Chapter IX: Part 9

_The Peasant Revolt of the Spirit._--We Europeans find ourselves in view of an immense world of ruins, where some things still tower aloft, while other objects stand mouldering and dismal, where most things however already lie on the ground, picturesque enough--where were there ever finer ruins?--overgrown with weeds, large and small. It is the Church which is this city of decay: we see the religious organisation of Christianity shaken to its deepest foundations. The belief in God is overthrown, the belief in the Christian ascetic ideal is now fighting its last fight. Such a long and solidly built work as Christianity--it was the last construction of the Romans!--could not of course be demolished..all at once; every sort of earthquake had to shake it, every sort of spirit which perforates, digs, gnaws and moulders had to assist in the work of destruction. But that which is strangest is that those who have exerted themselves most to retain and preserve Christianity, have been precisely those who did most to destroy it,--the Germans. It seems that the Germans do not understand the essence of a Church. Are they not spiritual enough, or not distrustful enough to do so? In any case the structure of the Church rests on a _southern_ freedom and liberality of spirit, and similarly on a southern suspicion of nature, man, and spirit,--it rests on a knowledge of man an experience of man, entirely different from what the north has had. The Lutheran Reformation in all its length and breadth was the indignation of the simple against something "complicated." To speak cautiously, it was a coarse, honest misunderstanding, in which much is to be forgiven,--people did not understand the mode of expression of a _victorious_ Church, and only saw corruption; they misunderstood the noble scepticism, the _luxury_ of scepticism and toleration which every victorious, self-confident power permits.... One overlooks the fact readily enough at present that as regards all cardinal questions concerning power Luther was badly endowed; he was fatally short-sighted, superficial and imprudent--and above all, as a man sprung from the people, he lacked all the hereditary qualities of a ruling caste, and all the instincts for power; so that his work, his intention to restore the work of the Romans, merely became involuntarily and unconsciously the commencement of a work of destruction. He unravelled, he tore asunder with honest rage, where the old spider had woven longest and most carefully. He gave the sacred books into the hands of everyone,--they thereby got at last into the hands of the philologists, that is to say, the annihilators of every belief based upon books. He demolished the conception of "the Church" in that he repudiated the belief in the inspiration of the Councils: for only under the supposition that the inspiring spirit which had founded the Church still lives in it, still builds it, still goes on building its house, does the conception of "the Church" retain its power. He gave back to the priest sexual intercourse: but three-fourths of the reverence of which the people (and above all the women of the people) are capable, rests on the belief that an exceptional man in this respect will also be an exceptional man in other respects. It is precisely here that the popular belief in something superhuman in man, in a miracle, in the saving God in man, has its most subtle and insidious advocate. After Luther had given a wife to the priest, he had _to take from him_ auricular confession; that was psychologically right: but thereby he practically did away with the Christian priest himself, whose profoundest utility has ever consisted I in his being a sacred ear, a silent well, and a grave for secrets. "Every man his own priest"--behind such formulæ and their bucolic slyness, there was concealed in Luther the profoundest hatred of "higher men," and of the rule of "higher men," as the Church had conceived them. Luther disowned an ideal which he did not know how to attain, while he seemed to combat and detest the degeneration thereof. As a matter of fact, he, the impossible monk, repudiated the _rule_ of the _homines religiosi_; he consequently brought about precisely the same thing within the ecclesiastical social order that he combated so impatiently in the civic order,--namely a "peasant insurrection."--As to all that grew out of his Reformation afterwards, good and bad, which can at present be almost counted up--who would be naïve enough to praise or blame Luther simply on account of these results? He is innocent of all; he knew not what he did. The art of making the European spirit shallower especially in the north, or more _good-natured,_ if people would rather hear it designated by a moral expression, undoubtedly took a clever step in advance in the Lutheran Reformation; and similarly there grew out of it the mobility and disquietude of the spirit, its thirst for independence, its belief in the right to freedom, and its "naturalness." If people wish to ascribe to the Reformation in the last instance the merit of having prepared and favoured that which we at present honour as "modern science," they must of course add that it is also accessory to bringing about the degeneration of the modern scholar, with his lack of reverence, of shame and of profundity; and that it is also responsible for all naïve candour and plain-dealing in matters of knowledge, in short for the _plebeianism of the spirit_ which is peculiar to the last two centuries, and from which even pessimism hitherto, has not in any way delivered us. "Modern ideas" also belong to this peasant insurrection of the north against the colder, more ambiguous, more suspicious spirit of the south, which has built itself its greatest monument in the Christian Church. Let us not forget in the end what a Church is, and especially in contrast to every "State": a Church is above all an authoritative organisation which secures to the _most spiritual_ men the highest rank, and _believes_ in the power of spirituality so far as to forbid all grosser appliances of authority. Through this alone the Church is under all circumstances a _nobler_ institution than the State.--

359.

