Skirmishes of an Untimely Man

10 of 12 chapters in Twilight of the Idols by Friedrich Nietzsche

Original German

1 Meine Unmöglichen. - Seneca: oder der Toreador der Tugend. - Rousseau: oder die Rückkehr zur Natur in impuris naturalibus. - Schiller: oder der Moral-Trompeter von Säckingen. - Dante: oder die Hyäne, die in Gräbern dichtet. - Kant: oder cant als intelligibler Charakter. -Victor Hugo: oder der Pharus am Meere des Unsinns. - Liszt: oder die Schule der Geläufigkeit - nach Weibern. - George Sand: oder lactea ubertas, auf deutsch: die Milchkuh mit "schönem Stil". - Michelet: oder die Begeisterung, die den Rock auszieht…Carlyle: oder Pessimismus als zurückgetretenes Mittagessen. - John Stuart Mill: oder die beleidigende Klarheit. - Les fréres de Goncourt: oder die beiden Ajaxe im Kampf mit Homer. Musik von Offenbach. - Zola: oder die Freude zu stinken. -

2 Renan. - Theologie, oder die Verderbniss der Vernunft durch die "Erbsünde" (das Christenthum). Zeugniss Renan, der, sobald er einmal ein Ja oder Nein allgemeinerer Art risquirt, mit peinlicher Regelmässigkeit daneben greift. Er möchte zum Beispiel la science und la noblesse in Eins verknüpfen: aber la science gehört zur Demokratie, das greift sich doch mit Händen. Er wünscht, mit keinem kleinen Ehrgeize, einen Aristokratismus des Geistes darzustellen: aber zugleich liegt er vor dessen Gegenlehre, dem évangile des humbles auf den Knien und nicht nur auf den Knien… Was hilft alle Freigeisterei, Modernität, Spötterei und Wendehals-Geschmeidigkeit, wenn man mit seinen Eingeweiden Christ, Katholik und sogar Priester geblieben ist! Renan hat seine Erfindsamkeit, ganz wie ein Jesuit und Beichtvater, in der Verführung; seiner Geistigkeit fehlt das breite Pfaffen-Geschmunzel nicht, - er wird, wie alle Priester, gefährlich erst, wenn er liebt. Niemand kommt ihm darin gleich, auf eine lebensgefährliche Weise anzubeten… Dieser Geist Renan's, ein Geist, der entnervt, ist ein Verhängniss mehr für das arme, kranke, willenskranke Frankreich. -

3 Sainte-Beuve. - Nichts von Mann; voll eines kleinen Ingrimms gegen alle Mannsgeister. Schweift umher, fein, neugierig, gelangweilt, aushorcherisch, - eine Weibsperson im Grunde, mit einer Weibs-Rachsucht und Weibs-Sinnlichkeit. Als Psycholog ein Genie der médisance; unerschöpflich reich an Mitteln dazu; Niemand versteht besser, mit einem Lob Gift zu mischen. Plebejisch in den untersten Instinkten und mit dem ressentiment Rousseau's verwandt: folglich Romantiker - denn unter allem romantisme grunzt und giert der Instinkt Rousseau's nach Rache. Revolutionär, aber durch die Furcht leidlich noch im Zaum gehalten. Ohne Freiheit vor Allem, was Stärke hat (öffentliche Meinung, Akademie, Hof, selbst Port Royal). Erbittert gegen alles Grosse an Mensch und Ding, gegen Alles, was an sich glaubt. Dichter und Halbweib genug, um das Grosse noch als Macht zu fühlen; gekrümmt beständig, wie jener berühmte Wurm, weil er sich beständig getreten fühlt. Als Kritiker ohne Maassstab, Halt und Rückgrat, mit der Zunge des kosmopolitischen libertin für Vielerlei, aber ohne den Muth selbst zum Eingeständniss der libertinage. Als Historiker ohne Philosophie, ohne die Macht des philosophischen Blicks, - deshalb die Aufgabe des Richtens in allen Hauptsachen ablehnend, die "Objektivität" als Maske vorhaltend. Anders verhält er sich zu allen Dingen, wo ein feiner, vernutzter Geschmack die höchste Instanz ist: da hat er wirklich den Muth zu sich, die Lust an sich, - da ist er Meister. - Nach einigen Seiten eine Vorform Baudelaire's. -

4 Die imitatio Christi gehört zu den Büchern, die ich nicht ohne einen physiologischen Widerstand in den Händen halte: sie haucht einen parfum des Ewig-Weiblichen aus, zu dem man bereits Franzose sein muss - oder Wagnerianer… Dieser Heilige hat eine Art von der Liebe zu reden, dass sogar die Pariserinnen neugierig werden. - Man sagt mir, dass jener klügste Jesuit, A. Comte, der seine Franzosen auf dem Umweg der Wissenschaft nach Rom führen wollte, sich an diesem Buche inspirirt habe. Ich glaube es: "die Religion des Herzens"…

5 G. Eliot. - Sie sind den christlichen Gott los und glauben nun um, so mehr die christliche Moral festhalten zu müssen: das ist eine englische Folgerichtigkeit, wir wollen sie den Moral Weiblein á la Eliot nicht verübeln. In England muss man sich für jede kleine Emancipation von der Theologie in furchteinflössender Weise als Moral-Fanatiker wieder zu Ehren bringen. Das ist dort die Busse, die man zahlt. - Für uns Andre steht es anders. Wenn man den christlichen Glauben aufgiebt, zieht man sich damit das Recht zur christlichen Moral unter den Füssen weg. Diese versteht sich schlechterdings nicht von selbst: man muss diesen Punkt, den englischen Flachköpfen zum Trotz, immer wieder an's Licht stellen. Das Christenthum ist ein System, eine zusammengedachte und ganze Ansicht der Dinge. Bricht man aus ihm einen Hauptbegriff, den Glauben an Gott, heraus, so zerbricht man damit auch das Ganze: man hat nichts Nothwendiges mehr zwischen den Fingern. Das Christenthum setzt voraus, dass der Mensch nicht wisse, nicht wissen könne, was für ihn gut, was böse ist: er glaubt an Gott, der allein es weiss. Die christliche Moral ist ein Befehl; ihr Ursprung ist transscendent; sie ist jenseits aller Kritik, alles Rechts auf Kritik; sie hat nur Wahrheit, falls Gott die Wahrheit ist, - sie steht und fällt mit dem Glauben an Gott. - Wenn thatsächlich die Engländer glauben, sie wüssten von sich aus, "intuitiv", was gut und böse ist, wenn sie folglich vermeinen, das Christenthum als Garantie der Moral nicht mehr nöthig zu haben, so ist dies selbst bloss die Folge der Herrschaft des christlichen Werthurtheils und ein Ausdruck von der Stärke und Tiefe dieser Herrschaft: so dass der Ursprung der englischen Moral vergessen worden ist, so dass das Sehr-Bedingte ihres Rechts auf Dasein nicht mehr empfunden wird. Für den Engländer ist die Moral noch kein Problem…

6 George Sand. - Ich las die ersten lettres d'un voyageur: wie Alles, was von Rousseau stammt, falsch, gemacht, Blasebalg, übertrieben. Ich halte diesen bunten Tapeten-Stil nicht aus; ebensowenig als die Pöbel-Ambition nach generösen Gefühlen. Das Schlimmste freilich bleibt die Weibskoketterie mit Männlichkeiten, mit Manieren ungezogener Jungen. - Wie kalt muss sie bei alledem gewesen sein, diese unausstehliche Künstlerin! Sie zog sich auf wie eine Uhr - und schrieb… Kalt, wie Hugo wie Balzac, wie alle Romantiker, sobald sie dichteten! Und wie selbstgefällig sie dabei dagelegen haben mag, diese fruchtbare Schreibe-Kuh, die etwas Deutsches im schlimmen Sinne an sich hatte, gleich Rousseau selbst, ihrem Meister, und jedenfalls erst beim Niedergang des französischen Geschmacks möglich war! - Aber Renan verehrt sie…

7 Moral für Psychologen. - Keine Colportage-Psychologie treiben! Nie beobachten, um zu beobachten! Das giebt eine falsche Optik, ein Schielen, etwas Erzwungenes und Übertreibendes. Erleben als Erleben-Wollen - das geräth nicht. Man darf nicht im Erlebniss nach sich hinblicken, jeder Blick wird da zum "bösen Blick". Ein geborner Psycholog hütet sich aus Instinkt, zu sehn, um zu sehn; dasselbe gilt vom gebornen Maler. Er arbeitet nie "nach der Natur", - er überlässt seinem Instinkte, seiner camera obscura das Durchsieben und Ausdrücken des "Falls", der "Natur", des "Erlebten"… Das Allgemeine erst kommt ihm zum Bewusstsein, der Schluss, das Ergebniss: er kennt jenes willkürliche Abstrahiren vom einzelnen Falle nicht. - Was wird daraus, wenn man es anders macht? Zum Beispiel nach Art der Pariser romanciers gross und klein Colportage-Psychologie treibt? Das lauert gleichsam der Wirklichkeit auf, das bringt jeden Abend eine Handvoll Curiositäten mit nach Hause… Aber man sehe nur, was zuletzt herauskommt - ein Haufen von Klecksen, ein Mosaik besten Falls, in jedem Falle etwas Zusammen-Addirtes, Unruhiges, Farbenschreiendes. Das Schlimmste darin erreichen die Goncourt: sie setzen nicht drei Sätze zusammen, die nicht dem Auge, dem Psychologen-Auge einfach weh thun. - Die Natur, künstlerisch abgeschätzt, ist kein Modell. Sie übertreibt, sie verzerrt, sie lässt Lücken. Die Natur ist der Zufall. Das Studium "nach der Natur" scheint mir ein schlechtes Zeichen: es verräth Unterwerfung, Schwäche, Fatalismus, - dies Im-Staube-Liegen vor petits faits ist eines ganzen Künstlers unwürdig. Sehen, was ist - das gehört einer andern Gattung von Geistern. zu, den antiartistischen, den Thatsächlichen. Man muss wissen, wer man ist…

8 Zur Psychologie des Künstlers. - Damit es Kunst giebt, damit es irgend ein ästhetisches Thun und Schauen giebt, dazu ist eine physiologische Vorbedingung unumgänglich: der Rausch. Der Rausch muss erst die Erregbarkeit der ganzen Maschine gesteigert haben: eher kommt es zu keiner Kunst. Alle noch so verschieden bedingten Arten des Rausches haben dazu die Kraft: vor Allem der Rausch der Geschlechtserregung, diese älteste und ursprünglichste Form des Rausches. Insgleichen der Rausch, der im Gefolge aller grossen Begierden, aller starken Affekte kommt; der Rausch des Festes, des Wettkampfs, des Bravourstücks, des Siegs, aller extremen Bewegung; der Rausch der Grausamkeit; der Rausch in der Zerstörung; der Rausch unter gewissen meteorologischen Einflüssen, zum Beispiel der Frühlingsrausch; oder unter dem Einfluss der Narcotica; endlich der Rausch des Willens, der Rausch eines überhäuften und geschwellten Willens. - Das Wesentliche am Rausch ist das Gefühl der Kraftsteigerung und Fülle. Aus diesem Gefühle giebt man an die Dinge ab, man zwingt sie von uns zu nehmen, man vergewaltigt sie, - man heisst diesen Vorgang Idealisiren. Machen wir uns hier von einem Vorurtheil los: das Idealisiren besteht nicht, wie gemeinhin geglaubt wird, in einem Abziehn oder Abrechnen des Kleinen, des Nebensächlichen. Ein ungeheures Heraustreibender Hauptzüge ist vielmehr das Entscheidende, so dass die andern darüber verschwinden.

9 Man bereichert in diesem Zustande Alles aus seiner eignen Fülle: was man sieht, was man will, man sieht es geschwellt, gedrängt, stark, überladen mit Kraft. Der Mensch dieses Zustandes verwandelt die Dinge, bis sie seine Macht wiederspiegeln, - bis sie Reflexe seiner Vollkommenheit sind. Dies Verwandeln müssen in's Vollkommne ist - Kunst. Alles selbst, was er nicht ist, wird trotzdem ihm zur Lust an sich; in der Kunst geniesst sich der Mensch als Vollkommenheit. - Es wäre erlaubt, sich einen gegensätzlichen Zustand auszudenken, ein spezifisches Antikünstlerthum des Instinks, - eine Art zu sein, welche alle Dinge verarmte, verdünnte, schwindsüchtig machte. Und in der That, die Geschichte ist reich an solchen Anti-Artisten, an solchen Ausgehungerten des Lebens: welche mit Nothwendigkeit die Dinge noch an sich nehmen, sie auszehren, sie magerer machen müssen. Dies ist zum Beispiel der Fall des echten Christen, Pascal's zum Beispiel: ein Christ, der zugleich Künstler wäre, kommt nicht vor… Man sei nicht kindlich und wende mir Raffael ein oder irgend welche homöopathische Christen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts: Raffael sagte Ja, Raffael machte Ja, folglich war Raffael kein Christ…

10 Was bedeutet der von mir in die Ästhetik eingeführte Gegensatz-Begriff apollinisch und dionysisch, beide als Arten des Rausches begriffen? - Der apollinische Rausch hält vor Allem das Auge erregt, so dass es die Kraft der Vision bekommt. Der Maler, der Plastiker, der Epiker sind Visionäre par excellence. Im dionysischen Zustande ist dagegen das gesammte Affekt-System erregt und gesteigert: so dass es alle seine Mittel des Ausdrucks mit einem Male entladet und die Kraft des Darstellens, Nachbildens, Transfigurirens, Verwandelns, alle Art Mimik und Schauspielerei zugleich heraustreibt. Das Wesentliche bleibt die Leichtigkeit der Metamorphose, die Unfähigkeit, nicht zu reagiren (- ähnlich wie bei gewissen Hysterischen, die auch auf jeden Wink hin in je de Rolle eintreten). Es ist dem dionysischen Menschen unmöglich, irgend eine Suggestion nicht zu verstehn, er übersieht kein Zeichen des Affekts, er hat den höchsten Grad des verstehenden und errathenden Instinkts, wie er den höchsten Grad von Mittheilungs-Kunst besitzt. Er geht in jede Haut, in jeden Affekt ein: er verwandelt sich beständig. - Musik, wie wir sie heute verstehn, ist gleichfalls eine Gesammt-Erregung und -Entladung der Affekte, aber dennoch nur das Überbleibsel von einer viel volleren Ausdrucks-Welt des Affekts, ein blosses residuum des dionysischen Histrionismus. Man hat, zur Ermöglichung der Musik als Sonderkunst, eine Anzahl Sinne, vor Allem den Muskelsinn still gestellt (relativ wenigstens: denn in einem gewissen Grade redet noch aller Rhythmus zu unsern Muskeln): so dass der Mensch nicht mehr Alles, was er fühlt, sofort leibhaft nachahmt und darstellt. Trotzdem ist Das der eigentlich dionysische Normalzustand, jedenfalls der Urzustand; die Musik ist die langsam erreichte Spezifikation desselben auf Unkosten der nächstverwandten Vermögen.

11 Der Schauspieler, der Mime, der Tänzer, der Musiker, der Lyriker sind in ihren Instinkten grundverwandt und an sich Eins, aber allmählich spezialisirt und von einander abgetrennt - bis selbst zum Widerspruch. Der Lyriker blieb am längsten mit dem Musiker geeint; der Schauspieler mit dem Tänzer. - Der Architekt stellt weder einen dionysischen, noch einen apollinischen Zustand dar: hier ist es der grosse Willensakt, der Wille, der Berge versetzt, der Rausch des grossen Willens, der zur Kunst verlangt. Die mächtigsten Menschen haben immer die Architekten inspirirt; der Architekt war stets unter der Suggestion der Macht. Im Bauwerk soll sich der Stolz, der Sieg über die Schwere, der Wille zur Macht versichtbaren; Architektur ist eine Art Macht-Beredsamkeit in Formen, bald überredend, selbst schmeichelnd, bald bloss befehlend. Das höchste Gefühl von Macht und Sicherheit kommt in dem zum Ausdruck, was grossen Stil hat. Die Macht, die keinen Beweis mehr nöthig hat; die es verschmäht, zu gefallen; die schwer antwortet; die keinen Zeugen um sich fühlt; die ohne Bewusstsein davon lebt, dass es Widerspruch gegen sie giebt; die in sich ruht, fatalistisch, ein Gesetz unter Gesetzen: Das redet als grosser Stil von sich. -

12 Ich las das Leben Thomas Carlyle's, diese farce wider Wissen und Willen, diese heroisch-moralische Interpretation dyspeptischer Zustände. - Carlyle, ein Mann der starken Worte und Attitüden, ein Rhetor aus Noth, den beständig das Verlangen nach einem starken Glauben agaçirt und das Gefühl der Unfähigkeit dazu (- darin ein typischer Romantiker!). Das Verlangen nach einem starken Glauben ist nicht der Beweis eines starken Glaubens, vielmehr das Gegentheil. Hat man ihn, so darf man sich den schönen Luxus der Skepsis gestatten: man ist sicher genug, fest genug, gebunden genug dazu. Carlyle betäubt Etwas in sich durch das fortissimo seiner Verehrung für Menschen starken Glaubens und durch seine Wuth gegen die weniger Einfältigen: er bedarf des Lärms. Eine beständige leidenschaftliche Unredlichkeit gegen sich - das ist sein proprium, damit ist und bleibt er interessant. - Freilich, in England wird er gerade wegen seiner Redlichkeit bewundert… Nun, das ist englisch; und in Anbetracht, dass die Engländer das Volk des vollkommnen cant sind, sogar billig, und nicht nur, begreiflich. Im Grunde ist Carlyle ein englischer Atheist, der seine Ehre darin sucht, es nicht zu sein.

13 Emerson. - Viel aufgeklärter, schweifender, vielfacher, raffinirter als Carlyle, vor Allem glücklicher… Ein Solcher, der sich instinktiv bloss von Ambrosia nährt, der das Unverdauliche in den Dingen zurücklässt. Gegen Carlyle gehalten ein Mann des Geschmacks. - Carlyle, der ihn sehr liebte, sagte trotzdem von ihm: "er giebt uns nicht genug zu beissen": was mit Recht gesagt sein mag, aber nicht zu Ungunsten Emerson's. - Emerson hat jene gütige und geistreiche Heiterkeit, welche allen Ernst entmuthigt; er weiss es schlechterdings nicht, wie alt er schon ist und wie jung er noch sein wird, - er könnte von sich mit einem Wort Lope de Vega's sagen: "yo me sucedo a mi mismo". Sein Geist findet immer Gründe, zufrieden und selbst dankbar zu sein; und bisweilen streift er die heitere Transscendenz jenes Biedermanns, der von einem verliebten Stelldichein tamquam re bene gesta zurückkam. "Ut desint vires, sprach er dankbar, tamen est laudanda voluptas." -

14 Anti-Darwin. - Was den berühmten Kampf um's Leben betrifft, so scheint er mir einstweilen mehr behauptet als bewiesen. Er kommt vor, aber als Ausnahme; der Gesammt-Aspekt des Lebens ist nicht die Nothlage, die Hungerlage, vielmehr der Reichthum, die Üppigkeit, selbst die absurde Verschwendung, - wo gekämpft wird, kämpft man um Macht… Man soll nicht Malthus mit der Natur verwechseln. - Gesetzt aber, es giebt diesen Kampf - und in der That, er kommt vor -, so läuft er leider umgekehrt aus als die Schule Darwin's wünscht, als man vielleicht mit ihr wünschen dürfte: nämlich zu Ungunsten der Starken, der Bevorrechtigten, der glücklichen Ausnahmen. Die Gattungen wachsen nicht in der Vollkommenheit: die Schwachen werden immer wieder über die Starken Herr, - das macht, sie sind die grosse Zahl, sie sind auch klüger… Darwin hat den Geist vergessen (- das ist englisch!), die Schwachen haben mehr Geist… Man muss Geist nöthig haben, um Geist zu bekommen, - man verliert ihn, wenn man ihn nicht mehr nöthig hat. Wer die Stärke hat, entschlägt sich des Geistes (- "lass fahren dahin! denkt man heute in Deutschland - das Reich muss uns doch bleiben"…). Ich verstehe unter Geist, wie man sieht, die Vorsicht, die Geduld, die List, die Verstellung, die grosse Selbstbeherrschung und Alles, was mimicry ist (zu letzterem gehört ein grosser Theil der sogenannten Tugend).

15 Psychologen-Casuistik. - Das ist ein Menschenkenner: wozu studirt er eigentlich die Menschen? Er will kleine Vortheile über sie erschnappen, oder auch grosse, - er ist ein Politikus!… Jener da ist auch ein Menschenkenner: und ihr sagt, der wolle Nichts damit für sich, das sei ein grosser "Unpersönlicher". Seht schärfer zu! Vielleicht will er sogar noch einen schlimmeren Vortheil: sich den Menschen überlegen fühlen, auf sie herabsehn dürfen, sich nicht mehr mit ihnen verwechseln. Dieser "Unpersönliche" ist ein Menschen-Verächter: und jener Erstere ist die humanere Species, was auch der Augenschein sagen mag. Er stellt sich wenigstens gleich, er stellt sich hinein…

16 Der psychologische Takt der Deutschen scheint mir durch eine ganze Reihe von Fällen in Frage gestellt, deren Verzeichniss vorzulegen mich meine Bescheidenheit hindert. In Einem Falle wird es mir nicht an einem grossen Anlasse fehlen, meine These zu begründen: ich trage es den Deutschen nach, sich über Kant und seine "Philosophie der Hinterthüren", wie ich sie nenne, vergriffen zu haben, - das war nicht der Typus der intellektuellen Rechtschaffenheit. - Das Andre, was ich nicht hören mag, ist ein berüchtigtes "und": die Deutschen sagen, "Goethe und Schiller", - ich fürchte, sie sagen "Schiller und Goethe"… Kennt man noch nicht diesen Schiller? - Es giebt noch schlimmere "und"; ich habe mit meinen eigenen Ohren, allerdings nur unter Universitäts-Professoren, gehört "Schopenhauer und Hartmann"

17 Die geistigsten Menschen, vorausgesetzt, dass sie die muthigsten sind, erleben auch bei weitem die schmerzhaftesten Tragödien: aber eben deshalb ehren sie das Leben, weil es ihnen seine grösste Gegnerschaft entgegenstellt.

18 Zum "intellektuellen Gewissen". - Nichts scheint mir heute seltner als die echte Heuchelei. Mein Verdacht ist gross, dass diesem Gewächs die sanfte Luft unsrer Cultur nicht zuträglich ist. Die Heuchelei gehört in die Zeitalter des starken Glaubens: wo man selbst nicht bei der Nöthigung, einen andern Glauben zur Schau zu tragen, von dem Glauben losliess, den man hatte. Heute lässt man ihn los; oder, was noch gewöhnlicher, man legt sich noch einen zweiten Glauben zu, - ehrlich bleibt man in jedem Falle. Ohne Zweifel ist heute eine sehr viel grössere Anzahl von Überzeugungen möglich als ehemals: möglich, das heisst erlaubt, das heisst unschädlich. Daraus entsteht die Toleranz gegen sich selbst. - Die Toleranz gegen sich selbst gestattet mehrere Überzeugungen: diese selbst leben verträglich beisammen, - sie hüten sich, wie alle Welt heute, sich zu compromittiren. Womit compromittirt man sich heute? Wenn man Consequenz hat. Wenn man in gerader Linie geht. Wenn man weniger als fünfdeutig ist. Wenn man echt ist… Meine Furcht ist gross, dass der moderne Mensch für einige Laster einfach zu bequem ist: so dass diese geradezu aussterben. Alles Böse, das vom starken Willen bedingt ist - und vielleicht giebt es nichts Böses ohne Willensstärke - entartet, in unsrer lauen Luft, zur Tugend… Die wenigen Heuchler, die ich kennen lernte, machten die Heuchelei nach: sie waren, wie heutzutage fast jeder zehnte Mensch, Schauspieler. -

19 Schön und hässlich. - Nichts ist bedingter, sagen wir beschränkter, als unser Gefühl des Schönen. Wer es losgelöst von der Lust des Menschen am Menschen denken wollte, verlöre sofort Grund und Boden unter den Füssen. Das "Schöne an sich" ist bloss ein Wort, nicht einmal ein Begriff. Im Schönen setzt sich der Mensch als Maass der Vollkommenheit; in. ausgesuchten Fällen betet er sich darin an. Eine Gattung kann gar nicht anders als dergestalt zu sich allein ja sagen. Ihr unterster Instinkt, der der Selbsterhaltung und Selbsterweiterung, strahlt noch in solchen Sublimitäten aus. Der Mensch glaubt die Welt selbst mit Schönheit überhäuft, - er vergisst sich als deren Ursache. Er allein hat sie mit Schönheit beschenkt, ach! nur mit einer sehr menschlich-allzumenschlichen Schönheit…. Im Grunde spiegelt sich der Mensch in den Dingen, er hält Alles für schön, was ihm sein Bild zurückwirft: das Urtheil "schön" ist seine Gattungs-Eitelkeit…. Dem Skeptiker nämlich darf ein kleiner Argwohn die Frage in's Ohr flüstern: ist wirklich damit die Welt verschönt, dass gerade der Mensch sie für schön nimmt? Er hat sie vermenschlicht: das ist Alles. Aber Nichts, gar Nichts verbürgt uns, dass gerade der Mensch das Modell des Schönen abgäbe. Wer weiss, wie er sich in den Augen eines höheren Geschmacksrichters ausnimmt? Vielleicht gewagt? vielleicht selbst erheiternd? vielleicht ein wenig arbiträr?… "Oh Dionysos, Göttlicher, warum ziehst du mich an den Ohren?" fragte Ariadne einmal bei einem jener berühmten Zwiegespräche auf Naxos ihren philosophischen Liebhaber. "Ich finde eine Art Humor in deinen Ohren, Ariadne: warum sind sie nicht noch länger?"

