Chapter VI: Part 6

But you will soon understand me.--Putting it shortly, there is reason enough, is there not, for us psychologists nowadays never getting from a certain mistrust of out _own selves_? Probably even we ourselves are still "too good" for our work, probably, whatever contempt we feel for this popular craze for morality, we ourselves are perhaps none the less its victims, prey, and slaves; probably it infects even us. Of what was that diplomat warning us, when he said to his colleagues: "Let us especially mistrust our first impulses, gentlemen! _they are almost always good_"? So should nowadays every psychologist talk to his colleagues. And thus we get back to our problem, which in point of fact does require from us a certain severity, a certain mistrust especially against "first impulses." The ascetic ideal in the service of projected emotional excess:--he who remembers the previous essay will already partially anticipate the essential meaning compressed into these above ten words. The thorough unswitching of the human soul, the plunging of it into terror, frost, ardour, rapture, so as to free it, as through some lightning shock, from all the smallness and pettiness of unhappiness, depression, and discomfort: what ways lead to _this_ goal? And which of these ways does so most safely?... At bottom all great emotions have this power, provided that they find a sudden outlet--emotions such as rage, fear, lust, revenge, hope, triumph, despair, cruelty; and, in sooth, the ascetic priest has had no scruples in taking into his service the whole pack of hounds that rage in the human kennel, unleashing now these and now those, with the same constant object of waking man out of his protracted melancholy, of chasing away, at any rate for a time, his dull pain, his shrinking misery, but always under the sanction of a religious interpretation and justification. This emotional excess has subsequently to be _paid for_, this is self-evident--it makes the ill more ill--and therefore this kind of remedy for pain is according to modern standards a "guilty" kind.

The dictates of fairness, however, require that we should all the more emphasise the fact that this remedy is applied with _a good conscience_, that the ascetic priest has prescribed it in the most implicit belief in its utility and indispensability;--often enough almost collapsing in the presence of the pain which he created;--that we should similarly emphasise the fact that the violent physiological revenges of such excesses, even perhaps the mental disturbances, are not absolutely inconsistent with the general tenor of this kind of remedy; this remedy, which, as we have shown previously, is _not_ for the purpose of healing diseases, but of fighting the unhappiness of that depression, the alleviation and deadening of which was its object. The object was consequently achieved. The keynote by which the ascetic priest was enabled to get every kind of agonising and ecstatic music to play on the fibres of the human soul--was, as every one knows, the exploitation of the feeling of "_guilt_." I have already indicated in the previous essay the origin of this feeling--as a piece of animal psychology and nothing else: we were thus confronted with the feeling of "guilt," in its crude state, as it were. It was first in the hands of the priest, real artist that he was in the feeling of guilt, that it took shape--oh, what a shape! "Sin"--for that is the name of the new priestly version of the animal "bad-conscience" (the inverted cruelty)--has up to the present been the greatest event in the history of the diseased soul: in "sin" we find the most perilous and fatal masterpiece of religious interpretation. Imagine man, suffering from himself, some way or other but at any rate physiologically, perhaps like an animal shut up in a cage, not clear as to the why and the wherefore! imagine him in his desire for reasons--reasons bring relief--in his desire again for remedies, narcotics at last, consulting one, who knows even the occult--and see, lo and behold, he gets a hint from his wizard, the ascetic priest, his _first_ hint on the "cause" of his trouble: he must search for it in _himself_, in his guiltiness, in a piece of the past, he must understand his very suffering as a _state of punishment_. He has heard, he has understood, has the unfortunate: he is now in the plight of a hen round which a line has been drawn. He never gets out of the circle of lines. The sick man has been turned into "the sinner"--and now for a few thousand years we never get away from the sight of this new invalid, of "a sinner"--shall we ever get away from it?--wherever we just look, everywhere the hypnotic gaze of the sinner always moving in one direction (in the direction of guilt, the _only_ cause of suffering); everywhere the evil conscience, this "_greuliche thier_,"[4] to use Luther's language; everywhere rumination over the past, a distorted view of action, the gaze of the "green-eyed monster" turned on all action; everywhere the wilful misunderstanding of suffering, its transvaluation into feelings of guilt, fear of retribution; everywhere the scourge, the hairy shirt, the starving body, contrition; everywhere the sinner breaking himself on the ghastly wheel of a restless and morbidly eager conscience; everywhere mute pain, extreme fear, the agony of a tortured heart, the spasms of an unknown happiness, the shriek for "redemption." In point of fact, thanks to this system of procedure, the old depression, dullness, and fatigue were absolutely conquered, life itself became _very_ interesting again, awake, eternally awake, sleepless, glowing, burnt away, exhausted and yet not tired--such was the figure cut by man, "the sinner," who was initiated into these mysteries. This grand old wizard of an ascetic priest fighting with depression--he had clearly triumphed, _his_ kingdom had come: men no longer grumbled at pain, men _panted_ after pain: "_More pain!_ More pain!" So for centuries on end shrieked the demand of his acolytes and initiates. Every emotional excess which hurt; everything which broke, overthrew, crushed, transported, ravished; the mystery of torture-chambers, the ingenuity of hell itself--all this was now discovered, divined, exploited, all this was at the service of the wizard, all this served to promote the triumph of his ideal, the ascetic ideal. "_My kingdom is not of this world_," quoth he, both at the beginning and at the end: had he still the right to talk like that?--Goethe has maintained that there are only thirty-six tragic situations: we would infer from that, did we not know otherwise, that Goethe was no ascetic priest. He--knows more.

21.