_Vengeance on Intellect, and other Backgrounds of Morality._--Morality--where do you think it has its most dangerous and rancorous advocates?--There, for example, is an ill-constituted man, who does not possess enough of intellect to be able to take pleasure in it, and just enough of culture to be aware of the fact; bored, satiated, and a self-despiser; besides being cheated unfortunately by some hereditary property out of the last consolation, the "blessing of labour," the self-forgetfulness in the "day's work "; one who is thoroughly ashamed of his existence--perhaps also harbouring some vices,--and who on the other hand (by means of books to which he has no right, or more intellectual society than he can digest), cannot help vitiating himself more and more, and making himself vain and irritable: such a thoroughly poisoned man--for intellect becomes poison, culture becomes poison, possession becomes poison, solitude becomes poison, to such ill-constituted beings--gets at last into a habitual state of vengeance and inclination for vengeance.... What do you think he finds necessary, absolutely necessary in order to give himself the appearance in his own eyes of superiority over more intellectual men, so as to give himself the delight of _perfect revenge,_ at least in imagination? It is always _morality_ that he requires, one may wager on it; always the big moral words, always the high-sounding words: justice, wisdom, holiness, virtue; always the Stoicism of gestures (how well Stoicism hides what one does _not_ possess!); always the mantle of wise silence, of affability, of gentleness, and whatever else the idealist-mantle is called, in which the incurable self-despisers and also the incurably conceited walk about. Let me not be misunderstood: out of such born _enemies of the spirit_ there arises now and then the rare specimen of humanity who is honoured by the people under the name of saint or sage: it is out of such men that there arise those prodigies of morality that make a noise, and make history,--St Augustine was one of these men. Fear of the intellect, vengeance on the intellect--Oh! how often have these powerfully impelling vices become the root of virtues! Yea, virtue _itself!_--And asking the question among ourselves, even the philosopher's pretension to wisdom, which has occasionally been made here and there on the earth, the maddest and most immodest of all pretensions,--has it not always been _above all_ in India as well as in Greece, _a means of concealment?_ Sometimes, perhaps, from the point of view of education which hallows so many lies, it is a tender regard for growing and evolving persons, for disciples who have often to be guarded against themselves by means of the belief in a person (by means of an error). In most cases, however, it is a means of concealment for a philosopher, behind which he seeks protection, owing to exhaustion, age, chilliness, or hardening; as a feeling of the approaching end, as the sagacity of the instinct which animals have before their death,--they go apart, remain at rest, choose solitude, creep into caves, become _wise_.... What? Wisdom a means of concealment of the philosopher from--intellect?--

360.

_Two Kinds of Causes which are Confounded._--It seems to me one of my most essential steps and advances that I have learned to distinguish the cause of an action generally from the cause of an action in a particular manner, say, in this direction, with this aim. The first kind of cause is a quantum of stored-up force, which waits to be used in some manner, for some purpose; the second kind of cause, on the contrary, is something quite unimportant in comparison with the first, an insignificant hazard for the most part, in conformity with which the quantum of force in question "discharges" itself in some unique and definite manner: the lucifer-match in relation to the barrel of gunpowder. Among those insignificant hazards and lucifer-matches I count all the so-called "aims," and similarly the still more so-called "occupations" of people: they are relatively optional, arbitrary, and almost indifferent in relation to the immense quantum of force which presses on, as we have said, to be used up in any way whatever. One generally looks at the matter in a different manner: one is accustomed to see the _impelling_ force precisely in the aim (object, calling, &c.), according to a primeval error,--but it is only the _directing_ force; the steersman and the steam have thereby been confounded. And yet it is not even always a steersman, the directing force.... Is the "aim" the "purpose," not often enough only an extenuating pretext, an additional self-blinding of conceit, which does not wish it to be said that the ship _follows_ the stream into which it has accidentally run? That it "wishes" to go that way, _because_ it _must_ go that way? That it has a direction, sure enough, but--not a steersman? We still require a criticism of the conception of "purpose."

361.