20 Nichts ist schön, nur der Mensch ist schön: auf dieser Naivetät ruht alle Ästhetik, sie ist deren erste Wahrheit. Fügen wir sofort noch deren zweite hinzu: Nichts ist hässlich als der entartende Mensch, - damit ist das Reich des ästhetischen Urtheils umgrenzt. - Physiologisch nachgerechnet, schwächt und betrübt alles Hässliche den Menschen. Es erinnert ihn an Verfall, Gefahr, Ohnmacht; er büsst thatsächlich dabei Kraft ein. Man kann die Wirkung des Hässlichen mit dem Dynamometer messen. Wo der Mensch überhaupt niedergedrückt wird, da wittert er die Nähe von etwas "Hässlichem". Sein Gefühl der Macht, sein Wille zur Macht, sein Muth, sein Stolz - das fällt mit dem Hässlichen, das steigt mit dem Schönen… Im einen wie im andern Falle machen wir einen Schluss: die Prämissen dazu sind in ungeheurer Fülle im Instinkte aufgehäuft. Das Hässliche wird verstanden als ein Wink und Symptom der Degenerescenz: was im Entferntesten an Degenerescenz erinnert, das wirkt in uns das Urtheil "hässlich". Jedes Anzeichen von Erschöpfung, von Schwere, von Alter, von Müdigkeit, jede Art Unfreiheit, als Krampf, als Lähmung, vor Allem der Geruch, die Farbe, die Form der Auflösung, der Verwesung, und sei es auch in der letzten Verdünnung zum Symbol - das Alles ruft die gleiche Reaktion hervor, das Werthurtheil "hässlich". Ein Hass springt da hervor: wen hasst da der Mensch? Aber es ist kein Zweifel: den Niedergang seines Typus. Er hasst da aus dem tiefsten Instinkte der Gattung heraus; in diesem Hass ist Schauder, Vorsicht, Tiefe, Fernblick, - es ist der tiefste Hass, den es giebt. Um seinetwillen ist die Kunst tief…

21 Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer, der letzte Deutsche, der in Betracht kommt (der ein europäisches Ereigniss gleich Goethe, gleich Hegel, gleich Heinrich Heine ist, und nicht bloss ein lokales, ein "nationales"), ist für einen Psychologen ein Fall ersten Ranges: nämlich als bösartig genialer Versuch, zu Gunsten einer nihilistischen Gesammt-Abwerthung des Lebens gerade die Gegen-Instanzen, die grossen Selbstbejahungen des "Willens zum Leben", die Exuberanz-Formen des Lebens in's Feld zu führen. Er hat, der Reihe nach, die Kunst, den Heroismus, das Genie, die Schönheit, das grosse Mitgefühl, die Erkenntniss, den Willen zur Wahrheit, die Tragödie als Folgeerscheinungen der "Verneinung" oder der Verneinungs-Bedürftigkeit des "Willens" interpretirt - die grösste psychologische Falschmünzerei, die es, das Christenthum abgerechnet, in der Geschichte giebt. Genauer zugesehn ist er darin bloss der Erbe der christlichen Interpretation: nur dass er auch das vom Christenthum Abgelehnte, die grossen Cultur-Thatsachen der Menschheit noch in einem christlichen, das heisst nihilistischen Sinne gut zu heissen wusste (- nämlich als Wege zur "Erlösung", als Vorformen der "Erlösung", als Stimulantia des Bedürfnisses nach "Erlösung"… )

22 Ich nehme einen einzelnen Fall. Schopenhauer spricht von der Schönheit mit einer schwermüthigen Gluth, - warum letzten Grundes? Weil er in ihr eine Brücke sieht, auf der man weiter gelangt, oder Durst bekommt, weiter zu gelangen… Sie ist ihm die Erlösung vom "Willen" auf Augenblicke - sie lockt zur Erlösung für immer… Insbesondere preist er sie als Erlöserin vom "Brennpunkte des Willens", von der Geschlechtlichkeit, - in der Schönheit sieht er den Zeugetrieb verneint… Wunderlicher Heiliger! Irgend Jemand widerspricht dir, ich fürchte, es ist die Natur. Wozu giebt es überhaupt Schönheit in Ton, Farbe, Duft, rhythmischer Bewegung in der Natur? Was treibt die Schönheit heraus?- Glücklicherweise widerspricht ihm auch ein Philosoph. Keine geringere Autorität als die des göttlichen Plato (- so nennt ihn Schopenhauer selbst) hält einen andern Satz aufrecht: dass alle Schönheit zur Zeugung reize, - dass dies gerade das proprium ihrer Wirkung sei, vom Sinnlichsten bis hinauf in's Geistigste…

23 Plato geht weiter. Er sagt mit einer Unschuld, zu der man Grieche sein muss und nicht "Christ", dass es gar keine platonische Philosophie geben würde, wenn es nicht so schöne Jünglinge in Athen gäbe: deren Anblick sei es erst, was die Seele des Philosophen in einen erotischen Taumel versetze und ihr keine Ruhe lasse, bis sie den Samen aller hohen Dinge in ein so schönes Erdreich hinabgesenkt habe. Auch ein wunderlicher Heiliger! - man traut seinen Ohren nicht, gesetzt selbst, dass man Plato traut. Zum Mindesten erräth man, dass in Athen anders philosophirt wurde, vor Allem öffentlich. Nichts ist weniger griechisch als die Begriffs-Spinneweberei eines Einsiedlers, amor intellectualis dei nach Art des Spinoza. Philosophie nach Art des Plato wäre eher als ein erotischer Wettbewerb zu definiren, als eine Fortbildung und Verinnerlichung der alten agonalen Gymnastik und deren Voraussetzungen… Was wuchs zuletzt aus dieser philosophischen Erotik Plato's heraus? Eine neue Kunstform des griechischen Agon, die Dialektik. - Ich erinnere noch, gegen Schopenhauer und zu Ehren Plato's, daran, dass auch die ganze höhere Cultur und Litteratur des klassischen Frankreichs auf dem Boden des geschlechtlichen Interesses aufgewachsen ist. Man darf überall bei ihr die Galanterie, die Sinne, den Geschlechts-Wettbewerb, das "Weib" suchen, - man wird nie umsonst suchen…

24 L'art pour l'art. - Der Kampf gegen den Zweck in der Kunst ist immer der Kampf gegen die moralisirende Tendenz in der Kunst, gegen ihre Unterordnung unter die Moral. L'art pour l'art heisst: "der Teufel hole die Moral!" - Aber selbst noch diese Feindschaft verräth die Übergewalt des Vorurtheils. Wenn man den Zweck des Moralpredigens und Menschen-Verbesserns von der Kunst ausgeschlossen hat, so folgt daraus noch lange nicht, dass die Kunst überhaupt zwecklos, ziellos, sinnlos, kurz l'art pour l'art - ein Wurm, der sich in den Schwanz beisst - ist. "Lieber gar keinen Zweck als einen moralischen Zweck!" - so redet die blosse Leidenschaft. Ein Psycholog fragt dagegen: was thut alle Kunst? lobt sie nicht? verherrlicht sie nicht? wählt sie nicht aus? zieht sie nicht hervor? Mit dem Allen stärkt oder schwächt sie gewisse Werthschätzungen… Ist dies nur ein Nebenbei? ein Zufall? Etwas, bei dem der Instinkt des Künstlers gar nicht betheiligt wäre? Oder aber: ist es nicht die Voraussetzung dazu, dass der Künstler kann…? Geht dessen unterster Instinkt auf die Kunst oder nicht vielmehr auf den Sinn der Kunst, das Leben? auf eine Wünschbarkeit von Leben?- Die Kunst ist das grosse Stimulans zum Leben: wie könnte man sie als zwecklos, als ziellos, als l'art pour l'art verstehn? - Eine Frage bleibt zurück: die Kunst bringt auch vieles Hässliche, Harte, Fragwürdige des Lebens zur Erscheinung, - scheint sie nicht damit vom Leben zu entleiden? - Und in der That, es gab Philosophen, die ihr diesen Sinn liehn: "loskommen vom Willen" lehrte Schopenhauer als Gesammt-Absicht der Kunst, "zur Resignation stimmen" verehrte er als die grosse Nützlichkeit der Tragödie. - Aber dies - ich gab es schon zu verstehn - ist Pessimisten-Optik und "böser Blick" -: man muss an die Künstler selbst appelliren. Was theilt der tragische Künstler von sich mit? Ist es nicht gerade der Zustand ohne Furcht vor dem Furchtbaren und Fragwürdigen, das er zeigt? - Dieser Zustand selbst ist eine hohe Wünschbarkeit; wer ihn kennt, ehrt ihn mit den höchsten Ehren. Er theilt ihn mit, er muss ihn mittheilen, vorausgesetzt, dass er ein Künstler ist, ein Genie der Mittheilung. Die Tapferkeit und Freiheit des Gefühls vor einem mächtigen Feinde, vor einem erhabenen Ungemach, vor einem Problem, das Grauen erweckt - dieser siegreiche Zustand ist es, den der tragische Künstler auswählt, den er verherrlicht. Vor der Tragödie feiert das Kriegerische in unserer Seele seine Saturnalien; wer Leid gewohnt ist, wer Leid aufsucht, der heroische Mensch preist mit der Tragödie sein Dasein, - ihm allein kredenzt der Tragiker den Trunk dieser süssesten Grausamkeit. -

25 Mit Menschen fürlieb nehmen, mit seinem Herzen offen Haus halten, das ist liberal, das ist aber bloss liberal. Man erkennt die Herzen, die der vornehmen Gastfreundschaft fähig sind, an den vielen verhängten Fenstern und geschlossenen Läden: ihre besten Räume halten sie leer. Warum doch? - Weil sie Gäste erwarten, mit denen man nicht "fürlieb nimmt"

26 Wir schätzen uns nicht genug mehr, wenn wir uns mittheilen. Unsre eigentlichen Erlebnisse sind ganz und gar nicht geschwätzig. Sie könnten sich selbst nicht mittheilen, wenn sie wollten. Das macht, es fehlt ihnen das Wort. Wofür wir Worte haben, darüber sind wir auch schon hinaus. In allem Reden liegt ein Gran Verachtung. Die Sprache, scheint es, ist nur für Durchschnittliches, Mittleres, Mittheilsames erfunden. Mit der Sprache vulgarisirt sich bereits der Sprechende. - Aus einer Moral für Taubstumme und andere Philosophen.

27 "Dies Bildniss ist bezaubernd schön!"… Das Litteratur-Weib, unbefriedigt, aufgeregt, öde in Herz und Eingeweide, mit schmerzhafter Neugierde jederzeit auf den Imperativ hinhorchend, der aus den Tiefen seiner Organisation "aut liberi aut libri" flüstert: das Litteratur-Weib, gebildet genug, die Stimme der Natur zu verstehn, selbst wenn sie Latein redet und andrerseits eitel und Gans genug, um im Geheimen auch noch französisch mit sich zu sprechen "je me verrai, je me lirai, je m'extasierai et je dirai: Possible, que j'aie eu tant d'esprit?"

28 Die "Unpersönlichen" kommen zu Wort. - "Nichts fällt uns leichter, als weise, geduldig, überlegen zu sein. Wir triefen vom Öl der Nachsicht und des Mitgefühls, wir sind auf eine absurde Weise gerecht, wir verzeihen Alles. Eben darum sollten wir uns etwas strenger halten; eben darum sollten wir uns, von Zeit zu Zeit, einen kleinen Affekt, ein kleines Laster von Affect züchten. Es mag uns sauer angehn; und unter uns lachen wir vielleicht über den Aspekt, den wir damit geben. Aber was hilft es! Wir haben keine andre Art mehr übrig von Selbstüberwindung: dies ist unsre Asketik, unser Büsserthum"… Persönlich werden - die Tugend des "Unpersönlichen"…

29 Aus einer Doctor-Promotion. - "Was ist die Aufgabe alles höheren Schulwesens?" - Aus dem Menschen eine Maschine zu machen. - "Was ist das Mittel dazu?" - Er muss lernen, sich langweilen. - "Wie erreicht man das?" - Durch den Begriff der Pflicht. - "Wer ist sein Vorbild dafür?" - Der Philolog: der lehrt ochsen. - "Wer ist der vollkommene Mensch?" - Der Staats-Beamte. - "Welche Philosophie giebt die höchste Formel für den Staats-Beamten?" - Die Kant's: der Staats-Beamte als Ding an sich zum Richter gesetzt über den Staats-Beamten als Erscheinung. -

30 Das Recht auf Dummheit. - Der ermüdete und langsam athmende Arbeiter, der gutmüthig blickt, der die Dinge gehen lässt, wie sie gehn: diese typische Figur, der man jetzt, im Zeitalter der Arbeit (und des "Reichs"! -) in allen Klassen der Gesellschaft begegnet, nimmt heute gerade die Kunst für sich in Anspruch, eingerechnet das Buch, vor Allem das Journal, - um wie viel mehr die schöne Natur, Italien… Der Mensch des Abends, mit den "entschlafenen wilden Trieben", von denen Faust redet, bedarf der Sommerfrische, des Seebads, der Gletscher, Bayreuth's… In solchen Zeitaltern hat die Kunst ein Recht auf reine Thorheit, - als eine Art Ferien für Geist, Witz und Gemüth. Das verstand Wagner. Die reine Thorheit stellt wieder her…

31 Noch ein Problem der Diät. - Die Mittel, mit denen Julius Cäsar sich gegen Kränklichkeiten und Kopfschmerz vertheidigte: ungeheure Märsche, einfachste Lebensweise, ununterbrochner Aufenthalt im Freien, beständige Strapazen - das sind, in's Grosse gerechnet, die Erhaltungs- und Schutz-Maassregeln überhaupt gegen die extreme Verletzlichkeit jener subtilen und unter höchstem Druck arbeitenden Maschine, welche Genie heisst. -

32 Der Immoralist redet. - Einem Philosophen geht Nichts mehr wider den Geschmack als der Mensch, sofern er wünscht… Sieht er den Menschen nur in seinem Thun, sieht er dieses tapferste, listigste, ausdauerndste Thier verirrt selbst in labyrinthische Nothlagen, wie bewunderungswürdig erscheint ihm der Mensch! Er spricht ihm noch zu… Aber der Philosoph verachtet den wünschenden Menschen, auch den "wünschbaren" Menschen - und überhaupt alle Wünschbarkeiten, alle Ideale des Menschen. Wenn ein Philosoph Nihilist sein könnte, so würde er es sein, weil er das Nichts hinter allen Idealen des Menschen findet. Oder noch nicht einmal das Nichts, - sondern nur das Nichtswürdige, das Absurde, das Kranke, das Feige, das Müde, alle Art Hefen aus dem ausgetrunkenen Becher seines Lebens… Der Mensch, der als Realität so verehrungswürdig ist, wie kommt es, dass er keine Achtung verdient, sofern er wünscht? Muss er es büssen, so tüchtig als Realität zu sein? Muss er sein Thun, die Kopf- und Willensanspannung in allem Thun, mit einem Gliederstrecken im Imaginären und Absurden ausgleichen? - Die Geschichte seiner Wünschbarkeiten war bisher die partie honteuse des Menschen: man soll sich hüten, zu lange in ihr zu lesen. Was den Menschen rechtfertigt, ist seine Realität, - sie wird ihn ewig rechtfertigen. Um wie viel mehr werth ist der wirkliche Mensch, verglichen mit irgend einem bloss gewünschten, erträumten, erstunkenen und erlogenen Menschen? mit irgend einem idealen Menschen?… Und nur der ideale Mensch geht dem Philosophen wider den Geschmack.

33 Naturwerth des Egoismus. - Die Selbstsucht ist so viel werth, als Der physiologisch werth ist, der sie hat: sie kann sehr viel werth sein, sie kann nichtswürdig und verächtlich sein. Jeder Einzelne darf darauf hin angesehen werden, ob er die aufsteigende oder die absteigende Linie des Lebens darstellt. Mit einer Entscheidung darüber hat man auch einen Kanon dafür, was seine Selbstsucht werth ist. Stellt er das Aufsteigen der Linie dar, so ist in der That sein Werth ausserordentlich, - und um des Gesammt-Lebens willen, das mit ihm einen Schritt weiter thut, darf die Sorge um Erhaltung, um Schaffung seines optimum von Bedingungen selbst extrem sein. Der Einzelne, das "Individuum", wie Volk und Philosoph das bisher verstand, ist ja ein Irrthum: er ist nichts für sich, kein Atom, kein "Ring der Kette", nichts bloss Vererbtes von Ehedem, - er ist die ganze Eine Linie Mensch bis zu ihm hin selber noch… Stellt er die absteigende Entwicklung, den Verfall, die chronische Entartung, Erkrankung dar (- Krankheiten sind, in's Grosse gerechnet, bereits Folgeerscheinungen des Verfalls, nicht dessen Ursachen), so kommt ihm wenig Werth zu, und die erste Billigkeit will, dass er den Wohlgerathenen so wenig als möglich wegnimmt. Er ist bloss noch deren Parasit…

34 Christ und Anarchist. - Wenn der Anarchist, als Mundstück niedergehender Schichten der Gesellschaft, mit einer schönen Entrüstung "Recht", "Gerechtigkeit", "gleiche Rechte" verlangt, so steht er damit nur unter dem Drucke seiner Unkultur, welche nicht zu begreifen weiss, warum er eigentlich leidet, - woran er arm ist, an Leben… Ein Ursachen-Trieb ist in ihm mächtig: Jemand muss schuld daran sein, dass er sich schlecht befindet… Auch thut ihm die "schöne Entrüstung" selber schon wohl, es ist ein Vergnügen für alle armen Teufel, zu schimpfen, - es giebt einen kleinen Rausch von Macht. Schon die Klage, das Sich-Beklagen, kann dem Leben einen Reiz geben, um dessentwillen man es aushält: eine feinere Dosis Rache ist in jeder Klage, man wirft sein Schlechtbefinden, unter Umständen selbst seine Schlechtigkeit Denen, die anders sind, wie ein Unrecht, wie ein unerlaubtes Vorrecht vor. "Bin ich eine canaille, so solltest du es auch sein": auf diese Logik hin macht man Revolution. - Das Sich-Beklagen taugt in keinem Falle etwas: es stammt aus der Schwäche. Ob man sein Schlecht-Befinden Andern oder sich selber zu misst -. Ersteres thut der Socialist, Letzteres zum Beispiel der Christ -, macht keinen eigentlichen Unterschied. Das Gemeinsame, sagen wir auch das Unwürdige daran ist, dass jemand schuld daran sein soll, dass man leidet - kurz, dass der Leidende sich gegen sein Leiden den Honig der Rache verordnet. Die Objekte dieses Rach-Bedürfnisses als eines Lust-Bedürfnisses sind Gelegenheits-Ursachen: der Leidende findet überall Ursachen, seine kleine Rache zu kühlen, - ist er Christ, nochmals gesagt, so findet er sie in sich… Der Christ und der Anarchist - Beide sind décadents. - Aber auch wenn der Christ die "Welt" verurtheilt, verleumdet, beschmutzt, so thut er es aus dem gleichen Instinkte, aus dem der socialistische Arbeiter die Gesellschaft verurtheilt, verleumdet, beschmutzt: das "jüngste Gericht" selbst ist noch der süsse Trost der Rache - die Revolution, wie sie auch der socialistische Arbeiter erwartet, nur etwas ferner gedacht… Das "Jenseits" selbst - wozu ein Jenseits, wenn es nicht ein Mittel wäre, das Diesseits zu beschmutzen?…

35 Kritik der Décadence-Moral. Eine "altruistische" Moral, eine Moral, bei der die Selbstsucht verkümmert -, bleibt unter allen Umständen ein schlechtes Anzeichen. Dies gilt vom Einzelnen, dies gilt namentlich von Völkern. Es fehlt am Besten, wenn es an der Selbstsucht zu fehlen beginnt. Instinktiv das Sich-Schädliche wählen, Gelockt-werden durch "uninteressirte" Motive giebt beinahe die Formel ab für décadence. "Nicht seinen Nutzen suchen" - das ist bloss das moralische Feigenblatt für eine ganz andere, nämlich physiologische Thatsächlichkeit: "ich weiss meinen Nutzen nicht mehr zu finden" Disgregation der Instinkte! - Es ist zu Ende mit ihm, wenn der Mensch altruistisch wird. - Statt naiv zu sagen, "ich bin nichts mehr werth", sagt die Moral Lüge im Munde des décadent: "Nichts ist etwas werth, - das Leben ist nichts werth"… Ein solches Urtheil bleibt zuletzt eine grosse Gefahr, es wirkt ansteckend, - auf dem ganzen morbiden Boden der Gesellschaft wuchert es bald zu tropischer Begriffs-Vegetation empor, bald als Religion (Christenthum), bald als Philosophie (Schopenhauerei). Unter Umständen vergiftet eine solche aus Fäulniss gewachsene Giftbaum-Vegetation mit ihrem Dunste weithin, auf Jahrtausende hin das Leben…

36 Moral für Ärzte. - Der Kranke ist ein Parasit der Gesellschaft. In einem gewissen Zustande ist es unanständig, noch länger zu leben. Das Fortvegetiren in feiger Abhängigkeit von Ärzten und Praktiken, nachdem der Sinn vom Leben, das Recht zum Leben verloren gegangen ist, sollte bei der Gesellschaft eine tiefe Verachtung nach sich ziehn. Die Ärzte wiederum hätten die Vermittler dieser Verachtung zu sein, - nicht Recepte, sondern jeden Tag eine neue Dosis Ekel vor ihrem Patienten… Eine neue Verantwortlichkeit schaffen, die des Arztes, für alle Fälle, wo das höchste Interesse des Lebens, des aufsteigenden Lebens, das rücksichtsloseste Nieder- und Beiseite-Drängen des entartenden Lebens verlangt - zum Beispiel für das Recht auf Zeugung, für das Recht, geboren zu werden, für das Recht, zu leben… Auf eine stolze Art sterben, wenn es nicht mehr möglich ist, auf eine stolze Art zu leben. Der Tod, aus freien Stücken gewählt, der Tod zur rechten Zeit, mit Helle und Freudigkeit, inmitten von Kindern und Zeugen vollzogen: so dass ein wirkliches Abschiednehmen noch möglich ist, wo Der noch da ist, der sich verabschiedet, insgleichen ein wirkliches Abschätzen des Erreichten und Gewollten, eine Summirung des Lebens - Alles im Gegensatz zu der erbärmlichen und schauderhaften Komödie, die das Christenthum mit der Sterbestunde getrieben hat. Man soll es dem Christenthume nie vergessen, dass es die Schwäche des Sterbenden zu Gewissens-Nothzucht, dass es die Art des Todes selbst zu Werth-Urtheilen über Mensch und Vergangenheit gemissbraucht hat! - Hier gilt es, allen Feigheiten des Vorurtheils zum Trotz, vor Allem die richtige, das heisst physiologische Würdigung des sogenannten natürlichen Todes herzustellen: der zuletzt auch nur ein "unnatürlicher", ein Selbstmord ist. Man geht nie durch jemand Anderes zu Grunde, als durch sich selbst. Nur ist es der Tod unter den verächtlichsten Bedingungen, ein unfreier Tod, ein Tod zur unrechten Zeit, ein Feiglings Tod. Man sollte, aus Liebe zum Leben -, den Tod anders wollen, frei, bewusst, ohne Zufall, ohne Überfall… Endlich ein Rath für die Herrn Pessimisten und andere décadents. Wir haben es nicht in der Hand, zu verhindern, geboren zu werden: aber wir können diesen Fehler - denn bisweilen ist es ein Fehler - wieder gut machen. Wenn man sich abschafft, thut man die achtungswürdigste Sache, die es giebt: man verdient beinahe damit, zu leben… Die Gesellschaft, was sage ich! Das Leben selber hat mehr Vortheil davon, als durch irgend welches "Leben" in Entsagung, Bleichsucht und andrer Tugend -, man hat die Andern von seinem Anblick befreit, man hat das Leben von einem Einwand befreit… Der Pessimismus, pur, vert, beweist sich erst durch die Selbst-Widerlegung der Herrn Pessimisten: man muss einen Schritt weiter gehn in seiner Logik, nicht bloss mit "Wille und Vorstellung", wie Schopenhauer es that, das Leben verneinen -, man muss Schopenhauern zuerst verneinen… Der Pessimismus, anbei gesagt, so ansteckend er ist, vermehrt trotzdem nicht die Krankhaftigkeit einer Zeit, eines Geschlechts im Ganzen: er ist deren Ausdruck. Man verfällt ihm, wie man der Cholera verfällt: man muss morbid genug dazu schon angelegt sein. Der Pessimismus selbst macht keinen einzigen décadent mehr; ich erinnere an das Ergebniss der Statistik, dass die Jahre, in denen die Cholera wüthet, sich in der Gesammt-Ziffer der Sterbefälle nicht von andern Jahrgängen unterscheiden.

