Perpeeenberte setae sees Cee ob arco SRST Samoan eee precems rtre iee eee = ; SSS ae rear eee pera Fea stereos = as reesei cheeks pee thereat ie! ae URIS LIBRARY “iii THE WORKS OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE VOL. XI This sole authorised edition of the Collected Works of Friedrich Nietesche is issued under the super- vision of the Nietesche-Archiv at Naumburg. It is based on the final German edition (Leipzig C. G. Naumann) prepared by Dr. Frits Koegel by direc- tion of Nietzsche's relatives, and is copyrighted in Great Britain by H. Henry & Co., Lid. All rights reserved. THE WORKS OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE ee) EDITED BY ALEXANDER TILLE Voi. XT THE CASE OF WAGNER; THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS; NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER TRANSLATED BY THOMAS COMMON URIS LIBRARY AUG 0 5 1987 New Work THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1908 All rights reserved CoryricHT, 1896, By MACMILLAN AND CO. Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1896. Reprinted August, 1908. Norssod Press J. 8. Cushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co, Norwood, Mass., U.8.A. Copyricut, 1896, By MACMILLAN AND CO. Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1896. Reprinted August, 1908. CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR i < ; ‘i . . . wi THE CasE OF WAGNER . . . \ 8 6 : . » XXIII Preface. 5 ‘ c . . . . é I A Letter from Turin of May, 1888. . 3 $ 2 : 5 Postscript . . . . . . . . . . 42 Second Postscript . ‘ . . : . s ‘ - 49 Epilogue . . . . . ° . . . . - 54 NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER . ° . . . . . - 59 Preface. s s . . . . ‘ . ‘ - 61 Where I admire rs 7 . . r 3 5 - 63 Where I make Objections s ‘ < < ‘ ‘ - 64 Wagner as a Danger . . ane : : J - 67 A Music without a Future 7 . . 3 5 : . 69 We Antipodes ). ee. es eat Where Wagner belongs to. . eo @ % ae, 7k Wagner as the Apostle of Chastity. . . . «© + 97 How I got free from Wagner . ey It Jt: BS Be Be 380) The Psychologist speaks . . . . . - ci . 83 Epilogue. - ee eet ee 8 v VI CONTENTS Page THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS ‘ - : . . . - 93 Preface. 5 ° r ‘ 7 7 : . ‘ - 95 Apophthegms and Darts . . - . . ‘ , : OF The Problem of Socrates . ‘ . ; ‘ 3 » » 105 Reason” in Philosophy . j - 7 és 4 ; + IIg How the “True World” finally became a Fable . ‘ - 122 Morality as Antinaturalness ‘ 7 - : ci « 124 The four great Errors. . ‘ 1 : = ‘ « 132 The “Improvers” of Mankind. is j aj i i - 144 What the Germans lack .. . : : . 3 + 51 Roving Expeditions of an Inopportune Philosopher . + 4161 My Indebtedness to the Ancients . é j 3 é » 219 The Hammer speaketh . : fs A ‘ : + 229 THE ANTICHRIST . F : ‘ , 3 a C . + 233 Preface. d . 6 5 5 5 , ‘ * + 235 The Antichrist. 6 ww ee el 237 INTRODUCTION If it be the task of philosophy to unite the results of the various departments of learning into an uncontradictory whole, the philosophy of the present age in Germany and Great Britain can claim a somewhat higher position than that of half a century ago. Although intellectual cobweb- spinning in the mode of Spinoza or Hegel has by no means died out, the continuation of speculative tradition is no longer regarded as the test for a philosopher’s significance. Above all, natural science, with its results as well as with its unavoidable presuppositions, has within the last half-cen- tury won a place in general esteem making it impossible for philosophy any longer to neglect it. More especially has the doctrine of evolution in the shape it received in 1859 from Darwin’s “Origin of Species” changed most of the general concepts about man, his position on the earth, his descent, and his relation to the lower animals, and philos- ophy has been compelled to define its position towards these new discoveries. Whilst, ever since the appearance of Hux- ley’s “Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature” in 1863, bio- logical science, and particularly phylogeny and ontogeny, all over the world have been busy to establish even the minor facts which bear on the ascent of beings by con- tinual evolution, and to collect ever new evidence upon the method of that development, English philosophy, so far as it has taken any notice of evolutionarism, has endeavoured to show that sexual and natural selection and elimination 1X x INTRODUCTION cannot possibly account for what, since the middle of last century, has been called “human progress.” It has denounced every attempt to apply that principle to human society and the “progress of civilisation.” Darwin himself inaugurated that movement in his “Descent of Man.” “When two tribes of primeval man, living in the same country, came into competition, if (other circumstances being equal) the one tribe included a great number of courageous, sympa- thetic, and faithful members who were always ready to warn each other of danger, to aid and defend each other, this tribe would succeed better and conquer the other.” That sounds like an application of natural selection to sociology, but is the very opposite. What we should have expected to hear from the great teacher of the “struggle for existence ”’ is an entirely different proposition. In a tribe the members of which (including the weak and sick) assist each other in every kind of danger natural selection must soon come to an end, a kind of panmixy must arise and lead to a rapid decline of individual strength and thereby of the tribe itself. — The last chapter of Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace’s “Darwinism ” (1889) is a sample of the same way of rea- soning. This unwillingness to acknowledge the selection of the fit and the elimination of the unfit as pre-requisites of “human progress” has, quite recently, reacted upon general biological theories by producing the Neo-Lamarckism of Sir Francis Galton and Mr. William Bateson. If scientists themselves whenever they touch upon the more complex problems of human existence dare not apply to them the principles they would not question for a moment in the realm of the organic world outside of man, how can one wonder if philosophers have still less courage? Mr. Her- bert Spencer’s own philosophical development has been one INTRODUCTION XI long campaign against natural selection and elimination, and in favour of heredity of acquired characters. His fight with Prof. Weismann is only an incidental skirmish. The whole drift of Mr. Spencer’s thought almost appears to be in- spired by the question: how to evade and veil the logical consequences of Darwin’s evolutionarism for human exist- ence? If that were the task he set for himself, his reasoning could scarcely have been better than it is. That he uses the word evolution so frequently does not matter in the least. What he terms evolution is utterly at variance with Darwin’s concept of development as the natural result of a struggle for existence. Only by a misunderstanding can he be called the philosopher of Darwinism, for he has never got beyond Lamarck’s ideas of natural development by accumulation of acquired qualities. Nor have any of his disciples looked at the problem from any other side. In the works of his closest follower, Mr. John Fiske, the gulf between Darwinism and philosophical evolutionarism becomes even more apparent, for Mr. Fiske, despite his much greater rhetorical gift, does not rival his great master in the art of complicating expres- sion or in the patient elaboration of long lines of argument the point of which is concealed until the last moment. “When humanity began to be evolved, an entirely new chapter in the history of the universe was opened. Hence- forth the life of the nascent soul came to be first in im- portance, and the bodily life became subordinated to it. Henceforth it appeared that the process of zodlogical change had come to an end, and the process of psychological change was to take its place.” These sentences from Mr. Fiske’s book on “The Destiny of Man” (1884) may be taken as fairly representative of the position taken up by English philosophy towards Darwin’s doctrine of evolution. Thus, XII INTRODUCTION until quite recently, whenever the words “ higher” and “lower” were used about the animal world they were unconsciously applied in two absolutely different meanings, according as man was meant to be included or not. In regard to the animal world without man, “higher” meant: with greater physical strength, more richly differentiated, able to defend its life against more dangerous enemies, gifted with more effective means Of motion and of getting food, having prog- eny which at birth though smaller is almost as perfect otherwise as the parents. Bodily differentiation and the qualification of the individual for self-defence and food- acquisition always stand in the foreground. When the word “higher”? was used of man, however, it meant something quite different. The savage tribes with their natural forces unimpaired were regarded as the lower types, and civilised man, although in ill-health, lame and unable to earn a penny all his life, as the “higher.” ‘“ Higher” in this sense may be taken as almost identical with: more socially de- pendent, with milder customs, able to enjoy mental pleasures, unable to live under any conditions but those of modern civilisation. At any rate the word was used regardless of any faculty of self-defence or self-maintenance, regardless of any physiological superiority in the power of locomotion, in strength and other bodily capacity. The fragile person with special intellectual gifts but with a progeny as fragile and strengthless as himself was without hesitation assumed as “greater” than the man with the strong body and average mental ability who presents his nation with half a dozen able sons and daughters. Thus the whole of the animal world was measured by two standards, was estimated according to two utterly dif- ferent principles. These standards were nowhere defined, INTRODUCTION XIII these principles were never examined. There is no fixed point in the line of evolution at which it could be said that the one standard ceases to apply and the other begins. Still greater becomes the confusion when, in arriving at a valuation of man, his general intellectual qualities are no longer taken into consideration and regard is had only to the extent of his subjection to the traditional restrictions of action called morality. Whenever that is so the chain be- tween the two standards which may be said to exist in the former case has disappeared completely. In the first case the “higher” being among a species is that which leaves the stronger and more numerous progeny, in the latter case the “higher” being is that which does a larger num- ber of such acts as are believed to serve certain ends par- ticularly esteemed by a certain portion of the community to which it belongs. In the first case the superiority of the individual is tested in its progeny; in the second case the superiority of the individual is tested by the quality of its own acts for the assumed welfare of a small community. In the first case the superiority is physiological and refers to the growth of the qualities of the species; in the second case the superiority exists merely in the imagination of the fellow beings and refers to their alleged or real happiness. It is only in the nineties of the present century that English philosophy has become aware of this duplicity of standard. While Prof. Samuel Alexander in 1892 still inter- preted the process of ethical evolution as the continuation of evolution in nature (in his Essay on “ Natural Selection in Morals’’), two independent thinkers, the Right Hon. Arthur James Balfour and Prof. Huxley, almost simultaneously dis- covered the gulf between the two standards. But both solve the discrepancy in the same way. Regarding the intellect- XIV INTRODUCTION ual-moral or simply moral standard as unquestionably superi to the physiological, they gladly sacrifice the latter to it, th arriving at that unity of thought requisite in every tr philosophy. Mr. Balfour in his “Fragment on Progress” (1891) car to the conclusion that “we can hardly refuse our suppc to the view that the general improvement of the race m in some respects lead to a deterioration in the natural co stitution of the individual. Humanity, civilisation, progre itself, must have a tendency to mitigate the harsh metho by which Nature has wrought out the variety and the ps fection of organic life. And however much man as he ultimately moulded by the social forces surrounding him m gain, man as he is born into the world must somewh lose.” If the sceptic, who is not sceptic enough to a the question whether such a “general improvement of t race’? can, under the circumstances, rightly be called | improvement at all, takes up this somewhat discouragi: position, the scientist who is unable to free himself fre traditional prejudices is more daring. He not only silent accepts the unfortunate physiological consequences of t social forces in modern life, but goes so far as to wish increase them immeasurably. Huxley said in his Roman Lecture on Evolution and Ethics (1893): “Let us unde stand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society d pends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less running away from it, but in combating it.” And althou; he calls it an “audacious proposal thus to pit the micr cosm against the macrocosm,” he yet calls man’s ends high ends than the ends of nature and hopes “that such . enterprise may meet with a certain measure of success Bentham, when the belief in a mythological origin of t INTRODUCTION XV moral law was sufficiently shaken to raise apprehensions con- cerning the further validity of that law, circumscribed the Christian ideal of happiness on earth—the ideal of one flock and one shepherd — by an abstract term as the maximisation of happiness, the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number. Huxley similarly circumscribes it in scien- tific terms borrowed from Darwin’s “Origin of Species” as “the fitting of as many as possible to survive.” But he merely circumscribes it, he does not question it or propose any modification. Thus he arrives at the proposition that the ethical process is to extinguish the cosmic process, it is to replace it. This is the point at which English philosophy now stands confronted like the age itself by a startling interrogation mark :— Our morality which we know to be the result of a social development limited to man and extending over a few thousand years under all kinds of climatic, economical and literary influences is asked to pronounce judgment upon the whole of the cosmic process.—The moral ideals which exist merely in men’s minds and are known to have been constantly changing all through the period of historical record, are they to create a new world, an ethical world in every particular opposed to the world of reality? — It was once generally believed that the world at large was governed by the same moral laws which were supposed to govern human society, that human justice ruled the whole realm of nature, that there sins were punished, good actions rewarded, and judgment passed. Darwinism has for ever put an end to that concept of a moral order of a uni- verse of peace. It is now generally admitted that a severe struggle for existence rages everywhere and that all higher development is due to the effects of that struggle. The XVI INTRODUCTION moral realm has thus been limited infinitely. If, in spite of that, man now-dares to think of forcing his own moral standard upon nature —why should not we measure man by the standard which Darwin has enabled us to apply to nature? Why should we not look at him as a being above all physiological, and measure first of all the value of his art, civilisation, and religion by their effect upon his species, by the standard of physiology ?— It is not easy to say beforehand to what results such a valua- tion would lead, and it is worthy of a great thinker to under- take thus the task of transvaluing the intellectual currency of our time. Whatever be the result, one thing at any rate will be gained, viz., that we shall no longer have two different, mutually contradictory concepts of “progress,” of “higher” and “lower,” but have only one standard, the physiological. Among the independent thinkers who have come forward in modern Germany, Friedrich Nietzsche, the first to under- take this task, stands foremost. Although the period of his greatest creative power was so late as the eighth decade of the century, he has already become a European event like Hegel, and given rise to an independent school of thought on the continent. Be the ultimate judgment of modern thought upon him what it may, certain it is that ‘philosophy can no longer neglect his works. To a large extent because of his highly condensed, epigrammatic, and elliptic style, which makes sometimes the full meaning diffi- cult even for a German to attain, he has been almost un- known in this country until a few years ago. But it is hoped that the publication of a complete English edition of his works prepared with the greatest possible care will make them known to all who are interested in the great mental problems of the age. INTRODUCTION XVII The present volume, which initiates the series, contains the last four of Nietzsche’s writings composed between May and December 1888. The first two deal with music, the third with some problems of civilisation and culture, and the fourth with Christianity. But one drift of thought per- vades them all: Physiology as the criterion of value of whatever is human, whether called art, culture, or religion! Physiology as the sole arbiter on what is great and what is small, what is good and what is bad! Physiology as the sole standard by which the facts of history and the phe- nomena of our time can be tried, and by which they have to be tried and to receive the verdict on the great issue: decline, or ascent? The circumstances of the origin of the parts of this vol- ume are simple though sad enough. As they stand they are all products of the last eight months of the year 1888. “The Case of Wagner” was sketched in May 1888 in Turin, and the manuscript completed for the press before the end of June. The two “ Postscripts” and the “Epilogue” were added during July. The pamphlet appeared in September 1888. Immediately thereafter another small book, “ Idlings of a Psychologist,” was begun, which was finished by the beginning of September. During the printing the title was changed into a parody of Wagner’s “ Twilight of the Gods,” and the book named “Twilight of the Idols.” Besides, the chapter “What the Germans lack” and some sections of the “ Roving Expeditions of an Inopportune Philosopher” were inserted. On September 3 Nietzsche applied himself to the completion of a work that had occupied his mind for a number of years and was projected as his masterpiece in philosophy, the “Transvaluation of all Values.” He had by him extensive preliminary sketches of the entire work, XVII INTRODUCTION but having altered the original plan had to rewrite almost the whole. The plan on which he now worked was the following: The title of the whole work, that was to consist of. four books, was to be “The Will to Power. An Essay towards a Transvaluation of all Values.” The First Book was called: “The Antichrist. An Essay towards a Criticism of Christianity.” It received its final form between Sep- tember 3 and 30, 1888. The Second Book was intended to bear the name “The Free Spirit. A Criticism of Phi- losophy as a Nihilistic Movement.” The Third Book was called: “The Immoralist. A Criticism of the most fatal kind of Ignorance: Morality ;” and the Fourth Book: “ Dio- nysos. Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence.” From the First Book of the “Transvaluation of all Val- ues” Nietzsche turned once more to Wagner. The con- trast between his first Wagner attempt “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” which had appeared in 1876 as the fourth of his “Inopportune Contemplations,” and “The Case of Wagner’? having made various critics speak of an apostasy of Nietzsche from Wagner, in December 1888 Nietzsche made a selection of most of the passages referring to Wagner from his writings’ later than “ Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,” 1 They are taken from the following places: — “Where I admire” from “ Joyful Science,” Aphorism 87. “Where I make Objections” from “ Joyful Science,” Aphorism 368. “Wagner as a Danger. 1.” from “Human, All-too-Human,” Vol. II. Part I. Aphorism 134. “Wagner as a Danger. 