_The Problem of the Actor_--The problem of the actor has disquieted me the longest; I was uncertain (and am sometimes so still) whether one could not get at the dangerous conception of "artist"--a conception hitherto treated with unpardonable leniency--from this point of view. Falsity with a good conscience; delight in dissimulation breaking forth as power, pushing aside, overflowing, and sometimes extinguishing the so-called "character"; the inner longing to play a rôle, to assume a mask, to put on an _appearance;_ a surplus of capacity for adaptations of every kind, which can no longer gratify themselves in the service of the nearest and narrowest utility: all that perhaps does not pertain _solely_ to the actor in himself?... Such an instinct would develop most readily in families of the lower class of the people, who have had to pass their lives in absolute dependence, under shifting pressure and constraint, who (to accommodate themselves to their conditions, to adapt themselves always to new circumstances) had again and again to pass themselves off and represent themselves as different persons,--thus having gradually qualified themselves to adjust the mantle to _every_ wind, thereby almost becoming the mantle itself, as masters of the embodied and incarnated art of eternally playing the game of hide and seek, which one calls _mimicry_ among the animals:--until at last this ability, stored up from generation to generation, has become domineering, irrational and intractable, till as instinct it begins to command the other instincts, and begets the actor and "artist" (the buffoon, the pantaloon, the Jack-Pudding, the fool, and the clown in the first place, also the classical type of servant, Gil Blas: for in such types one has the precursors of the artist, and often enough even of the "genius"). Also under higher social conditions there grows under similar pressure a similar species of men: only the histrionic instinct is there for the most part held strictly in check by another instinct, for example, among "diplomatists";--for the rest, I should think that it would always be open to a good diplomatist to become a good actor on the stage, provided his dignity "allowed" it. As regards the _Jews,_ however, the adaptable people _par excellence,_ we should, in conformity to this line of thought, expect to see among them a world-wide historical institution at the very first, for the rearing of actors, a proper breeding-place for actors; and in fact the question is very pertinent just now: what good actor at present is _not--_a Jew? The Jew also, as a born literary man, as the actual ruler of the European press, exercises this power on the basis of his histrionic capacity: for the literary man is essentially an actor,--he plays the part of "expert," of "specialist."--Finally _women._ If we consider the whole history of women, are they not _obliged_ first of all, and above all to be actresses? If we listen to doctors who have hypnotised women, or, finally, if we love them--and let ourselves be "hypnotised" by them--what is always divulged thereby? That they "give themselves airs," even when they--"give themselves." ... Woman is so artistic ...

362.

_My Belief in the Virilising of Europe._--We owe it to Napoleon (and not at all to the French Revolution, which had in view the "fraternity" of the nations, and the florid interchange of good graces among people generally) that several warlike centuries, which have not had their like in past history, may now follow one another--in short, that we have entered upon _the classical age of war,_ war at the same time scientific and popular, on the grandest scale (as regards means, talents and discipline), to which all coming millenniums will look back with envy and awe as a work of perfection:--for the national movement out of which this martial glory springs, is only the counter_-choc_ against Napoleon, and would not have existed without him. To him, consequently, one will one day be able to attribute the fact that _man_ in Europe has again got the upper hand of the merchant and the Philistine; perhaps even of "woman" also, who has become pampered owing to Christianity and the extravagant spirit of the eighteenth century, and still more owing to "modern ideas." Napoleon, who saw in modern ideas, and accordingly in civilisation, something like a personal enemy, has by this hostility proved himself one of the greatest continuators of the Renaissance: he has brought to the surface a whole block of the ancient character, the decisive block perhaps, the block of granite. And who knows but that this block of ancient character will in the end get the upper hand of the national movement, and will have to make itself in a _positive_ sense the heir and continuator of Napoleon:--who, as one knows, wanted _one_ Europe, which was to be _mistress of the world._--

363.

_How each Sex has its Prejudice about Love.--_Notwithstanding all the concessions which I am inclined to make to the monogamie prejudice, I will never admit that we should speak of _equal_ rights in the love of man and woman: there are no such equal rights. The reason is that man and woman understand something different by the term love,--and it belongs to the conditions of love in both sexes that the one sex does _not_ presuppose the same feeling, the same conception of "love," in the other sex. What woman understands by love is clear enough: complete surrender (not merely devotion) of soul and body, without any motive, without any reservation, rather with shame and terror at the thought of a devotion restricted by clauses or associated with conditions. In this absence of conditions her love is precisely a _faith:_ woman has no other.--Man, when he loves a woman, _wants_ precisely this love from her; he is consequently, as regards himself, furthest removed from the prerequisites of feminine love; granted, however, that there should also be men to whom on their side the demand for complete devotion is not unfamiliar,--well, they are really--not men. A man who loves like a woman becomes thereby a slave; a woman, however, who loves like a woman becomes thereby a _more perfect_ woman. ... The passion of woman in its unconditional renunciation of its own rights presupposes in fact that there does _not_ exist on the other side an equal _pathos,_ an equal desire for renunciation: for if both renounced themselves out of love, there would result--well, I don't know what, perhaps a _horror vacui?_ Woman wants to be taken and accepted as a possession, she wishes to be merged in the conceptions of "possession" and "possessed"; consequently she wants one who _takes,_ who does not offer and give himself away, but who reversely is rather to be made richer in "himself"--by the increase of power, happiness and faith which the woman herself gives to him. Woman gives herself, man takes her.--I do not think one will get over this natural contrast by any social contract, or with the very best will to do justice, however desirable it may be to avoid bringing the severe, frightful, enigmatical, and unmoral elements of this antagonism constantly before our eyes. For love, regarded as complete, great, and full, is nature, and as nature, is to all eternity something "unmoral."_--Fidelity_ is accordingly included in woman's love, it follows from the definition thereof; with man fidelity _may_ readily result in consequence of his love, perhaps as gratitude or idiosyncrasy of taste, and so-called elective affinity, but it does not belong to the _essence_ of his love--and indeed so little, that one might almost be entitled to speak of a natural opposition between love and fidelity in man, whose love is just a desire to possess, and _not_ a renunciation and giving away; the desire to possess, however, comes to an end every time with the possession.... As a matter of fact it is the more subtle and jealous thirst for possession in a man (who is rarely and tardily convinced of having this "possession"), which makes his love continue; in that case it is even possible that his love may increase after the surrender,--he does not readily own that a woman has nothing more to "surrender" to him.--

364.