37 Ob wir moralischer geworden sind. - Gegen meinen Begriff "jenseits von Gut und Böse" hat sich, wie zu erwarten stand, die ganze Ferocität der moralischen Verdummung, die bekanntlich in Deutschland als die Moral selber gilt -, in's Zeug geworfen: ich hätte artige Geschichten davon zu erzählen. Vor Allem gab man mir die "unleugbare Überlegenheit" unsrer Zeit im sittlichen Urtheil zu überdenken, unsern wirklich hier gemachten Fortschritt: ein Cesare Borgia sei, im Vergleich mit uns, durchaus nicht als ein "höherer Mensch", als eine Art Übermensch, wie ich es thue, aufzustellen… Ein Schweizer Redakteur, vom "Bund", gieng so weit, nicht ohne seine Achtung vor dem Muth zu solchem Wagniss auszudrücken, den Sinn meines Werks dahin zu "verstehn", dass ich mit demselben die Abschaffung aller anständigen Gefühle beantragte. Sehr verbunden! - Ich erlaube mir, als Antwort, die Frage aufzuwerfen, ob wir wirklich moralischer geworden sind. Dass alle Welt das glaubt, ist bereits ein Einwand dagegen… Wir modernen Menschen, sehr zart, sehr verletzlich und hundert Rücksichten gebend und nehmend, bilden uns in der That ein, diese zärtliche Menschlichkeit, die wir darstellen, diese erreichte Einmüthigkeit in der Schonung, in der Hülfsbereitschaft, im gegenseitigen Vertrauen sei ein positiver Fortschritt, damit seien wir weit über die Menschen der Renaissance hinaus. Aber so denkt jede Zeit, so muss sie denken. Gewiss ist, dass wir uns nicht in Renaissance-Zustände hineinstellen dürften, nicht einmal hineindenken: unsre Nerven hielten jene Wirklichkeit nicht aus, nicht zu reden von unsern Muskeln. Mit diesem Unvermögen ist aber kein Fortschritt bewiesen, sondern nur eine andre, eine spätere Beschaffenheit, eine schwächere, zärtlichere, verletzlichere, aus der sich nothwendig eine rücksichtenreiche Moral erzeugt. Denken wir unsre Zartheit und Spätheit, unsre physiologische Alterung weg, so verlöre auch unsre Moral der "Vermenschlichung" sofort ihren Werth - an sich hat keine Moral Werth -: sie würde uns selbst Geringschätzung machen. Zweifeln wir andrerseits nicht daran, dass wir Modernen mit unsrer dick wattirten Humanität, die durchaus an keinen Stein sich stossen Will, den Zeitgenossen Cesare Borgia's eine Komödie zum Todtlachen abgeben würden. In der That, wir sind über die Maassen unfreiwillig spasshaft, mit unsren modernen "Tugenden"… Die Abnahme der feindseligen und misstrauenweckenden Instinkte - und das wäre ja unser "Fortschritt" - stellt nur eine der Folgen in der allgemeinen Abnahme der Vitalität dar: es kostet hundert Mal mehr Mühe, mehr Vorsicht, ein so bedingtes, so spätes Dasein durchzusetzen. Da hilft man sich gegenseitig, da ist Jeder bis zu einem gewissen Grade Kranker und Jeder Krankenwärter. Das heisst dann "Tugend" -: unter Menschen, die das Leben noch anders kannten, voller, verschwenderischer, überströmender, hätte man's anders genannt, "Feigheit" vielleicht, "Erbärmlichkeit", "Altweiber-Moral"… Unsre Milderung der Sitten - das ist mein Satz, das ist, wenn man will, meine Neuerung - ist eine Folge des Niedergangs; die Härte und Schrecklichkeit der Sitte kann umgekehrt eine Folge des Überschusses von Leben sein: dann nämlich darf auch Viel gewagt, Viel herausgefordert, Viel auch vergeudet werden. Was Würze ehedem des Lebens war, für uns wäre es Gift… Indifferent zu sein - auch das ist eine Form der Stärke - dazu sind wir gleichfalls zu alt, zu spät: unsre Mitgefühls-Moral, vor der ich als der Erste gewarnt habe, Das, was man l'impressionisme morale nennen könnte, ist ein Ausdruck mehr der physiologischen Überreizbarkeit, die Allem, was décadent ist, eignet. Jene Bewegung, die mit der Mitleids-Moral Schopenhauer's versucht hat, sich wissenschaftlich vorzuführen - ein sehr unglücklicher Versuch! - ist die eigentliche décadence-Bewegung in der Moral, sie ist als solche tief verwandt mit der christlichen Moral. Die starken Zeiten, die vornehmen Culturen sehen im Mitleiden, in der "Nächstenliebe", im Mangel an Selbst und Selbstgefühl etwas Verächtliches. - Die Zeiten sind zu messen nach ihren positiven Kräften - und dabei ergiebt sich jene so verschwenderische und verhängnissreiche Zeit der Renaissance als die letzte grosse Zeit, und wir, wir Modernen mit unsrer ängstlichen Selbst-Fürsorge und Nächstenliebe, mit unsren Tugenden der Arbeit, der Anspruchslosigkeit, der Rechtlichkeit, der Wissenschaftlichkeit - sammelnd, ökonomisch, machinal - als eine schwache Zeit… Unsre Tugenden sind bedingt, sind herausgefordert durch unsre Schwäche… Die "Gleichheit", eine gewisse thatsächliche Anähnlichung, die sich in der Theorie von "gleichen Rechten" nur zum Ausdruck bringt, gehört wesentlich zum Niedergang: die Kluft zwischen Mensch und Mensch, Stand und Stand, die Vielheit der Typen, der Wille, selbst zu sein, sich abzuheben, Das, was ich Pathos der Distanz nenne, ist jeder starken Zeit zu eigen. Die Spannkraft, die Spannweite zwischen den Extremen wird heute immer kleiner, - die Extreme selbst verwischen sich endlich bis zur Ähnlichkeit… Alle unsre politischen Theorien und Staats-Verfassungen, das "deutsche Reich" durchaus nicht ausgenommen, sind Folgerungen, Folge-Nothwendigkeiten des Niedergangs; die unbewusste Wirkung der décadence ist bis in die Ideale einzelner Wissenschaften hinein Herr geworden. Mein Einwand gegen die ganze Sociologie in England und Frankreich bleibt, dass sie nur die Verfalls-Gebilde der Societät aus Erfahrung kennt und vollkommen unschuldig die eigenen Verfalls-Instinkte als Norm des sociologischen Werthurteils nimmt. Das niedergehende Leben, die Abnahme aller organisirenden, das heisst trennenden, Klüfte aufreissenden, unter- und überordnenden Kraft formulirt sich in der Sociologie von heute zum Ideal… Unsre Socialisten sind décadents, aber auch Herr Herbert Spencer ist ein décadent, - er sieht im Sieg des Altruismus etwas Wünschenswerthes!…

38 Mein Begriff von Freiheit. - Der Werth einer Sache liegt mitunter nicht in dem, was man mit ihr erreicht, sondern in dem, was man für sie bezahlt, - was sie uns kostet. Ich gebe ein Beispiel. Die liberalen Institutionen hören alsbald auf, liberal zu sein, sobald sie erreicht sind: es giebt später keine ärgeren und gründlicheren Schädiger der Freiheit, als liberale Institutionen. Man weiss ja, was sie zu Wege bringen: sie unterminiren den Willen zur Macht, sie sind die zur Moral erhobene Nivellirung von Berg und Tal, sie machen klein, feige und genüsslich, - mit ihnen triumphirt jedesmal das Heerdenthier. Liberalismus: auf deutsch Heerden-Verthierung… Dieselben Institutionen bringen, so lange sie noch erkämpft werden, ganz andere Wirkungen hervor; sie fördern dann in der That die Freiheit auf eine mächtige Weise. Genauer zugesehn, ist es der Krieg, der diese Wirkungen hervorbringt, der Krieg um liberale Institutionen, der als Krieg die illiberalen Instinkte dauern lässt. Und der Krieg erzieht zur Freiheit. Denn was ist Freiheit! Dass man den Willen zur Selbstverantwortlichkeit hat. Dass man die Distanz, die uns abtrennt, festhält. Dass man gegen Mühsal, Härte, Entbehrung, selbst gegen das Leben gleichgültiger wird. Dass man bereit ist, seiner Sache Menschen zu opfern, sich selber nicht abgerechnet. Freiheit bedeutet, dass die männlichen, die kriegs- und siegsfrohen Instinkte die Herrschaft haben über andre Instinkte, zum Beispiel über die des "Glücks". Der freigewordne Mensch, um wie viel mehr der freigewordne Geist, tritt mit Füssen auf die verächtliche Art von Wohlbefinden, von dem Krämer, Christen, Kühe, Weiber, Engländer und andre Demokraten träumen. Der freie Mensch ist Krieger. - Wonach misst sich die Freiheit, bei Einzelnen, wie bei Völkern? Nach dem Widerstand, der überwunden werden muss, nach der Mühe, die es kostet, oben zu bleiben. Den höchsten Typus freier Menschen hätte man dort zu suchen, wo beständig der höchste Widerstand überwunden wird: fünf Schritt weit von der Tyrannei, dicht an der Schwelle der Gefahr der Knechtschaft. Dies ist psychologisch wahr, wenn man hier unter den "Tyrannen" unerbittliche und furchtbare Instinkte begreift, die das Maximum von Autorität und Zucht gegen sich herausfordern - schönster Typus Julius Caesar -; dies ist auch politisch wahr, man mache nur seinen Gang durch die Geschichte. Die Völker, die Etwas werth waren, werth wurden, wurden dies nie unter liberalen Institutionen: die grosse Gefahr machte Etwas aus ihnen, das Ehrfurcht verdient, die Gefahr, die uns unsre Hülfsmittel, unsre Tugenden, unsre Wehr und Waffen, unsern Geist erst kennen lehrt, - die uns zwingt, stark zu sein… Erster Grundsatz: man muss es nöthig haben, stark zu sein: sonst wird man's nie. - Jene grossen Treibhäuser für starke, für die stärkste Art Mensch, die es bisher gegeben hat, die aristokratischen Gemeinwesen in der Art von Rom und Venedig verstanden Freiheit genau in dem Sinne, wie ich das Wort Freiheit verstehe: als Etwas, das man hat und nicht hat, das man will, das man erobert…

39 Kritik der Modernität. - Unsre Institutionen taugen nichts mehr: darüber ist man einmüthig. Aber das liegt nicht an ihnen, sondern an uns. Nachdem uns alle Instinkte abhanden gekommen sind, aus denen Institutionen wachsen, kommen uns Institutionen überhaupt abhanden, weil wir nicht mehr zu ihnen taugen. Demokratismus war jeder Zeit die Niedergangs-Form der organisirenden Kraft: ich habe schon in "Menschliches, Allzumenschliches" 1, 318 die moderne Demokratie sammt ihren Halbheiten, wie "deutsches Reich", als Verfallsform des Staats gekennzeichnet. Damit es Institutionen giebt, muss es eine Art Wille, Instinkt, Imperativ geben, antiliberal bis zur Bosheit: den Willen zur Tradition, zur Autorität, zur Verantwortlichkeit auf Jahrhunderte hinaus, zur Solidarität von Geschlechter-Ketten vorwärts und rückwärts in infinitum. Ist dieser Wille da, so gründet sich Etwas wie das imperium Romanum: oder wie Russland, die einzige Macht, die heute Dauer im Leibe hat, die warten kann, die Etwas noch versprechen kann, - Russland der Gegensatz-Begriff zu der erbärmlichen europäischen Kleinstaaterei und Nervosität, die mit der Gründung des deutschen Reichs in einen kritischen Zustand eingetreten ist… Der ganze Westen hat jene Instinkte nicht mehr, aus denen Institutionen wachsen, aus denen Zukunft wächst: seinem "modernen Geiste" geht vielleicht Nichts so sehr wider den Strich. Man lebt für heute, man lebt sehr geschwind, - man lebt sehr unverantwortlich: dies gerade nennt man "Freiheit". Was aus Institutionen Institutionen macht, wird verachtet, gehasst, abgelehnt: man glaubt sich in der Gefahr einer neuen Sklaverei, wo das Wort "Autorität" auch nur laut wird. So weit geht die décadence im Werth-Instinkte unsrer Politiker, unsrer politischen Parteien: sie ziehn instinktiv vor, was auflöst, was das Ende beschleunigt… Zeugniss die moderne Ehe. Aus der modernen Ehe ist ersichtlich alle Vernunft abhanden gekommen: das giebt aber keinen Einwand gegen die Ehe ab, sondern gegen die Modernität. Die Vernunft der Ehe - sie lag in der juristischen Alleinverantwortlichkeit des Mannes: damit hatte die Ehe Schwergewicht, während sie heute auf beiden Beinen hinkt. Die Vernunft der Ehe - sie lag in ihrer principiellen Unlösbarkeit: damit bekam sie einen Accent, der, dem Zufall von Gefühl, Leidenschaft und Augenblick gegenüber, sich Gehör zu schaffen wusste. Sie lag insgleichen in der Verantwortlichkeit der Familien für die Auswahl der Gatten. Man hat mit der wachsenden Indulgenz zu Gunsten der Liebes-Heirath geradezu die Grundlage der Ehe, Das, was erst aus ihr eine Institution macht, eliminirt. Man gründet eine Institution nie und nimmermehr auf eine Idiosynkrasie, man gründet die Ehe nicht, wie gesagt, auf die "Liebe", - man gründet sie auf den Geschlechtstrieb, auf den Eigenthumstrieb (Weib und Kind als Eigenthum), auf den Herrschafts-Trieb, der sich beständig das kleinste Gebilde der Herrschaft, die Familie, organisirt, der Kinder und Erben braucht, um ein erreichtes Maass von Macht, Einfluss, Reichthum auch physiologisch festzuhalten, um lange Aufgaben, um Instinkt-Solidarität zwischen Jahrhunderten vorzubereiten. Die Ehe als Institution begreift bereits die Bejahung der grössten, der dauerhaftesten Organisationsform in sich: wenn die Gesellschaft selbst nicht als Ganzes für sich gutsagen kann bis in die fernsten Geschlechter hinaus, so hat die Ehe überhaupt keinen Sinn. - Die moderne Ehe verlor ihren Sinn, - folglich schafft man sie ab. -

40 Die Arbeiter-Frage. - Die Dummheit, im Grunde die Instinkt-Entartung, welche heute die Ursache aller Dummheiten ist, liegt darin, dass es eine Arbeiter-Frage giebt. Über gewisse Dinge fragt man nicht: erster Imperativ des Instinktes. - Ich sehe durchaus nicht ab, was man mit dem europäischen Arbeiter machen will, nachdem man erst eine Frage aus ihm gemacht hat. Er befindet sich viel zu gut, um nicht Schritt für Schritt mehr zu fragen, unbescheidner zu fragen. Er hat zuletzt die grosse Zahl für sich. Die Hoffnung ist vollkommen vorüber, dass hier sich eine bescheidene und selbstgenügsame Art Mensch, ein Typus Chinese zum Stande herausbilde: und dies hätte Vernunft gehabt, dies wäre geradezu eine Nothwendigkeit gewesen. Was hat man gethan? - Alles, um auch die Voraussetzung dazu im Keime zu vernichten, - man hat die Instinkte, vermöge deren ein Arbeiter als Stand möglich, sich selber möglich wird, durch die unverantwortlichste Gedankenlosigkeit in Grund und Boden zerstört. Man hat den Arbeiter militärtüchtig gemacht, man hat ihm das Coalitions-Recht, das politische Stimmrecht gegeben: was Wunder, wenn der Arbeiter seine Existenz heute bereits als Nothstand (moralisch ausgedrückt als Unrecht -) empfindet? Aber was will man? nochmals gefragt. Will man einen Zweck, muss man auch die Mittel wollen: will man Sklaven, so ist man ein Narr, wenn man sie zu Herrn erzieht. -

41 "Freiheit, die ich nicht meine…" In solchen Zeiten, wie heute, seinen Instinkten überlassen sein, ist ein Verhängniss mehr. Diese Instinkte widersprechen, stören sich, zerstören sich unter einander; ich definirte das Moderne bereits als den physiologischen Selbst-Widerspruch. Die Vernunft der Erziehung würde wollen, dass unter einem eisernen Drucke wenigstens Eins dieser Instinkt-Systeme paralysirt würde, um einem andren zu erlauben, zu Kräften zu kommen, stark zu werden, Herr zu werden. Heute müsste man das Individuum erst möglich machen, indem man dasselbe beschneidet: möglich, das heisst ganz… Das Umgekehrte geschieht: der Anspruch auf Unabhängigkeit, auf freie Entwicklung, auf laisser aller wird gerade von Denen am hitzigsten gemacht, für die kein Zügel zu streng wäre - dies gilt in politicis, dies gilt in der Kunst. Aber das ist ein Symptom der décadence: unser moderner Begriff "Freiheit" ist ein Beweis von Instinkt-Entartung mehr. -

42 Wo Glaube noth thut. - Nichts ist seltner unter Moralisten und Heiligen als Rechtschaffenheit; vielleicht sagen sie das Gegentheil, vielleicht glauben sie es selbst. Wenn nämlich ein Glaube nützlicher, wirkungsvoller, überzeugender ist, als die bewusste Heuchelei, so wird, aus Instinkt, die Heuchelei alsbald zur Unschuld: erster Satz zum Verständniss grosser Heiliger. Auch bei den Philosophen, einer andren Art von Heiligen, bringt es das ganze Handwerk mit sich, dass sie nur gewisse Wahrheiten zulassen: nämlich solche, auf die hin ihr Handwerk die öffentliche Sanktion hat, - Kantisch geredet, Wahrheiten der praktischen Vernunft. Sie wissen, was sie beweisen müssen, darin sind sie praktisch, - sie erkennen sich unter einander daran, dass sie über "die Wahrheiten" übereinstimmen. - "Du sollst nicht lügen" - auf deutsch: hüten Sie sich, mein Herr Philosoph, die Wahrheit zu sagen…

43 Den Conservativen in's Ohr gesagt. - Was man früher nicht wusste, was man heute weiss, wissen könnte -, eine Rückbildung, eine Umkehr in irgend welchem Sinn und Grade ist gar nicht möglich. Wir Physiologen wenigstens wissen das. Aber alle Priester und Moralisten haben daran geglaubt, - sie wollten die Menschheit auf ein früheres Maass von Tugend zurückbringen, zurückschrauben. Moral war immer ein Prokrustes-Bett. Selbst die Politiker haben es darin den Tugendpredigern nachgemacht: es giebt auch heute noch Parteien, die als Ziel den Krebsgang aller Dinge träumen. Aber es steht Niemandem frei, Krebs zu sein. Es hilft nichts: man muss vorwärts, will sagen Schritt für Schritt weiter in der décadence (- dies meine Definition des modernen "Fortschritts"… ). Man kann diese Entwicklung hemmen und, durch Hemmung, die Entartung selber stauen, aufsammeln, vehementer und plötzlicher machen: mehr kann man nicht. -

44 Mein Begriff vom Genie. - Grosse Männer sind wie grosse Zeiten Explosiv-Stoffe, in denen eine ungeheure Kraft aufgehäuft ist; ihre Voraussetzung ist immer, historisch und physiologisch, dass lange auf sie hin gesammelt, gehäuft, gespart und bewahrt worden ist, - dass lange keine Explosion stattfand. Ist die Spannung in der Masse zu gross geworden, so genügt der zufälligste Reiz, das "Genie", die "That", das grosse Schicksal in die Welt zu rufen. Was liegt dann an Umgebung, an Zeitalter, an "Zeitgeist", an "öffentlicher Meinung"! - Man nehme den Fall Napoleon's. Das Frankreich der Revolution, und noch mehr das der Vorrevolution, würde aus sich den entgegengesetzten Typus, als der Napoleon's ist, hervorgebracht haben: es hat ihn auch hervorgebracht. Und weil Napoleon anders war, Erbe einer stärkeren, längeren, älteren Civilisation als die, welche in Frankreich in Dampf und Stücke gieng, wurde er hier Herr, war er allein hier Herr. Die grossen Menschen sind nothwendig, die Zeit, in der sie erscheinen, ist zufällig; dass sie fast immer über dieselbe Herr werden, liegt nur darin, dass sie stärker, dass sie älter sind, dass länger auf sie hin gesammelt worden ist. Zwischen einem Genie und seiner Zeit besteht ein Verhältniss, wie zwischen stark und schwach, auch wie zwischen alt und jung: die Zeit ist relativ immer viel jünger, dünner, unmündiger, unsicherer, kindischer. - Dass man hierüber in Frankreich heute sehr anders denkt (in Deutschland auch: aber daran liegt nichts), dass dort die Theorie vom milieu, eine wahre Neurotiker-Theorie, sakrosankt und beinahe wissenschaftlich geworden ist und bis unter die Physiologen Glauben findet, das "riecht nicht gut", das macht Einem traurige Gedanken. - Man versteht es auch in England nicht anders, doch darüber wird sich kein Mensch betrüben. Dem Engländer stehen nur zwei Wege offen, sich mit dem Genie und "grossen Manne" abzufinden: entweder demokratisch in der Art Buckle's oder religiös in der Art Carlyle's. - Die Gefahr, die in grossen Menschen und Zeiten liegt, ist ausser ordentlich; die Erschöpfung jeder Art, die Sterilität folgt ihnen auf dem Fusse. Der grosse Mensch ist ein Ende; die grosse Zeit, die Renaissance zum Beispiel, ist ein Ende. Das Genie - in Werk, in That - ist nothwendig ein Verschwender: dass es sich ausgiebt, ist seine Grösse… Der Instinkt der Selbsterhaltung ist gleichsam ausgehängt; der übergewaltige Druck der ausströmenden Kräfte verbietet ihm jede solche Obhut und Vorsicht. Man nennt das "Aufopferung"; man rühmt seinen "Heroismus" darin, seine Gleichgültigkeit gegen das eigne Wohl, seine Hingebung für eine Idee, eine grosse Sache, ein Vaterland: Alles Missverständnisse… Er strömt aus, er strömt über, er verbraucht sich, er schont sich nicht, - mit Fatalität, verhängnissvoll, unfreiwillig, wie das Ausbrechen eines Flusses über seine Ufer unfreiwillig ist. Aber weil man solchen Explosiven viel verdankt, hat man ihnen auch viel dagegen geschenkt, zum Beispiel eine Art höherer Moral… Das ist ja die Art der menschlichen Dankbarkeit: sie missversteht ihre Wohlthäter.-