2.” from “Human, All-too-Human,” Vol. II. Part II. Aphorism 165. “A Music without a Future” from “Human, All-too-Human,” Vol. II. Part I. Aphorism 171. “We Antipodes” from “Joyful Science,” Aphorism 370. INTRODUCTION XIX in order to show that he and Wagner were natural antagonists. After the satirical pleasantries of the first pamphlet he wished, besides, to point to the graver side of the case of Wagner. He arranged the twelve inde- pendent passages, the style of which he changed somewhat into a little book “ Nietzsche contra Wagner” printed in the last weeks of 1888. An Intermezzo he had put in between the second and third passage he later withdrew. ‘“ Nietzsche contra Wagner” was to appear in course of 1889, per- haps even previous to the “Twilight of the Idols.” But he was not fated to see the publication of his last three writings or even to finish his “Transvaluation of all Values.” In the middle of the winter of 1888-9 he succumbed to a serious nervous disturbance which led to hopeless insanity and a temporary confinement in a lunatic asylum. Since the summer of 1890 he has lived under the care of his relatives at Naumburg. He has never, however, again been able to write or give directions about the publication of his works, which passed into the hands of his relatives. “The Twilight of the Idols” did not appear until January 1889. The first impression of “ Nietzsche contra “Where Wagner belongs to” from “Beyond Good and Evil,” Sec- tions 254 and 256. “Wagner as the Apostle of Chastity. 1.” from “Beyond Good and Evil,” Section 256. * Wagner as the Apostle of Chastity. 2. and 3.” from “A Genealogy of Morals,” Essay Third, Sections 2 and 3. “How I got free from Wagner” from “Human, All-too-Human,” Vol. II. Preface, Sections 3 and 4. “The Pyschologist speaks” from “Beyond Good and Evil,” Sections 269 and 270. “Epilogue” from “ Joyful Science,” Preface, Sections 3 and 4. xX INTRODUCTION Wagner” of 1888 was never published, and the little pam- phlet was only issued with “The Antichrist,” in Vol. VIII of Wietesches Werke which appeared towards the end of 1894 with 1895 on the titlepage. For most of the facts and dates regarding the compo- sition of the four works of the present volume, which has been translated by Mr. Thomas Common, the Editor is obliged to Dr. Fritz Koegel’s Wachbericht in Vol. VIII of the Ger- man edition. ALEXANDER TILLE. THE CASE OF WAGNER; NIETZ- SCHE CONTRA WAGNER; THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS; THE ANTICHRIST THE CASE OF WAGNER: A MUSI- CIAN’S PROBLEM: BEING A LETTER FROM TURIN, MAY 1888 ridendo dicere severum .. PREFACE I relieve myself a little. It is not solely out of sheer wickedness that I praise Bizet at the expense of Wagner in this work. In the midst of much pleas- antry, I bring forward a case which is serious enough, It was my fate to turn the back on Wagner; to be fond of aught afterwards was a triumph. No one, perhaps, had been more dangerously entangled in Wagnerism, no one has defended himself harder — against it, no one has been more glad to get rid of it. A long history!—JIs there a word wanted for it?— If I were a moralist, who knows how I should des- ignate it! Perhaps sedf-overcoming.— But the philos- opher never loves moralists . . . neither does he love fancy words. . What does a philosopher firstly and lastly require of himself? To overcome his age in himself, to be- come “timeless.” With what, then, has he to wage the hardest strife? With the characteristics in which he is just the child of his age. Well! I am the child of this age, just like Wagner, z.¢. a décadent, I am, however, conscious of it; I defended myself against it. My philosophic spirit defended itself against it. B 1 2 PREFACE The problem of décadence is, in fact, that which has occupied me most profoundly ;—TI have had reasons for it. “Good and Evil” is only a variety of that problem. When one has learned to discern the symp- toms of decline, one also understands morality, —one understands what conceals itself under its holiest names and valuation-formulze; namely, zmpoverished life, desire for the end, great lassitude. Morality negatives life... For such a task I required some self-discipline: —I had to engage in combat agaznust whatever was morbid in me, including Wagner, includ- ing Schopenhauer, including all modern “humanity.” —A profound estrangement, coolness, and sobriety with reference to everything temporary or opportune; and as my highest wish, the eye of Zarathushtra, an eye, which, exalted to an immense height, surveys the whole phenomenon of man,—looks down on it... To attain such an object—what sacrifice would not be appropriate? What “self-overcoming!” What “self-denying ! ” My most important experience was a convalescence ; Wagner belongs only to my maladies. Not that I would wish to be ungrateful to this malady. If in this work I maintain the proposition that Wagner is hurtful, I want none the less to maintain ¢o whom, in spite of it all, Wagner is indis- pensable —to the philosopher. In other departments people may perhaps get along without Wagner; the PREFACE 3 philosopher, however, is not free to dispense with him. The philosopher has to be the bad conscience of his time ; for that purpose he must possess its best knowl- edge. But where would he find a better initiated guide for the labyrinth of modern soul, a more eloquent psychological expert than Wagner? Modernism speaks its most familiar language in Wagner: it conceals neither its good nor its evil, it has lost all its sense of shame. And reversely: when one has formed a clear notion about what is good and evil in Wagner, one has almost determined the value of modernism.—I under- stand perfectly, when a musician says now, “I hate Wagner, but I no longer stand any other music.” I should however also understand a philosopher who declared, “ Wagner summarises modernism. There is no help for it; we must first be Wagnerians” . . I I heard yesterday — will you believe it?—the mas- terpiece of Bzze¢ for the twentieth time. I again held out with meek devotion, I again succeeded in not run- ning away. This victory over my impatience surprises me. How such a work perfects one! One becomes a “masterpiece” one’s self by its influence.— And really, I have appeared to myself, every time I have heard Carmen, to be more of a philosopher, a better philoso- pher than at other times: I have become so patient, so happy, so Indian, so sedate... Five hours sitting: the first stage of holiness! May I venture to say that Bizet’s orchestra music is almost the sole orchestration I yet endure? That other orchestra music which is all the rage at present, the Wagnerian orchestration, at once brutal, artificial, and “ innocent ” —thereby speak- ing to the three senses of modern soul at the same time,— how detrimental to me is that Wagnerian orchestration! I call it the Sirocco. An unpleasant sweat breaks out on me. My good time is at an end. This music seems to me to be perfect. It approaches lightly, nimbly, and with courtesy. It is amiable, it 5 6 THE CASE OF WAGNER does not produce sweat. ‘“ What is good is easy; every- thing divine runs with light feet :””—the first proposi- tion of my Aésthetics. This music is wicked, subtle, and fatalistic; it remains popular at the same time, — it has the subtlety of a race, not of an individual. It is rich. It is precise. It builds, it organises, it com- pletes; it is thus the antithesis to the polypus in music, “infinite melody.” Have more painful, tragic accents ever been heard on the stage? And how are they obtained? Without grimace! Without counterfeit coinage! Without the zmposture of the grand style! Finally, this music takes the auditor for an intelligent being, even for a musician; here also Bizet is the contrast to Wagner, who, whatever else he was, was certainly the most uncourteous genius in the world. (Wagner takes us just as if , he says a thing again and again until one despairs,— until one believes it.) And once more, I become a better man when this Bizet exhorts me. Also a better musician, a better auditor. Is it at all possible to listen better? —I bury my ears under this music, I hear the very reason of it. I seem to assist at its production —I tremble before dangers which accompany any hazardous enter- prise, I am enraptured by strokes of good fortune of which Bizet is innocent.— And, curiously enough, I don’t think of it after all, or I don’t kxow how much I think of it. For quite other thoughts run THE CASE OF WAGNER 7 through my mind at the time... Has it been no- ticed that music makes the spirit free? that it gives wings to thought? that one becomes so much more a philosopher, the more one becomes a musician ?— The grey heaven of abstraction thrilled, as it were, by lightnings; the light strong enough for all the filigree of things; the great problems ready to be grasped; the universe surveyed as from a mountain summit.—I have just defined philosophical pathos. — And auswers fall into my lap unexpectedly; a little hail-shower of ice and wisdom, of solved problems... . Where am I? Bizet makes me productive. All that is good makes me productive. I have no other grati- tude, nor have I any other proof of what is good. 2 This work saves also; Wagner is not the only “Saviour.” With Bizet’s work one takes leave of the humid north, and all the steam of the Wagnerian ideal. Even the dramatic action saves us therefrom. It has borrowed from Mérimée the logic in passion, the shortest route, stern necessity. It possesses, above all, what belongs to the warm climate, the dry- ness of the air, its Mmpidezza. Here, in all respects, the climate is altered. Here a different sensuality ex- presses itself, a different sensibility, a different gaiety. This music is gay; but it has not a French or a Ger- 8 THE CASE OF WAGNER man gaiety. Its gaiety is African; destiny hangs over it, its happiness is short, sudden, and without for- giveness. I envy Bizet for having had the courage for this sensibility, which did not hitherto find expression in the cultured music of Europe—this more southern, more tawny, more scorched sensibility ... How the yellow afternoons of its happiness benefit us! We contemplate the outlook: did we ever see the sea smoother? And how tranquillisingly the Moorish dance appeals tous! How even our insatiability learns for once to be satiated with its lascivious melancholy! Finally, love,—love retranslated again into nature! Not the love of a “cultured maiden!” No Senta-sen- timentality!} But love as fate, as fatality, cynical, innocent, cruel,—and thus true to zature! Love, which in its expedients is the war of the sexes, and in its basis their sortal hatred. —1 know of no case where tragic humour, which forms the essence of love, has expressed itself so strenuously, has formulated itself so terribly, as in the last cry of Don Jose, with which the work concludes : “Yes! I myself have killed her; Oh my Carmen! my Carmen adored !” — Such a conception of love (the only one which is worthy of a philosopher) is rare; it distinguishes a work of art among thousands of others. For, on an 1Senta is one of Wagner’s female personages, THE CASE OF WAGNER 9 average, artists do like all the world, or worse even —they misunderstand love. Wagner also has misun- derstood it. People imagine they are unselfish in love because they seek the advantage of another being, often in opposition to their own advantage. But for so doing they want to possess the other being ... Even God himself is no exception to this rule. He is far from thinking, “What need you trouble about it, if I love you?” —he becomes a terror, if he is not loved in. return. L’Amour—with this word one gains one’s case with gods and men—est de tous les sentiments le plus égoiste, et, par conséquent, lorsqwil est blessé, le moins généreux (B. Constant). 3 You already see how much this music zmproves me? —Tll faut méditerraniser la musique: I have reasons for using this formula (Beyond Good and Evil, Nr. 255). The return to nature, to health, to gaiety, to- youth, and to wivtwe/— And yet I was one of the most corrupt of the Wagnerians ... I was capable of tak- ing Wagner seriously ... Ah, this old magician! to- what extent has he imposed upon us! The first thing his art furnishes is a magnifying-glass. We look into it, we don’t trust our eyes— everything becomes great, even Wagner becomes great... What a wise rattle- snake! All his life he has rattled before us about 10 THE CASE OF WAGNER “devotion,” about “loyalty,” about “purity;” with a panegyric on chastity, he withdrew from the corrupt world !— And we have believed him... But you do not listen to me? You prefer even the problem of Wagner to that of Bizet? I don’t under- value it myself, it has its charm. The problem of salvation is even a venerable problem. There is‘noth- ing which Wagner has meditated on more profoundly than salvation; his opera is the opera of salvation. Someone always wants to be saved in Wagner’s works ; at one time it is some little man, at another time it is some little woman—that is 42s problem.— And with what opulence he varies his leading motive! What rare, what profound sallies! Who was it but Wagner taught us that innocence has a preference for saving interesting sinners (the case in Zannhduser)? Or that even the Wandering Jew will be saved, will become settled, if he marries (the case in the Flying Dutch- man)? Or that corrupt old women prefer to be saved by chaste youths (the case of Kundry in Parsifal) ? Or that young hysterics like best to be saved by their doctor (the case in Lohengrin)? Or that handsome girls like best to be saved by a cavalier who is a Wagnerian (the case in the Master-singers)? Or that even married women are willingly saved by a cavalier (the case of Jso/de)? Or that “the old God,” after he has compromised himself morally in every respect, is finally saved by a freethinker and immoralist (the case THE CASE OF WAGNER II in the Wrbelung’s Ring)? Admire especially this last profundity! Do you understand it? I take good care not to understand it... That other lessons also may be derived from these works, I would rather prove than deny. That one can be brought to despair by a Wagnerian ballet — and to virtue (once more the case of Tannhdéuser)! That the worst consequences may result if one does not go to bed at the right time (once more the case of Lohengrin). That one should never know too exactly whom one marries (for the third time the case of Lohengrin). — Ti vistan and Isolde extols the perfect husband, who on a certain occasion has only one question in his mouth: “But why have you not told me that sooner? Nothing was simpler than that!” Answer: “Jn truth I cannot tell it. What thou dost ask Remains for aye unanswered.” Lohengrin contains a solemn proscription of investi- gation and questioning. Wagner, accordingly, advo- cates the Christian doctrine, “Thou shalt de/zeve, and must Jdelieve.”’ It is an offence against the highest and holiest to be scientific... The Flyzug Dutchman preaches the sublime doctrine that woman makes even the most vagabond person settle down, or, in Wagnerian language, “saves” him. Here we take the liberty to ask a question. Granted that it is true, would it at the same time be desirable? What becomes of the IZ THE CASE OF WAGNER “Wandering Jew,” adored and settled down by a woman? He simply ceases to be the eternal wanderer, he marries, and is of no more interest to us. Trans- lated into actuality: the danger of artists, of geniuses —for these are the “Wandering Jews’’—lies in woman: adoring women are their ruin. Hardly anyone has sufficient character to resist being cor- rupted — being “saved’”’— when he finds himself treated as a god: he forthwith condescends to woman. — Man is cowardly before all that is eternally feminine: women know it.—In many cases of feminine love (perhaps precisely in the most celebrated cases), love is only a more refined parasitism, a nestling in a strange soul, sometimes even in a strange body — Ah! at what expense always to “the host!” Goethe’s fate in moralic-acid, old-maidenish Ger- many is known. He was always a scandal to the Germans ; he has had honest admirers only among Jew- esses. Schiller, “noble” Schiller, who blustered round their ears with high-flown phrases, Ze was according to their taste. Why did they reproach Goethe? For the “Mountain of Venus,” and because he had composed Venetian epigrams. Klopstock had already preached to him on morals; there was a time when Herder had a preference for the word “Priapus,’ when speaking of Goethe. Even Wilhelm Meister was only regarded as a symptom of décadence, of “going to the dogs” in morals. The “menagerie of tame cattle” which it THE CASE OF WAGNER 13 exhibits, and the “meanness” of the hero, exasperated Niebuhr, for example, who finally breaks out into a lamentation which Biterolf1 might have chanted: “ Hardly anything can produce a more painful impres- sion than a great mind despoiling itself of its wings, and seeking its virtuosity in something far lower, while zt renounces the higher” ... The cultured maiden,was however especially roused: all the little courts — every sort of “ Wartburg” in Germany — crossed themselves before Goethe, before the “unclean spirit” in Goethe. — Wagner has set z#zs history to music. He saves Goethe, that goes without saying, but he does it in such a way that he adroitly takes the part of the cultured maiden at the same time. Goethe is saved; a prayer saves him, a cultured maiden draws him upward... What Goethe would have thought of Wagner? Goethe once proposed to himself the question, ‘“ What is the danger which hovers over all romanticists: the fate of the romanticist?” His answer was, ‘“ Suffoca- tion by chewing moral and religious absurdities over The philoso- pher adds an epilogue to that answer. Holiness —the last of the higher values perhaps still seen by the populace and woman, the horizon of the ideal for all who are naturally myopic. For philosophers, however, it is like every other horizon, a mere misap- again.” In fewer words: Parsifal 1A personage in Wagner’s Tannhduser. 14 THE CASE OF WAGNER prehension, a sort of door-closing of the region wh their world only commences — their danger, thezr ide theiy desirability ... Expressed more politely: philosophie ne suffit pas au grand nombre. Il lua f la sainteté. — 4 I further recount the story of the Wzbelung’s Ri It belongs to this place. It is also a story of sal tion, only, this time, it is Wagner himself who is sav For the half of his life, Wagner has believed in vevc tion, as none but a Frenchman has ever believed in He sought for it in the Runic characters of myths, believed that he found in Siegfried the typical revc tionist. — ‘‘Whence comes all the evil in the world Wagner asked himself. From “old conventions ” answered, like every revolutionary ideologist. T! means from customs, laws, morals, and institutio from all that the old world, old society rest | “How does one get rid of the evil in the wor! How does one do away with old society?” Only declaring war against ‘“‘conventions”’ (traditional usz and morality). That is what Siegfried does. He cc mences early with it, very early: his procreation ready is a declaration of war against morality — comes into the world through adultery and incest . It is zo¢ the legend, but Wagner who is the inventor THE CASE OF WAGNER 15 this radical trait; on this point he has corrected the legend .. . Siegfried continues as he commenced: he follows only the first impulse, he casts aside all tradi- tion, all reverence, all fear, Whatever displeases him, he stabs down. He runs irreverently to the attack on the old Deities. His principal undertaking, however, is for the purpose of emancipating woman — “ saving Brunn- hilde” ... Siegfried and Brunnhilde; the sacrament of free love; the dawn of the golden age; the twilight of the Gods of old morality!—evzl ts done away with... Wagner’s vessel ran merrily on this course for a long time. Here, undoubtedly, Wagner sought his highest goal.— What happened? A misfortune. The vessel went on a reef; Wagner was run aground. The reef was Schopenhauer’s philosophy ; Wagner was run aground on a contrary view of things. What had he set to music? Optimism. Wagner was ashamed. In addition, it was an optimism for which Schopen- hauer had formed a malicious epithet —zxzfamous opti- mism. He was once more ashamed. He thought long over it; his situation seemed desperate... A way out of the difficulty finally dawned on his mind. The reef on which he was wrecked —how would it be if he interpreted it as the goad, the ultimate purpose, the real meaning of his voyage? To be wrecked here —that was a goal also. Bene navigavi cum nau- fragium fect... And he translated the Wibelung’s Ring into Schopenhauerism. Everything goes wrong, 16 THE CASE OF WAGNER everything goes to ruin, the new world is as bad as the old. — Nothingness, the Indian Circe, makes a sign . . . Brunnhilde, who according to the earlier design had to take leave with a song in honour of free love, solacing the world in anticipation of a Socialistic Utopia in which “all will be well,” has now something else to do. She has first to study Schopenhauer; she has to put into verse the fourth book of the “World as Will and Representation.” Wagner was saved... In all seriousness, that was a salvation. The service for which Wagner is indebted to Schopenhauer is im- mense. It was only the philosopher of décadence who enabled the artist of décadence to discover himself. 