_The Anchorite Speaks._--The art of associating with men rests essentially on one's skilfulness (which presupposes long exercise) in accepting a repast, in taking a repast, in the cuisine of which one has no confidence. Provided one comes to the table with the hunger of a wolf everything is easy "the worst society gives thee _experience_"-- Mephistopheles says; but one has not always this wolf's-hunger when one needs it! Alas! how difficult are our fellow-men to digest! First principle: to stake one's courage as in a misfortune, to seize boldly, to admire oneself at the same time, to take one's repugnance between one's teeth, to cram down one's disgust. Second principle: to "improve" one's fellow-man, by praise for example, so that he may begin to sweat out his self-complacency; or to seize a tuft of his good or "interesting" qualities, and pull at it till one gets his whole virtue out, and can put him under the folds of it. Third principle: self-hypnotism. To fix one's eye on the object of one's intercourse as on a glass knob, until, ceasing to feel pleasure or pain thereat, one falls asleep unobserved, becomes rigid, and acquires a fixed pose: a household recipe used in married life and in friendship, well tested and prized as indispensable, but not yet scientifically formulated. Its proper name is--patience.--

365.

_The Anchorite Speaks once more._--We also have intercourse with "men," we also modestly put on the clothes in which people know us (_as such,_) respect us and seek us; and we thereby mingle in society, that is to say, among the disguised who do not wish to be so called; we also do like a prudent masqueraders, and courteously dismiss all curiosity which has not reference merely to our "clothes" There are however other modes and artifices for "going about" among men and associating with them: for example, as a ghost,-which is very advisable when one wants to scare them, and get rid of them easily. An example: a person grasps at us, and is unable to seize us. That frightens him. Or we enter by a closed door. Or when the lights are extinguished. Or after we are dead The latter is the artifice of _posthumous_ men _par excellence._ ("What?" said such a one once impatiently, "do you think we should delight in enduring this strangeness, coldness, death-stillness about us, all this subterranean, hidden, dim, undiscovered solitude, which is called life with us, and might just as well be called death, if we were not conscious of what _will arise_ out of us,--and that only after our death shall we attain to _our_ life and become living, ah! very living! we posthumous men!"--)

366.

_At the Sight of a Learned Book._--We do not belong to those who only get their thoughts from books, or at the prompting of books,--it is our custom to think in the open air, walking, leaping, climbing, or dancing on lonesome mountains by preference, or close to the sea, where even the paths become thoughtful. Our first question concerning the value of a book, a man, or a piece of music is: Can it walk? or still better: Can it dance?... We seldom read; we do not read the worse for that--oh, how quickly we divine how a person has arrived at his thoughts:--if it is by sitting before an ink-bottle with compressed belly and head bent over the paper: oh, how quickly we are then done with his book! The constipated bowels betray themselves, one may wager on it, just as the atmosphere of the room, the ceiling of the room, the smallness of the room, betray themselves.--These were my feelings when closing a straightforward, learned book, thankful, very thankful, but also relieved.... In the book of a learned man there is almost always something oppressive and oppressed: the "specialist" comes to light somewhere, his ardour, his seriousness, his wrath, his over-estimation of the nook in which he sits and spins, his hump--every specialist has his hump. A learned book also always mirrors a distorted soul: every trade distorts. Look at our friends again with whom we have spent our youth, after they have taken possession of their science: alas! how the reverse has always taken place! Alas! how they themselves are now for ever occupied and possessed by their science! Grown into their nook, crumpled into unrecognisability, constrained, deprived of their equilibrium, emaciated and angular everywhere, perfectly round only in one place,--we are moved and silent when we find them so. Every handicraft, granting even that it has a golden floor,[3] has also a leaden ceiling above it, which presses and presses on the soul, till it is pressed into a strange and distorted shape. There is nothing to alter here. We need not think that it is at all possible to obviate this disfigurement by any educational artifice whatever. Every kind of _perfection_ is purchased at a high price on earth, where everything is perhaps purchased too dear; one is an expert in one's department at the price of being also a victim of one's department. But you want to have it otherwise--"more reasonable," above all more convenient--is it not so, my dear contemporaries? Very well! But then you will also immediately get something different: instead of the craftsman and expert, you will get the literary man, the versatile, "many-sided "littérateur, who to be sure lacks the hump--not taking account of the hump or bow which he makes before you as the shopman of the intellect and the "porter" of culture--, the littérateur, who _is_ really nothing, but "represents" almost everything: he plays and "represents" the expert, he also takes it upon himself in all modesty _to see that he is_ paid, honoured and celebrated in this position.--No, my learned friends! I bless you even on account of your humps! And also because like me you despise the littérateurs and parasites of culture! And because you do not know how to make merchandise of your intellect! And have so many opinions which cannot be expressed in money value! And because you do not represent anything which you _are_ not! Because your sole desire is to become masters of your craft; because you reverence every kind of mastership and ability, and repudiate with the most relentless scorn everything of a make-believe, half-genuine, dressed-up, virtuoso, demagogic, histrionic nature in _litteris et artibus_--all that which does not convince you by its absolute _genuineness_ of discipline and preparatory training, or cannot stand your test! (Even genius does not help a person to get over such a defect, however well it may be able to deceive with regard to it: one understands this if one has once looked closely at our most gifted painters and musicians,--who almost without exception, can artificially and supplementarily appropriate to themselves (by means of artful inventions of style, make-shifts, and even principles), the _appearance_ of that genuineness, that solidity of training and culture; to be sure, without thereby deceiving themselves, without thereby imposing perpetual silence on their bad consciences. For you know of course that all great modern artists suffer from bad consciences?...)

