspectives and error. Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life’s nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in “another” or “better” life. Hatred of “the world,” condemnations of the passions, fear of beauty and sensuality, a beyond invented the better to slander this life, at bottom a craving for the nothing, for the end, for respite, for “the sabbath of sabbaths”—all this always struck me, no less than the unconditional will of Christianity to recognize only moral values, as the most dangerous and uncanny form of all possible forms of a “will to decline”8—at the very least a sign of abysmal sickness, weariness, discouragement, exhaustion, and the impoverishment of life. For, confronted with morality (especially Christian, or unconditional, morality), life must continually and inevitably be in the wrong, because life is something essentially amoral—and eventually, crushed by the weight of contempt and the eternal No, life must then be felt to be unworthy of desire and altogether worthless. Morality itself—how now? might not morality be “a will to negate life,” a secret instinct of annihilation, a principle of decay, diminution, and slander—the beginning of the end? Hence, the danger of dangers?It was against morality that my instinct turned with this questionable book, long ago; it was an instinct that aligned itself with life and that discovered, for itself a fundamentally opposite doctrine and valuation of life—purely artistic and anti-Christian. What to call it? As a philologist and man of words I baptized it, not without taking some liberty—for who could claim to know the rightful name of the Antichrist?—in the name of a Greek god: I called it Dionysian.6It is clear what task I first dared to touch with this book? How I regret now that in those days I still lacked the courage (or immodesty?) to permit myself in every way an individual language of my own for such individual views and hazards—and that instead I tried laboriously to express by means of Schopenhauerian and Kantian formulas strange and new valuations which were basically at odds with Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s spirit and taste! What, after all, did Schopenhauer think of tragedy?“That which bestows on everything tragic its peculiar elevating force”—he says in The World as Will and Representation,9 volume II—“is the discovery that the world, that life, can never give real satisfaction and hence is not worthy of our affection: this constitutes the tragic spirit—it leads to resignation.”How differently Dionysus spoke to me! How far removed I was from all this resignationism!—10 But there is something far worse in this book, something I now regret still more than that I obscured and spoiled Dionysian premonitions with Schopenhauerian formulations: namely, that I spoiled the grandiose Greek problem, as it had arisen before my eyes, by introducing the most modern problems! That I appended hopes where there was no ground for hope, where everything pointed all too plainly to an end! That on the basis of the latest German music I began to rave about “the German spirit” as if that were in the process even then of discovering and finding itself again—at a time when the German spirit, which not long before had still had the will to dominate Europe and the strength to lead Europe,11 was just making its testament and abdicating forever, making its transition, under the pompous pretense of founding a Reich, to a leveling mediocrity, democracy, and “modern ideas”!Indeed, meanwhile I have learned to consider this “German spirit” with a sufficient lack of hope or mercy; also, contemporary German music, which is romanticism through and through and most un-Greek of all possible art forms—moreover, a first-rate poison for the nerves, doubly dangerous among a people who love drink and who honor lack of clarity as a virtue, for it has the double quality of a narcotic that both intoxicates and spreads a fog.To be sure, apart from all the hasty hopes and faulty applications to the present with which I spoiled my first book, there still remains the great Dionysian question mark I raised—regarding music as well: what would a music have to be like that would no longer be of romantic origin, like German music—but Dionysian?7But, my dear sir, what in the world is romantic if your book isn’t? Can deep hatred against “the Now,” against “reality” and “modern ideas” be pushed further than you pushed it in your artists’ metaphysics? believing sooner in the Nothing, sooner in the devil than in “the Now”? Is it not a deep bass of wrath and the lust for destruction that we hear humming underneath all of your contrapuntal vocal art and seduction of the ear, a furious resolve against everything that is “now,” a will that is not too far removed from practical nihilism and seems to say: “sooner let nothing be true than that you should be right, than that your truth should be proved right!”Listen yourself, my dear pessimist and art-deifier, but with open ears, to a single passage chosen from your book—to the not ineloquent dragon-slayer passage which may have an insidious pied-piper sound for young ears and hearts. How now? Isn’t this the typical creed of the romantic of 1830, masked by the pessimism of 1850? Even the usual romantic finale is sounded—break, breakdown, return and collapse before an old faith, before the old God. How now? Is your pessimists’ book not itself a piece of anti-Hellenism and romanticism? Is it not itself something “equally intoxicating and befogging,” in any case a narcotic, even a piece of music, German music? But listen:“Let us imagine a coming generation with such intrepidity of vision, with such a heroic penchant for the tremendous; let us imagine the bold stride of these dragon-slayers, the proud audacity with which they turn their back on all the weakling’s doctrines of optimism in order to ‘live resolutely’ in wholeness and fullness: would it not be necessary for the tragic man of such a culture, in view of his self-education for seriousness and terror, to desire a new art, the art of metaphysical comfort, to desire tragedy as his own proper Helen, and to exclaim with Faust:Should not my longing overleap the distanceAnd draw the fairest form into existence?”12“Would it not be necessary?”—No, thrice no! O you young romantics: it would not be necessary! But it is highly probable that it will end that way, that you end that way—namely, “comforted,” as it is written, in spite of all self-education for seriousness and terror, “comforted metaphysically”—in sum, as romantics end, as Christians.No! You ought to learn the art of this-worldly comfort first; you ought to learn to laugh, my young friends, if you are hell-bent on remaining pessimists. Then perhaps, as laughers, you may some day dispatch all metaphysical comforts to the devil—metaphysics in front. Or, to say it in the language of that Dionysian monster who bears the name of Zarathustra:“Raise up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher! And don’t forget your legs! Raise up your legs, too, good dancers; and still better: stand on your heads!“This crown of the laugher, the rose-wreath crown: I crown myself with this crown; I myself pronounced holy my laughter. I did not find anyone else today strong enough for that.“Zarathustra, the dancer; Zarathustra, the light one who beckons with his wings, preparing for a flight, beckoning to all birds, ready and heady, blissfully lightheaded;“Zarathustra, the soothsayer; Zarathustra, the sooth-laugher; not impatient; not unconditional; one who loves leaps and side-leaps: I crown myself with this crown.“This crown of the laugher, the rose-wreath crown: to you, my brothers, I throw this crown. Laughter I have pronounced holy: you higher men, learn—to laugh!”Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part IV.13Sils-Maria, Oberengadin,August 1886—1In the first edition of 1872 the title was The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. A second edition with very slight textual changes was printed in 1874 and appeared in 1878. In 1886, the same year that saw the publication of Beyond Good and Evil, the remaining copies of both editions were reissued with the new title page, above. The original title page was also retained but it now followed the “Attempt at a Self-Criticism.”1An allusion to Schiller’s lines in Wallensteins Lager: “He that has satisfied the best minds of the time has lived for all times.”2In the arts.3The profane crowd.4When Nietzsche died in 1900, Stefan George, the most remarkable German poet of his generation, after Rilke, wrote a poem on “Nietzsche” that ends: “it should have sung, not spoken, this new soul.” For George’s whole poem, see Twenty German Poets: A Bilingual Collection (New York, The Modern Library, 1963).5The conception of the Dionysian in The Birth differs from Nietzsche’s later conception of the Dionysian. He originally introduced the term to symbolize the tendencies that found expression in the festivals of Dionysus, and contrasted the Dionysian with the Apollinian; but in his later thought the Dionysian stands for the creative employment of the passions and the affirmation of life in spite of suffering—as it were, for the synthesis of the Dionysian, as originally conceived, with the Apollinian—and it is contrasted with the Christian negation of life and extirpation of the passions. In the Twilight of the Idols, written in 1888, the outlook of the old Goethe can thus be called Dionysian (section 49).6Cf. the words which Heine, in his Schöpfungslieder, attributes to God: “Disease was the most basic ground/of my creative urge and stress;/creating, I could convalesce,/creating, I again grew sound.”7The book with that title was published in 1886, the same year that the new edition of The Birth of Tragedy appeared, with this preface.8Untergang, as in the title of Spengler’s Decline of the West, which was influenced decisively by this discussion. Spengler himself says in his preface that he owes “everything” to Goethe and to Nietzsche.9Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, ed. Julius Frauenstädt (Leipzig, F. A. Brockhaus, 1873). Translated by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp as World as Will and Idea (London, Kegan Paul, 1907).10Nietzsche’s coinage.11The allusion is to the time of Goethe when Germany, at her cultural zenith, was at her political nadir. The whole passage illustrates Nietzsche’s conception of the “will to dominate” and the “will to power.”12Section 18 below.13“On the Higher Man,” sections 17-20, quoted by Nietzsche with omissions. THEBIRTH OF TRAGEDYOut of the Spirit of Music Preface to Richard WagnerTo keep at a distance all the possible scruples, excitements, and misunderstandings that the thoughts united in this essay will occasion, in view of the peculiar character of our aesthetic public, and to be able to write these introductory remarks, too, with the same contemplative delight whose reflection—the distillation of good and elevating hours—is evident on every page, I picture the moment when you, my highly respected friend, will receive this essay. Perhaps after an evening walk in the winter snow, you will behold Prometheus unbound on the title page, read my name, and be convinced at once that, whatever this essay should contain, the author certainly has something serious and urgent to say; also that, as he hatched these ideas, he was communicating with you as if you were present, and hence could write down only what was in keeping with that presence. You will recall that it was during the same period when your splendid Festschrift on Beethoven came into being, amid the terrors and sublimities of the war that had just broken out, that I collected myself for these reflections. Yet anyone would be mistaken if he associated my reflections with the contrast between patriotic excitement and aesthetic enthusiasm, of courageous seriousness and a cheerful game: if he really read this essay, it would dawn on him, to his surprise, what a seriously German problem is faced here and placed right in the center of German hopes, as a vortex and turning point.1 But perhaps such readers will find it offensive that an aesthetic problem should be taken so seriously—assuming they are unable to consider art more than a pleasant sideline, a readily dispensable tinkling of bells that accompanies the “seriousness of life,” just as if nobody knew what was involved in such a contrast with the “seriousness of life.” Let such “serious” readers learn something from the fact that I am convinced that art represents the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life, in the sense of that man to whom, as my sublime predecessor on this path, I wish to dedicate this essay.Basel, end of the year 1871 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Seventy-Five Aphorisms from Five Volumes Contents Chapter 1 - Human, All-Too-Human (1878) B EYOND G OOD AND E VIL Dedication Contents Translator’s Preface Jenseitsvon Gut und Böse.VorspieleinerPhilosophie der Zukunft.VonFriedrich Nietzsche.LeipzigDruck und Verlag von C. G. Naumann.1886. Preface Contents Part One - On the Prejudices of Philosophers Part1 Part Two - The Free Spirit Part Two24O Part Three - What is Religious Part Three45The human soul and its limits, the range of inner human experiences reached so far, the heights, depths, and distances of these experiences, the whole history of the soul so far and its as yet unexhausted possibilities—that is the predestined hunting ground for a born psychologist and lover of the “great hunt.” But how often he has to say to himself in despair: “One hunter! alas, only a single one! and look at this huge forest, this primeval forest!” And then he wishes he had a few hundred helpers and good, well-trained hounds that he could drive into the history of the human soul to round up his game. In vain: it is proved to him again and again, thoroughly and bitterly, how helpers and hounds for all the things that excite his curiosity cannot be found. What is wrong with sending scholars into new and dangerous hunting grounds, where courage, sense, and subtlety in every way are required, is that they cease to be of any use precisely where the “great hunt,” but also the great danger, begins: precisely there they lose their keen eye and nose.To figure out and determine, for example, what kind of a history the problem of science and conscience2 has so far had in the soul of homines religiosi3 one might perhaps have to be as profound, as wounded, as monstrous as Pascal’s intellectual conscience was—and then one would still need that vaulting heaven of bright, malicious spirituality that would be capable of surveying from above, arranging, and forcing into formulas this swarm of dangerous and painful experiences.But who would do me this service? But who would have time to wait for such servants? They obviously grow too rarely; they are so improbable in any age. In the end one has to do everything one-self in order to know a few things oneself: that is, one has a lot to do. But a curiosity of my type remains after all the most agreeable of all vices—sorry, I meant to say: the love of truth has its reward in heaven and even on earth.—46The faith demanded, and not infrequently attained, by original Christianity, in the midst of a skeptical and southern free-spirited world that looked back on, and still, contained, a centuries-long fight between philosophical schools, besides the education for tolerance given by the imperium Romanum4—this faith is not that ingenuous and bearlike subalterns’ faith with which, say, a Luther or a Cromwell, or some other northern barbarian of the spirit, clung to his god and to Christianity. It is much closer to the faith of Pascal, which resembles in a gruesome manner a continual suicide of reason—a tough, long-lived, wormlike reason that cannot be killed all at once and with a single stroke.From the start, the Christian faith is a sacrifice: a sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of the spirit; at the same time, enslavement and self-mockery, self-mutilation. There is cruelty and religious Phoenicianism in this faith which is expected of an over-ripe, multiple, and much-spoiled conscience: it presupposes that the subjection of the spirit hurts indescribably; that the whole past and the habits of such a spirit resist the absurdissimum5 which “faith” represents to it.Modern men, obtuse to all Christian nomenclature, no longer feel the gruesome superlative that struck a classical taste in the paradoxical formula “god on the cross.” Never yet and nowhere has there been an equal boldness in inversion, anything as horrible, questioning, and questionable as this formula: it promised a revaluation of all the values of antiquity.It is the Orient, deep Orient, it is the Oriental slave who revenged himself in this way on Rome and its noble and frivolous tolerance, on the Roman “catholicity” of faith. It has always been not faith but the freedom from faith, that half-stoical and smiling unconcern with the seriousness of faith, that enraged slaves in their masters—against their masters. “Enlightenment” enrages: for the slave wants the unconditional; he understands only what is tyrannical, in morals, too; he loves as he hates, without nuance, to the depths, to the point of pain, of sickness—his abundant concealed suffering is enraged against the noble taste that seems to deny suffering. Nor was skepticism concerning suffering, at bottom merely a pose of aristocratic morality, the least cause of the origin of the last great slave rebellion which began with the French Revolution.47Wherever on earth the religious neurosis has appeared we find it tied to three dangerous dietary demands: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence. But one cannot decide with certainty what is cause and what effect, and whether any relation of cause and effect is involved here. The final doubt seems justified because among its most regular symptoms, among both savage and tame peoples, we also find the most sudden, most extravagant voluptuousness which then, just as suddenly, changes into a penitential spasm and denial of the world and will—both perhaps to be interpreted as masked epilepsy? But nowhere should one resist interpretation more: no other type has yet been surrounded by such a lavish growth of nonsense and superstition, no other type seems to have interested men, even philosophers, more. The time has come for becoming a bit cold right here, to learn caution—better yet: to look away, to go away.Even in the background of the most recent philosophy, that of Schopenhauer, we find, almost as the problem-in-itself, this gruesome question mark of the religious crisis and awakening. How is the denial of the will possible? how is the saint possible? This really seems to have been the question over which Schopenhauer became a philosopher and began. And so it was a genuinely Schopenhauerian conclusion when his most convinced adherent (perhaps also the last one, as far as Germany is concerned), namely, Richard Wagner, finished his life’s work at precisely this point and in the end brought this horrible and eternal type on the stage as Kundry, type vécu,6 in the flesh—at the very time when the psychiatrists of almost all the countries of Europe had occasion to study it at close quarters, wherever the religious neurosis—or what I call “das religiöse Wesen”7—had its latest epidemic outbreak and pageant in the “Salvation Army.”Let us ask what precisely about this whole phenomenon of the saint has seemed so enormously interesting to men of all types and ages, even to philosophers. Beyond any doubt, it was the air of the miraculous that goes with it—namely, the immediate succession of opposites, of states of the soul that are judged morally in opposite ways. It seemed palpable that a “bad man” was suddenly transformed into a “saint,” a good man. The psychology we have had so far suffered shipwreck at this point: wasn’t this chiefly because it had placed itself under the dominion of morals, because it, too, believed in opposite moral values and saw, read, interpreted these opposites into the text and the facts?What? The “miracle” merely a mistake of interpretation? A lack of philology?48It seems that Catholicism is much more intimately related to the Latin races than all of Christianity in general is to us northerners—and unbelief therefore means something altogether different in Catholic and Protestant countries: among them, a kind of rebellion against the spirit of the race, while among us it is rather a return to the spirit (or anti-spirit) of the race. We northerners are undoubtedly descended from barbarian races, which also shows in our talent for religion: we have little talent for it. We may except the Celts, who therefore also furnished the best soil for the spread of the Christian infection to the north: in France the Christian ideal came to flourish as much as the pale sun of the north permitted it. How strangely pious for our taste are even the most recent French skeptics insofar as they have any Celtic blood! How Catholic, how un-German Auguste Comte’s sociology smells to us with its Roman logic of the instincts! How Jesuitical that gracious and clever cicerone of Port-Royal, Sainte-Beuve, in spite of all his hostility against the Jesuits! And especially Ernest Renan: how inaccessible the language of such a Renan sounds to us northerners: at one instant after another some nothing of religious tension unbalances his soul, which is, in the more refined sense, voluptuous and inclined to stretch out comfortably. Let us speak after him these beautiful sentences—and how much malice and high spirits stir immediately in our probably less beautiful and harder, namely more German, soul as a response!“Disons donc hardiment que la religion est un produit de l’homme normal, que l’homme est le plus dans le vrai quand il est le plus religieux et le plus assuré d’une destinée infinie…. C’est quand il est bon qu’il veut que la vertu corresponde à un ordre éternel, c’est quand il contemple les choses d’une manière désintéressée qu’il trouve la morte révoltante et absurde. Comment ne pas supposer que c’est dans ces moments-là, que l’homme voit le mieux?”8These sentences are so utterly antipodal to my ears and habits that on finding them my first wrath wrote on the margin “la niaiserie religieuse par excellence!” But my subsequent wrath actually took a fancy to them—these sentences standing truth on her head! It is so neat, so distinguished to have one’s own antipodes!49What is amazing about the religiosity of the ancient Greeks is the enormous abundance of gratitude it exudes: it is a very noble type of man that confronts nature and life in this way.9Later, when the rabble gained the upper hand in Greece, fear became rampant in religion, too—and the ground was prepared for Christianity.—50The passion for God: there are peasant types, sincere and obtrusive, like Luther—the whole of Protestantism lacks southern delicatezza.10 There is sometimes an Oriental ecstasy worthy of a slave who, without deserving it, has been pardoned and elevated—for example, in Augustine, who lacks in a truly offensive manner all nobility of gestures and desires. There is a womanly tenderness and lust that presses bashfully and ignorantly toward a unio mystica et physica11—as in Madame de Guyon.12 In many cases it appears oddly enough as a disguise for the puberty of a girl or youth; here and there even as the hysteria of an old maid, also as her final ambition—and in several such instances the church has proclaimed the female a saint.51So far the most powerful human beings have still bowed worshipfully before the saint as the riddle of self-conquest and deliberate final renunciation. Why did they bow? In him—and as it were behind the question mark of his fragile and miserable appearance—they sensed the superior force that sought to test itself in such a conquest, the strength of the will in which they recognized and honored their own strength and delight in dominion: they honored something in themselves when they honored the saint. Moreover, the sight of the saint awakened a suspicion in them: such an enormity of denial, of anti-nature will not have been desired for nothing, they said to and asked themselves. There may be a reason for it, some very great danger about which the ascetic, thanks to his secret comforters and visitors, might have inside information. In short, the powerful of the world learned a new fear before him; they sensed a new power, a strange, as yet unconquered enemy—it was the “will to power” that made them stop before the saint. They had to ask him—52In the Jewish “Old Testament,” the book of divine justice, there are human beings, things, and speeches in so grand a style that Greek and Indian literature have nothing to compare with it. With terror and reverence one stands before these tremendous remnants of what man once was, and will have sad thoughts about ancient Asia and its protruding little peninsula Europe, which wants by all means to signify as against Asia the “progress of man.” To be sure, whoever is himself merely a meager, tame domestic animal and knows only the needs of domestic animals (like our educated people of today, including the Christians of “educated” Christianity) has no cause for amazement or sorrow among these ruins—the taste for the Old Testament is a touchstone for “great” and “small”13—perhaps he will find the New Testament, the book of grace, still rather more after his heart (it contains a lot of the real, tender, musty true-believer and small-soul smell). To have glued this New Testament, a kind of rococo of taste in every respect, to the Old Testament to make one book, as the “Bible,” as “the book par excellence”—that is perhaps the greatest audacity and “sin against the spirit” that literary Europe has on its conscience.1453Why atheism today?—“The father” in God has been thoroughly refuted; ditto, “the judge,” “the rewarder.” Also his “free will”: he does not hear—and if he heard he still would not know how to help. Worst of all: he seems incapable of clear communication: is he unclear?This is what I found to be causes for the decline of European theism, on the basis of a great many conversations, asking and listening. It seems to me that the religious instinct is indeed in the process of growing powerfully—but the theistic satisfaction it refuses with deep suspicion.54What is the whole of modern philosophy doing at bottom? Since Descartes—actually more despite him than because of his precedent—all the philosophers seek to assassinate the old soul concept, under the guise of a critique of the subject-and-predicate concept—which means an attempt on the life of the basic presupposition of the Christian doctrine. Modern philosophy, being an epistemological skepticism, is, covertly or overtly, anti-Christian—although, to say this for the benefit of more refined ears, by no means anti-religious.For, formerly, one believed in “the soul” as one believed in grammar and the grammatical subject: one said, “I” is the condition, “think” is the predicate and conditioned—thinking is an activity to which thought must supply a subject as cause. Then one tried with admirable perseverance and cunning to get out of this net—and asked whether the opposite might not be the case: “think” the condition, “I” the conditioned; “I” in that case only a synthesis which is made by thinking. At bottom, Kant wanted to prove that, starting from the subject, the subject could not be proved—nor could the object: the possibility of a merely apparent existence of the subject, “the soul” in other words, may not always have remained strange to him—that thought which as Vedanta philosophy existed once before on this earth and exercised tremendous power.55There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, with many rungs; but three of these are the most important.Once one sacrificed human beings to one’s god, perhaps precisely those whom one loved most: the sacrifices of the first-born in all prehistoric religions belong here, as well as the sacrifice of the Emperor Tiberius in the Mithras grotto of the isle of Capri, that most gruesome of all Roman anachronisms.Then, during the moral epoch of mankind, one sacrificed to one’s god one’s own strongest instincts, one’s “nature”: this festive joy lights up the cruel eyes of the ascetic, the “anti-natural” enthusiast.Finally—what remained to be sacrificed? At long last, did one not have to sacrifice for once whatever is comforting, holy, healing; all hope, all faith in hidden harmony, in future blisses and justices? didn’t one have to sacrifice God himself and, from cruelty against oneself, worship the stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, the nothing? To sacrifice God for the nothing—this paradoxical, mystery of the final cruelty was reserved for the generation that is now coming up: all of us already know something of this.—56Whoever has endeavored with some enigmatic longing, as I have, to think pessimism through to its depths and to liberate it from the half-Christian, half-German narrowness and simplicity in which it has finally presented itself to our century, namely, in the form of Schopenhauer’s philosophy; whoever has really, with an Asiatic and supra-Asiatic eye, looked into, down into the most world-denying of all possible ways of thinking—beyond good and evil and no longer, like the Buddha and Schopenhauer, under the spell and delusion of morality—may just thereby, without really meaning to do so, have opened his eyes to the opposite ideal: the ideal of the most high-spirited, alive, and world-affirming human being who has not only come to terms and learned to get along with whatever was and is, but who wants to have what was and is repeated into all eternity,15 shouting insatiably da capo16—not only to himself but to the whole play and spectacle, and not only to a spectacle but at bottom to him who needs precisely this spectacle—and who makes it necessary because again and again he needs himself—and makes himself necessary—What? And this wouldn’t be—circulus vitiosus deus?1757With the strength of his spiritual eye and insight grows distance and, as it were, the space around man: his world becomes more profound; ever new stars, ever new riddles and images become visible for him. Perhaps everything on which the spirit’s eye has exercised its acuteness and thoughtfulness was nothing but an occasion for this exercise, a playful matter, something for children and those who are childish. Perhaps the day will come when the most solemn concepts which have caused the most fights and suffering, the concepts “God” and “sin,” will seem no more important to us than a child’s toy and a child’s pain seem to an old man—and perhaps “the old man” will then be in need of another toy and another pain—still child enough, an eternal child!58Has it ever been really noted to what extent a genuinely religious life (both its microscopic favorite occupation of self-examination and that tender composure which calls itself “prayer” and is a continual readiness for the “coming of God”) requires a leisure class, or half-leisure—I mean leisure with a good conscience, from way back, by blood, to which the aristocratic feeling that work disgraces is not altogether alien—the feeling that it makes soul and body common. And that consequently our modern, noisy, time-consuming industriousness, proud of itself, stupidly proud, educates and prepares people, more than anything else does, precisely for “unbelief.”Among those, for example, who now live in Germany at a distance from religion I find people whose “free-thinking” is of diverse types and origins, but above all a majority of those in whom industriousness has, from generation unto generation, dissolved the religious instincts, so they no longer even know what religions are good for and merely register their presence in the world with a kind of dumb amazement. They feel abundantly committed, these good people, whether to their business or to their pleasures, not to speak of the “fatherland” and the newspapers and “family obligations”: it seems that they simply have no time left for religion, the more so because it remains unclear to them whether it involves another business or another pleasure—for it is not possible, they say to themselves, that one goes to church merely to dampen one’s good spirits. They are not enemies of religious customs; when participation in such customs is required in certain cases, by the state, for example, they do what is required, as one does so many things—with a patient and modest seriousness and without much curiosity and discomfort: they simply live too much apart and outside to feel any need for any pro and con in such matters.Those indifferent in this way include today the great majority of German middle-class Protestants, especially in the great industrious centers of trade and traffic; also the great majority of industrious scholars and the other accessories of the universities (excepting the theologians, whose presence and possibility there pose ever increasing and ever subtler riddles for a psychologist). Pious or even merely churchly people rarely have the slightest idea how much, good will—one might say caprice—is required of a German scholar today if he is to take the problem of religion seriously. On the basis of his whole trade (and, as noted, on the basis of the tradelike industriousness to which he is committed by his modern conscience) he is inclined toward a superior, almost good-natured amusement in the face of religion, occasionally mixed with a dash of disdain for the “uncleanliness” of the spirit which he assumes wherever a church is still acknowledged. The scholar succeeds only with the help of history (not on the basis of his own personal experience) to muster a reverent seriousness and a certain shy consideration in the face of religion. But even if he raises his feeling into real gratitude toward it,18 he still has not personally approached, not even by a single step, what still exists now as church or piety; perhaps even the opposite. The practical indifference toward religious matters into which he has been born and brought up is generally sublimated in him into caution and cleanliness that shun contact with religious men and matters; and it may be precisely the depth of his tolerance and humanity that bids him dodge the subtle distress involved in tolerance.Every age has its own divine type of naïveté for whose invention other ages may envy it—and how much naïveté, venerable, childlike, and boundlessly clumsy naïveté lies in the scholar’s faith in his superiority, in the good conscience of his tolerance, in the unsuspecting simple certainty with which his instinct treats the religious man as an inferior and lower type that he has outgrown, leaving it behind, beneath him—him, that presumptuous little dwarf and rabble man, the assiduous and speedy head- and handiworker of “ideas,” of “modern ideas”!59Anyone who has looked deeply into the world may guess how much wisdom lies in the superficiality of men. The instinct that preserves them teaches them to be flighty, light, and false. Here and there one encounters an impassioned and exaggerated worship of “pure forms,” among both philosophers and artists: let nobody doubt that whoever stands that much in need of the cult of surfaces must at some time have reached beneath them with disastrous results.Perhaps there even exists an order of rank among these burnt children, these born, artists who can find the enjoyment of life only in the intention of falsifying its image (as it were, in a longwinded revenge on life): the degree to which life has been spoiled for them might be inferred from the degree to which they wish to see its image falsified, thinned down, transcendentalized, deified—the homines religiosi might be included among artists, as their highest rank.It is the profound, suspicious fear of an incurable pessimism that forces whole millennia to bury their teeth in and cling to a religious interpretation of existence: the fear of that instinct which senses that one might get a hold of the truth too soon, before man has become strong enough, hard enough, artist enough.Piety, the “life in God,” seen in this way, would appear as the subtlest and final offspring of the fear of truth, as an artist’s worship and intoxication before the most consistent of all falsifications, as the will to the inversion of truth, to untruth at any price. It may be that until now there has been no more potent means for beautifying man himself than piety: it can turn man into so much art, surface, play of colors, graciousness that his sight no longer makes one suffer.—60To love man for God’s sake—that has so far been the noblest and most remote feeling attained among men. That the love of man is just one more stupidity and brutishness if there is no ulterior intent to sanctify it; that the inclination to such love of man must receive its measure, its subtlety, its grain of salt and dash of ambergris from some higher inclination—whoever the human being may have been who first felt and “experienced” this, however much his tongue may have stumbled19 as it tried to express such délicatesse, let him remain holy and venerable for us for all time as the human being who has flown highest yet and gone astray most beautifully!61The philosopher as we understand him, we free spirits—as the man of the most comprehensive responsibility who has the conscience for the over-all development of man—this philosopher will make use of religions for his project of cultivation20 and education, just as he will make use of whatever political and economic states are at hand. The selective and cultivating21 influence, always destructive as well as creative and form-giving, which can be exerted with the help of religions, is always multiple and different according to the sort of human beings who are placed under its spell and protection. For the strong and independent who are prepared and predestined to command and in whom the reason and art of a governing race become incarnate, religion is one more means for overcoming resistances, for the ability to rule—as a bond that unites rulers and subjects and betrays and delivers the consciences of the latter, that which is most concealed and intimate and would like to elude obedience, to the former. And if a few individuals of such noble descent are inclined through lofty spirituality to prefer a more withdrawn and contemplative life and reserve for themselves only the most subtle type of rule (over selected disciples or brothers in some order), then religion can even be used as a means for obtaining peace from the noise and exertion of cruder forms of government, and purity from the necessary dirt of all politics. That is how the Brahmins, for example, understood things: by means of a religious organization they gave themselves the power of nominating the kings of the people while they themselves kept and felt apart and outside, as men of higher and supra-royal tasks.Meanwhile religion also gives to some of the ruled the instruction and opportunity to prepare themselves for future ruling and obeying: those slowly ascending classes—in which, thanks to fortunate marital customs, the strength and joy of the will, the will to self-control is ever growing—receive enough nudges and temptations from religion to walk the paths to higher spirituality, to test the feelings of great self-overcoming, of silence and solitude. Asceticism and puritanism are almost indispensable means for educating and ennobling a race that wishes to become master over its origins among the rabble and that works its way up toward future rule.To ordinary human beings, finally—the vast majority who exist for service and the general advantage, and who may exist only for that—religion gives an inestimable contentment with their situation and type, manifold peace of the heart, an ennobling of obedience, one further happiness and sorrow with their peers and something transfiguring and beautifying, something of a justification for the whole everyday character, the whole lowliness, the whole half-brutish poverty of their souls. Religion and religious significance spread the splendor of the sun over such ever-toiling human beings and make their own sight tolerable to them. Religion has the same effect which an Epicurean philosophy has on sufferers of a higher rank: it is refreshing, refining, makes, as it were, the most of suffering, and in the end even sanctifies and justifies. Perhaps nothing in Christianity or Buddhism is as venerable as their art of teaching even the lowliest how to place themselves through piety in an illusory higher order of things and thus to maintain their contentment with the real order, in which their life is hard enough—and precisely this hardness is necessary.62In the end, to be sure—to present the other side of the account of these religions, too, and to expose their uncanny dangerousness—one always pays dearly and terribly when religions do not want to be a means of education and cultivation in the philosopher’s hand but insist on having their own sovereign way, when they themselves want to be ultimate ends and not means among other means. There is among men as in every other animal species an excess of failures, of the sick, degenerating, infirm, who suffer necessarily; the successful cases are, among men too, always the exception—and in view of the fact that man is the as yet undetermined animal, the rare exception. But still worse: the higher the type of man that a man represents, the greater the improbability that he will turn out well The accidental, the law of absurdity in the whole economy of mankind, manifests itself most horribly in its destructive effect on the higher men whose complicated conditions of life can only be calculated with great subtlety and difficulty.What, then, is the attitude of the above-mentioned two greatest religions toward this excess of cases that did not turn out right? They seek to preserve, to preserve alive whatever can possibly be preserved; indeed, as a matter of principle, they side with these cases as religions for sufferers; they agree with all those who suffer life like a sickness and would like to make sure that every other feeling about life should be considered false and should become impossible. Even if the very highest credit is given to this considerate and preserving care, which, besides being directed toward all the others, was and is also directed toward the highest type of man, the type that so far has almost always suffered most; nevertheless, in a total accounting, the sovereign religions we have had so far are among the chief causes that have kept the type “man” on a lower rung—they have preserved too much of what ought to Part Four - Epigrams and Interludes Part Four63Whoever is a teacher through and through takes all things seriously only in relation to his students—even himself.64“Knowledge for its own sake”—that is the last snare of morality: with that one becomes completely entangled in it once more.65The attraction of knowledge would be small if one did not have to overcome so much shame on the way.65a1One is most dishonest to one’s god: he is not allowed to sin.66The inclination to depreciate himself, to let himself be robbed, lied to, and taken advantage of, could be the modesty2 of a god among men.67Love of one is a barbarism; for it is exercised at the expense of all others. The love of God, too.68“I have done that,” says my memory. “I cannot have done that,” says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually—memory yields.369One has watched life badly if one has not also seen the hand that considerately—kills.70If one has character one also has one’s typical experience, which recurs repeatedly.71The sage as astronomer.