5 The artist of décadence —that is the word. And it is here that my seriousness commences. I am not at all inclined to be a quiet spectator, when this décadent ruins our health—and music along with it. Is Wagner a man at all? Is he not rather a disease? Everything he touches he makes morbid—e has made music morbid. — A typical décadent, who feels himself necessary with his corrupt taste, who claims that it is a higher taste, who knows how to make his depravity be regarded as a law, as a progress, as fulfilment. And nobody defends himself. Wagner’s power of THE CASE OF WAGNER 17 seduction becomes prodigious, the smoke of incense steams around him, the misunderstanding about him calls itself ““Gospel’’—it is by no means the poor in Spirit exclusively whom he has convinced. I should like to open the windows a little. Air! More air! It does not surprise me that people deceive them- selves about Wagner in Germany. The contrary would surprise me. The Germans have created for themselves a Wagner whom they can worship; they were never psychologists, they are grateful by mis- understanding. But that people also deceive them- selves about Wagner in Paris! where people are almost nothing else but psychologists. And in St. Petersburg ! where things are still divined which are not divined even in Paris. How intimately related to the entire European déadence must Wagner be, when he is not recognised by it as a décadent. He belongs to it: he is its Protagonist, its greatest name... People honour themselves by exalting him to the skies. — For it is already a sign of décadence that no one de- fends himself against Wagner. Instinct is weakened. What should be shunned attracts people. What drives still faster into the abyss is put to the lips. — You want an example? One need only observe the régime which the anzmic, the gouty, and the diabetic prescribe for themselves. Definition of the vegetarian : a being who needs a strengthening diet. To recognise c 18 THE CASE OF WAGNER what is hurtful, as hurtful, zo de able to deny one’s se] what is hurtful, is a sign of youth and vitality. Th exhausted is al/ured by what is hurtful; the vegetaria by his pot-herbs. Disease itself may be a stimulus t life: only, a person must be sound enough for such stimulus! Wagner increases exhaustion; it is on tha account that he allures the weak and exhausted. OIF the rattlesnake joy of the old master, when he alway saw just “the little children” come to him! I give prominence to this point of view: Wagner’ art is morbid. The problems which he brings upo the stage,— nothing but problems of hysterics —th convulsiveness of his emotion, his over-excited sens bility, his taste, which always asked for stronge stimulants, his instability, which he disguised as prit ciples, and, not least, the choice of his heroes an heroines, regarded as physiological types (a galler of morbid individuals!): altogether these symptom represent a picture of disease about which there ca be no mistake. Wagner est une névrose. Nothin is perhaps better known at present, at any rat nothing is studied more than the Protean characte of degeneracy, which here crystallises as art and artis’ Our physicians and physiologists have in Wagne their most interesting case, at least a very complet case. Just because nothing is more modern than thi entire morbidness, this decrepitude and over-excitabilit of the nervous mechanism, Wagner is the moder THE CASE OF WAGNER 19 artist par excellence, the Cagliostro of modernism. In his art there is mixed, in the most seductive manner, the things at present most necessary for everybody — the three great stimulants of the exhausted, drutalzty, artifice, and innocence (idiocy). Wagner is a great ruin for music. He has di- vined in music the expedient for exciting fatigued nerves—he has thus made music morbid. He pos- sesses no small inventive ability in the art of pricking up once more the most exhausted, and calling back to life those who are half-dead. He is the master of hypnotic passes; he upsets, like the bulls, the very strongest. The success of Wagner—his success on the nerves, and consequently on women —has made all the ambitious musical world disciples of his magical art. And not the ambitious only, the shrewd also... . At present money is only made by morbid music, our great theatres live by Wagner. 6 I again allow myself a little gaiety. I suppose the case that the success of Wagner became embodied, took form, and that, disguised as a philanthropic musical savant, it mixed among young artists. How do you think it would express itself under the cir- cumstances ? — My friends, it would say, let us have five words 20 THE CASE OF WAGNER among ourselves. It is easier to make bad music than good music. What if, apart from that, it were also more advantageous? more effective, more persuasive, more inspiriting, more sure? more Wagnerian? Put- chrum est paucorum hominum. Bad enough! We understand Latin, we perhaps also understand our advantage. The beautiful has its thorns; we are aware of that. What is the good, then, of beauty? Why not rather the grand, the sublime, the gigantic, that which moves the masses?— And once more: it is easier to be gigantic than to be beautiful; we are aware of that... We know the masses, we know the theatre. The best that sit in it, German youths, horned Siegfrieds and other Wagnerians, require the sublime, the pro- found, the overpowering. Thus much we can accom- plish. And the others that sit in the theatre —the culture-cretins, the little d/asés, the eternally feminine, the good digesters, in short the people — similarly re- quire the sublime, the profound, and the overpowering. Those have all one kind of logic. “He who upsets us is strong; he who raises us is divine; he who makes us imaginative is profound.” Let us decide, Messrs. the musicians: let us upset them, let us raise them, let us make them imaginative. Thus much we can accomplish. As regards the making imaginative, it is here that our conception of “style” has its starting point. THE CASE OF WAGNER 21 Above all, there must be no thought! Nothing is more compromising than a thought! But the state of mind which precedes thought, the travail of yet unborn thoughts, the promise of future thoughts, the world as it was before God created it—a recrudés- cence of chaos . . . chaos makes imaginative .. . In the language of the master: infinity, but without melody. In the second place, as concerns the upsetting, it already belongs in part to physiology. Let us study first of all the instruments. Some of them persuade even the bowels (they ofez the doors, as Handel says), others charm the spinal marrow. The colour of sound is decisive here ; what resounds is almost indifferent. Let us refine on 742s point! What is the use of wasting ourselves on other matters? Let us be characteristic in sound, even to foolishness! It is attributed to our genius when we give much to con- jecture in our sounds! Let us irritate the nerves, let us strike them dead, let us make use of lightning and thunder, — that upsets . Above all, however, passzon upsets. — Let there be no misunderstanding among us with regard to passion. Nothing is less expensive than passion. One can dis- pense with all the virtues of counterpoint, one need not have learned anything,— one can always use passion. Beauty is difficult: let us guard ourselves against beauty!... And melody still more! Let us 22 THE CASE OF WAGNER disparage, my friends, let us disparage, if we are serious about the ideal, let us disparage melody! Nothing is more dangerous than a fine melody! Nothing more certainly ruins the taste. We are lost, my friends, if fine melodies are again loved! ... Principle: Melody is immoral. Proof: Palestrina. Application: Parsifal. The want of melody even sanctifies .. . And this is the definition of passion. Passion — or the gymnastics of the loathsome on the rope of enharmonics. — Let us dare, my friends, to be loath- some! Wagner has dared it! Let us splash before us, undismayed, the mire of the most odious har- monies! Let us not spare our hands! It is thus only that we become natural... At last counsel! Perhaps it embraces all in one :— Let us be idealists! If this is not the most expedient thing we can do, it is at least the wisest. In order to raise men, we ourselves must be exalted. Let us walk above the clouds, let us harangue the infinite, let us surround ourselves with grand symbols! Szr- sum! Bumbum!—there is no better counsel. Let “fulness of heart” be our argument; let “fine feel- ing” be our advocate. Virtue still wins the case against counterpoint. ‘He who makes us better — how could it be that he was not good himself?” such has always been the conclusion of mankind. Let us therefore make mankind better !— one thereby THE CASE OF WAGNER 23 becomes good (one thereby becomes ‘“classic’’ even: Schiller became a “classic”). Seeking after ignoble sense-excitement, after so-called beauty, has enervated the Italians; let us remain German! Even Mozart’s relation to music— Wagner has told ws by way of consolation! — was frivolous after all... Let us never admit that music “serves for recreation,” that it “cheers up,” that it “furnishes enjoyment.” Lez us never furnish enjoyment !—we are lost, if people again think of art as hedonistic... That belongs to the bad eighteenth century... On the other hand, nothing might be more advisable (we say it apart) than a dose of —hypocrisy, stt venta verbo. That gives dignity.— And let us choose the hour when it is suitable to look black, to sigh publicly, to sigh in a Christian manner, to exhibit large Christian sym- pathy. “Man is depraved: who will save him? What will save him?’ Let us not answer. Let us be careful. Let us struggle against our ambition, which would like to found religions. But nobody must venture to doubt that we save him, that our music alone brings salvation . . . (Wagner’s Essay, “ Re- ligion and Art”). 7 Enough! Enough! I fear sinister reality will have been too plainly recognised under my cheerful lines 24 THE CASE OF WAGNER —the picture of a decline in art, of a decline also in the artists. The latter, a decline of character, would perhaps receive a provisory expression with this formula: the musician is now becoming a stage-player, his art is developing more and more into a talent for lying. J shall have an opportunity (in a chapter of my principal work, which bears the title, “A Physi- ology of Art”) of showing in detail how this total transformation of art into stage-playing is just as defi- nite an expression of physiological degeneration (more exactly, a form of hysterics) as any of the corruptions and weaknesses of the art inaugurated by Wagner; for example, the restlessness of its optics, which necessitates continual changing of posture before it. One understands nothing of Wagner so long as one only sees in him a sport of nature, a caprice, a whim, or an accident. He was no “defective,” “abortive,” or “contradictory” genius, as has occasionally been said. Wagner was something complete, a typical déca- dent, in whom all “free will” was lacking, all whose characteristics were determined by necessity. If any- thing is interesting in Wagner, it is the logic with which a physiological trouble, as practice and proced- ure, aS innovation in principles and crisis in taste, advances step by step, from conclusion to conclusion. I confine myself this time solely to the question of style, — What is the characteristic of all Atevary déca- dence? It is that the life no longer resides in the THE CASE OF WAGNER 25 whole. The word gets the upper hand and jumps out of the sentence, the sentence stretches too far and obscures the meaning of the page, the page acquires life at the expense of the whole—the whole is no longer a whole. But that is the simile for every style of décadence: always anarchy of the atoms, disgre- gation of will, in the language of morality, “liberty of the individual,’ — widened to a political theory, “equal rights for all.” Life, egua/ vitality, vibration and exuberance of life pushed back into the most minute structures, the others foor in life. Every- where paralysis, distress, and torpor, or hostility and chaos, always becoming more striking, as one ascends to ever higher forms of organisation. The whole has ceased to live altogether; it is composite, summed up, artificial, an unnatural product. There is hallucination at the commencement in Wagner—not of tones, but of gestures; for these he seeks the appropriate semeiotic tones. If you want to admire him, see him at work here: how he separates, how he arrives at little unities, how he animates them, inflates them, and renders them visible. But by so doing his power exhausts itself: the rest is worth nothing. How pitiable, how confused, how laic is his mode of “developing,” his attempt to piece at least into one another, things which have not grown out of one another! His manner here reminds one of the Fréres de Goncourt, whose style approaches Wag- 26 THE CASE OF WAGNER ner’s in other respects also. A sort of pity is arous for so much trouble. That Wagner has masked unc the guise of a principle his incapacity for creati organically, that he asserts a “dramatic style” whe we assert merely his incapacity for any style, cor sponds to an audacious habit which has accompani Wagner all his life: he posits a principle where lacks a faculty (very different in this respect, let say in passing, from old Kant, who loved another ki of audacity: whenever he lacked a principle, he posit a “faculty” in human beings ...). Once more let be said that Wagner is only worthy of admirati and love in the invention of mtnutig, in the elaborati of details ;—- here we have every right to proclaim h as a master of the first rank, as our greatest mznzatus in music, who compresses into the smallest space infinitude of meaning and sweetness. His wealth colours, of demi-tints, of the mysteries of vanishi light, spoils us to such a degree that almost other musicians seem too robust afterwards. —If will believe me, the highest conception of Wagner not to be got from what at present pleases in his wor That has been invented to persuade the masses; ¢ of our class bounds back in presence of it, as bef: an all too impudent fresco. What do we care for | agacante brutality of the Overture of Zannhduser ? for the Circus of the Walkyrie? Whatever has beco popular in Wagner’s music apart from the theatre is THE CASE OF WAGNER 27 a doubtful flavour and spoils the taste. The Zannhduser March seems to me to raise a suspicion of Philistinism ; the Overture of the Flying Dutchman is much ado about nothing; the Prelude to Lohengrin gave the first example, only too insidious, only too successful, of how one may hypnotise with music (I dislike all music that has no higher ambition than to persuade the nerves). Apart, however, from Wagner the magnetiser and fresco-painter, there is yet a Wagner who deposits little jewels in his works, our greatest melancholist in music, full of flashes, delicacies, and words of comfort in which no one has anticipated him, the master of the tones of a melancholy and comatose happiness .. . A lexicon of the most familiar language of Wagner, nothing but short phrases of from five to fifteen meas- ures, nothing but music which xodbody knows . Wagner had the virtue of the décadents, pity .. .- 8 —“Very good! But how can one lose one’s taste for this décadent, if one is not perchance a musician, if one is not perchance a adécadent one’s self ?”’ — Re- versely! How is it we can’t do it? Just attempt it! You are not aware who Wagner is; he is quite a great stage-player! Does there at all exist a more profound, a more oppressive effect in the theatre? Do look at these youths — benumbed, pale, and breathless! They 28 THE CASE OF WAGNER are Wagnerians, they understand nothing of music — and nevertheless Wagner becomes master over them Wagner's art presses with the weight of a hun- dred atmospheres: bow yourselves just, it is unavoid- able ... Wagner the stage-player is a tyrant, his pathos overthrows every kind of taste, every kind of resistance.— Who has such convincing power of attitude, who sees the attitude so definitely before everything else? This holding the breath of Wag- nerian pathos, this unwillingness to let an extreme feeling escape, this dread-inspiring duration of con- ditions where momentary suspense is enough to choke one! Was Wagner a musician at all? At least he was something else in a higher degree, namely, an incom- parable Aistrio, the greatest mime, the most astonish-- ing theatrical genius that the Germans have had, our scenic artist par excellence. His place is elsewhere than in the history of music, with the grand true gen- iuses of which he must not be confounded. Wagner and Beethoven —that is a blasphemy — and in the end an injustice even to Wagner... He was also as a musician only that which he was in other respects: he became a musician, he decame a poet, because the tyrant ~ in him, his stage-player genius, compelled him to it. One finds out nothing about Wagner as long as one has not found out his dominating instinct. Wagner was zo?¢ a musician by instinct. He proved THE CASE OF WAGNER 29 this himself by abandoning all lawfulness, and —to speak more definitely —all style in music, in order to make out of it what he required, a theatrical rhetoric, a means for expression, for strengthening attitudes, for suggestion, for the psychologically picturesque. Wag- ner might here pass for an inventor and an innovator of the first rank—he has immeasurably increased the speaking power of music; he is the Victor Hugo of music as language. Provided always one grants that music may, under certain conditions, not be music, but speech, tool, or axctlla dramaturgica. Wagner's music, not taken under protection by theatrical taste, a very tolerant taste, is simply bad music, perhaps the worst that has ever been made. When a musician can no longer count three, he becomes “dramatic,” he becomes “Wagnerian” .. . Wagner has almost discovered what magic can be wrought with a music decomposed and reduced, as it were, to the elementary. His consciousness of it goes so far as to be disquieting, like his instinct for finding a higher lawfulness and a s¢y/e unnecessary. The ele- mentary szfices—sound, movement, colour, in short, the sensuality of music. Wagner never calculates as a musician from any kind of musical conscience; he wants effect, he wants nothing but effect. And he knows that on which he has to operate! He has, in this respect, the unscrupulousness which Schiller possessed, which everyone possesses who is connected with the 30 THE CASE OF WAGNER stage; he has also Schiller’s contempt for the world, which has to sit at his feet. A person is a stage-player in virtue of having a certain discernment in advance of other men, viz., that what has to operate as true must not be true at all. The proposition has been formu- lated by Talma: it contains the entire psychology of the stage-player, it contains — let us not doubt it — his morality also. Wagner’s music is never true. — But it zs taken as true, and so it is all right. — As long as people continue childish, and Wagnerian in addition, they think of Wagner even as rich, as a para- gon of lavishness, as a great landed proprietor in the em- pire of sound. They admire in him what young French people admire in Victor Hugo, the “royal generosity.” Later on people admire both of them for the very reverse reasons: as masters and models of economy, as prudent amphitryons. Nobody equals them in the ability to present an apparently princely table at a modest cost. — The Wagnerian, with his devout stomach, becomes satiated even with the fare which his master conjures up for him. We others, however, who, alike in books and in music, want szbstance more than anything else, and for whom merely “repre- sented” feasts hardly suffice, we are much worse off. Speaking plainly, Wagner does not give us enough to chew. His vrecttativo —little meat, somewhat more bone, and very much sauce —has been christened by wherewith I certainly do not , me “Alla genovese ;’ THE CASE OF WAGNER 31 mean to flatter the Genoese, but rather the older recitativo, the recitativo secco. As for the Wagnerian “leading motive,” I lack all culinary intelligence for it. If I were pressed, I would perhaps assign to it the value of an ideal toothpick, as an occasion for dis- pensing with the vest of the food. The “arias” of Wagner are still left.