[3] An allusion to the German Proverb, "Handwerk hat einen goldenen Boden."--TR.

367.

_How one has to Distinguish first of all in Works of Art--_Everything that is thought, versified, painted and composed, yea, even built and moulded, belongs either to monologic art, or to art before witnesses. Under the latter there is also to be included the apparently monologic art which involves the belief in God, the whole lyric of prayer; because for a pious man there is no solitude,--we, the godless, have been the first to devise this invention. I know of no profounder distinction in all the perspective of the artist than this: Whether he looks at his growing work of art (at "himself--") with the eye of the witness; or whether he "has forgotten the world," as is the essential thing in all monologic art,--it rests _on forgetting,_ it is the music of forgetting.

368.

_The Cynic Speaks.--_My objections to Wagner's music are physiological objections. Why should I therefore begin by disguising them Under æsthetic formulæ? My "point" is that I can no longer breathe freely when this music begins to operate on me; my _foot_ immediately becomes indignant at it and rebels: for what it needs is time, dance and march; it demands first of all from music the ecstasies which are in _good_ walking, striding, leaping and dancing. But do not my stomach, my heart, my blood and my bowels also protest? Do I not become hoarse unawares under its influence? And then I ask myself what my body really _wants_ from music generally. I believe it wants to have _relief:_ so that all animal functions should be accelerated by means of light, bold, unfettered, self-assured rhythms; so that brazen, leaden life should be gilded by means of golden, good, tender harmonies. My melancholy would fain rest its head in the hiding-places and abysses of _perfection:_ for this reason I need music. What do I care for the drama! What do I care for the spasms of its moral ecstasies, in which the "people" have their satisfaction! What do I care for the whole pantomimic hocus-pocus of the actor!... It will now be divined that I am essentially anti-theatrical at heart,--but Wagner on the contrary, was essentially a man of the stage and an actor, the most enthusiastic mummer-worshipper that has ever existed, even among musicians!... And let it be said in passing that if Wagner's theory was that "drama is the object, and music is only the means to it,"--his _practice_ on the contrary from beginning to end has been to the effect that "attitude is the object, drama and even music can never be anything else but means to _this._" Music as a means of elucidating, strengthening and intensifying dramatic poses and the actor's appeal to the senses, and Wagnerian drama only an opportunity for a number of dramatic attitudes! Wagner possessed, along with all other instincts, the dictatorial instinct of a great actor in all and everything, and as has been said, also as a musician.--I once made this clear with some trouble to a thorough-going Wagnerian, and I had reasons for adding:--"Do be a little more honest with yourself: we are not now in the theatre. In the theatre we are only honest in the mass; as individuals we lie, we belie even ourselves. We leave ourselves at home when we go to the theatre; we there renounce the right to our own tongue and choice, to our taste, and even to our courage as we possess it and practise it within our own four walls in relation to God and man. No one takes his finest taste in art into the theatre with him, not even the artist who works for the theatre: there one is people, public, herd, woman, Pharisee, voting animal, democrat, neighbour, and fellow-creature; there even the most personal conscience succumbs to the levelling charm of the 'great multitude'; there stupidity operates as wantonness and contagion; there the neighbour rules, there one _becomes_ a neighbour...." (I have forgotten to mention what my enlightened Wagnerian answered to my physiological objections: "So the fact is that you are really not healthy enough for our music?"--)

369.