45 Der Verbrecher und was ihm verwandt ist. - Der Verbrecher-Typus, das ist der Typus des starken Menschen unter ungünstigen Bedingungen, ein krank gemachter starker Mensch. Ihm fehlt die Wildniss, eine gewisse freiere und gefährlichere Natur und Daseinsform, in der Alles, was Waffe und Wehr im Instinkt des starken Menschen ist, zu Recht besteht. Seine Tugenden sind von der Gesellschaft in Bann gethan; seine lebhaftesten Triebe, die er mitgebracht hat, verwachsen alsbald mit den niederdrückenden Affekten, mit dem Verdacht, der Furcht, der Unehre. Aber dies ist beinahe das Recept zur physiologischen Entartung. Wer Das, was er am besten kann, am liebsten thäte, heimlich thun muss, mit langer Spannung, Vorsicht, Schlauheit, wird anämisch; und weil er immer nur Gefahr, Verfolgung, Verhängniss von seinen Instinkten her erntet, verkehrt sich auch sein Gefühl gegen diese Instinkte - er fühlt sie fatalistisch. Die Gesellschaft ist es, unsre zahme, mittelmässige, verschnittene Gesellschaft, in der ein naturwüchsiger Mensch, der vom Gebirge her oder aus den Abenteuern des Meeres kommt, nothwendig zum Verbrecher entartet. Oder beinahe nothwendig: denn es giebt Fälle, wo ein solcher Mensch sich stärker erweist als die Gesellschaft: der Corse Napoleon ist der berühmteste Fall. Für das Problem, das hier vorliegt, ist das Zeugniss Dostoiewsky's von Belang - Dostoiewsky's, des einzigen Psychologen, anbei gesagt, von dem ich Etwas zu lernen hatte: er gehört zu den schönsten Glücksfällen meines Lebens, mehr selbst noch als die Entdeckung Stendhal's. Dieser tiefe Mensch, der zehn Mal Recht hatte, die oberflächlichen Deutschen gering zu schätzen, hat die sibirischen Zuchthäusler, in deren Mitte er lange lebte, lauter schwere Verbrecher, für die es keinen Rückweg zur Gesellschaft mehr gab, sehr anders empfunden als er selbst erwartete - ungefähr als aus dem besten, härtesten und werthvollsten Holze geschnitzt, das auf russischer Erde überhaupt wächst. Verallgemeinern wir den Fall des Verbrechers: denken wir uns Naturen, denen, aus irgend einem Grunde, die öffentliche Zustimmung fehlt, die wissen, dass sie nicht als wohlthätig, als nützlich empfunden werden, - jenes Tschandala-Gefühl, dass man nicht als gleich gilt, sondern als ausgestossen, unwürdig, verunreinigend. Alle solche Naturen haben die Farbe des Unterirdischen auf Gedanken und Handlungen; an ihnen wird Jegliches bleicher als an Solchen, auf deren Dasein das Tageslicht ruht. Aber fast alle Existenzformen, die wir heute auszeichnen, haben ehemals unter dieser halben Grabesluft gelebt: der wissenschaftliche Charakter, der Artist, das Genie, der freie Geist, der Schauspieler, der Kaufmann, der grosse Entdecker… So lange der Priester als oberster Typus galt, war jede werthvolle Art Mensch entwerthet… Die Zeit kommt - ich verspreche das - wo er als der niedrigste gelten wird, als unser Tschandala, als die verlogenste, als die unanständigste Art Mensch… Ich richte die Aufmerksamkeit darauf, wie noch jetzt, unter dem mildesten Regiment der Sitte, das je auf Erden, zum Mindesten in Europa, geherrscht hat, jede Abseitigkeit, jedes lange, allzulange Unterhalb, jede ungewöhnliche, undurchsichtige Daseinsform jenem Typus nahe bringt, den der Verbrecher vollendet. Alle Neuerer des Geistes haben eine Zeit das fahle und fatalistische Zeichen des Tschandala auf der Stirn: nicht, weil sie so empfunden würden, sondern weil sie selbst die furchtbare Kluft fühlen, die sie von allem Herkömmlichen und in Ehren Stehenden trennt. Fast jedes Genie kennt als eine seiner Entwicklungen die "catilinarische Existenz", ein Hass-, Rache- und Aufstands-Gefühl gegen Alles, was schon ist, was nicht mehr wird… Catilina - die Präexistenz-Form jedes Caesar. -

46 Hier ist die Aussicht frei. - Es kann Höhe der Seele sein, wenn ein Philosoph schweigt; es kann Liebe sein, wenn er sich widerspricht; es ist eine Höflichkeit des Erkennenden möglich, welche lügt. Man hat nicht ohne Feinheit gesagt: il est indigne des grands coeurs de répandre le trouble, qu'ils ressentent: nur muss man hinzufügen, dass vor dem Unwürdigsten sich nicht zu fürchten ebenfalls Grösse der Seele sein kann. Ein Weib, das liebt, opfert seine Ehre; ein Erkennender, welcher "liebt", opfert vielleicht seine Menschlichkeit; ein Gott, welcher liebte, ward Jude…

47 Die Schönheit kein Zufall. - Auch die Schönheit einer Rasse oder Familie, ihre Anmuth und Güte in allen Gebärden wird erarbeitet: sie ist, gleich dem Genie, das Schlussergebniss der accumulirten Arbeit von Geschlechtern. Man muss dem guten Geschmacke grosse Opfer gebracht haben, man muss um seinetwillen Vieles gethan, Vieles gelassen haben - das siebzehnte Jahrhundert Frankreichs ist bewunderungswürdig in Beidem -, man muss in ihm ein Princip der Wahl, für Gesellschaft, Ort, Kleidung, Geschlechtsbefriedigung gehabt haben, man muss Schönheit dem Vortheil, der Gewohnheit, der Meinung, der Trägheit vorgezogen haben. Oberste Richtschnur: man muss sich auch vor sich selber nicht "gehen lassen". - Die guten Dinge sind über die Maassen kostspielig: und immer gilt das Gesetz, dass wer sie hat, ein Andrer ist, als wer sie erwirbt. Alles Gute ist Erbschaft: was nicht ererbt ist, ist unvollkommen, ist Anfang… In Athen waren zur Zeit Cicero's, der darüber seine Überraschung ausdrückt, die Männer und Jünglinge bei weitem den Frauen an Schönheit überlegen: aber welche Arbeit und Anstrengung im Dienste der Schönheit hatte daselbst das männliche Geschlecht seit Jahrhunderten von sich verlangt! - Man soll sich nämlich über die Methodik hier nicht vergreifen: eine blosse Zucht von Gefühlen und Gedanken ist beinahe Null (- hier liegt das grosse Missverständniss der deutschen Bildung, die ganz illusorisch ist): man muss den Leib zuerst überreden. Die strenge Aufrechterhaltung bedeutender und gewählter Gebärden, eine Verbindlichkeit, nur mit Menschen zu leben, die sich nicht "gehen lassen", genügt vollkommen, um bedeutend und gewählt zu werden: in zwei, drei Geschlechtern ist bereits Alles verinnerlicht. Es ist entscheidend über das Loos von Volk und Menschheit, dass man die Cultur an der rechten Stelle beginnt - nicht an der "Seele" (wie es der verhängnissvolle Aberglaube der Priester und Halb-Priester war): die rechte Stelle ist der Leib, die Gebärde, die Diät, die Physiologie, der Rest folgt daraus… Die Griechen bleiben deshalb das erste Cultur-Ereigniss der Geschichte - sie wussten, sie thaten, was Noth that; das Christenthum, das den Leib verachtete, war bisher das grösste Unglück der Menschheit. -

48 Fortschritt in meinem Sinne. - Auch ich rede von "Rückkehr zur Natur", obwohl es eigentlich nicht ein Zurückgehn, sondern ein Hinaufkommen ist - hinauf in die hohe, freie, selbst furchtbare Natur und Natürlichkeit, eine solche, die mit grossen Aufgaben spielt, spielen darf.. Um es im Gleichniss zu sagen: Napoleon war ein Stück "Rückkehr zur Natur", so wie ich sie verstehe (zum Beispiel in rebus tacticis, noch mehr, wie die Militärs wissen, im Strategischen). - Aber Rousseau - wohin wollte der eigentlich zurück? Rousseau, dieser erste moderne Mensch, Idealist und canaille in Einer Person; der die moralische "Würde" nöthig hatte, um seinen eignen Aspekt auszuhalten; krank vor zügelloser Eitelkeit und zügelloser Selbstverachtung. Auch diese Missgeburt, welche sich an die Schwelle der neuen Zeit gelagert hat, wollte "Rückkehr zur Natur" - wohin, nochmals gefragt, wollte Rousseau zurück? - Ich hasse Rousseau noch in der Revolution: sie ist der welthistorische Ausdruck für diese Doppelheit von Idealist und canaille. Die blutige farce, mit der sich diese Revolution abspielte, ihre "Immoralität", geht mich wenig an: was ich hasse, ist ihre Rousseau'sche Moralität - die sogenannten "Wahrheiten" der Revolution, mit denen sie immer noch wirkt und alles Flache und Mittelmässige zu sich überredet. Die Lehre von der Gleichheit!… Aber es giebt gar kein giftigeres Gift: denn sie scheint von der Gerechtigkeit selbst gepredigt, während sie das Ende der Gerechtigkeit ist… "Den Gleichen Gleiches, den Ungleichen Ungleiches - das wäre die wahre Rede der Gerechtigkeit: und, was daraus folgt, Ungleiches niemals gleich machen." - Dass es um jene Lehre von der Gleichheit herum so schauerlich und blutig zu gieng, hat dieser "modernen Idee" par excellence eine Art Glorie und Feuerschein gegeben, so dass die Revolution als Schauspiel auch die edelsten Geister verführt hat. Das ist zuletzt kein Grund, sie mehr zu achten. - Ich sehe nur Einen, der sie empfand, wie sie empfunden werden muss, mit Ekel - Goethe…

49 Goethe - kein deutsches Ereigniss, sondern ein europäisches: ein grossartiger Versuch, das achtzehnte Jahrhundert zu überwinden durch eine Rückkehr zur Natur, durch ein Hinaufkommen zur Natürlichkeit der Renaissance, eine Art Selbstüberwindung von Seiten dieses Jahrhunderts. - Er trug dessen stärkste Instinkte in sich: die Gefühlsamkeit, die Natur-Idolatrie, das Antihistorische, das Idealistische, das Unreale und Revolutionäre (- letzteres ist nur eine Form des Unrealen). Er nahm die Historie, die Naturwissenschaft, die Antike, insgleichen Spinoza zu Hülfe, vor Allem die praktische Thätigkeit; er umstellte sich mit lauter geschlossenen Horizonten; er löste sich nicht vom Leben ab, er stellte sich hinein; er war nicht verzagt und nahm so viel als möglich auf sich, über sich, in sich. Was er Wollte, das war Totalität; er bekämpfte das Auseinander von Vernunft, Sinnlichkeit, Gefühl, Wille (- in abschreckendster Scholastik durch Kant gepredigt, den Antipoden Goethe's), er disciplinirte sich zur Ganzheit, er schuf sich… Goethe war, inmitten eines unreal gesinnten Zeitalters, ein überzeugter Realist: er sagte ja zu Allem, was ihm hierin verwandt war, - er hatte kein grösseres Erlebniss als jenes ens realissimum, genannt Napoleon. Goethe concipirte einen starken, hochgebildeten, in aller Leiblichkeiten geschickten, sich selbst im Zaume habenden, vor sich selber ehrfürchtigen Menschen, der sich den ganzen Umfang und Reichthum der Natürlichkeit zu gönnen wagen darf, der stark genug zu dieser Freiheit ist; den Menschen der Toleranz, nicht aus Schwäche, sondern aus Stärke, weil er Das, woran die durchschnittliche Natur zu Grunde gehn würde, noch zu seinem Vortheile zu brauchen weiss; den Menschen, für den es nichts Verbotenes mehr giebt, es sei denn die Schwäche, heisse sie nun Laster oder Tugend… Ein solcher freigewordner Geist steht mit einem freudigen und vertrauenden Fatalismus mitten im All, im Glauben, dass nur das Einzelne verwerflich ist, dass im Ganzen sich Alles erlöst und bejaht - er verneint nicht mehr… Aber ein solcher Glaube ist der höchste aller möglichen Glauben: ich habe ihn auf den Namen des Dionysos getauft. -

50 Man könnte sagen, dass in gewissem Sinne das neunzehnte Jahrhundert Das alles auch erstrebt hat, was Goethe als Person erstrebte: eine Universalität im Verstehn, im Gutheissen, ein Ansich-heran-kommen-lassen von Jedwedem, einen verwegnen Realismus, eine Ehrfurcht vor allem Thatsächlichen. Wie kommt es, dass das Gesammt-Ergebniss kein Goethe, sondern ein Chaos ist, ein nihilistisches Seufzen, ein Nicht-wissen-wo-aus-noch-ein, ein Instinkt von Ermüdung, der in praxi fortwährend dazu treibt, zum achtzehnten Jahrhundert zurückzugreifen? (- zum Beispiel als Gefühls-Romantik, als Altruismus und Hyper-Sentimentalität, als Femininismus im Geschmack, als Socialismus in der Politik.) Ist nicht das neunzehnte Jahrhundert, zumal in seinem Ausgange, bloss ein verstärktes verrohtes achtzehntes Jahrhundert, das heisst ein décadence-Jahrhundert? So dass Goethe nicht bloss für Deutschland, sondern für ganz Europa bloss ein Zwischenfall, ein schönes Umsonst gewesen wäre? - Aber man missversteht grosse Menschen, wenn man sie aus der armseligen Perspektive eines öffentlichen Nutzens ansieht. Dass man keinen Nutzen aus ihnen zu ziehn weiss, das gehört selbst vielleicht zur Grösse…

51 Goethe ist der letzte Deutsche, vor dem ich Ehrfurcht habe: er hätte drei Dinge empfunden, die ich empfinde, - auch verstehen wir uns über das "Kreuz"… Man fragt mich öfter, wozu ich eigentlich deutsch schriebe: nirgendswo würde ich schlechter gelesen, als im Vaterlande. Aber wer weiss zuletzt, ob ich auch nur wünsche, heute gelesen zu werden? - Dinge schaffen, an denen umsonst die Zeit ihre Zähne versucht; der Form nach, der Substanz nach um eine kleine Unsterblichkeit bemüht sein - ich war noch nie bescheiden genug, weniger von mir zu verlangen. Der Aphorismus, die Sentenz, in denen ich als der Erste unter Deutschen Meister bin, sind die Formen der "Ewigkeit"; mein Ehrgeiz ist, in zehn Sätzen zu sagen, was jeder Andre in einem Buche sagt, - was jeder Andre in einem Buche nicht sagt…

Ich habe der Menschheit das tiefste Buch gegeben, das sie besitzt, meinen Zarathustra: ich gebe ihr über kurzem das unabhängigste. -

Musean translation

A complete machine-assisted Musean translation, made directly from the German in independent chapter tasks. Includes all 44 Maxims and Arrows and The Hammer Speaks.

1 My impossible people.—Seneca: or virtue’s toreador.—Rousseau: or the return to nature in all its natural impurity.—Schiller: or the moral trumpeter of Säckingen.—Dante: or the hyena composing poetry among graves.—Kant: or cant as an intelligible character.—Victor Hugo: or the lighthouse on the sea of nonsense.—Liszt: or the school of dexterity—at chasing women.—George Sand: or milky abundance, in plain German: the dairy cow with a “beautiful style.”—Michelet: or enthusiasm taking off its coat… Carlyle: or pessimism as a lunch that will not go down.—John Stuart Mill: or offensive clarity.—The Goncourt brothers: or the two Ajaxes fighting Homer. Music by Offenbach.—Zola: or the joy of stinking.—

2 Renan.—Theology, or the corruption of reason through “original sin”—Christianity. Witness Renan, who, whenever he ventures a yes or no of any general scope, misses the mark with painful regularity. He would like, for example, to unite science and nobility: but science belongs to democracy—that is palpable enough. He wishes, with no small ambition, to embody an aristocracy of the intellect: yet at the same time he kneels before its counterdoctrine, the gospel of the humble—and does not merely kneel… What use are all his freethinking, modernity, mockery, and supple turncoat maneuvers if in his very entrails he has remained a Christian, a Catholic, even a priest! Renan, just like a Jesuit and confessor, exercises his inventiveness in seduction; his intellectual bearing does not lack the broad priestly smirk—like every priest, he becomes dangerous only when he loves. No one equals him at worshipping in a way that endangers life… This spirit of Renan’s, a spirit that unnerves, is one more calamity for poor, sick France, sick in its will.—

3 Sainte-Beuve.—Nothing of a man; full of petty rancor against every masculine mind. He wanders about, subtle, curious, bored, prying—at bottom a woman, with a woman’s vengefulness and sensuality. As a psychologist a genius of malicious gossip; inexhaustibly rich in its resources; no one knows better how to mix poison into praise. Plebeian in his deepest instincts and akin to Rousseau’s resentment: hence a Romantic—for beneath all Romanticism Rousseau’s instinct grunts and lusts for revenge. A revolutionary, but still kept tolerably in check by fear. Unfree before everything that has strength—public opinion, the Academy, the court, even Port-Royal. Embittered against everything great in people and things, against everything that believes in itself. Poet and half-woman enough still to feel greatness as power; perpetually curled up, like that famous worm, because he feels himself perpetually trodden on. As a critic without standard, footing, or backbone, with a cosmopolitan libertine’s taste for many things, yet without the courage even to acknowledge his libertinism. As a historian without philosophy, without the power of the philosophical eye—and so declining the task of judgment in every major matter, holding “objectivity” before him as a mask. His relation is different to everything over which a refined, worn-out taste is the highest court: here he truly has the courage to be himself, takes pleasure in himself—here he is a master.—In certain respects a precursor of Baudelaire.—

4 The Imitation of Christ is among the books I cannot hold without a physiological resistance: it breathes a perfume of the eternal feminine for which one must already be French—or a Wagnerian… This saint has a way of speaking about love that would make even the women of Paris curious.—I am told that that cleverest of Jesuits, A. Comte, who wished to lead his Frenchmen to Rome by the detour of science, drew inspiration from this book. I believe it: “the religion of the heart”…

5 G. Eliot.—They have got rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more that they must hold fast to Christian morality: that is English consistency; let us not hold it against little moral women in Eliot’s manner. In England, every small emancipation from theology has to be followed by a terrifying display of moral fanaticism to restore one’s respectability. That is the penance paid there.—For the rest of us, matters stand differently. Giving up Christian belief pulls the right to Christian morality from beneath one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: despite the English shallow-pates, this point must be brought to light again and again. Christianity is a system, a connected and whole view of things. Break out one of its chief concepts, belief in God, and you break the whole as well: nothing necessary remains between your fingers. Christianity presupposes that human beings do not know, cannot know, what is good and what is evil for them: they believe in God, who alone knows. Christian morality is a command; its origin is transcendent; it stands beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God is truth—it stands and falls with belief in God.—If the English really believe they know by themselves, “intuitively,” what is good and evil, and therefore imagine that they no longer need Christianity as morality’s guarantee, this itself is merely the consequence of Christian value judgment’s rule and an expression of that rule’s strength and depth: so that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, so that its highly conditional right to exist is no longer felt. For the Englishman, morality is not yet a problem…

6 George Sand.—I read the first Letters of a Traveler: like everything descended from Rousseau, false, manufactured, a bellows, inflated. I cannot endure this gaudy wallpaper style, any more than the plebeian ambition for generous feelings. The worst, of course, remains the feminine flirtation with masculinity, with the manners of ill-bred boys.—How cold she must have been through it all, this intolerable artist! She wound herself up like a clock—and wrote… Cold, like Hugo, like Balzac, like every Romantic as soon as they began to compose! And how complacently she must have lain there, this fertile writing-cow, who had something German about her in the bad sense, like Rousseau himself, her master, and who in any case became possible only with the decline of French taste!—But Renan worships her…

7 Morality for psychologists.—Do not practice peddlers’ psychology! Never observe for observation’s sake! That produces a false perspective, a squint, something forced and exaggerating. Experiencing as a will to experience does not succeed. One must not look toward oneself within the experience: every glance becomes an “evil eye.” A born psychologist instinctively takes care not to look in order to look; the same holds for the born painter. He never works “from nature”—he leaves the sifting and expressing of the “case,” of “nature,” of the “experience” to his instinct, his dark chamber… Only the general reaches his consciousness, the conclusion, the result: he knows nothing of that arbitrary abstraction from the individual case.—What happens if one proceeds otherwise? Practices peddlers’ psychology, for example, in the manner of Parisian novelists great and small? It lies in wait for reality, as it were, bringing home a handful of curiosities every evening… But just look at what emerges in the end—a heap of blotches, a mosaic at best, in every case something added together, restless, garish. The Goncourts achieve the worst in this: they cannot put three sentences together without simply hurting the eye, the psychologist’s eye.—Artistically assessed, nature is no model. It exaggerates, distorts, leaves gaps. Nature is chance. Studying “from nature” seems a bad sign to me: it betrays submission, weakness, fatalism—this groveling before little facts is unworthy of a complete artist. Seeing what is belongs to another kind of mind, the antiartistic, the factual. One must know who one is…

8 Toward a psychology of the artist.—For art to exist, for any aesthetic doing or seeing to exist, one physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication. Intoxication must first have heightened the excitability of the whole machine: before that, no art occurs. Every kind of intoxication, however differently conditioned, has this power: above all the intoxication of sexual excitement, that oldest and most original form. Likewise the intoxication following all great desires, all strong emotions; the intoxication of the festival, the contest, the feat of daring, victory, every extreme movement; the intoxication of cruelty; intoxication in destruction; intoxication under certain meteorological influences, spring intoxication for example; or under the influence of narcotics; finally the intoxication of the will, of a will heaped up and swelling.—What matters in intoxication is the feeling of increased strength and fullness. Out of this feeling one gives to things, forces them to take from us, violates them—one calls this process idealizing. Let us free ourselves of a prejudice here: idealizing does not consist, as people generally believe, in subtracting or discounting what is small and incidental. Rather, the decisive thing is an immense driving-out of the principal features, so that the others disappear before them.

9 In this state one enriches everything out of one’s own fullness: whatever one sees, whatever one wills, one sees swollen, compacted, strong, overloaded with strength. A person in this state transforms things until they reflect his power—until they are reflections of his perfection. This having-to-transform into perfection is—art. Even everything he is not nevertheless becomes a pleasure in himself; in art the human being enjoys himself as perfection.—One might be permitted to imagine an opposite state, a specifically antiartistic instinct—a way of being that impoverished, thinned, made consumptive all things. And history is indeed rich in such antiartists, such starvelings of life: people who must necessarily take things to themselves too, drain them, make them leaner. This is the case, for example, with the genuine Christian, with Pascal, for instance: a Christian who was also an artist does not exist… Do not be childish and object with Raphael, or with some homeopathic Christians of the nineteenth century: Raphael said yes, Raphael made yes, and consequently Raphael was no Christian…

10 What is the meaning of the opposition I introduced into aesthetics between Apollonian and Dionysian, both conceived as kinds of intoxication?—Apollonian intoxication above all keeps the eye excited, giving it the power of vision. The painter, the sculptor, the epic poet are visionaries above all. In the Dionysian state, by contrast, the whole system of emotions is excited and heightened: so that it discharges all its expressive means at once, driving forth together the power to represent, imitate, transfigure, transform, every kind of mimicry and acting. What remains essential is the ease of metamorphosis, the inability not to react—as with certain hysterical people who enter any role at the slightest hint. It is impossible for the Dionysian person not to understand any suggestion; he overlooks no sign of emotion, possesses the highest degree of the instinct for understanding and divining, just as he possesses the highest degree of the art of communication. He enters every skin, every emotion: he is continually transforming himself.—Music, as we understand it today, is likewise an excitation and discharge of the emotions as a whole, yet only the remnant of a much fuller world of emotional expression, a mere residue of Dionysian theatricality. To make music possible as a separate art, a number of senses, above all the muscular sense, have been stilled—relatively at least, for to some degree all rhythm still speaks to our muscles—so that a person no longer immediately imitates and embodies everything he feels. Nevertheless that is the truly normal Dionysian state, at any rate the original state; music is its slowly attained specialization at the expense of the most closely related capacities.

11 The actor, the mime, the dancer, the musician, the lyric poet are fundamentally related in their instincts and in themselves one, but gradually specialized and separated from one another—even to the point of contradiction. The lyric poet remained united with the musician the longest; the actor with the dancer.—The architect represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollonian state: here it is the great act of will, the will that moves mountains, the intoxication of the great will, that demands art. The mightiest human beings have always inspired the architects; the architect has always stood under the suggestion of power. In the building, pride, victory over gravity, the will to power should become visible; architecture is a kind of power-eloguence in forms, now persuading, even flattering, now simply commanding. The highest feeling of power and security comes to expression in what has great style. The power that no longer needs any proof; that disdains to please; that answers heavily; that feels no witness around it; that lives without being aware that there is contradiction against it; that rests in itself, fatalistic, a law among laws: that is what speaks of itself as great style.—

12 I read the life of Thomas Carlyle, that farce against knowledge and will, that heroic-moral interpretation of dyspeptic conditions.—Carlyle, a man of strong words and attitudes, a rhetorician from necessity, whom the craving for a strong faith and the feeling of being incapable of it constantly agitate (—in this a typical Romantic!). The craving for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, but the opposite. If one has it, one may allow oneself the fine luxury of skepticism: one is sure enough, firm enough, bound enough for it. Carlyle deadens something in himself with the fortissimo of his veneration for people of strong faith and with his rage against the less simple-minded: he needs the noise. A constant passionate dishonesty toward himself—that is his proprium, and with it he is and remains interesting.—To be sure, in England he is admired precisely for his honesty… Well, that is English; and considering that the English are the people of perfect cant, it is even cheap, and not only comprehensible. At bottom Carlyle is an English atheist who seeks his honor in not being one.