— And now I do not say a word more. 9 In sketching dramatic action, likewise, Wagner is. above all a stage-player. That which first suggests itself to him is a scene with an absolutely sure effect, a veritable actio,! with a haut-relief of gesture, a scene which mupsets,;,—he thinks this out thoroughly, it is only out of this that he derives his characters. All the rest follows therefrom in accordance with a techni- cal economy which has no reasons to be subtle. It is not the public of Corneille Wagner has to indulge; 1NoTE.—It has been a veritable misfortune for AMsthetics that the word “ drama” has always been translated by “action.’”” Wagner is not the only one who errs here; all the world is still in error about the matter; even the philologists, who ought to know better. The ancient drama had grand pathetic scenes in view,— it just excluded action (relegated it previous to the commencement, or Jdehind the scene). The word “drama” is of Doric origin, and according to Dorian usage signifies “event,” “history,” both words in a hieratic sense. The oldest drama represented local legend, the ‘sacred history” on which the establish- ment of the cult rested (consequently no doing, but a happening: dpa in Dorian does not at all signify “to do”). 32 THE CASE OF WAGNER it is merely the nineteenth century. Wagner would decide with regard to the “one thing needful” in much the same manner as every other stage-player decides now-a-days: a series of strong scenes, each stronger than the other,—and much sage stupidity in between. He seeks first of all to guarantee to him- self the effect of his work; he begins with the third act, he zests for himself his work by its final effect. With such a theatrical talent for guide, one is in no danger of creating a drama unawares. A drama requires hard logic: but what did Wagner ever care about logic! Let us repeat: it was oft the public of Corneille he had to indulge, it was mere Ger- mans! One knows the technical problem in solving which the dramatist applies all his power and often sweats blood: to give ecessity to the plot, and like- wise to the dénxouement, so that both are possible only in one way, so that both give the impression of free- dom (principle of the least expenditure of force). Now Wagner sweats the least blood here; it is certain that he makes the least expenditure of force on plot and dénouement. You may put any one of Wagner’s “plots” under the microscope ;—I promise you will have to laugh at what you see. Nothing more en- livening than the plot of Zris¢an, unless it be that of the Master-singers. Wagner is mot a dramatist; let us not be imposed upon! He loved the word “drama;” that was all—he always loved fancy words. The THE CASE OF WAGNER 33 word “drama,” in his writings, is nevertheless purely a misunderstanding (and shrewd policy: Wagner always affected superiority toward the word “opera’’), much in the same manner as the word “spirit” in the New Testament is purely a misunderstanding. — From the first, he was not enough of a psychologist for the drama; he avoided instinctively psychological motiva- tion. By what means? By always putting idiosyn- crasy in its place... Very modern, is it not? very Parisian! very décadent!... The plots, let us say in passing, which Wagner really knows how to work out by means of dramatic invention, are of quite another kind. I give an example. Let us take the case of Wagner requiring a woman’s voice. An entire act wzthout a woman’s voice —that does not do! But for the moment none of the “heroines” are free. What does Wagner do! He emancipates the oldest woman in the world, Erda. “Up! old grandmother! You have got to sing!” Erda sings. Wagner's purpose is served. He immediately discharges the old dame again. “Why really did you come? Retire! Please go to sleep again!” — J summa: ascene full of mythological horrors, which makes the Wagnerians zmaginative... —“But the contents of the Wagnerian texts! their mythical contents, their eternal contents !”” — Question: how does one test these contents, these eternal con- tents! The chemist gives the reply: one translates Wagner into the real, into the modern—let us be D 34 THE CASE OF WAGNER ‘ still more cruel, —into civil life! What then becor of Wagner! To speak in confidence, I have attempt it. Nothing more entertaining, nothing more reco mendable for pleasure walks, than to recount Wagner one’s self in more modern proportions: for example, 2 sifal as a candidate in divinity, with a public sch education (the latter indispensable for pure folly What surprises one then experiences! Would y believe it that the Wagnerian heroines, each and « when one has only stripped them of their heroic tr pings, are like counterparts of Madame Bovary! And how one comprehends, inversely, that Flaub: was at liberty to translate his heroine into Scan navian, or Carthaginian, and then to offer her, myth ogised, to Wagner as a libretto. Yes, taken as whole, Wagner appears to have had no interest in a other problems than those which at present inter: petty Parisian décadents. Always just five steps frc the hospital! Nothing but quite modern problen nothing but problems of @ great city! don’t you dov it! ... Have you remarked (it belongs to this assoc tion of ideas) that the Wagnerian heroines have children? They cannot have children... The desp with which Wagner has dealt with the problem permitting Siegfried to be born at all, reveals 1 Nietzsche here refers to the etymology of Parsifal (pure fool) wh Wagner adopted. THE CASE OF WAGNER 35 modern his sentiments were on this point. — Siegfried “emancipates woman ” —but without hope of posterity. — Finally, a fact which perplexes us: Parsifal is the father of Lohengrin! How has he done that ?— Have we here to recollect that “chastity works miracles?” ... Wagnerus dixit princeps in castitate auctoritas. 10 A word yet, in passing, concerning Wagner’s writ- ings: they are, among other things, a school of expedi- ency. The system of procedure which Wagner uses is to be employed in a hundred other cases, —he that hath an ear, let him hear. Perhaps I shall have a claim to public gratitude, if I give precise expression to his three most valuable principles of procedure : — Whatever Wagner cannot accomplish is objectionable. Wagner might accomplish much more, but he is unwilling — owing to strictness of principle. Whatever Wagner caz accomplish, no one will imi- tate, no one has anticipated, no one ought to imitate Wagner is divine... These three propositions are the quintessence of Wagner's writings: the rest is — “literature.” —Not all the music up till now has had need of literature: one does well here to seek for a satisfactory reason. Is it that Wagner’s music is too difficult to understand? Or did he fear the contrary, that it 36 THE CASE OF WAGNER would be understood too easily, that it would xot be dificult enough to understand ?—TIn fact, he has all his life repeated one phrase: that his music does not simply mean music! But more! Infinitely more! .. “ Not simply music’? —no musician speaks in such a manner! Let it be said once more, Wagner was unable to cut out of the block; he had no choice at all, he was obliged to make patch-work — “ motives,’’ atti- tudes, formule, reduplications, centuplications; as a musician he remained a rhetorician :—on that account he was compelled as a matter of principle to bring the device, “It implies,” into the foreground. “Music is always just a means;” that was his theory, that was the only praxzs at all possible for him. But no musi- cian thinks in such a way.— Wagner had need of litera- ture in order to persuade all the world to take his music seriously, to take it as profound, “because it meant Infinity;” all his life he was the commentator of the “Idea.” — What does Elsa signify? There is no doubt however: Elsa is “the unconscious spirit of the people” (“with this idea I necessarily developed to a complete revolutionist”’). } Let us recollect that Wagner was young when Hegel and Schelling led men’s minds astray; that he found out, that he grasped firmly what only a German takes seriously — “the Idea,” that is to say, something 1 Quotations from Wagner. THE CASE OF WAGNER 37 obscure, uncertain, mysterious; that among Germans clearness is an objection, and logic is disproof. | Schopenhauer has, with severity, accused the epoch of Hegel and Schelling of dishonesty — with severity, and also with injustice: he himself, the old pessimistic false-coiner, has in no way acted “more honestly” than his more celebrated contemporaries. Let us leave morality out of the game: Hegel is a flavour... And not only a German, but a European flavour ! — A flavour which Wagner understood !— which he felt himself equal to! — which he has immortalised! — He merely made application of it to music—he invented for himself a style which “meant Infinity” —he be- came the heir of Hegel... Music as “Idea” And how Wagner was understood! The same sort of men who were enthusiastic for Hegel, are at pres- ent enthusiastic for Wagner: in his school Hegelian is even written!— Above all, the German youth understood him. The two words, “infinite” and “sig- nificance,” quite sufficed; he enjoyed an incomparable pleasure in hearing them. It is zo¢ with music that Wagner has won the youth over to himself, it is with the “Idea:” —it is the mysteriousness of his art, its game of hide-and-seek among a hundred symbols, its polychromy of the ideal, which has led and allured these youths to Wagner! it is Wagner’s genius for forming clouds, his gripping, sweeping and roving through the air, his ubiquity and nullibiety— precisely the same 38 THE CASE OF WAGNER proceeding with which once Hegel misled and se- duced the youth! In the midst of Wagner's multi- plicity, fulness, and arbitrariness, they are justified, as it were, in their own eyes—they are “saved.” — They hear with trembling how in his art the sublime symbols become audible with gentle thunder out of the cloudy distance; they are not out of temper if the atmosphere here sometimes becomes grey, fright- ful, and cold. For they are each and all related to bad weather, German weather, like Wagner himself! Woden is their God: Woden, however, is the God of bad weather... They are right, these German youths, such as they are: how could they miss in Wagner what we others, we Halcyonians, miss in him: —J/a gaya scienza; light feet; wit, fire, grace, lofty logic; the dance of the stars, haughty intellect- uality ; the tremor of southern light; the smooth sea — perfection... It —I have explained where Wagner belongs to — ot to the history of music. Nevertheless, what is his import for the history of music? Zhe advent of the stage-player im music: a momentous event, which gives occasion to reflect, perhaps also to fear. In a formula, “Wagner and Liszt.’—Never has the up- rightness of musicians, their “ genuineness,” been put to such a dangerous test. It is easily enough under- THE CASE OF WAGNER 39 stood: great success, the success with the masses, is no longer on the side of genuineness, — one has to be a stage-player in order to obtain it!— Victor Hugo and Richard Wagner — they imply one and the same truth, that in declining civilisations, wherever the arbitrating power falls into the hands of the masses, genuineness becomes superfluous, disadvantageous, and a drawback. It is only the stage-player that still awakens great enthusiasm.— Thus dawns the golden age for the stage-player—for him and all that is re- lated to his species. Wagner marches with drums and fifes at the head of all the artists of elocution, of display, of virtuosity; he has first convinced the leaders of the orchestras, the machinists, and the- atrical singers. Not to forget the musicians of the orchestra :—he “saved” them from tedium... The movement which Wagner created encroaches even on the domain of knowledge; entire sciences belonging thereto emerge slowly out of a scholasticism which is centuries old. To give an example, I call special attention to the service which Rzemann has rendered to rhythmics; he is the first who has made current the essential idea of punctuation in music (it is a pity that by means of an ugly word he calls it “ phrasing ”). —All these, I say it with gratitude, are the best, the most worthy of regard, among the worshippers of Wagner—they are simply right to worship Wag- ner, The same instinct unites them with one an- 40 THE CASE OF WAGNER other, they see in him their highest type, they feel themselves transformed and elevated to power, even to great power, ever since he inflamed them with his peculiar ardour. Here indeed, if anywhere, the influ- - ence of Wagner has really been Jdeneficent. In this sphere, there has never been so much thought, so much purpose, so much work. Wagner has inspired all these artists with a new conscience: what they at present require of themselves, what they od¢azx from themselves, they have never required before Wagner’s time — formerly they were too modest for that. A different spirit rules in the theatre since the spirit jot Wagner began to rule there: the most difficult is demanded, there is severe blaming, there is rarely praising, —the good, the excellent, is regarded as the rule. Taste is no longer necessary; not even voice. Wagner is only sung with a ruined voice: that has a “dramatic” effect. Even talent is ex- cluded. The espresstvo at any price, such as is de- manded by the Wagnerian ideal, the décadence ideal, gets along badly with talent. Virtue only is the proper thing here—that is to say, drilling, automatism, “self-denial.” Neither taste, nor voice, nor talent:, there is only one thing needful for Wagner’s stage — Germanics! ... Definition of Germanics : obedience and long legs... It is full of deep significance that the advent of Wagner coincides with the advent of the “Empire;” both facts furnish proof of one THE CASE OF WAGNER 4!I and the same thing— obedience and long legs. — There has never been better obedience; there has never been better commanding. The Wagnerian musical directors, in particular, are worthy of an age ‘which posterity will one day designate with timorous reverence, the classical age of war. Wagner under- stood how to command; by that means he was the great teacher also. He commanded as the inexorable. will to himself, as the life-long discipline of himself : Wagner, who perhaps furnishes the most striking example of self-tyranny which the history of art sup- plies (even Alfieri, otherwise most nearly related to. him, has been surpassed.— Remark of a Turinese). 12 By means of this insight that our stage-players are more worthy of adoration than ever, their. dangerous-~ ness has not been conceived as less... But who yet doubts what I am after — what are the ¢hree de- mands for which my resentment, my solicitude, and my love for art, have at present opened my mouth ?— That the theatre may not become the master of art. That the stage-player may not become the cor- rupter of the genuine ones. That music may not become an art of lying. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE. POSTSCRIPT The gravity of the last words permits me in this place to communicate in addition some passages from an unprinted dissertation, which at least leave no doubt concerning my seriousness in this matter. The disser- tation is entitled, What Wagner costs us. The adherence to Wagner costs dear. An obscure consciousness of this still exists at present. Even Wagner’s success, his triumph, did not outroot this feeling radically. But formerly it was strong, it was formidable, it was like a gloomy hatred — throughout almost three-fourths of Wagner’s lifetime. That re- sistance which he encountered among us Germans, cannot be estimated highly enough, nor sufficiently honoured. We defended ourselves against him as against a disease — xot with arguments—one does not refute a disease,—but with obstruction, with mistrust, with aversion, with loathing, with a sullen seriousness, as if a great danger prowled around us in him. The esthetic gentlemen compromised them- selves when, out of three schools of German philos- ophy, they made an absurd attack upom Wagner’s principles with “if” and “for’’—what did he care 42 POSTSCRIPT 43 for principles, even his own! The Germans, however, have had enough of reason in their instincts to pro- hibit themselves every “if” and “for” in this matter. An instinct is weakened when it is rationalised; for dy rationalising itself it weakens itself. If there are indications that, in spite of the totality of European décadence, there yet resides in the German character a degree of healthfulness, an instinctive scent for what is injurious and threatens danger. I should like least of all to see this stolid resistance to Wagner un- dervalued among us. It does honour to us, it permits us even to hope: France could no longer dispense with so much healthfulness. The Germans, the re- tarders par excellence in history, are at present the most backward among the civilised peoples of Europe: this has its advantage,—they are thus relatively the youngest. The adherence to Wagner costs dear. The Ger- mans have only quite lately unlearned a sort of dread of him —the desire to get rid of him came upon them on every occasion.!— Do you recollect a curious 1 NoTE. — Was Wagner German at all? We have some reasons for asking this. It is difficult to discover in him any German trait whatsoever. Being a great learner, he has learned to imitate much that is German — that is all. His character itself is i opposition to what has hitherto been regarded as German— not to speak of the German musician! — His father was a stage-player named Geyer. A Geyer is almost an Adler* ... What has hitherto been put in circulation as the “Life of Wagner” is fadle con- * Geyer (vulture) and Adler (eagle) are both names of Jewish families. 44 THE CASE OF WAGNER occurrence, in which, just at the end, that old feeling again, quite unexpectedly, made its appearance? It happened at the funeral of Wagner that the first Wagner Society in Germany, that of Munich, de- posited on his tomb a wreath, the zzscription on which immediately became celebrated. ‘Salvation to the Saviour!”»— was how it read. Everybody admired the sublime inspiration which had dictated this in- scription, everybody admired a taste in which the partisans of Wagner have a privilege; but many also (it was singular enough!) made the same little correc- tion in the inscription: “Salvation from the Saviour!” — People recovered breath. — The adherence to Wagner costs dear. Let us measure it in its effect upon civilisation. Whom has his movement really brought into the foreground? What has it more and more reared into magnitude ?— More than anything else, the arrogance of the layman, of the idiotic art-amateur. He organises societies just now, he wants to make his “taste”’ prevail, he would like even to become the judge zz rebus musicis et musicantibus. In the second place, an ever greater indifference to all severe, noble, conscientious training in the service of art; the belief in genius substituted venue, if not worse. I confess my distrust of every point which rests solely on the testimony of Wagner himself. He had not pride enough for any truth whatsoever about himself, nobody was less proud; he remained, just like Victor Hugo, true to himself even in biographical matters, —he re- mained a stage-player. POSTSCRIPT 45 for it; in plain words, insolent dilettanteism (the for- mula for it is to be found in the Master-singers). In the third place, and worst of all, Theatrocracy ; —the absurdity of a belief in precedence of the theatre, in the right of sovereignty of the theatre over the arts, over art... But one has to tell the Wagneri- ans a hundred times to their face what the theatre is:—always just something zz subterposztion to art, always something merely secondary, something vul- garised, something suitably adapted for the masses, suitably falsified for them. Even Wagner has changed nothing of that: Bayreuth is big opera— but never good opera... The theatre is a form of demolatry in matters of taste, the theatre is an insurrection of the masses, a plébiscite agaimst good taste. The case of Wagner just proves this: he gained the multitude, — he depraved the taste, he depraved even our taste for the opera! — The adherence to Wagner costs dear. What does it make of the mind? Does Wagner free the mind? —He is possessed of every ambiguity, every equiv- ocation, everything, in fact, which persuades the un- decided, without making them conscious what they are persuaded to. Wagner is thereby a seducer in the grand style. There is nothing fatigued, nothing decrepit, nothing dangerous to life and derogatory to the world in spiritual matters, which would not be secretly taken under protection by his art,—it is 46 THE CASE OF WAGNER the blackest obscurantism which he conceals in the luminous husks of the ideal. He flatters every nihil- istic (Buddhistic) instinct and disguises it in music, he flatters every kind of Christianity, and every religious form of expression of décadence. Let us open our ears: everything that has grown up on the soil of zmpoverished life, the entire false coinage of transcendence and another world, has in Wagner’s art its sublimest advocate — ot in formulee (Wagner is too prudent to use formulz) but in its persuasion of sensuality, which, in its turn, again makes the mind tender and fatigued. Music as Circe... His last work is in this respect his greatest masterpiece. Parsifal will always maintain the chief place in the art of seduction, as its stroke of genius... I ad- mire that work, I should like to have composed it myself ; not having done so, / at least understand it Wagner was never better inspired than at the end. The exquisiteness in the alliance of beauty and disease is here carried so far that it casts, as it were, a shadow over Wagner’s earlier art:—it appears too bright, too healthy. Do you understand that ? Health and brightness acting as a shadow? as an objection almost? ... We are so far pure fools already... Never was there a greater connoisseur of musty, hieratic perfumes, —there never lived such an expert in the knowledge of all the /t//e infinite, of all the tremulous and exuberant, of all the femininism in POSTSCRIPT 47 the thesaurus of happiness!