—As long as you still experience the stars as something “above you” you lack the eye of knowledge.72Not the intensity but the duration of high feelings makes high men.73Whoever reaches his ideal transcends it eo ipso.73a4Many a peacock hides his peacock tail from all eyes—and calls that his pride.74A man with spirit is unbearable if he does not also have at least two other things: gratitude5 and cleanliness.75The degree and kind of a man’s sexuality reach up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit.76Under peaceful conditions a warlike man sets upon himself.77With one’s principles one wants to bully one’s habits, or justify, honor, scold, or conceal them: two men with the same principles probably aim with them at something basically different.78Whoever despises himself still respects himself as one who despises.79A soul that knows it is loved but does not itself love betrays its sediment: what is at the bottom comes up.80A matter that becomes clear ceases to concern us.—What was on the mind of that god who counseled: “Know thyself!” Did he mean: “Cease to concern yourself! Become objective!”— And Socrates?— And “scientific men”?—81It is terrible to die of thirst in the ocean. Do you have to salt your truth so heavily that it does not even—quench thirst any more?82“Pity for all”—would be hardness and tyranny toward you, my dear neighbor!—83Instinct.—When the house burns one forgets even lunch.—Yes, but one eats it later in the ashes.84Woman learns to hate to the extent to which her charms—decrease.85The same affects in man and woman are yet different in tempo: therefore man and woman do not cease to misunderstand each other.86Women themselves always still have in the background of all personal vanity an impersonal contempt—for “woman.”—87Tethered heart, free spirit.—If one tethers one’s heart severely arid imprisons it, one can give one’s spirit many liberties: I have said that once before. But one does not believe me, unless one already knows it—88One begins to mistrust very clever people when they become embarrassed.89Terrible experiences pose the riddle whether the person who has them is not terrible.90Heavy, heavy-spirited people become lighter precisely through what makes others heavier, through hatred and love, and for a time they surface.91So cold, so icy that one burns one’s fingers on him! Every hand is startled when touching him.— And for that very reason some think he glows.92Who has not, for the sake of his good reputation—sacrificed himself once?—93Affability contains no hatred of men, but for that very reason too much contempt for men.94A man’s maturity—consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play.95To be ashamed of one’s immorality—that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one’s morality.96One should part from life as Odysseus parted from Nausicaa—blessing it rather than in love with it.97What? A great man? I always see only the actor of his own ideal.98If we train our conscience, it kisses us while it hurts us.99The voice of disappointment:6 “I listened for an echo and heard nothing but praise—”100In front of ourselves we all pose as simpler than we are: thus we take a rest from our fellow men.101Today the man of knowledge might well feel like God become animal.102Discovering that one is loved in return really ought to disenchant the lover with the beloved. “What? this person is modest enough to love even you? Or stupid enough? Or—or—”103Danger in happiness.7—“Now everything redounds to my best, now I love every destiny—who feels like being my destiny?”104Not their love of men but the impotence of their love of men keeps the Christians of today from—burning us.8105The pia fraus9 offends the taste (the “piety”) of the free spirit, who has “the piety of the search for knowledge,” even more than the impia fraus. Hence his profound lack of understanding for the church, a characteristic of the type “free spirit”—his un-freedom.106In music the passions enjoy themselves.107Once the decision has been made, close your ear even to the best counterargument: sign of a strong character. Thus an occasional will to stupidity.108There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena—109A criminal is frequently not equal to his deed: he makes it smaller and slanders it.10110The lawyers defending a criminal are rarely artists enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of his deed to his advantage.111Our vanity is hardest to wound when our pride has just been wounded.112Those who feel predestined to see and not to believe will find all believers too noisy and obtrusive: they fend them off.113“You want to prepossess him in your favor? Then pretend to be embarrassed in his presence—”114The enormous expectation in sexual love and the sense of shame in this expectation spoils all perspective for women from the start.115Where neither love nor hatred is in the game, a woman’s game is mediocre.116The great epochs of our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us,117The will to overcome an affect is ultimately only the will of another, or of several other, affects.118There is an innocence in admiration; it is found in those to whom it has never yet occurred that they, too, might be admired some day.119The disgust with dirt can be so great that it keeps us from cleaning ourselves—from “justifying” ourselves.120Sensuality often hastens the growth of love so much that the roots remain weak and are easily torn up.121It was subtle of God to learn Greek when he wished to become an author—and not to learn it better.122Enjoying praise is in some people merely a courtesy of the heart—and just the opposite of vanity of the spirit.123Even concubinage has been corrupted—by marriage.124Whoever rejoices on the very stake triumphs not over pain but at the absence of pain that he had expected. A parable.125When we have to change our mind about a person, we hold the inconvenience he causes us very much against him.126A people11 is a detour of nature to get to six or seven great men.—Yes, and then to get around them.127Science offends the modesty of all real women. It makes them feel as if one wanted to peep under their skin—yet worse, under their dress and finery.128The more abstract the truth is that you would teach, the more you have to seduce the senses to it.129The devil has the broadest perspectives for God; therefore he keeps so far away from God—the devil being the most ancient friend of wisdom.130What a man is begins to betray itself when his talent decreases—when he stops showing what he can do. Talent, too, is finery; finery, too, is a hiding place.131The sexes deceive themselves about each other—because at bottom they honor and love only themselves (or their own ideal, to put it more pleasantly). Thus man likes woman peaceful—but woman is essentially unpeaceful, like a cat, however well she may have trained herself to seem peaceable.132One is best punished for one’s virtues.133Whoever does not know how to find the way to his ideal lives more frivolously and impudently than the man without an ideal.134All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.135Pharisaism is not a degeneration in a good man: a good deal of it is rather the condition of all being good.136One seeks a midwife for his thoughts, another someone whom he can help: origin of a good conversation.137When associating with scholars and artists we easily miscalculate in opposite directions: behind a remarkable scholar one finds, not infrequently, a mediocre man, and behind a mediocre artist quite often—a very remarkable man.138When we are awake we also do what we do in our dreams: we invent and make up the person with whom we associate—and immediately forget it.139In revenge and in love woman is more barbarous than man.140Rule as a riddle.—“If the bond shan’t burst—bite upon it first.”141The abdomen is the reason why man does not easily take himself for a god.142The chastest words I have heard: “Dans le veritable amour c’est l’âme, qui enveloppe le corps.”12143Our vanity desires that what we do best should be considered what is hardest for us. Concerning the origin of many a morality.144When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexually. Sterility itself disposes one toward a certain masculinity of taste; for man is, if I may say so, “the sterile animal.”145Comparing man and woman on the whole, one may say: woman would not have the genius for finery if she did not have an instinct for a secondary role.146Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.147From old Florentine novels; also—from life: “Buona femmina e mala femmina vuol bastone”13 Sacchetti, Nov. 86.148Seducing one’s neighbor to a good opinion and afterwards believing piously in this opinion—who could equal women in this art?—149What a time experiences as evil is usually an untimely echo of what was formerly experienced as good—the atavism of a more ancient ideal.150Around the hero everything turns into a tragedy; around the demigod, into a satyr play; and around God—what? perhaps into “world”?—151Having a talent is not enough: one also requires your permission for it—right, my friends?152“Where the tree of knowledge stands, there is always Paradise”: thus speak the oldest and the youngest serpents.153Whatever is done from love always occurs beyond good and evil.154Objections, digressions, gay mistrust, the delight in mockery are signs of health: everything unconditional belongs in pathology.155The sense of the tragic gains and wanes with sensuality.156Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.157The thought of suicide is a powerful comfort: it helps one through many a dreadful night.158To our strongest drive, the tyrant in us, not only our reason bows but also our conscience.159One has to repay good and ill—but why precisely to the person who has done us good or ill?160One no longer loves one’s insight enough once one communicates it.161Poets treat their experiences shamelessly: they exploit them.162“Our neighbor14—is not our neighbor but his neighbor”—thus thinks every nation.163Love brings the high and concealed characteristics of the lover into the light—what is rare and exceptional in him: to that extent it easily deceives regarding his normality.164Jesus said to his Jews: “The law was for servants—love God as I love him, as his son! What are morals to us sons of God!”165Regarding all parties.—A shepherd always needs a bellwether—or he himself must occasionally be a wether.166Even when the mouth lies, the way it looks still tells the truth.167In men who are hard, intimacy involves shame—and is precious.168Christianity gave Eros poison to drink: he did not die of it but degenerated—into a vice.169Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.170Praise is more obtrusive than a reproach.171In a man devoted to knowledge, pity seems almost ridiculous, like delicate hands on a cyclops.172From love of man one occasionally embraces someone at random (because one cannot embrace all): but one must not tell him this—173One does not hate as long as one still despises, but only those whom one esteems equal or higher.174You utilitarians, you, too, love everything useful only as a vehicle for your inclinations; you, too, really find the noise of its wheels insufferable?175In the end one loves one’s desire and not what is desired.176The vanity of others offends our taste only when it offends our vanity.177Perhaps nobody yet has been truthful enough about what “truthfulness” is.178One does not credit clever people with their follies: what a loss of human rights!179The consequences of our actions take hold of us, quite indifferent to our claim that meanwhile we have “improved.”180There is an innocence in lying which is the sign of good faith in a cause.181It is inhuman to bless where one is cursed.182The familiarity of those who are superior embitters because it may not be returned.—183“Not that you lied to me, but that I no longer believe you, has shaken me”—184The high spirits of kindness may look like malice.185“I don’t like him.”—Why?—“I am not equal to him.”—Has any human being ever answered that way?1In the original edition of 1886 and in the second edition of 1891 this section bears the same number (65) as that preceding it. In the third and fourth editions of 1893 and 1894, the editor introduced minor changes and renumbered all the sections from this point on. In the standard editions (the so-called Grossoktav and the Musarion editions) this section is distinguished from the one preceding it by the addition of an “a.” Schlechta, whose edition of the works in three volumes is widely considered impeccable philologically, follows the standard editions although he purports to follow the edition of 1886. Similar instances will be noted in subsequent notes.2Scham: in most other places (see sections 40 and 65 above) this word has been translated as “shame.”3Freud’s theory of repression in nuce—or in ovo. Other sections that put one in mind of Freud include 3 above and 75 below; but this list could easily be lengthened.4See section 65a, note 1, above.5Again, as in sections 49 and 58, gratitude is virtually an antonym of resentment.6Emphasized in most editions, but not in that of 1886 nor in Schlechta’s.7See note 6 above.8If Christians were really passionately concerned for the salvation of their fellow men in the hereafter, they would still burn those whose heresies lead legions into eternal damnation.9“Pious fraud” or holy lie; here juxtaposed with “impious fraud” or unholy lie. The former means deceiving men for the sake of their own salvation, as in Plato’s Republic, 414C.10One of Sartre’s leitmotifs; cf. Electra in Les Mouches (The Flies) and the problem of Les Mains sales (Dirty Hands).11Ein Volk: the polemical and sarcastic thrust of this epigram depends on the heavy reliance of German nationalism—both in Nietzsche’s time and in the twentieth century—on the mystique of the Volk.12“In true love it is the soul that envelops the body.”13“Good and bad women want a stick.”14In the religious sense. Part Five - Natural History of Morals Part Five186The moral sentiment in Europe today is as refined, old, diverse, irritable, and subtle, as the “science of morals” that accompanies it is still young, raw, clumsy, and butterfingered—an attractive contrast that occasionally even becomes visible and incarnate in the person of a moralist. Even the term “science of morals” is much too arrogant considering what it designates, and offends good taste—which always prefers more modest terms.One should own up in all strictness to what is still necessary here for a long time to come, to what alone is justified so far: to collect material, to conceptualize and arrange a vast realm of subtle feelings of value and differences of value which are alive, grow, beget, and perish—and perhaps attempts to present vividly some of the more frequent and recurring forms of such living crystallizations—all to prepare a typology of morals.To be sure, so far one has not been so modest. With a stiff seriousness that inspires laughter, all our philosophers demanded something far more exalted, presumptuous, and solemn from themselves as soon as they approached the study of morality: they wanted to supply a rational foundation for morality—and every philosopher so far has believed that he has provided such a foundation. Morality itself, however, was accepted as “given.” How remote from their clumsy pride was that task which they considered insignificant and left in dust and must—the task of description—although the subtlest fingers and senses can scarcely be subtle enough for it.Just because our moral philosophers knew the facts of morality only very approximately in arbitrary extracts or in accidental epitomes—for example, as the morality of their environment, their class, their church, the spirit of their time, their climate and part of the world—just because they were poorly informed and not even very curious about different peoples, times, and past ages—they never laid eyes on the real problems of morality; for these emerge only when we compare many moralities. In all “science of morals” so far one thing was lacking, strange as it may sound: the problem of morality itself; what was lacking was any suspicion that there was something problematic here. What the philosophers called “a rational foundation for morality” and tried to supply was, seen in the right light, merely a scholarly variation of the common faith in the prevalent morality; a new means of expression for this faith; and thus just another fact within a particular morality; indeed, in the last analysis a kind of denial that this morality might ever be considered problematic—certainly the very opposite of an examination, analysis, questioning, and vivisection of this very faith.Listen, for example, with what almost venerable innocence Schopenhauer still described his task, and then draw your conclusions about the scientific standing of a “science” whose ultimate masters still talk like children and little old women: “The principle,” he says (p. 136 of Grundprobleme der Moral),1 “the fundamental proposition on whose contents all moral philosophers are really2 agreed—neminem laede, immo omnes, quantum potes, juva3—that is really the proposition for which all moralists endeavor to find the rational foundation … the real basis of ethics for which one has been looking for thousands of years as for the philosopher’s stone.”The difficulty of providing a rational foundation for the principle cited may indeed be great—as is well known, Schopenhauer did not succeed either—and whoever has once felt deeply how insipidly false and sentimental this principle is in a world whose essence is will to power, may allow himself to be reminded that Schopenhauer, though a pessimist, really—played the flute. Every day, after dinner: one should read his biography on that. And incidentally: a pessimist, one who denies God and the world but comes to a stop before morality—who affirms morality and plays the flute—the laede neminem morality—what? is that really—a pessimist?187Even apart from the value of such claims as “there is a categorical imperative in us,” one can still always ask: what does such a claim tell us about the man who makes it? There are moralities which are meant to justify their creator before others. Other moralities are meant to calm him and lead him to be satisfied with himself. With yet others he wants to crucify himself and humiliate himself. With others he wants to wreak revenge, with others conceal himself, with others transfigure himself and place himself way up, at a distance. This morality is used by its creator to forget, that one to have others forget him or something about him. Some moralists want to vent their power and creative whims on humanity; some others, perhaps including Kant, suggest with their morality: “What deserves respect in me is that I can obey—and you ought not to be different from me.”—In short, moralities are also merely a sign language of the affects.188Every morality is, as opposed to laisser aller4 a bit of tyranny against “nature;” also against “reason;” but this in itself is no objection, as long as we do not have some other morality which permits us to decree that every kind of tyranny and unreason is impermissible. What is essential and inestimable in every morality is that it constitutes a long compulsion: to understand Stoicism or Port-Royal or Puritanism, one should recall the compulsion under which every language so far has achieved strength and freedom—the metrical compulsion of rhyme and rhythm.How much trouble the poets and orators of all peoples have taken—not excepting a few prose writers today in whose ear there dwells an inexorable conscience—“for the sake of some foolishness,” as utilitarian dolts say, feeling smart—“submitting abjectly to capricious laws,” as anarchists say, feeling “free,” even “free-spirited.” But the curious fact is that all there is or has been on earth of freedom, subtlety, boldness, dance, and masterly sureness, whether in thought itself or in government, or in rhetoric and persuasion, in the arts just as in ethics, has developed only owing to the “tyranny of such capricious laws;” and in all seriousness, the probability is by no means small that precisely this is “nature” and “natural”—and not that laisser aller.Every artist knows how far from any feeling of letting himself go his “most natural” state is—the free ordering, placing, disposing, giving form in the moment of “inspiration”—and how strictly and subtly he obeys thousandfold laws precisely then, laws that precisely on account of their hardness and determination defy all formulation through concepts (even the firmest concept is, compared with them, not free of fluctuation, multiplicity, and ambiguity).What is essential “in heaven and on earth” seems to be, to say it once more, that there should be obedience over a long period of time and in a single direction: given that, something always develops, and has developed, for whose sake it is worth while to live on earth; for example, virtue, art, music, dance, reason, spirituality—something transfiguring, subtle, mad, and divine. The long unfreedom of the spirit, the mistrustful constraint in the communicability of thoughts, the discipline thinkers imposed on themselves to think within the directions laid down by a church or court, or under Aristotelian presuppositions, the long spiritual will to interpret all events under a Christian schema and to rediscover and justify the Christian god in every accident—all this, however forced, capricious, hard, gruesome, and anti-rational, has shown itself to be the means through which the European spirit has been trained to strength, ruthless curiosity, and subtle mobility, though admittedly in the process an irreplaceable amount of strength and spirit had to be crushed, stifled, and ruined (for here, as everywhere, “nature” manifests herself as she is, in all her prodigal and indifferent magnificence which is outrageous but noble).That for thousands of years European thinkers thought merely in order to prove something—today, conversely, we suspect every thinker who “wants to prove something”—that the conclusions that ought to be the result of their most rigorous reflection were always settled from the start, just as it used to be with Asiatic astrology, and still is today with the innocuous Christian-moral interpretation of our most intimate personal experiences “for the glory of God” and “for the salvation of the soul”—this tyranny, this caprice, this rigorous and grandiose stupidity has educated the spirit. Slavery is, as it seems, both in the cruder and in the more subtle sense, the indispensable means of spiritual discipline and cultivation,5 too. Consider any morality with this in mind: what there is in it of “nature” teaches hatred of the laisser aller, of any all-too-great freedom, and implants the need for limited horizons and the nearest tasks—teaching the narrowing of our perspective, and thus in a certain sense stupidity, as a condition of life and growth.“You shall obey—someone and for a long time: else you will perish and lose the last respect for yourself”—this appears to me to be the moral imperative of nature which, to be sure, is neither “categorical” as the old Kant would have it (hence the “else”) nor addressed to the individual (what do individuals matter to her?), but to peoples, races, ages, classes—but above all to the whole human animal, to man.189Industrious races find it very troublesome to endure leisure: it was a masterpiece of English instinct to make the Sabbath so holy and so boring that the English begin unconsciously to lust again for their work- and week-day. It is a kind of cleverly invented, cleverly inserted fast, the like of which is also encountered frequently in the ancient world (although, in fairness to southern peoples, not exactly in regard to work). There have to be fasts of many kinds; and wherever powerful drives and habits prevail, legislators have to see to it that intercalary days are inserted on which such a drive is chained and learns again to hunger. Viewed from a higher vantage point, whole generations and ages that make their appearance, infected with some moral fanaticism, seem to be such times of constraint and fasting during which a drive learns to stoop and submit, but also to purify and sharpen itself. A few philosophical sects, too, permit such an interpretation (for example, the Stoa in the midst of Hellenistic culture with its lascivious atmosphere, overcharged with aphrodisiac odors).This is also a hint for an explanation of the paradox: why it was precisely during the most Christian period of Europe and altogether only under the pressure of Christian value judgments that the sex drive sublimated6 itself into love (amour-passion).190There is something in the morality of Plato that does not really belong to Plato but is merely encountered in his philosophy—one might say, in spite of Plato: namely, the Socratism for which he was really too noble. “Nobody wants to do harm to himself, therefore all that is bad is done involuntarily. For the bad do harm to themselves: this they would not do if they knew that the bad is bad. Hence the bad are bad only because of an error; if one removes the error, one necessarily makes them—good.”This type of inference smells of the rabble that sees nothing in bad actions but the unpleasant consequences and really judges, “it is stupid to do what is bad,” while “good” is taken without further ado to be identical with “useful and agreeable.” In the case of every moral utilitarianism one may immediately infer the same origin and follow one’s nose: one will rarely go astray.Plato did everything he could in order to read something refined and noble into the proposition of his teacher—above all, himself. He was the most audacious of all interpreters and took the whole Socrates only the way one picks a popular tune and folk song from the streets in order to vary it into the infinite and impossible—namely, into all of his own masks and multiplicities. In a jest, Homeric at that: what is the Platonic Socrates after all if not prosthe Platōn opithen te Platōn messe te Chimaira.7191The ancient theological problem of “faith” and “knowledge”—or, more clearly, of instinct and reason—in other words, the question whether regarding the valuation of things instinct deserves more authority than rationality, which wants us to evaluate and act in accordance with reasons, with a “why?”—in other words, in accordance with expedience and utility—this is still the ancient moral problem that first emerged in the person of Socrates and divided thinking people long before Christianity. Socrates himself, to be sure, with the taste of his talent—that of a superior dialectician—had initially sided with reason; and in fact, what did he do his life long but laugh at the awkward incapacity of noble Athenians who, like all noble men, were men of instinct and never could give sufficient information about the reasons for their actions? In the end, however, privately and secretly, he laughed at himself, too: in himself he found, before his subtle conscience and self-examination, the same difficulty and incapacity. But is that any reason, he encouraged himself, for giving up the instincts? One has to see to it that they as well as reason receive their due—one must follow the instincts but persuade reason to assist them with good reasons. This was the real falseness of that great ironic, so rich in secrets; he got his conscience to be satisfied with a kind of self-trickery: at bottom, he had seen through the irrational element in moral judgments.Plato, more innocent in such matters and lacking the craftiness of the plebeian, wanted to employ all his strength—the greatest strength any philosopher so far has had at his disposal—to prove to himself that reason and instinct of themselves tend toward one goal, the good, “God.” And since Plato, all theologians and philosophers are on the same track—that is, in moral matters it has so far been instinct, or what the Christians call “faith,” or “the herd,” as I put it, that has triumphed. Perhaps Descartes should be excepted, as the father of rationalism (and hence the grandfather of the Revolution) who conceded authority to reason alone: but reason is merely an instrument, and Descartes was superficial.192Whoever has traced the history of an individual science finds a clue in its development for understanding the most ancient and common processes of all “knowledge and cognition.” There as here it is the rash hypotheses, the fictions, the good dumb will to “believe,” the lack of mistrust and patience that are developed first; our senses learn only late, and never learn entirely, to be subtle, faithful, and cautious organs of cognition. Our eye finds it more comfortable to respond to a given stimulus by reproducing once more an image that it has produced many times before, instead of registering what is different and new in an impression. The latter would require more strength, more “morality.” Hearing something new is embarrassing and difficult for the ear; foreign music we do not hear well. When we hear another language we try involuntarily to form the sounds we hear into words that sound more familiar and more like home to us: thus the German, for example, transformed arcubalista, when he heard that, into Armbrust.8 What is new finds our senses, too, hostile and reluctant; and even in the “simplest” processes of sensation the affects dominate, such as fear, love, hatred, including the passive affects of laziness.Just as little as a reader today reads all of the individual words (let alone syllables) on a page—rather he picks about five words at random out of twenty and “guesses” at the meaning that probably belongs to these five words—just as little do we see a tree exactly and completely with reference to leaves, twigs, color, and form; it is so very much easier for us simply to improvise some approximation of a tree. Even in the midst of the strangest experiences we still do the same: we make up the major part of the experience and can scarcely be forced not to contemplate some event as its “inventors.” All this means: basically and from time immemorial we are—accustomed to lying. Or to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one knows.In an animated conversation I often see the face of the person with whom I am talking so clearly and so subtly determined in accordance with the thought he expresses, or that I believe has been produced in him, that this degree of clarity far surpasses my powers of vision: so the subtle shades of the play of the muscles and the expression of the eyes must have been made up by me. Probably the person made an altogether different face, or none at all.193Quidquid luce fuit, tenebris agit:9 but the other way around, too. What we experience in dreams—assuming that we experience it often—belongs in the end just as much to the over-all economy of our soul as anything experienced “actually”: we are richer or poorer on account of it, have one need more or less, and finally are led a little by the habits of our dreams even in broad daylight and in the most cheerful moments of our wide-awake spirit.Suppose someone has flown often in his dreams and finally, as soon as he dreams, he is conscious of his power and art of flight as if it were his privilege, also his characteristic and enviable happiness. He believes himself capable of realizing every kind of arc and angle simply with the lightest impulse; he knows the feeling of a certain divine frivolity, an “upward” without tension and constraint, a “downward” without condescension and humiliation—without gravity! How could a human being who had had such dream experiences and dream habits fail to find that the word “happiness” had a different color and definition in his waking life, too? How could he fail to—desire happiness differently? “Rising” as described by poets must seem to him, compared with this “flying,” too earthbound, muscle-bound, forced, too “grave.”194The difference among men becomes manifest not only in the difference between their tablets of goods—in the fact that they consider different goods worth striving for and also disagree about what is more and less valuable, about the order of rank of the goods they recognize in common—it becomes manifest even more in what they take for really having and possessing something good.Regarding a woman, for example, those men who are more modest consider the mere use of the body and sexual gratification a sufficient and satisfying sign of “having,” of possession. Another type, with a more suspicious and demanding thirst for possession, sees the “question mark,” the illusory quality of such “having” and wants subtler tests, above all in order to know whether the woman does not only give herself to him but also gives up for his sake what she has or would like to have: only then does she seem to him “possessed.” A third type, however, does not reach the end of his mistrust and desire for having even so: he asks himself whether the woman, when she gives up everything for him, does not possibly do this for a phantom of him. He wants to be known deep down, abysmally deep down, before he is capable of being loved at all; he dares to let himself be fathomed. He feels that his beloved is fully in his possession only when she no longer deceives herself about him, when she loves him just as much for his devilry and hidden insatiability as for his graciousness, patience, and spirituality.One type wants to possess a people—and all the higher arts of a Cagliostro and Catiline suit him to that purpose. Someone else, with a more subtle thirst for possession, says to himself: “One may not deceive where one wants to possess.” The idea that a mask of him might command the heart of the people10 irritates him and makes him impatient: “So I must let myself be known, and first must know myself.”Among helpful and charitable people one almost regularly encounters that clumsy ruse which first doctors the person to be helped—as if, for example, he “deserved” help, required just their help, and would prove to be profoundly grateful for all help, faithful and submissive. With these fancies they dispose of the needy as of possessions, being charitable and helpful people from a desire for possessions. One finds them jealous if one crosses or anticipates them when they want to help.Involuntarily, parents turn children into something similar to themselves—they call that “education.” Deep in her heart, no mother doubts that the child she has borne is her property; no father contests his own right to subject it to his concepts and valuations. Indeed, formerly it seemed fair for fathers (among the ancient Germans, for example) to decide on the life or death of the newborn as they saw fit. And like the father, teachers, classes, priests, and princes still see, even today, in every new human being an unproblematic opportunity for another possession. So it follows—195The Jews—a people “born for slavery,” as Tacitus and the whole ancient world say; “the chosen people among the peoples,” as they themselves say and believe—the Jews have brought off that miraculous feat of an inversion of values, thanks to which life on earth has acquired a novel and dangerous attraction for a couple of millennia: their prophets have fused “rich,” “godless,” “evil,” “violent,” and “sensual” into one and were the first to use the word “world” as an opprobrium. This inversion of values (which includes using the word “poor” as synonymous with “holy” and “friend”) constitutes the significance of the Jewish people: they mark the beginning of the slave rebellion in morals.11196Countless dark bodies are to be inferred near the sun—and we shall never see them. Among ourselves, this is a parable; and a psychologist of morals reads the whole writing of the stars only as a parable- and sign-language which can be used to bury much in silence.197We misunderstand the beast of prey and the man of prey (for example, Cesare Borgia)12 thoroughly, we misunderstand “nature,” as long as we still look for something “pathological” at the bottom of these healthiest of all tropical monsters and growths, or even for some “hell” that is supposed to be innate in them; yet this is what almost all moralists so far have done. Could it be that moralists harbor a hatred of the primeval forest and the tropics? And that the “tropical man” must be discredited at any price, whether as sickness and degeneration of man or as his own hell and self-torture? Why? In favor of the “temperate zones”? In favor of temperate men? Of those who are “moral”? Who are mediocre?