13 Emerson.—Far more enlightened, more wandering, more manifold, more refined than Carlyle, above all happier… One of those who instinctively feed only on ambrosia, who leave behind whatever is indigestible in things. Set beside Carlyle, a man of taste.—Carlyle, who loved him very much, nevertheless said of him: “he does not give us enough to chew on”: which may be said with justice, but not to Emerson’s disadvantage.—Emerson has that kindly and ingenious cheerfulness which disheartens all seriousness; he simply does not know how old he already is and how young he will still be—he could say of himself, in a phrase of Lope de Vega’s: “yo me sucedo a mi mismo”. His spirit always finds grounds to be content, even grateful; and now and then it touches the serene transcendence of that good fellow who came back from a lovers’ rendezvous tamquam re bene gesta. “Ut desint vires,” he said gratefully, “tamen est laudanda voluptas.”—

14 Anti-Darwin.—As for the famous struggle for life, it seems to me for the present more asserted than proved. It does occur, but as an exception; the overall aspect of life is not the state of need, the state of hunger, but rather abundance, opulence, even absurd squandering—where there is struggle, one struggles for power… One should not confuse Malthus with nature.—Suppose, however, that this struggle exists—and indeed it does occur—then unfortunately it turns out the opposite way from what the school of Darwin wishes, from what one might perhaps wish along with it: namely to the disadvantage of the strong, the privileged, the happy exceptions. Species do not grow in perfection: the weak keep becoming masters over the strong again—that is because they are the great number, they are also cleverer… Darwin forgot the spirit (—that is English!), the weak have more spirit… One must need spirit in order to get spirit—one loses it when one no longer needs it. Whoever has strength dispenses with spirit (—“let it go! people think today in Germany—the Reich must remain ours nonetheless”…). By spirit, as one sees, I understand caution, patience, cunning, dissimulation, great self-mastery, and everything that is mimicry (a large part of so-called virtue belongs to the latter).

15 Casuistry of psychologists.—There is a connoisseur of human beings: what does he actually study human beings for? He wants to snap up small advantages over them, or great ones too—he is a politician!… That one there is also a connoisseur of human beings: and you say he wants nothing for himself by it, that he is a great “impersonal” one. Look more sharply! Perhaps he even wants a worse advantage: to feel himself superior to human beings, to be allowed to look down on them, to no longer confuse himself with them. This “impersonal” one is a despiser of human beings: and the former is the more humane species, whatever appearances may say. At least he puts himself on the same level, he puts himself inside…

16 The psychological tact of the Germans seems to me put in question by a whole series of cases whose list my modesty prevents me from presenting. In one case I shall not lack a great occasion to ground my thesis: I hold it against the Germans that they have laid hands on Kant and his “philosophy of back doors,” as I call it—that was not the type of intellectual honesty.—The other thing I do not like to hear is a notorious “and”: the Germans say “Goethe and Schiller”—I fear they say “Schiller and Goethe”… Is that Schiller still not known?—There are even worse “ands”; I have heard with my own ears, though only among university professors, “Schopenhauer and Hartmann”

17 The most spiritual human beings, assuming they are the most courageous, also experience by far the most painful tragedies: but precisely for that reason they honor life, because it sets its greatest opposition against them.

18 On “intellectual conscience.”—Nothing seems to me rarer today than genuine hypocrisy. My suspicion is great that this plant does not thrive in the mild air of our culture. Hypocrisy belongs to the ages of strong faith: when one did not let go of the faith one had even under the compulsion to display another faith. Today one lets it go; or, what is still more common, one acquires a second faith—one stays honest in every case. Without doubt a far greater number of convictions is possible today than formerly: possible, that is, permitted, that is, harmless. From this arises tolerance toward oneself.—Tolerance toward oneself permits several convictions: these themselves live peaceably together—they take care, like everyone today, not to compromise themselves. With what does one compromise oneself today? When one has consistency. When one walks in a straight line. When one is less than fivefold ambiguous. When one is genuine… My fear is great that modern man is simply too indolent for a few vices: so that these are dying out altogether. All evil that is conditioned by a strong will—and perhaps there is no evil without strength of will—degenerates, in our tepid air, into virtue… The few hypocrites I have known made a copy of hypocrisy: they were, as nearly every tenth person is nowadays, actors.—

19 Beautiful and ugly.—Nothing is more conditioned, let us say more limited, than our feeling for the beautiful. Anyone who wanted to think it detached from the human pleasure in human beings would instantly lose the ground under his feet. The “beautiful in itself” is merely a word, not even a concept. In the beautiful, the human being posits himself as the measure of perfection; in selected cases he worships himself in it. A species cannot do otherwise than say yes to itself in this way. Its lowest instinct, that of self-preservation and self-expansion, still radiates in such sublimities. The human being believes he has heaped beauty on the world itself—he forgets himself as its cause. He alone has endowed it with beauty, ah! only with a very human-all-too-human beauty… At bottom the human being mirrors himself in things, he holds everything to be beautiful that throws his image back to him: the judgment “beautiful” is his species-vanity… To the skeptic, indeed, a small suspicion may whisper the question in his ear: is the world really beautified by the fact that precisely the human being takes it for beautiful? He has humanized it: that is all. But nothing, absolutely nothing, guarantees us that precisely the human being is the model of the beautiful. Who knows how he looks in the eyes of a higher judge of taste? Perhaps daring? perhaps even amusing? perhaps a little arbitrary?… “Oh Dionysus, divine one, why are you pulling me by the ears?” Ariadne once asked her philosophical lover during one of those famous dialogues on Naxos. “I find a kind of humor in your ears, Ariadne: why are they not longer still?”

20 Nothing is beautiful, only the human being is beautiful: on this naiveté all aesthetics rests, it is its first truth. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but the degenerating human being—with that the realm of aesthetic judgment is circumscribed.—Reckoned physiologically, everything ugly weakens and saddens the human being. It reminds him of decay, danger, powerlessness; he actually loses strength in its presence. One can measure the effect of the ugly with a dynamometer. Wherever the human being is depressed at all, there he scents the nearness of something “ugly.” His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride—these fall with the ugly, these rise with the beautiful… In the one case as in the other we draw a conclusion: the premises for it are heaped up in the instinct in immense abundance. The ugly is understood as a hint and symptom of degeneration: whatever reminds one even remotely of degeneration produces in us the judgment “ugly.” Every sign of exhaustion, of heaviness, of age, of fatigue, every kind of unfreedom, as cramp, as paralysis, above all the smell, the color, the form of dissolution, of putrefaction, even in its last dilution into a symbol—all this calls forth the same reaction, the value judgment “ugly.” A hatred leaps up there: whom does the human being hate there? But there is no doubt: the decline of his type. He hates there out of the deepest instinct of the species; in this hatred there is dread, caution, depth, far-sightedness—it is the deepest hatred there is. For its sake art is deep…

21 Schopenhauer.—Schopenhauer, the last German who counts (who is a European event like Goethe, like Hegel, like Heinrich Heine, and not merely a local, a “national” one), is for a psychologist a case of the first rank: namely as a maliciously ingenious attempt to bring into the field, in favor of a nihilistic total devaluation of life, precisely the counter-instances, the great self-affirmations of the “will to life,” the exuberant forms of life. One after another he interpreted art, heroism, genius, beauty, great compassion, knowledge, the will to truth, tragedy as consequences of the “denial,” or of the need for denial, of the “will”—the greatest psychological counterfeiting, Christianity aside, that there is in history. Looked at more closely, he is in this merely the heir of the Christian interpretation: except that he also knew how to approve even what Christianity rejected, the great cultural facts of humanity, in a Christian, that is, a nihilistic sense (—namely as paths to “redemption,” as preliminary forms of “redemption,” as stimulantia of the need for “redemption”…).

22 I take a single case. Schopenhauer speaks of beauty with a melancholy glow—for what ultimate reason? Because he sees in it a bridge on which one gets further, or gets a thirst to get further… It is for him redemption from the “will” for moments—it lures to redemption forever… In particular he praises it as redeemer from the “focal point of the will,” from sexuality—in beauty he sees the procreative drive denied… Strange saint! Someone contradicts you, I fear it is nature. Why is there beauty at all in tone, color, scent, rhythmic movement in nature? What drives beauty out?—Fortunately a philosopher contradicts him too. No lesser authority than that of the divine Plato (—so Schopenhauer himself calls him) maintains another proposition: that all beauty incites to procreation—that this is precisely the proprium of its effect, from the most sensual up into the most spiritual…

23 Plato goes further. He says with an innocence for which one must be Greek and not “Christian” that there would be no Platonic philosophy at all if there were not such beautiful youths in Athens: it is the sight of them that first throws the philosopher’s soul into an erotic frenzy and leaves it no rest until it has sunk the seed of all high things into so beautiful a soil. Also a strange saint!—one does not trust one’s ears, even granting that one trusts Plato. At least one guesses that in Athens people philosophized differently, above all publicly. Nothing is less Greek than the concept-spinning of a hermit, amor intellectualis dei in the manner of Spinoza. Philosophy in Plato’s manner would better be defined as an erotic contest than as a further development and internalization of the old agonal gymnastics and its presuppositions… What grew in the end out of this philosophical eroticism of Plato’s? A new art form of the Greek agon, dialectic.—I recall, against Schopenhauer and in honor of Plato, that the whole higher culture and literature of classical France, too, grew on the soil of sexual interest. One may look everywhere in it for gallantry, the senses, sexual competition, “woman”—one will never look in vain…

24 L’art pour l’art.—The struggle against purpose in art is always the struggle against the moralizing tendency in art, against its subordination to morality. L’art pour l’art means: “to hell with morality!”—But even this enmity betrays the over-power of the prejudice. If one has excluded from art the purpose of moral preaching and human improvement, it by no means follows that art is altogether purposeless, aimless, senseless, in short l’art pour l’art—a worm that bites its own tail. “No purpose at all rather than a moral purpose!”—so speaks mere passion. A psychologist asks in reply: what does all art do? does it not praise? does it not glorify? does it not select? does it not bring out? With all this it strengthens or weakens certain value estimations… Is this only incidental? an accident? something in which the artist’s instinct would have no part? Or rather: is it not the presupposition for the artist being able to…? Does his lowest instinct aim at art, or not rather at the sense of art, at life? at a desirability of life?—Art is the great stimulant to life: how could one understand it as purposeless, as aimless, as l’art pour l’art?—One question remains: art also brings much that is ugly, hard, questionable in life to appearance—does it not thereby seem to sicken one of life?—And indeed there were philosophers who lent it this sense: “to get free of the will” Schopenhauer taught as the total intention of art, “to move to resignation” he revered as the great usefulness of tragedy.—But this—I have already given it to be understood—is pessimists’ optics and an “evil eye”—: one must appeal to the artists themselves. What does the tragic artist communicate of himself? Is it not precisely the state without fear before the fearful and questionable, which he shows?—This state itself is a high desirability; whoever knows it honors it with the highest honors. He communicates it, he must communicate it, provided he is an artist, a genius of communication. The courage and freedom of feeling before a mighty enemy, before a sublime calamity, before a problem that awakens horror—this victorious state is what the tragic artist selects, what he glorifies. Before tragedy, the warlike in our soul celebrates its Saturnalia; whoever is used to suffering, whoever seeks out suffering, the heroic human being praises his existence with tragedy—to him alone the tragedian offers the draught of this sweetest cruelty.—

25 To put up with people, to keep open house with one’s heart, that is liberal, but it is merely liberal. One recognizes the hearts capable of noble hospitality by the many curtained windows and closed shutters: their best rooms they keep empty. Why then?—Because they await guests with whom one does not “put up.”

26 We no longer value ourselves enough when we communicate ourselves. Our true experiences are not at all garrulous. They could not communicate themselves even if they wanted to. That is because they lack the word. Whatever we have words for, we have already got beyond. In all talk there is a grain of contempt. Language, it seems, was invented only for what is average, middling, communicable. With language the speaker already vulgarizes himself.—From a morality for the deaf and dumb and other philosophers.

27 “This portrait is enchantingly beautiful!”… The literary woman, unsatisfied, excited, desolate in heart and entrails, with painful curiosity forever listening for the imperative that whispers from the depths of her organization “aut liberi aut libri”: the literary woman, educated enough to understand the voice of nature even when it speaks Latin, and on the other hand vain and goose enough to speak French with herself in secret as well: “je me verrai, je me lirai, je m’extasierai et je dirai: Possible, que j’aie eu tant d’esprit?”

28 The “impersonal” ones come to speak.—“Nothing is easier for us than to be wise, patient, superior. We drip with the oil of forbearance and compassion, we are just in an absurd way, we forgive everything. Precisely for that reason we should hold ourselves a little more strictly; precisely for that reason we should, from time to time, cultivate a small affect, a small vice of affect. It may go hard with us; and among ourselves we perhaps laugh at the aspect we present thereby. But what does it help? We have no other kind of self-overcoming left: this is our ascetics, our penance”… To become personal—the virtue of the “impersonal”…

29 From a doctor’s promotion.—“What is the task of all higher schooling?”—To make a machine out of the human being.—“What is the means to it?”—He must learn to be bored.—“How does one achieve that?”—Through the concept of duty.—“Who is his model for that?”—The philologist: he teaches oxen.—“Who is the perfect human being?”—The civil servant.—“Which philosophy gives the highest formula for the civil servant?”—Kant’s: the civil servant as thing in itself set as judge over the civil servant as appearance.—

30 The right to stupidity.—The tired and slow-breathing worker, who looks good-natured, who lets things go as they go: this typical figure, whom one now meets in all classes of society, in the age of work (and of the “Reich”!—), today claims art for himself, including the book, above all the journal—how much more the beautiful nature, Italy… The evening human being, with the “wild drives fallen asleep” that Faust speaks of, needs the summer resort, the seaside, the glaciers, Bayreuth… In such ages art has a right to pure foolishness—as a kind of holiday for spirit, wit and feeling. Wagner understood this. Pure foolishness restores…

31 Another problem of diet.—The means by which Julius Caesar defended himself against sickliness and headache: enormous marches, the simplest way of life, uninterrupted stay in the open air, constant exertions—these are, reckoned on a large scale, the preserving and protective measures generally against the extreme vulnerability of that subtle machine working under the highest pressure, which is called genius.—

32 The immoralist speaks.—Nothing goes more against a philosopher’s taste than the human being insofar as he wishes… If he sees the human being only in his doing, if he sees this most courageous, most cunning, most enduring animal gone astray even in labyrinthine predicaments, how admirable the human being appears to him! He even encourages him… But the philosopher despises the wishing human being, also the “desirable” human being—and in general all desirabilities, all ideals of the human being. If a philosopher could be a nihilist, he would be one because he finds the nothing behind all ideals of the human being. Or not even the nothing—but only the worthless, the absurd, the sick, the cowardly, the tired, all kinds of dregs from the drained cup of his life… The human being, who as reality is so worthy of veneration, how is it that he deserves no respect insofar as he wishes? Must he atone for being so capable as reality? Must he balance his doing, the head- and will-strain in all doing, with a stretching of limbs in the imaginary and the absurd?—The history of his desirabilities has so far been the partie honteuse of the human being: one should beware of reading in it too long. What justifies the human being is his reality—it will justify him eternally. How much more worthy is the real human being compared with any merely wished, dreamed, stunk-up and lied-up human being? with any ideal human being?… And only the ideal human being goes against the philosopher’s taste.

33 Natural value of egoism.—Selfishness is worth as much as the person who has it is physiologically worth: it can be worth very much, it can be worthless and contemptible. Each individual may be examined as to whether he represents the ascending or the descending line of life. With a decision about that one also has a canon for what his selfishness is worth. If he represents the ascending of the line, then his value is in fact extraordinary—and for the sake of the total life that takes a step further with him, the care for preservation, for the creation of his optimum of conditions, may itself be extreme. The individual, the “individuum,” as people and philosophers have so far understood it, is indeed an error: he is nothing for himself, no atom, no “link in the chain,” nothing merely inherited from of old—he is the whole one line of humanity up to him still himself… If he represents the descending development, decline, chronic degeneration, sickening (—illnesses, reckoned on a large scale, are already consequences of decline, not its causes), then little value accrues to him, and the first fairness wants that he take as little as possible from the well-formed. He is merely their parasite still…

34 Christian and anarchist.—When the anarchist, as the mouthpiece of declining strata of society, demands “right,” “justice,” “equal rights” with a fine indignation, he stands thereby only under the pressure of his lack of culture, which does not know how to grasp why he actually suffers—what he is poor in, in life… A cause-drive is mighty in him: someone must be to blame that he feels bad… And the “fine indignation” itself already does him good, it is a pleasure for all poor devils to curse—there is a small intoxication of power. Even complaint, self-lamentation, can give life a charm for whose sake one endures it: a finer dose of revenge is in every complaint, one reproaches those who are different with one’s feeling bad, under circumstances even with one’s badness, as an injustice, as an impermissible privilege. “If I am a canaille, then you should be one too”: on this logic one makes revolution.—Self-lamentation is good for nothing in any case: it stems from weakness. Whether one imputes one’s feeling bad to others or to oneself—the former the socialist does, the latter, for example, the Christian—makes no real difference. What is common, let us say also the unworthy thing about it, is that someone should be to blame that one suffers—in short, that the sufferer prescribes for himself the honey of revenge against his suffering. The objects of this need for revenge as a need for pleasure are occasion-causes: the sufferer finds causes everywhere to cool his little revenge—if he is a Christian, as said again, he finds them in himself… The Christian and the anarchist—both are décadents.—But even when the Christian condemns, slanders, befouls the “world,” he does it out of the same instinct out of which the socialist worker condemns, slanders, befouls society: the “last judgment” itself is still the sweet consolation of revenge—the revolution, as the socialist worker also expects it, only thought somewhat more distant… The “beyond” itself—why a beyond, if it were not a means to befoul the here and now?…

35 Critique of the morality of decadence. An “altruistic” morality, a morality in which self-interest withers, remains a bad sign under all circumstances. This holds for individuals; it holds especially for peoples. The best is lacking when self-interest begins to fail. Instinctively choosing what harms oneself, being lured by “disinterested” motives, comes close to a formula for decadence. “Not to seek one’s own advantage”—that is merely the moral fig leaf for an entirely different, namely physiological, state of affairs: “I no longer know how to find my own advantage.” Disintegration of the instincts!—A human being is finished when he becomes altruistic.—Instead of saying honestly, “I am no longer worth anything,” the moral lie in the decadent’s mouth says: “Nothing is worth anything—life is worth nothing”… Such a judgment ultimately remains a great danger; it is contagious—across the whole diseased soil of society it soon sprouts into a tropical vegetation of concepts, now as religion (Christianity), now as philosophy (Schopenhauerism). Under certain circumstances, such a growth of poison trees, sprung from decay, poisons life with its exhalations far and wide, for millennia to come…

36 Morality for physicians.—The sick person is a parasite on society. In a certain condition, it is indecent to go on living. To keep vegetating in cowardly dependence on physicians and treatments, once the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost, should bring profound contempt from society. Physicians, in turn, should be the agents of this contempt—not prescriptions, but a fresh daily dose of disgust at their patients… To create a new responsibility, that of the physician, for every case in which the highest interest of life, of ascending life, demands that degenerating life be thrust down and aside with the utmost ruthlessness—for example, regarding the right to procreate, the right to be born, the right to live… To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death freely chosen, death at the right time, carried out with clarity and joy, amid children and witnesses: so that a real farewell is still possible, with the person taking leave still present; likewise a real appraisal of what one has achieved and intended, a summing-up of life—all in contrast to the wretched and horrifying comedy Christianity has made of the hour of death. Christianity must never be forgiven for abusing the dying person’s weakness to rape his conscience, for abusing the very manner of his death to pass value judgments on the person and his past!—Here, in defiance of every cowardice of prejudice, the first task is to establish the correct—that is, physiological—assessment of so-called natural death: which is ultimately also only an “unnatural” death, a suicide. No one ever perishes through anyone but himself. Only this is death under the most contemptible conditions, an unfree death, a death at the wrong time, a coward’s death. Out of love for life, one should want death otherwise: free, conscious, without accident, without ambush… Finally, a word of advice for the gentlemen pessimists and other decadents. It is not in our power to prevent our being born: but we can make good this mistake—for sometimes it is a mistake. In doing away with oneself, one does the most respectable thing there is: one almost earns the right to live by doing so… Society—what am I saying!—life itself gains more from this than from any “life” of renunciation, anemia, and other virtues—one has freed others from the sight of oneself, freed life from an objection… Pessimism, pure and unadulterated, proves itself only through the gentlemen pessimists’ self-refutation: one must go a step further in one’s logic, not merely negate life with “will and representation,” as Schopenhauer did—one must first negate Schopenhauer… Pessimism, incidentally, however contagious it may be, nevertheless does not increase the overall morbidity of an age, of a generation: it is its expression. One succumbs to it as one succumbs to cholera: one must already be morbidly predisposed enough. Pessimism itself does not produce a single additional decadent; I recall the statistical finding that years in which cholera rages do not differ from other years in their total number of deaths.