— Just drink, my friends, the philtres of this art! You nowhere find a more pleasant mode of enervating your mind, of forgetting your manliness under a rose-bush ... Ah! this old magician! This Klingsor of all the Klingsors! How he makes war against ws therewith! against us, the free spirits! How he humours every cowardice of modern soul with Siren tones!— There was never such a mortal hatred of knowledge!— One here requires to be a Cynic to escape being seduced; one requires to be able to bite to avoid worshipping. Well! old seducer! The Cynic warns thee—cave canem... The adherence to Wagner costs dear. I observe the youths who have long been exposed to his infection. The proximate effect, relatively innocent, relates to taste. Wagner’s influence is like a continuous use of alcohol. It dulls, it obstructs the stomach with phlegm. Specific effect: degeneracy of the sense of rhythm. The Wagnerian at last comes to call rhythmical, what I myself, borrowing a Greek proverb, call “agitating the swamp.” The corruption of the conceptions is undoubtedly much more dangerous. The youth be- comes a moon-calf—an “idealist.” He has got beyond science, in that respect he stands at the height of the master. On the other hand, he plays the philosopher; he writes ‘Bayreuth journals; he solves all problems in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Master. The most disquieting 48 THE CASE OF WAGNER thing, to be sure, is the ruin of the nerves. You may go at night through any of the larger cities, and everywhere you hear instruments violated with solemn fury——a savage howling mingling therewith. What is taking place?—the youths are worshipping Wagner... Bayreuth rhymes itself with hydro- pathic-establishment.— A typical telegram from Bay- reuth: Bereits bereut (rued already).—- Wagner is bad for youths; he is fatal to women. What, in medical language, is a Wagnerienne?— It seems to me that a physician could not put this conscience-alter- native with too much seriousness to brides: either the one or the other.— But they have already made their choice. One cannot serve two masters if one of them is called Wagner. Wagner has saved woman, therefore woman has built Bayreuth for him. Entire sacrifice, entire devotion, they have nothing they would not give him. Woman impoverishes herself in favour of the master, she becomes touching, she stands naked before him. —The Wagnerienne—the most gracious equivocalness to be found at present: she embodies Wagner's cause —in her sign, his cause triumphs .. . Ah, this old robber! He plunders us of our youths, he takes even our women as plunder, and drags them into his’ cavern... Ah, this old Minotaur! What he has already cost us! Every year trains of the finest maidens and youths are led into his labyrinth, that he may devour them,—every year all Europe strikes up the cry: “Off to Crete! Off to Crete!” . SECOND POSTSCRIPT My letter, it appears, is liable to a misapprehension. On certain countenances the indications of gratitude show themselves; I hear even a discreet mirth. I should prefer here, as in many things, to be understood. — But since a new animal ravages in the vineyards of German intellect, the Empire worm, celebrated R/zno- «era, nothing I say is any longer understood. The Kreugzeitung itself attests this to me, not to speak of of the Literarisches Centralblatt. —I have given to the Germans the profoundest books they at all possess —a sufficient reason why they should not understand a word of them... If in ¢kzs work I make an attack on Wagner — and incidentally on a German “taste,” — if I have hard words for the Bayreuth cretinism, I should like least of all to make an entertainment therewith for any other musicians. Of¢her musicians do not come into consideration in presence of Wagner. Things are bad everywhere. The decay is universal. The disease is deep seated. If Wagner’s name typifies the ruzn of music, as Bernini’s name typifies the ruin of sculpture, he is not by any means its cause. He has only acceler- ated its ¢empo,—to be sure, in such a way that one E 49 50 THE CASE OF WAGNER stands frightened before the almost instantaneous de- scent, downwards, into the abysm. He had the xaiveté of décadence: that was his superiority. He believed in it, he did not stop before any logic of décadence. The others hesitate —that distinguishes them. Noth- ing else! ... That which Wagner and the “others” have in common—lI enumerate it: the decline of organising power; the abuse of traditional means with- out the justifying capacity, that of attaining the end; the false coinage in the imitation of great forms, for which at present nobody is sufficiently strong, suffi- ciently proud, sufficiently self-confident, or sufficiently healthy ; the over-liveliness of the smallest details; emotion at any price; refinement as the expression of impoverished life; always more nerves in place of flesh.—I know only one musician who is at present still in a position to cut an overture out of the block, and nobody knows him!... What is at present famous does not create “better” music in compari- son with Wagner’s, but only music which is more indecisive, more indifferent:— more indifferent, be- cause the incomplete is set aside dy the presence of the complete. Wagner was complete; but he was com- plete corruption ; he was courage, he was will, he was conviction in corruption—of what import, then, is Jo- hannes Brahms! ... His good fortune was a Ger- 1It is Peter Gast, a disciple and friend of Nietzsche’s, who is here re- ferred to. SECOND POSTSCRIPT SI man misapprehension: he was taken for Wagner's antagonist, —an antagonist to Wagner was needed / — That does not produce ixzdispensable music, it produces in the first instance too much music!—TIf you are not rich, be proud enough for poverty!... The sym- pathy which Brahms here and there undeniably inspires, apart altogether from such party interest and party mis- understanding, was for a long time an enigma to me, until finally, almost by accident, I came to perceive that he operated on a certain type of persons. He has the melancholy of impotency; he does ot create out of plenitude, he is thirsty for plenitude. If one de- ducts his imitations, what he borrows either from the great ancient or the exotic modern forms of style —he is a master in the art of copying, — there remains, as his most striking peculiarity, the longing mood... That is divined by all who long, by all who are dissatis- fied. He is too little of a person, too little centralised. That is what the “impersonal,” the peripheristic understand,—they love him on that account. He is especially the musician of a class of unsatisfied ladies. Fifty paces further on we find the Wagnerienne — just as we find Wagner fifty paces further on than Brahms, —the Wagnerienne, a better stamped, more interest- ing, and, above all, a more gracious type. Brahms is moving, as long as he is in secret reveries, or mourns over himself—in that he is “modern ;” he becomes cold, he is of no more interest to us, immedi- 52 THE CASE OF WAGNER ately that he becomes the heir of the classics ... One likes to speak of Brahms as the ezry of Beethoven: I know of no more considerate euphemism. — All that at present makes pretensions to the “grand style” in music is thereby ezther false with respect to us, or false with respect to itself. This alternative is sufficiently thought-worthy, for it involves a casuistry with regard to the worth of the two cases. “False with respect to us: the instinct of most people protests against that —they do not want to be deceived ; though I myself, to be sure, should still prefer this type to the other (“false with respect to ztse/f’”’). This is my taste. — Expressed more simply for the “poor in spirit:” Brahms —or Wagner... Brahms is zo stage-player. —One may subsume a good many of the other musi- cians under the conception of Brahms. —I do not say a word of the sagacious apes of Wagner, for example, of Goldmark: with his Queen of Sheba one belongs to the menagerie — one may exhibit one’s self. — What can be done well at present, what can be done in a masterly manner, is only the small things. It is here only that honesty is still possible. — Nothing, however, can cure music zz the main thing, of the main thing, of the fatality of being the expression of a physiological contra- diction, —of being modern. The best instruction, the most conscientious schooling, the most thorough inti- macy with the old masters, yea, even isolation in their society —all that is only palliative, or, speaking more ' SECOND POSTSCRIPT 53 strictly, 2//usory ; because one has no longer the physi- cal capacity which is presupposed: be it that of the strong race of a Handel, be it the overflowing animal- ity of a Rossini. — Not everyone has the right to every teacher: that is true of whole epochs. — The possibility is not in itself excluded that there still exist, somewhere in Europe, vemains of stronger races, men typically in- opportune: from thence a delayed beauty and perfec- tion even for music might still be hoped for. It is only exceptions we can still experience under the best cir- cumstances. From the vz/e that corruption is preva- lent, that corruption is fatalistic, no God can save music, — EPILOGUE Let us finally, in order to take breath, withdraw for a moment from the narrow world to which all questions concerning the worth of persons condemn the mind. A philosopher requires to wash his hands after he has so long occupied himself with the “case of Wagner.” —I give my conception of the Modern. — Every age has in its quantum of energy, a quan- tum determining what virtues are permitted to it, what virtues are proscribed. It has either the vir- tues of ascending life, and then it resists to the utter- most the virtues of descending life; or it is itself an epoch of descending life, and then it requires the virtues of decline, then it hates all that justifies itself solely by plenitude, by superabundance of strength. “Esthetics is indissolubly bound up with these biologi- cal presuppositions: there is décadence zsthetics, and there is classical esthetics, —the “beautiful in itself” is a chimera, like all idealism.—In the narrower sphere of so-called moral values there is no greater con- trast than that of master morality and morality accord- ing to Christian valuation: the latter grown up on a thoroughly morbid soil (the Gospels present to us pre- 54 EPILOGUE 55 cisely the same physiological types which the romances of Dostoiewsky depict); master morality (‘“ Roman,” “heathen,” “classical,” ‘“ Renaissance”) reversely, as the symbolic language of well-constitutedness, of ascend- tng life, of the will to power as the principle of life. Master morality affirms, just as instinctively as Chris- tian morality denzes (“ God,” “the other world,” “self- renunciation” —nothing but negations). The former communicates to things out of its fulness —it glorifies, it embellishes, it vationalises the world, the latter im- poverishes, blanches, and mars the value of things, it denies the world. ‘The world,” a Christian term of insult. These antithetical forms in the optics of values are doth indispensable: they are modes of seeing which one does not reach with reasons and refutations. One does not refute Christianity, one does not refute a dis- ease of the eye. To have combated pessimism as one combats a philosophy was the acme of learned idiocy. The concepts “true” and “untrue” have not, as it seems to me, any meaning in optics.— That against which alone one has to defend one’s self is the falsity, the instinctive duplicity, which 22/7 not be sensible of these antitheses as antitheses: as was the case with Wagner, for example, who possessed no little master- liness in such falsities. To look enviously towards master morality, zod/e morality (the Icelandic legend is almost its most important document), and at the same time to have in his mouth the contrary doctrine, the 56 THE CASE OF WAGNER “Gospel of the Lowly,” the xeed of salvation! ... In passing, let me say that I admire the modesty of the Christians who go to Bayreuth. I myself should not endure certain words out of the mouth of Wagner. There are conceptions which do zo¢t belong to Bayreuth What? A Christianity adjusted for Wagneri- ennes, perhaps 6y Wagneriennes (for Wagner in his old days was positively feminint generis)? Let me say once more that the Christians of to-day are too modest forme... If Wagner was a Christian, then Liszt was perhaps a Church-Father!1— The need of salvation, the essence of all Christian needs, has nothing to do with such harlequins; it is the sincerest form of ex- pression of décadence, the most convinced and most painful affirmation of it in sublime symbols and prac- tices. The Christian wishes to get /oose from himself. Le moi est toujours haissable. — Noble morality, master morality, has, reversely, its roots in a triumphing se/f- affirmation, —it is the self-affirming, the self-glorifying of life ; it equally needs sublime symbols and practices, but only “because its heart is too full.” All deautiful art, all great art belongs here: the essence of both is gratitude. On the other hand, one cannot discount from it an instinctive aversion from the décadents, a disdain, a horror even, before their symbolism: such is almost its demonstration. The noble Roman recog- 1 Liszt was Wagner’s father-in-law. EPILOGUE 57 nised Christianity as a feda superstitio; I here remind you how Goethe, the last German of noble taste, felt with regard to the cross. One seeks in vain for more valuable, for more zxdispensable contrasts.} But such a falsity as that of the Bayreuthians is now no exception. We all know the unesthetic conception of the Christian “gentleman.” Indeed that zxnocence in the midst of contradictions, that “good conscience” in lying, is modern par excellence; one almost defines modernism by it. Modern man represents biologically a contradiction of moral values, he sits between two chairs, he says in one breath, Yea and Nay. What wonder, then, that just in our time, falsity itself be- came flesh and even genius? what wonder that Wagner “dwelt among us?” It was not without reason that I named Wagner the Cagliostro of modernism... But we all, unconsciously and involuntarily, have in ourselves standards, phrases, formule, and moralities of contradictory origin, —regarded physiologically, we are spurious... A atagnostic of modern soul —what would it commence with? With a resolute incision 1 Note. — My “ Genealogy of Morals” furnished the first information concerning the contrast between “ zod/e morality” and “Christian mo- rality;” there is perhaps no more decisive modification of thought in the history of religious and moral knowledge. That book, my touchstone for what belongs to me, has the good fortune to be accessible only to the most elevated and the most rigorous minds: ofkers have not got ears for it. One has to have one’s passion in things where nobody has it at present... 58 THE CASE OF WAGNER into this contradictoriness of instincts, with the disen- tangling of its antithetical moral values, with a vivi- section performed on its most instructive case. — The case of Wagner is a fortunate case for the philosopher —this work, one hears, is inspired by gratitude. . . NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER: THE BRIEF OF A PSYCHOLOGIST PREFACE The following chapters are all rather carefully se- lected out of my older writings—some of them go back to 1877,—they are perhaps simplified here and there ; above all, they are shortened. When read in succession, they will leave no doubt concerning either Richard Wagner or myself: we are antipodes. Some- thing further will also be understood: for example, that this is an essay for psychologists, but zo¢t for Germans... I have my readers everywhere, in Vienna, in St. Petersburg, in Copenhagen and Stock- _holm, in Paris, in New York—J have not them in Europe’s Flatland, Germany ... And I might per- haps also have a word to whisper in the ear of Messrs. the Italians, whom I love just as much as I... Quousque tandem, Crispi... Triple alliance: with the “Empire” an. intelligent people will never make aught but a mésalliance . Turin, Christmas-tide 1888. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, 61 WHERE I ADMIRE I believe artists often do not know what they can do best : they are too conceited for that. Their atten- tion is directed to something prouder than those little plants give promise of, which know how to grow up in actual perfection, new, rare, and beautiful, on their soil. The final excellency of their own garden and vineyard is superficially estimated by them, and their love and their insight are not of equal quality. There is a musi- cian, who, more than any other, has the genius for find- ing the tones peculiar to suffering, oppressed, tortured souls, and even for giving speech to dumb misery. No one equals him in the colours of the late autumn, the indescribably pathetic happiness of a last, alder-last, alder-shortest enjoyment ; he knows a sound for those secretly haunted midnights of the soul when cause and effect seem to have gone out of joint and every instant something can originate out of nothing. He draws his resources best of all out of the lowest depth of human happiness, and as it were out of its drained goblet, where the bitterest and most nauseous drops” have at the end —the good or the bad end — met with the sweetest. He knows that weary self-impelling of the soul which can no longer leap or fly, yea, not even 63 64 NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER walk ; le has the shy glance of pain that is concealed, of understanding without comfort, of leave-taking with- out confession; yea, as the Orpheus of all secret misery, he is greater than anyone, and much has been added to art through him only, much which was hitherto inexpressible and even seemingly unworthy of art— the cynical revolts, for example, of which only the greatest sufferers are capable, and likewise many quite small and microscopic matters belonging to the soul, as it were the scales of its amphibious nature, — yes, he is the master of minutiz. But he does not wish to be so! His character loves rather the large walls and the audacious wall-painting ... He fails to observe that his spirit has a different taste and inclination — antithetical opftzcs, —and likes best of all to sit quietly in the corners of broken-down houses: concealed there, concealed from himself, he paints his proper master- pieces, which are all very short, often only one measure in length, — it is not till there that he becomes quite good, great, and perfect, perhaps there only. — Wagner is one who has suffered sorely —that is his pre-eminence over the other musicians. I admire Wagner in every- thing in which he sets Azmse/f to music. — WHERE I MAKE OBJECTIONS That is not to say that I regard this music as healthy, and there least of all where it speaks of WHERE I MAKE OBJECTIONS 65 Wagner. My objections to Wagner’s music are phys- iological objections: for what purpose is to be served by disguising the same under esthetic formule? Esthetics is certainly nothing but applied Physiology. — My “matter of fact,” my “petit fait vrai,” is that I no longer breathe easily when once this music operates on me, that my foot immediately becomes angry at it and revolts: my foot has need of measure, dance, march —even the young German Kaiser can- not march according to Wagner’s Kaiser-march, —my foot desires first of all from music the raptures which lie in good walking, stepping, and dancing. But does not my stomach also protest? my heart? my circula- tion? do not my bowels fret? Do I not unawares become hoarse thereby . . . In order to listen to Wagner I need pastilles Géraudel . . . And so I ask myself, what is it at all that my whole body spe- cially wants from music? For there is no soul... I believe it wants alleviation: as if all the animal functions were to be accelerated by light, bold, wan- ton, self-assured rhythms; as if iron, leaden life were to lose its heaviness by golden, tender, unctuous melodies. My melancholy wants to take its repose in the hiding-places and abysses of perfection: for that purpose I need music. But Wagner makes people morbid. — Of what account is the theatre to me? ” ecstasies in which the mob— and who is not “mob!” —has its satis- F The convulsions of its “mora 66 NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER™ faction? The whole pantomime hocus-pocus of the stage-player?