—This for the chapter “Morality as Timidity.”198All these moralities that address themselves to the individual, for the sake of his “happiness,” as one says—what are they but counsels for behavior in relation to the degree of dangerousness in which the individual lives with himself; recipes against his passions, his good and bad inclinations insofar as they have the will to power and want to play the master; little and great prudences and artifices that exude the nook odor of old nostrums and of the wisdom of old women; all of them baroque and unreasonable in form—because they address themselves to “all,” because they generalize where one must not generalize. All of them speak unconditionally, take themselves for unconditional, all of them flavored with more than one grain of salt and tolerable only—at times even seductive—when they begin to smell over-spiced and dangerous, especially “of the other world.” All of it is, measured intellectually, worth very little and not by a long shot “science,” much less “wisdom,” but rather, to say it once more, three times more, prudence, prudence, prudence, mixed with stupidity, stupidity, stupidity—whether it be that indifference and statue coldness against the hot-headed folly of the affects which the Stoics advised and administered; or that laughing-no-more and weeping-no-more of Spinoza, his so naively advocated destruction of the affects through their analysis and vivisection; or that tuning down of the affects to a harmless mean according to which they may be satisfied, the Aristotelianism of morals; even morality as enjoyment of the affects in a deliberate thinness and spiritualization by means of the symbolism of art, say, as music, or as love of God and of man for God’s sake—for in religion the passions enjoy the rights of citizens again, assuming that—; finally even that accommodating and playful surrender to the affects, as Hafiz and Goethe taught it, that bold dropping of the reins, that spiritual-physical licentia morum13 in the exceptional case of wise old owls and sots14 for whom it “no longer holds much danger.” This, too, for the chapter “Morality as Timidity.”199Inasmuch as at all times, as long as there have been human beings, there have also been herds of men (clans, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches) and always a great many people who obeyed, compared with the small number of those commanding—considering, then, that nothing has been exercised and cultivated better and longer among men so far than obedience—it may fairly be assumed that the need for it is now innate in the average man, as a kind of formal conscience that commands: “thou shalt unconditionally do something, unconditionally not do something else,” in short, “thou shalt.” This need seeks to satisfy itself and to fill its form with some content. According to its strength, impatience, and tension, it seizes upon things as a rude appetite, rather indiscriminately, and accepts whatever is shouted into its ears by someone who issues commands—parents, teachers, laws, class prejudices, public opinions.The strange limits of human development, the way it hesitates, takes so long, often turns back, and moves in circles, is due to the fact that the herd instinct of obedience is inherited best, and at the expense of the art of commanding. If we imagine this instinct progressing for once to its ultimate excesses, then those who command and are independent would eventually be lacking altogether; or they would secretly suffer from a bad conscience and would find it necessary to deceive themselves before they could command—as if they, too, merely obeyed. This state is actually encountered in Europe today: I call it the moral hypocrisy of those commanding. They know no other way to protect themselves against their bad conscience than to pose as the executors of more ancient or higher commands (of ancestors, the constitution, of right, the laws, or even of God). Or they even borrow herd maxims from the herd’s way of thinking, such as “first servants of their people” or “instruments of the common weal.”On the other side, the herd man in Europe today gives himself the appearance of being the only permissible kind of man, and glorifies his attributes, which make him tame, easy to get along with, and useful to the herd, as if they were the truly human virtues: namely, public spirit, benevolence, consideration, industriousness, moderation, modesty, indulgence, and pity. In those cases, however, where one considers leaders and bellwethers indispensable, people today make one attempt after another to add together clever herd men by way of replacing commanders: all parliamentary constitutions, for example, have this origin. Nevertheless, the appearance of one who commands unconditionally strikes these herd-animal Europeans as an immense comfort and salvation from a gradually intolerable pressure, as was last attested in a major way by the effect of Napoleon’s appearance. The history of Napoleon’s reception is almost the history of the higher happiness attained by this whole century in its most valuable human beings and moments.200In an age of disintegration that mixes races indiscriminately, human beings have in their bodies the heritage of multiple origins, that is, opposite, and often not merely opposite, drives and value standards that fight each other and rarely permit each other any rest. Such human beings of late cultures and refracted lights will on the average be weaker human beings: their most profound desire is that the war they are should come to an end. Happiness appears to them, in agreement with a tranquilizing (for example, Epicurean or Christian) medicine and way of thought, pre-eminently as the happiness of resting, of not being disturbed, of satiety, of finally attained unity, as a “sabbath of sabbaths,” to speak with the holy rhetorician Augustine who was himself such a human being.But when the opposition and war in such a nature have the effect of one more charm and incentive of life—and if, moreover, in addition to his powerful and irreconcilable drives, a real mastery and subtlety in waging war against oneself, in other words, self-control, self-outwitting, has been inherited or cultivated, too—then those magical, incomprehensible, and unfathomable ones arise, those enigmatic men predestined for victory and seduction, whose most beautiful expression is found in Alcibiades and Caesar (to whose company I should like to add that first European after my taste, the Hohenstaufen Frederick II),15 and among artists perhaps Leonardo da Vinci. They appear in precisely the same ages when that weaker type with its desire for rest comes to the fore: both types belong together and owe their origin to the same causes.201As long as the utility reigning in moral value judgments is solely the utility of the herd, as long as one considers only the preservation of the community, and immorality is sought exactly and exclusively in what seems dangerous to the survival of the community—there can be no morality of “neighbor love.” Supposing that even then there was a constant little exercise of consideration-pity, fairness, mildness, reciprocity of assistance; supposing that even in that state of society all those drives are active that later receive the honorary designation of “virtues” and eventually almost coincide with the concept of “morality”—in that period they do not yet at all belong in the realm of moral valuations; they are still extra-moral. An act of pity, for example, was not considered either good or bad, moral or immoral, in the best period of the Romans; and even when it was praised, such praise was perfectly compatible with a kind of disgruntled disdain as soon as it was juxtaposed with an action that served the welfare of the whole, of the res publica.16In the last analysis, “love of the neighbor” is always something secondary, partly conventional and arbitrary-illusory in relation to fear of the neighbor. After the structure of society is fixed on the whole and seems secure against external dangers, it is this fear of the neighbor that again creates new perspectives of moral valuation. Certain strong and dangerous drives, like an enterprising spirit, foolhardiness, vengefulness, craftiness, rapacity, and the lust to rule, which had so far not merely been honored insofar as they were socially useful—under different names, to be sure, from those chosen here—but had to be trained and cultivated to make them great (because one constantly needed them in view of the dangers to the whole community, against the enemies of the community), are now experienced as doubly dangerous, since the channels to divert them are lacking, and, step upon step, they are branded as immoral and abandoned to slander.Now the opposite drives and inclinations receive moral honors; step upon step, the herd instinct draws its conclusions. How much or how little is dangerous to the community, dangerous to equality, in an opinion, in a state or affect, in a will, in a talent—that now constitutes the moral perspective: here, too, fear is again the mother of morals.The highest and strongest drives, when they break out passionately and drive the individual far above the average and the flats of the herd conscience, wreck the self-confidence of the community, its faith in itself, and it is as if its spine snapped. Hence just these drives are branded and slandered most. High and independent spirituality, the will to stand alone, even a powerful reason are experienced as dangers; everything that elevates an individual above the herd and intimidates the neighbor is henceforth called evil; and the fair, modest, submissive, conforming mentality, the mediocrity of desires attains moral designations and honors. Eventually, under very peaceful conditions, the opportunity and necessity for educating one’s feelings to severity and hardness is lacking more and more; and every severity, even in justice, begins to disturb the conscience; any high and hard nobility and self-reliance is almost felt to be an insult and arouses mistrust; the “lamb,” even more the “sheep,” gains in respect.There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining “punishment” and “being supposed to punish” hurts it, arouses fear in it. “Is it not enough to render him undangerous? Why still punish? Punishing itself is terrible.” With this question, herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its ultimate consequence. Supposing that one could altogether abolish danger, the reason for fear, this morality would be abolished, too, eo ipso: it would no longer be needed, it would no longer consider itself necessary.Whoever examines the conscience of the European today will have to pull the same imperative out of a thousand moral folds and hideouts—the imperative of herd timidity: “we want that some day there should be nothing any more to be afraid of!” Some day—throughout Europe, the will and way to this day is now called “progress.”17202Let us immediately say once more what we have already said a hundred times, for today’s ears resist such truths—our truths. We know well enough how insulting it sounds when anybody counts man, unadorned and without metaphor, among the animals; but it will be charged against us as almost a guilt that precisely for the men of “modern ideas” we constantly employ such expressions as “herd,” “herd instincts,” and so forth. What can be done about it? We cannot do anything else; for here exactly lies our novel insight. We have found that in all major moral judgments Europe is now of one mind, including even the countries dominated by the influence of Europe: plainly, one now knows in Europe what Socrates thought he did not know and what that famous old serpent once promised to teach—today one “knows” what is good and evil.18Now it must sound harsh and cannot be heard easily when we keep insisting: that which here believes it knows, that which here glorifies itself with its praises and reproaches, calling itself good, that is the instinct of the herd animal, man, which has scored a breakthrough and attained prevalence and predominance over other instincts—and this development is continuing in accordance with the growing physiological approximation and assimilation of which it is the symptom. Morality in Europe today is herd animal morality—in other words, as we understand it, merely one type of human morality beside which, before which, and after which many other types, above all higher moralities, are, or ought to be, possible. But this morality resists such a “possibility,” such an “ought” with all its power: it says stubbornly and inexorably, “I am morality itself, and nothing besides is morality.” Indeed, with the help of a religion which indulged and flattered the most sublime herd-animal desires, we have reached the point where we find even in political and social institutions an ever more visible expression of this morality: the democratic movement is the heir of the Christian movement.But there are indications that its tempo is still much too slow and sleepy for the more impatient, for the sick, the sufferers of the instinct mentioned: witness the ever madder howling of the anarchist dogs who are baring their fangs more and more obviously and roam through the alleys of European culture. They seem opposites of the peacefully industrious democrats and ideologists of revolution, and even more so of the doltish philosophasters and brotherhood enthusiasts who call themselves socialists and want a “free society;” but in fact they are at one with the lot in their thorough and instinctive hostility to every other form of society except that of the autonomous herd (even to the point of repudiating the very concepts of “master” and “servant”—ni dieu ni maître19 runs a socialist formula). They are at one in their tough resistance to every special claim, every special right and privilege (which means in the last analysis, every right: for once all are equal nobody needs “rights” any more). They are at one in their mistrust of punitive justice (as if it were a violation of those who are weaker, a wrong against the necessary consequence of all previous society). But they are also at one in the religion of pity, in feeling with all who feel, live, and suffer (down to the animal, up to “God”—the excess of a “pity with God” belongs in a democratic age). They are at one, the lot of them, in the cry and the impatience of pity, in their deadly hatred of suffering generally, in their almost feminine inability to remain spectators, to let someone suffer. They are at one in their involuntary plunge into gloom and unmanly tenderness under whose spell Europe seems threatened by a new Buddhism. They are at one in their faith in the morality of shared pity, as if that were morality in itself, being the height, the attained height of man, the sole hope of the future, the consolation of present man, the great absolution from all former guilt. They are at one, the lot of them, in their faith in the community as the savior, in short, in the herd, in “themselves”—203We have a different faith; to us the democratic movement is not only a form of the decay of political organization but a form of the decay, namely the diminution, of man, making him mediocre and lowering his value. Where, then, must we reach with our hopes?Toward new philosophers; there is no choice; toward spirits strong and original enough to provide the stimuli for opposite valuations and to revalue and invert “eternal values;” toward forerunners, toward men of the future who in the present tie the knot and constraint that forces the will of millennia upon new tracks. To teach man the future of man as his will, as dependent on a human will, and to prepare great ventures and over-all attempts of discipline and cultivation by way of putting an end to that gruesome dominion of nonsense and accident that has so far been called “history”—the nonsense of the “greatest number” is merely its ultimate form: at some time new types of philosophers and commanders will be necessary for that, and whatever has existed on earth of concealed, terrible, and benevolent spirits, will look pale and dwarfed by comparison. It is the image of such leaders that we envisage: may I say this out loud, you free spirits? The conditions that one would have partly to create and partly to exploit for their genesis; the probable ways and tests that would enable a soul to grow to such a height and force that it would feel the compulsion for such tasks; a revaluation of values under whose new pressure and hammer a conscience would be steeled, a heart turned to bronze, in order to endure the weight of such responsibility; on the other hand, the necessity of such leaders, the frightening danger that they might fail to appear or that they might turn out badly or degenerate—these are our real worries and gloom—do you know that, you free spirits?—these are the heavy distant thoughts and storms that pass over the sky of our life.There are few pains as sore as once having seen, guessed, felt how an extraordinary human being strayed from his path and degenerated.20 But anyone who has the rare eye for the over-all danger that “man” himself degenerates; anyone who, like us, has recognized the monstrous fortuity that has so far had its way and play regarding the future of man—a game in which no hand, and not even a finger, of God took part as a player; anyone who fathoms the calamity that lies concealed in the absurd guilelessness and blind confidence of “modern ideas” and even more in the whole Christian-European morality—suffers from an anxiety that is past all comparisons. With a single glance he sees what, given a favorable accumulation and increase of forces and tasks, might yet be made of man; he knows with all the knowledge of his conscience how man is still unexhausted for the greatest possibilities and how often the type “man” has already confronted enigmatic decisions and new paths—he knows still better from his most painful memories what wretched things have so far usually broken a being of the highest rank that was in the process of becoming, so that it broke, sank, and became contemptible.The over-all degeneration of man down to what today appears to the socialist dolts and flatheads as their “man of the future”—as their ideal—this degeneration and diminution of man into the perfect herd animal (or, as they say, to the man of the “free society”), this animalization of man into the dwarf animal of equal rights and claims, is possible, there is no doubt of it. Anyone who has once thought through this possibility to the end knows one kind of nausea that other men don’t know—but perhaps also a new task!—1First edition of 1886 and second edition of 1891: “das Princip, sagt er (S. 136 der Grundprobleme der Moral), der Grundsatz …”   Musarion edition of the Werke: “das Princip, sagt er (S. 137 der Grundprobleme der Ethik), der Grundsatz …”   Schlechta’s edition, which purports to follow the original edition, actually departs even a little further from it than the Musarionausgabe: “das Princip” sagt er (S. 137 der Grundprobleme der Ethik), “der Grundsatz …”   The correct title of Schopenhauer’s book is Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik (the two fundamental problems of ethics), and in the original edition of 1841 the quoted passage is found. Nietzsche neither placed the title in quotes nor italicized it, and his slight variation of the title is less odd than the fact that on Schopenhauer’s own title page of 1841 the title of the second essay, which Nietzsche cites, is given as “Ueber das Fundament der Moral, nicht gekrönt von der K. Dänischen Societät der Wissenschaften, zu Kopenhagen, den 30. Januar 1840” (“On the Foundation of Morals, not awarded a prize by the Danish Royal Society …”). Turning the page, one finds the table of contents, in which the title of the second essay is given as follows: “Preisschrift über die Grundlage der Moral” (Prize essay on the basis of morals). (The heading agrees with the table of contents, not with Schopenhauer’s title page.) If Schopenhauer could say in one instance Fundament and in the other Grundlage, Nietzsche might as well say Moral instead of Ethik; moreover, the word in the title that concerned Nietzsche was Moral, not Ethik.   The editors who changed the title and page reference given by Nietzsche failed to insert three dots in the quotation itself, to indicate a minor omission of two and a half lines between “agreed” and the Latin quotation. This omission does not change the sense and is in no way unfair to Schopenhauer.2“Really” and “real”: eigentlich. The emphasis is Nietzsche’s, not Schopenhauer’s.3“Hurt no one; rather, help all as much as you can.”4Letting go.5Zucht und Züchtung.6Nietzsche was the first to use sublimiren in its specifically modern sense, which is widely associated with Freud. On the history of this interesting term see Kaufmann’s Nietzsche, Chapter 7, section II.7“Plato in front and Plato behind, in the middle Chimaera.” Cf. Iliad, VI: 181, where Chimaera is described: “Lion in front and serpent behind, in the middle a goat.” For Nietzsche’s complex and seemingly contradictory view of Socrates, see Kaufmann’s Nietzsche, Chapter 13.8Literally, arm-breast; both words mean crossbow.9“What occurred in the light, goes on in the dark.”10This, of course, was what happened to Nietzsche himself after his death.11But compare section 52 above; also Human, All-Too-Human, section 475, and The Dawn, section 205 (Portable Nietzsche.); and, above all, sections 248 and 250 below. For a discussion of Nietzsche’s image of the Jews and the many pertinent passages in his writings, see Kaufmann, Nietzsche, Chapter 10.12It has often been alleged that Cesare Borgia was Nietzsche’s ideal, but an examination of all of Nietzsche’s references to him shows that this is plainly false (Kaufmann, Nietzsche, Chapter 7, section III). One can consider a type healthy without admiring it or urging others to emulate it.13Moral license.14The association of Goethe and Hafiz is suggested by Goethe’s great collection of poems, West-Östlicher Divan (West-Eastern Divan, 1819), in which he identifies himself with the Persian poet. But the old Goethe, unlike Hafiz, was certainly no sot.15Medieval German emperor, 1215-50. The members of the Stefan George Circle cultivated “monumentalistic” historiography, in the sense of Nietzsche’s second “Untimely Meditation,” and penned portraits of great men partly aimed to show the qualities that constitute human greatness. Two of their most celebrated studies are Friedrich Gundolfs Caesar (1924) and Ernst Kantorowicz’s Kaiser Friedrich 11 (1927). Another such study is Ernst Bertram’s Nietzsche (1918), whose faults are summed up in the subtitle: “Attempt at a Mythology.”16Commonwealth.17Cf. F. D. Roosevelt’s celebrated demand for “freedom from fear.” The idea that much of man’s conduct and culture can be explained in terms of fear was first explored extensively by Nietzsche in The Dawn (1881). For some discussion and pertinent quotations, see Kaufmann’s Nietzsche, Chapter 6, section II; for Nietzsche’s own opposition to punishment and resentment, ibid., Chapter 12, section V. Nietzsche’s critique of one type of opposition to punishment, above, should be compared with Twilight of the Idols, section 37 (Portable Nietzsche.), and Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, II.9 (original and translation in Twenty German Poets, ed. and trans. W. Kaufmann, New York, Modern Library, 1963.).18Zarathustra, “On Old and New Tablets,” section 2 (Portable Nietzsche): “When I came to men I found them sitting on an old conceit: the conceit that they have long known what is good and evil for man … whoever wanted to sleep well still talked of good and evil before going to sleep.”   And in Shaw’s Major Barbara (Act III) Undershaft says: “What! no capacity for business, no knowledge of law, no sympathy with art, no pretension to philosophy; only a simple knowledge of the secret that has puzzled all the philosophers, baffled all the lawyers …: the secret of right and wrong. Why, man, you are a genius, a master of masters, a god! At twenty-four, too!”19“Neither god nor master;” cf. section 22 above.20Perhaps an allusion to Richard Wagner. Part Six - We Scholars Part Six204At the risk that moralizing will here, too, turn out to be what it has always been—namely, according to Balzac, an intrepid montrer ses plaies2—I venture to speak out against an unseemly and harmful shift in the respective ranks of science3 and philosophy, which is now threatening to become established, quite unnoticed and as if it were accompanied by a perfectly good conscience. I am of the opinion that only experience—experience always seems to mean bad experience?—can entitle us to participate in the discussion of such higher questions of rank, lest we talk like blind men about colors—against science the way women and artists do (“Oh, this dreadful science!” sigh their instinct and embarrassment; “it always gets to the bottom of things!”).The scholar’s4 declaration of independence, his emancipation from philosophy, is one of the more refined effects of the democratic order—and disorder: the self-glorification and self-exaltation of scholars5 now stand in full bloom, in their finest spring, everywhere—which is not meant to imply that in this case self-praise smells pleasant.6 “Freedom from all masters!” that is what the instinct of the rabble wants in this case, too; and after science has most happily rid itself of theology whose “handmaid” it was too long, it now aims with an excess of high spirits and a lack of understanding to lay down laws for philosophy and to play the “master” herself—what am I saying? the philosopher.My memory—the memory of a scientific man, if you’ll forgive me—is bulging with naïvetés of overbearing that I have heard about philosophy and philosophers from the lips of young natural scientists and old physicians (not to speak of the most learned7 and conceited8 of all scholars, the philologists and schoolmen, who are both by profession). Sometimes it was the specialist and nook dweller who instinctively resisted any kind of synthetic enterprise and talent; sometimes the industrious worker who had got a whiff of otium9 and the noble riches in the psychic economy of the philosopher which had made him feel defensive and small. Sometimes it was that color blindness of the utility man who sees nothing in philosophy but a series of refuted systems and a prodigal effort that “does nobody any good.” Sometimes the fear of masked mysticism and a correction of the limits of knowledge leaped forward; sometimes lack of respect for individual philosophers that had involuntarily generalized itself into lack of respect for philosophy.Most frequently, finally, I found among young scholars that what lay behind the arrogant contempt for philosophy was the bad aftereffect of—a philosopher to whom they now denied allegiance on the whole without, however, having broken the spell of his cutting evaluation of other philosophers—with the result of an over-all irritation with all philosophy. (Schopenhauer’s aftereffect on our most modern Germany, for example, seems to me to be of this kind: with his unintelligent wrath against Hegel10 he has succeeded in wrenching the whole last generation of Germans out of the context of German culture—a culture that was, considering everything, an elevation and divinatory subtlety of the historical sense. But precisely at this point Schopenhauer was poor, unreceptive, and un-German to the point of genius.)Altogether, taking a large view, it may have been above all what was human, all too human, in short, the wretchedness of the most recent philosophy itself that most thoroughly damaged respect for philosophy and opened the gates to the instinct of the rabble. Let us confess how utterly our modern world lacks the whole type11 of a Heraclitus, Plato, Empedocles, and whatever other names these royal and magnificent hermits of the spirit had; and how it is with considerable justification that, confronted with such representatives of philosophy as are today, thanks to fashion, as much on top as they are really at the bottom—in Germany, for example, the two lions of Berlin, the anarchist Eugen Dühring and the amalgamist Eduard von Hartmann12—a solid man of science may feel that he is of a better type and descent. It is especially the sight of those hodgepodge philosophers who call themselves “philosophers of reality” or “positivists” that is capable of injecting a dangerous mistrust into the soul of an ambitious young scholar: these are at best scholars and specialists themselves—that is palpable—they are all losers who have been brought back under the hegemony of science, after having desired more of themselves at some time without having had the right to this “more” and its responsibilities—and who now represent, in word and deed, honorably, resentfully, and vengefully, the unbelief in the masterly task and masterfulness of philosophy.Finally: how could it really be otherwise? Science is flourishing today and her good conscience is written all over her face, while the level to which all modern philosophy has gradually sunk, this rest of philosophy today, invites mistrust and displeasure, if not mockery and pity. Philosophy reduced to “theory of knowledge,” in fact no more than a timid epochism and doctrine of abstinence—a philosophy that never gets beyond the threshold and takes pains to deny itself the right to enter—that is philosophy in its last throes, an end, an agony, something inspiring pity. How could such a philosophy—dominate!205The dangers for a philosopher’s development are indeed so manifold today that one may doubt whether this fruit can still ripen at all. The scope and the tower-building of the sciences has grown to be enormous, and with this also the probability that the philosopher grows weary while still learning or allows himself to be detained somewhere to become a “specialist”—so he never attains his proper level, the height for a comprehensive look, for looking around, for looking down. Or he attains it too late, when his best time and strength are spent—or impaired, coarsened, degenerated, so his view, his over-all value judgment does not mean much any more. It may be precisely the sensitivity of his intellectual conscience that leads him to delay somewhere along the way and to be late: he is afraid of the seduction to become a dilettante, a millipede, an insect with a thousand antennae; he knows too well that whoever has lost his self-respect cannot command or lead in the realm of knowledge—unless he would like to become a great actor, a philosophical Cagliostro and pied piper, in short, a seducer. This is in the end a question of taste, even if it were not a question of conscience.Add to this, by way of once more doubling the difficulties for a philosopher, that he demands of himself a judgment, a Yes or No, not about the sciences but about life and the value of life—that he is reluctant to come to believe that he has a right, or even a duty, to such a judgment, and must seek his way to this right and faith only from the most comprehensive—perhaps most disturbing and destructive13—experiences, and frequently hesitates, doubts, and lapses into silence.Indeed, the crowd has for a long time misjudged and mistaken the philosopher, whether for a scientific man and ideal scholar or for a religiously elevated, desensualized,14 “desecularized” enthusiast and sot of God.15 And if a man is praised today for living “wisely” or “as a philosopher,” it hardly means more than “prudently and apart.” Wisdom—seems to the rabble a kind of escape, a means and trick for getting well out of a wicked game. But the genuine philosopher—as it seems to us, my friends?—lives “unphilosophically” and “unwisely,” above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life—he risks himself constantly, he plays the wicked game—206Compared to a genius—that is, to one who either begets or gives birth, taking both terms in their most elevated sense—the scholar, the scientific average man, always rather resembles an old maid: like her he is not conversant with the two most valuable functions of man. Indeed, one even concedes to both, to the scholars and to old maids, as it were by way of a compensation, that they are respectable—one stresses their respectability—and yet feels annoyed all over at having to make this concession.Let us look more closely: what is the scientific man? To begin with, a type of man that is not noble, with the virtues of a type of man that is not noble, which is to say, a type that does not dominate and is neither authoritative nor self-sufficient: he has industrious-ness, patient acceptance of his place in rank and file, evenness and moderation in his abilities and needs, an instinct for his equals and for what they need; for example, that bit of independence and green pasture without which there is no quiet work, that claim to honor and recognition (which first of all presupposes literal recognition and recognizability), that sunshine of a good name, that constant attestation of his value and utility which is needed to overcome again and again the internal mistrust which is the sediment in the hearts of all dependent men and herd animals.The scholar also has, as is only fair, the diseases and bad manners of a type that is not noble: he is rich in petty envy and has lynx eyes for what is base in natures to whose heights he cannot attain. He is familiar, but only like those who let themselves go, not flow; and just before those who flow like great currents he freezes and becomes doubly reserved: his eye becomes like a smooth and reluctant lake with not a ripple of delight or sympathy. The worst and most dangerous thing of which scholars are capable comes from their sense of the mediocrity of their own type—from that Jesuitism of mediocrity which instinctively works at the annihilation of the uncommon man and tries to break every bent bow or, preferably, to unbend it. Unbending—considerately, of course, with a solicitous hand—unbending with familiar pity, that is the characteristic art of Jesuitism which has always known how to introduce itself as a religion of pity.—207However gratefully we may welcome an objective spirit—and is there anyone who has never been mortally sick of everything subjective and of his accursed ipsissimosity?16—in the end we also have to learn caution against our gratitude and put a halt to the exaggerated manner in which the “unselfing” and depersonalization of the spirit is being celebrated nowadays as if it were the goal itself and redemption and transfiguration. This is particularly characteristic of the pessimist’s school, which also has good reasons for according the highest honors to “disinterested knowledge.”The objective person who no longer curses and scolds like the pessimist, the ideal scholar in whom the scientific instinct, after thousands of total and semi-failures, for once blossoms and blooms to the end, is certainly one of the most precious instruments there are; but he belongs in the hand of one more powerful. He is only an instrument; let us say, he is a mirror—he is no “end in himself.” The objective man is indeed a mirror: he is accustomed to submit before whatever wants to be known, without any other pleasure than that found in knowing and “mirroring;” he waits until something comes, and then spreads himself out tenderly lest light footsteps and the quick passage of spiritlike beings should be lost on his plane and skin.Whatever still remains in him of a “person” strikes him as accidental, often arbitrary, still more often disturbing: to such an extent has he become a passageway and reflection of strange forms and events even to himself. He recollects “himself” only with an effort and often mistakenly; he easily confuses himself with others, he errs about his own needs and is in this respect alone unsubtle and slovenly. Perhaps his health torments him, or the pettiness and cramped atmosphere of wife and friend, or the lack of companions and company—yes, he forces himself to reflect on his torments—in vain. Already his thoughts roam—to a more general case, and tomorrow he knows no more than he did yesterday how he might be helped. He has lost any seriousness for himself, also time: he is cheerful, not for lack of distress, but for lack of fingers and handles for his need. His habit of meeting every thing and experience halfway, the sunny and impartial hospitality with which he accepts everything that comes his way, his type of unscrupulous benevolence, of dangerous unconcern about Yes and No—alas, there are cases enough in which he has to pay for these virtues! And as a human being he becomes all too easily the caput mortuum17 of these virtues.If love and hatred are wanted from him—I mean love and hatred as God, woman, and animal understand them—he will do what he can and give what he can. But one should not be surprised if it is not much—if just here he proves inauthentic, fragile, questionable, and worm-eaten. His love is forced, his hatred artificial and rather un tour de force, a little vanity and exaggeration. After all, he is genuine only insofar as he may be objective: only in his cheerful “totalism” he is still “nature” and “natural.” His mirror soul, eternally smoothing itself out, no longer knows how to affirm or negate; he does not command, neither does he destroy. “Je ne méprise presque rien”18 he says with Leibniz: one should not overlook and underestimate that presque.19Neither is he a model man; he does not go before anyone, nor behind; altogether he places himself too far apart to have any reason to take sides for good or evil. When confusing him for so long with the philosopher, with the Caesarian cultivator and cultural dynamo,20 one accorded him far too high honors and overlooked his most essential characteristics: he is an instrument, something of a slave though certainly the most sublime type of slave, but in himself nothing—presque rien! The objective man is an instrument, a precious, easily injured and clouded instrument for measuring and, as an arrangement of mirrors, an artistic triumph that deserves care and honor; but he is no goal, no conclusion and sunrise,21 no complementary man in whom the rest of existence is justified, no termination—and still less a beginning, a begetting and first cause, nothing tough, powerful, self-reliant that wants to be master—rather only a delicate, carefully dusted, fine, mobile pot for forms that still has to wait for some content and substance in order to “shape” itself accordingly—for the most part, a man without substance and content, a “selfless” man. Consequently, also nothing for women, in parenthesi.—208When a philosopher suggests these days that he is not a skeptic—I hope this is clear from the description just given of the objective spirit—everybody is annoyed. One begins to look at him apprehensively, one would like to ask, to ask so much—Indeed, among timid listeners, of whom there are legions now, he is henceforth considered dangerous. It is as if at his rejection of skepticism they heard some evil, menacing rumbling in the distance, as if a new explosive were being tried somewhere, a dynamite of the spirit, perhaps a newly discovered Russian nihiline,22 a pessimism bonae voluntatis23 that does not merely say No, want No, but—horrible thought!—does No.Against this type of “good will”—a will to the actual, active denial of life—there is today, according to common consent, no better soporific and sedative than, skepticism, the gentle, fair, lulling poppy of skepticism; and even Hamlet is now prescribed by the doctors of the day against the “spirit”24 and its underground rumblings. “Aren’t our ears filled with wicked noises as it is?” asks the skeptic as a friend of quiet, and almost as a kind of security police; “this subterranean No is terrible! Be still at last, you pessimistic moles!”For the skeptic, being a delicate creature, is frightened all too easily; his conscience is trained to quiver at every No, indeed even at a Yes that is decisive and hard, and to feel as if it had been bitten.25 Yes and No—that goes against his morality; conversely, he likes to treat his virtue to a feast of noble abstinence, say, by repeating Montaigne’s “What do I know?” or Socrates’ “I know that I know nothing.” Or: “Here I don’t trust myself, here no door is open to me.” Or: “Even if one were open, why enter right away?” Or: “What use are all rash hypotheses? Entertaining no hypotheses at all might well be part of good taste. Must you insist on immediately straightening what is crooked? on filling up every hole with oakum? Isn’t there time? Doesn’t time have time? O you devilish brood, are you incapable of waiting? The uncertain has its charms, too; the sphinx, too, is a Circe; Circe, too, was a philosopher.”Thus a skeptic consoles himself; and it is true that he stands in need of some consolation. For skepticism is the most spiritual expression of a certain complex physiological condition that in ordinary language is called nervous exhaustion and sickliness; it always develops when races or classes that have long been separated are crossed suddenly and decisively. In the new generation that, as it were, has inherited in its blood diverse standards and values, everything is unrest, disturbance, doubt, attempt; the best forces have an inhibiting effect, the very virtues do not allow each other to grow and become strong; balance, a center of gravity, and perpendicular poise are lacking in body and soul. But what becomes sickest and degenerates most in such hybrids is the will: they no longer know independence of decisions and the intrepid sense of pleasure in willing—they doubt the “freedom of the will” even in their dreams.Our Europe of today, being the arena of an absurdly sudden attempt at a radical mixture of classes, and hence races, is therefore skeptical in all its heights and depths—sometimes with that mobile skepticism which leaps impatiently and lasciviously from branch to branch, sometimes dismal like a cloud overcharged with question marks—and often mortally sick of its will. Paralysis of the will: where today does one not find this cripple sitting? And often in such finery! How seductive the finery looks! This disease enjoys the most beautiful pomp- and lie-costumes; and most of what today displays itself in the showcases, for example, as “objectivity,” “being scientific,” “l’art pour l’art,” “pure knowledge, free of will,” is merely dressed-up skepticism and paralysis of the will: for this diagnosis of the European sickness I vouch.The sickness of the will is spread unevenly over Europe: it appears strongest and most manifold where culture has been at home longest; it disappears to the extent to which the “barbarian” still—or again—claims his rights under the loose garments of Western culture. In France today the will is accordingly most seriously sick, which is as easy to infer as it is palpable. And France, having always possessed a masterly skill at converting even the most calamitous turns of its spirit into something attractive and seductive, now really shows its cultural superiority over Europe by being the school and display of all the charms of skepticism.The strength to will, and to will something for a long time, is a little greater in Germany, and more so in the German north than in the center of Germany; but much stronger yet in England, Spain, and Corsica, here in association with indolence, there with hard heads—not to speak of Italy, which is too young to know what it wants and still has to prove whether it is able to will—but it is strongest and most amazing by far in that enormous empire in between, where Europe, as it were, flows back into Asia, in Russia. There the strength to will has long been accumulated and stored up, there the will—uncertain whether as a will to negate or a will to affirm—is waiting menacingly to be discharged, to borrow a pet phrase of our physicists today. It may well take more than Indian wars and complications in Asia to rid Europe of its greatest danger: internal upheavals would be needed, too, the shattering of the empire into small units, and above all the introduction of the parliamentary nonsense, including the obligation for everybody to read his newspaper with his breakfast.I do not say this because I want it to happen: the opposite would be rather more after my heart—I mean such an increase in the menace of Russia that Europe would have to resolve to become menacing, too, namely, to acquire one will by means of a new caste that would rule Europe, a long, terrible will of its own that would be able to cast its goals millennia hence—so the long-drawn-out comedy of its many splinter states as well as its dynastic and democratic splinter wills would come to an end. The time for petty politics is over: the very next century will bring the fight for the dominion of the earth—the compulsion to large-scale politics.209To what extent the new warlike age into which we Europeans have evidently entered may also favor the development of another and stronger type of skepticism, on that I want to comment for the present only in the form of a parable which those who like German history should understand readily. That unscrupulous enthusiast for handsome and very tall grenadiers who, as King of Prussia,26 brought into being a military and skeptical genius—and thus, when you come right down to it, that new type of German which has just now come to the top triumphantly—the questionable, mad father of Frederick the Great himself had the knack and lucky claw of genius, though only at one point: he knew what was missing in Germany at that time, and what lack was a hundred times more critical and urgent than, say, the lack of education and social graces—his antipathy against the young Frederick came from the fear of a deep instinct. Men were missing; and he suspected with the most bitter dismay that his own son was not man enough. In this he was deceived: but who, in his place, wouldn’t have deceived himself about that? He saw his son surrender to atheism, to esprit, to the hedonistic frivolity of clever Frenchmen: in the background he saw that great vampire, the spider of skepticism; he suspected the incurable misery of a heart that is no longer hard enough for evil or good, of a broken will that no longer commands, no longer is capable of commanding. Meanwhile there grew up in his son that more dangerous and harder new type of skepticism—who knows how much it owed precisely to the hatred of the father and the icy melancholy of a will condemned to solitude?