37 Whether we have become more moral.—As was to be expected, the entire ferocity of moral stupefaction—which, as everyone knows, passes for morality itself in Germany—has thrown itself into battle against my concept “beyond good and evil”: I could tell some pretty stories about that. Above all, I was invited to consider the “undeniable superiority” of our age in moral judgment, the real progress we have made here: a Cesare Borgia, compared with us, was by no means to be presented as a “higher human being,” as a kind of overman, as I present him… A Swiss editor, from the “Bund,” went so far as to “understand” the meaning of my work as a proposal to abolish all decent feelings—not without expressing his respect for the courage of such a venture. Much obliged!—In reply, I take the liberty of raising the question whether we have really become more moral. That everyone believes it is already an objection to it… We modern people, very delicate, very vulnerable, showing and receiving consideration in a hundred ways, actually imagine that this tender humanity we represent, this achieved unanimity in sparing one another, in readiness to help, in mutual trust, is a positive advance, that we have thereby moved far beyond the people of the Renaissance. But every age thinks this way, must think this way. What is certain is that we could not put ourselves into Renaissance conditions, could not even think ourselves into them: our nerves could not stand that reality, not to mention our muscles. Yet this incapacity proves no progress, only a different, a later constitution, a weaker, more tender, more vulnerable one, which necessarily produces a morality full of consideration. Suppose we thought away our tenderness and lateness, our physiological aging: then our morality of “humanization” would instantly lose its value as well—no morality has value in itself—it would inspire contempt even in us. On the other hand, let us not doubt that we moderns, with our thickly padded humanity, determined not to bump against a single stone, would furnish Cesare Borgia’s contemporaries with a comedy to make them die laughing. Indeed, with our modern “virtues,” we are involuntarily funny beyond all measure… The decline of hostile instincts and instincts that arouse distrust—and this would be our “progress”—represents only one consequence of the general decline in vitality: it takes a hundred times more effort, more caution, to sustain so conditional, so belated an existence. People help one another here; everyone is to some degree a patient, and everyone a nurse. This is then called “virtue”—among people who still knew life differently, more fully, more lavishly, more abundantly, it would have been called something else, perhaps “cowardice,” “wretchedness,” “old women’s morality”… The softening of our customs—this is my proposition, this, if you like, is my innovation—is a consequence of decline; conversely, the harshness and dreadfulness of custom can be a consequence of a surplus of life: for then much may be risked, much challenged, much squandered as well. What once gave life its spice would be poison to us… To be indifferent—that, too, is a form of strength—for that, too, we are too old, too late: our morality of fellow feeling, against which I was the first to warn, what one might call moral impressionism, is one more expression of the physiological overexcitability characteristic of everything decadent. The movement that tried to present itself as scientific through Schopenhauer’s morality of pity—a very unfortunate attempt!—is the true movement of decadence in morality; as such, it is deeply akin to Christian morality. Strong ages, noble cultures, see something contemptible in pity, in “love of one’s neighbor,” in a lack of self and self-esteem.—Ages must be measured by their positive forces—and measured in this way, that so lavish and fateful age of the Renaissance emerges as the last great age, while we, we moderns, with our anxious concern for ourselves and love of our neighbors, with our virtues of work, modest demands, lawfulness, scientific method—collecting, economical, mechanical—emerge as a weak age… Our virtues are conditioned, are called forth, by our weakness… “Equality,” a certain actual process of becoming alike, which merely finds expression in the theory of “equal rights,” belongs essentially to decline: the gulf between one person and another, one rank and another, the multiplicity of types, the will to be oneself, to stand apart, what I call the pathos of distance, belongs to every strong age. The tensile strength, the span between the extremes, is growing ever smaller today—the extremes themselves finally blur into similarity… All our political theories and state constitutions, the “German Reich” by no means excepted, are consequences, necessary consequences of decline; the unconscious effect of decadence has gained mastery even over the ideals of individual sciences. My objection to the whole of sociology in England and France remains that it knows from experience only society’s forms of decay, and in all innocence takes its own instincts of decay as the norm of sociological value judgment. Declining life, the diminution of all organizing power—that is, power that separates, tears open gulfs, subordinates and superordinates—formulates itself as an ideal in today’s sociology… Our socialists are decadents, but Mr. Herbert Spencer is also a decadent—he sees something desirable in the triumph of altruism!…

38 My concept of freedom.—The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one achieves with it, but in what one pays for it—what it costs us. I will give an example. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they have been attained: afterward there are no worse or more thorough enemies of freedom than liberal institutions. We know what they bring about: they undermine the will to power; they are the leveling of mountain and valley exalted into morality; they make people small, cowardly, and pleasure-seeking—with them the herd animal triumphs every time. Liberalism: in plain language, turning people into herd animals… These same institutions produce quite different effects while they are still being fought for; then they do indeed promote freedom powerfully. Looked at more closely, it is war that produces these effects, the war for liberal institutions, which, as war, keeps the illiberal instincts alive. And war educates for freedom. For what is freedom! Having the will to take responsibility for oneself. Maintaining the distance that separates us. Becoming more indifferent to hardship, harshness, privation, even to life. Being ready to sacrifice human beings to one’s cause, oneself included. Freedom means that the masculine instincts, those that delight in war and victory, hold sway over other instincts, those of “happiness,” for example. The human being who has become free, and how much more the spirit who has become free, tramples underfoot the contemptible kind of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free human being is a warrior.—How is freedom measured, in individuals as in peoples? By the resistance that must be overcome, by the effort it costs to remain on top. The highest type of free human beings would have to be sought where the greatest resistance is constantly overcome: five paces from tyranny, close to the threshold of the danger of enslavement. This is true psychologically, if by “tyrants” we understand relentless and terrible instincts that challenge one to bring the maximum of authority and discipline to bear against them—the finest type, Julius Caesar; it is also true politically: one need only make one’s way through history. The peoples who were worth something, who became worth something, never became so under liberal institutions: great danger made something of them that deserves reverence, the danger that first teaches us to know our resources, our virtues, our defenses and weapons, our spirit—that compels us to be strong… First principle: one must need to be strong; otherwise one never becomes strong.—Those great hothouses for strong human beings, for the strongest kind there has yet been, aristocratic commonwealths such as Rome and Venice, understood freedom in precisely the sense in which I understand the word freedom: as something one has and does not have, something one wants, something one conquers…

39 Critique of modernity.—Our institutions are no longer good for anything: on that we agree. But the fault lies not with them, but with us. Once we have lost all the instincts from which institutions grow, we lose institutions altogether, because we are no longer fit for them. Democracy has always been the declining form of organizing power: as early as “Human, All Too Human” 1, 318, I characterized modern democracy, together with its half measures such as the “German Reich,” as a form of the state’s decay. For institutions to exist, there must be a kind of will, instinct, imperative, antiliberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility for centuries to come, to solidarity among chains of generations stretching forward and backward to infinity. Where this will exists, something like the Roman Empire is founded: or like Russia, the only power today that has endurance in its body, that can wait, that can still promise something—Russia, the opposite concept to Europe’s wretched fragmentation into petty states and its nervousness, which entered a critical stage with the founding of the German Reich… The whole West no longer possesses those instincts from which institutions grow, from which a future grows: perhaps nothing runs more deeply against the grain of its “modern spirit.” People live for today, live very fast—live very irresponsibly: and this is precisely what they call “freedom.” What makes an institution an institution is despised, hated, rejected: people believe themselves in danger of a new slavery wherever the word “authority” is so much as uttered. This is how far decadence has gone in the valuing instinct of our politicians, our political parties: they instinctively prefer what dissolves, what hastens the end… Witness modern marriage. All reason has visibly departed from modern marriage: but that furnishes no objection to marriage, only to modernity. The reason in marriage lay in the husband’s sole legal responsibility: this gave marriage weight, whereas today it limps on both legs. The reason in marriage lay in its indissolubility as a matter of principle: this gave it an emphasis that knew how to make itself heard against the accidents of feeling, passion, and the moment. It lay equally in the families’ responsibility for choosing the spouses. With growing indulgence toward marriage for love, people have simply eliminated the foundation of marriage, what first makes it an institution. One never, ever founds an institution on an idiosyncrasy; one does not, as I have said, found marriage on “love”—one founds it on the sexual drive, on the drive to possess (wife and child as property), on the drive to rule, which continually organizes for itself the smallest structure of domination, the family, which needs children and heirs in order to secure, physiologically as well, an attained measure of power, influence, and wealth, to prepare for long tasks, for a solidarity of instincts across centuries. Marriage as an institution already contains the affirmation of the greatest, most enduring form of organization: if society itself, as a whole, cannot vouch for itself down to the most distant generations, marriage has no meaning at all.—Modern marriage has lost its meaning—consequently, people abolish it.—

40 The worker question.—The stupidity—at bottom, the degeneration of instinct that causes all stupidity today—lies in there being a worker question at all. About certain things one does not ask questions: the first imperative of instinct.—I simply cannot see what people intend to do with the European worker now that they have made a question of him. He is far too well off not to ask more and more questions, more immodest questions, step by step. Ultimately, he has numbers on his side. All hope is gone that a modest and self-sufficient kind of human being, a Chinese type, might here develop into a class: and that would have made sense, would indeed have been a necessity. What has been done?—Everything to destroy even the precondition for it in the bud—through the most irresponsible thoughtlessness, people have utterly destroyed the instincts through which a worker becomes possible as a class, possible to himself. They have made the worker fit for military service, given him the right to organize, the right to vote politically: is it any wonder if the worker already feels his existence today to be a state of distress (in moral terms, an injustice)? But what do people want? I ask again. If one wills an end, one must also will the means: if one wants slaves, one is a fool to educate them to be masters.—

41 “Freedom I do not mean…” In times like ours, being left to one’s instincts is one more calamity. These instincts contradict, disrupt, destroy one another; I have already defined the modern as physiological self-contradiction. Rational education would demand that at least one of these systems of instinct be paralyzed under iron pressure, to allow another to gather strength, become strong, become master. Today one would first have to make the individual possible by pruning him: possible, that is, whole… The opposite happens: the demand for independence, for free development, for letting things take their course, is pressed most heatedly by precisely those for whom no bridle would be too strict—this holds in politics, this holds in art. But that is a symptom of decadence: our modern concept of “freedom” is one more proof of the degeneration of instinct.—

42 Where faith is needed.—Nothing is rarer among moralists and saints than integrity; perhaps they say the opposite, perhaps they believe it themselves. For when a belief is more useful, more effective, more convincing than conscious hypocrisy, instinct soon turns hypocrisy into innocence: the first principle for understanding great saints. With philosophers, too, another kind of saint, the entire trade entails admitting only certain truths: namely, those on the strength of which their trade enjoys public sanction—in Kant’s language, truths of practical reason. They know what they must prove; in that they are practical—they recognize one another by their agreement about “the truths.”—“You shall not lie”—in plain language: take care, my dear philosopher, not to tell the truth…

43 A whisper in the conservatives’ ear.—What was not known before, what is known today, could be known: regression, a reversal in any sense or degree, is simply impossible. We physiologists, at least, know this. But all priests and moralists have believed in it—they wanted to bring humanity back, screw it back, to an earlier measure of virtue. Morality has always been a Procrustean bed. Even politicians have copied the preachers of virtue in this: even today there are parties whose dream and goal is for everything to move backward like a crab. But no one is free to be a crab. There is no help for it: one must go forward, which is to say, step by step further into decadence (—my definition of modern “progress”…). One can check this development and, by checking it, dam up degeneration itself, accumulate it, make it more violent and sudden: that is all one can do.—

44 My concept of genius.—Great men, like great ages, are explosives in which an immense force has been stored up; historically and physiologically, their precondition is always that things have long been collected, accumulated, saved, and preserved toward their coming—that for a long time no explosion has occurred. Once the tension in the mass has grown too great, the most accidental stimulus is enough to call “genius,” the “deed,” the great destiny into the world. What do surroundings, an age, the “spirit of the times,” “public opinion” matter then!—Take the case of Napoleon. The France of the Revolution, and still more of the years before it, would have produced from itself the opposite type to Napoleon: and it did produce him. And because Napoleon was different, heir to a stronger, longer, older civilization than the one that went up in smoke and fragments in France, he became master here, he alone was master here. Great human beings are necessary; the age in which they appear is accidental; that they almost always become its masters is due only to their being stronger, being older, to a longer accumulation toward their coming. The relation between a genius and his age is that between the strong and the weak, also between the old and the young: relatively speaking, the age is always much younger, thinner, less mature, less sure of itself, more childish.—That people in France today think very differently about this (in Germany, too: but that does not matter), that the theory of the milieu, a true neurotic’s theory, has become sacrosanct and almost scientific there, finding believers even among physiologists, does not “smell good”; it gives one melancholy thoughts.—People in England understand it no differently, but no one will grieve over that. Only two paths are open to the Englishman in coming to terms with genius and the “great man”: either democratically, in Buckle’s fashion, or religiously, in Carlyle’s.—The danger in great human beings and ages is extraordinary; exhaustion of every kind, sterility, follows close on their heels. The great human being is an end; the great age, the Renaissance, for example, is an end. Genius—in work, in deed—is necessarily a spendthrift: spending itself is its greatness… The instinct of self-preservation is, as it were, unhinged; the overwhelming pressure of the forces pouring out forbids it any such care and caution. People call this “self-sacrifice”; they praise its “heroism,” its indifference to its own welfare, its devotion to an idea, a great cause, a fatherland: all misunderstandings… He pours out, he overflows, he uses himself up, he does not spare himself—fatally, fatefully, involuntarily, as a river’s bursting its banks is involuntary. But because people owe so much to such explosives, they have given them much in return, a kind of higher morality, for example… That is the way of human gratitude: it misunderstands its benefactors.—

45 The criminal and his kin.—The criminal type is the type of the strong human being under unfavorable conditions, a strong human being made sick. He lacks the wilderness, a somewhat freer and more dangerous nature and way of life in which everything that serves as a weapon and a defense in the strong person’s instinct has its rightful place. Society has outlawed his virtues; the most vigorous drives he brings with him soon grow together with the depressing emotions—with suspicion, fear, dishonor. But this is almost a recipe for physiological degeneration. Whoever must do in secret what he does best and would most like to do, amid prolonged tension, caution, and cunning, becomes anemic; and because his instincts never bring him anything but danger, persecution, and disaster, his feelings toward these instincts also turn against them—he comes to feel them as a fatality. It is society, our tame, mediocre, castrated society, in which a human being of untamed growth, coming down from the mountains or out of adventures at sea, necessarily degenerates into a criminal. Or almost necessarily: for there are cases in which such a person proves stronger than society: the Corsican Napoleon is the most famous case. Dostoevsky’s testimony bears on the problem before us—Dostoevsky, incidentally, the only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn: he belongs among the finest strokes of good fortune in my life, even more than the discovery of Stendhal. This profound man, who was ten times right to hold the superficial Germans in low esteem, came to feel very differently than he himself had expected about the Siberian convicts among whom he lived for a long time, all serious criminals for whom there was no road back to society—he felt them to be carved, roughly speaking, from the best, hardest, and most valuable timber that grows anywhere on Russian soil. Let us generalize the criminal’s case: let us imagine natures who, for whatever reason, lack public approval, who know that they are not regarded as beneficent, as useful—that Chandala feeling of counting not as an equal but as an outcast, unworthy, defiling. All such natures carry the color of the underground in their thoughts and actions; everything about them grows paler than it does in those whose existence lies in daylight. Yet almost all the forms of existence we honor today once lived in this half-sepulchral air: the scientific character, the artist, the genius, the free spirit, the actor, the merchant, the great explorer… As long as the priest counted as the highest type, every valuable kind of human being was devalued… The time is coming—I promise it—when he will count as the lowest, as our Chandala, as the most deceitful, the most indecent kind of human being… I call attention to the way that even now, under the mildest rule of custom ever to prevail on earth, at least in Europe, every life off the beaten track, every long, all-too-long existence below the surface, every unusual, opaque way of living brings one close to the type the criminal embodies to perfection. All innovators of the spirit bear for a time the pale, fatalistic mark of the Chandala on their brows: not because others feel this way about them, but because they themselves feel the terrible gulf separating them from everything established and held in honor. Almost every genius knows, as a phase of his development, the “Catilinarian existence,” a feeling of hatred, revenge, and rebellion against everything that already is, that no longer becomes… Catiline—the preliminary form of every Caesar’s existence.—

46 Here the view is open.—It can be loftiness of soul when a philosopher is silent; it can be love when he contradicts himself; a seeker of knowledge can show a courtesy that lies. It has been said, not without subtlety: it is unworthy of great hearts to spread the turmoil they feel; one need only add that not fearing what is most unworthy can also be greatness of soul. A woman who loves sacrifices her honor; a seeker of knowledge who “loves” perhaps sacrifices his humanity; a god who loved became a Jew…

47 Beauty is no accident.—Even the beauty of a race or family, its grace and goodness in every gesture, is worked for: like genius, it is the final result of the accumulated labor of generations. One must have made great sacrifices to good taste, done much and left much undone for its sake—seventeenth-century France is admirable in both respects—one must have made it a principle of selection in company, surroundings, dress, sexual satisfaction; one must have preferred beauty to advantage, habit, opinion, inertia. The supreme rule: one must not “let oneself go,” even in one’s own presence.—Good things are costly beyond measure: and the law always holds that the person who has them is not the person who acquires them. Everything good is an inheritance: what is not inherited is imperfect, is a beginning… In Athens at the time of Cicero, who expresses his surprise at this, men and young men far surpassed women in beauty: but what labor and effort the male sex had demanded of itself there, for centuries, in the service of beauty!—One must not, that is, go wrong about the method here: a mere disciplining of feelings and thoughts amounts to almost nothing (—here lies the great misunderstanding of German cultivation, which is wholly illusory): one must first persuade the body. Strictly maintaining gestures of distinction and refinement, obliging oneself to live only with people who do not “let themselves go,” is quite enough to make one distinguished and refined: in two or three generations everything has already been internalized. It is decisive for the fate of a people and of humanity that culture should begin in the right place—not in the “soul” (as the fatal superstition of priests and half-priests would have it): the right place is the body, gesture, diet, physiology; the rest follows from there… The Greeks therefore remain the first cultural event in history—they knew, they did, what was needed; Christianity, which despised the body, has so far been humanity’s greatest misfortune.—

48 Progress as I understand it.—I too speak of a “return to nature,” although it is really not a going back but an ascent—up into a lofty, free, even terrible nature and naturalness, one that plays with great tasks, that is entitled to play with them… To put it figuratively: Napoleon was a piece of “return to nature” as I understand it (for instance, in tactical matters, and still more, as military men know, in strategy).—But Rousseau—where did he actually want to go back to? Rousseau, this first modern human being, idealist and scoundrel in one person; who needed moral “dignity” to bear the sight of himself; sick with unbridled vanity and unbridled self-contempt. This monstrosity, too, which planted itself on the threshold of the modern age, wanted a “return to nature”—where, I ask again, did Rousseau want to go back to?—I hate Rousseau even in the Revolution: it is the world-historical expression of this double nature, idealist and scoundrel. The bloody farce in which this Revolution played itself out, its “immorality,” concerns me little: what I hate is its Rousseauian morality—the so-called “truths” of the Revolution, through which it still exerts its influence and wins over everything shallow and mediocre. The doctrine of equality!… But there is no more poisonous poison: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, when it is the end of justice… “Equal treatment for equals, unequal treatment for unequals—that would be the true voice of justice: and, as a consequence, never make unequal things equal.”—The fact that such horror and bloodshed surrounded this doctrine of equality has given this quintessential “modern idea” a kind of glory and fiery radiance, so that the Revolution as a spectacle has seduced even the noblest spirits. In the end, that is no reason to esteem it more highly.—I see only one person who felt about it as one must feel, with disgust—Goethe…

49 Goethe—not a German event but a European one: a magnificent attempt to overcome the eighteenth century through a return to nature, through an ascent to the naturalness of the Renaissance, a kind of self-overcoming on the part of that century.—He bore its strongest instincts within him: sentimentality, the idolatry of nature, the antihistorical, the idealistic, the unreal and revolutionary (—the last is only one form of the unreal). He enlisted the help of history, natural science, antiquity, and likewise Spinoza, but above all practical activity; he surrounded himself entirely with bounded horizons; he did not detach himself from life, he placed himself within it; he did not lose heart, and took as much as possible upon himself, over himself, into himself. What he wanted was totality; he fought against the separation of reason, sensuality, feeling, will (—preached in the most forbidding scholasticism by Kant, Goethe’s antipode); he disciplined himself into wholeness, he created himself… In the midst of an age that set its mind on unreality, Goethe was a convinced realist: he said yes to everything akin to him in this—he had no greater experience than that supremely real being called Napoleon. Goethe conceived a strong, highly cultivated human being, skilled in everything bodily, keeping himself in check, revering himself, who may dare to allow himself the full range and richness of naturalness, who is strong enough for this freedom; the human being of tolerance, not from weakness but from strength, because he knows how to turn to his own advantage even what would destroy an average nature; the human being for whom nothing is forbidden any longer, except weakness, whether it goes by the name of vice or virtue… Such a spirit, having become free, stands amid the universe with a joyful and trusting fatalism, believing that only what is isolated is reprehensible, that in the whole everything is redeemed and affirmed—he no longer negates… But such a faith is the highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name of Dionysus.—

50 One could say that in a certain sense the nineteenth century also strove for everything Goethe strove for as a person: a universality of understanding, of approval, a willingness to let anything and everything draw near, an audacious realism, a reverence for everything factual. How is it that the overall result is not a Goethe but a chaos, a nihilistic sighing, not knowing which way to turn, an instinct of weariness that in practice continually drives people to reach back to the eighteenth century? (—For example, as a Romanticism of feeling, as altruism and hypersentimentality, as femininity in taste, as socialism in politics.) Is the nineteenth century, especially toward its close, not merely an intensified, coarsened eighteenth century, that is, a century of decadence? So that Goethe would have been no more than an interlude, a beautiful effort in vain, not just for Germany but for all Europe?—But we misunderstand great human beings when we view them from the paltry perspective of public usefulness. That we do not know how to make use of them may itself belong to greatness…

51 Goethe is the last German for whom I have reverence: he would have felt three things that I feel—we understand each other about the “cross,” too… People often ask me why I write in German at all: nowhere, they say, am I read worse than in my own country. But who knows, in the end, whether I even want to be read today?—To create things on which time tries its teeth in vain; to strive, in form and in substance, for a little immortality—I have never yet been modest enough to demand less of myself. The aphorism, the maxim, of which I am the first German master, are the forms of “eternity”; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what anyone else says in a book—what anyone else does not say in a book…

I have given humanity the deepest book it possesses, my Zarathustra: before long I shall give it the most independent.—

Plain English translation

A complete machine-assisted Plain English translation made independently and directly from the German, not from the Musean edition or an existing English translation.

1 People I can’t stand.—Seneca: or the bullfighter of virtue.—Rousseau: or the return to nature in impure nakedness.—Schiller: or the moral trumpeter of Säckingen.—Dante: or the hyena writing poetry in graves.—Kant: or cant as an intelligible character.—Victor Hugo: or the lighthouse on the sea of nonsense.—Liszt: or the school of dexterity—in chasing women.—George Sand: or milky abundance, in plain language: the dairy cow with a “beautiful style.”—Michelet: or enthusiasm taking off its coat… Carlyle: or pessimism as a lunch that has backed up.—John Stuart Mill: or offensive clarity.—The Goncourt brothers: or the two Ajaxes fighting Homer. Music by Offenbach.—Zola: or the joy of stinking.—

2 Renan.—Theology, or the corruption of reason by “original sin” (Christianity). Renan is evidence: whenever he risks a yes or no on any general issue, he gets it wrong with embarrassing regularity. For example, he wants to combine science and nobility into one. But science belongs to democracy; that is obvious enough to touch. He has no small ambition to represent an aristocracy of the mind. Yet at the same time he kneels before its opposite teaching, the gospel of the humble—and kneeling is not all he does… What good are all his free thinking, modern attitudes, mockery, and chameleon’s flexibility if he has remained a Christian, a Catholic, even a priest in his guts! Like a Jesuit and confessor, Renan puts his inventiveness into seduction. His intellectual qualities include the priest’s broad smirk—like all priests, he becomes dangerous only when he loves. No one can match his way of worshiping that puts life at risk… Renan’s kind of mind, a mind that drains people’s strength, is one more disaster for poor, sick France, sick in its will.—

3 Sainte-Beuve.—Nothing of a man; full of petty bitterness against every manly mind. He wanders around, subtle, curious, bored, fishing for information—basically a woman, with a woman’s vindictiveness and sensuality. As a psychologist, a genius at malicious gossip, with an inexhaustible supply of ways to do it. No one knows better how to mix poison into praise. His deepest instincts are common and base, related to Rousseau’s resentment. So he is a Romantic—for underneath all Romanticism, Rousseau’s instinct grunts and hungers for revenge. A revolutionary, but still reasonably restrained by fear. Not independent of anything that has strength: public opinion, the Academy, the court, even Port-Royal. Bitter toward everything great in people and things, toward everything that believes in itself. Enough of a poet and half a woman still to feel greatness as a power; always bent like that famous worm, because he always feels stepped on. As a critic he has no standard, stability, or backbone. He has the cosmopolitan libertine’s tongue for many things, but not even the courage to admit his own free living. As a historian he has no philosophy, no power of philosophical insight. So he refuses the task of judging in any major matter, holding up “objectivity” as a mask. He is different with everything for which a delicate, worn-out taste is the final judge. There he really does have the courage to be himself and take pleasure in himself—there he is a master.—In some respects, an early form of Baudelaire.—

4 The Imitation of Christ is one of those books I cannot hold in my hands without a physical resistance. It gives off a perfume of the Eternal Feminine that you have to be French—or a Wagnerian—to appreciate… This saint has a way of talking about love that would make even the women of Paris curious.—I am told that the cleverest of Jesuits, A. Comte, who wanted to lead his Frenchmen to Rome by the roundabout route of science, drew inspiration from this book. I believe it: “the religion of the heart”…

5 G. Eliot.—They have got rid of the Christian God and now think they have all the more reason to hold on to Christian morality. That is English consistency; we won’t hold it against little moralizing women like Eliot. In England, for every small step away from theology, you have to regain your good name by showing yourself to be a frightening moral fanatic. That is the penance you pay there.—For the rest of us, things are different. When you give up Christian belief, you also pull the right to Christian morality out from under your feet. This morality is by no means self-evident. We have to keep bringing this point to light, despite the English blockheads. Christianity is a system, a connected and complete view of things. If you break a central idea out of it, the belief in God, you also break the whole thing apart. Nothing necessary remains in your hands. Christianity assumes that human beings do not know and cannot know what is good or evil for them. They believe in God, who alone knows it. Christian morality is a command. Its origin is beyond this world. It is beyond all criticism, beyond any right to criticize. It is true only if God is the truth—it stands or falls with belief in God.—If the English actually believe they know for themselves, “intuitively,” what is good and evil, and therefore think they no longer need Christianity to guarantee morality, that is itself only a consequence of the dominance of Christian value judgments. It shows how strong and deep this dominance is: the origin of English morality has been forgotten, and people no longer feel how much its right to exist depends on particular conditions. For the Englishman, morality is not yet a problem…

6 George Sand.—I read the first Letters of a Traveler: like everything that comes from Rousseau, false, contrived, puffed up like bellows, exaggerated. I cannot stand this colorful wallpaper of a style, or the commoner’s ambition to have generous feelings. The worst thing, though, remains this woman’s flirtation with masculine qualities, with the manners of ill-behaved boys.—How cold she must have been through all of it, this unbearable artist! She wound herself up like a clock—and wrote… Cold, like Hugo, like Balzac, like all the Romantics as soon as they started writing literature! And how smugly she must have lain there, this fertile writing cow, who had something German about her in the bad sense, like Rousseau himself, her master, and who could only have become possible once French taste had declined!—But Renan worships her…

7 A rule for psychologists.—Don’t practice cheap gossip psychology! Never observe just for the sake of observing! That gives you a false perspective, a squint, something forced and exaggerated. Trying to have experiences by wanting to have them—that doesn’t work. You must not look at yourself while having an experience; every such look becomes the “evil eye.” A born psychologist instinctively avoids looking just to look. The same is true of a born painter. He never works “from nature”—he leaves it to his instinct, his dark chamber, to sift and give expression to the “case,” “nature,” the “experience”… Only the general result enters his awareness: the conclusion, the outcome. He knows nothing of deliberately extracting an abstraction from an individual case.—What happens if you do it differently? For example, if you practice cheap gossip psychology like the Parisian novelists, great and small? You practically lie in wait for reality and bring home a handful of curiosities every evening… But just look at the final result—a heap of blotches, a mosaic at best, and in every case something pieced together, restless, with clashing colors. The Goncourts are the worst at this. They cannot put three sentences together without simply hurting the eye—the psychologist’s eye.—Judged as art, nature is no model. It exaggerates, distorts, leaves gaps. Nature is chance. Studying “from nature” seems a bad sign to me: it reveals submission, weakness, fatalism. Groveling in the dust before little facts is unworthy of a complete artist. Seeing what is there—that belongs to another kind of mind, the unartistic, fact-minded kind. You have to know who you are…

8 On the artist’s psychology.—For there to be art, for there to be any aesthetic activity or perception, one physical precondition is essential: intoxication. Intoxication must first have made the whole machine more excitable; otherwise no art results. Every kind of intoxication has this power, however different its causes. Above all, the intoxication of sexual excitement, the oldest and most basic form of intoxication. Also the intoxication that follows every great desire, every strong emotion; the intoxication of festivals, competitions, daring feats, victory, any extreme movement; the intoxication of cruelty; intoxication in destruction; intoxication under certain weather conditions, such as spring fever; or under the influence of drugs; finally, intoxication of the will, of a will that is overflowing and swollen.—The essential thing in intoxication is the feeling of increased strength and fullness. Out of this feeling we give something to things, force them to take from us, overpower them—we call this process idealizing. Let’s get rid of a prejudice here: idealizing does not consist, as people generally believe, in subtracting or discounting what is small or secondary. What matters instead is an enormous amplification of the main features, so that the others disappear beside them.