—It is obvious that I am essentially antitheatrically constituted: I have, from the bottom of my soul, for the theatre—this art of the masses par excellence—that profound scorn which at pres- ent every artist has. Szccess in the theatre—a person thereby sinks in my estimation, till he is never again seen; son-success—then I prick up my ears and begin to esteem... But Wagner was the re- verse (desides the Wagner who had made the lone- somest of all music), essentially a theatre man and stage-player, perhaps the most enthusiastic mimo- maniac that has existed, even as a musician... And in passing, we would say that if it has been Wag- ner’s theory, “the drama is the end, music is always but the means,” —his praxis, on the contrary, from the beginning to the close, has been, “the attitude is the end, the drama, as well as music, is always only the means.” Music as a means for elucidating, strengthening, and internalising the dramatic pan- tomime and stage-player concreteness; and the Wag- nerian drama only an occasion for many interesting attitudes !—-He possessed, along with all the other instincts, the commanding instincts of a great stage- player in all and everything: and, as we have said, also as a musician.—I once made this clear, not without ¢vouble, to a Wagnerian pur sang, —clear- ness and Wagnerians! I do not say a word more. WAGNER AS A DANGER 67 There was reason for adding further—‘“Be but a little more honest with yourself! for we are not in Bayreuth. In Bayreuth people are only honest in the mass, as individuals they lie, they deceive themselves. They leave themselves at home when they go to Bay- reuth, they renounce the right to their own tongue and choice, to their taste, even to their courage, as they have it and use it within their own four walls with respect to God and the world. Nobody takes the. most refined sentiments of his art into the thea- tre with him, least of all the artist who works for the theatre,—solitude is wanting, the perfect does not tolerate witnesses. In the theatre one becomes mob, herd, woman, Pharisee, voting animal, patron, idiot — Wagnerian: there even the most personal con- science succumbs to the levelling charm of the great multitude, there the neighbour rules, there one Je- comes neighbour... WAGNER AS A DANGER I The object which recent music pursues in what is at present called — by a strong though obscure name — “infinite melody” one can explain to one’s self by going into the sea, gradually losing secure footing on the bottom, and finally submitting one’s self to the 68 NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER element at discretion: one has to swim. In older music, in an elegant, or solemn, or passionate to-and- fro, faster and slower, one had to do something quite different, namely, to dance. The proportion necessary thereto, the observance of definite balance in meas- ures of time and intensity, extorted from the soul of the hearer a continuous comsidevation, —on the con- trast between this cooler breeze, which originated from consideration, and the breath of enthusiasm warmed through, the charm of all good music rested. — Richard Wagner wanted another kind of movement —he overthrew the physiological pre-requisite of pre- vious music. Swimming, hovering —no longer walk- ing, dancing... Perhaps the decisive word is thereby said. “Infinite melody” just seeks to break up all symmetry of measure and intensity, at times it derides it even—it has its wealth of invention precisely in what sounded to the ears of former times as rhythmical paradox and abuse. Out of an imitation, out of a predominance of such a taste, ‘there might arise such a danger to music that a greater could not even be imagined——the complete degeneration of rhythmical feeling, chaos in place of rhythm... The danger reaches its climax when such a music rests always more and more upon en- tirely naturalistic stage-playing and pantomime, which, subject to no law of plastic art, desire effect and nothing more... The espresstvo at any price, and A MUSIC WITHOUT A FUTURE 69 music in the service, in the slavery of attitude— that ts the end... 2 What? would it really be the first virtue of a performance (as the performing musical artists at present seem to believe), to attain under all cir- cumstances a haut-relief which cannot be surpassed ? Is not this, when applied, for example, to Mozart, the special sin against the spirit of Mozart, the gay, enthusiastic, tender, amorous spirit of Mozart, who, fortunately, was not German, and whose seriousness is a gracious, golden seriousness, and wot that of a German Philistine ... Not to mention the serious- ness of the “marble statue”... But you think that a/Z music is music of the “marble statue,” — that a/7 music must spring forth out of the wall and agitate the hearer to his very bowels... It is only thus that music is said to operate!— Who is there operated upon? Something on which a nodle artist must never operate, — the masses! the imma- ture! the used up! the morbid! the idiots! the Wag- nerians!... A MUSIC WITHOUT A FUTURE Music, of all the arts that know how to grow up on the soil of a certain civilisation, makes its ap- 7O NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER , pearance last of the plants, perhaps because it is the most intrinsic, and consequently arrives latest —in the autumn and withering of each civilisation. It was only in the art of the Dutch masters that the soul of the Christian Middle Ages found its dying echo, —their tone-architecture is the posthumous, though genuine and equally legitimate sister of Gothic. It was only in Handel’s music that the best re-echoed out of the soul of Luther and his kin: the heroic Jewish trait, which gave the Refor- mation a touch of greatness,—the Old Testament become music, zof the New Testament. It was re- served for Mozart to pay in clinking gold pieces the balance due to the age of Louis XIV and the art of Racine and Claude Lorrain; it was only in Beetho- ven’s and Rossini’s music that the eighteenth cen- tury sang itself out, the century of enthusiasm, of broken ideals, and of fugztzve happiness. All true, all original music is a swan’s song.— Perhaps even our latest music, notwithstanding its predominance and ambition, has but a brief space of time before it; for it originated out of a civilisation whose basis is rapidly sinking,—a forthwith suse civilisation. A certain catholicism of sentiment, and a delight in some ancient indigenous (so-called “national ”’) exist- ence, or nuisance, are its pre-requisites. Wagner's appropriation of old legends and songs in which learned prejudice had taught us to see something WE ANTIPODES 71 Germanic par excellence—we laugh at that now, — and the new inspiration of these Scandinavian mon- sters with a thirst for ecstatic sensuality and super- sensuality: all this taking and giving of Wagner in respect to materials, characters, passions, and nerves, would also express plainly the spirit of Wagner's music, provided that this itself, like all music, should not know how to speak unambiguously of itself: for music is a woman... We must not allow our- selves to be misled with regard to this state of affairs by the fact that for the moment we are living precisely in the reaction wzthkin the reaction. The age of national wars, of ultramontane martyrdom, this whole z#ter/ude-character which the circumstances of Europe at present are possessed of, may, in fact, assist such art as that of Wagner in obtaining a sudden glory, without thereby guaranteeing to it a future. The Germans themselves have no future... WE ANTIPODES It will be remembered perhaps, at least among my friends, that at the commencement I rushed upon this modern world with some errors and overestimates, and in any case as a hopeful person. I understood —who knows from what personal experiences ?— the philosophical pessimism of the nineteenth century as 72 NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER the symptom of a higher thinking power, of a more triumphal fulness of life than had found expression in the philosophy of Hume, Kant, and Hegel, —I took tragical perception for the choicest luxury of our civilisation, as its most precious, most noble, most dangerous mode of squandering, but always, on the ground of its superabundance, as its permitted luxury. I similarly interpreted Wagner’s music in my own way, as the expression of a Dionysian powerfulness of soul, I believed that I heard in it the earthquake with which a primitive force of life, suppressed for ages, finally relieves itself, indifferent as to whether all that at present calls itself civilisation is shaken thereby. It is obvious what I misunderstood, it is obvious in like manner what I destowed upon Wagner and Schopenhauer—myself ... Every art, every philosophy may be regarded as a medicine and help- ing expedient of advancing or decaying life: they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: on the one hand those suffering from the superabundance of life, who want a Dionysian art and similarly a tragic insight and prospect with regard to life,—and on the other hand those suffering from the zmpoverishment of life, who desire repose, stillness, smooth sea, or e/se ecstasy, convulsion, intoxication furnished by art and philoso- phy. The revenge on life itself —the most voluptuous kind of ecstasy for such impoverished ones!... To WE ANTIPODES 73 the double requirement of the latter Wagner, just like Schopenhauer, corresponds —they both deny life, they calumniate it; they are thereby my antipodes. — The richest in fulness of life, the Dionysian God and man, may not only allow himself the spectacle of the. frightful and the questionable, but even the frightful: deed, and every luxury of destruction, decomposition and denial,— with him the evil, the senseless, and the loathsome appear as it were permitted, as they appear to be permitted in nature—as a consequence: of the superabundance of the procreative, restorative powers— which out of every desert is still able to. create a luxuriant orchard. On the other hand those: suffering most, the poorest in life, would have most. need of gentleness, peaceableness, and benevolence — that which at present is called humanity —in think- ing as well as in practice: if possible, a God who is. quite specially a God for the sick, a “Hezland,;” similarly also logic, the understandableness of exist-. ence as a conception, even for idiots—the typical. “freethinkers,” like the “idealists,” and “ beautiful. souls,” are all décadents; in short, a certain warm, fear-excluding narrowness and inclusion in optimistic: horizons which permit stupefaction ... In this: manner, I gradually learned to understand Epicurus,. the antithesis of a Dionysian Greek; in like manner the Christian, who, in fact, is only a species of Epi- curean who, with the doctrine, “belief makes d/essed,”’ 74 NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER carries out the principle of Hedonism as far as pos- stble —till he is beyond all intellectual righteousness If I have something in advance of all psy- chologists, it is that my insight is sharper for that nicest and most insidious species of znference a pos- teriort in which most errors are made: the infer- ence from the work to its originator, from the deed to the doer, from the ideal to him who zeeds it, from every mode of thinking and valuing to the ruling veguirement behind it.—In respect to artists of every kind, I now make use of this main distinc- tion: has the hatred of life, or the superabundance of life, become creative here? In Goethe, for example, the superabundance became creative, in Flaubert the hatred: Flaubert, a new edition of Pascal, but as an artist with instinctive judgment at bottom: “ Flaubert est toujours haissable, Thomme n'est rien, Caeuvre est tout”... He tortured himself when he composed, quite as Pascal tortured himself when he thought — they both felt “unegotistic.” ‘“ Unselfishness”? — the décadence-principle, the will to the end in art as well as in morals. WHERE WAGNER BELONGS TO Even at the present time France is still the seat of the most intellectual and refined civilisation of Europe, and the zghk school of taste: but one must WHERE WAGNER BELONGS TO 75 know how to find this “France of taste.” The Nord: deutsche Zeitung, for example, or he who has it for his mouthpiece, sees in the French, “ barbarians,” — as for me, I seek for the déack part of earth, where “the slaves”’ ought to be freed, in the neighbourhood of the Morddeutsche . . . He who belongs to chat France keeps himself well concealed: there may be a small number in whom it is embodied and lives, besides perhaps men who do not stand upon the strongest legs, in part fatalistic, melancholy, sick, in part over-pampered, over-refined, such as have the ambition to be artificial—but they have in their pos- session all the elevation and delicacy that is still left in the world. In this France of intellect, which is also the France of pessimism, Schopenhauer is at present more at home than he ever has been in Ger- many; his principal work twice translated already, the second time admirably, so that I now prefer to read Schopenhauer in French (he was an accident among Germans, as I am an accident — the Germans have no fingers for us, they have no fingers at all, they have only claws). Not to speak of Heinrich Heine — Padorable Heine they say in Paris—who has long ago passed over into the flesh and blood of the profounder and more soul-breathing lyric poets of France. What would German horned cattle know of how to deal with the délicatesses of such a nature! —Finally, as regards Richard Wagner: one would 76 NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER seize it with hands, not perhaps with fists, that Paris is the proper soi/ for Wagner: the more French music shapes itself according to the needs of the “Ame moderne,” the more it becomes Wagnerian, — it already does so sufficiently. — One must not allow one’s self to be misled here by Wagner himself — it was sheer wickedness of Wagner to mock at Paris in its agony in 1871... In Germany Wagner is never- theless a mere misunderstanding: who would be more incapable of understanding anything of Wagner than the young Kaiser, for example? — The fact remains certain, nevertheless, for everyone who is acquainted with the movement of European civilisation, that French Romanticism and Richard Wagner are very closely connected. Altogether dominated by litera- ture, up to their eyes and ears—the first artists of Europe possessing a universal literary culture, — mostly even themselves writers, poets, intermediaries and blenders of the senses and arts, altogether fanatics of expression, great discoverers in the domain of the sublime, also of the loathsome and the shocking, still greater discoverers in effect, in display, in the art of the shop window, altogether talented far beyond their geniuses, — vzrtuost through and through with dismal accesses to everything which seduces, allures, forces, or upsets, born enemies of logic and the straight line, covetous of the foreign, the exotic, the mon- strous, and all opiates of the senses and understand- WAGNER AS THE APOSTLE OF CHASTITY 77 ing. On the whole, a rashly-venturing, magnificently- violent, high-flying, and high up-pulling kind of artists, who had first to teach to ¢heiy century—it is the century of the mass—the conception of “artist.” But sick... WAGNER AS THE APOSTLE OF CHASTITY I —TIs this our mode? From German heart came this vexed ululating ? From German body this self-lacerating? Is ours this priestly hand-dilation, This incense-fuming excitation ? Is ours this plunging, faltering, brangling, This, sweet as sugar, ding-dong-dangling ? This sly nun ogling, Ave-hour-bell tinkled, This whole false rapturous flight beyond the heavens star-sprinkled? ... —Is this our mode? Think well! Ye still stay for ingression .. . For what ye hear is Rome,— Rome's faith without expression. 2 Chastity and sensuality are not necessarily anti- thetical; every true marriage, every genuine love- affair is beyond any such antithesis. But in those 78 NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER cases in which this antithesis really exists, it fortu- nately needs not at all to be a tragical antithesis. This might at least be the case with all better constituted, more cheerful mortals, who are not at all disposed, without further ado, to reckon their fluctuating state of equilibrium betwixt angel and petite béte among the arguments against existence, — the finest, the brightest, such as Hafiz and Goethe, have even discerned an additional charm therein. It is just such contradic- tions that allure to life... But if, on the other hand, the ill-constituted beasts of Circe can be in- duced to worship chastity, they will, as is but too plain, see and worship in it only their own antithesis —and oh, one can imagine with how much tragic grunting and eagerness!—that same painful and absolutely superfluous antithesis which Richard Wag- ner at the end of his days undoubtedly intended to set to music and produce on the stage. For what purpose really? we may reasonably ask. 3 Here, to be sure, that other question cannot be avoided: what had Wagner really to do with that manly (alas, so very unmanly) “rustic simplicity,” the poor devil and country lad, Parsifal, whom, by such insidious means, he finally succeeded in making a WAGNER AS THE APOSTLE OF CHASTITY 79 Roman Catholic — what? was this Parsifal really meant seriously ? For that people have /aughed over him I would least of all dispute, nor would Gottfried Keller do so... One might wish that the Wagnerian Parsifal had been meant to be gay, like a finale or satiric drama, with which, precisely in a due and worthy manner, the tragedian Wagner had intended to take his farewell of us, also of himself, and above all of tragedy, namely, with an excess of the greatest and most wanton parody on the tragical itself, on all the awful earth-earnestness and earth-sorrowfulness of the past, on the s¢tupzdest form of the antinatural- ness of the ascetic ideal finally surmounted. For Parsifal is an operetta theme par excellence Are we to understand Wagner's Parsifal as his secret laugh of superiority at himself, as the triumph of his greatest, finally attained artistic freedom and artistic other-worldness — Wagner, who knows how to laugh at himself? . . . As has been said, one might wish that it were so: for what sense could we attach to a Parstfal seriously meant? Is it really necessary to suppose (as I have been told) that Wagner’s Parsifal is “the product of a maddened hatred of perception, intellect, and sensuality?” an anathema on sense and intellect in one breath, in a fit of hatred? an apostasy and return to sickly, Chris- tian, and obscurantist ideals? And finally, worst of all, the self-negation and self-annulment of an artist 80 NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER who had striven so far, with all his will-power, for the opposite, namely, for the highest spiritualising and sensualising of his art? And not only of his art, but of his life as well. Let us recollect how enthusiastically Wagner once walked in the footsteps of Feuerbach the philosopher. Feuerbach’s phrase of “a healthy sensuality,” echoed in the third and fourth decades of this century to Wagner as to many other Germans —they called themselves the young Germans — like the word of salvation. Did the older Wagner uxlearn his former creed? Very likely he did! judging from the disposition he evinced toward the end of his life to wnteach his first belief. . . Has the hatred of life got the upper hand in him, as in Flaubert? ... For Parsifal is a work of cun- ning, of revengefulness, of secret poison-brewing, hos- tile to the pre-requisites of life; a dad work. — The preaching of chastity is an incitement to antinatural- ness: I despise everyone who does not regard Parst- Jal as an outrage on morals. — HOW I GOT FREE FROM WAGNER I As far back as the summer of 1876, in the middle of the period of the first festival plays, my heart had taken farewell of Wagner. I cannot stand anything HOW I GOT FREE FROM WAGNER 81 ambiguous; and since Wagner’s return to Germany, he had condescended step by step to everything that I despise —even to Anti-Semitism ... It was, in fact, high time to take farewell then: soon enough I got proof of that. Richard Wagner, apparently the most triumphal, while in truth become a decayed, despairing décadent, sank down suddenly, helpless and disjointed, before the Christian cross... Was there no German then with eyes in his head, or sympathy in his conscience, for this awe-inspiring spectacle? Was I the only one who — suffered from it?