So far as all _this_ kind of priestly medicine-mongering, the "guilty" kind, is concerned, every word of criticism is superfluous. As for the suggestion that emotional excess of the type, which in these cases the ascetic priest is fain to order to his sick patients (under the most sacred euphemism, as is obvious, and equally impregnated with the sanctity of his purpose), has ever really been of use to any sick man, who, forsooth, would feel inclined to maintain a proposition of that character? At any rate, some understanding should be come to as to the expression "be of use." If you only wish to express that such a system of treatment has _reformed_ man, I do not gainsay it: I merely add that "reformed" conveys to my mind as much as "tamed," "weakened," "discouraged," "refined," "daintified," "emasculated" (and thus it means almost as much as injured). But when you have to deal principally with sick, depressed, and oppressed creatures, such a system, even granted that it makes the ill "better," under any circumstances also makes them more _ill_: ask the mad-doctors the invariable result of a methodical application of penance-torture, contrition, and salvation ecstasies. Similarly ask history. In every body politic where the ascetic priest has established this treatment of the sick, disease has on every occasion spread with sinister speed throughout its length and breadth. What was always the "result"? A shattered nervous system, in addition to the existing malady, and this in the greatest as in the smallest, in the individuals as in masses. We find, in consequence of the penance and redemption-training, awful epileptic epidemics, the greatest known to history, such as the St. Vitus and St. John dances of the Middle Ages; we find, as another phase of its after-effect, frightful mutilations and chronic depressions, by means of which the temperament of a nation or a city (Geneva, Bale) is turned once for all into its opposite;--this _training_, again, is responsible for the witch-hysteria, a phenomenon analogous to somnambulism (eight great epidemic outbursts of this only between 1564 and 1605);--we find similarly in its train those delirious death-cravings of large masses, whose awful "shriek," "_evviva la morte!_" was heard over the whole of Europe, now interrupted by voluptuous variations and anon by a rage for destruction, just as the same emotional sequence with the same intermittencies and sudden changes is now universally observed in every case where the ascetic doctrine of sin scores once more a great success (religious neurosis _appears_ as a manifestation of the devil, there is no doubt of it. What is it? _Quæritur_). Speaking generally, the ascetic ideal and its sublime-moral cult, this most ingenious, reckless, and perilous systematisation of all methods of emotional excess, is writ large in a dreadful and unforgettable fashion on the whole history of man, and unfortunately not only on history. I was scarcely able to put forward any other element which attacked the health and race efficiency of Europeans with more destructive power than did this ideal; it can be dubbed,without exaggeration, _the real fatality_ in the history of the health of the European man. At the most you can merely draw a comparison with the specifically German influence: I mean the alcohol poisoning of Europe, which up to the present has kept pace exactly with the political and racial pre–dominance of the Germans (where they inoculated their blood, there too did they inoculate their vice). Third in the series comes syphilis--_magno sed proximo intervallo_.

22.

The ascetic priest has, wherever he has obtained the mastery, corrupted the health of the soul, he has consequently also corrupted _taste in artibus et litteris_--he corrupts it still. "Consequently?" I hope I shall be granted this "consequently "; at any rate, I am not going to prove it first. One solitary indication, it concerns the arch-book of Christian literature, their real model, their "book-in-itself." In the very midst of the Græco-Roman splendour, which was also a splendour of books, face to face with an ancient world of writings which had not yet fallen into decay and ruin, at a time when certain books were still to be read, to possess which we would give nowadays half our literature in exchange, at that time the simplicity and vanity of Christian agitators (they are generally called Fathers of the Church) dared to declare: "We too have our classical literature, we _do not need that of the Greeks_"--and meanwhile they proudly pointed to their books of legends, their letters of apostles, and their apologetic tractlets, just in the same way that to-day the English "Salvation Army" wages its fight against Shakespeare and other "heathens" with an analogous literature. You already guess it, I do not like the "New Testament"; it almost upsets me that I stand so isolated in my taste so far as concerns this valued, this over-valued Scripture; the taste of two thousand years is _against_ me; but what boots it! "Here I stand! I cannot help myself"[5]--I have the courage of my bad taste. The Old Testament--yes, that is something quite different, all honour to the Old Testament! I find therein great men, an heroic landscape, and one of the rarest phenomena in the world, the incomparable naïveté _of the strong heart_; further still, I find a people. In the New, on the contrary, just a hostel of petty sects, pure rococo of the soul, twisting angles and fancy touches, nothing but conventicle air, not to forget an occasional whiff of bucolic sweetness which appertains to the epoch (_and_ the Roman province) and is less Jewish than Hellenistic. Meekness and braggadocio cheek by jowl; an emotional garrulousness that almost deafens; passionate hysteria, but no passion; painful pantomime; here manifestly every one lacked good breeding. How dare any one make so much fuss about their little failings as do these pious little fellows! No one cares a straw about it--let alone God. Finally they actually wish to have "the crown of eternal life," do all these little provincials! In return for what, in sooth? For what end? It is impossible to carry insolence any further. An immortal Peter! who could stand _him_! They have an ambition which makes one laugh: the _thing_ dishes up cut and dried his most personal life, his melancholies, and common-or-garden troubles, as though the Universe itself were under an obligation to bother itself about them, for it never gets tired of wrapping up God Himself in the petty misery in which its troubles are involved. And how about the atrocious form of this chronic hobnobbing with God? This Jewish, and not merely Jewish, slobbering and clawing importunacy towards God!--There exist little despised "heathen nations" in East Asia, from whom these first Christians could have learnt something worth learning, a little tact in worshiping; these nations do not allow themselves to say aloud the name of their God. This seems to me delicate enough, it is certain that it is _too_ delicate, and not only for primitive Christians; to take a contrast, just recollect Luther, the most "eloquent" and insolent peasant whom Germany has had, think of the Lutherian tone, in which he felt quite the most in his element during his _tête-à-têtes_ with God. Luther's opposition to the mediæval saints of the Church (in particular, against "that devil's hog, the Pope"), was, there is no doubt, at bottom the opposition of a boor, who was offended at the _good etiquette_ of the Church, that worship-etiquette of the sacerdotal code, which only admits to the holy of holies the initiated and the silent, and shuts the door against the boors. These definitely were not to be allowed a hearing in this planet--but Luther the peasant simply wished it otherwise; as it was, it was not German enough for him. He personally wished himself to talk direct, to talk personally, to talk "straight from the shoulder" with his God. Well, he's done it. The ascetic ideal, you will guess, was at no time and in no place, a school of good taste, still less of good manners--at the best it was a school for sacerdotal manners: that is, it contains in itself something which was a deadly enemy to all good manners. Lack of measure, opposition to measure, it is itself a "_non plus ultra_."