_Juxtapositions in us._--Must we not acknowledge to ourselves, we artists, that there is a strange discrepancy in us; that on the one hand our taste, and on the other hand our creative power, keep apart in an extraordinary manner, continue apart, and have a separate growth;--I mean to say that they have entirely different gradations and _tempi_ of age, youth, maturity, mellowness and rottenness? So that, for example, a musician could all his life create things which _contradicted_ all that his ear and heart, spoilt for listening, prized, relished and preferred:--he would not even require to be aware of the contradiction! As an almost painfully regular experience shows, a person's taste can easily outgrow the taste of his power, even without the latter being thereby paralysed or checked in its productivity. The reverse, however, can also to some extent take place,--and it is to this especially that I should like to direct the attention of artists. A constant producer, a man who is a "mother" in the grand sense of the term, one who no longer knows or hears of anything except pregnancies and child-beds of his spirit, who has no time at all to reflect and make comparisons with regard to himself and his work, who is also no longer inclined to exercise his taste, but simply forgets it, letting it take its chance of standing, lying or falling,--perhaps such a man at last produces works _on which he is then quite unfit to pass a judgment:_ so that he speaks and thinks foolishly about them and about himself. This seems to me almost the normal condition with fruitful artists,--nobody knows a child worse than its parents--and the rule applies even (to take an immense example) to the entire Greek world of poetry and art, which was never "conscious" of what it had done....

370.

_What is Romanticism?_--It will be remembered perhaps, at least among my friends, that at first I assailed the modern world with some gross errors and exaggerations, but at any rate with _hope_ in my heart. I recognised--who knows from what personal experiences?--the philosophical pessimism of the nineteenth century as the symptom of a higher power of thought, a more daring courage and a more triumphant _plenitude_ of life than had been characteristic of the eighteenth century, the age of Hume, Kant, Condillac, and the sensualists: so that the tragic view of things seemed to me the peculiar _luxury_ of our culture, its most precious, noble, and dangerous mode of prodigality; but nevertheless, in view of its overflowing wealth, a _justifiable_ luxury. In the same way I interpreted for myself German music as the expression of a Dionysian power in the German soul: I thought I heard in it the earthquake by means of which a primeval force that had been imprisoned for ages was finally finding vent--indifferent as to whether all that usually calls itself culture was thereby made to totter. It is obvious that I then misunderstood what constitutes the veritable character both of philosophical pessimism and of German music,--namely, their _Romanticism._ What is Romanticism? Every art and every philosophy may be regarded as a healing and helping appliance in the service of growing, struggling life: they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: on the one hand those that suffer from _overflowing vitality,_ who need Dionysian art, and require a tragic view and insight into life; and on the other hand those who suffer from _reduced vitality,_ who seek repose, quietness, calm seas, and deliverance from themselves through art or knowledge, or else intoxication, spasm, bewilderment and madness. All Romanticism in art and knowledge responds to the twofold craving of the _latter;_ to them Schopenhauer as well as Wagner responded (and responds),--to name those most celebrated and decided romanticists, who were then _misunderstood_ by me (_not_ however to their disadvantage, as may be reasonably conceded to me). The being richest in overflowing vitality, the Dionysian God and man, may not only allow himself the spectacle of the horrible and questionable, but even the fearful deed itself, and all the luxury of destruction, disorganisation and negation. With him evil, senselessness and ugliness seem as it were licensed, in consequence of the overflowing plenitude of procreative, fructifying power, which can convert every desert into a luxuriant orchard. Conversely, the greatest sufferer, the man poorest in vitality, would have most need of mildness, peace and kindliness in thought and action: he would need, if possible, a God who is specially the God of the sick, a "Saviour"; similarly he would have need of logic, the abstract intelligibility of existence--for logic soothes and gives confidence;--in short he would need a certain warm, fear-dispelling narrowness and imprisonment within optimistic horizons. In this manner I gradually began to understand Epicurus, the opposite of a Dionysian pessimist;--in a similar manner also the "Christian," who in fact is only a type of Epicurean, and like him essentially a romanticist:--and my vision has always become keener in tracing that most difficult and insidious of all forms of _retrospective inference,_ in which, most mistakes have been made--the inference from the work to its author from the deed to its doer, from the ideal to him who _needs_ it, from every mode of thinking and valuing to the imperative _want_ behind it.--In regard to all æsthetic values I now avail myself of this radical distinction: I ask in every single case, "Has hunger or superfluity become creative here?" At the outset another distinction might seem to recommend itself more--it is far more conspicuous,--namely, to have in view whether the desire for rigidity, for perpetuation, for _being_ is the cause of the creating, or the desire for destruction, for change, for the new, for the future--for _becoming._ But when looked at more carefully, both these kinds of desire prove themselves ambiguous, and are explicable precisely according to the before-mentioned, and, as it seems to me, rightly preferred scheme. The desire for _destruction,_ change and becoming, may be the expression of overflowing power, pregnant with futurity (my _terminus_ for this is of course the word "Dionysian"); but it may also be the hatred of the ill-constituted, destitute and unfortunate, which destroys, and _must_ destroy, because the enduring, yea, all that endures, in fact all being, excites and provokes it. To understand this emotion we have but to look closely at our anarchists. The will to _perpetuation_ requires equally a double interpretation. It may on the one hand proceed from gratitude and love:--art of this origin will always be an art of apotheosis, perhaps dithyrambic, as with Rubens, mocking divinely, as with Hafiz, or clear and kind-hearted as with Goethe, and spreading a Homeric brightness and glory over everything (in this case I speak of _Apollonian_ art). It may also, however, be the tyrannical will of a sorely-suffering, struggling or tortured being, who would like to stamp his most personal, individual and narrow characteristics, the very idiosyncrasy of his suffering, as an obligatory law and constraint on others; who, as it were, takes revenge on all things, in that he imprints, enforces and brands _his_ image, the image of _his_ torture, upon them. The latter is _romantic pessimism_ in its most extreme form, whether it be as Schopenhauerian will-philosophy, or as Wagnerian music:--romantic pessimism, the last _great_ event in the destiny of our civilisation. (That there _may be_ quite a different kind of pessimism, a classical pessimism--this presentiment and vision belongs to me, as something inseparable from me, as my _proprium_ and _ipsissimum;_ only that the word "classical" is repugnant to my ears, it has become far too worn, too indefinite and indistinguishable. I call that pessimism of the future,--for it is coming! I see it coming!--_Dionysian_ pessimism.)