—the skepticism of audacious manliness which is most closely related to the genius for war and conquest and first entered Germany in the shape of the great Frederick.This skepticism despises and nevertheless seizes; it undermines and takes possession; it does not believe but does not lose itself in the process; it gives the spirit dangerous freedom, but it is severe on the heart; it is the German form of skepticism which, in the form of a continued Frederickianism that had been sublimated spiritually, brought Europe for a long time under the hegemony of the German spirit and its critical and historical mistrust. Thanks to the unconquerably strong and tough virility of the great German philologists and critical historians (viewed properly, all of them were also artists of destruction and dissolution), a new concept of the German spirit crystallized gradually in spite of all romanticism in music and philosophy, and the inclination to virile skepticism became a decisive trait, now, for example, as an intrepid eye, now as the courage and hardness of analysis, as the tough will to undertake dangerous journeys of exploration and spiritualized North Pole expeditions under desolate and dangerous skies.27There may be good reasons why warmblooded and superficial humanitarians cross themselves just when they behold this spirit—cet esprit fataliste, ironique, méphistophélique,28 Michelet calls it, not without a shudder. But if we want to really feel what a distinction such fear of the “man” in the German spirit confers—a spirit through which Europe was after all awakened from her “dogmatic slumber”29—we have to remember the former conception which was replaced by this one: it was not so long ago that a masculinized woman could dare with unbridled presumption to commend the Germans to the sympathy of Europe as being gentle, goodhearted, weak-willed, and poetic dolts.30 At long last we ought to understand deeply enough Napoleon’s surprise when he came to see Goethe: it shows what people had associated with the “German spirit” for centuries. “Voilà un homme!”—that meant: “But this is a man! And I had merely expected a German.”31—210Suppose then that some trait in the image of the philosophers of the future poses the riddle whether they would not perhaps have to be skeptics in the sense suggested last, this would still designate only one feature and not them as a whole. With just as much right one could call them critics: and certainly they will be men of experiments.32 With the name in which I dared to baptize them I have already stressed expressly their attempts and delight in attempts: was this done because as critics in body and soul they like to employ experiments in a new, perhaps wider, perhaps more dangerous sense? Does their passion for knowledge force them to go further with audacious and painful experiments than the softhearted and effeminate taste of a democratic century could approve?No doubt, these coming philosophers will be least able to dispense with those serious and by no means unproblematic qualities which distinguish the critic from the skeptic; I mean the certainty of value standards, the deliberate employment of a unity of method, a shrewd courage, the ability to stand alone and give an account of themselves. Indeed, they admit to a pleasure in saying No and in taking things apart, and to a certain levelheaded cruelty that knows how to handle a knife surely and subtly, even when the heart bleeds. They will be harder (and perhaps not always only against themselves) than humane people might wish; they will not dally with “Truth” to be “pleased” or “elevated” or “inspired” by her. On the contrary, they will have little faith that truth of all things should be accompanied by such amusements for our feelings.They will smile, these severe spirits, if somebody should say in front of them: “This thought elevates me; how could it fail to be true?” Or: “This work delights me; how could it fail to be beautiful?” Or: “This artist makes me greater; how could he fail to be great?” Perhaps they do not merely have a smile but feel a genuine nausea over everything that is enthusiastic, idealistic, feminine, hermaphroditic in this vein. And whoever knew how to follow them into the most secret chambers of their hearts would scarcely find any intention there to reconcile “Christian feelings” with “classical taste” and possibly even with “modern parliamentarism” (though such conciliatory attempts are said to occur even among philosophers in our very unsure and consequently very conciliatory century).Critical discipline and every habit that is conducive to cleanliness and severity in matters of the spirit will be demanded by these philosophers not only of themselves: they could display them as their kind of jewels—nevertheless they still do not want to be called critics on that account. They consider it no small disgrace for philosophy when people decree, as is popular nowadays: “Philosophy itself is criticism and critical science—and nothing whatever besides.” This evaluation of philosophy may elicit applause from all the positivists of France and Germany (and it might even have pleased the heart and taste of Kant—one should remember the titles of his major works); our new philosophers will say nevertheless: critics are instruments of the philosopher and for that very reason, being instruments, a long ways from being philosophers themselves. Even the great Chinese of Königsberg33 was merely a great critic.—211I insist that people should finally stop confounding philosophical laborers, and scientific men generally, with philosophers; precisely at this point we should be strict about giving “each his due,” and not far too much to those and far too little to these.It may be necessary for the education of a genuine philosopher that he himself has also once stood on all these steps on which his servants, the scientific laborers of philosophy, remain standing—have to remain standing. Perhaps he himself must have been critic and skeptic and dogmatist and historian and also poet and collector and traveler and solver of riddles and moralist and seer and “free spirit” and almost everything in order to pass through the whole range of human values and value feelings and to be able to see with many different eyes and consciences, from a height and into every distance, from the depths into every height, from a nook into every expanse. But all these are merely preconditions of his task: this task itself demands something different—it demands that he create values.Those philosophical laborers after the noble model of Kant and Hegel have to determine and press into formulas, whether in the realm of logic or political (moral) thought or art, some great data of valuations—that is, former positings of values, creations of value which have become dominant and are for a time called “truths.” It is for these investigators to make everything that has happened and been esteemed so far easy to look over, easy to think over, intelligible and manageable, to abbreviate everything long, even “time,” and to overcome the entire past—an enormous and wonderful task in whose service every subtle pride, every tough will can certainly find satisfaction. Genuine philosophers, however, are commanders and legislators: they say, “thus it shall be!” They first determine the Whither and For What of man, and in so doing have at their disposal the preliminary labor of all philosophical laborers, all who have overcome the past. With a creative hand they reach for the future, and all that is and has been becomes a means for them, an instrument, a hammer. Their “knowing” is creating, their creating is a legislation, their will to truth is—will to power.Are there such philosophers today? Have there been such philosophers yet? Must there not be such philosophers?34—212More and more it seems to me that the philosopher, being of necessity a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself, and had to find himself, in contradiction to his today: his enemy was ever the ideal of today. So far all these extraordinary furtherers of man whom one calls philosophers, though they themselves have rarely felt like friends of wisdom but rather like disagreeable fools and dangerous question marks, have found their task, their hard, unwanted, inescapable task, but eventually also the greatness of their task, in being the bad conscience of their time.By applying the knife vivisectionally to the chest of the very virtues of their time, they betrayed what was their own secret: to know of a new greatness of man, of a new untrodden way to his enhancement. Every time they exposed how much hypocrisy, comfortableness, letting oneself go and letting oneself drop, how many lies lay hidden under the best honored type of their contemporary morality, how much virtue was outlived. Every time they said: “We must get there, that way, where you today are least at home.”Facing a world of “modern ideas” that would banish everybody into a corner and “specialty,” a philosopher—if today there could be philosophers—would be compelled to find the greatness of man, the concept of “greatness,” precisely in his range and multiplicity, in his wholeness in manifoldness. He would even determine value and rank in accordance with how much and how many things one could bear and take upon himself, how far one could extend his responsibility.Today the taste of the time and the virtue of the time weakens and thins down the will; nothing is as timely as weakness of the will. In the philosopher’s ideal, therefore, precisely strength of the will, hardness, and the capacity for long-range decisions must belong to the concept of “greatness”—with as much justification as the opposite doctrine and the ideal of a dumb, renunciatory, humble, selfless humanity was suitable for an opposite age, one that suffered, like the sixteenth century, from its accumulated energy of will and from the most savage floods and tidal waves of selfishness.In the age of Socrates, among men of fatigued instincts, among the conservatives of ancient Athens who let themselves go—“toward happiness,” as they said; toward pleasure, as they acted—and who all the while still mouthed the ancient pompous words to which their lives no longer gave them any right, irony may have been required for greatness of soul,35 that Socratic sarcastic assurance of the old physician and plebeian who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as he did into the flesh and heart of the “noble,” with a look that said clearly enough: “Don’t dissemble in front of me! Here—we are equal.”Today, conversely, when only the herd animal receives and dispenses honors in Europe, when “equality of rights” could all too easily be changed into equality in violating rights—I mean, into a common war on all that is rare, strange, privileged, the higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility, and the abundance of creative power and masterfulness—today the concept of greatness entails being noble, wanting to be by oneself, being able to be different, standing alone and having to live independently. And the philosopher will betray something of his own ideal when he posits: “He shall be greatest who can be loneliest, the most concealed, the most deviant, the human being beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, he that is overrich in will. Precisely this shall be called greatness: being capable of being as manifold as whole, as ample as full.” And to ask it once more: today—is greatness possible?213What a philosopher is, that is hard to learn because it cannot be taught: one must “know” it, from experience—or one should have the pride not to know it. But nowadays all the world talks of things of which it cannot have any experience, and this is most true, and in the worst way, concerning philosophers and philosophical states: exceedingly few know them, may know them, and all popular opinions about them are false.That genuinely philosophical combination, for example, of a bold and exuberant spirituality that runs presto and a dialectical severity and necessity that takes no false step is unknown to most thinkers and scholars from their own experience, and therefore would seem incredible to them if somebody should speak of it in their presence. They picture every necessity as a kind of need, as a painstaking having-to-follow and being-compelled. And thinking itself they consider something slow and hesitant, almost as toil, and often enough as “worthy of the sweat of the noble”—but not in the least as something light, divine, closely related to dancing and high spirits. “Thinking” and taking a matter “seriously,” considering it “grave”—for them all this belongs together: that is the only way they have “experienced” it.Artists seem to have more sensitive noses in these matters, knowing only too well that precisely when they no longer do anything “voluntarily” but do everything of necessity, their feeling of freedom, subtlety, full power, of creative placing, disposing, and forming reaches its peak—in short, that necessity and “freedom of the will” then become one in them.Ultimately, there is an order of rank among states of the soul, and the order of rank of problems accords with this. The highest problems repulse everyone mercilessly who dares approach them without being predestined for their solution by the height and power of his spirituality. What does it avail when nimble smarties or clumsy solid mechanics and empiricists push near them, as is common today, trying with their plebeian ambition to enter the “court of courts.” Upon such carpets coarse feet may never step: the primeval law of things takes care of that; the doors remain closed to such obtrusiveness, even if they crash and crush their heads against them.For every high world one must be born; or to speak more clearly, one must be cultivated for it: a right to philosophy—taking that word in its great sense—one has only by virtue of one’s origins; one’s ancestors, one’s “blood”36 decide here, too. Many generations must have labored to prepare the origin of the philosopher; every one of his virtues must have been acquired, nurtured, inherited, and digested singly, and not only the bold, light, delicate gait and course of his thoughts but above all the readiness for great responsibilities, the loftiness of glances that dominate and look down, feeling separated from the crowd and its duties and virtues, the affable protection and defense of whatever is misunderstood and slandered, whether it be god or devil, the pleasure and exercise of the great justice, the art of command, the width of the will, the slow eye that rarely admires, rarely looks up, rarely loves37—1Wir Gelehrten. This can only mean “Scholars,” not “Intellectuals” (Cowan translation).2“Showing one’s wounds.”3Wissenschaft might just as well be rendered as “scholarship” in this section—and in much German literature: the term does not have primary reference to the natural sciences as it does in twentieth-century English.4Des wissenschaftlichen Menschen.5Des Gelehrten.6An allusion the German proverb: “Self-praise stinks.”7Gebildet.8Eingebildet.9Leisure.10Cf. section 252 below.11The German word Art in this context could mean manner, but the same word near the end of the sentence plainly means type.12Eugen Dühring (1833–1921) and Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906) were highly regarded at the time. Dühring was a virulent anti-Semite; Hartmann attempted to amalgamate Schopenhauer’s philosophy with Hegel’s.13Störendsten, zerstörendsten.14Entsinnlichten. Cowan mistakenly translates this word as “demoralized.”15An allusion to the conception of Spinoza as “God-intoxicated.” Cowan: “divine alcoholic.”16Coinage, formed from ipsissima (very own).17Dross.18“I despise almost nothing.”19Almost.20Dem cäsarischen Züchter und Gewaltmenschen der Cultur.21Ausgang und Aufgang; literally, going out and going up.22Coinage, modeled on “nicotine;” cf. Antichrist, section 2 (Portable Nietzsche).23Of good will.24The Cowan translation has, instead of “against the ‘spirit’” [gegen den “Geist”], “to cure mind,” which misses the point of the remark about Hamlet.   Nietzsche had argued in one of the most brilliant passages of his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, that Hamlet is no skeptic: “Action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much … Not reflection, no—true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action” (section 7).25In German, conscience bites. Cf. the medieval “agenbite of inwit” of which James Joyce makes much in Ulysses.26Frederick William I, reigned 1713-40.27It is essential for understanding Nietzsche to realize that he is not “for” or “against” skepticism, but that he analyzes one type of skepticism with disdain (section 208) before describing another with which he clearly identifies himself. It is equally characteristic that when he joins his countrymen in admiration of Frederick the Great, he pays tribute to him not for his exploits and conquests but rather for his skepticism, and that his praise of “tough virility” is aimed at the sublimated, spiritual version found, for example, in philologists and historians. For Nietzsche’s anti-romanticism cf., e.g., The Gay Science (1887), section 370, cited at length and discussed in Kaufmann’s Nietzsche, Chapter 12, section V.28“That fatalistic, ironical, Mephistophelic spirit.” “Mephistophelic” obviously refers to Goethe’s Mephistopheles, not to Marlowe’s. For Goethe’s conception see Goethe’s Faust: The Original German and a New Translation and Introduction by Walter Kaufmann (Garden City, Anchor Books, 1962).29Allusion to Kant’s famous dictum, in the Preface to his Prolegomena (1783), that it was Hume who had first interrupted his “dogmatic slumber.”30Allusion to Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne (Paris, 1810).31For Nietzsche’s conception of Goethe see, e.g., Twilight of the Idols, sections 49-51 (Portable Nietzsche.). Cf. also the title of one of Nietzsche’s last works, Ecce Homo (written in 1888).32Experimente. In the following, as earlier, Versuch is rendered as “attempt.” Cf. section 42 above.33Kant. Cf. Antichrist, section 11 (Portable Nietzsche).34The dichotomy proposed in this section is highly questionable: we find both analyses and normative suggestions in the works of the major moral philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Spinoza and Kant; and normative thinkers or legislators who are not also analysts are not philosophers. Yet Nietzsche’s point that something vital is lacking in the work of those who are merely “laborers” is certainly worth pondering, and the immediately following section offers a far superior suggestion about the ethos of the “true” philosopher.35Aristotle’s discussion of greatness of soul (megalopsychia) is worth quoting here, at least in part, because it evidently influenced Nietzsche. The valuations that find expression in Aristotle’s account are exceedingly remote from those of the New Testament and help us understand Nietzsche’s contrast of master morality and slave morality, introduced below (section 260). Moreover, in his long discussion of “what is noble,” Nietzsche emulates Aristotle’s descriptive mode.   “A person is thought to be great-souled if he claims much and deserves much [as Socrates did in the Apology when he said he deserved the greatest honor Athens could bestow]…. He that claims less than he deserves is small-souled…. The great-souled man is justified in despising other people—his estimates are correct; but most proud men have no good ground for their pride…. He is fond of conferring benefits, but ashamed to receive them, because the former is a mark of superiority and the latter of inferiority…. It is also characteristic of the great-souled men never to ask help from others, or only with reluctance, but to render aid willingly; and to be haughty towards men of position and fortune, but courteous towards those of moderate station…. He must be open both in love and in hate, since concealment shows timidity; and care more for the truth than for what people will think; … he is outspoken and frank, except when speaking with ironical self-depreciation, as he does to common people…. He does not bear a grudge, for it is not a mark of greatness of soul to recall things against people, especially the wrongs they have done you, but rather to overlook them. He is … not given to speaking evil himself, even of his enemies, except when he deliberately intends to give offence…. Such then being the great-souled man, the corresponding character on the side of deficiency is the small-souled man, and on that of excess the vain man” (Nicomachean Ethics IV.3, Rackham translation Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1947).   The whole passage is relevant and extremely interesting.36“Gebiüt.” Nietzsche’s conception of “blood” is discussed, and other relevant passages are quoted, in Kaufmann’s Nietzsche, at the end of Chapter 10.37The element of snobbery and the infatuation with “dominating” and “looking down” are perhaps more obvious than Nietzsche’s perpetual sublimation and spiritualization of these and other similar qualities. It may be interesting to compare Nietzsche’s view with Dr. Thomas Stockmann in Act IV of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People:   “What a difference there is between a cultivated and an uncultivated animal family! Just look at a common barnyard hen…. But now take a cultivated Spanish or Japanese hen, or take a noble pheasant or a turkey; indeed, you’ll see the difference. And then I refer you to dogs, which are so amazingly closely related to us men. Consider first a common plebeian dog—I mean, a disgusting, shaggy, moblike cur that merely runs down the streets and fouls the houses. And then compare the cur with a poodle that for several generations is descended from a noble house where it received good food and has had occasion to hear harmonious voices and music. Don’t you suppose that the poodle’s brain has developed in a way quite different from the cur’s? You can count on it. It is such cultivated young poodles that jugglers can train to do the most astonishing tricks. A common peasant cur could never learn anything of the kind, even if stood on its head.”   Not only do Nietzsche and Ibsen’s Dr. Stockmann share Lamarck’s belief in the heredity of acquired characteristics; both are concerned with spiritual nobility and realize that—to put it plainly—of two brothers one may have it and the other not. Thus Stockmann says.a little later: “But that’s how it always goes when plebeian descent is still in one’s limbs and one has not worked one’s way up to spiritual nobility…. That kind of rabble of which I am speaking isn’t to be found only in the lower strata…. My brother Peter—he is also a plebeian straight out of the book.” Part Seven - Our Virtues Part Seven214Our virtues?—It is probable that we, too, still have our virtues, although in all fairness they will not be the simpleminded and foursquare virtues for which we hold our grandfathers in honor—and at arm’s length. We Europeans of the day after tomorrow, we firstborn of the twentieth century—with all our dangerous curiosity, our multiplicity and art of disguises, our mellow and, as it were, sweetened cruelty in spirit and senses—if we should have virtues we shall presumably have only virtues which have learned to get along best with our most secret and cordial inclinations, with our most ardent needs. Well then, let us look for them in our labyrinths—where, as is well known, all sorts of things lose themselves, all sorts of things are lost for good. And is there anything more beautiful than looking for one’s own virtues? Doesn’t this almost mean: believing in one’s own virtue? But this “believing in one’s virtue”—isn’t this at bottom the same thing that was formerly called one’s “good conscience,” that venerable long pigtail of a concept which our grandfathers fastened to the backs of their heads, and often enough also to the backside of their understanding? So it seems that however little we may seem old-fashioned and grandfatherly-honorable to ourselves in other matters, in one respect we are nevertheless the worthy grandsons of these grandfathers, we last Europeans with a good conscience: we, too, still wear their pigtail.—Alas, if you knew how soon, very soon—all will be different!—215As in the realm of stars the orbit of a planet is in some cases determined by two suns; as in certain cases suns of different colors shine near a single planet, sometimes with red light, sometimes with green light, and then occasionally illuminating the planet at the same time and flooding it with colors—so we modern men are determined, thanks to the complicated mechanics of our “starry sky,” by different moralities; our actions shine alternately in different colors, they are rarely univocal—and there are cases enough in which we perform actions of many colors.216Love one’s enemies? I think this has been learned well: it is done thousands of times today, in small ways and big ways. Indeed, at times something higher and more sublime is done: we learn to despise when we love, and precisely when we love best—but all of this unconsciously, without noise, without pomp, with that modesty and concealed goodness which forbids the mouth solemn words and virtue formulas. Morality as a pose—offends our taste today. That, too, is progress—just as it was progress when religion as a pose finally offended our fathers’ taste, including hostility and Voltairian bitterness against religion (and everything that formerly belonged to the gestures of free-thinkers). It is the music in our conscience, the dance in our spirit, with which the sound of all puritan litanies, all moral homilies and old-fashioned respectability won’t go.217Beware of those who attach great value to being credited with moral tact and subtlety in making moral distinctions. They never forgive us once they have made a mistake in front of us (or, worse, against us): inevitably they become our instinctive slanderers and detractors, even if they should still remain our “friends.”Blessed are the forgetful: for they get over their stupidities, too.218The psychologists of France—and where else are any psychologists left today?—still have not exhausted their bitter and manifold delight in the bêtise bourgeoise,1 just as if—enough, this betrays something. Flaubert, for example, that solid citizen of Rouen, in the end no longer saw, heard, or tasted anything else any more: this was his kind of self-torture and subtler cruelty. Now, for a change—since this is becoming boring—I propose another source of amusement: the unconscious craftiness with which all good, fat, solid, mediocre spirits react to higher spirits and their tasks—that subtle, involved, Jesuitical craftiness which is a thousand times more subtle than not only the understanding and taste of this middle class is at its best moments, but even the understanding of its victims—which proves once again that “instinct” is of all the kinds of intelligence that have been discovered so far—the most intelligent. In short, my dear psychologists, study the philosophy of the “norm” in its fight against the “exception”: there—you have a spectacle that is good enough for gods and godlike malice! Or, still more clearly: vivisect the “good man,” the “homo bonae voluntatis”2—yourselves!219Moral judgments and condemnations constitute the favorite revenge of the spiritually limited against those less limited—also a sort of compensation for having been ill-favored by nature—finally an opportunity for acquiring spirit and becoming refined—malice spiritualized. It pleases them deep down in their hearts that there are standards before which those overflowing with the wealth and privileges of the spirit are their equals: they fight for the “equality of all men before God” and almost need faith in God just for that. They include the most vigorous foes of atheism. Anyone who said to them, “high spirituality is incomparable with any kind of solidity and respectability of a merely moral man” would enrage them—and I shall beware of doing this. Rather I want to flatter them with my proposition, that high spirituality itself exists only as the ultimate product of moral qualities; that it is a synthesis of all those states which are attributed to “merely moral” men, after they have been acquired singly through long discipline and exercise, perhaps through whole chains of generations; that high spirituality is the spiritualization of justice and of that gracious severity which knows that it is its mission to maintain the order of rank in the world, among things themselves—and not only among men.220In view of the modern popularity of praise of the “disinterested,” we should bring to consciousness, perhaps not without some danger, what it is that elicits the people’s interest, and what are the things about which the common man is deeply and profoundly concerned—including the educated, even the scholars, and unless all appearances deceive, perhaps even the philosophers. Then the fact emerges that the vast majority of the things that interest and attract choosier and more refined tastes and every higher nature seem to the average man totally “uninteresting;” and when he nevertheless notices a devotion to such matters he calls it “désintéressé” and wonders how it is possible to act “without interest.” There have been philosophers who have known how to lend to this popular wonder a seductive and mystical-transcendental expression3(—perhaps because they did not know the higher nature from experience?)—instead of positing the naked truth, which is surely not hard to come by, that the “disinterested” action is an exceedingly interesting and interested action, assuming—“And love?”—What? Even an action done from love is supposed to be “unegoistic”? But you dolts! “And the praise of sacrifices?”—But anyone who has really made sacrifices knows that he wanted and got something in return—perhaps something of himself in return for something of himself—that he gave up here in order to have more there, perhaps in order to be more or at least to feel that he was “more.” But this a realm of questions and answers in which a choosier spirit does not like to dwell: even now truth finds it necessary to stifle her yawns when she is expected to give answers. In the end she is a woman: she should not be violated.221It does happen, said a moralistic pedant and dealer in trifles, that I honor and exalt a man free of self-interest—not because he is free of self-interest but because he seems to me to be entitled to profit another human being at his own expense. Enough; the question is always who he is, and who the other person is. In a person, for example, who is called and made to command, self-denial and modest self-effacement would not be a virtue but the waste of a virtue: thus it seems to me. Every unegoistic morality that takes itself for unconditional and addresses itself to all does not only sin against taste: it is a provocation to sins of omission, one more seduction under the mask of philanthropy—and precisely a seduction and injury for the higher, rarer, privileged. Moralities must be forced to bow first of all before the order of rank; their presumption must be brought home to their conscience—until they finally reach agreement that it is immoral to say: “what is right for one is fair for the other.”Thus my moralistic pedant and bonhomme:4 does he deserve to be laughed at for thus admonishing moralities to become moral? But one should not be too right if one wants to have those who laugh on one’s own side; a grain of wrong actually belongs to good taste.222Where pity is preached today—and, if you listen closely, this is the only religion preached now—psychologists should keep their ears open: through all the vanity, through all the noise that characterizes these preachers (like all preachers) they will hear a hoarse, groaning, genuine sound of self-contempt. This belongs to that darkening and uglification of Europe which has been growing for a century now (and whose first symptoms were registered in a thoughtful letter Galiani wrote to Madame d’Épinay)5—unless it is the cause of this process. The man of “modern ideas,” this proud ape, is immeasurably dissatisfied with himself: that is certain. He suffers—and his vanity wants him to suffer only with others, to feel pity.—223The hybrid European—all in all, a tolerably ugly plebeian—simply needs a costume: he requires history as a storage room for costumes. To be sure, he soon notices that not one fits him very well; so he keeps changing. Let anyone look at the nineteenth century with an eye for these quick preferences and changes of the style masquerade; also for the moments of despair over the fact that “nothing is becoming.” It is no use to parade as romantic or classical, Christian or Florentine, baroque or “national,” in moribus et artibus: it “does not look good.” But the “spirit,” especially the “historical spirit,” finds its advantage even in this despair: again and again a new piece of prehistory or a foreign country is tried on, put on, taken off, packed away, and above all studied: we are the first age that has truly studied “costumes”—I mean those of moralities, articles of faith, tastes in the arts, and religions—prepared like no previous age for a carnival in the grand style, for the laughter and high spirits of the most spiritual revelry, for the transcendental heights of the highest nonsense and Aristophanean derision of the world. Perhaps this is where we shall still discover the realm of our invention, that realm in which we, too, can still be original, say, as parodists of world history and God’s buffoons—perhaps, even if nothing else today has any future, our laughter may yet have a future.224The historical sense (or the capacity for quickly guessing the order of rank of the valuations according to which a people, a society, a human being has lived; the “divinatory instinct” for the relations of these valuations, for the relation of the authority of values to the authority of active forces)—this historical sense to which we Europeans lay claim as our specialty has come to us in the wake of that enchanting and mad semi-barbarism into which Europe had been plunged by the democratic mingling of classes and races: only the nineteenth century knows this sense, as its sixth sense. The past of every form and way of life, of cultures that formerly lay right next to each other or one on top of the other, now flows into us “modern souls,” thanks to this mixture; our instincts now run back everywhere; we ourselves are a kind of chaos. Finally, as already mentioned, “the spirit” sees its advantage in this.Through our semi-barbarism in body and desires we have secret access in all directions, as no noble age ever did; above all, access to the labyrinths of unfinished cultures and to every semi-barbarism that ever existed on earth. And insofar as the most considerable part of human culture so far was semi-barbarism, “historical sense” almost means the sense and instinct for everything, the taste and tongue for everything—which immediately proves it to be an ignoble sense. We enjoy Homer again, for example: perhaps it is our most fortunate advantage that we know how to relish Homer whom the men of a noble culture (say, the French of the seventeenth century, like Saint-Évremond, who reproached him for his esprit vaste,6 and even their afterglow, Voltaire) cannot and could not assimilate so easily—whom to enjoy they scarcely permitted themselves. The very definite Yes and No of their palate, their easy nausea, their hesitant reserve toward everything foreign, their horror of the poor taste even of a lively curiosity, and altogether the reluctance of every noble and self-sufficient culture to own a new desire, a dissatisfaction with what is one’s own, and admiration for what is foreign—all this inclines and disposes them unfavorably even against the best things in the world which are not theirs or could not become their prey. No sense is more incomprehensible for such people than the historical sense and its submissive plebeian curiosity.It is no different with Shakespeare, that amazing Spanish-Moorish-Saxon synthesis of tastes that would have all but killed an ancient Athenian of Aeschylus’ circle with laughter or irritation. But we—accept precisely this wild abundance of colors, this medley of what is most delicate, coarsest, and most artificial, with a secret familiarity and cordiality; we enjoy him as a superb subtlety of art saved up especially for us; and the disgusting odors and the proximity of the English rabble in which Shakespeare’s art and taste live we do not allow to disturb us any more than on the Chiaja of Naples, where we go our way with all our senses awake, enchanted and willing, though the sewer smells of the plebeian quarters fill the air.As men of the “historical sense” we also have our virtues; that cannot be denied: we are unpretentious, selfless, modest, courageous, full of self-overcoming, full of devotion, very grateful, very patient, very accommodating; but for all that we are perhaps not paragons of good taste. Let us finally own it to ourselves: what we men of the “historical sense” find most difficult to grasp, to feel, to taste once more, to love once more, what at bottom finds us prejudiced and almost hostile, is precisely the perfection and ultimate maturity of every culture and art,7 that which is really noble in a work or human being, the moment when their sea is smooth and they have found halcyon self-sufficiency, the golden and cold aspect of all things that have consummated themselves.Perhaps our great virtue of the historical sense is necessarily opposed to good taste, at least to the very best taste; and precisely the highest little strokes of luck and transfigurations of human life that briefly light up here and there we can recapture only poorly, hesitantly, by forcing ourselves—those moments and marvels when great power voluntarily stopped this side of the immeasurable and boundless, when an excess of subtle delight in sudden restraint and petrification, in standing firm and taking one’s measure, was enjoyed on still trembling ground. Measure is alien to us; let us own it; our thrill is the thrill of the infinite, the unmeasured. Like a rider on a steed that flies forward, we drop the reins before the infinite, we modern men, like semi-barbarians—and reach our bliss only where we are most—in danger.225Whether it is hedonism or pessimism, utilitarianism or eudaemonism—all these ways of thinking that measure the value of things in accordance with pleasure and pain, which are mere epiphenomena and wholly secondary, are ways of thinking that stay in the foreground and naïvetés on which everyone conscious of creative powers and an artistic conscience will look down not without derision, nor without pity. Pity with you—that, of course, is not pity in your sense: it is not pity with social “distress,” with “society” and its sick and unfortunate members, with those addicted to vice and maimed from the start, though the ground around us is littered with them; it is even less pity with grumbling, sorely pressed, rebellious slave strata who long for dominion, calling it “freedom.” Our pity is a higher and more farsighted pity: we see how man makes himself smaller, how you make him smaller—and there are moments when we behold your very pity with indescribable anxiety, when we resist this pity—when we find your seriousness more dangerous than any frivolity. You want, if possible—and there is no more insane “if possible”—to abolish suffering. And we? It really seems that we would rather have it higher and worse than ever. Well-being as you understand it—that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible—that makes his destruction8 Part Eight - Peoples and Fatherlands Part Eight240I heard once again for the first time—Richard Wagner’s overture to the Meistersinger:1it is magnificent, overcharged, heavy, late art that has the pride of presupposing two centuries of music as still living, if it is to be understood: it is to the credit of the Germans that such pride did not miscalculate. What flavors and forces, what seasons and climes are not mixed here! It strikes us now as archaic, now as strange, tart, and too young, it is just as capricious as it is pompous-traditional, it is not infrequently saucy, still more often coarse and rude—it has fire and courage and at the same time the loose dun skin of fruit that ripens too late. It flows broad and full—and suddenly a moment of inexplicable hesitation, like a gap opening up between cause and effect, a pressure triggering dreams, almost nightmares—but already the old width and breadth are regained by the current of well-being, the most manifold well-being, of old and new happiness, very much including the artist’s happiness with himself which he has no wish to hide, his amazed, happy sharing of the knowledge that the means he has employed here are masterly—new artistic devices, newly acquired, not yet tested, as he seems to let us know.Altogether, no beauty, no south, nothing of southern and subtle brightness of the sky, nothing of gracefulness, no dance, scarcely any will to logic; even a certain clumsiness that is actually stressed, as if the artist wished to say to us, “that is part of my intention;” cumbersome drapery, something capricious, barbarian, and solemn, a flurry of erudite preciousness and lace; something German in the best and worst senses of the word, something manifold, formless, and inexhaustible in a German way; a certain German powerfulness and overfulness of the soul which is not afraid of hiding behind the refinements of decay—which perhaps really feels most at home there; a truly genuine token of the German soul which is at the same time young and superannuated, overly mellow and still overrich in future. This kind of music expresses best what I think of the Germans: they belong to the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow—as yet they have no today.241We “good Europeans”—we, too, know hours when we permit ourselves some hearty fatherlandishness, a plop and relapse into old loves and narrownesses—I have just given a sample of that—hours of national agitations, patriotic palpitations, and various other sorts of archaizing sentimental inundations. More ponderous spirits than we are may require more time to get over what with us takes only hours and in a few hours has run its course: some require half a year, others half a life, depending on the speed and power of their digestion and metabolism. Indeed, I could imagine dull2 and sluggish races who would require half a century even in our rapidly moving Europe to overcome such atavistic attacks of fatherlandishness and soil addiction and to return to reason, meaning “good Europeanism.”As I am digressing to this possibility, it so happens that I become an ear-witness of a conversation between two old “patriots”: apparently both were hard of hearing and therefore spoke that much louder.