— Enough; to myself the unexpected event, like a flash of lightning, illuminated the position I had left, —and also that subsequent horror which everyone feels who has passed unconsciously through a fearful danger. When I went further on alone, I shivered; not long thereafter I was sick, more than sick, namely, fatigued: —fatigued by the incessant un- deceiving concerning all that yet remained for the inspiration of us modern men, concerning the strength, labour, hope, youth, and love sguandered on all sides; fatigued out of disgust for the whole ideal- istic falsity and softening of conscience, which here once more had scored a victory over one of the bravest ; fatigued, finally, and not least, by the grief of an unrelenting suspicion—that I was henceforth condemned to mistrust more profoundly, to depise more profoundly, to be more profoundly a/one, than G 82 NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER ever before. For I had had no one but Richard Wagner ... I was condemned perpetually to the Germans... 2 Lonely, henceforth, and sadly mistrustful of myself, I then, not without indignation, took sides against myself, and for everything which gave pain to, and was hard upon me; I thus found the way again to that brave pessimism which is the antithesis of all idealistic falsity, and also, as it would appear to me, the way to myself,—to my task... That concealed and imperious something for which for a long time we have had no name, until it finally proves itself to be our task,—this tyrant in us retaliates frightfully for every attempt which we make to shirk it or escape from it, for every premature decision, for every thinking ourselves equal to those of whose number we are not, for every activity, however honourable it may be, if it happen to distract us from our main business—nay, even for every virtue which might shield us from the sternness of our special responsi- bility. Sickness is always the answer, when we are inclined to doubt concerning our right to our task, when we begin to make it easier for ourselves in any respect. Strange and frightful at the same time! It is our alleviations for which we must do THE PSYCHOLOGIST SPEAKS 83 the severest penance! And if we want afterwards to return to health, there is no choice for us: we must burden ourselves eavier than we were ever burdened before... THE PSYCHOLOGIST SPEAKS I The more a psychologist, a born, an unavoidable psychologist and soul-diviner, turns his attention to the more select cases and individuals, the greater becomes his danger of suffocation by sympathy. He needs sternness and gaiety more than another man. For corruption, the ruin of higher men, is the rule: it is dreadful to have such a rule always before one’s eyes. The manifold tortures of the psycholo- gist who has once discovered this ruin, and has then in almost every case throughout all history discov- ered this entire internal “unblessedness” of higher man, this eternal “too late!” in every sense —may perhaps one day become the cause of his own ruin... One perceives, in almost every psychologist, a tell-tale preference for intercourse with common and well-ordered men, such as betrays that he always requires curing, that he needs a sort of flight and forgetfulness away from what his insight, his inci- sions, his duszzess have laid upon his conscience. He 84 NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER is possessed by a fear of his memory. He is easily silenced before the judgment of others, he hears with unmoved countenance how others reverence, admire, love, and glorify where he has perceived, — or he even conceals his silence by expressing his agreement with some superficial opinion. Perhaps the paradox of his situation gets to be so horrible that the “educated classes,” on their part, learn great reverence precisely where he has learned great sympathy and great contempt... And who knows if in all great cases nothing more than this took place, —that a God was worshipped, and the God was only a poor sacrificial animal... Swccess has always been the greatest liar—and the work, the deed is a success as well... The great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer, are disguised in their creations, hidden away until they are unrecognisable ; the work of the artist, of the philosopher, only in- vents him who has created it, zs said to have created it... The “great men,” as they are reverenced, are poor little fictions composed after- wards, —in the world of historical values spurious coinage is current... 2 Those great poets, for example, such as Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopardi, Kleist, Gogol —I do not vent- THE PSYCHOLOGIST SPEAKS 85 ure to name much greater names, but I think them — as they avowedly are and must be, men of the moment, sensuous, absurd, five-fold, light-minded, and hasty in mistrust and in trust; with souls in which usually some flaw has to be concealed; often taking revenge by their works for an inner contamination, often seek- ing forgetfulness with their upward flights from a too- true memory, idealists out of the neighbourhood of the szwamp—what torments these great artists are, and the so-called higher men generally, for him who has once found them out... We are all advocates of the mediocre ... It is conceivable that it is just from woman (who is clairvoyant in the world of suf- fering, and alas, also, ready to help and save to an extent far beyond her powers) that ¢hey experience so easily those outbreaks of unlimited sympathy, which the multitude, above all the reverent multitude, overloads with inquisitive and self-satisfying interpreta- tions. This sympathising deceives itself constantly as to its power: woman would like to believe that love can do all, —it is a superstition peculiar to herself. Alas, he who knows the heart finds out how poor, helpless, pretentious, and liable to error even the best, the deep- est love is— how it rather destyvoys than saves... 3 The intellectual loathing and haughtiness of any man who has suffered profoundly —it almost deter- 86 NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER mines rank, Zow profoundly a person can suffer, —the chilling certainty, with which he is entirely imbued and coloured, that in virtue of his suffering he zxows more than the shrewdest and wisest could know, that he has been familiar with, and at home in many dis- tant, frightful worlds, of which “you know nothing” . . this tacit intellectual haughtiness, this pride of the elect of perception, of the “initiated,” of the almost sacrificed, deems all kinds of disguises neces- sary to protect itself from contact with over-officious and sympathising hands, and, in general, from all that is not its equal in suffering. Profound suffering makes noble; it separates. —One of the most refined forms of disguise is Epicurism, and a certain osten- tatious boldness of taste, which takes the suffering lightly, and puts itself in defence against all that is sorrowful and profound. There are “gay men” who make use of gaiety, because, on account of it, they are misunderstood, — they wzsk to be misunderstood. There are ‘scientific minds,” which make use of sci- ence, because it gives a gay appearance and because the scientific spirit suggests that a person is super- ficial—they wish to mislead to a false conclusion There are free, insolent minds which would fain conceal and deny that at the bottom they are dis- jointed, incurable souls—it is the case of Hamlet: and then folly itself may be the mask for an unhappy over-assured knowledge. — EPILOGUE I I have often asked myself if I am not under deeper obligation to the hardest years of my life than to any other. As my innermost nature teaches me, all that is necessary, when viewed from an ele- vation and in the sense of a great economy, is also the useful in itself,— one should not only bear it, one should Jove it... Amor fati: that is my inner- most nature.— And as regards my long sickness, do I not owe to it unutterably more than to my health? I owe to it a Aigher health, such a health as be- comes stronger by everything that does not kill it! —T owe to it also my philosophy ... It is great affliction only that is the ultimate emancipator of the mind, as the instructor of stvong suspicion which makes an X out of every U, a true, correct X, that is, the penultimate letter of the alphabet, before the last... It is great affliction only— that long, slow affliction in which we are burned as it were with green wood, which takes time,— that compels us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depth and divest ourselves of all trust, all good-nature, glossing, 87 88 NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER gentleness, and averageness, where we have perhaps: formerly installed our humanity. I doubt whether such affliction “improves” us: but I know that it deepens us... Be it that we learn to confront it with our pride, our scorn, our strength of will, doing like the Indian who, however sorely he may be tort- ured, takes revenge on his tormentor by his bad tongue; be it that we withdraw from affliction into nothingness, into dumb, benumbed, deaf self-sur- render, self-forgetfulness, and self-extinction ; — from such long, dangerous exercises of self-mastery one emerges as another man, with several additional interrogation marks, — above all, with the will to question henceforward more, more profoundly, more strictly, more sternly, more wickedly, more quietly than has ever been questioned on earth before... Confidence in life is gone; life itself has become a problem. — May it never be believed that one has thereby necessarily become a gloomy person, a mop- ing owl! Even love to life is still possible, — only one loves differently ... It is the love to a woman that causes us doubts... 2 The strangest thing is this: one has afterwards another taste, —a second taste. Out of such abysses, including the abyss of strong suspicion, one comes EPILOGUE 89 back born again, with the skin cast, more ticklish, more wicked, with a finer taste for pleasure, with a more delicate tongue for all good things, with a mer- rier disposition, with a second and more dangerous innocence in pleasure, more childish and also a hun- dred times more refined than one had ever been before. Oh, how repugnant to one henceforth is gratifi- cation, coarse, dull, drab-coloured gratification, as usually understood by those who enjoy life, our “educated” class, our rich and ruling class! How malignantly we now listen to the great bum-bum of the fair with which (by means of art, book, and music and with the assistance of spirituous liquors) “educated” people and city men at present allow themselves to be outraged for the sake of “ intellect- ual gratification!” How the theatre-cry of passion now pains our ear, how the whole romantic tumult and sensuous hubbub which the educated mob love (to- gether with its aspirations after the sublime, the ele- vated, the preposterous), has become strange to our taste! No, if we convalescents still need an art, it is another art—an ironical, easy, fugitive, divinely untrammelled, divinely artificial art, which, like a pure flame, blazes forth in an unclouded heaven! Above all, an art for artists, only for artists! We afterwards understand better about what is first of all necessary thereto: gaiety, a// gaiety, my friends! go NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER We know some things too well now, we know- ing ones: oh, how we henceforth learn to forget well, things well zo¢ to know, as artists! ... And as regards our future: we will scarcely be found again on the paths of those Egyptian youths who at night make the temples unsafe, embrace statues, and absolutely want to unveil, uncover, and put into clear light everything which for good reasons is kept con- cealed. No, this bad taste, this will to truth, to “truth at any price,” this madness of youths in the love of truth—has become disagreeable to us: for it we are too experienced, too serious, too jovial, too shrewd, too profound ... We no longer believe that truth remains truth when the veil is pulled off it, — we have lived long enough to believe this ... At present it is regarded as a matter of propriety not to be anxious to see everything naked, to be present at everything, to understand and “know” every- thing. Tout comprendre—c'est tout mépriser . “Ts it true that God is everywhere present?” asked a little girl of her mother; “that is indecent, I think” —a hint to philosophers! ... One ought to have more reverence for the dashfulness with which nature has concealed herself behind enigmas and variegated uncertainties. Is truth perhaps a woman who has reasons for not showing her reasons? ... Is her name perhaps, to speak in Greek, Baubo? .. Oh these Greeks! they knew how to /zve/ For that EPILOGUE gr end it is necessary, to remain bravely at the sur- face, the fold, the skin, to worship appearance, to believe in forms, in tones, in words, in the whole Olympus of appearance! These Greeks were super- ficial— out of profundity ... And do we not just come back thereto, we adventurers of intellect, we who have climbed up the highest and most dangerous peak of present thought and have looked around us therefrom, we who have looked down therefrom ? Are we not just therein— Greeks? Worshippers of forms, of tones, and of words? and just by virtue of that — artists? ... THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS; OR HOW TO PHILOSOPHISE WITH A HAMMER PREFACE It requires no little skill to maintain one’s cheer- fulness when engaged in a sullen and extremely re- sponsible business; and yet, what is more necessary than cheerfulness? Nothing succeeds unless overflow- ing spirits have a share in it. The excess of power only is the proof of power.—A Tyvansvaluation of alt Values, that question mark, so black, so huge that it casts a shadow on him who sets it up, —such a doom of a task compels one every moment to run into sunshine, to shake off a seriousness which has be- come oppressive, far too oppressive. Every expedient is justifiable for that purpose, every “case” is a case of fortune, — warfare more especially. Warfare has. always been the grand policy of all minds which have become too self-absorbed and too profound: there is healing virtue even in being wounded. A saying, the origin of which I withhold from learned curiosity, has for a long time been my motto: Increscunt animt, virescit volnere virtus. Another mode of recuperation, which under certain circumstances is still more to my taste, is zo auscultate 95 96 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS 1 idols... There are more idols in the world than realities; that is my “evil eye” for this world, it is also my “evil ear” ... To put questions here for once with a hammer, and perhaps to hear as answer that well-known hollow sound which indicates inflation of the bowels, — what delight for one who has got ears behind his ears,—for me, an old psychologist and rat-catcher in whose presence precisely that which would like to remain unheard zs obliged to become audible . This work also—the title betrays it—is above all a recreation, a sun-freckle, a diversion into the idleness of a psychologist. Is it also perhaps a new warfare? And new idols are auscultated, are they?... This little work is a grand declaration of warfare: and as regards the auscultation of idols, it is no temporary idols, but eternal idols which are here touched with a hammer as with a tuning-fork, there are no older, more self-convinced, or more inflated idols in exist- ence... Neither are there any hollower ones... That does not prevent them from being the most be- lieved in. Besides people never call them idols, least of all in the most eminent case . Turin, 30% September 1888, the day when the first book of the Transvaluation of ail Values was finished. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE. APOPHTHEGMS AND DARTS I Idleness is the parent of all psychology. What! is psychology then a—vice? 2 Even the boldest of us have but seldom the courage for what we really know. 3 To live alone, one must be an animal or a God — says Aristotle. The third case is wanting: one must be both —a philosopher. 4 Every truth is simple—JIs that not doubly a lie? 5 Once for all, there is much I do zo¢ want to know. — Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge. 6 We recover best from our unnaturalness, from our spirituality, in our savage moods... H 97 98 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS 7 How is it? Is man only a mistake of God? Or God only a mistake of man ?— 8 From the military school of life.— What does not kill me, strengthens me. a Help thyself: then everyone else helps thee. Prin- ciple of brotherly love. 10 Would that we were guilty of no cowardice with respect to our doings, would that we did not repudiate them afterwards !— Remorse of conscience is indecent. II Is it possible for an ass to be tragic?— For a person to sink under a burden which can neither be carried nor thrown off? ... The case of the philoso- pher. 12 ‘ When one has one’s wherefore of life, one gets along with almost every 4ow.— Man does zo@ strive after happiness; the Englishman only does so. 13 Man has created woman — out of what do you think ? Out of a rib of his God,—his “ideal”... APOPHTHEGMS AND DARTS 99 14 What? you are seeking? you would like to decuple, to centuple yourself? you are seeking adherents ? — Seek ciphers !— 15 Posthumous men — myself, for example —are worse understood than opportune, but are better heard. More strictly: we are never understood — therefore our authority ... 16 Among women.— “Truth? Oh, you do not know truth! Is it not an outrage on all our pudeurs ?” 17 That is an artist such as I love, modest in his requirements: he really wants only two things, his bread and his art,—panem et Circen... 18 He who cannot put his will into things, puts at least a meaning into them: that is, he believes there is a will in them already. (Principle of “ Belief.’’) 19 What? you choose virtue and a full heart, and at the same time gaze with envy at the advantages of the unscrupulous ?— With virtue, however, one venounces “advantage” ... (At the door of an Anti-Semite.) 100 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS 20 The perfect woman perpetrates literature as she perpetrates a little sin: by way of test, in passing, turning round to look if anybody notices it, and zz order that somebody may notice it... 21 To get ourselves into such conditions only as do not permit us to have feigned virtues ; in which, rather, like the rope-dancer on his rope, we either fall, or stand —or escape in safety... 22 “Bad men have no songs.” 1— How is it that the Russians have songs? 23 “German esprit:’ for eighteen years, a contradictio in adjecto. 24 By seeking after the beginnings of things people become crabs. The historian looks backwards; he finally dedzeves backwards also. 25 Contentedness is a prophylactic even against catch- ing cold) Has a woman who knew she was well dressed ever caught cold? I put the case that she was hardly dressed at all. 1 Quotation from Seume’s Die Gesiinge. The correct form is “ Rascals have no songs,” but “bad men” has become the traditional form of the saying. APOPHTHEGMS AND DARTS: IoI 26 I mistrust all systematisers, and avoid them. The will to system is a lack of rectitude. 27 We think woman deep—why? because we never find any bottom in her. Woman is not even shallow. 28 If a woman possesses manly virtues, she is to be run away from; and if she does not possess them, she runs away herself. 29 “How much the conscience had to bite formerly! what good teeth it had!