23.

The ascetic ideal has corrupted not only health and taste, there are also third, fourth, fifth, and sixth things which it has corrupted--I shall take care not to go through the catalogue (when should I get to the end?). I have here to expose not what this ideal effected; but rather only what it _means_, on what it is based, what lies lurking behind it and under it, that of which it is the provisional expression, an obscure expression bristling with queries and misunderstandings. And with _this_ object only in view I presumed "not to spare" my readers a glance at the awfulness of its results, a glance at its fatal results; I did this to prepare them for the final and most awful aspect presented to me by the question of the significance of that ideal. What is the significance of the _power_ of that ideal, the monstrousness of its power? Why is it given such an amount of scope? Why is not a better resistance offered against it? The ascetic ideal expresses one will: where is the opposition will, in which an opposition ideal expresses itself? The ascetic ideal has an aim-- this goal is, putting it generally, that all the other interests of human life should, measured by its standard, appear petty and narrow; it explains epochs, nations, men, in reference to this one end; it forbids any other interpretation, any other end; it repudiates, denies, affirms, confirms, only in the sense of its own interpretation (and was there ever a more thoroughly elaborated system of interpretation?); it subjects itself to no power, rather does it believe in its own precedence over every power--it believes that nothing powerful exists in the world that has not first got to receive from "it" a meaning, a right to exist, a value, as being an instrument in its work, a way and means to its end, to one end. Where is the _counterpart_ of this complete system of will, end, and interpretation? Why is the counterpart lacking? Where is the other "one aim"? But I am told it is not lacking, that not only has it fought a long and fortunate fight with that ideal, but that further it has already won the mastery over that ideal in all essentials: let our whole modern _science_ attest this--that modern science, which, like the genuine reality-philosophy which it is, manifestly believes in itself alone, manifestly has the courage to be itself, the will to be itself, and has got on well enough without God, another world, and negative virtues.

With all their noisy agitator-babble, however, they effect nothing with me; these trumpeters of reality are bad musicians, their voices do not come from the deeps with sufficient audibility, they are not the mouthpiece for the abyss of scientific knowledge--for to-day scientific knowledge is an abyss--the word "science," in such trumpeter-mouths, is a prostitution, an abuse, an impertinence. The truth is just the opposite from what is maintained in the ascetic theory. Science has to-day absolutely no belief in itself, let alone in an ideal superior to itself, and wherever science still consists of passion, love, ardour, suffering, it is not the opposition to that ascetic ideal, but rather the _incarnation of its latest and noblest form_. Does that ring strange? There are enough brave and decent working people, even among the learned men of to-day, who like their little corner, and who, just because they are pleased so to do, become at times indecently loud with their demand, that people to-day should be quite content, especially in science--for in science there is so much useful work to do. I do not deny it--there is nothing I should like less than to spoil the delight of these honest workers in their handiwork; for I rejoice in their work. But the fact of science requiring hard work, the fact of its having contented workers, is absolutely no proof of science as a whole having to-day one end, one will, one ideal, one passion for a great faith; the contrary, as I have said, is the case. When science is not the latest manifestation of the ascetic ideal--but these are cases of such rarity, selectness, and exquisiteness, as to preclude the general judgment being affected thereby--science is a _hiding-place_ for every kind of cowardice, disbelief, remorse, _despectio sui_, bad conscience--it is the very _anxiety_ that springs from having no ideal, the suffering from the _lack_ of a great love, the discontent with an enforced moderation. Oh, what does all science not cover to-day? How much, at any rate, does it not try to cover? The diligence of our best scholars, their senseless industry, their burning the candle of their brain at both ends--their very mastery in their handiwork--how often is the real meaning of all that to prevent themselves continuing to see a certain thing? Science as a self-anæsthetic: _do you know that_? You wound them--every one who consorts with scholars experiences this--you wound them sometimes to the quick through just a harmless word; when you think you are paying them a compliment you embitter them beyond all bounds, simply because you didn't have the _finesse_ to infer the real kind of customers you had to tackle, the _sufferer_ kind (who won't own up even to themselves what they really are), the dazed and unconscious kind who have only one fear--_coming to consciousness_.

24.