“He thinks and knows as much of philosophy as a peasant or a fraternity student,” said one; “he is still innocent. But what does it matter today? This is the age of the masses: they grovel on their bellies before anything massive. In politicis, too. A statesman who piles up for them another tower of Babel, a monster of empire and power, they call ‘great’; what does it matter that we, more cautious and reserved, do not yet abandon the old faith that only a great thought can give a deed or cause greatness. Suppose a statesman put his people in a position requiring them to go in for ‘great politics’ from now on, though they were ill-disposed for that by nature and ill prepared as well, so that they would find it necessary to sacrifice their old and secure virtues for the sake of a novel and dubious mediocrity—suppose a statesman actually condemned his people to ‘politicking’ although so far they had had better things to do and think about, and deep down in their souls they had not got rid of a cautious disgust with the restlessness, emptiness, and noisy quarrelsomeness of peoples that really go in for politicking—suppose such a statesman goaded the slumbering passions and lusts of his people, turning their diffidence and delight in standing aside into a blot, their cosmopolitanism and secret infinity into a serious wrong, devaluating their most cordial inclinations, inverting their conscience, making their spirit narrow, their taste ‘national’—what! a statesman who did all this, for whom his people would have to atone for all future time, if they have any future, such a statesman should be great?”“Without a doubt!” the other patriot replied vehemently; “otherwise he would not have been able to do it. Perhaps it was insane to want such a thing? But perhaps everything great was merely insane when it started.”“An abuse of words!” his partner shouted back; “strong! strong! strong and insane! Not great!”The old men had obviously become heated as they thus flung their truths into each other’s faces; but I, in my happiness and beyond, considered how soon one stronger will become master over the strong; also that for the spiritual flattening3 of a people there is a compensation, namely the deepening of another people.242Call that in which the distinction of the European is sought “civilization” or “humanization” or “progress,” or call it simply—without praise or blame—using a political formula, Europe’s democratic movement: behind all the moral and political foregrounds to which such formulas point, a tremendous physiological process is taking place and gaining momentum. The Europeans are becoming more similar to each other; they become more and more detached from the conditions under which races originate that are tied to some climate or class; they become increasingly independent of any determinate milieu that would like to inscribe itself for centuries in body and soul with the same demands. Thus an essentially supra-national and nomadic type of man is gradually coming up, a type that possesses, physiologically speaking, a maximum of the art and power of adaptation as its typical distinction.The tempo of this process of the “evolving European” may be retarded by great relapses, but perhaps it will gain in vehemence and profundity and grow just on their account: the still raging storm and stress of “national feeling” belongs here, also that anarchism which is just now coming up. But this process will probably lead to results which would seem to be least expected by those who naively promote and praise it, the apostles of “modern ideas.” The very same new conditions that will on the average lead to the leveling and mediocritization of man—to a useful, industrious, handy, multi-purpose herd animal—are likely in the highest degree to give birth to exceptional human beings of the most dangerous and attractive quality.To be sure, that power of adaptation which keeps trying out changing conditions and begins some new work with every generation, almost with every decade, does not make possible the powerfulness of the type, and the over-all impression of such future Europeans will probably be that of manifold garrulous workers who will be poor in will, extremely employable, and as much in need of a master and commander as of their daily bread. But while the democratization of Europe leads to the production of a type that is prepared for slavery in the subtlest sense, in single, exceptional cases the strong human being will have to turn out stronger and richer than perhaps ever before—thanks to the absence of prejudice from his training, thanks to the tremendous manifoldness of practice, art, and mask. I meant to say: the democratization of Europe is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for the cultivation of tyrants—taking that word in every sense, including the most spiritual.243I hear with pleasure that our sun is swiftly moving toward the constellation of Hercules—and I hope that man on this earth will in this respect follow the sun’s example? And we first of all, we good Europeans!—244There was a time when it was customary to attribute “profundity” to the Germans, as a distinction. Now that the most successful type of the new Germanism lusts after utterly different honors and perhaps misses “pluck” in everything profound, some doubt may almost be timely and patriotic as to whether that former praise was not based on self-deception—in short, whether German profundity is not at bottom something different and worse, and something that, thank God, one is about to shake off successfully. Let us make the attempt to relearn about German profundity: nothing more is needed for this than a little vivisection of the German soul.The German soul is above all manifold, of diverse origins, more put together and superimposed than actually built: that is due to where it comes from. A German who would make bold to say, “two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast,” 4 would violate the truth rather grossly or, more precisely, would fall short of the truth by a good many souls. As a people of the most monstrous mixture and medley of races, perhaps even with a preponderance of the pre-Aryan element, as “people of the middle” in every sense, the Germans are more incomprehensible, comprehensive, contradictory, unknown, incalculable, surprising, even frightening than other people are to themselves: they elude definition and would be on that account alone the despair of the French.It is characteristic of the Germans that the question, “what is German?” never dies out among them. Kotzebue surely knew his Germans well enough: “we have been recognized!” they jubilated—but Sand, too, thought he knew them.5 Jean Paul6 knew what he was doing when he declared himself wrathfully against Fichte’s mendacious but patriotic flatteries and exaggerations—but it is probable that Goethe did not think about the Germans as Jean Paul did, although he considered him right about Fichte. What did Goethe really think about the Germans?But there were many things around him about which he never spoke clearly, and his life long he was a master of subtle silence—he probably had good reasons for that. What is certain is that it was not “the Wars of Liberation” 7 that made him look up more cheerfully, any more than the French Revolution; the event on whose account he rethought his Faust, indeed the whole problem of man, was the appearance of Napoleon. There are words of Goethe in which he deprecates with impatient hardness, as if he belonged to a foreign country, what the Germans take pride in: the celebrated German Gemüt8 he once defined as “indulgence toward the weaknesses of others as well as one’s own.” Was he wrong in that? It is characteristic of the Germans that one is rarely completely wrong about them.The German soul has its passageways and inter-passageways; there are caves, hideouts, and dungeons in it; its disorder has a good deal of the attraction of the mysterious; the German is an expert on secret paths to chaos. And just as everything loves its simile, the German loves clouds and everything that is unclear, becoming, twilit, damp, and overcast: whatever is in any way uncertain, unformed, blurred, growing, he feels to be “profound.” The German himself is not, he becomes, he “develops.” “Development” is therefore the truly German find and hit in the great realm of philosophical formulas—a governing concept that, united with German beer and German music, is at work trying to Germanize the whole of Europe.Foreigners stand amazed and fascinated before the riddles posed for them by the contradictory nature at the bottom of the German soul (brought into a system by Hegel and finally set to music by Richard Wagner). “Good-natured and vicious”—such a conjunction, preposterous in relation to any other people, is unfortunately justified all too often in Germany: let anyone live for a while among Swabians! The ponderousness of the German scholar, his social bad taste, gets along alarmingly well with an inner rope-dancing and easy boldness which has taught all the gods what fear is. Whoever wants a demonstration of the “German soul” ad oculos9 should merely look into German taste, into German arts and customs: What boorish indifference to “taste”! How the noblest stands right next to the meanest! How disorderly and rich this whole psychic household is! The German drags his soul along: whatever he experiences he drags. He digests his events badly, he never gets “done” with them; German profundity is often merely a hard and sluggish “digestion.” And just as all chronic invalids, all dyspeptics, love comfort, Germans love “openness” and “Biederkeit”: how comfortable it is to be open and “bieder”!10Perhaps the German of today knows no more dangerous and successful disguise than this confiding, accommodating, cards-on-the-table manner of German honesty: this is his true Mephistopheles-art; with that he can “still go far.” The German lets himself go while making faithful blue, empty, German eyes—and immediately foreigners confound him with his dressing gown.I meant to say: whatever “German profundity” may be—when we are entirely among ourselves, perhaps we permit ourselves to laugh at it?—we shall do well to hold its semblance and good name in honor in the future, too, and not to trade our old reputation as a people of profundity too cheaply for Prussian “pluck” and Berlin wit and sand.11 It is clever for a people to make and let itself be considered profound, awkward, good-natured, honest, and not clever: it might even be—profound. Finally, one should live up to one’s name: it is not for nothing that one is called the “tiusche” Volk, the Täusche-Volk, deceiver people.12—245The “good old time” is gone, in Mozart we hear its swan song. How fortunate we are that his rococo still speaks to us, that his “good company,” his tender enthusiasms, his childlike delight in curlicues and Chinese touches, his courtesy of the heart, his longing for the graceful, those in love, those dancing, those easily moved to tears, his faith in the south, may still appeal to some residue in us. Alas, some day all this will be gone—but who may doubt that the understanding and taste for Beethoven will go long before that! Beethoven was after all merely the final chord of transition in style, a style break, and not, like Mozart, the last chord of a centuries-old great European taste.Beethoven is the interlude of a mellow old soul that constantly breaks and an over-young future soul that constantly comes; on his music lies that twilight of eternal losing and eternal extravagant hoping—the same light in which Europe was bathed when it dreamed with Rousseau, danced around the freedom tree of the Revolution, and finally almost worshiped before Napoleon. But how quickly this feeling pales now; how difficult is mere knowledge of this feeling even today—how strange to our ears sounds the language of Rousseau, Schiller, Shelley, Byron, in whom, taken together, the same fate of Europe found its way into words that in Beethoven knew how to sing!Whatever German music came after that belongs to romanticism, a movement that was, viewed historically, still briefer, still more fleeting, still more superficial than that great entr’acte, that transition of Europe from Rousseau to Napoleon and to the rise of democracy. Weber: but what are Freischütz and Oberon to us today! Or Marschner’s Hans Heiling and Vampyr! Or even Wagner’s Tannhäuser. That is music that has died away though it is not yet forgotten. All this music of romanticism, moreover, was not noble enough to remain valid anywhere except in the theater and before crowds; it was from the start second-rate music that was not considered seriously by genuine musicians.It is different with Felix Mendelssohn, that halcyon master who, on account of his lighter, purer, more enchanted soul, was honored quickly and just as quickly forgotten: as the beautiful intermezzo of German music. But as for Robert Schumann, who was very serious and also was taken seriously from the start—he was the last to found a school—is it not considered a good fortune among us today, a relief, a liberation, that this Schumann romanticism has been overcome?Schumann, fleeing into the “Saxon Switzerland” 13 of his soul, half like Werther, half like Jean Paul, certainly not like Beethoven, certainly not like Byron—his Manfred music is a mistake and misunderstanding to the point of an injustice—Schumann with his taste which was basically a small taste (namely, a dangerous propensity, doubly dangerous among Germans, for quiet lyricism and sottishness of feeling), constantly walking off to withdraw shyly and retire, a noble tender-heart who wallowed in all sorts of anonymous bliss and woe, a kind of girl and noli me tangere14 from the start: this Schumann was already a merely German event in music, no longer a European one, as Beethoven was and, to a still greater extent, Mozart. With him German music was threatened by its greatest danger: losing the voice for the soul of Europe and descending to mere fatherlandishness.246What torture books written in German are for anyone who has a third ear! How vexed one stands before the slowly revolving swamp of sounds that do not sound like anything and rhythms that do not dance, called a “book” among Germans! Yet worse is the German who reads books! How lazily, how reluctantly, how badly he reads! How many Germans know, and demand of themselves that they should know, that there is art in every good sentence—art that must be figured out if the sentence is to be understood! A misunderstanding about its tempo, for example—and the sentence itself is misunderstood.That one must not be in doubt about the rhythmically decisive syllables, that one experiences the break with any excessively severe symmetry as deliberate and attractive, that one lends a subtle and patient ear to every staccato15 and every rubato,16 that one figures out the meaning in the sequence of vowels and diphthongs and how delicately and richly they can be colored and change colors as they follow each other—who among book-reading Germans has enough good will to acknowledge such duties and demands and to listen to that much art and purpose in language? In the end one simply does not have “the ear for that;” and thus the strongest contrasts of style go unheard, and the subtlest artistry is. wasted as on the deaf.These were my thoughts when I noticed how clumsily and un-discerningly two masters in the art of prose were confounded—one whose words drop hesitantly and coldly, as from the ceiling of a damp cave—he counts on their dull sound and resonance—and another who handles his language like a flexible rapier, feeling from his arm down to his toes the dangerous delight of the quivering, over-sharp blade that desires to bite, hiss, cut.17—24718How little German style has to do with sound and the ears is shown by the fact that precisely our good musicians write badly. The German does not read aloud, not for the ear but only with the eye: meanwhile his ears are put away in a drawer. In antiquity men read—when they did read, which happened rarely enough—to themselves, aloud, with a resounding voice; one was surprised when anyone read quietly, and secretly asked oneself for the reasons. With a resounding voice: that means, with all the crescendos, inflections, and reversals of tone and changes in tempo in which the ancient public world took delight.The laws of written style were then the same as those for spoken style; and these laws depended partly on the amazing development and the refined requirements of ear and larynx, partly on the strength, perseverance, and power of ancient lungs. A period in the classical sense is above all a physiological unit, insofar as it is held together by a single breath. Such periods as are found in Demosthenes and Cicero, swelling twice and coming down twice, all within a single breath, are delights for the men of antiquity who, from their own training, knew how to esteem their virtue and how rare and difficult was the delivery of such a period. We really have no right to the great period, we who are modern and in every sense short of breath.19All of these ancients were after all themselves dilettantes in rhetoric, hence connoisseurs, hence critics and thus drove their rhetoricians to extremes; just as in the last century, when all Italians and Italiennes knew how to sing, virtuosity in singing (and with that also the art of melody) reached its climax among them. In Germany, however, there really was (until quite recently, when a kind of platform eloquence began shyly and clumsily enough to flap its young wings) only a single species of public and roughly artful rhetoric: that from the pulpit.In Germany the preacher alone knew what a syllable weighs, or a word, and how a sentence strikes, leaps, plunges, runs, runs out; he alone had a conscience in his ears, often enough a bad conscience; for there is no lack of reasons why Germans rarely attain proficiency in rhetoric, and almost always too late. The masterpiece of German prose is therefore, fairly enough, the masterpiece of its greatest preacher: the Bible has so far been the best German book. Compared with Luther’s Bible, almost everything else is mere “literature”—something that did not grow in Germany and therefore also did not grow and does not grow into German hearts—as the Bible did.248There are two types of genius: one which above all begets and wants to beget, and another which prefers being fertilized and giving birth. Just so, there are among peoples of genius those to whom the woman’s problem of pregnancy and the secret task of forming, maturing, and perfecting has been allotted—the Greeks, for example, were a people of this type; also the French—and others who must fertilize and become the causes of new orders of life—like the Jews,20 the Romans, and, asking this in all modesty, the Germans? Peoples, tormented and enchanted by unknown fevers and irresistibly pressed beyond themselves, in love and lusting after foreign races (after those who like “being fertilized”), and at the same time domineering like all that knows itself to be full of creative powers and hence “by the grace of God.” These two types of genius seek each other, like man and woman; but they also misunderstand each other—like man and woman.249Every people has its own Tartuffery and calls it its virtues.—What is best in us we do not know—we cannot know.250What Europe owes to the Jews? Many things, good and bad, and above all one thing that is both of the best and of the worst: the grand style in morality, the terribleness and majesty of infinite demands, infinite meanings, the whole romanticism and sublimity of moral questionabilities—and hence precisely the most attractive, captious, and choicest part of those plays of color and seductions to life in whose afterglow the sky of our European culture, its evening sky, is burning now—perhaps burning itself out. We artists among the spectators and philosophers are—grateful for this to the Jews.21251It must be taken into the bargain if all sorts of clouds and disturbances—in brief, little attacks of hebetation—pass over the spirit of a people that is suffering, and wants to suffer, of nationalistic nerve fever and political ambition. Examples among the Germans today include now the anti-French stupidity, now the anti-Jewish, now the anti-Polish, now the Christian-romantic, now the Wagnerian, now the Teutonic, now the Prussian (just look at the wretched historians, these Sybels and Treitschkes22 and their thickly bandaged heads!) and whatever other names these little notifications23 of the German spirit and conscience may have. Forgive me, for during a brief daring sojourn in very infected territory I, too, did not altogether escape this disease and began like everyone else to develop notions about matters that are none of my business: the first sign of the political infection. For example about the Jews: only listen!I have not met a German yet who was well disposed toward the Jews; and however unconditionally all the cautious and politically-minded repudiated real anti-Semitism,24 even this caution and policy are not directed against the species of this feeling itself but only against its dangerous immoderation, especially against the insipid and shameful expression of this immoderate feeling—about this, one should not deceive oneself. That Germany has amply enough Jews, that the German stomach, the German blood has trouble (and will still have trouble for a long time) digesting even this quantum of “Jew”—as the Italians, French, and English have done, having a stronger digestive system—that is the clear testimony and language of a general instinct to which one must listen, in accordance with which one must act. “Admit no more new Jews! And especially close the doors to the east (also to Austria)!” thus commands the instinct of a people whose type is still weak and indefinite, so it could easily be blurred or extinguished by a stronger race. The Jews, however, are beyond any doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race now living in Europe; they know how to prevail even under the worst conditions (even better than under favorable conditions), by means of virtues that today one would like to mark as vices—thanks above all to a resolute faith that need not be ashamed before “modern ideas;” they change, when they change, always only as the Russian Empire makes its conquests—being an empire that has time and is not of yesterday—namely, according to the principle, “as slowly as possible.”A thinker who has the development of Europe on his conscience will, in all his projects for this future, take into account the Jews as well as the Russians as the provisionally surest and most probable factors in the great play and fight of forces. What is called a “nation” in Europe today, and is really rather a res facta than a res nata (and occasionally can hardly be told from a res ficta et picta)25 is in any case something evolving, young, and easily changed, not yet a race, let alone such an aere perennius26 as the Jewish type: these “nations” really should carefully avoid every hotheaded rivalry and hostility! That the Jews, if they wanted it—or if they were forced into it, which seems to be what the anti-Semites want—could even now have preponderance, indeed quite literally mastery over Europe, that is certain; that they are not working and planning for that is equally certain.Meanwhile they want and wish rather, even with some importunity, to be absorbed and assimilated by Europe; they long to be fixed, permitted, respected somewhere at long last, putting an end to the nomads’ life, to the “Wandering Jew;” and this bent and impulse (which may even express an attenuation of the Jewish instincts) should be noted well and accommodated: to that end it might be useful and fair to expel the anti-Semitic screamers from the country.27 Accommodated with all caution, with selection; approximately as the English nobility does. It is obvious that the stronger and already more clearly defined types of the new Germanism can enter into relations with them with the least hesitation; for example, officers of the nobility from the March Brandenburg:28 it would be interesting in many ways to see whether the hereditary art of commanding and obeying—in both of these, the land just named is classical today—could not be enriched with29 the genius of money and patience (and above all a little spirituality, which is utterly lacking among these officers). But here it is proper to break off my cheerful Germanomania and holiday oratory; for I am beginning to touch on what is serious for me, the “European problem” as I understand it, the cultivation of a new caste that will rule Europe.252They are no philosophical race, these Englishmen: Bacon signifies an attack on the philosophical spirit; Hobbes, Hume, and Locke a debasement and lowering of the value of the concept of “philosophy” for more than a century. It was against Hume that Kant arose, and rose; it was Locke of whom Schelling said, understandably, “je méprise Locke”;30 in their fight against the English-mechanistic doltification of the world, Hegel and Schopenhauer were of one mind (with Goethe)—these two hostile brother geniuses in philosophy who strove apart toward opposite poles of the German spirit and in the process wronged each other as only brothers wrong each other.31What was lacking in England, and always has been lacking there, was known well enough to that semi-actor and rhetorician, the insipid muddlehead Carlyle, who tried to conceal behind passionate grimaces what he knew of himself—namely, what was lacking in Carlyle: real power of spirituality, real profundity of spiritual perception; in brief, philosophy.It is characteristic of such an unphilosophical race that it clings firmly to Christianity: they need its discipline to become “moralized” and somewhat humanized. The English, being gloomier, more sensual, stronger in will, and more brutal than the Germans, are precisely for that reason more vulgar, also more pious than the Germans: they stand more in need of Christianity. For more sensitive nostrils even this English Christianity still has a typically English odor of spleen and alcoholic dissipation against which it is needed for good reasons as a remedy—the subtler poison against the coarser: a subtler poisoning is indeed for clumsy peoples some progress, a step toward spiritualization. English clumsiness and peasant seriousness is still disguised most tolerably—or rather elucidated and reinterpreted—by the language of Christian gestures and by prayers and singing of psalms. And for those brutes of sots and rakes who formerly learned how to grunt morally under the sway of Methodism and more recently again as a “Salvation Army,” a penitential spasm may really be the relatively highest achievement of “humanity” to which they can be raised: that much may be conceded in all fairness. But what is offensive even in the most humane Englishman is his lack of music, speaking metaphorically (but not only metaphorically): in the movements of his soul and body he has no rhythm and dance, indeed not even the desire for rhythm and dance, for “music.” Listen to him speak; watch the most beautiful Englishwomen walk—there are no more beautiful doves and swans in any country in the world—finally listen to them sing! But I am asking too much—253There are truths that are recognized best by mediocre minds because they are most congenial to them; there are truths that have charm and seductive powers only for mediocre spirits: we come up against this perhaps disagreeable proposition just now, since the spirit of respectable but mediocre Englishmen—I name Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer—is beginning to predominate in the middle regions of European taste. Indeed, who would doubt that it is useful that such spirits should rule at times? It would be a mistake to suppose that the spirits of a high type that soar on their own paths would be particularly skillful at determining and collecting many small and common facts and then drawing conclusions from them: on the contrary, being exceptions, they are from the start at a disadvantage when it comes to the “rule.” Finally, they have more to do than merely to gain knowledge—namely, to be something new, to signify something new, to represent new values. Perhaps the chasm between know and can is greater, also uncannier, than people suppose: those who can do things in the grand style, the creative, may possibly have to be lacking in knowledge—while, on the other hand, for scientific discoveries of the type of Darwin’s a certain narrowness, aridity, and industrious diligence, something English in short, may not be a bad disposition.Finally, we should not forget that the English with their profound normality have once before caused an over-all depression of the European spirit: what people call “modern ideas” or “the ideas of the eighteenth century” or also “French ideas”—that, in other words, against which the German spirit has risen with a profound disgust—was of English origin; there is no doubt of that. The French have merely been apes and mimes of these ideas; also their best soldiers; unfortunately, their first and most thoroughgoing victims as well: for over this damnable Anglomania of “modern ideas” the âme française32 has in the end become so thin and emaciated that today one recalls her sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, her profound and passionate strength, and her inventive nobility almost with disbelief. Yet we must hang on to this proposition of historical fairness with our very teeth, defending it against momentary appearances: European noblesse—of feeling, of taste, of manners, taking the word, in short, in every higher sense—is the work and invention of France; European vulgarity, the plebeianism of modern ideas, that of England.—33254Even now France is still the seat of the most spiritual and sophisticated culture in Europe and the foremost school of taste—but one has to know how to find this “France of taste.” 34 Those who belong to it stay well hidden: it may be a small number in whom it lives—at that, perhaps human beings whose legs might be sturdier, some of them fatalists, somber and sick, some of them overly delicate and artificial, such as have the ambition to hide. One point they all have in common: they plug their ears against the raging stupidity and the noisy twaddle of the democratic bourgeois. Indeed, the foreground today is taken up by a part of France that has become stupid and coarse: recently, at Victor Hugo’s funeral,35 it celebrated a veritable orgy of bad taste and at the same time self-admiration. They have in common one other point as well: the good will to resist any spiritual Germanization—and a still better incapacity to succeed.Perhaps Schopenhauer is even now more at home and indigenous in this France of the spirit, which is also a France of pessimism, than he ever was in Germany—not to speak of Heinrich Heine, who has long become part of the very flesh and blood of the subtler and more demanding lyric poets of Paris, or of Hegel, who today exerts an almost tyrannical influence through Taine, who is the foremost historian now living. But as for Richard Wagner: the more French music learns to form itself in accordance with the actual needs of the âme moderne,36 the more it will “Wagnerize”—that one can predict—and it is doing enough of that even now.Nevertheless, there are three things to which the French can still point with pride today, as their heritage and possession and an enduring mark of their ancient cultural superiority over Europe, in spite of all voluntary and involuntary Germanization and vulgarization of their taste. First, the capacity for artistic passions, for that devotion to “form” for which the phrase l’art pour l’art has been invented along with a thousand others: that sort of thing has not been lacking in France for the last three centuries and has made possible again and again, thanks to their reverence for the “small number,” a kind of chamber music in literature for which one looks in vain in the rest of Europe.The second thing on which the French can base a superiority over Europe is their old, manifold, moralistic37 culture, as a result of which we find, on the average, even in the little romanciers of the newspapers and in chance boulevardiers de Paris a psychological oversensitivity and curiosity of which in Germany, for example, one simply has no idea (let alone the thing itself). For this the Germans lack a few centuries of moralistic work which, as mentioned, France did not spare herself; anyone who calls the Germans “naïve” on that account praises them for a defect. (By way of contrast to the German inexperience and innocence in voluptate psychological,38 which is none too distantly related to the tediousness of German company, and as the most consummate expression of a typically French curiosity and inventiveness for this realm of delicate thrills, one may consider Henri Beyle,39 that remarkable anticipatory and precursory human being who ran with a Napoleonic tempo through his Europe, through several centuries of the European soul, as an explorer and discoverer of this soul: it required two generations to catch up with him in any way, to figure out again a few of the riddles that tormented and enchanted him, this odd epicurean and question mark of a man who was France’s last great psychologist.)There is yet a third claim to superiority. The French character contains a halfway successful synthesis of the north and the south which allows them to comprehend many things and to do things which an Englishman could never understand. Their temperament, periodically turned toward and away from the south, in which from time to time Provençal and Ligurian blood foams over, protects them against the gruesome northern gray on gray and the sunless concept-spooking and anemia—the disease of German taste against whose excesses one has now prescribed for oneself, with considerable resolution, blood and iron,40 which means “great politics” (in accordance with a dangerous healing art which teaches me to wait and wait but so far has not taught me any hope.) Even now one still encounters in France an advance understanding and accommodation of those rarer and rarely contented human beings who are too comprehensive to find satisfaction in any fatherlandishness and know how to love the south in the north and the north in the south—the born Midlanders, the “good Europeans.”It was for them that Bizet made music, this last genius to see a new beauty and seduction—who discovered a piece of the south of music.255Against German music all kinds of precautions seem to me to be indicated. Suppose somebody loves the south as I love it, as a great school of convalescence, in the most spiritual as well as the most sensuous sense, as an uncontainable abundance of sun and transfiguration by the sun that suffuses an existence that believes and glories in itself: well, such a person will learn to be somewhat on his guard against German music, because in corrupting his taste again it also corrupts his health again.If such a southerner, not by descent but by faith, should dream of the future of music, he must also dream of the redemption of music from the north, and in his ears he must have the prelude of a more profound, more powerful, perhaps more evil and mysterious music, a supra-German music that does not fade away at the sight of the voluptuous blue sea and the brightness of the Mediterranean sky, nor does it turn yellow and then pale as all German music does—a supra-European music that prevails even before the brown sunsets of the desert, a music whose soul is related to palm trees and feels at home and knows how to roam among great, beautiful, lonely beasts of prey—I could imagine a music whose rarest magic would consist in its no longer knowing anything of good and evil, only now and then some sailor nostalgia, some golden shadows and delicate weaknesses would pass over it—an art that from a great distance would behold, fleeing toward it, the colors of a setting moral world that had almost become unintelligible—and that would be hospitable and profound enough to receive such late fugitives.