9 In this state a person enriches everything out of his own fullness: whatever he sees, whatever he wants, he sees swollen, compressed, strong, loaded with power. A person in this state transforms things until they mirror his power—until they are reflections of his perfection. This compulsion to transform things into something perfect is—art. Even everything he is not still becomes a delight in itself to him; in art a person enjoys himself as perfection.—We could imagine the opposite state: an instinct that is specifically anti-artistic, a way of being that makes everything poorer, thinner, consumptive. And in fact history is full of such anti-artists, people starved of life, who by necessity take things into themselves, drain them, and make them leaner. The genuine Christian is an example, Pascal for one: a Christian who was also an artist does not occur… Don’t be childish and object with Raphael or some homeopathic Christians of the nineteenth century: Raphael said yes, Raphael did yes, so Raphael was not a Christian…

10 What do the opposing concepts Apollonian and Dionysian mean, which I introduced into aesthetics, both understood as kinds of intoxication?—Above all, Apollonian intoxication keeps the eye excited, so that it gains the power of vision. Painters, sculptors, and epic poets are visionaries in the fullest sense. In the Dionysian state, by contrast, the whole system of emotions is excited and heightened. It discharges all its means of expression at once, and it drives out at the same time the power of representing, imitating, transfiguring, and transforming, every kind of mimicry and acting. What remains essential is the ease of transformation, the inability not to react (—much like certain hysterics, who also step into any role at the slightest hint). It is impossible for the Dionysian person to miss any suggestion; he overlooks no sign of emotion; he has the highest degree of the instinct for understanding and guessing, just as he has the highest degree of skill at communicating. He enters every skin, every emotion; he is constantly changing himself.—Music as we understand it today is likewise a total excitement and discharge of the emotions, but still only the leftover of a much fuller world of emotional expression, a mere remainder of Dionysian play-acting. To make music possible as a separate art, a number of senses have been shut down, above all the muscle sense (at least relatively; to a certain degree all rhythm still speaks to our muscles), so that a person no longer imitates and acts out in his body everything he feels right away. Even so, this is the truly Dionysian normal state, in any case the original state; music is the slowly achieved specialization of this state, at the expense of the most closely related abilities.

11 The actor, the mime, the dancer, the musician, and the lyric poet are fundamentally related in their instincts and in themselves one, but they have gradually specialized and separated from each other—even to the point of contradiction. The lyric poet stayed united with the musician longest; the actor with the dancer.—The architect represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollonian state. Here it is the great act of will, the will that moves mountains, the intoxication of great will, that calls for art. The most powerful people have always inspired the architects; the architect was always under the suggestion of power. A building is meant to make pride, victory over gravity, and the will to power visible; architecture is a kind of eloquence of power in forms, sometimes persuading, even flattering, sometimes simply commanding. The highest feeling of power and security is expressed in whatever has the grand style. Power that no longer needs proof; that scorns to please; that is slow to answer; that feels no witness around it; that lives unaware that there is any opposition to it; that rests in itself, fatalistic, a law among laws: that is how the grand style speaks of itself.—

12 I read the life of Thomas Carlyle, a farce that happened without anyone knowing or meaning it, a heroic and moral interpretation of upset stomachs.—Carlyle, a man of strong words and poses, an orator by necessity, constantly irritated by the longing for a strong faith and the feeling that he is incapable of it (—in that a typical Romantic!). Longing for a strong faith is not proof of a strong faith; it is the opposite. If you have such a faith, you can allow yourself the fine luxury of skepticism: you are secure enough, firm enough, tied down enough for it. Carlyle numbs something in himself with the fortissimo of his reverence for people of strong faith and with his fury against the less simple-minded: he needs noise. A constant, passionate dishonesty toward himself—that is his distinguishing trait; that is what makes him interesting, and keeps him so.—Of course, in England he is admired precisely for his honesty… Well, that is English; and considering that the English are the people of perfect cant, it is even fair, and not just understandable. At bottom Carlyle is an English atheist who makes it a point of honor not to be one.

13 Emerson.—Much more enlightened, more wide-ranging, more many-sided, more refined than Carlyle, and above all happier… A man who instinctively feeds only on ambrosia, who leaves behind whatever is indigestible in things. Compared with Carlyle, a man of taste.—Carlyle, who was very fond of him, still said of him: “He doesn’t give us enough to bite on.” That may be rightly said, but it does not count against Emerson.—Emerson has that kind and witty cheerfulness which discourages all seriousness. He simply has no idea how old he already is and how young he will still be—he could say of himself, in words of Lope de Vega, “I succeed myself.” His mind always finds reasons to be content and even grateful; and sometimes he touches the cheerful transcendence of that decent fellow who came back from a lovers’ rendezvous as though the business had gone well. “Though strength may be lacking,” he said gratefully, “the pleasure still deserves praise.”—

14 Anti-Darwin.—As for the famous struggle for life, so far it seems to me more asserted than proved. It does occur, but as an exception. The overall look of life is not need or hunger but wealth, abundance, even absurd waste—where there is fighting, it is a fight for power… Don’t confuse Malthus with nature.—But suppose this struggle exists—and in fact it does occur—then unfortunately it turns out the opposite of what Darwin’s school wants, and perhaps of what one might want along with them: namely, it turns out to the disadvantage of the strong, the privileged, the fortunate exceptions. Species do not grow in perfection: the weak keep becoming master over the strong—the reason is that they are the great majority, and they are also cleverer… Darwin forgot intelligence (—that is English!); the weak have more intelligence… You have to need intelligence in order to get it—you lose it when you no longer need it. Whoever has strength gets rid of intelligence (—“let it go!” people think in Germany today, “the Empire must stay with us anyway”…). By intelligence, as you can see, I mean caution, patience, cunning, disguise, great self-control, and everything that counts as mimicry (a large part of so-called virtue belongs to the latter).

15 Case studies of psychologists.—This man is a judge of human nature: why does he actually study people? He wants to snatch small advantages over them, or big ones—he is a politician!… That man over there is also a judge of human nature, and you say he wants nothing for himself from it, that he is a great “impersonal one.” Look closer! Maybe he wants an even worse advantage: to feel superior to people, to be able to look down on them, to no longer be mistaken for one of them. This “impersonal one” is a despiser of people; and the first man is the more humane type, whatever appearances may say. At least he puts himself on the same level; he puts himself in among them…

16 The Germans’ psychological tact seems to me called into question by a whole series of cases, and my modesty keeps me from presenting the list. In one case I do have a big occasion to support my claim: I hold it against the Germans that they misjudged Kant and his “philosophy of back doors,” as I call it—he was not the type of intellectual honesty.—The other thing I cannot stand to hear is a notorious “and”: the Germans say “Goethe and Schiller”—I fear they say “Schiller and Goethe”… Don’t people know this Schiller yet?—There are even worse “ands”; I have heard with my own ears, though only among university professors, “Schopenhauer and Hartmann.”

17 The most intellectual people, provided they are also the most courageous, also experience by far the most painful tragedies. But for that very reason they honor life, because it sets its greatest opposition against them.

18 On “intellectual conscience.”—Nothing seems to me rarer today than real hypocrisy. I strongly suspect that the mild air of our culture is not good for this plant. Hypocrisy belongs to ages of strong belief, when even if you were forced to put on a show of some other belief, you did not let go of the belief you had. Today you let it go; or, more commonly still, you acquire a second belief as well—in either case you stay honest. Without doubt a much greater number of convictions is possible today than before: possible, that is, permitted, that is, harmless. Out of this comes tolerance toward oneself.—Tolerance toward oneself allows several convictions; these live together peacefully—they take care, like everyone today, not to compromise themselves. What compromises you today? Being consistent. Going in a straight line. Having fewer than five meanings. Being genuine… I am very afraid that modern people are simply too comfortable for some vices, so that these are dying out altogether. All evil that depends on a strong will—and perhaps there is no evil without strength of will—degenerates into virtue in our lukewarm air… The few hypocrites I got to know were imitating hypocrisy: they were actors, like almost every tenth person these days.—

19 Beautiful and ugly.—Nothing is more conditional, let us say more limited, than our sense of the beautiful. Anyone who wanted to think of it apart from people’s delight in people would immediately lose the ground under his feet. The “beautiful in itself” is merely a word, not even a concept. In the beautiful a person sets himself up as the measure of perfection; in select cases he worships himself in it. A species cannot do anything other than say yes to itself alone in this way. Its lowest instinct, that of self-preservation and self-expansion, still radiates out even in such sublimities. A person believes that the world itself is heaped with beauty—he forgets that he is its cause. He alone has given it beauty—alas, only a very human, all-too-human beauty… At bottom a person mirrors himself in things; he considers everything beautiful that throws his image back at him. The judgment “beautiful” is the vanity of his species… A small suspicion may whisper this question in the skeptic’s ear: is the world really made more beautiful by the fact that humans take it to be beautiful? He has made it human: that is all. But nothing, nothing at all, guarantees us that humans should be the model of the beautiful. Who knows how he looks in the eyes of a higher judge of taste? Perhaps daring? Perhaps even amusing? Perhaps a little arbitrary?… “Oh Dionysus, divine one, why are you pulling me by the ears?” Ariadne once asked her philosopher lover in one of those famous dialogues on Naxos. “I find a kind of humor in your ears, Ariadne: why aren’t they even longer?”

20 Nothing is beautiful; only man is beautiful: all aesthetics rests on this naïveté; it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us add its second truth right away: nothing is ugly except degenerating man—with that, the realm of aesthetic judgment is bounded.—Figured out physiologically, everything ugly weakens and saddens people. It reminds them of decay, danger, powerlessness; they actually lose strength from it. You can measure the effect of the ugly with a dynamometer. Wherever a person is pushed down at all, he senses that something “ugly” is near. His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride—these fall with the ugly and rise with the beautiful… In both cases we draw a conclusion; the premises for it are piled up in enormous quantity in instinct. The ugly is understood as a hint and symptom of degeneration; whatever reminds us of degeneration, even in the most distant way, produces in us the judgment “ugly.” Every sign of exhaustion, heaviness, age, tiredness; every kind of lack of freedom, such as cramp or paralysis; above all the smell, color, and form of dissolution and rot, even when diluted to a mere symbol—all of this calls up the same reaction, the value judgment “ugly.” A hatred leaps out there: whom does man hate there? But there is no doubt: the decline of his own type. He hates there out of the deepest instinct of his species; in this hatred are shuddering, caution, depth, far-sightedness—it is the deepest hatred there is. Because of it, art is deep…

21 Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer, the last German who counts (who is a European event, like Goethe, like Hegel, like Heinrich Heine, and not merely a local, “national” one), is a case of the first rank for a psychologist: namely, as a maliciously brilliant attempt to bring into the field, in support of a nihilistic devaluation of life as a whole, precisely the opposing cases—the great self-affirmations of the “will to life,” the exuberant forms of life. One after another, he interpreted art, heroism, genius, beauty, great compassion, knowledge, the will to truth, and tragedy as consequences of the “denial” of the “will,” or of the will’s need for denial—the greatest psychological counterfeiting in history, apart from Christianity. Looked at more closely, in this he is only the heir of the Christian interpretation, except that he knew how to approve even what Christianity rejected, the great cultural facts of humanity, in a Christian, that is, nihilistic sense (namely as paths to “redemption,” as early forms of “redemption,” as stimulants of the need for “redemption”…).

22 I will take one single case. Schopenhauer speaks of beauty with a melancholy fervor—why, ultimately? Because he sees in it a bridge on which one gets further, or gets thirsty to get further… For him it is redemption from the “will” for moments—it entices toward redemption forever… Above all he praises it as the redeemer from the “focal point of the will,” from sexuality—in beauty he sees the drive to procreate denied… Strange saint! Someone contradicts you, and I fear it is nature. Why is there beauty in nature at all, in sound, color, scent, rhythmic movement? What drives beauty out?—Fortunately a philosopher also contradicts him. No lesser authority than the divine Plato (Schopenhauer himself calls him that) maintains a different claim: that all beauty stimulates procreation—that this is precisely the distinctive feature of its effect, from the most sensual up to the most spiritual…

23 Plato goes further. He says, with an innocence you need to be Greek to have, and not “Christian,” that there would be no Platonic philosophy at all if there were not such beautiful young men in Athens: it is only the sight of them that throws the philosopher’s soul into an erotic frenzy and gives it no rest until it has sunk the seed of all lofty things into such beautiful soil. Another strange saint!—you can’t believe your ears, even if you do trust Plato. At the very least you guess that philosophy was done differently in Athens, above all in public. Nothing is less Greek than the concept-cobweb-weaving of a hermit, the intellectual love of God in the manner of Spinoza. Philosophy in Plato’s style would be better defined as an erotic competition, as a further development and internalization of the old competitive gymnastics and what it presupposed… What finally grew out of Plato’s philosophical eroticism? A new art form of the Greek contest: dialectic.—I would also remind you, against Schopenhauer and in Plato’s honor, that the whole higher culture and literature of classical France also grew up on the soil of sexual interest. Everywhere in it you may look for gallantry, the senses, competition between the sexes, “woman”—you will never look in vain…

24 Art for art’s sake.—The fight against purpose in art is always a fight against the moralizing tendency in art, against its subordination to morality. Art for art’s sake means: “To the devil with morality!”—But even this hostility still shows the overwhelming power of the prejudice. If you have excluded the purpose of preaching morals and improving people from art, it does not follow by a long way that art has no purpose at all, no aim, no meaning—in short, that it is art for art’s sake, a worm biting its own tail. “Better no purpose at all than a moral purpose!”—that is mere passion talking. A psychologist asks instead: what does all art do? Doesn’t it praise? Doesn’t it glorify? Doesn’t it select? Doesn’t it bring things forward? In doing all this it strengthens or weakens certain valuations… Is this only a side effect? An accident? Something in which the artist’s instinct was not involved at all? Or is it rather the precondition for the artist being able to do what he does…? Is his deepest instinct aimed at art, or rather at the point of art, which is life? At the desirability of life?—Art is the great stimulant to life: how could anyone understand it as purposeless, aimless, art for art’s sake?—One question remains: art also brings out much of life’s ugliness, hardness, and questionable side—doesn’t that seem to put us off life?—And in fact there were philosophers who gave it this meaning: Schopenhauer taught “getting free of the will” as the overall aim of art, and he honored “putting us in a mood of resignation” as the great usefulness of tragedy.—But this—I have already hinted at it—is the pessimist’s way of seeing and an “evil eye”: we must appeal to the artists themselves. What does the tragic artist communicate of himself? Isn’t it precisely the state of being without fear of the terrible and questionable things he shows?—This state is itself highly desirable; whoever knows it honors it with the highest honors. He communicates it, he has to communicate it, provided he is an artist, a genius of communication. The bravery and freedom of feeling in front of a powerful enemy, a sublime hardship, a problem that arouses dread—this victorious state is what the tragic artist selects and glorifies. Before tragedy the warlike part of our soul celebrates its Saturnalia; the person who is used to suffering, who seeks out suffering, the heroic person, praises his existence with tragedy—to him alone the tragic poet offers the drink of this sweetest cruelty.—

25 Taking people as they come, keeping open house with your heart—that is generous, but it is only generous. You recognize the hearts capable of noble hospitality by the many curtained windows and closed shutters: they keep their best rooms empty. Why? Because they are expecting guests with whom one does not “make do.”

26 We no longer value ourselves enough when we communicate ourselves. Our real experiences are not chatty at all. They could not communicate themselves even if they wanted to. The reason is that they lack the word. What we have words for, we have already moved past. There is a grain of contempt in all talking. Language, it seems, was invented only for what is average, middling, communicable. With language the speaker already makes himself vulgar.—From a morality for the deaf and mute, and other philosophers.

27 “This image is enchantingly beautiful!”… The literary woman, unsatisfied, agitated, empty in heart and belly, listening at all times with painful curiosity to the command that whispers “either children or books” from the depths of her body: the literary woman, educated enough to understand the voice of nature even when it speaks Latin, and on the other hand vain and enough of a silly goose to also say to herself in secret, in French: “I will see myself, I will read myself, I will go into ecstasies, and I will say: is it possible that I had so much wit?”

28 The “impersonal ones” get their say.—“Nothing is easier for us than to be wise, patient, superior. We drip with the oil of indulgence and sympathy; we are absurdly fair; we forgive everything. For that very reason we ought to be a little stricter with ourselves; for that very reason we ought to cultivate in ourselves, from time to time, a small emotion, a small vice of passion. It may go hard with us; and among ourselves we perhaps laugh at the picture we present that way. But what can we do! We have no other form of self-overcoming left: this is our asceticism, our penance”… Getting personal—the virtue of the “impersonal one”…

29 From a doctoral examination.—“What is the task of all higher education?”—To turn the person into a machine.—“What is the means?”—He has to learn to be bored.—“How is that achieved?”—Through the concept of duty.—“Who is his model for it?”—The philologist: he teaches cramming.—“Who is the perfect person?”—The civil servant.—“Which philosophy gives the highest formula for the civil servant?”—Kant’s: the civil servant as thing-in-itself, set up as judge over the civil servant as appearance.—

30 The right to stupidity.—The tired worker who breathes slowly, who looks good-natured, who lets things go as they go: this typical figure, whom one now meets in all classes of society in the age of work (and of the “Empire”!—), claims art for himself today, books included, above all the newspaper—and how much more so beautiful nature, Italy… The evening person, with the “wild urges lulled to sleep” that Faust talks about, needs the summer resort, the seaside, the glaciers, Bayreuth… In ages like these art has a right to pure foolishness, as a kind of vacation for mind, wit, and feeling. Wagner understood that. Pure foolishness restores…

31 Another problem of diet.—The means with which Julius Caesar defended himself against sickliness and headaches: enormous marches, the simplest way of life, constant time outdoors, continual hardships—these are, on the large scale, the measures of preservation and protection in general against the extreme vulnerability of that subtle machine, working under the highest pressure, which is called genius.—

32 The immoralist speaks.—Nothing offends a philosopher’s taste more than man insofar as he wishes… If the philosopher sees man only in his doing, sees this bravest, craftiest, most enduring animal lost even in labyrinthine predicaments, how admirable man seems to him! He still speaks encouragement to him… But the philosopher despises man the wisher, also the “desirable” man—and in general everything desirable, all of man’s ideals. If a philosopher could be a nihilist, he would be one because he finds nothing behind all of man’s ideals. Or not even nothing—only the worthless, the absurd, the sick, the cowardly, the tired, every kind of dregs from the drained cup of his life… Man, who as a reality is so worthy of reverence—how is it that he deserves no respect as soon as he wishes? Does he have to pay for being so capable as a reality? Does he have to make up for his doing, the strain of head and will in all doing, by stretching his limbs in the imaginary and absurd?—The history of his desirables has so far been the shameful private parts of man: one should take care not to read in it too long. What justifies man is his reality—it will justify him forever. How much more is the real man worth compared with any merely wished-for, dreamed-up, fabricated, lied-into-existence man? Compared with any ideal man?… And only the ideal man offends the philosopher’s taste.

33 The natural value of egoism.—Selfishness is worth as much as the person who has it is worth physiologically: it can be worth a great deal, or it can be worthless and contemptible. Every individual can be looked at to see whether he represents the ascending or the descending line of life. Once you have decided that, you also have a standard for what his selfishness is worth. If he represents the rising line, then his value is indeed extraordinary—and for the sake of life as a whole, which takes a step forward with him, the care to preserve him and to create the best possible conditions for him may even be extreme. The single person, the “individual” as the people and philosophers have understood it so far, is after all an error: he is nothing in himself, no atom, no “link in the chain,” nothing merely inherited from the past—he is the whole one line of humanity all the way up to himself… If he represents the descending development, decay, chronic degeneration, sickness (—illnesses are, on the large scale, already results of decay, not its causes), then he has little value, and basic fairness demands that he take as little as possible away from those who have turned out well. He is only their parasite now…

34 Christian and anarchist.—When the anarchist, as mouthpiece of declining layers of society, demands “right,” “justice,” “equal rights” with fine indignation, he is only under the pressure of his lack of culture, which does not know how to grasp why he is actually suffering—what he is poor in: life… A drive to find causes is strong in him: someone must be to blame for his feeling bad… The “fine indignation” itself also does him good; it is a pleasure for all poor devils to grumble—it gives a small intoxication of power. Even complaint, complaining about oneself, can give life an appeal that makes it bearable: there is a subtler dose of revenge in every complaint. You reproach those who are different for your bad feeling—under some circumstances even for your own badness—as if it were a wrong, as if they enjoyed an illegitimate privilege. “If I am a scoundrel, you should be one too”: on this logic people make revolution.—Complaining is good for nothing in any case: it comes from weakness. Whether you blame others or yourself for your bad feeling—the socialist does the former, the Christian for example the latter—makes no real difference. What they have in common, let us also say the undignified part, is that someone is supposed to be to blame for one’s suffering—in short, that the sufferer prescribes himself the honey of revenge against his suffering. The objects of this need for revenge, as a need for pleasure, are causes picked up as the occasion arises: the sufferer finds causes everywhere to cool his small revenge—if he is a Christian, to say it again, he finds them in himself… The Christian and the anarchist—both are decadents.—But even when the Christian condemns, slanders, and dirties the “world,” he does it out of the same instinct from which the socialist worker condemns, slanders, and dirties society: the “Last Judgment” itself is still the sweet comfort of revenge—the revolution, as the socialist worker also expects it, only imagined somewhat further off… The “beyond” itself—what is a beyond for, if not as a means of dirtying the here and now?…

35 A criticism of the morality of decadence. An “altruistic” morality, a morality in which self-interest wastes away, is always a bad sign. This applies to individuals, and especially to whole peoples. When self-interest starts to fail, the best thing is missing. Instinctively choosing what harms you, being drawn to “disinterested” motives, comes close to a formula for decadence. “Not looking out for your own advantage”—that is just the moral fig leaf covering a very different, physiological fact: “I no longer know how to find my own advantage.” The instincts are falling apart!—Once a person becomes altruistic, it is all over for him.—Instead of saying frankly, “I’m no longer worth anything,” the moral lie in the decadent person’s mouth says, “Nothing is worth anything—life is worth nothing”… Such a judgment is ultimately a great danger. It is contagious—across the whole diseased soil of society, it soon grows into a tropical jungle of concepts, now as religion (Christianity), now as philosophy (Schopenhauerism). Under some circumstances, the fumes of these poisonous trees, grown from decay, poison life far and wide, for thousands of years…

36 Morality for doctors.—A sick person is a parasite on society. In a certain condition, it is indecent to go on living. Continuing to vegetate in cowardly dependence on doctors and medical treatments, after the meaning of life and the right to live have been lost, should meet with deep contempt from society. Doctors, in turn, should communicate this contempt—not prescriptions, but a fresh dose of disgust at their patient every day… A new responsibility must be created, the doctor’s responsibility, for every case in which the highest interest of life, of life on the rise, calls for the most ruthless suppression and pushing aside of degenerating life—for example, concerning the right to reproduce, the right to be born, the right to live… To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death freely chosen, death at the right time, carried out clearly and cheerfully, among children and witnesses: so that a real farewell is still possible, with the person saying goodbye still present; and likewise a real assessment of what has been achieved and wanted, a summing up of life—all in contrast to the pitiful, horrifying comedy Christianity has made of the hour of death. Christianity must never be forgiven for exploiting the dying person’s weakness to rape his conscience, for misusing the very manner of his death to pass value judgments on the person and his past!—Here, in spite of all the cowardice of prejudice, the first task is to establish the right assessment—that is, the physiological assessment—of so-called natural death, which in the end is only an “unnatural” death too, a suicide. No one ever dies through anyone but himself. Only, this is death under the most contemptible conditions, an unfree death, a death at the wrong time, a coward’s death. Out of love for life, we should want death differently: freely, consciously, not by chance, not by surprise… Finally, a piece of advice for the pessimists and other decadents. It is not in our power to prevent being born, but we can make up for this mistake—for sometimes it is a mistake. When you do away with yourself, you do the most respectable thing there is: you almost earn the right to live by doing it… Society—what am I saying! Life itself benefits more from this than from any “life” of self-denial, anemia, and other virtues—you have freed others from the sight of you, freed life from an objection to it… Pure, fresh pessimism proves itself only through the pessimists’ refutation of themselves: they must go one step further in their logic, not just deny life with “will and representation,” as Schopenhauer did—they must first deny Schopenhauer… Incidentally, however contagious pessimism is, it still does not increase the total sickness of an age or a generation: it expresses that sickness. You fall victim to it as you fall victim to cholera: you must already have a sufficiently sickly disposition. Pessimism itself does not produce a single additional decadent. I recall the statistical finding that the years in which cholera rages do not differ from other years in the total number of deaths.