371.

_We Unintelligible Ones._--Have we ever complained among ourselves of being misunderstood, misjudged, and confounded with others; of being calumniated, misheard, and not heard? That is just our lot--alas, for a long time yet! say, to be modest, until 1901--, it is also our distinction; we should not have sufficient respect for ourselves if we wished it otherwise. People confound us with others--the reason of it is that we ourselves grow, we change continually, we cast off old bark, we still slough every spring, we always become younger, higher, stronger, as men of the future, we thrust our roots always more powerfully into the deep--into evil--, while at the same time we embrace the heavens ever more lovingly, more extensively, and suck in their light ever more eagerly with all our branches and leaves. We grow like trees--that is difficult to understand, like all life!--not in one place, but everywhere, not in one direction only, but upwards and outwards, as well as inwards and downwards. At the same time our force shoots forth in stem, branches, and roots; we are really no longer free to do anything separately, or to _be_ anything separately.... Such is our lot, as we have said: we grow in _height;_ and even should it be our calamity--for we dwell ever closer to the lightning!--well, we honour it none the less on that account; it is that which we do not wish to share with others, which we do not wish to bestow upon others, the fate of all elevation, _our_ fate....

372.

_Why we are not Idealists.--_Formerly philosophers were afraid of the senses: have we, perhaps, been far too forgetful of this fear? We are at present all of us sensualists, we representatives of the present and of the future in philosophy,--_not_ according to theory, however, but in _praxis,_ in practice.... Those former philosophers, on the contrary, thought that the senses lured them out of _their_ world, the cold realm of "ideas," to a dangerous southern island, where they were afraid that their philosopher-virtues would melt away like snow in the sun. "Wax in the ears," was then almost a condition of philosophising; a genuine philosopher no longer listened to life, in so far as life is music, he _denied_ the music of life--it is an old philosophical superstition that all music is Sirens' music.--Now we should be inclined at the present day to judge precisely in the opposite manner (which in itself might be just as false), and to regard _ideas,_ with their cold, anæmic appearance, and not even in spite of this appearance, as worse seducers than the senses. They have always lived on the "blood" of the philosopher, they always consumed his senses, and indeed, if you will believe me, his "heart" as well. Those old philosophers were heartless: philosophising was always a species of vampirism. At the sight of such figures even as Spinoza, do you not feel a profoundly enigmatical and disquieting sort of impression? Do you not see the drama which is here performed, the constantly _increasing pallor_--, the spiritualisation always more ideally displayed? Do you not imagine some long-concealed blood-sucker in the background, which makes its beginning with the senses, and in the end retains or leaves behind nothing but bones and their rattling?--I mean categories, formulæ, and _words_(for you will pardon me in saying that what _remains_ of Spinoza, _amor intellectualis dei,_ is rattling and nothing more! What is _amor,_ what is _deus,_ when they have lost every drop of blood?...) _In summa:_ all philosophical idealism has hitherto been something like a disease, where it has not been, as in the case of Plato, the prudence of superabundant and dangerous healthfulness, the fear of _overpowerful_ senses, and the wisdom of a wise Socratic.--Perhaps, is it the case that we moderns are merely not sufficiently sound _to require_ Plato's idealism? And we do not fear the senses because----

373.