And now look at the other side, at those rare cases, of which I spoke, the most supreme idealists to be found nowadays among philosophers and scholars. Have we, perchance, found in them the sought-for _opponents_ of the ascetic ideal, its _anti-idealists_? In fact, they _believe_ themselves to be such, these "unbelievers" (for they are all of them that): it seems that this idea is their last remnant of faith, the idea of being opponents of this ideal, so earnest are they on this subject, so passionate in word and gesture;--but does it follow that what they believe must necessarily be _true_? We "knowers" have grown by degrees suspicious of all kinds of believers, our suspicion has step by step habituated us to draw just the opposite conclusions to what people have drawn before; that is to say, wherever the strength of a belief is particularly prominent to draw the conclusion of the difficulty of proving what is believed, the conclusion of its actual _improbability_. We do not again deny that "faith produces salvation": _for that very reason_ we do deny that faith _proves_ anything,--a strong faith, which produces happiness, causes suspicion of the object of that faith, it does not establish its "truth," it does establish a certain probability of--_illusion_. What is now the position in these cases? These solitaries and deniers of to-day; these fanatics in one thing, in their claim to intellectual cleanness; these hard, stern, continent, heroic spirits, who constitute the glory of our time; all these pale atheists, anti-Christians, immoralists, Nihilists; these sceptics, "ephectics," and "hectics" of the intellect (in a certain sense they are the latter, both collectively and individually); these supreme idealists of knowledge, in whom alone nowadays the intellectual conscience dwells and is alive--in point of fact they believe themselves as far away as possible from the ascetic ideal, do these "free, very free spirits": and yet, if I may reveal what they themselves cannot see--for they stand too near themselves: this ideal is simply _their_ ideal, they represent it nowadays and perhaps no one else, they themselves are its most spiritualised product, its most advanced picket of skirmishers and scouts, its most insidious delicate and elusive form of seduction.--If I am in any way a reader of riddles, then I will be one with this sentence: for some time past there have been no free spirits; _for they still believe in truth_. When the Christian Crusaders in the East came into collision with that invincible order of assassins, that order of free spirits _par excellence_, whose lowest grade lives in a state of discipline such as no order of monks has ever attained, then in some way or other they managed to get an inkling of that symbol and tally-word, that was reserved for the highest grade alone as their _secretum_, "Nothing is true, everything is allowed,"--in sooth, that was _freedom_ of thought, thereby was _taking leave_ of the very belief in truth. Has indeed any European, any Christian freethinker, ever yet wandered into this proposition and its labyrinthine consequences? Does he know _from experience_ the Minotauros of this den.--I doubt it--nay, I know otherwise. Nothing is more really alien to these "mono-fanatics," these _so-called_ "free spirits," than freedom and unfettering in that sense; in no respect are they more closely tied, the absolute fanaticism of their belief in truth is unparalleled. I know all this perhaps too much from experience at close quarters--that dignified philosophic abstinence to which a belief like that binds its adherents, that stoicism of the intellect, which eventually vetoes negation as rigidly as it does affirmation, that wish for standing still in front of the actual, the _factum brutum_, that fatalism in "_petits faits_" (ce petit faitalism, as I call it), in which French Science now attempts a kind of moral superiority over German, this renunciation of interpretation generally (that is, of forcing, doctoring, abridging, omitting, suppressing, inventing, falsifying, and all the other _essential_ attributes of interpretation)--all this, considered broadly, expresses the asceticism of virtue, quite as efficiently as does any repudiation of the senses (it is at bottom only a _modus_ of that repudiation.) But what forces it into that unqualified will for truth is the faith _in the ascetic ideal itself_, even though it take the form of its unconscious imperatives,--make no mistake about it, it is the faith, I repeat, in a _metaphysical_ value, an _intrinsic_ value of truth, of a character which is only warranted and guaranteed in this ideal (it stands and falls with that ideal). Judged strictly, there does not exist a science without its "hypotheses," the thought of such a science is inconceivable, illogical: a philosophy, a faith, must always exist first to enable science to gain thereby a direction, a meaning, a limit and method, a _right_ to existence. (He who holds a contrary opinion on the subject--he, for example, who takes it upon himself to establish philosophy "upon a strictly scientific basis"--has first got to "turn up-side-down" not only philosophy but also truth itself--the gravest insult which could possibly be offered to two such respectable females!) Yes, there is no doubt about it--and here I quote my _Joyful Wisdom_, cp. Book V. Aph. 344: "The man who is truthful in that daring and extreme fashion, which is the presupposition of the faith in science, _asserts thereby a different world_ from that of life, nature, and history; and in so far as he asserts the existence of that different world, come, must he not similarly repudiate its counterpart, this world, _our_ world? The belief on which our faith in science is based has remained to this day a metaphysical belief--even we knowers of to-day, we godless foes of metaphysics, we too take our fire from that conflagration which was kindled by a thousand-year-old faith, from that Christian belief, which was also Plato's belief, the belief that God is truth, that truth is _divine_.... But what if this belief becomes more and more incredible, what if nothing proves itself to be divine, unless it be error, blindness, lies--what if God, Himself proved Himself to be our _oldest lie_?"--It is necessary to stop at this point and to consider the situation carefully. Science itself now _needs_ a justification (which is not for a minute to say that there is such a justification). Turn in this context to the most ancient and the most modern philosophers: they all fail to realise the extent of the need of a justification on the part of the Will for Truth--here is a gap in every philosophy--what is it caused by? Because up to the present the ascetic ideal dominated all philosophy, because Truth was fixed as Being, as God, as the Supreme Court of Appeal, because Truth was not allowed to be a problem. Do you understand this "allowed"? From the minute that the belief in the God of the ascetic ideal is repudiated, there exists _a new problem_: the problem of the value of truth. The Will for Truth needed a critique--let us define by these words our own task---the value of truth is tentatively _to be called in question_.... (If this seems too laconically expressed, I recommend the reader to peruse again that passage from the _Joyful Wisdom_ which bears the title, "How far we also are still pious," Aph. 344, and best of all the whole fifth book of that work, as well as the Preface to _The Dawn of Day_.)