—256Owing to the pathological estrangement which the insanity of nationality has induced, and still induces, among the peoples of Europe; owing also to the shortsighted and quick-handed politicians who are at the top today with the help of this insanity, without any inkling that their separatist policies can of necessity only be entr’acte policies; owing to all this and much else that today simply cannot be said, the most unequivocal portents are now being overlooked, or arbitrarily and mendaciously reinterpreted—that Europe wants to become one.In all the more profound and comprehensive men of this century, the over-all direction of the mysterious workings of their soul was to prepare the way for this new synthesis and to anticipate experimentally the European of the future: only in their foregrounds or in weaker hours, say in old age, did they belong to the “fatherlandish”—they were merely taking a rest from themselves when they became “patriots.” I am thinking of such human beings as Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heinrich Heine, Schopenhauer: do not hold it against me when I include Richard Wagner, too, with them, for one should not allow oneself to be led astray about him by his own misunderstandings—geniuses of his type rarely have the right to understand themselves. Even less, to be sure, by the indecent noise with which people in France now close themselves off against him and resist him: the fact remains nevertheless that the late French romanticism of the forties and Richard Wagner belong together most closely and intimately. In all the heights and depths of their needs they are related, fundamentally related: it is Europe, the one Europe, whose soul surges and longs to get further and higher through their manifold and impetuous art—where? into a new light? toward a new sun? But who could express precisely what all these masters of new means of language could not express precisely? What is certain is that the same storm and stress tormented them and that they sought in the same way, these last great seekers!Literature dominated all of them up to their eyes and ears—they were the first artists steeped in world literature—and most of them were themselves writers, poets, mediators and mixers of the arts and senses (as a musician, Wagner belongs among painters; as a poet, among musicians; as an artist in general, among actors); all of them were fanatics of expression “at any price”—I should stress Delacroix, who was most closely related to Wagner—all of them great discoverers in the realm of the sublime, also of the ugly and gruesome, and still greater discoverers concerning effects, display, and the art of display windows—all of them talents far beyond their genius—virtuosos through and through, with uncanny access to everything that seduces, allures, compels, overthrows; born enemies of logic and straight lines, lusting after the foreign, the exotic, the tremendous, the crooked, the self-contradictory; as human beings, Tantaluses of the will, successful plebeians who knew themselves to be incapable, both in their lives and works, of a noble tempo, a lento41—take Balzac, for example—unbridled workers, almost self-destroyers through work; antinomians and rebels against custom, ambitious and insatiable without balance and enjoyment; all of them broke and collapsed in the end before the Christian cross (with right and reason: for who among them would have been profound and original42 enough for a philosophy of the Antichrist?)—on the whole, an audaciously daring, magnificently violent type of higher human beings who soared, and tore others along, to the heights—it fell to them to first teach their century—and it is the century of the crowd!—the concept “higher man”—Let the German friends of Richard Wagner ponder whether there is in Wagner’s art anything outright German, or whether it is not just its distinction that it derives from supra-German sources and impulses. Nor should it be underestimated to what extent Paris was indispensable for the development of his type, and at the decisive moment the depth of his instincts led him to Paris. His entire manner and self-apostolate could perfect itself only when he saw the model of the French socialists. Perhaps it will be found after a subtler comparison that, to the honor of Richard Wagner’s German nature, his doings were in every respect stronger, more audacious, harder, and higher than anything a Frenchman of the nineteenth century could manage—thanks to the fact that we Germans are still closer to barbarism than the French. Perhaps Wagner’s strangest creation is inaccessible, inimitable, and beyond the feelings of the whole, so mature, Latin race, not only today but forever: the figure of Siegfried, that very free man who may indeed be much too free, too hard, too cheerful, too healthy, too anti-Catholic for the taste of ancient and mellow cultured peoples. He may even have been a sin against romanticism, this anti-romantic Siegfried: well, Wagner more than atoned for this sin in his old and glum days when—anticipating a taste that has since then become political—he began, if not to walk, at least to preach, with his characteristic religious vehemence, the way to Rome.Lest these final words be misunderstood, I will enlist the assistance of a few vigorous rhymes which will betray to less subtle ears, too, what I want—what I have against the “final Wagner” and his Parsifal music:—Is this still German?—Out of a German heart, this sultry screeching?a German body, this self-laceration?German, this priestly affectation,this incense-perfumed sensual preaching?German, this halting, plunging, reeling,this so uncertain bim-bam pealing?this nunnish ogling, Ave leavening,this whole falsely ecstatic heaven overheavening?—Is this still German?—You still stand at the gate, perplexed?Think! What you hear is Rome—Rome’s faith without the text.1 Nietzsche discusses Wagner at greater length in The Birth of Tragedy, The Case of Wagner, and Nietzsche contra Wagner.2Dumpf has no perfect equivalent in English. It can mean hollow or muted when applied to a sound, heavy and musty applied to air, dull applied to wits, and is a cousin of the English words, dumb and damp. Goethe still used it with a positive connotation when he wrote poetry about inarticulate feelings; Nietzsche uses the word often—with a strongly negative, anti-romantic connotation.3Verflachung (becoming shallower) contrasted with Vertiefung (becoming more profound). The first people is, without a doubt, Germany; the statesman, Bismarck; and the second people probably France. Of course, the points made are also meant to apply more generally, but this evaluation of Bismarck at the zenith of his success and power certainly shows an amazing independence of spirit, and without grasping the full weight of the final sentence one cannot begin to understand Nietzsche’s conceptions of the will to power or of “beyond good and evil.”4 Goethe’s Faust, line 1112.5 August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue (1761–1819), a popular German writer in his time who had his differences with Goethe and also published attacks on Napoleon, was assassinated by Karl Ludwig Sand (1795–1820), a theology student who took the poet for a Russian spy. Sand was executed.6 Pen name of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825), one of the most renowned German writers of the romantic period.7 Against Napoleon.8 A word without any exact equivalent in English. It is variously rendered as feeling, soul, heart, while gemütlich might be translated as comfortable or cozy.9 For the eyes.10 The word has no exact English equivalent but might be rendered “four-square.”11 The area around Berlin was at one time called “the sandbox of the Holy Roman Empire.”12 This is by no means the accepted German etymology of deutsch.13 A very rugged and picturesque mountain range about fifteen miles southeast of Dresden, not comparable in height, extent, or magnificence to the Swiss Alps.14 “Touch me not!” John 20:17.15 A musical term, meaning detached, disconnected, with breaks between successive notes.16Tempo rubato, literally robbed time, is a tempo in which some notes are shortened in order that others may be lengthened.17 The second master is surely Nietzsche, and the whole passage may give some idea of the difficulty of translating him.18 In the first two editions this appears as 247a, although there is no section 247.19 But Beyond Good and Evil is full of examples, most of which have been preserved in translation, though a few have been broken up into shorter sentences. Plainly it is part of the aim of these sections to tell the reader how the present book wants to be read.20 Nietzsche inverts the anti-Semitic cliché that the Jews are uncreative parasites who excel, if at all, only as performers and interpreters. (Cf. also, e.g., section 52 above and his praise of Mendelssohn in section 245.) The image of the Jews “lusting after foreign races” was a cliché of German anti-Semitism, but it is entirely characteristic of Nietzsche’s style of thinking and writing that the phrase is “spiritualized” (to use his own term) and moreover used in a context which makes plain—for those who read and do not merely browse—that Nietzsche’s meaning is utterly opposed to that previously associated with the words. His famous “revaluation” begins with words that receive new values.   Nietzsche’s conception of the Greeks and Romans also inverts the usual view. In his frequent insistence on the debt of the Greeks to earlier civilizations he was at least half a century ahead of his time.21 Cf. section 195 above. In the light of these two sections it seems probable that the reference to the Germans (“in all modesty”) in section 248 alludes to Nietzsche’s own ambitions. He is hoping to initiate a “revaluation” comparable to that ascribed to the Jews in section 195: they are his model. Of course, he does not agree with the values he ascribes to them; but the whole book represents an effort to rise “beyond” simpleminded agreement and disagreement, beyond the vulgar faith in antithetic values, “beyond good and evil.” The point of that title is not that the author considers himself beyond good and evil in the crudest sense, but it is in part that he is beyond saying such silly things as “the Jews are good” or “the Jews are evil;” or “free spirits” or “scholars” or “virtues” or “honesty” or “humaneness” are “good” or “evil.” Everywhere he introduces distinctions, etching first one type and then another—both generally confounded under a single label. He asks us to shift perspectives, or to perceive hues and gradations instead of simple black and white. This has led superficial readers to suppose that he contradicts himself or that he never embraces any meaningful conclusions (Karl Jaspers); but this book abounds in conclusions. Only one can never be sure what they are as long as one tears sentences and half-sentences out of context (the method of Bertram and Jaspers)—or even whole aphorisms: section 240 is meant to be read before section 241, not in isolation.22 Heinrich von Sybel (1817–95) and Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–96) were among the leading German historians of their time. Sybel was for many years a member of the Prussian parliament. At one time a critic of Bismarck, he strongly supported many of Bismarck’s policies, beginning in 1866. In 1875 Bismarck appointed him director of the Prussian archives. His major works include Die deutsche Nation und das Kaiserreich (the German nation and the Empire; 1862) and Die Begründung des deutschen Reiches durch Wilhelm I (1889–94; English version, The Founding of the German Empire by William I, trans. Marshall Livingston, 1890-98).   Treitschke, born at Dresden, was a Liberal as a young man. By 1866, when Prussia went to war against Austria, “his sympathies with Prussia were so strong that he went to Berlin [from Freiburg, where he had been a professor], became a Prussian subject, and was appointed editor of the Preussische Jahrbücher” (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed.). In 1871 he became a member of the new imperial parliament, and in 1874 a professor of history at Berlin. He became “the chief panegyrist of the house of Hohenzollern. He did more than anyone to mould the minds of the rising generation, and he carried them with him even in his violent attacks on all opinions and all parties which appeared in any way to be injurious to the rising power of Germany. He supported the government in its attempts to subdue by legislation the Socialists, Poles, and Catholics; and he was one of the few men of eminence who gave the sanction of his name to the attacks on the Jews which began in 1878. As a strong advocate of colonial expansion, he was also a bitter enemy of Great Britain, and he was to a large extent responsible for the anti-British feeling of German Chauvinism during the last years of the 19th century” (ibid.).   Although all of Nietzsche’s references to Treitschke are vitriolic (there are three in Ecce Homo), uninformed writers have occasionally linked Nietzsche and Treitschke as if both had been German nationalists.23Benebelungen. Could also be translated “befoggings.”24Antisemiterei is more derogatory than Antisemitismus.25 Something made; something born; something fictitious and unreal.26 More enduring than bronze: quotation from Horace’s Odes, III, 30.1.27 None of this prevented Richard Oehler from quoting a passage from this section, out of context, in one of the first Nazi books on Nietzsche, after saying: “To wish to give proof regarding Nietzsche’s thoughts in order to establish that they agree with the race views and strivings of the National Socialist movement would be carrying coals to Newcastle” (Friedrich Nietzsche und die deutsche Zukunft, Leipzig [Friedrich Nietzsche and the German future], 1935). Oehler knew better: he had been one of the editors of the collected works and had even then compiled elaborate indices for two editions—one of these indices comprised two and a half large volumes—and later he compiled a third one for yet another edition. But the Nazis’ occasional use and perversion of Nietzsche was completely devoid of the most elementary scruples. For other examples see Kaufmann’s Nietzsche, Chapter 10.28 The region around Berlin. In 1701 the Elector of Brandenburg was crowned the first King of Prussia, and in 1871 the kings of Prussia, his descendants, became German Emperors.29Hinzutun, hinzuzüchten.30 “I despise Locke.”31 In fact, Hegel, who was then very famous and influential, never wronged Schopenhauer, who was young, unknown, and deliberately provocative; but Schopenhauer attacked Hegel after his death in the strongest terms, in print. See Walter Kaufmann, Hegel (Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1965), section 54. It is remarkable how completely Nietzsche emancipated himself from Schopenhauer’s view of Hegel, considering Nietzsche’s early enthusiasm for Schopenhauer.32 French soul.33 Nietzsche’s influence on French letters since the turn of the century has been second only to his influence on German literature and thought; his reputation in England has been negligible. The British writers of the first rank who were influenced greatly by him were Irish: Shaw, Yeats, and Joyce.34 Parts of this section were later included by Nietzsche, slightly revised, in Nietzsche contra Wagner, in the chapter “Where Wagner Belongs” (Portable Nietzsche.). He also used section 256 in the same chapter of Nietzsche contra Wagner and in the following one, and sections 269 and 270 for the chapter “The Psychologist Speaks Up”.35 Victor Hugo died May 22, 1885.36 Modern soul.37 The negative overtones of “moralistic” in current English usage are out of place in this context; Nietzsche is plainly thinking of the French term moraliste.38 In the delight of psychology.39 The great French novelist (1783–1842) who is better known by his pen name, Stendhal. Nietzsche’s writings abound in tributes to him; e.g., section 39 above.40 Bismarck’s famous phrase. On May 12, 1859, writing to the cabinet minister Schleinitz from St. Petersburg, Bismarck spoke of “an infirmity of Prussia that sooner or later we shall have to cure ferro et igni.” In an evening session of the budget commission of the Prussian parliament, September 30, 1862, he said: “It is not by speeches and majority resolutions that the great questions of the time are decided—that was the mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by iron and blood.” And on January 28, 1886, Bismarck said to the Parliament: “It is not my fault that at that time I was misunderstood. It was a matter of military questions, and I said: Place as great a military force as possible, in other words as much blood and iron as possible, in the hand of the king of Prussia, then he will be able to make the politics you desire; with speeches and riflemen’s festivals and songs it cannot be made; it can be made only with blood and iron.”41 Slow tempo.42Ursprünglich. Part Nine - What is Noble Chapter 45 From High Mountains: Aftersong Aus hohen Bergen.——NACHGESANG.Oh Lebens Mittag! Feierliche Zeit!      Oh Sommergarten!Unruhig Glück im Stehn und Spähn und Warten:—Der Freunde harr’ ich, Tag und Nacht bereit,Wo bleibt ihr Freunde? Kommt! ’s ist Zeit! ’s ist Zeit!War’s nicht für euch, dass sich des Gletschers Grau      Heut schmückt mit Rosen?Euch sucht der Bach, sehnsüchtig drängen, stossenSich Wind und Wolke höher heut in’s Blau,Nach euch zu spähn aus fernster Vogel-Schau.Im Höchsten ward für euch mein Tisch gedeckt:—      Wer wohnt den SternenSo nahe, wer des Abgrunds grausten Fernen?Mein Reich—welch Reich hat weiter sich gereckt?Und meinen Honig—wer hat ihn geschmeckt?….—Da seid ihr, Freunde!—Weh, doch ich bin’s nicht,      Zu dem ihr wolltet?Ihr zögert, staunt—ach, dass ihr lieber grolltet!Ich—bin’s nicht mehr? Vertauscht Hand, Schritt, Gesicht?Und was ich bin, euch Freunden—bin ich’s nicht?Ein Andrer ward ich? Und mir selber fremd?      Mir selbst entsprungen?Ein Ringer, der zu oft sich selbst bezwungen?Zu oft sich gegen eigne Kraft gestemmt,Durch eignen Sieg verwundet und gehemmt? From High Mountains———AFTERSONGO noon of life! O time to celebrate!      O summer garden!Restlessly happy and expectant, standing,Watching all day and night, for friends I wait:Where are you, friends? Come! It is time! It’s late!The glacier’s gray adorned itself for you      Today with roses;The brook seeks you, and full of longing risesThe wind, the cloud, into the vaulting blueTo look for you from dizzy bird’s-eye view.Higher than mine no table has been set:      Who lives so nearThe stars or dread abysses half as sheer?My realm, like none, is almost infinite,And my sweet honey—who has tasted it?——There you are, friends!—Alas, the man you sought      You do not find here?You hesitate, amazed? Anger were kinder!I—changed so much? A different face and gait?And what I am—for you, friends, I am not?Am I another? Self-estranged? From me—      Did I elude?A wrestler who too oft himself subdued?Straining against his strength too frequently,Wounded and stopped by his own victory?Ich suchte, wo der Wind am schärfsten weht?      Ich lernte wohnen,Wo Niemand wohnt, in öden Eisbär-Zonen,Verlernte Mensch und Gott, Fluch und Gebet?Ward zum Gespenst, das über Gletscher geht?—Ihr alten Freunde! Seht! Nun blickt ihr bleich,      Voll Lieb’ und Grausen!Nein, geht! Zürnt nicht! Hier—könntet ihr nicht hausen: Hier zwischen fernstem Eis- und Felsenreich—Hier muss man Jäger sein und gemsengleich.Ein schlimmer Jäger ward ich!—Seht, wie steil      Gespannt mein Bogen!Der Stärkste war’s, der solchen Zug gezogen—:Doch wehe nun! Gefährlich ist der Pfeil,Wie kein Pfeil,—fort von hier! Zu eurem Heil!….Ihr wendet euch?—Oh Herz, du trugst genung,      Stark blieb dein Hoffen:Halt neuen Freunden deine Thüren offen!Die alten lass! Lass die Erinnerung!Warst einst du jung, jetzt—bist du besser jung!Was je uns knüpfte, Einer Hoffnung Band,—      Wer liest die Zeichen,Die Liebe einst hineinschrieb, noch, die bleichen?Dem Pergament vergleich ich’s, das die HandZu fassen scheut,—ihm gleich verbräunt, verbrannt.Nicht Freunde mehr, das sind—wie nenn’ ich’s doch?—      Nur Freunds-Gespenster!Das klopft mir wohl noch Nachts an Herz und Fenster,Das sieht mich an und spricht: “wir waren’s doch?”——Oh welkes Wort, das einst wie Rosen roch!Oh Jugend-Sehnen, das sich missverstand!      Die ich ersehnte,Die ich mir selbst verwandt-verwandelt wähnte,Dass alt sie wurden, hat sie weggebannt:Nur wer sich wandelt, bleibt mit mir verwandt.Oh Lebens Mittag! Zweite Jugendzeit!       Oh Sommergarten!Unruhig Glück im Stehn und Spähn und Warten!I sought where cutting winds are at their worst?       I learned to dwellWhere no one lives, in bleakest polar hell,Unlearned mankind and god, prayer and curse?Became a ghost that wanders over glaciers?—My ancient friends! Alas! You show the shock       Of love and fear!No, leave! Do not be wroth! You—can’t live here—Here, among distant fields of ice and rock—Here one must be a hunter, chamois-like,A wicked archer I’ve become.—The ends      Of my bow kiss;Only the strongest bends his bow like this.No arrow strikes like that which my bow sends:Away from here—for your own good, my friends!—You leave?—My heart: no heart has borne worse hunger;      Your hope stayed strong:Don’t shut your gates; new friends may come along.Let old ones go. Don’t be a memory-monger!Once you were young—now you are even younger.What once tied us together, one hope’s bond—      Who reads the signsLove once inscribed on it, the pallid lines?To parchment I compare it that the handIs loath to touch—discolored, dark, and burnt.No longer friends—there is no word for those—      It is a wraithThat knocks at night and tries to rouse my faith,And looks at me and says: “Once friendship was—”—O wilted word, once fragrant as the rose.Youth’s longing misconceived inconstancy.      Those whom I deemedChanged to my kin, the friends of whom I dreamed,Have aged and lost our old affinity:One has to change to stay akin to me.O noon of life! Our second youthful state!      O summer garden!Restlessly happy and expectant, standing, Der Freunde harr’ ich, Tag und Nacht bereit,Der neuen Freunde! Kommt! ’s ist Zeit! ’s ist Zeit!Dies Lied ist aus,—der Sehnsucht süsser Schrei      Erstarb im Munde:Ein Zaubrer that’s, der Freund zur rechten Stunde,Der Mittags-Freund—nein! fragt nicht, wer es sei—Um Mittag war’s, da wurde Eins zu Zwei….Nun feiern wir, vereinten Siegs gewiss,     Das Fest der Feste:Freund Zarathustra kam, der Gast der Gäste!Nun lacht die Welt, der grause Vorhang riss,Die Hochzeit kam für Licht und Finsterniss….Looking all day and night, for friends I wait:For new friends! Come! It’s time! It’s late!This song is over—longing’s dulcet cry      Died in my mouth:A wizard did it, friend in time of drought,The friend of noon—no, do not ask me who—At noon it was that one turned into two—Sure of our victory, we celebrate      The feast of feasts:Friend Zarathustra came, the guest of guests!The world now laughs, rent are the drapes of fright,The wedding is at hand of dark and light— O N THE G ENEALOGY OF M ORALS Contents Editor’s Introduction ON THEGENEALOGY OF MORALSA Polemic11Eine Streitschrift. Preface Chapter 1 - First Essay: “Good and Evil,” “Good and Bad” Chapter 2 - Second Essay: “Guilt,” “Bad Conscience,” and the Like Chapter 3 - Third Essay: What Is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals? T HE C ASE OF W AGNER Dedication Contents Translator’s Introduction Chapter 1 - The Case of Wagner PrefaceI have granted myself some small relief. It is not merely pure malice when I praise Bizet in this essay at the expense of Wagner. Interspersed with many jokes, I bring up a matter that is no joke. To turn my back on Wagner was for me a fate; to like anything at all again after that, a triumph. Perhaps nobody was more dangerously attached to—grown together with—Wagnerizing; nobody tried harder to resist it; nobody was happier to be rid of it. A long story!—You want a word for it?—If I were a moralist, who knows what I might call it? Perhaps self-overcoming.—But the philosopher has no love for moralists. Neither does he love pretty words.What does a philosopher demand of himself first and last? To overcome his time in himself, to become “timeless.” With what must he therefore engage in the hardest combat? With whatever marks him as the child of his time. Well, then! I am, no less than Wagner, a child of this time; that is, a decadent: but I comprehended this, I resisted it. The philosopher in me resisted.Nothing has preoccupied me more profoundly than the problem of decadence—I had reasons. “Good and evil” is merely a variation of that problem. Once one has developed a keen eye for the symptoms of decline, one understands morality, too—one understands what is hiding under its most sacred names and value formulas: impoverished life, the will to the end, the great weariness. Morality negates life.For such a task I required a special self-discipline: to take sides against everything sick in me, including Wagner, including Schopenhauer, including all of modern “humaneness.”—A profound estrangement, cold, sobering up—against everything that is of this time, everything timely—and most desirable of all, the eye of Zarathustra, an eye that beholds the whole fact of man at a tremendous distance—below. For such a goal—what sacrifice wouldn’t be fitting? what “self-overcoming”? what “self-denial”?My greatest experience was a recovery. Wagner is merely one of my sicknesses.Not that I wish to be ungrateful to this sickness. When in this essay I assert the proposition that Wagner is harmful, I wish no less to assert for whom he is nevertheless indispensable—for the philosopher. Others may be able to get along without Wagner; but the philosopher is not free to do without Wagner. He has to be the bad conscience of his time:1 for that he needs to understand it best. But confronted with the labyrinth of the modern soul, where could he find a guide more initiated, a more eloquent prophet of the soul, than Wagner? Through Wagner modernity speaks most intimately, concealing neither its good nor its evil—having forgotten all sense of shame. And conversely: one has almost completed an account of the value of what is modern once one has gained clarity about what is good and evil in Wagner.I understand perfectly when a musician says today: “I hate Wagner, but I can no longer endure any other music.” But I’d also understand a philosopher who would declare: “Wagner sums up modernity. There is no way out, one must first become a Wagnerian.” 1Yesterday I heard—would you believe it?—Bizet’s masterpiece, for the twentieth time. Again I stayed there with tender devotion; again I did not run away. This triumph over my impatience surprises me. How such a work makes one perfect! One becomes a “masterpiece” oneself.Really, every time I heard Carmen I seemed to myself more of a philosopher, a better philosopher, than I generally consider myself: so patient do I become, so happy, so Indian, so settled.—To sit five hours: the first stage of holiness!May I say that the tone of Bizet’s orchestra is almost the only one I can still endure? That other orchestral tone which is now the fashion, Wagner’s, brutal, artificial, and “innocent” at the same time—thus it speaks all at once to the three senses of the modern soul—how harmful for me is this Wagnerian orchestral tone! I call it sirocco. I break out into a disagreeable sweat. My good weather is gone.This music seems perfect to me. It approaches lightly, supplely, politely. It is pleasant, it does not sweat. “What is good is light; whatever is divine moves on tender feet”: first principle of my aesthetics. This music is evil, subtly fatalistic: at the same time it remains popular—its subtlety belongs to a race, not to an individual. It is rich. It is precise. It builds, organizes, finishes: thus it constitutes the opposite of the polyp in music, the “infinite melody.” Have more painful tragic accents ever been heard on the stage? How are they achieved? Without grimaces. Without counterfeit. Without the lie of the great style.Finally, this music treats the listener as intelligent, as if himself a musician—and is in this respect, too, the counterpart of Wagner, who was, whatever else he was, at any rate the most impolite genius in the world (Wagner treats us as if—he says something so often—till one despairs—till one believes it).Once more: I become a better human being when this Bizet speaks to me. Also a better musician, a better listener. Is it even possible to listen better?—I actually bury my ears under this music to hear its causes. It seems to me I experience its genesis—I tremble before dangers that accompany some strange risk; I am delighted by strokes of good fortune of which Bizet is innocent.— And, oddly, deep down I don’t think of it, or don’t know how much I think about it. For entirely different thoughts are meanwhile running through my head.Has it been noticed that music liberates the spirit? gives wings to thought? that one becomes more of a philosopher the more one becomes a musician?—The gray sky of abstraction rent as if by lightning; the light strong enough for the filigree of things; the great problems near enough to grasp; the world surveyed as from a mountain.—I have just defined the pathos of philosophy.— And unexpectedly answers drop into my lap, a little hail of ice and wisdom, of solved problems.—Where am I?—Bizet makes me fertile. Whatever is good makes me fertile. I have no other gratitude, nor do I have any other proof for what is good.2This work, too, redeems; Wagner is not the only “redeemer.” With this work one takes leave of the damp north, of all the steam of the Wagnerian ideal. Even the plot spells redemption from that. From Mérimée it still has the logic in passion, the shortest line, the harsh necessity; above all, it has what goes with the torrid zone: the dryness of the air, the limpidezza1 in the air. In every respect, the climate is changed. Another sensuality, another sensibility speaks here, another cheerfulness. This music is cheerful,—but not in a French or German way. Its cheerfulness is African; fate hangs over it; its happiness is brief, sudden, without pardon. I envy Bizet for having had the courage for this sensibility which had hitherto had no language in the cultivated music of Europe—for this more southern, brown, burnt sensibility.—How the yellow afternoons of its happiness do us good! We look into the distance as we listen: did we ever find the sea smoother?— And how soothingly the Moorish dance speaks to us? How even our insatiability for once gets to know satiety in this lascivious melancholy!Finally, love—love translated back into nature. Not the love of a “higher virgin”! No Senta-sentimentality!2 But love as fatum, as fatality, cynical, innocent, cruel—and precisely in this a piece of nature. That love which is war in its means, and at bottom the deadly hatred of the sexes!—I know no case where the tragic joke that constitutes the essence of love is expressed so strictly, translated with equal terror into a formula, as in Don José’s last cry, which concludes the work:“Yes. I have killed her,I—my adored Carmen!”Such a conception of love (the only one worthy of a philosopher) is rare: it raises a work of art above thousands.3 For on the average, artists do what all the world does, even worse—they misunderstand love. Wagner, too, misunderstood it. They believe one becomes selfless in love because one desires the advantage of another human being, often against one’s own advantage. But in return for that they want to possess the other person.—Even God does not constitute an exception at this point. He is far from thinking, “What is it to you if I love you?”4—he becomes terrible when one does not love him in return. L’amour—this saying remains true among gods and men—est de tous les sentiments le plus égoïste, et par conséquent, lorsqu’il est blessé, le moins généreux. (B. Constant.)53You begin to see how much this music improves me?—Il faut méditerraniser la musique:1 I have reasons for this formula (Beyond Good and Evil, Aph. 255). The return to nature, health, cheerfulness, youth, virtue!— And yet I was one of the most corrupted Wagnerians.—I was capable of taking Wagner seriously.—Ah, this old magician, how much he imposed upon us! The first thing his art offers us is a magnifying glass: one looks through it, one does not trust one’s own eyes—everything looks big, even Wagner.—What a clever rattlesnake! It has filled our whole life with its rattling about “devotion,” about “loyalty,” about “purity;” and with its praise of chastity it withdrew from the corrupted world.— And we believed it in all these things.—But you do not hear me? You, too, prefer Wagner’s problem to Bizet’s? I, too, do not underestimate it; it has its peculiar magic. The problem of redemption is certainly a venerable problem. There is nothing about which Wagner has thought more deeply than redemption: his opera is the opera of redemption. Somebody or other always wants to be redeemed in his work: sometimes a little male, sometimes a little female—this is his problem.— And how richly he varies his leitmotif! What rare, what profound dodges! Who if not Wagner would teach us that innocence prefers to redeem interesting sinners? (The case in Tannhäuser.) Or that even the Wandering Jew is redeemed, settles down, when he marries? (The case in The Flying Dutchman.) Or that old corrupted females prefer to be redeemed by chaste youths? (The case of Kundry.2) Or that beautiful maidens like best to be redeemed by a knight who is a Wagnerian? (The case in Die Meistersinger.) Or that married women, too, enjoy being redeemed by a knight? (The case of Isolde.) Or that “the old Goa,” after having compromised himself morally in every respect, is finally redeemed by a free spirit and immoralist? (The case in the Ring.) Do admire this final profundity above all! Do you understand it? I—beware of understanding it.That yet other lessons may be learned from the works just named I’d sooner demonstrate than deny. That a Wagnerian ballet may drive one to despair—and virtue! (Again the case of Tannhäuser.) That it may have the direst consequences if one doesn’t go to bed at the right time. (Once more the case of Lohengrin.) That one should never know too precisely whom exactly one has married. (For the third time, the case of Lohengrin.)Tristan and Isolde glorifies the perfect spouse who in a certain case has only the single question: “But why didn’t you tell me this before? Nothing simpler than that!” Answer:“That I may not tell you;and what you askyou may never know.”Lohengrin contains a solemn excommunication of inquiry and questioning. Wagner thus represents the Christian concept, “you ought to and must believe” It is a crime against what is highest and holiest to be scientific.The Flying Dutchman preaches the sublime doctrine that woman makes even the most restless man stable; in Wagnerian terms, she “redeems” him. Here we permit ourselves a question. Supposing this were true, would it also be desirable?What becomes of the “Wandering Jew”3 whom a woman adores and makes stable? He merely ceases to be eternal; he gets married, he is of no further concern to us.Translated into reality: the danger for artists, for geniuses—and who else is the “Wandering Jew”?—is woman: adoring women confront them with corruption. Hardly any of them have character enough not to be corrupted—or “redeemed”—when they find themselves treated like gods: soon they condescend to the level of the women.—Man is a coward, confronted with the Eternal-Feminine4—and the females know it.—In many cases of feminine love, perhaps including the most famous ones above all, love is merely a more refined form of parasitism, a form of nestling down in another soul, sometimes even in the flesh of another—alas, always decidedly at the expense of “the host”!One knows Goethe’s fate in moraline-sour, old-maidish Germany. He always seemed offensive to Germans; he had honest admirers only among Jewesses. Schiller, the “noble” Schiller, who lambasted the ears of the Germans with big words—he was after their hearts. What did they hold against Goethe? The “mount of Venus;” and that he had written Venetian Epigrams. Klopstock5 already felt called upon to deliver a moral sermon to him; there was a time when Herder6 liked to use the word “Priapus” whenever he spoke of Goethe. Even Wilhelm Meister was considered merely a symptom of decline, “going to the dogs” as far as morals go. Niebuhr,7 for example, was enraged by the “menagerie of tame animals” and the “worthlessness” of the hero, and finally he broke out into the lament, fit to be sung by Biterolf:8 “Nothing could easily make a more painful impression than a great spirit who deprives himself of his wings and seeks virtuosity in something much inferior, renouncing what is higher.”—Above all, however, the higher virgins were indignant: all the petty courts, every kind of “Wartburg”9 in Germany crossed themselves against Goethe, against the “unclean spirit” in Goethe.This is the story Wagner put into music. He redeems Goethe, that goes without saying; but in such a way that at the same time he himself sides shrewdly with the higher virgin. Goethe is saved: a prayer saves him, a higher virgin lures him to perfection.What Goethe might have thought of Wagner?—Goethe once asked himself what danger threatened all romantics: the fatality of romanticism. His answer was: “suffocating of the rumination of moral and religious absurdities.” In brief: Parsifal.The philosopher adds an epilogue to this: Holiness—perhaps the last thing the people and women still get to see of higher values, the horizon of the ideal for all who are by nature myopic. But among philosophers this is, like every horizon, a mere case of lack of understanding, a sort of shutting the gate at the point where their world only begins—their danger, their ideal, their desideratum.—To say it more politely: la philosophie ne suffit pas au grand nombre. Il lui faut la sainteté.—104I shall still relate the story of the Ring. It belongs here. It, too, is a story of redemption: only this time it is Wagner who is redeemed.—Half his life, Wagner believed in the Revolution as much as ever a Frenchman believed in it. He searched for it in the runic writing of myth, he believed that in Siegfried he had found the typical revolutionary.“Whence comes all misfortune in the world?” Wagner asked himself. From “old contracts,” he answered, like all revolutionary ideologists. In plain: from customs, laws, moralities, institutions, from everything on which the old world, the old society rests. “How can one rid the world of misfortune? How can one abolish the old society?” Only by declaring war against “contracts” (tradition, morality). That is what Siegfried does. He starts early, very early: his very genesis is a declaration of war against morality—he comes into this world through adultery, through incest.—It is not the saga but Wagner who invented this radical trait; at this point he revised the saga.Siegfried continues as he has begun: he merely follows his first impulse, he overthrows everything traditional, all reverence, all fear. Whatever displeases him he stabs to death. Without the least respect, he tackles old deities. But his main enterprise aims to emancipate woman—“to redeem Brunhilde.”—Siegfried and Brunhilde; the sacrament of free love; the rise of the golden age; the twilight of the gods for the old morality—all ill has been abolished.For a long time, Wagner’s ship followed this course gaily. No doubt, this was where Wagner sought his highest goal.—What happened? A misfortune. The ship struck a reef; Wagner was stuck. The reef was Schopenhauer’s philosophy; Wagner was stranded on a contrary world view. What had he transposed into music? Optimism. Wagner was ashamed. Even an optimism for which Schopenhauer had coined an evil epithet—infamous1 optimism. He was ashamed a second time. He reflected for a long while, his situation seemed desperate.—Finally, a way out dawned on him: the reef on which he was shipwrecked—what if he interpreted it as the goal, as the secret intent, as the true significance of his voyage? To be shipwrecked here—that was a goal, too. Bene navigavi, cum naufragium feci.2So he translated the Ring into Schopenhauer’s terms. Everything goes wrong, everything perishes, the new world is as bad as the old: the nothing, the Indian Circe beckons.Brunhilde was initially supposed to take her farewell with a song in honor of free love, putting off the world with the hope for a socialist utopia in which “all turns out well”—but now gets something else to do. She has to study Schopenhauer first; she has to transpose the fourth book of The World as Will and Representation into verse. Wagner was redeemed.In all seriousness, this was a redemption. The benefit Schopenhauer conferred on Wagner is immeasurable. Only the philosopher of-decadence gave to the artist of decadence—himself.5To the artist of decadence: there we have the crucial words. And here my seriousness begins. I am far from looking on guilelessly while this decadent corrupts our health—and music as well. Is Wagner a human being at all? Isn’t he rather a sickness? He makes sick whatever he touches—he has made music sick—A typical decadent who has a sense of necessity in his corrupted taste, who claims it as a higher taste, who knows how to get his corruption accepted as law, as progress, as fulfillment.And he is not resisted. His seductive force increases tremendously, smoke clouds of incense surround him, the misunderstandings about him parade as “gospel”—he hasn’t by any means converted only the poor in spirit.I feel the urge to open the windows a little. Air! More air!—1That people in Germany should deceive themselves about Wagner does not surprise me. The opposite would surprise me. The Germans have constructed a Wagner for themselves whom they can revere: they have never been psychologists; their gratitude consists in misunderstanding. But that people in Paris, too, deceive themselves about Wagner, though there they are hardly anything anymore except psychologists! And in St. Petersburg, where they guess things that aren’t guessed even in Paris! How closely related Wagner must be to the whole of European decadence to avoid being experienced by them as a decadent. He belongs to it: he is its protagonist, its greatest name.