37 Have we become more moral?—As might have been expected, all the ferocity of moral stupidity—which in Germany, as everyone knows, counts as morality itself—has thrown itself against my idea of “beyond good and evil.” I could tell some nice stories about that. Above all, people asked me to consider our age’s “undeniable superiority” in moral judgment, the real progress we have made here: compared with us, they said, Cesare Borgia certainly should not be presented as a “higher human being,” a kind of overman, as I present him… A Swiss editor at the “Bund” went so far as to “understand” my work as a proposal to abolish all decent feelings, while expressing his respect for the courage it took to dare such a thing. Much obliged!—In reply, I take the liberty of asking whether we really have become more moral. That everyone believes it is already an objection… We modern people, very delicate, very easily hurt, giving and receiving a hundred kinds of consideration, really do imagine that the tender humanity we embody, the agreement we have reached about sparing one another, helping one another, trusting one another, is a positive advance; that it puts us far above the people of the Renaissance. But every age thinks this way, has to think this way. What is certain is that we could not put ourselves into Renaissance conditions, or even imagine ourselves there: our nerves could not stand that reality, not to mention our muscles. But this inability proves no progress, only a different, later constitution, a weaker, more delicate, more vulnerable one, which necessarily produces a morality full of consideration. Imagine away our delicacy and lateness, our physiological aging, and our morality of “humanization” would immediately lose its value too—no morality has value in itself: it would make us despise ourselves. On the other hand, let us not doubt that we modern people, with our thickly padded humanity, which refuses to bump into a single stone, would give Cesare Borgia’s contemporaries a comedy to die laughing at. In fact, with our modern “virtues,” we are extraordinarily funny without meaning to be… The decline of hostile instincts, instincts that arouse distrust—and that would be our “progress”—is only one consequence of the general decline in vitality: it takes a hundred times more effort, more caution, to maintain an existence so dependent on conditions, so late in life. People help one another; everyone is to some extent a patient, and everyone a nurse. Then they call that “virtue”—among people who knew life differently, fuller, more extravagant, more overflowing, it would have had another name, perhaps “cowardice,” “wretchedness,” “old women’s morality”… Our milder customs—this is my proposition, my new idea, if you like—are a consequence of decline; conversely, harsh and terrifying customs can result from an excess of life. For then much can be risked, much challenged, much wasted too. What once gave life its spice would be poison to us… We are also too old, too late, to be indifferent—that too is a form of strength. Our morality of sympathetic feeling, against which I was the first to warn, what could be called “moral impressionism,” is one more expression of the physiological oversensitivity characteristic of everything decadent. That movement which tried to present itself scientifically through Schopenhauer’s morality of pity—a very unsuccessful attempt!—is the real movement of decadence in morality. As such, it is deeply related to Christian morality. Strong ages, noble cultures, see something contemptible in pity, in “love of one’s neighbor,” in a lack of self and self-esteem.—Ages must be measured by their positive strengths—and by that measure, the Renaissance, so extravagant and so full of disastrous consequences, proves to be the last great age. And we, we modern people, with our anxious care for ourselves and love of our neighbors, with our virtues of hard work, modest expectations, honesty, and scientific method—collecting, economical, mechanical—prove to be a weak age… Our virtues are conditioned, are called for, by our weakness… “Equality,” a certain actual growing alike that merely finds expression in the theory of “equal rights,” essentially belongs to decline. The gap between one person and another, one class and another, the variety of types, the will to be oneself, to stand apart, what I call the passion of distance, belongs to every strong age. Today the tension, the distance spanned between the extremes, is growing smaller and smaller—the extremes themselves finally blur into similarity… All our political theories and constitutions, certainly including the “German Empire,” are conclusions, necessary consequences, of decline. The unconscious influence of decadence has gained control even over the ideals of particular sciences. My objection to all sociology in England and France remains that its experience is limited to the decaying forms of society, and that it quite innocently takes its own instincts of decay as the standard for sociological value judgments. Declining life, the decrease in all organizing power—that is, power that separates, opens gaps, puts some below and others above—is formulated as an ideal in today’s sociology… Our socialists are decadents, but Mr. Herbert Spencer is a decadent too—he sees the victory of altruism as something desirable!…

38 My idea of freedom.—Sometimes a thing’s value lies not in what we achieve with it but in what we pay for it—what it costs us. Here is an example. Liberal institutions stop being liberal as soon as they have been achieved: after that, nothing harms freedom more badly or more thoroughly than liberal institutions. We know what they bring about: they undermine the will to power, they turn leveling mountains and valleys into a moral principle, they make people small, cowardly, and pleasure-seeking—with them, the herd animal always wins. Liberalism: in plain language, becoming herd animals… While these same institutions are still being fought for, they have quite different effects; then they really do promote freedom powerfully. Look more closely, and it is war that produces these effects, the war for liberal institutions, which, as war, keeps the illiberal instincts alive. And war teaches freedom. For what is freedom? Having the will to take responsibility for oneself. Maintaining the distance that separates us. Becoming more indifferent to hardship, severity, deprivation, even to life. Being ready to sacrifice people to one’s cause, oneself included. Freedom means that the masculine instincts, the instincts that delight in war and victory, rule over other instincts, for example the instincts of “happiness.” The person who has become free, and still more the spirit that has become free, tramples on the contemptible kind of comfort that shopkeepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen, and other democrats dream of. A free person is a warrior.—What measures freedom, in individuals as in peoples? The resistance that must be overcome, the effort it takes to stay on top. The highest type of free person should be sought where the greatest resistance is constantly overcome: five steps away from tyranny, right on the threshold of the danger of slavery. This is true psychologically, if by “tyrants” we mean relentless and terrible instincts that call for the greatest possible authority and discipline against them—the finest example is Julius Caesar. It is also true politically: just take a walk through history. Peoples who were worth something, who became worth something, never did so under liberal institutions. Great danger made them into something deserving of reverence, danger that first teaches us what our resources, our virtues, our defenses and weapons, our minds are—danger that forces us to be strong… First principle: you must need to be strong; otherwise you never will be.—Those great hothouses for strong people, for the strongest kind of person there has ever been, the aristocratic communities of the kind found in Rome and Venice, understood freedom in exactly the sense in which I understand the word freedom: as something you have and do not have, something you want, something you conquer…

39 A criticism of modernity.—Our institutions are no good anymore: everyone agrees on that. But that is our fault, not theirs. Now that we have lost all the instincts from which institutions grow, we are losing institutions altogether, because we are no longer fit for them. Democracy has always been the declining form of organizing power: already in “Human, All Too Human” 1, 318, I described modern democracy, along with its halfway forms such as the “German Empire,” as a form of the state’s decay. For institutions to exist, there must be a kind of will, instinct, command, anti-liberal to the point of viciousness: the will for tradition, for authority, for responsibility extending centuries ahead, for solidarity among chains of generations reaching forward and backward without end. Where this will exists, something like the Roman Empire is founded; or like Russia, the only power today that has endurance in its body, that can wait, that can still promise something—Russia, the opposite of Europe’s pitiful fragmentation into little states and its nervousness, which entered a critical phase with the founding of the German Empire… The whole West no longer has the instincts from which institutions grow, from which a future grows: perhaps nothing goes so much against the grain of its “modern spirit.” People live for today, they live very fast—they live very irresponsibly: this is precisely what they call “freedom.” What makes institutions into institutions is despised, hated, rejected: people think they are in danger of a new slavery as soon as the word “authority” is even spoken. That is how far decadence has gone in our politicians’ and political parties’ instinct for values: they instinctively prefer what breaks things apart, what speeds up the end… Modern marriage is evidence. Clearly, all reason has disappeared from modern marriage: but that is no objection to marriage, only to modernity. The reason behind marriage lay in the man’s sole legal responsibility: that gave marriage weight, whereas today it limps on both legs. The reason behind marriage lay in its being indissoluble in principle: that gave it an emphasis that could make itself heard against the accidents of feeling, passion, and the moment. It also lay in families’ responsibility for choosing the partners. By growing more tolerant toward marriage for love, people have actually eliminated marriage’s foundation, what first makes it an institution. You never, ever base an institution on a personal peculiarity; as I said, you do not base marriage on “love.” You base it on the sexual drive, on the drive to own property (wife and child as property), on the drive to rule, which keeps organizing the smallest structure of rule for itself, the family; which needs children and heirs to maintain an achieved degree of power, influence, and wealth physiologically too, to prepare for long-term tasks, for solidarity of instinct across centuries. Marriage as an institution already includes affirmation of the greatest, most lasting form of organization: if society itself cannot, as a whole, stand guarantee for itself into the most distant generations, marriage has no meaning at all.—Modern marriage lost its meaning—so people abolish it.—

40 The worker question.—The stupidity—really the degeneration of instinct that causes all stupidity today—lies in the very existence of a worker question. You do not ask questions about certain things: the first command of instinct.—I cannot see at all what people intend to do with the European worker, now that they have made him into a question. He is doing far too well not to ask for more, step by step, to make more immodest demands. In the end, he has the great weight of numbers on his side. The hope that a modest, self-sufficient kind of person, a Chinese type, might develop into a class here is completely gone; and that would have made sense, that would actually have been necessary. What have people done?—Everything to destroy even the conditions for it in the bud. With the most irresponsible thoughtlessness, they have utterly destroyed the instincts through which a worker becomes possible as a class, possible to himself. They have made the worker fit for military service, given him the right to organize and the right to vote politically: is it any wonder that the worker already feels his existence to be a state of distress—in moral terms, an injustice? But what do people want? I ask again. If you want an end, you must also want the means: if you want slaves, you are a fool to train them to be masters.—

41 “Freedom that I do not mean…” In times like ours, being left to your instincts is one more disaster. These instincts contradict, disrupt, and destroy one another; I have already defined modernity as physiological self-contradiction. A rational education would require that at least one of these systems of instinct be paralyzed under iron pressure, allowing another to gain strength, become strong, become master. Today the individual would first have to be made possible by being pruned: possible, that is, whole… The opposite happens: independence, free development, letting things take their course, are demanded most hotly by precisely those for whom no restraint would be too strict—this applies in politics and in art. But that is a symptom of decadence: our modern idea of “freedom” is one more proof of the degeneration of instinct.—

42 Where belief is needed.—Nothing is rarer among moralists and saints than honesty; perhaps they say the opposite, perhaps they believe it themselves. For when a belief is more useful, more effective, more convincing than conscious hypocrisy, instinct soon turns hypocrisy into innocence: the first principle for understanding great saints. With philosophers, another kind of saint, the whole trade likewise requires them to admit only certain truths: namely, those on whose basis their trade has public approval—in Kant’s terms, truths of practical reason. They know what they have to prove; in that respect they are practical—they recognize one another by their agreement about “the truths.”—“You shall not lie”—in plain language: take care, Mr. Philosopher, not to tell the truth…

43 A word in the conservatives’ ear.—What people did not know before, what they know today, or could know: regression, a return in any sense or to any degree, is not possible at all. We physiologists, at least, know this. But all priests and moralists have believed in it—they wanted to bring humanity back, screw it back, to an earlier level of virtue. Morality was always a bed of Procrustes. Even politicians have imitated the preachers of virtue here: even today there are parties whose dream and goal is for everything to move backward like a crab. But no one is free to be a crab. There is no help for it: we must go forward, which means step by step further into decadence (—this is my definition of modern “progress”…). You can hold this development back and, by holding it back, dam up degeneration itself, let it accumulate, make it more violent and sudden: you can do no more.—

44 My idea of genius.—Great men, like great ages, are explosives in which an enormous force has been stored up. Historically and physiologically, they always presuppose a long process of collecting, accumulating, saving, and preserving for their sake—a long time without an explosion. Once the tension in the mass has grown too great, the most accidental stimulus is enough to call “genius,” the “deed,” a great destiny into the world. What do surroundings, historical period, the “spirit of the age,” or “public opinion” matter then?—Take Napoleon’s case. The France of the Revolution, and even more the France before the Revolution, would have produced from itself the opposite type to Napoleon’s: it did produce that type. And because Napoleon was different, the heir of a stronger, longer, older civilization than the one going up in smoke and falling to pieces in France, he became master here; he alone was master here. Great people are necessary; the age in which they appear is accidental. They almost always become masters of their age simply because they are stronger, because they are older, because the accumulation that prepared for them went on longer. The relation between a genius and his age is like that between strong and weak, also like that between old and young: comparatively, the age is always much younger, thinner, less mature, less sure of itself, more childish.—That people in France think very differently about this today (in Germany too, but that does not matter), that the theory of the social environment, a truly neurotic theory, has become sacred and almost scientific there, finding believers even among physiologists—that “doesn’t smell good,” it gives you sad thoughts.—People in England understand it no differently, but no one will be upset about that. The Englishman has only two ways of coming to terms with genius and the “great man”: either democratically, in Buckle’s manner, or religiously, in Carlyle’s.—The danger in great people and great ages is extraordinary; exhaustion of every kind, sterility, follows right on their heels. The great person is an end; the great age, the Renaissance for example, is an end. Genius—in work, in action—is necessarily a spendthrift: its greatness lies in spending itself… The instinct for self-preservation is, as it were, disconnected; the overwhelming pressure of the forces pouring out forbids any such care and caution. People call this “self-sacrifice”; they praise its “heroism,” its indifference to its own well-being, its devotion to an idea, a great cause, a fatherland: all misunderstandings… It pours out, it overflows, it uses itself up, it does not spare itself—inevitably, disastrously, involuntarily, as a river bursts its banks involuntarily. But because people owe so much to such explosives, they have given them much in return, for example a kind of higher morality… That is how human gratitude works: it misunderstands its benefactors.—

45 The criminal and related types.—The criminal type is the strong person under unfavorable conditions, a strong person made sick. He lacks the wilderness, a certain freer, more dangerous nature and way of life, in which everything that serves as a weapon or defense in the strong person’s instinct has its rightful place. Society has outlawed his virtues; the liveliest drives he brought with him soon grow together with depressing emotions, with suspicion, fear, dishonor. But this is almost a recipe for physiological degeneration. Someone who has to do what he does best, what he most wants to do, in secret, with prolonged tension, caution, cunning, becomes anemic. And because his instincts never bring him anything but danger, persecution, disaster, his feeling toward these instincts also changes—he feels them as a doom. It is society, our tame, mediocre, castrated society, in which a naturally vigorous person coming from the mountains or the adventures of the sea necessarily degenerates into a criminal. Or almost necessarily: for there are cases in which such a person proves stronger than society: the Corsican Napoleon is the most famous case. Dostoevsky’s testimony matters for the problem before us—Dostoevsky, incidentally the only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn: he is one of the happiest discoveries of my life, even more than my discovery of Stendhal. This deep man, who was ten times right to look down on the shallow Germans, experienced the Siberian convicts among whom he lived for a long time, all serious criminals with no way back to society, quite differently from what he himself expected—roughly, as carved from the best, hardest, most valuable wood that grows anywhere on Russian soil. Let us generalize the criminal’s case: let us think of people who, for whatever reason, lack public approval, who know that they are not seen as doing good or being useful—that Chandala feeling of not being considered equal, but outcast, unworthy, polluting. All such people have the color of the underground on their thoughts and actions; everything about them becomes paler than in those whose lives rest in daylight. But almost all the ways of life we honor today once lived in this half-tomb atmosphere: the scientific character, the artist, the genius, the free spirit, the actor, the merchant, the great explorer… As long as the priest counted as the highest type, every valuable kind of person was devalued… The time is coming—I promise it—when he will count as the lowest, as our Chandala, as the most dishonest, most indecent kind of person… I draw attention to how, even now, under the mildest rule of custom that has ever prevailed on earth, at least in Europe, every standing apart, every long, all-too-long stay below, every unusual, hard-to-see-through way of life brings a person close to the type that the criminal completes. All innovators of the spirit wear the Chandala’s pale, fatalistic mark on their foreheads for a time: not because others see them this way, but because they themselves feel the terrible gulf separating them from everything traditional and honored. Almost every genius goes through a “Catilinarian existence” as one stage of his development: a feeling of hatred, revenge, and revolt against everything that already exists, that is no longer becoming… Catiline—the form in which every Caesar first exists.—

46 Here the view is clear.—It can show greatness of soul when a philosopher stays silent; it can show love when he contradicts himself; a person seeking knowledge can practice a courtesy that lies. Someone said, not without subtlety, “It is unworthy of great hearts to spread the turmoil they feel”: we must only add that not fearing what is most unworthy can also show greatness of soul. A woman who loves sacrifices her honor; a person seeking knowledge who “loves” perhaps sacrifices his humanity; a god who loved became a Jew…

47 Beauty is no accident.—The beauty of a race or family, too, its grace and goodness in every gesture, is achieved through work: like genius, it is the final result of the accumulated work of generations. Great sacrifices must have been made to good taste; much must have been done and much left undone for its sake—seventeenth-century France is admirable in both respects. It must have served as a principle of selection in company, place, dress, sexual satisfaction; beauty must have been preferred to advantage, habit, opinion, laziness. The highest guideline: you must not “let yourself go,” even in front of yourself.—Good things are extremely costly, and the rule always holds that the person who has them is different from the person who acquires them. Everything good is inherited: what is not inherited is imperfect, is a beginning… In Athens at the time of Cicero, who expresses his surprise at this, men and young men far surpassed women in beauty: but what work and effort the male sex there had demanded of itself for centuries in the service of beauty!—We must not choose the wrong method here: merely training feelings and thoughts amounts to almost nothing (—here lies the great misunderstanding of German education, which is entirely illusory). The body must be persuaded first. Strictly maintaining meaningful, well-chosen gestures, committing to live only with people who do not “let themselves go,” is quite enough to become meaningful and well-chosen: in two or three generations everything has already been internalized. It is decisive for the fate of a people and of humanity that culture begin in the right place—not in the “soul” (as the disastrous superstition of priests and half-priests held): the right place is the body, gesture, diet, physiology; the rest follows from that… That is why the Greeks remain history’s first great cultural event—they knew, they did, what was needed. Christianity, which despised the body, has been humanity’s greatest misfortune so far.—

48 Progress as I understand it.—I too speak of a “return to nature,” though it is not really a going back but a climbing up—up into high, free, even terrible nature and naturalness, the kind that plays with great tasks, that is allowed to play with them… To put it in an image: Napoleon was a piece of “return to nature” as I understand it (for example in tactical matters, and even more, as military men know, in strategy).—But Rousseau—where did he actually want to return to? Rousseau, this first modern person, idealist and scoundrel in one, who needed moral “dignity” to bear the sight of himself; sick with unrestrained vanity and unrestrained self-contempt. This malformed creature who settled on the threshold of the modern age also wanted a “return to nature”—where, I ask again, did Rousseau want to return to?—I hate Rousseau even in the Revolution: it is the world-historical expression of this combination of idealist and scoundrel. The bloody farce in which this revolution played itself out, its “immorality,” concerns me little: what I hate is its Rousseau-style morality—the so-called “truths” of the Revolution, with which it still exerts its influence and wins over everything shallow and mediocre. The doctrine of equality!… But there is no poison more poisonous: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, while it is the end of justice… “Equal things to equals, unequal things to unequals—that would be justice’s true message; and, as follows from this, never make unequal things equal.”—The fact that this doctrine of equality was surrounded by such horror and blood has given this most “modern idea” a kind of glory and fiery glow, so that the Revolution as a spectacle has seduced even the noblest minds. In the end, that is no reason to respect it more.—I see only one person who felt about it as one must, with disgust—Goethe…

49 Goethe—not a German event but a European one: a grand attempt to overcome the eighteenth century by returning to nature, by climbing up to the naturalness of the Renaissance, a kind of self-overcoming on the part of that century.—He carried that century’s strongest instincts in himself: sentimentality, the worship of nature, the anti-historical, the idealistic, the unreal and revolutionary (—the latter is only a form of the unreal). He called to his aid history, natural science, antiquity, and likewise Spinoza, and above all practical activity. He surrounded himself with nothing but closed horizons. He did not detach himself from life; he placed himself in it. He was not fainthearted, and he took as much as possible upon himself, over himself, into himself. What he wanted was totality. He fought the splitting apart of reason, senses, feeling, and will (—preached in the most repellent scholasticism by Kant, Goethe’s opposite), he disciplined himself into wholeness, he created himself… In the middle of an age with an unreal outlook, Goethe was a convinced realist: he said yes to everything in this respect that was related to him—he had no greater experience than that most real of beings, called Napoleon. Goethe conceived of a person who is strong, highly cultivated, skilled in all physical things, holding himself in check, reverent toward himself, who may dare to allow himself the whole range and richness of naturalness, who is strong enough for this freedom; the person of tolerance, not out of weakness but out of strength, because he knows how to use for his own advantage even what would destroy the average nature; the person for whom nothing is forbidden anymore, except weakness, whether it is called vice or virtue… Such a spirit that has become free stands in the middle of the universe with a joyful and trusting fatalism, believing that only the individual is reprehensible, that in the whole everything is redeemed and affirmed—he no longer denies… But such a belief is the highest of all possible beliefs: I have given it the name Dionysus.—

50 You could say that in a certain sense the nineteenth century also strove for all that Goethe strove for as a person: a universality in understanding and approving, letting everything come close to oneself, a bold realism, a reverence for everything factual. How does it happen that the overall result is not a Goethe but a chaos, a nihilistic sigh, a not-knowing-which-way-to-turn, an instinct of fatigue that in practice keeps driving people to fall back on the eighteenth century? (—for example as the Romanticism of feeling, as altruism and hypersentimentality, as femininity in taste, as socialism in politics.) Isn’t the nineteenth century, especially at its close, just a strengthened, coarsened eighteenth century, that is, a century of decadence? So that Goethe, not just for Germany but for all of Europe, would have been only an episode, a beautiful waste?—But you misunderstand great people if you look at them from the wretched perspective of public usefulness. That one does not know how to draw any use from them may itself be part of their greatness…

51 Goethe is the last German for whom I feel reverence: he would have felt three things that I feel—we also understand each other about the “cross”… People often ask me why I actually write in German: I would be read worse nowhere than in the fatherland. But who knows in the end whether I even wish to be read today?—To create things on which time tries its teeth in vain; to strive for a small immortality in form and in substance—I have never been modest enough to ask less of myself. The aphorism and the maxim, in which I am a master, the first among Germans, are the forms of “eternity”; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book—what everyone else does not say in a book…

I have given humanity the deepest book it possesses, my Zarathustra; before long I will give it the most independent one.—

About this section

Skirmishes of an Untimely Man is part of Twilight of the Idols by Friedrich Nietzsche. This page sets the German original beside 2 direct-source translations, so any line can be checked against the source. It is chapter 10 of 12 in the work, which is kept in the European tradition.

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