25.

No! You can't get round me with science, when I search for the natural antagonists of the ascetic ideal, when I put the question: "_Where_ is the opposed will in which the _opponent ideal_ expresses itself?" Science is not, by a long way, independent enough to fulfil this function; in every department science needs an ideal value, a power which creates values, and in whose _service_ it _can believe_ in itself --science itself never creates values. Its relation to the ascetic ideal is not in itself antagonistic; speaking roughly, it rather represents the progressive force in the inner evolution of that ideal. Tested more exactly, its opposition and antagonism are concerned not with the ideal itself, but only with that ideal's outworks, its outer garb, its masquerade, with its temporary hardening, stiffening, and dogmatising--it makes the life in the ideal free once more, while it repudiates its superficial elements. These two phenomena, science and the ascetic ideal, both rest on the same basis––I have already made this clear––the basis, I say, oft the same over-appreciation of truth (more accurately the same belief in the _impossibility_ of valuing and of criticising truth), and consequently they are _necessarily_ allies, so that, in the event of their being attacked, they must always be attacked and called into question together. A valuation of the ascetic ideal inevitably entails a valuation of science as well; lose no time in seeing this clearly, and be sharp to catch it! (_Art_, I am speaking provisionally, for I will treat it on some other occasion in greater detail,––art, I repeat, in which lying is sanctified and the _will for deception_ has good conscience on its side, is much more fundamentally opposed to the ascetic ideal than is science: Plato's instinct felt this––Plato, the greatest enemy of art which Europe has produced up to the present. Plato _versus_ Homer, that is the complete, the true antagonism––on the one side, the whole–hearted "transcendental," the great defamer of life; on the other, its involuntary panegyrist, the _golden_ nature. An artistic subservience to the service of the ascetic ideal is consequently the most absolute artistic _corruption_ that there can be, though unfortunately it is one of the most frequent phases, for nothing is more corruptible than an artist.) Considered physiologically, moreover, science rests on the same, basis as does the ascetic ideal: a certain _impoverishment of life_ is the presupposition of the latter as of the former––add, frigidity of the emotions, slackening of the _tempo_, the substitution of dialectic for instinct, _seriousness_ impressed on mien and gesture (seriousness, that most unmistakable sign of strenuous metabolism, of struggling, toiling life). Consider the periods in a nation in which the learned man comes into prominence; they are the periods of exhaustion, often of sunset, of decay--the effervescing strength, the confidence in life, the confidence in the future are no more. The preponderance of the mandarins never signifies any good, any more than does the advent of democracy, or arbitration instead of war, equal rights for women, the religion of pity, and all the other symptoms of declining life. (Science handled as a problem! what is the meaning of science?--upon this point the Preface to the _Birth of Tragedy_.) No! this "modern science"--mark you this well--is at times the _best_ ally for the ascetic ideal, and for the very reason that it is the ally which is most unconscious, most automatic, most secret, and most subterranean! They have been playing into each other's hands up to the present, have these "poor in spirit" and the scientific opponents of that ideal (take care, by the bye, not to think that these opponents are the antithesis of this ideal, that they are the _rich_ in spirit--that they are _not_; I have called them the _hectic_ in spirit). As for these celebrated victories of science; there is no doubt that they are _victories_--but victories over what? There was not for a single minute any victory among their list over the ascetic ideal, rather was it made stronger, that is to say, more elusive, more abstract, more insidious, from the fact that a wall, an outwork, that had got built on to the main fortress and disfigured its appearance, should from time to time be ruthlessly destroyed and broken down by science. Does any one seriously suggest that the downfall of the theological astronomy signified the downfall of that ideal?--Has, perchance, man grown _less in need_ of a transcendental solution of his riddle of existence, because since that time this existence has become more random, casual, and superfluous in the _visible_ order of the universe? Has there not been since the time of Copernicus an unbroken progress in the self-belittling of man and his _will_ for belittling himself? Alas, his belief in his dignity, his uniquenesses irreplaceableness in the scheme of existence, is gone--he has become animal, literal, unqualified, and unmitigated animal, he who in his earlier belief was almost God ("child of God," "demi-God"). Since Copernicus man seems to have fallen on to a steep plane--he rolls faster and faster away from the centre--whither? into nothingness? into the "thrilling sensation of his own nothingness"--Well! this would be the straight way--to the old ideal?--All science (and by no means only astronomy, with regard to the humiliating and deteriorating effect of which Kant has made a remarkable confession, "it annihilates my own importance"), all science, natural as much as _unnatural_--by unnatural I mean the self-critique of reason--nowadays sets out to talk man out of his present opinion of himself, as though that opinion had been nothing but a bizarre piece of conceit; you might go so far as to say that science finds its peculiar pride, its peculiar bitter form of stoical ataraxia, in preserving man's _contempt of himself_, that state which it took so much trouble to bring about, as man's final and most serious claim to self-appreciation (rightly so, in point of fact, for he who despises is always "one who has not forgotten how to appreciate"). But does all this involve any real effort to _counteract_ the ascetic ideal? Is it really seriously suggested that Kant's _victory_ over the theological dogmatism about "God," "Soul," "Freedom," "Immortality," has damaged that ideal in any way (as the theologians have imagined to be the case for a long time past)?–– And in this connection it does not concern us for a single minute, if Kant himself intended any such consummation. It is certain that from the time of Kant every type of transcendentalist is playing a winning game––they are emancipated from the theologians; what luck!––he has revealed to them that secret art, by which they can now pursue their "heart's desire" on their own responsibility, and with all the respectability of science. Similarly, who can grumble at the agnostics, reverers, as they are, of the unknown and the absolute mystery, if they now worship _their very query_ as God? (Xaver Doudan talks somewhere of the _ravages_ which _l'habitude d'admirer l'inintelligible au lieu de rester tout simplement dans l'inconnu_ has produced––the ancients, he thinks, must have been exempt from those ravages.) Supposing that everything, "known" to man, fails to satisfy his desires, and on the contrary contradicts and horrifies them, what a divine way out of all this to be able to look for the responsibility, not in the "desiring" but in "knowing"!––"There is no knowledge. _Consequently_––there is a God"; what a novel _elegantia syllogism_i! what a triumph for the ascetic ideal!