—One honors oneself when raising him to the clouds.For that one does not resist him, this itself is a sign of decadence. The instincts are weakened. What one ought to shun is found attractive. One puts to one’s lips what drives one yet faster into the abyss.Is an example desired? One only need observe the regimen that those suffering from anemia or gout or diabetes prescribe for themselves. Definition of a vegetarian: one who requires a corroborant diet. To sense that what is harmful is harmful, to be able to forbid oneself something harmful, is a sign of youth and vitality. The exhausted are attracted by what is harmful: the vegetarian by vegetables.2 Sickness itself can be a stimulant to life: only one has to be healthy enough for this stimulant.3Wagner increases exhaustion: that is why he attracts the weak and exhausted. Oh, the rattlesnake-happiness of the old master when he always saw precisely “the little children” coming unto him!4I place this perspective at the outset: Wagner’s art is sick. The problems he presents on the stage—all of them problems of hysterics—the convulsive nature of his affects, his overexcited sensibility, his taste that required ever stronger spices, his instability which he dressed up as principles, not least of all the choice of his heroes and heroines—consider them as physiological types (a pathological gallery)!—all of this taken together represents a profile of sickness that permits no further doubt. Wagner est une névrose.5 Perhaps nothing is better known today, at least nothing has been better studied, than the Protean character of degeneration that here conceals itself in the chrysalis of art and artist. Our physicians and physiologists confront their most interesting case in Wagner, at least a very complete case. Precisely because nothing is more modern than this total sickness, this lateness and overexcitement of the nervous mechanism, Wagner is the modern artist par excellence, the Cagliostro of modernity. In his art all that the modern world requires most urgently is mixed in the most seductive manner: the three great stimulantia of the exhausted—the brutal, the artificial, and the innocent (idiotic).6Wagner represents a great corruption of music. He has guessed that it is a means to excite weary nerves—and with that he has made music sick. His inventiveness is not inconsiderable in the art of goading again those who are weariest, calling back into life those who are half dead. He is a master of hypnotic tricks, he manages to throw down the strongest like bulls. Wagner’s success—his success with nerves and consequently women—has turned the whole world of ambitious musicians into disciples of his secret art, And not only the ambitious, the clever, too.—Only sick music makes money today; our big theaters subsist on Wagner.6I permit myself some exhilaration again. Suppose it were the case that Wagner’s success became incarnate, took human form and, dressed up as a philanthropic music scholar, mixed with young artists. How do you suppose he would talk?My friends, he would say, let us have a few words among ourselves. It is easier to write bad music than good. What if it were more profitable, too? more effective, persuasive, inspiring, reliable—Wagnerian?—Pulchrum est paucorum hominum.1 Bad enough. We understand Latin; perhaps we also understand our own advantage. What is beautiful has a fly in its ointment: we know that. Why, then, have beauty? Why not rather that which is great, sublime, gigantic—that which moves masses?— Once more: it is easier to be gigantic than to be beautiful; we know that.We know the masses, we know the theater. The best among those who sit there—German youths, horned Siegfrieds, and other Wagnerians—require the sublime, the profound, the overwhelming. That much we are capable of. And the others who also sit there—the culture crétins, the petty snobs, the eternally feminine, those with a happy digestion, in sum, the people—also require the sublime, the profound, the overwhelming. They all have the same logic. “Whoever throws us is strong; whoever elevates us is divine; whoever leads us to have intimations is profound.”—Let us make up our minds, honored musicians: we want to throw them, we want to elevate them, we want to lead them to have intimations. That much we are capable of.Regarding the matter of inducing intimations: this is the point of departure for our concept of “style.” Above all, no thought! Nothing is more compromising than a thought. Rather the state preceding thought, the throng of yet unborn thoughts, the promise of future thoughts, the world as it was before God created it—a recrudescence of chaos.—Chaos induces intimations.To speak in the language of the master: infinity, but without melody.Secondly, as far as throwing people is concerned, this really belongs partly in physiology. Let us study the instruments above all. Some of them persuade even the intestines (they open the gates, as Handel put it); others bewitch the marrow of the spine. The color of the tone is decisive; what it is that resounds is almost a matter of indifference. This is the point to refine. Why squander ourselves? Regarding the tone, let us be characteristic to the point of folly. People will give credit to our spirit if our tones seem to pose many riddles. Let us agitate the nerves, let us slay them, let us handle lightning and thunder—that will throw them.—Above all, however, passion throws people.—Let us reach an understanding about passion. Nothing is cheaper than passion. One can dispense with all the virtues of counterpoint, one need not have learned a thing—passion is one ability we always have. Beauty is difficult: beware of beaufy!— And melody! Slander, my friends, let us slander, if we are at all serious about our ideal, let us slander melody! Nothing is more dangerous than a beautiful melody. Nothing corrupts taste more surely. We are lost, my friends, once beautiful melodies are loved again!—Principle: melody is immoral. Proof: Palestrina. Practical application: Parsifal The lack of melody even sanctifies.—And this is the definition of passion. Passion—or the gymnastics of what is ugly on the rope of enharmonics.—Let us dare, my friends, to be ugly. Wagner has dared it. Let us dauntlessly roll in front of us the mud of the most contrary harmonies. Let us not spare our hands. Only thus will we become natural.A final bit of advice! Perhaps it includes everything else. Let us be idealists! This is, if not the cleverest thing we can do at least the wisest. To elevate2 men one has to be sublime3 oneself. Let us walk on clouds, let us harangue the infinite, let us surround ourselves with symbols! Sursum! Bumbum!—there is no better advice. The “swelled bosom” shall be our argument, the beautiful sentiment our advocate. Virtue prevails even over counterpoint. “Whoever makes us better cannot fail to be good himself”: thus mankind has always inferred. So let us improve mankind!4 Thus one becomes comes good (thus one even becomes a “classic”5—Schiller became a “classic”). The hunt for low excitement of the senses, for so-called beauty, has enervated the Italians: let us remain German! Even Mozart’s attitude to music was—as Wagner said to comfort us—at bottom frivolous.Let us never admit that music “serves recreation;” that it “exhilarates;” that it “gives pleasure.” Let us never give pleasure! We are lost as soon as art is again thought of hedonistically.—That is bad eighteenth century.—Nothing on the other hand should be more advisable than a dose of—hypocrisy, sit venia verbo.6 That lends dignity.— And let us choose the hour when it is decent to look black, to heave sighs publicly, to heave Christian sighs, to make an exhibition of great Christian pity. “Man is corrupt: who redeems him? what redeems him?”—Let us not answer. Let us be cautious. Let us resist our ambition which would found religions. But nobody may doubt that we redeem him, that our music alone saves.—(Wagner’s essay, Religion and Art.)7Enough! Enough! My cheerful strokes, I fear, may have revealed sinister reality all too clearly—the picture of a decay of art, a decay of the artists as well. The latter, the decay of a character, could perhaps find preliminary expression in this formula: the musician now becomes an actor, his art develops more and more as a talent to lie. I shall have an opportunity (in a chapter of my main work, entitled “Toward a Physiology of Art”1) to show in more detail how this over-all change of art into histrionics is no less an expression of physiological degeneration (more precisely, a form of hystericism) than every single corruption and infirmity of the art inaugurated by Wagner: for example, the visual restlessness which requires one continually to change one’s position. One doesn’t understand a thing about Wagner as long as one finds in him merely an arbitrary play of nature, a whim, an accident. He was no “fragmentary,” “hapless,” or “contradictory” genius, as people have said. Wagner was something perfect, a typical decadent in whom there is no trace of “free will” and in whom every feature is necessary. If anything in Wagner is interesting it is the logic with which a physiological defect makes move upon move and takes step upon step as practice and procedure, as innovation in principles, as a crisis in taste.For the present I merely dwell on the question of style.—What is the sign of every literary decadence? That life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, the page gains life at the expense of the whole—the whole is no longer a whole.2 But this is the simile of every style of decadence: every time, the anarchy of atoms, disgregation of the will, “freedom of the individual,” to use moral terms—expanded into a political theory, “equal rights for all.” Life, equal vitality, the vibration and exuberance of life pushed back into the smallest forms; the rest, poor in life. Everywhere paralysis, arduousness, torpidity or hostility and chaos: both more and more obvious the higher one ascends in forms of organization. The whole no longer lives at all: it is composite, calculated, artificial, and artifact.—Wagner begins from a hallucination—not of sounds but of gestures. Then he seeks the sign language of sounds for them. If one would admire him, one should watch him at work at this point: how he separates, how he gains small units, how he animates these, severs them, and makes them visible. But this exhausts his strength: the rest is no good. How wretched, how embarrassed, how amateurish is his manner of “development,” his attempt to at least interlard what has not grown out of each other. His manners recall those of the frères de Goncourt,3 who are quite generally pertinent to Wagner’s style: one feels a kind of compassion for so much distress. That Wagner disguised as a principle his incapacity for giving organic form, that he establishes a “dramatic style” where we merely establish his incapacity for any style whatever, this is in line with a bold habit that accompanied Wagner through his whole life: he posits a principle where he lacks a capacity (—very different in this respect, incidentally, from the old Kant who preferred another boldness: wherever he lacked a principle he posited a special human capacity).4Once more: Wagner is admirable and gracious only in the invention of what is smallest, in spinning out the details. Here one is entirely justified in proclaiming him a master of the first rank, as our greatest miniaturist in music who crowds into the smallest space an infinity of sense and sweetness. His wealth of colors, of half shadows, of the secrecies of dying light spoils one to such an extent that afterward almost all other musicians seem too robust.If one would believe me one should have to derive the highest conception of Wagner not from what is liked about him today. That has been invented to persuade the masses; from that we recoil as from an all too impudent fresco.5 Of what concern to us is the agaçant6 brutality of the Tannhäuser Overture. Or the circus of Walküre? Whatever of Wagner’s music has become popular also apart from the theater shows dubious taste and corrupts taste. The Tannhäuser March I suspect of bonhommerie;7 the overture of The Flying Dutchman is noise about nothing;8 the Lohengrin Prelude furnished the first example, only too insidious, only too successful, of hypnotism by means of music (—I do not like whatever music has no ambition beyond persuasion of the nerves). But quite apart from the magnétiseur9 and fresco-painter Wagner, there is another Wagner who lays aside small gems: our greatest melancholiac in music, full of glances, tendernesses, and comforting words in which nobody has anticipated him, the master in tones of a heavy-hearted and drowsy happiness.A lexicon of Wagner’s most intimate words, all of them short things of five to fifteen measures, all of it music nobody knows.—Wagner had the virtue of decadents: pity.8“Very good. But how can one lose a taste for this decadent if one does not happen to be a musician, if one does not happen to be a decadent oneself?”On the contrary, how can one fail to do it? Just try it.—You do not know who Wagner is: a first-rate actor. Is a more profound, a weightier effect to be found in the theater? Just look at these youths—rigid, pale, breathless! These are the Wagnerians: they understand nothing about music—and yet Wagner becomes master over them.—Wagner’s art has the pressure of a hundred atmospheres: stoop! what else can one do?The actor Wagner is a tyrant; his pathos topples every taste, every resistance.—Who equals the persuasive power of these gestures? Who else envisages gestures with such assurance, so clearly from the start? The way Wagner’s pathos holds its breath, refuses to let go an extreme feeling, achieves a terrifying duration of states when even a moment threatens to strangle us—Was Wagner a musician at all? At any rate, there was something else that he was more: namely, an incomparable histrio,1 the greatest mime, the most amazing genius of the theater ever among Germans, our scenic artist par excellence. He belongs elsewhere, not in the history of music: one should not confuse him with the genuine masters of that. Wagner and Beethoven—that is blasphemy and really wrongs even Wagner.—As a musician, too, he was only what he was in general: he became a musician, he became a poet because the tyrant within him, his actor’s genius, compelled him. One cannot begin to figure out Wagner until one figures out his dominant instinct.Wagner was not a musician by instinct. He showed this by abandoning all lawfulness and, more precisely, all style in music in order to turn it into what he required, theatrical rhetoric, a means of expression, of underscoring gestures, of suggestion, of the psychologically picturesque. Here we may consider Wagner an inventor and innovator of the first rank—he has increased music’s capacity for language to the point of making it immeasurable: he is the Victor Hugo of music as language. Always presupposing that one first allows that under certain circumstances music may be not music but language, instrument, ancilla2 PostscriptThe seriousness of the last words permits me to publish at this point a few sentences from an as yet unprinted essay. At least they should leave no room for doubt about my seriousness in this matter. This essay bears the title: The Price We Are Paying for Wagner.One pays heavily for being one of Wagner’s disciples. An obscure recognition of this fact is still encountered even today. Wagner’s success, his triumph, has not eradicated it. But formerly it was strong, it was terrible, it was like a dark hatred—through almost three quarters of Wagner’s life. The resistance he encountered among us Germans cannot be esteemed too highly or honored too much. He was resisted like a sickness—not with reasons—one does not refute a sickness—but with inhibition, mistrust, vexation, and disgust, with a gloomy seriousness, as if he represented some great creeping danger. Our honored aestheticians have compromised themselves when, coming from three schools of German philosophy, they waged an absurd war against Wagner’s principles with “if” and “for”—as if he cared about principles, even his own!The Germans themselves had reason enough in their instincts to rule out any “if” and “for.” An instinct is weakened when it rationalizes itself: for by rationalizing itself it weakens itself. If there are any signs that, in spite of the total character of European decadence, the German character still possesses some degree of health, some instinctive sense for what is harmful and dangerous, this dim resistance to Wagner is the sign I should like least to see underestimated. It does us honor, it even permits a hope: France would not have that much health any more. The Germans, the delayers par excellence in history, are today the most retarded civilized nation in Europe:1 this has its advantages—by the same token they are relatively the youngest.One pays heavily for being one of Wagner’s disciples. Only quite recently have the Germans shed a kind of fear of him—the itch to be rid of him they felt at every opportunity.*It is a curious matter, still remembered, which revealed this old feeling once more at the very end, quite unexpectedly. It happened at Wagner’s funeral: the first German Wagner Association, that of Munich, placed a wreath on his grave, with an inscription that immediately became famous. It read: “Redemption for the redeemer!” Everybody admired the lofty inspiration that had dictated this inscription; also the taste that distinguished Wagner’s admirers. But many (strangely enough!) made the same small correction: “Redemption from the redeemer!”—One heaved a sigh of relief.—One pays heavily for being one of Wagner’s disciples. Let us take the measure of this discipleship by considering its cultural effects. Whom did his movement bring to the fore? What did it breed and multiply?—Above all, the presumption of the layman, the art-idiot. That kind now organizes associations, wants its “taste” to prevail, wants to play the judge even in rebus musicis et musicantibus.2 Secondly: an ever growing indifference against all severe, noble, conscientious training in the service of art; all this is to be replaced by faith in genius or, to speak plainly, by impudent dilettantism (—the formula for this is to be found in the Meistersinger). Thirdly and worst of all: theatrocracy—the nonsense of a faith in the precedence of the theater, in the right of the theater to lord it over the arts, over art.—But one should tell the Wagnerians a hundred times to their faces what the theater is: always only beneath art, always only something secondary, something made cruder, something twisted tendentiously, mendaciously, for the sake of the masses. Wagner, too, did not change anything in this respect: Bayreuth is large-scale opera;—and not even good opera.—The theater is a form of demolatry3 in matters of taste; the theater is a revolt of the masses,4 a plebiscite against good taste.—This is precisely what is proved by the case of Wagner: he won the crowd, he corrupted taste, he spoiled even our taste for opera!—5One pays heavily for being one of Wagner’s disciples. What does it do to the spirit? Does Wagner liberate the spirit?—He is distinguished by every ambiguity, every double sense, everything quite generally that persuades those who are uncertain without making them aware of what they have been persuaded. Thus Wagner is a seducer on a large scale. There is nothing weary, nothing decrepit, nothing fatal and hostile to life in matters of the spirit that his art does not secretly safeguard: it is the blackest obscurantism that he conceals in the ideal’s shrouds of light. He flatters every nihilistic (Buddhistic) instinct and disguises it in music; he flatters everything Christian, every religious expression of decadence. Open your ears: everything that ever grew on the soil of impoverished life, all of the counterfeiting of transcendence and beyond,6 has found its most sublime advocate in Wagner’s art—not by means of formulas: Wagner is too shrewd for formulas—but by means of a persuasion of sensuousness which in turn makes the spirit weary and worn-out. Music as Circe.His last work is in this respect his greatest masterpiece. In the art of seduction, Parsifal will always retain its rank—as the stroke of genius in seduction.—I admire this work; I wish I had written it myself; failing that, I understand it,—Wagner never had better inspirations than in the end. Here the cunning in his alliance of beauty and sickness goes so far that, as it were, it casts a shadow over Wagner’s earlier art—which now seems too bright, too healthy. Do you understand this? Health, brightness having the effect of a shadow? almost of an objection?—To such an extent have we become pure fools,—Never was there a greater master in dim, hieratic aromas—never was there a man equally expert in all small infinities, all that trembles and is effusive, all the feminisms from the idioticon7 of happiness!—Drink, O my friends, the philters of this art! Nowhere will you find a more agreeable way of enervating your spirit, of forgetting your manhood under a rosebush.—Ah, this old magician! This Klingsor8 of all Klingsors! How he thus wages war against us! us, the free spirits! How he indulges every cowardice of the modern soul with the tones of magic maidens!—Never before has there been such a deadly hatred of the search for knowledge!—One has to be a cynic in order not to be seduced here; one has to be able to bite in order not to worship here. Well then, you old seducer, the cynic warns you—cave canem.—9One pays heavily for being one of Wagner’s disciples. I observe those youths who have been exposed to his infection for a long time. The first, relatively innocent effect is the corruption of taste. Wagner has the same effect as continual consumption of alcohol: blunting, and obstructing the stomach with phlegm. Specific effect: degeneration of the sense of rhythm. In the end the Wagnerian calls rhythmic what I myself call, using a Greek proverb, “moving the swamps.” Considerably more dangerous is the corruption of concepts. The youth becomes a moon-calf—an “idealist.” He has gone beyond science; in this way he has reached the master’s level. And he poses as a philosopher; he writes Bayreuther Blätter;10 he solves all problems in the name of the father, the son, and the holy master.11 What is uncanniest, however, is the corruption of the nerves. Let anyone walk through a city: everywhere he will hear how instruments are ravished in a solemn rage—interspersed with a savage howling. What’s going on?—The youths are worshiping Wagner.—Bayreuth rhymes on institute for cold-water therapy.12—Typical telegram from Bayreuth: bereits bereut [already rued].—Wagner is bad for youths; he is calamitous for women. What is a female Wagnerian, medically speaking?—It seems to me, a doctor can’t confront young women too seriously with this alternative for the conscience: one or the other.—But they have already made their choice. One cannot serve two masters when the name of one is Wagner. Wagner has redeemed woman; in return, woman has built Bayreuth for him. All sacrifice, all devotion: one has nothing that one would not give to him. Woman impoverishes herself for the benefit of the master, she becomes touching, she stands naked before him.—The female Wagnerian—the most charming ambiguity that exists today; she embodies the cause of Wagner—in her sign his cause triumphs.—Ah, this old robber! He robs our youths, he even robs our women and drags them into his den.—Ah, this old Minotaur! The price we have had to pay for him! Every year trains of the most beautiful maidens and youths are led into his labyrinth, so that he may devour them—every year all of Europe intones the words, “off to Crete! off to Crete!”13Second PostscriptMy letter, it seems, is open to a misunderstanding. On certain faces the lines of gratitude appear; I even hear a modest exultation. I should prefer to be understood in this matter—as in many others.—But since a new animal plays havoc in the vineyards of the German spirit, the Reich-worm, the famous Rhinoxera,1 not a word I write is understood any more. Even the Kreuzzeitung2 testifies to that, not to speak of the Literarische Zentralblatt.3—I have given the Germans the most profound books they have—reason enough for the Germans not to understand a single word.—When in this essay I declare war upon Wagner—and incidentally upon a German “taste”—when I use harsh words against the cretinism of Bayreuth, the last thing I want to do is start a celebration for any other musicians. Other musicians don’t count compared to Wagner. Things are bad generally. Decay is universal. The sickness goes deep. If Wagner nevertheless gives his name to the ruin of music, as Bernini did to the ruin of sculpture, he is certainly not its cause. He merely accelerated its tempo—to be sure, in such a manner that one stands horrified before this almost sudden downward motion, abyss-ward. He had the naïveté of decadence: this was his superiority. He believed in it, he did not stop before any of the logical implications of decadence. The others hesitate—that is what differentiates them. Nothing else.What Wagner has in common with “the others”—I’ll enumerate it: the decline of the power to organize; the misuse of traditional means without the capacity to furnish any justification, any for-the-sake-of; the counterfeiting4 in the imitation of big forms for which nobody today is strong, proud, self-assured, healthy enough; excessive liveliness in the smallest parts; excitement at any price; cunning as the expression of impoverished life; more and more nerves in place of flesh.—I know only one musician who is still capable today of creating an overture that is of one piece: and nobody knows him.5Those famous today do not write “better” music than Wagner but merely less decisive music, more indifferent music—more indifferent because what is merely half is dated by the presence of what is whole. But Wagner was whole; but Wagner was the whole corruption; but Wagner was courage, the will, conviction in corruption—what does Johannes Brahms matter now?—His good fortune was a German misunderstanding: he was taken for Wagner’s antagonist—an antagonist was needed.—That does not make for necessary music, that makes, above all, for too much music.—If one is not rich one should have pride enough for poverty.The sympathy Brahms inspires undeniably at certain points, quite aside from this party interest, party misunderstanding, long seemed enigmatic to me—until finally I discovered, almost by accident, that he affects a certain type of man. His is the melancholy of incapacity; he does not create out of an abundance, he languishes for abundance. If we discount what he imitates, what he borrows from great old or exotic-modern styles—he is a master of imitation—what remains as specifically his is yearning.—This is felt by all who are full of yearning and dissatisfaction of any kind. He is too little a person, too little a center.—This is understood by those who are “impersonal,” those on the periphery—and they love him for that. In particular, he is the musician for a certain type of dissatisfied women. Fifty steps more, and you have got the female Wagnerian—just as fifty steps beyond Brahms you encounter Wagner—the female Wagnerian, a type that is more incisive, more interesting, and above all more charming. Brahms is touching as long as he is secretly enraptured or mourns for himself—in this he is “modern;” he becomes cold and of no further concern to us as soon as he becomes the heir of the classical composers.—People like to call Brahms the heir of Beethoven: I know no more cautious euphemism.—Everything in music today that lays claim to a “great style” either deceives us or deceives itself. This alternative gives enough food for thought; for it includes some casuistry about the value of these two cases. “Deceives us”: most people’s instinct protests against this—they don’t want to be deceived—but I myself should still prefer even this type to the other (“deceives itself”). This is my taste.—To make this easier to understand, for the benefit of the “poor in spirit”: Brahms—or Wagner.—Brahms is no actor.—A goodly portion of the other musicians may be subsumed in the concept of Brahms.—I waste no words on the clever apes of Wagner, Goldmark, for example: with the Queen of Sheba6 one belongs in a zoo—one can make an exhibit of oneself.—What can be done well today, what can be masterly, is only what is small. Here alone integrity is still possible.—Nothing, however, can cure music in what counts, from what counts, from the fatality of being an expression of the physiological contradiction—of being modern. The best instruction, the most conscientious training, intimacy on principle, even isolation in the company of the old masters—all this remains merely palliative—to speak more precisely, illusory—for one no longer has the presupposition in one’s body, whether this be the strong race of a Handel or whether it be the overflowing animal vitality of a Rossini.—Not everybody has a right to every teacher: that applies to whole ages.—To be sure, the possibility cannot be excluded that somewhere in Europe there are still remnants of stronger generations, of typically untimely human beings: if so, one could still hope for a belated beauty and perfection in music, too, from that quarter. What we can still experience at best are exceptions. From the rule that corruption is on top, that corruption is fatalistic, no god can save music.1Das zurückgebliebenste Kulturvolk Euro pas. For the conception of the Germans as “delayers” (Verzögerer), cf. The Antichrist, section 61, written a few months after The Case of Wagner (Portable Nietzsche.) and the chapter on The Case of Wagner in Ecce Homo.* [Nietzsche’s] Note. Was Wagner a German at all? There are some reasons for this question. It is difficult to find any German trait in him. Being a great learner, he learned to imitate much that was German—that’s all. His own nature contradicts that which has hitherto been felt to be German—not to speak of a German musician.—His father was an actor by the name of Geyer. A Geyer [vulture] is practically an Adler [eagle].—What has hitherto circulated as “Wagner’s Life” is fable convenue [a myth that has gained acceptance], if not worse. I confess my mistrust of every point attested to only by Wagner himself. He did not have pride enough for any truth about himself; nobody was less proud. Entirely like Victor Hugo, he remained faithful to himself in biographical questions, too—he remained an actor. [See the letters of August 1888, printed below. W. K.]2Of music and musicians.3Worship of the people, or of the masses. Cf. Aristotle’s disparagement of “spectacle” in his Poetics (end of Chapter 6) and, above all, Plato’s Laws, 700—the passage in which he introduces the term theatrocracy, here taken up by Nietzsche.4Ein Massen-Aufstand: the phrase is here introduced in the very same sense in which Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) gave it world-wide currency when he made it the title of his best known book in 1930. Nietzsche’s influence on Oretga was very great.5Er verdarb den Geschmack, er verdarb selbst für die Oper unsren Geschmack!—“Verderben” can mean “spoil” as well as “corrupt.”   If verdarb were taken to mean “corrupted” in both places, the meaning of the second part of the sentence would be puzzling: “he corrupted our taste even for opera.” Why “even for opera”? One would expect Nietzsche to say that Wagner corrupted not only musical taste, and taste for opera above all, but also taste in general. So Nietzsche presumably means: he corrupted taste and spoiled even our taste for opera.6Die ganze Falschmünzerei der Transcendenz und des Jenseits. See section 10, footnote 1, above.7A dictionary confined to a particular dialect.8Magician in Parsifal.9Beware of the dog! Greek kynikos (cynical) means literally “doglike.”10Literally, leaves, leaflets, or papers from Bayreuth: the monthly organ of the Wagner Societies to which Wagner himself contributed copiously.11Und des heiligen Meisters instead of und des heiligen Geistes. In English, unlike German, “master” does not sound much like “spirit” or “ghost.”12In German this does not rhyme either: Bayreuth reimt sich auf Kaltwasserhellanstalt.13See the letter to Gast, August 24, 1888, below.1Nietzsche’s coinage. No previous German or English edition attempts an explanation. The similarity of the word to “rhinoceros” makes the name sound like that of a real animal; but Greek rhinos, which can either mean skin or be the genitive of rhis (nose), does not seem relevant. Douglas E. Wilson has called my attention to Phylloxera, the plant lice that attack European grape vines, and I have found that in 1881 there actually was an international convention about means to combat this vine pest. Nietzsche’s Rhinoxera might thus be translated Rhinepest. The Rhine is a symbol of German nationalism and central in Wagner’s Ring.   None of this should be taken too seriously, any more than similar coinages in Zarathustra. But it helps to explain why Christian Morgenstern (1871–1914) placed a motto from Nietzsche at the head of his delightful Galgenlieder (Gallow Songs: three are included in Twenty German Poets: A Bilingual Edition, ed. and tr. Walter Kaufmann, New York, The Modern Library): these songs abound in similar coinages.2A prominent right-wing newspaper; cf. Ecce Homo, Chapter III, end of section 1: “Is it credible that the Nationalzeitung— a Prussian newspaper, to explain this to my foreign readers—I myself read, if I may say so, only the Journal des Débats—should in all seriousness have understood the book [Beyond Good and Evil] as a ‘sign of the times,’ as the true and proper Junker philosophy for which the Kreuzzeitung merely lacked the courage?”3A weekly survey of scholarly publications, founded in 1850.4See section 10, note 1.5Nietzsche’s young friend and disciple, Heinrich Köselitz, alias Peter Gast. See the letter of August 9, 1888, below.6The first and best-known opera (1875) by Karl Goldmark (1830–1915), a Jewish composer who was born in Hungary and died in Vienna. EpilogueLet us recover our breath in the end by getting away for a moment from the narrow world to which every question about the worth of persons condemns the spirit. A philosopher feels the need to wash his hands after having dealt so long with “The Case of Wagner.”—I offer my conception of what is modern.—In its measure of strength every age also possesses a measure for what virtues are permitted and forbidden to it. Either it has the virtues of ascending life: then it will resist from the profoundest depths the virtues of declining life. Or the age itself represents declining life: then it also requires the virtues of decline, then it hates everything that justifies itself solely out of abundance, out of the overflowing riches of strength. Aesthetics is tied indissolubly to these biological presuppositions: there is an aesthetics of decadence, and there is a classical aesthetics—the “beautiful in itself”1 is a figment of the imagination, like all of idealism.—In the narrower sphere of so-called moral values one cannot find a greater contrast than that between a master morality2 and the morality of Christian value concepts: the latter developed on soil that was morbid through and through (the Gospels present us with precisely the same physiological types that Dostoevsky’s novels describe),3 master morality (“Roman,” “pagan,” “classical,” “Renaissance”) is, conversely, the sign language of what has turned out well, of ascending life, of the will to power as the principle of life. Master morality affirms as instinctively as Christian morality negates (“God,” “beyond,” “self-denial”—all of them negations). The former gives to things out of its own abundance—it transfigures, it beautifies the world and makes it more rational—the latter impoverishes, pales and makes uglier the value of things, it negates the world. “World” is a Christian term of abuse.—These opposite forms in the optics of value are both necessary: they are ways of seeing, immune to reasons and refutations. One cannot refute Christianity; one cannot refute a disease of the eye. That pessimism was fought like a philosophy, was the height of scholarly idiocy. The concepts “true” and “untrue” have, as it seems to me, no meaning in optics.—What alone should be resisted is that falseness, that deceitful-ness of instinct which refuses to experience these opposites as opposites—as Wagner, for example, refused, being no mean master of such falsehoods. To make eyes at master morality, at noble morality (Icelandic saga is almost its most important document) while mouthing the counterdoctrine, that of the “gospel of the lowly,” of the need for redemption!—I admire, incidentally, the modesty of the Christians who go to Bayreuth. I myself wouldn’t be able to endure certain words out of the mouth of a Wagner. There are concepts which do not belong in Bayreuth.—What? A version of Christianity adapted for female Wagnerians, perhaps by female Wagnerians—for Wagner was in his old days by all means feminini generis? To say it once more, the Christians of today are too modest for my taste.—If Wagner was a Christian, then Liszt was perhaps a church father!4—The need for redemption, the quintessence of all Christian needs, has nothing to do with such buffoons: it is the most honest expression of decadence, it is the most convinced, most painful affirmation of decadence in the form of sublime symbols and practices. The Christian wants to be rid of himself. Le moi est toujours haïssable.5Noble morality, master morality, conversely, is rooted in a triumphant Yes said to oneself—it is self-affirmation, self-glorification of life; it also requires sublime symbols and practices, but only because “its heart is too full.” All of beautiful, all of great art belongs here: the essence of both is gratitude. On the other hand, one cannot dissociate from it an instinctive aversion against decadents, scorn for their symbolism, even horror: such feelings almost prove it. Noble Romans experienced Christianity as foeda superstitio:6 I recall how the last German of noble taste, how Goethe experienced the cross.7One looks in vain for more valuable, more necessary opposites.—*But such falseness as that of Bayreuth is no exception today. We are all familiar with the unaesthetic concept of the Christian Junker. Such innocence among opposites, such a “good conscience” in a lie is actually modern par excellence, it almost defines modernity. Biologically, modern man represents a contradiction of values; he sits between two chairs, he says Yes and No in the same breath. Is it any wonder that precisely in our times falsehood itself has become flesh and even genius? that Wagner “dwelled among us”? It was not without reason that I called Wagner the Cagliostro of modernity.—But all of us have, unconsciously, involuntarily in our bodies values, words, formulas, moralities of opposite descent—we are, physiologically considered, false.—A diagnosis of the modern soul—where would it begin? With a resolute incision into this instinctive contradiction, with the isolation of its opposite values, with the vivisection of the most instructive case.—The case of Wagner is for the philosopher a windfall—this essay is inspired, as you hear, by gratitude.—1“Schönes an sich” might also be rendered in this context as “inherently beautiful” or “absolutely” or “unconditionally beautiful.”2See Beyond Good and Evil, section 260.3Cf. The Antichrist (in Portable Nietzsche), including the translator’s footnotes; also Kaufmann, Nietzsche, Chapter 12, section I.4Franz Liszt (1811–86) was the father of Cosima (1837–1930), Wagner’s second wife. This is not the first allusion to Cosima in this work; cf. Kaufmann, Nietzsche (1950); (1956); i.e., Chapter 1, section II. Liszt had retired to Rome in 1861, joined the Franciscan order in 1865—and eventually joined the Wagners in Bayreuth, where he died in 1886.5“The ego is always hateful.” Cf. Nietzsche contra Wagner (in Portable Nietzsche).6“An abominable superstition.”7See Goethe’s Venetian Epigrams, cited in section 3 above; especially:Much there is I can stand, and most things not easy to suffer  1 bear with quiet resolve, just as a god commands it.Only a few I find as repugnant as snakes and poison—  These four: tobacco smoke, bedbugs, garlic, and†.   For other examples see Kaufmann, Twenty German Poets; for Nietzsche on Goethe, Twilight of the Idols (in Portable Nietzsche).* [Nietzsche’s! Note. The opposition between “noble morality” and “Christian morality” was first explained in my Genealogy of Morals: perhaps there is no more decisive turning point in the history of our understanding of religion and morality. This book, my touchstone for what belongs to me, has the good fortune of being accessible only to the most high-minded and severe spirits: the rest lack ears for it. One must have one’s passion in things where nobody else today has it.