_"Science" as Prejudice_.--It follows from the laws of class distinction that the learned, in so far as they belong to the intellectual middle-class, are debarred from getting even a sight of the really _great_ problems and notes of interrogation. Besides, their courage, and similarly their outlook, does not reach so far,--and above all, their need, which makes them investigators, their innate anticipation and desire that things should be constituted _in such and such a way_, their fears and hopes are too soon quieted and set at rest. For example, that which makes the pedantic Englishman, Herbert Spencer, so enthusiastic in his way, and impels him to draw a line of hope, a horizon of desirability, the final reconciliation of "egoism and altruism" of which he dreams,--that almost causes nausea to people like us:--a humanity with such Spencerian perspectives as ultimate perspectives would seem to us deserving of contempt, of extermination! But the _fact_ that something has to be taken by him as his highest hope, which is regarded, and may well be regarded, by others merely as a distasteful possibility, is a note of interrogation which Spencer could not have foreseen.... It is just the same with the belief with which at present so many materialistic natural-scientists are content, the belief in a world which is supposed to have its equivalent and measure in human thinking and human valuations, a "world of truth" at which we might be able ultimately to arrive with the help of our insignificant, four-cornered human reason! What? do we actually wish to have existence debased in that fashion to a ready-reckoner exercise and calculation for stay-at-home mathematicians? We should not, above all, seek to divest existence of its _ambiguous_ character: _good_ taste forbids it, gentlemen, the taste of reverence for everything that goes beyond your horizon! That a world-interpretation is alone right by which _you_ maintain your position, by which investigation and work can go on scientifically in _your_ sense (you really mean _mechanically?_), an interpretation which acknowledges numbering, calculating, weighing, seeing and handling, and nothing more--such an idea is a piece of grossness and naïvety, provided it is not lunacy and idiocy. Would the reverse not be quite probable, that the most superficial and external characters of existence--its most apparent quality, its outside, its embodiment--should let themselves be apprehended first? perhaps alone allow themselves to be apprehended? A "scientific" interpretation of the world as you understand it might consequently still be one of the _stupidest,_ that is to say, the most destitute of significance, of all possible world-interpretations--I say this in confidence to my friends the Mechanicians, who to-day like to hobnob with philosophers, and absolutely believe that mechanics is the teaching of the first and last laws upon which, as upon a ground-floor, all existence must be built. But an essentially mechanical world would be an essentially _meaningless_ world! Supposing we valued the _worth_ of a music with reference to how much it could be counted, calculated, or formulated --how absurd such a "scientific" estimate of music would be! What would one have apprehended, understood, or discerned in it! Nothing, absolutely nothing of what is really "music" in it!...

374.

_Our new "Infinite"_--How far the perspective character of existence extends, or whether it have any other character at all, whether an existence without explanation, without "sense" does not just become "nonsense," whether, on the other hand, all existence is not essentially an _explaining_ existence--these questions, as is right and proper, cannot be determined even by the most diligent and severely conscientious analysis and self-examination of the intellect, because in this analysis the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its perspective forms, and _only_ in them. We cannot see round our corner: it is hopeless curiosity to want to know what other modes of intellect and perspective there _might_ be: for example, whether any kind of being could perceive time backwards, or alternately forwards and backwards (by which another direction of life and another conception of cause and effect would be given). But I think that we are to-day at least far from the ludicrous immodesty of decreeing from our nook that there _can_ only be legitimate perspectives from that nook. The world, on the contrary, has once more become "infinite" to us: in so far we cannot dismiss the possibility that it _contains infinite interpretations._ Once more the great horror seizes us--but who would desire forthwith to deify once more _this_ monster of an unknown world in the old fashion? And perhaps worship _the_ unknown thing as _the_ "unknown person" in future? Ah! there are too many _ungodly_ possibilities of interpretation comprised in this unknown, too much devilment, stupidity and folly of interpretation,--our own human, all too human interpretation itself, which we know....

375.

_Why we Seem to be Epicureans._--We are cautious, we modern men, with regard to final convictions, our distrust lies in wait for the enchantments and tricks of conscience involved in every strong belief, in every absolute Yea and Nay: how is this explained? Perhaps one may see in it a good deal of the caution of the "burnt child," of the disillusioned idealist; but one may also see in it another and better element, the joyful curiosity of a former lingerer in a corner, who has been brought to despair by his nook, and now luxuriates and revels in its antithesis, in the unbounded, in the "open air in itself." Thus there is developed an almost Epicurean inclination for knowledge, which does not readily lose sight of the questionable character of things; likewise also a repugnance to pompous moral phrases and attitudes, a taste that repudiates all coarse, square contrasts, and is proudly conscious of its habitual reserve. For _this too_ constitutes our pride, this easy tightening of the reins in our headlong impulse after certainty, this self-control of the rider in his most furious riding: for now, as of old, we have mad, fiery steeds under us, and if we delay, it is certainly least of all the danger which causes us to delay....

376.

_Our Slow Periods._--It is thus that artists feel, and all men of "works," the maternal species of men: they always believe at every chapter of their life--a work always makes a chapter--that they have now reached the goal itself; they would always patiently accept death with the feeling: "we are ripe for it." This is not the expression of exhaustion,--but rather that of a certain autumnal sunniness and mildness, which the work itself, the maturing of the work, always leaves behind in its originator. Then the _tempo_ of life slows down--turns thick and flows with honey--into long pauses, into the belief in _the_ long pause....

377.