26.

Or, perchance, does the whole of modern history show in its demeanour greater confidence in life, greater confidence in its ideals? Its loftiest pretension is now to be a _mirror_; it repudiates all teleology; it will have no more "proving"; it disdains to play the judge, and thereby shows its good taste––it asserts as little as it denies, it fixes, it "describes." All this is to a high degree ascetic, but at the same time it is to a much greater degree _nihilistic_; make no mistake about this! You see in the historian a gloomy, hard, but determined gaze,––an eye that _looks out_ as an isolated North Pole explorer looks out (perhaps so as not to look within, so as not to look back?)––there is snow––here is life silenced, the last crows which caw here are called "whither?" "Vanity," "Nada"––here nothing more flourishes and grows, at the most the metapolitics of St. Petersburg and the "pity" of Tolstoi. But as for that other school of historians, a perhaps still more "modern" school, a voluptuous and lascivious school which ogles life and the ascetic ideal with equal fervour, which uses the word "artist" as a glove, and has nowadays established a "corner" for itself, in all the praise given to contemplation; oh, what a thirst do these sweet intellectuals excite even for ascetics and winter landscapes! Nay! The devil take these "contemplative" folk! How much liefer would I wander with those historical Nihilists through the gloomiest, grey, cold mist!––nay, I shall not mind listening (supposing I have to choose) to one who is completely unhistorical and anti-historical (a man, like Dühring for instance, over whose periods a hitherto shy and unavowed species of "beautiful souls" has grown intoxicated in contemporary Germany, _the species anarchistica_ within the educated proletariate). The "contemplative" are a hundred times worse––I never knew anything which produced such intense nausea as one of those "objective" _chairs_,[6] one of those scented mannikins-about-town of history, a thing half-priest, half-satyr (Renan _parfum_), which betrays by the high, shrill falsetto of his applause what he lacks and where he lacks it, who betrays where in this case the Fates have plied their ghastly shears, alas! in too surgeon-like a fashion! This is distasteful to me, and irritates my patience; let him keep patient at such sights who has nothing to lose thereby,––such a sight enrages me, such spectators embitter me against the "play," even more than does the play itself (history itself, you understand); Anacreontic moods imperceptibly come over me. This Nature, who gave to the steer its horn, to the lion its χάσμ ὀδοντων, for what purpose did Nature give me my foot?––To kick, by St. Anacreon, and not merely to run away! To trample on all the worm-eaten "chairs," the cowardly contemplators, the lascivious eunuchs of history, the flirters with ascetic ideals, the righteous hypocrites of impotence! All reverence on my part to the ascetic ideal, _in so far as it is honourable_! So long as it believes in itself and plays no pranks on us! But I like not all these coquettish bugs who have an insatiate ambition to smell of the infinite, until eventually the infinite smells of bugs; I like not the whited sepulchres with their stagey reproduction of life; I like not the tired and the used up who wrap themselves in wisdom and look "objective"; I like not the agitators dressed up as heroes, who hide their dummy-heads behind the stalking-horse of an ideal; I like not the ambitious artists who would fain play the ascetic and the priest, and are at bottom nothing but tragic clowns; I like not, again, these newest speculators in idealism, the Anti-Semites, who nowadays roll their eyes in the patent Christian-Aryan-man-of-honour fashion, and by an abuse of moralist attitudes and agitation dodges, so cheap as to exhaust any patience, strive to excite all the blockhead elements in the populace (the invariable success of _every_ kind of intellectual charlatanism in present-day Germany hangs together with the almost indisputable and already quite palpable desolation of the German mind, whose cause I look for in a too exclusive diet, of papers, politics, beer, and Wagnerian music, not forgetting the condition precedent of this diet, the national exclusiveness and vanity, the strong but narrow principle, "Germany, Germany above everything,"[7] and finally the _paralysis agitans_ of "modern ideas"). Europe nowadays is, above all, wealthy and ingenious in means of excitement; it apparently has no more crying necessity than _stimulantia_ and alcohol. Hence the enormous counterfeiting of ideals, those most fiery spirits of the mind; hence too the repulsive, evil-smelling, perjured, pseudo–alcoholic air everywhere. I should like to know how many cargoes of imitation idealism, of hero-costumes and high falutin' clap-trap, how many casks of sweetened pity liqueur (Firm: _la religion de la souffrance_), how many crutches of righteous indignation for the help of these flat-footed intellects, how many _comedians_ of the Christian moral ideal would need to-day to be exported from Europe, to enable its air to smell pure again. It is obvious that, in regard to this over-production, a new _trade_ possibility lies open; it is obvious that there is a new business to be done in little ideal idols and obedient "idealists"--don't pass over this tip! Who has sufficient courage? We have in _our hands_ the possibility of idealising the whole earth. But what am I talking about courage? we only need one thing here--a hand, a free, a very free hand.