— Chapter 2 - From Nietzsche’s Correspondence About: The Case of Wagner E CCE H OMO Dedication Contents Editor’s Introduction A Note on the Publication of Ecce Homo ECCE HOMOHow One Becomes What One Is Preface On this perfect day, when everything is ripening and not only the grape turns brown, the eye of the sun just fell upon my life: I looked back, I looked forward, and never saw so many and such good things at once. It was not for nothing that I buried my forty-fourth year today; I had the right to bury it; whatever was life in it has been saved, is immortal. The first book of the Revaluation of All Values,1 the Songs of Zarathustra,2 the Twilight of the Idols, my attempt to philosophize with a hammer3—all presents of this year, indeed of its last quarter! How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life?—and so I tell my life to myself.1The Antichrist.2Published, after Nietzsche’s collapse, under the title Dionysus Dithyrambs, in the same volume with Zarathustra IV.3This image is explained in the preface of Twilight: “… idols, which are here touched with a hammer as with a tuning fork.” Chapter 1 - Why I Am So Wise Chapter 2 - Why I Am So Clever Chapter 3 - Why I Write Such Good Books Chapter 4 - The Birth of Tragedy Chapter 5 - The Untimely Ones Chapter 6 - Human, All-Too-Human With Two Sequels Chapter 7 - Dawn Thoughts About Morality as a Prejudice Chapter 8 - The Gay Science (“la gaya scienza”) Chapter 9 - Thus Spoke Zarathustra A Book for All and None Chapter 10 - Beyond Good and Evil Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future Chapter 11 - Genealogy of Morals A Polemic Chapter 12 - Twilight of the Idols How One Philosophizes with a Hammer Chapter 13 - The Case of Wagner A Musician’s Problem Chapter 14 - Why I Am a Destiny Appendix: Variants from Nietzsche’s Drafts 1Part of a discarded draft for section 3 of “Why I Am So Clever” (Podach, Friedrich Nietzsches Werke.):Emerson with his essays has been a good friend and cheered me up even in black periods: he contains so much skepsis, so many “possibilities” that even virtue achieves esprit in his writings. A unique case! Even as a boy I enjoyed listening to him. Tristram Shandy also belongs to my earliest favorites; how I experienced Sterne may be seen from a very pensive passage in Human, All-Too-Human [Part II, section 113]. Perhaps it was for related reasons that I preferred Lichtenberg1 among German books, while the “idealist” Schiller was more than I could swallow even when I was thirteen.—I don’t want to forget Abbé Galiani,2 this most profound buffoon that ever lived.Of all books, one of my strongest impressions is that exuberant Provençal, Petronius, who composed the last Satura Menippea.3 Such sovereign freedom from “morality,” from “seriousness,” from his own sublime taste; such subtlety in his mixture of vulgar and “educated” Latin; such indomitable good spirits that leap with grace and malice over all anomalies of the ancient “soul” —I could not name any book that makes an equally liberating impression on me: the effect is Dionysian. In cases in which I find it necessary to recuperate quickly from a base impression—for example, because for the sake of my critique of Christianity I had to breathe all too long the swampy air of the apostle Paul—a few pages of Petronius suffice me as a heroic remedy, and immediately I am well again.2Part of a discarded draft for section 3 of “Why I Write Such Good Books” (Podach, Friedrich Nietzsches Werke.):My writings are difficult; I hope this is not considered an objection? To understand the most abbreviated language ever spoken by a philosopher—and also the one poorest in formulas, most alive, most artistic—one must follow the opposite procedure of that generally required by philosophical literature. Usually, one must condense, or upset one’s digestion; I have to be diluted, liquefied, mixed with water, else one upsets one’s digestion.Silence is as much of an instinct with me as is garrulity with our dear philosophers. I am brief; my readers themselves must become long and comprehensive in order to bring up and together all that I have thought, and thought deep down.On the other hand, there are prerequisites for “understanding” here, which very few can satisfy: one must be able to see a problem in its proper place—that is, in the context of the other problems that belong with it; and for this one must have at one’s finger tips the topography of various nooks and the difficult areas of whole sciences and above all of philosophy.Finally, I speak only of what I have lived through, not merely of what I have thought through; the opposition of thinking and life is lacking in my case. My “theory” grows from my “practice”—oh, from a practice that is not by any means harmless or unproblematic!3In his postscript to the first edition, 1908, Raoul Richter said: “A page that, according to information received from Frau Förster-Nietzsche, was mailed to Paraguay, with a notation regarding its insertion in Ecce Homo, survives in a copy and contains invective against his brother-in-law and friends, but has been excluded from publication here as something not belonging to the authentic Nietzsche. This is presumably one of those violent outpourings of which several have been found in the Förster papers, some of them long destroyed, with uninhibited attacks on Bismarck, the Kaiser, and others. The fact alone that an addition to Ecce Homo was sent to South America [where the sister and brother-in-law were then living], instead of being sent to the publisher in Leipzig, shows that this is presumably a page that belongs to the first days of the collapse. Possibly, a similar but no longer extant note sent to the publisher was also intended for Ecce.” Podach’s criticism of Richter for not publishing this note (Friedrich Nietzsches Werke.) seems highly unreasonable; but the text (p. 314) deserves inclusion in this Appendix. Nietzsche’s notation read: “To be inserted in the chapter ‘The Case of Wagner,’ section 4, after the words: ‘Except for my association with a few artists, above all with Richard Wagner, I have not spent one good hour with a German’” (ibid.). The text itself reads:Shall I here divulge my “German” experiences?—Förster: long legs, blue eyes, blond (straw head!), a “racial German” who with poison and gall attacks everything that guarantees spirit and future: Judaism, vivisection, etc.—but for his sake my sister left those nearest her1 and plunged into a world full of dangers and evil accidents.Köselitz:2 Saxon, weak, at times awkward, immovable, an embodiment of the law of gravity—but his music is of the first rank and runs on light feet.Overbeck3 dried up, become sour, subject to his wife, hands me, like Mime,4 the poisoned draft of doubt and mistrust of myself—but he shows how he is full of good will toward me and worried about me and calls himself my “indulgent friend.”Look at them—these are three German types! Canaille!And if the most profound spirit of all millennia appeared among Germans4All of the paragraphs in this section come from three discarded drafts for the attack on the Germans in the chapter “The Case of Wagner.” (a) and (b) constitute the beginning and end of the same draft (Podach, Friedrich Nietzsches Werke); (c) comes from another attempt (ibid.); (d) from the last (ibid.).(a)And from what side did all great obstructions, all calamities in my life emanate? Always from Germans. The damnable German anti-Semitism, this poisonous boil of névrose nationale, has intruded into my existence almost ruinously during that decisive time when not my destiny but the destiny of humanity was at issue. And I owe it to the same element that my Zarathustra entered this world as indecent literature—its publisher being an anti-Semite. In vain do I look for some sign of tact, of délicatesse, in relation to me: from Jews, yes; never yet from Germans.(b)The Germans are by far the worst experience of my life; for sixteen years now one has left me in the lurch, not only concerning my philosophy but also in regard to my honor. What respect can I have for the Germans when even my friends cannot discriminate between me and a liar like Richard Wagner? In one extreme case, one even straddles the fence between me and anti-Semitic canaille.— And this at a moment when an indescribable responsibility weighs on me—1(C)It seems to be that association with Germans even corrupts one’s character. I lose all mistrust; I feel how the fungus of neighbor-love spreads in me—it has even happened, to my profound humiliation, that I have become good-natured. Is it possible to sink any lower?—For with me, malice belongs to happiness—I am no good when I am not malicious2—I find no small justification of existence in provoking tremendous stupidities against me.(d)I am solitude become man.3—That no word ever reached me, forced me to reach myself.—I should not be possible without a countertype of race, without Germans, without these Germans, without Bismarck, without 1848, without “Wars of Liberation,” without Kant, even without Luther.—The great crimes committed against culture by the Germans are justified in a higher economy of culture.—I want nothing differently, not backward either—I was not permitted to want anything differently.—Amor fati.—Even Christianity becomes necessary: only the highest form, the most dangerous, the one that was most seductive in its No to life, provokes its highest affirmation—me.—What in the end are these two millennia? Our most instructive experiment, a vivisection of life itself.—Merely two millennia!—5For a time, Nietzsche thought of concluding Ecce Homo with two sections that are included in a table of contents reproduced photographically by Podach (Friedrich Nietzsches Werke, plate XIV); but then he wrote on a separate sheet (ibid.): “The section Declaration of War is to be omitted—Also The Hammer Speaks.” The latter he moved to the end of Twilight (Portable Nietzsche); the former is lost, except for the following paragraph on a sheet with the notation: “At the end, after the Declaration of War” (ibid.).Final ConsiderationIf we could dispense with wars, so much the better. I can imagine more profitable uses for the twelve billion now paid annually for the armed peace we have in Europe; there are other means of winning respect for physiology than field hospitals.—Good; very good even: since the old God is abolished, I am prepared to rule the world—1Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799), professor of physics at Göttingen, was perhaps the greatest German aphorist and satirist of his century.2A writer (1728–1787) often mentioned by Nietzsche. See my note (6) in Beyond Good and Evil, section 26, above.3The relevant information has been put most succinctly by William Arrow-smith, in his Introduction to his own translation of The Satyricon of Petronius (Ann Arbor, Mich., University of Michigan Press, 1959): “Formally … the Satyricon … belongs to that genre we call Menippean satire, the curious blending of prose with verse and philosophy with realism invented by the Cynic philosopher Menippus of Gadara [third century B.C.] and continued by his Roman disciple, Varro [116-27 B.C.].” The identity and dates of Petronius have been disputed, but he probably committed suicide when Nero was Emperor. Cf. Beyond, section 28, above.1Ihre “Nächsten”: The word used in the Bible for neighbor.2Heinrich Köselitz was the real name of Peter Gast.3Franz Overbeck was professor of church history at Basel, but an unbeliever. For accounts of Förster, Gast, and Overbeck see Kaufmann’s Nietzsche, Chapter 1, sections I and III, or—for a much fuller account, in German—Podach’s Gestalten um Nietzsche (figures around Nietzsche; Weimar, Lichtenstein, 1932).4In Wagner’s Ring.1The passage ends like the one cited in the final footnote for that chapter, above. The “extreme case” is presumably that of Nietzsche’s sister.2Ich tauge Nichts, wenn ich nicht boshaft bin. “Malice”: Bosheit.3Ich bin die Einsamkeit als Mensch. Bibliographical Note C OMMENTARY MARTIN HEIDEGGER[The] word nihilism came into vogue through Turgeniev as a name for the notion that only what is perceptible to our senses, that is, only beings that one experiences oneself, only these and nothing else are real and have being. Therefore, anything grounded on tradition, authority, or any other definitive value is negated. Usually, however, the name positivism is used to designate this point of view.For Nietzsche, though, the word nihilism means something substantially “more.” Nietzsche speaks about “European nihilism.” He does not mean the positivism that arose in the mid-nineteenth century and spread throughout Europe. “European” has a historical significance here, and means as much as “Western” in the sense of Western history. Nietzsche uses nihilism as the name for the historical movement that he was the first to recognize and that already governed the previous century while defining the century to come, the movement whose essential interpretation he concentrates in the terse sentence: “God is dead.” That is to say, the “Christian God” has lost His power over beings and over the determination of man. “Christian God” also stands for the “transcendent” in general in its various meanings—for “ideals” and “norms,” “principles” and “rules,” “ends” and “values,” which are set “above” the being, in order to give being as a whole a purpose, an order, and—as it is succintly expressed—“meaning.” Nihilism is that historical process whereby the dominance of the “transcendent” becomes null and void, so that all being loses its worth and meaning. Nihilism is the history of the being itself, through which the death of the Christian God comes slowly but inexorably to light. It may be that this God will continue to be believed in, and that His world will be taken as “real,” “effectual,” and “determinative.” This history resembles the process in which the light of a star that has been extinguished for millennia still gleams, but in its gleaming nonetheless remains a mere “appearance.” For Nietzsche, therefore, nihilism is in no way some kind of viewpoint “put forward” by somebody, nor is it an arbitrary historical “given,” among many others, that can be historically documented. Nihilism is, rather, that event of long duration in which the truth of being as a whole is essentially transformed and driven toward an end that such truth has determined.The truth of being as a whole has long been called metaphysics. Every era, every human epoch, is sustained by some metaphysics and is placed thereby in a definite relation to being as a whole and also to itself. The end of metaphysics discloses itself as the collapse of the reign of the transcendent and the “ideal” that sprang from it. But the end of metaphysics does not mean the cessation of history. It is the beginning of a serious concern with that “event”: “God is dead.” That beginning is already under way. Nietzsche himself understood his philosophy as an introduction to the beginning of a new age. He envisioned the coming century—that is, the current, twentieth century—as the start of an era whose upheavals could not be compared to anything previously known. Although the scenery of the world theater might remain the same for a time, the play in performance would already be a different one. The fact that earlier aims now disappear and former values are devalued is no longer experienced as sheer annihilation and deplored as wasteful and wrong, but is rather greeted as a liberation, touted as an irrevocable gain, and perceived as a fulfillment.“Nihilism” is the increasingly dominant truth that all prior aims of being have become superfluous. But with this transformation of the erstwhile relation to ruling values, nihilism has also perfected itself for the free and genuine task of a new valuation. Such nihilism, which is in itself perfected and is decisive for the future, may be characterized as “classical nihilism.” Nietzsche describes his own “metaphysics” with this name and conceives it to be the counterstroke to all preceding metaphysics. The name nihilism thus loses the purely nihilistic sense in which it means a destruction and annihilation of previous values, the mere negation of beings and the futility of human history.“Nihilism,” thought now in its classic sense, calls for freedom from values as freedom for a revaluation of all (such) values. Nietzsche uses the expression “revaluation of all values hitherto” alongside the key word nihilism as another major rubric by which he assigns his own fundamental metaphysical position its definite place within the history of Western metaphysics.From the rubric “revaluation of values,” we expect that altered values will be posited in place of earlier ones. But for Nietzsche “revaluation” means that the very “place” for previous values disappears, not merely that the values themselves fall away. This implies that the nature and direction of valuation, and the definition of the essence of value are transformed. The revaluation thinks Being for the first time as value. With it, metaphysics begins to be value thinking. In accordance with this transformation, prior values do not merely succumb to devaluation but, above all, the need for values in their former shape and in their previous place—that is to say, their place in the transcendent—is uprooted. The uprooting of past needs most assuredly takes place by cultivating the growing ignorance of past values and by obliterating history through a revision of its basic traits. “Revaluation of prior values” is primarily the metamorphosis of all valuation heretofore and the “breeding” of a new need for values.If such revaluation of all prior values is not only to be carried out but is also to be grounded, then it has need of a “new principle;” that is, the establishment of a basis for defining beings as a whole in a new, authoritative way. But if the interpretation of beings as a whole cannot issue from a transcendent that is posited “over” them from the outset, then the new values and their standard of measure can only be drawn from the realm of beings themselves. Thus beings themselves require a new interpretation through which their basic character may be defined in a way that will make it fit to serve as a “principle” for the inscription of a new table of values and as a standard of measure for suitably ranking such values.If the essence of metaphysics consists in grounding the truth of being as a whole, then the revaluation of all values, as a grounding of the principle for a new valuation, is itself metaphysics. What Nietzsche perceives and posits as the basic character of being as a whole is what he calls the “will to power.” That concept does not merely delimit what a being in its Being is: Nietzsche’s phrase, “will to power,” which has in many ways become familiar, contains his interpretation of the essence of power. Every power is a power only as long as it is more power; that is to say, an increase in power. Power can maintain itself in itself, that is, in its essence, only if it overtakes and overcomes the power level it has already attained—overpowering is the expression we use. As soon as power stalls at a certain power level, it immediately becomes powerless. “Will to power” does not mean simply the “romantic” yearning and quest for power by those who have no power; rather, “will to power” means the accruing of power by power for its own overpowering.“Will to power” is a single name for the basic character of beings and for the essence of power. Nietzsche often substitutes “force” for “will to power” in a way that is easily misunderstood. His conception of the basic character of beings as will to power is not the contrivance or whim of a fantast who has strayed off of chase chimeras. It is the fundamental experience of a thinker; that is, of one of those individuals who have no choice but to find words for what a being is in the history of its Being. Every being, insofar as it is, and is as it is, is “will to power.” The phrase names that from which all valuation proceeds and to which it returns. However, as we have said, the new valuation is not a “revaluation of all prior values” merely in that it supplants all earlier values with power, the uppermost value, but first and foremost because power and only power posits values, validates them, and makes decisions about the possible justifications of a valuation. If all being is will to power, then only what is fulfilled in its essence by power “has” value or “is” a value. But power is power only as enhancement of power. To the extent that it is truly power, alone determining all beings, power does not recognize the worth or value of anything outside of itself. That is why will to power as a principle for the new valuation tolerates no end outside of being as a whole. Now, because all beings as will to power—that is, as incessant self-overpowering—must be a continual “becoming,” and because such “becoming” cannot move “toward an end” outside its own “farther and farther,” but is ceaselessly caught up in the cyclical increase of power to which it reverts, then being as a whole too, as this power-conforming becoming, must itself always recur again and bring back the same.Hence, the basic character of beings as will to power is also defined as “the eternal recurrence of the same.” The latter constitutes yet another major rubric in Nietzsche’s metaphysics and, moreover, implies something essential: only through the adequately conceived essence of will to power can it become clear why the Being of beings as a whole must be eternal recurrence of the same. The reverse holds as well: only through the essence of the eternal recurrence of the same can the innermost core of will to power and its necessity be grasped. The phrase “will to power” tells what beings are in their “essence” (in their constitution). The phrase “eternal recurrence of the same” tells how beings of such an essence must as a whole be.It remains for us to observe what is decisive here; namely, that Nietzsche had to think the eternal recurrence of the same before the will to power. The most essential thought is thought first.When Nietzsche himself insists that Being, as “life,” is in essence “becoming” he does not intend the roughly defined concept of “becoming” to mean either an endless, continual progression to some unknown goal, nor is he thinking about the confused turmoil and tumult of unrestrained drives. The vague and hackneyed term becoming signifies the overpowering of power, as the essence of power, which powerfully and continually returns to itself in its own way.At the same time, the eternal recurrence of the same offers the keenest interpretation of “classical nihilism,” which absolutely obliterates any end above and beyond beings. For such nihilism, the words “God is dead” suggest the impotence not only of the Christian God but of every transcendent element under which men might want to shelter themselves. And that impotence signifies the collapse of the old order.With the revaluation of all past values, an unrestricted challenge has been issued to men: that unconditionally from, through, and over themselves, they raise “new standards” under which the accommodation of being as a whole to a new order must be effected. Because the “transcendent,” the “beyond,” and “heaven” have been abolished, only the “earth” remains. The new order must therefore be the absolute dominance of pure power over the earth through man—not through any arbitrary kind of man, and certainly not through the humanity that has heretofore lived under the old values. Through what kind of man, then?With nihilism—that is to say, with the revaluation of all prior values among beings as will to power and in light of the eternal recurrence of the same—it becomes necessary to posit a new essence for man. But, because “God is dead,” only man himself can grant man his measure and center, the “type” the “model” of a certain kind of man who has assigned the task of a revaluation of all values to the individual power of his will to power and who is prepared to embark on the absolute domination of the globe. Classical nihilism, which as the revaluation of all values hitherto understands beings as will to power and can admit eternal recurrence of the same as the sole “end,” must take man himself—that is, man as he has been until now—out of and “over” himself and must fashion as his measure the figure of the “Overman.”From Nietzsche’s point of view, the Overman is not meant to be a mere amplification of prior man, but the most unequivocally singular form of human existence that, as absolute will to power, is brought to power in every man to some degree and that thereby grants him his membership in being as a whole—that is, in will to power—and that shows him to be a true “being,” close to reality and “life.” The Overman simply leaves the man of traditional values behind, overtakes him, and transfers the justification for all laws and the positing of all values to the empowering of power. An act or accomplishment is valid as such only to the extent that it serves to equip, nurture, and enhance will to power.The five main rubrics we have mentioned—“nihilism,” “revaluation of all values hitherto,” “will to power,” “eternal recurrence of the same,” and “Overman”—each portrays Nietzsche’s metaphysics from just one perspective, although in each case it is a perspective that defines the whole. Thus Nietzsche’s metaphysics is grasped only when what is named in these five headings can be thought—that is, essentially experienced—in its primordial and heretofore merely intimated conjunction. We can learn what “nihilism” in Nietzsche’s sense is only if we also comprehend, in their contexts, “revaluation of all values hitherto,” “will to power,” “eternal recurrence of the same,” and “Overman.” By starting from an adequate comprehension of nihilism and working in the opposite direction, we can also acquire knowledge about the essence of revaluation, the essence of will to power, the essence of the eternal recurrence of the same, and the essence of the Overman. But to have such knowledge is to stand within the moment that the history of Being has opened up for our age.The necessity of having to think the essence of “nihilism” in the context of the “revaluation of all values,” “will to power,” “eternal recurrence of the same,” and the “Overman” lets us readily surmise that the essence of nihilism is in itself manifold, multileveled, and multifarious. The word nihilism therefore permits many applications. It can be misused as an empty slogan or epithet that both repels and discredits and that conceals the user’s own thoughtlessness from him. But we can also experience the full burden of what the name says when uttered in Nietzsche’s sense. Here it means to think the history of Western metaphysics as the ground of our own history; that is, of future decisions. Finally, we can ponder more essentially what Nietzsche was thinking in using this word if we grasp his “classical nihilism” as that nihilism whose “classicism” consists in the fact that it must unwittingly put itself on extreme guard against knowledge of its innermost essence. Classical nihilism, then, discloses itself as the fulfillment of nihilism, whereby it considers itself exempt from the necessity of thinking about the very thing that constitutes its essence: the nihil, the nothing—as the veil that conceals the truth of the Being of beings.From Nihilism, vol. 5, edited by David Farrell Krell, translated by Frank A. Capuzzi, originally published as part of Nietzsche, Zweiter Band (1961)ALBERT CAMUSWith Nietzsche, nihilism seems to become prophetic. But we can draw no conclusions from Nietzsche, except the base and mediocre cruelty that he hated with all his strength, unless we give first place in his work—well ahead of the prophet—to the diagnostician. The provisional, methodical, strategic character of his thought cannot be doubted for a moment. With him, nihilism becomes conscious for the first time. Diagnosticians have this in common with prophets—they think and operate in terms of the future. Nietzsche never thought except in terms of an apocalypse to come, not in order to extol it, for he guessed the sordid and calculating aspect that this apocalypse would finally assume, but in order to avoid it and to transform it into a renaissance. He recognized nihilism for what it was and examined it like a clinical fact.He said of himself that he was the first complete nihilist of Europe. Not by choice, but by condition, and because he was too great to refuse the heritage of his time. He diagnosed in himself, and in others, the inability to believe and the disappearance of the primitive foundation of all faith—namely the belief in life. The “Can one live as a rebel?” became with him “Can one live, believing in nothing?” His reply is in the affirmative. Yes, if one creates a system out of absence of faith, if one accepts the final consequences of nihilism, and if, on emerging into the desert and putting one’s confidence in what is going to come, one feels, with the same primitive instinct, both pain and joy.[…]Nietzsche’s philosophy, undoubtedly, revolves around the problem of rebellion. More precisely, it begins by being a rebellion. But we sense the change of position that Nietzsche makes. With him, rebellion begins at “God is dead” which is assumed as an established fact; then rebellion hinges on everything that aims at falsely replacing the vanished deity and reflects dishonour on a world which undoubtedly has no direction but which remains the only proving-ground of the gods.Contrary to the opinion of certain of his Christian critics, Nietzsche did not form a project to kill God. He found Him dead in the soul of his contemporaries. He was the first to understand the immense importance of the event and to decide that this rebellion among men could not lead to a renaissance unless it were controlled and directed. Any other attitude towards it, whether it were regret or complacency, must lead to the apocalypse. Thus Nietzsche did not formulate a philosophy of rebellion, but constructed a philosophy on rebellion.[…]In Nietzsche’s mind, the only problem was to see that the human spirit bowed proudly to the inevitable. We know, however, his posterity and the kind of politics that were to be authorized by the man who claimed to be the last anti-political German. He dreamed of tyrants who were artists. But tyranny comes more naturally than art to mediocre men. “Rather Cesare Borgia than Parsifal,” he exlaimed. He begat both Caesar and Borgia, but devoid of the distinction of feeling which he attributed to the great men of the Renaissance. As a result of his insistence that the individual should bow before the eternity of the species and should submerge himself in the great cycle of time, race has been turned into a special aspect of the species and the individual has been made to bow before this sordid god. The life of which he spoke with such fear and trembling has been degraded to a sort of biology for domestic use. Finally a race of vulgar overlords, with a blundering desire for power, adopted, in his name, the “anti-Semitic deformity” on which he never ceased to pour scorn.In the history of intelligence, with the exception of Marx, Nietzsche’s adventure has no equivalent: we shall never finish making reparation for the injustice done to him. Of course history records other philosophies that have been misconstrued and betrayed. But up to the time of Nietzsche and national socialism, it was quite without parallel that a process of thought—brilliantly illuminated by the nobility and by the sufferings of an exceptional mind—should have been demonstrated to the eyes of the world by a parade of lies and by the hideous accumulation of corpses from concentration camps. The doctrine of the superman led to the methodical creation of submen—a fact that doubtless should be denounced but which also demands interpretation. If the final result of the great movement of rebellion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was to be this ruthless bondage then surely rebellion should be rejected and Nietzsche’s desperate cry to his contemporaries taken up: “My conscience and yours are no longer the same conscience.”From “Metaphysical Rebellion,” in The Rebel, translated by Anthony Bower (1951)GILLES DELEUZEThe eternal return is as badly misunderstood as the will to power. Every time we understand the eternal return as the return of a particular arrangement of things after all the other arrangements have been realised, every time we interpret the eternal return as the return of the identical or the same, we replace Nietzsche’s thought with childish hypotheses. No one extended the critique of all forms of identity further than Nietzsche. On two occasions in Zarathustra Nietzsche explicitly denies that the eternal return is a circle which makes the same return. The eternal return is the strict opposite of this since it cannot be separated from a selection, from a double selection. Firstly, there is the selection of willing or of thought which constitutes Nietzsche’s ethics: only will that of which one also wills the eternal return (to eliminate all half-willing, everything which can only be willed with the proviso “once, only once”). Secondly, there is the selection of being which constitutes Nietzsche’s ontology: only that which becomes in the fullest sense of the word can return, is fit to return. Only action and affirmation return: becoming has being and only becoming has being. That which is opposed to becoming, the same or the identical, strictly speaking, is not. The negative as the lowest degree of power, the reactive as the lowest degree of force, do not return because they are the opposite of becoming and only becoming has being. We can thus see how the eternal return is linked, not to a repetition of the same, but on the contrary, to a transmutation. It is the moment or the eternity of becoming which eliminates all that resists it. It releases, indeed it creates, the purely active and pure affirmation. And this is the sole content of the Overman; he is the joint product of the will to power and the eternal return, Dionysus and Ariadne. This is why Nietzsche says that the will to power is not wanting, coveting or seeking power, but only “giving” or “creating.”But the difficulty of Nietzsche depends less on conceptual analysis than on practical evaluations which evoke a whole atmosphere, all kinds of emotional dispositions in the reader. Like Spinoza, Nietzsche always maintained that there is the deepest relationship between concept and affect. Conceptual analyses are indispensable and Nietzsche takes them further than anyone else. But they will always be ineffective if the reader grasps them in an atmosphere which is not that of Nietzsche. As long as the reader persists in: 1) seeing the Nietzschean “slave” as someone who finds himself dominated by a master, and deserves to be; 2) understanding the will to power as a will which wants and seeks power; 3) conceiving the eternal return as the tedious return of the same; 4) imagining the Overman as a given master race—no positive relationship between Nietzsche and his reader will be possible. Nietzsche will appear a nihilist, or worse, a fascist and at best as an obscure and terrifying prophet. Nietzsche knew this, he knew the fate that lay in store for him, he who gave Zarathustra an “ape” or “buffoon” as a double, foretelling that Zarathustra would be confused with his ape (a prophet, a fascist or a madman…). This is why a book about Nietzsche must try hard to correct the practical or emotional misunderstanding as well as re-establishing the conceptual analysis.And it is indeed true that Nietzsche diagnosed nihilism as the movement which carries history forward. No one has analysed the concept of nihilism better than he did, he invented the concept. But it is important to see that he defined it in terms of the triumph of reactive forces or the negative in the will to power. To nihilism he opposed transmutation, that is the becoming which is simultaneously the only action of force and the only affirmation of power, the transhistoric element of man, the Overman (and not the superman). The Overman is the focal point, where the reactive (ressentiment and bad conscience) is conquered, and where the negative gives way to affirmation. Nietzsche remains inseparable, at every moment, from the forces of the future, from the forces yet to come that his prayers invoke, that his thought outlines, that his art prefigures. He not only diagnoses, as Kafka put it, the diabolical forces already knocking at the door, but he exorcises them by raising the last Power capable of struggling with them, against them, and of ousting them both within us and outside us. A Nietzschean “aphorism” is not a mere fragment, a morsel of thought: it is a proposition which only makes sense in relation to the state of forces that it expresses, and which changes sense, which must change sense, according to the new forces which it is “capable” (has the power) of attracting.And without doubt this is the most important point of Nietzsche’s philosophy: the radical transformation of the image of thought that we create for ourselves. Nietzsche snatches thought from the element of truth and falsity. He turns it into an interpretation and an evaluation, interpretation of forces, evaluation of power.—It is a thought-movement, not merely in the sense that Nietzsche wants to reconcile thought and concrete movement, but in the sense that thought itself must produce movements, bursts of extraordinary speed and slowness (here again we can see the role of the aphorism, with its variable speeds and its “projectile-like” movement). As a result philosophy has a new relationship to the arts of movement: theatre, dance and music. Nietzsche was never satisfied with the discourse or the dissertation (logos) as an expression of philosophical thought, although he wrote the finest dissertations—notably the Genealogy of Morals, to which all modern ethnology owes an inexhaustible “debt.” But a book like Zarathustra can only be read as a modern opera and seen and heard as such. It is not that Nietzsche produces a philosophical opera or a piece of allegorical theatre, but he creates a piece of theatre or an opera which directly expresses thought as experience and movement. And when Nietzsche says that the Overman resembles a Borgia rather than a Parsifal, or that he is a member of both the order of Jesuits and the Prussian officer corps, it would be wrong to see these as protofascist statements, since they are the remarks of a director indicating how the Overman should be “played” (rather like Kierkegaard saying that the knight of the faith is like a bourgeois in his Sunday best).—To think is to create: this is Nietzsche’s greatest lesson. To think, to cast the dice …: this was already the sense of the eternal return.From Nietzsche and Philosophy, translated by Hugh Tomlinson (1983) R EADING G ROUP G UIDE THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARDMaya Angelou•Daniel J. Boorstin•A. S. Byatt•Caleb Carr•Christopher Cerf•Ron Chernow•Shelby Foote•Stephen Jay Gould•Vartan Gregorian•Charles Johnson•Jon Krakauer•Edmund Morris•Joyce Carol Oates•Elaine Pagels•John Richardson•Salman Rushdie•Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.•Carolyn See•William Styron•Gore Vidal MODERN LIBRARY IS ONLINE ATWWW.MODERNLIBRARY.COMMODERN LIBRARY ONLINE IS YOUR GUIDE TO CLASSIC LITERATURE ON THE WEBTHE MODERN LIBRARY E-NEWSLETTEROur free e-mail newsletter is sent to subscribers, and features sample chapters, interviews with and essays by our authors, upcoming books, special promotions, announcements, and news.To subscribe to the Modern Library e-newsletter, send a blank e-mail to: sub_modernlibrary@info.randomhouse.com or visit www.modernlibrary.comTHE MODERN LIBRARY WEBSITECheck out the Modern Library website at www.modernlibrary.com for:The Modern Library e-newsletterA list of our current and upcoming titles and seriesReading Group Guides and exclusive author spotlightsSpecial features with information on the classics and other paperback seriesExcerpts from new releases and other titlesA list of our e-books and information on where to buy themThe Modern Library Editorial Board’s 100 Best Novels and 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Twentieth Century written in the English languageNews and announcementsQuestions? E-mail us at Biographical note copyright © 2000 by Random House, Inc. Introduction copyright © 2000 by Peter Gay Copyright © 1967 by Walter Kaufmann Copyright renewed 1995 by Mrs. Hazel KaufmannAll rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Columbia University Press and The Athlone Press Limited: Excerpt from Nietzsche and Philosophy, by Gilles Deleuze. Copyright © 1983 by Columbia University Press. Rights outside of the United States are controlled by The Athlone Press Limited, London. HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.: Excerpt from Nietzsche, Volume IV: Nihilism, by Martin Heidegger, translated by Frank A. Capuzzi. English translation copyright © 1982 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. Notes and analysis copyright © 1982 by David Farrell Krell. Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.: Excerpt from The Rebel, by Albert Camus, translated by Anthony Bower. Copyright © 1956 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900. [Selections. English. 2000] Basic writings of Nietzsche / introduction by Peter Gay; translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann.p. cm.eISBN: 978-0-307-41769-51. Philosophy. I. Kaufmann, Walter Arnold. II. Title.B3312.E5 K3 2000193—dc21   00-064578Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.comv3.0
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