27.

Enough! enough! let us leave these curiosities and complexities of the modern spirit, which excite as much laughter as disgust. Our problem can certainly do without them, the problem of _meaning_ of the ascetic ideal--what has it got to do with yesterday or to-day? those things shall be handled by me more thoroughly and severely in another connection (under the title "A Contribution to the History of European Nihilism," I refer for this to a work which I am preparing: _The Will to Power, an Attempt at a Transvaluation of All Values_). The only reason why I come to allude to it here is this: the ascetic ideal has at times, even in the most intellectual sphere, only one real kind of enemies and _damagers_: these are the comedians of this ideal--for they awake mistrust. Everywhere otherwise, where the mind is at work seriously, powerfully, and without counterfeiting, it dispenses altogether now with an ideal (the popular expression for this abstinence is "Atheism")--_with the exception of the will for truth_. But this will, this _remnant_ of an ideal, is, if you will believe me, that ideal itself in its severest and cleverest formulation, esoteric through and through, stripped of all outworks, and consequently not so much its remnant as its _kernel_. Unqualified honest atheism (and its air only do we breathe, we, the most intellectual men of this age) is _not_ opposed to that ideal, to the extent that it appears to be; it is rather one of the final phases of its evolution, one of its syllogisms and pieces of inherent logic--it is the awe-inspiring catastrophe of a two-thousand-year training in truth, which finally forbids itself _the lie of the belief in God_. (The same course of development in India--quite independently, and consequently of some demonstrative value--the same ideal driving to the same conclusion the decisive point reached five hundred years before the European era, or more precisely at the time of Buddha--it started in the Sankhyam philosophy, and then this was popularised through Buddha, and made into a religion.)

_What_, I put the question with all strictness, has really _triumphed_ over the Christian God? The answer stands in my _Joyful Wisdom_, Aph. 357: "the Christian morality itself, the idea of truth, taken as it was with increasing seriousness, the confessor-subtlety of the Christian conscience translated and sublimated into the scientific conscience into intellectual cleanness at any price. Regarding Nature as though it were a proof of the goodness and guardianship of God; interpreting history in honour of a divine reason, as a constant proof of a moral order of the world and a moral teleology; explaining our own personal experiences, as pious men have for long enough explained them, as though every arrangement, every nod, every single thing were invented and sent out of love for the salvation of the soul; all this is now done away with, all this has the conscience _against_ it, and is regarded by every subtler conscience as disreputable, dishonourable, as lying, feminism, weakness, cowardice--by means of this severity, if by means of anything at all, are we, in sooth, _good Europeans_ and heirs of Europe's longest and bravest self-mastery.". .. All great things go to ruin by reason of themselves, by reason of an act of self-dissolution: so wills the law of life, the law of necessary "self-mastery" even in the essence of life--ever is the law-giver finally exposed to the cry, "_patere legem quam ipse tulisti_"; in thus wise did Christianity _go to ruin as a dogma_, through its own morality; in thus wise must Christianity go again to ruin to-day as a morality--we are standing on the threshold of this event. After Christian truthfulness has drawn one conclusion after the other, it finally draws its _strongest conclusion_, its conclusion against itself; this, however, happens, when it puts the question, "_what is the meaning of every will for truth?_" And here again do I touch on my problem, on our problem, my unknown friends (for as yet _I know_ of no friends): what sense has our whole being, if it does not mean that in our own selves that will for truth has come to its own consciousness _as a problem_?---By reason of this attainment of self-consciousness on the part of the will for truth, morality from henceforward--there is no doubt about it--goes _to pieces_: this is that great hundred-act play that is reserved for the next two centuries of Europe, the most terrible, the most mysterious, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all plays.

28.

If you except the ascetic ideal, man, the animal man had no meaning. His existence on earth contained no end; "What is the purpose of man at all?" was a question without an answer; the _will_ for man and the world was lacking; behind every great human destiny rang as a refrain a still greater "Vanity!" The ascetic ideal simply means this: that something _was lacking_, that a tremendous _void_ encircled man--he did not know how to justify himself, to explain himself, to affirm himself, he _suffered_ from the problem of his own meaning. He suffered also in other ways, he was in the main a _diseased_ animal; but his problem was not suffering itself, but the lack of an answer to that crying question, "_To what purpose_ do we suffer?" Man, the bravest animal and the one most inured to suffering, does _not_ repudiate suffering in itself: he _wills_ it, he even seeks it out, provided that he is shown a meaning for it, a _purpose_ of suffering. _Not_ suffering, but the senselessness of suffering was the curse which till then lay spread over humanity--_and the ascetic ideal gave it a meaning!_ It was up till then the only meaning; but any meaning is better than no meaning; the ascetic ideal was in that connection the _"faute de mieux" par excellence_ that existed at that time. In that ideal suffering _found an explanation_; the tremendous gap seemed filled; the door to all suicidal Nihilism was closed. The explanation--there is no doubt about it--brought in its train new suffering, deeper, more penetrating, more venomous, gnawing more brutally into life: it brought all suffering under the perspective of _guilt_; but in spite of all that--man was _saved_ thereby, he had a _meaning_, and from henceforth was no more like a leaf in the wind, a shuttle-cock of chance, of nonsense, he could now "will" something--absolutely immaterial to what end, to what purpose, with what means he wished: _the will itself was saved_. It is absolutely impossible to disguise _what_ in point of fact is made clear by every complete will that has taken its direction from the ascetic ideal: this hate of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this desire to get right away from all illusion, change, growth, death, wishing and even desiring--all this means--let us have the courage to grasp it--a will for Nothingness, a will opposed to life, a repudiation of the most fundamental conditions of life, but it is and remains _a will_!--and to say at the end that which I said at the beginning--man will wish _Nothingness_ rather than not wish _at all_.

[1] An allusion to the celebrated monologue in William Tell.

[2] Mistress Sly.--Tr.

[3] In the German text "Heiland." This has the double meaning of "healer" and "saviour."--H. B. S.

[4] "Horrible beast."

[5] "Here I stand! I cannot help myself. God help me! Amen"--were Luther's words before the Reichstag at Worms.--H. B. S.

[6] E.g. Lectureships.

[7] An allusion to the well-known patriotic song.--H. B. S.

PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES. Translated by J. M. KENNEDY.

[The following twenty-seven fragments were intended by Nietzsche to form a supplement to Chapter VIII. of _Beyond Good and Evil_, dealing with Peoples and Countries.]

1.

The Europeans now imagine themselves as representing, in the main, the highest types of men on earth.

2.

A characteristic of Europeans: inconsistency between word and deed; the Oriental is true to himself in daily life. How the European has established colonies is explained by his nature, which resembles that of a beast of prey.

This inconsistency is explained by the fact that Christianity has abandoned the class from which it sprang.

This is the difference between us and the Hellenes: their morals grew up among the governing castes. Thucydides' morals are the same as those that exploded everywhere with Plato.

Attempts towards honesty at the Renaissance, for example: always for the benefit of the arts. Michael Angelo's conception of God as the "Tyrant of the World" was an honest one.

3.

I rate Michael Angelo higher than Raphael, because, through all the Christian clouds and prejudices of his time, he saw the ideal of a culture _nobler_ than the Christo-Raphaelian: whilst Raphael truly and modestly glorified only the values handed down to him, and did not carry within himself any inquiring, yearning instincts. Michael Angelo, on the other hand, saw and felt the problem of the law-giver of new values: the problem of the conqueror made perfect, who first had to subdue the "hero within himself," the man exalted to his highest pedestal, master even of his pity, who mercilessly shatters and annihilates everything that does not bear his own stamp, shining in Olympian divinity. Michael Angelo was naturally only at certain moments so high and so far beyond his age and Christian Europe: for the most part he adopted a condescending attitude towards the eternal feminine in Christianity; it would seem, indeed, that in the end he broke down before her, and gave up the ideal of his most inspired hours. It was an ideal which only a man in the strongest and highest vigour of life could bear; but not a man advanced in years! Indeed, he would have had to demolish Christianity with his ideal! But he was not thinker and philosopher enough for that Perhaps Leonardo da Vinci alone of those artists had a really super-Christian outlook. He knows the East, the "land of dawn," within himself as well as without himself. There is something super-European and silent in him: a characteristic of every one who has seen too wide a circle of things good and bad.

4.

How much we have learnt and learnt anew in fifty years! The whole Romantic School with its belief in "the people" is refuted! No Homeric poetry as "popular" poetry! No deification of the great powers of Nature! No deduction from language-relationship to race-relationship! No "intellectual contemplations" of the supernatural! No truth enshrouded in religion!

The problem of truthfulness is quite a new one. I am astonished. From this standpoint we regard such natures as Bismarck as culpable out of carelessness, such as Richard Wagner out of want of modesty; we would condemn Plato for his _pia fraus_, Kant for the derivation of his Categorical Imperative, his own belief certainly not having come to him from this source.

Finally, even doubt turns against itself: doubt in doubt. And the question as to the _value_ of truthfulness and its extent lies _there_.

5.

What I observe with pleasure in the German is his Mephistophelian nature; but, to tell the truth, one must have a higher conception of Mephistopheles than Goethe had, who found it necessary to _diminish_ his Mephistopheles in order to magnify his "inner Faust." The true German Mephistopheles is much more dangerous, bold, wicked, and cunning, and consequently more open-hearted: remember the nature of Frederick the Great, or of that much greater Frederick, the Hohenstaufen, Frederick II.

The real German Mephistopheles crosses the Alps, and believes that everything there belongs to him. Then he recovers himself, like Winckelmann, like Mozart. He looks upon Faust and Hamlet as caricatures, invented to be laughed at, and upon Luther also. Goethe had his good German moments, when he laughed inwardly at all these things. But then he fell back again into his cloudy moods.

6.

Perhaps the Germans have only grown up in a wrong climate! There is something in them that might be Hellenic!--something that is awakened when they are brought into touch with the South--Winckelmann, Goethe, Mozart. We should not forget, however, that we are still young. Luther is still our last event; our last book is still the Bible. The Germans have never yet "moralised." Also, the very food of the Germans was their doom: its consequence, Philistinism.

7.

The Germans are a dangerous people: they are experts at inventing intoxicants. Gothic, rococo (according to Semper), the historical sense and exoticism, Hegel, Richard Wagner--Leibniz, too (dangerous at the present day)--(they even idealised the serving soul as the virtue of scholars and soldiers, also as the simple mind). The Germans may well be the most composite people on earth.

"The people of the Middle," the inventors of porcelain, and of a kind of Chinese breed of Privy Councillor.

8.