— And to-day, what is wrong?” —A dentist’s question. 30 We seldom commit a single precipitancy. The first time we always do too much. Just on that account we are usually guilty of a second precipitancy —and then we do too little... 31 The trodden worm turns itself. That is sagacious. It thereby lessens the probability of being again trodden on. In the language of morality: sudbmts- Stveness. — 102 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS 32 There is a hatred of lying and dissembling result- ing from a sensitive notion of honour; there is also a similar hatred resulting from cowardice inasmuch as lying is forbidden by a Divine command. Too cowardly to tell lies . 33 How little is required for happiness! The sound of a bag-pipe. — Without music life would be a mistake. The German conceives of God even as singing songs.} 34 On ne peut penser et écrive quwassis (G. Flaubert). There have I got you, nihilist! Sedentary application is the very s¢z against the Holy Ghost. Only thoughts won by walking are valuable. 35 There are times when we psychologists become restive like horses: we see our own shadows before us bobbing up and down. The psychologist, to see at all, has to abstract from himself. 1 An allusion to a song by Arndt, Des Deutschen Vaterland. In the lines : So weit die deutsche Zunge klingt Und Gott im Himmel Lieder singt Gott is of course dative; but by a misunderstanding it is traditionally regarded as nominative. Hence the conception of God singing songs over Germany. My APOPHTHEGMS AND DARTS 103 36 Whether we immoralists do injury to virtue? — Just as little as Anarchists do to princes. It is only since princes have been wounded by shots that they sit firmly on their thrones again. Moral: We must wound morality by our shots. 37 You run on ahead? Do you do so as shepherd? or as an exception? A third case would be that of the deserter... %rs¢ question of conscience. 38 Are you genuine? or only a dissembler? A repre- sentative? or the represented itself ?— Finally, you are merely an imitation of a dissembler ... Second question of conscience. 39 The disillusioned speaks. —I sought for great men; I never found aught but the apes of their ideal. 40 Are you one who looks on? or one who goes to work ?—or one who looks away, and turns aside? ... Third question of conscience. 41 Do you intend to go along with others? or go on ahead ? or go by yourself? ... One must know what 104 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS one intends, and ¢ha¢ one intends something. — Fourth question of conscience. 42 Those were steps for me, I have climbed up beyond them, —to do so, I had to pass them. But it was thought I would make them my resting place... 43 Of what consequence is it that 7 am in the right! I am too much in the right. — And he who laughs best to-day, will laugh also in the end. 44 Formula of my happiness: A Yea, a Nay, a straight line, a goal... THE PROBLEM OF SOCRATES I The wisest men in all ages have judged similarly with regard to life: zt zs good for nothing. Always and everywhere we hear the same sound out of their mouth —a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy :. full of the fatigue of life, full of resistance to life. Even Socrates said when he died, “To live—that. means to be long sick: I owe a cock to Asclepios the- saviour.” Even Socrates had enough of it. — What: does that prove? What does it txdicate? Formerly it would have been said (it has been said indeed and loud enough, and loudest of all by our pessimists!) “Here at all events, there must be something true!! The consensus sapientium proves the truth.” — Are we: still to continue talking in such a manner? are: we: allowed to do so? “Here at all events there must be: something diseased,” is our answer: those wisest men. of all ages, we should look at them close at hand!: Were they, perhaps all of them, a little shaky on their- legs? latish? tottering? décadents? Does wisdom per- haps appear on earth as a raven inspirited by a faint scent of carrion?.. 105 106 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS 2 This irreverence, that the great wise men are declin- ing types, first suggested itself to my mind with regard toa case where the strongest prejudices of the learned and the unlearned stood opposed to it: I recognised Socrates and Plato as symptoms of decline, as agen- cies in Grecian dissolution, as pseudo-Grecian, as anti-Grecian (“The Birth of Tragedy,” 1872). That consensus saptentium—I understood it better and better — proves least of all that they were correct in that on which they were in accordance: it proves rather that they themselves, those wisest men, were somehow in accordance physiologically to take up a position — to have to take up a position — unanimously negative with regard to life. Judgments, valuations with regard to life, for or against, can ultimately never be true: they only possess value as symptoms, they only come into consideration as symptoms, — in themselves such judgments are follies. We must by all means stretch out the hand, and attempt to grasp this surprising finesse, that the worth of life cannot be estimated. It cannot be estimated by a living being, because such a one is a party — yea, the very object—in the dispute, and not a judge; it cannot be estimated by a dead person for a different reason. — For a philosopher to see a problem in the worth of life, is really an objection to him, a mark THE PROBLEM OF SOCRATES 107 questioning his wisdom, a folly.— What? and all these great wise men—they were not only déadents, they were not even wise ?— But I come back to the problem of Socrates. 3 Socrates, according to his descent, belonged to the lowest of the people; Socrates was of the mob. One knows, one still sees it one’s self, how ugly he was. But ugliness, while it is an objection in itself, is almost a refutation when found among Greeks. Was Socrates Greek at all? Ugliness is often enough the expression of a thwarted development checked by cross breeding. Besides, it appears as deteriorating development. The anthropologists who are criminol- ogists tell us that the typical criminal is ugly: mon- strum in fronte, monstrum in animo. But the criminal is a décadent. Was Socrates a typical criminal ?— At least the famous verdict of a physiognomist, which was so offensive to the friends of Socrates, would not contradict that assumption. A foreigner, who was a judge of countenances, when he passed through Athens, told Socrates to his face that he was a monstrum—he concealed in himself all the worst vices and passions. And Socrates merely answered, “You know me, Sir.” 4 Not only does the confessed dissoluteness and anarchy in his instincts point to décadence in Socrates, 108 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS but the superfoetation of logicality and that rhachitt- cal malignity which distinguishes him points in the same direction. Neither must we forget those auditory hallucinations which have wrongly been interpreted in a religious sense, as the “demon of Socrates.” Every- thing is exaggerated in him, everything is duffo and caricature; at the same time everything is concealed, reserved, and subterranean. I try to understand out of what idiosyncrasy the Socratic equation of reason = virtue = happiness originates: that most bizarre of equations, which, in particular, has all the instincts of the older Hellenes opposed to it. 5 ‘With Socrates Greek taste veers round in favour of dialectics. What really happens then? Above all supevior taste is vanquished, the mob gets the upper hand along with dialectics. Previous to Socrates dia- lectic manners were repudiated in good society: they were regarded as improper manners, they compromised. The youths were warned against them. Besides, all such modes of presenting reasons were distrusted. honest things, like honest men, do not carry their reasons in their hands in such fashion. It is indecent to put forth all the five fingers. That which requires to be proved is little worth. All the world over, where authority still belongs to good usage, where one does not “demonstrate”? but commands, the dialectician is THE PROBLEM OF SOCRATES 10G a sort of buffoon: he is laughed at, he is not taken seriously. Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously. What really happened then? 6 We choose dialectics only when we have no other means. We know we excite mistrust with it, we know it does not carry much conviction. Nothing is easier wiped away than the effect of a dialectician: that is proved by the experience of every assembly where speeches are made. It can only be a J/as¢ defence in the hands of such as have no other weapon left. It is necessary to have to exéort one’s rights; otherwise one makes no use of dialectics. The Jews were therefore dialecticians; Reynard the Fox was a dialectician: what? and Socrates also was one ?— 7 —Is the irony of Socrates an expression of revolt? of a moblike resentment? Does he, as one of the suppressed, enjoy his natural ferocity in the dagger- thrusts of syllogism? does he revenge himself on the upper classes whom he fascinates ?— As a dialecti- cian a person has a merciless instrument in his hand: he can play the tyrant with it; he compromises when he conquers. The dialectician leaves it to his oppo- nent to demonstrate that he is not an idiot; he is 110 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS made furious, and at the same time helpless. The dialectician paralyses the intellect of his opponent. — What? is dialectics only a form of vevenge with Socrates? 8 I have given to understand what could make Socrates repellent; there is now the more need to explain the fact that he fascinated.— That he discovered a new mode of agon, of which he became the first fencing- master for the superior circles of Athens—that is one reason. He fascinated in that he appealed to the agonal impulse of the Hellenes,—he introduced a variation into the wrestling matches among young men and youths. Socrates was also a great erotzc. 9 But Socrates found out somewhat more. He saw behind the higher class of Athenians, he understood that Ais case, the idiosyncrasy of his case, was no longer exceptional. The same kind of degeneration was preparing quietly everywhere: old Athens: was coming to an end.— And Socrates understood that all the world had xeed of him,—of his method, his cure, his special artifice for self-maintenance .. . Everywhere the instincts were in anarchy; every- where people were within an ace of excess: the mon- strum in animo was the universal danger. “The THE PROBLEM OF SOCRATES Tit impulses are about to play the tyrant, we must invent a counter-tyrant stronger than they”... When the physiognomist had disclosed to Socrates who he was, a cave of all evil passions, the great ironist uttered another word which gives the key to him. “It is true,” he said, “but I became master over them all.” How did Socrates become master over himself ?— His case was after all only the extreme case, the most striking case of that which then began to be the uni- versal trouble— namely, that nobody was any longer master of himself, that the instincts became mutually antagonistic. He fascinated as such an extreme case, —his fear-inspiring ugliness proclaimed him as such to every eye; as a matter of course, he fascinated still more as the answer, the solution, the seeming cure of this case. — 10 When it is necessary to make a tyrant out of reason, as Socrates did, there must be considerable danger of something else playing the tyrant. Rationality was hit upon in those days as a Saviour, it was not a matter of free choice for either Socrates or his “vale- tudinarians” to be rational, —it was de rigueur, it was their /as¢t expedient. The fanaticism with which the whole of Greek thought throws itself upon rationality betrays a desperate situation: they were in danger, they had only one choice: they had either to go to 112 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS ruin, or—be absurdly rational... The moralism of Greek philosophers, from Plato downwards, is patho- logically conditioned; their estimation of dialectics likewise. Reason = virtue = happiness means merely that we have to imitate Socrates, and put a permanent day-light in opposition to the obscure desires — the day-light of reason. We have to be rational, clear, and distinct, at any price: every yielding to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downwards... II I have given to understand by what means Socrates fascinated: he seemed to be a physician, a Saviour. Is it necessary to expose the error which was involved in his belief in. “rationality at any price?” —It is self-deception on the part of philosophers and moralists to think of rising above décadence by waging war with it. Rising above it is beyond their power; what they select as an expedient, as a deliverance, is itself only an expression of décadence:—they alter its expres- sion, they do not do away with itself. Socrates was a misunderstanding ; the whole of improving morality, including Christian morality, has been a misunder- standing ... The fiercest day-light, rationality at any price, the life clear, cold, prudent, conscious, without instincts, in opposition to instincts: this itself was only an infirmity, another infirmity, and not at all a way of return to “virtue,” to “health,” or to happi- THE PROBLEM OF SOCRATES II3 ness. To have to combat the instincts —that is the formula for décadence: as long as life ascends, happi- ness is identical with instinct. — 12 Has he himself conceived that, this wisest of all self-dupers? Did he say that to himself at the last in the wisdom of his courage to meet death?... Socrates wanted to die:— Athens did not give him the poison cup; Ze gave it to himself; he compelled Athens to give it to him... “Socrates is no phy- sician,” he said softly to himself: “death is the only physician here... Socrates himself was just a chronic valetudinarian” ... “REASON” IN PHILOSOPHY I People ask me what is all idiosyncrasy in philos- ophers?... For example, their lack of historical sense, their hatred of the very idea of becoming, their Egyptianism. They think they confer onour on a thing when they isolate it from its historical relations, sub specte eterni,— when they make a mummy out of it. For millenniums philosophers have been handling conceptual mummies only: nothing real has come out of their hands alive. They kill, they stuff, when they adore, these gentlemen, the conceptual idolators, — they become mortally dangerous to everything when they adore. For them death, change, and age, just as well as production and growth, are objections, — refuta- tions even. What is, does not decome ; what becomes, zs not... Now they all believe in what is, with desperation even. As, however, they do not get hold of what is they seek for reasons why it is withheld from them. ‘There must be a semblance, a deception there, which prevents us perceiving what is: where is the deceiver concealed ?”” — “We have found it,” they 114 “REASON” IN PHILOSOPHY 115 cry joyfully, “it is sensuousness! Those senses, which are also so immoral in other respects, deceive us with regard to the ¢vwe world. Moral: to escape from the deception of the senses, from becoming, from history, from falsehood, — history is nothing but belief in the senses, belief in falsehood. Moral: denial of all that accords belief to the senses, of all the rest of man- kind: that all is ‘mob.’ To be a philosopher, to be a mummy, to represent monotono-theism by a grave- digger’s mimicry!— And above all, away with the body, that pitiable zdée fixe of the senses! afflicted with all the fallacies of logic in existence, — refuted, impossible even, although it is impudent enough to pose as actual”... 2 With high reverence I put the name of Heraclitus apart from the others. If the mob of the other philos- ophers rejected the testimony of the senses because they exhibited plurality and alteration, he rejected their testimony because they exhibited things as if they possessed permanence and unity. Heraclitus also did injustice to the senses. They neither deceive in the way the Eleatics believed, nor as he believed, — they do not deceive at all. What we make out of their testimony, that is what introduces falsehood; for ex- ample, the falsehood of unity, the falsehoods of mate- riality, of substance, of permanence... “Reason” 116 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS is the cause why we falsify the testimony of the senses. In as far as the senses exhibit becoming, dissolving, and transforming; they do not deceive... But Heraclitus will always be right in this that being is an empty fiction. The “seeming” world is the only one; the “true world” has been deceiifully invented merely... t 3 —And what fine instruments for observation we possess in our senses! This nose, for example, of which as yet no philosopher has spoken with respect and gratitude, is even (in the meantime at least) the most delicate instrument at our disposal: it is able to attest minimum differences of movement which even the spectroscope cannot attest. At present, we pos- sess science exactly to the extent we have resolved to accept the testimony of the senses, — to the extent we have learned to sharpen them, furnish them with appliances, and follow them mentally to their limits. The rest is abortion and not-yet-science: z¢. meta- physics, divinity, psychology, and theory of perception. Or formal science, science of symbols; as logic, and that applied form of logic, mathematics. Actuality is nowhere mentioned in those sciences, not even as a problem; as little as the question, what value at all such a symbolic convention as logic possesses. — “REASON” IN PHILOSOPHY 117 4 The other idiosyncrasy of philosophers is not less dangerous : it consists in confounding the last and the first. The products which occur at the end—alas! for they should not occur at all!—the “highest notions,” that is, the most general, the emptiest notions, the last fume of evaporating reality are placed by them at the beginning, as the beginning. This, again, is but the expression of their mode of doing reverence: the higher mst not grow out of the lower, it must not be grown at all... Moral: everything of the first rank must be causa suz. The origin out of something else is regarded as an objection, as a sign of questionable value. All highest values are of the first rank, none of the highest notions —the notions of what is, of the unconditioned, of the true, of the perfect -——none of all these can have become; each must consequently be causa suz. But none of those highest notions can be unequal either, they cannot be in disagreement among themselves. They thereby attain their stupendous conception of “God” The last, the thinnest, the emptiest is placed as the first, as cause in itself, as exs realissimum... Alas, that mankind have had to take seriously the delirium of sick cobweb spinners!—And they have paid dearly for it... 118 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS 5 —Let us finally state, in opposition thereto, how differently we (I say courteously we) view the problem of error and seemingness. Formerly, people regarded alteration, mutation, and becoming, generally, as evi- dence of seemingness, as indications that there could not but be something there which led them astray. At present, on the contrary, we see ourselves entangled in some measure in error, necessitated to error pre- cisely as far as our rational prejudice compels us to posit unity, identity, permanence, substance, cause, materiality, what zs; however certain we are, by means of a strict recalculation of the account, that the error is found there. It is just the same here as with the motions of the sun. There, our eyes are the agencies through which error constantly operates, here it is our language. In its origin, language belongs to the age of the most rudimentary form of psychology: we come into the midst of a gross fetich system when we call up into consciousness the fundamental presuppositions of linguistic metaphysics (7.e. the presuppositions of “veason”), This system sees everywhere actors and action; it believes in will as cause in general; it believes in the “ego,” in the ego as being, in the ego as substance; and it projects the belief in the ego-sub- stance on to everything —it first creates thereby the conception “thing” ... Being is everywhere thought “REASON” IN PHILOSOPHY 119 into, and fotsted upon things, as cause; it is only from the conception “ego” that the derivative conception of being follows... At the commencement there is the great bane of error, —that will is something which acts—that will is a faculty... We now know that it is merely a word... Very much later, in a world a thousand times better enlightened, the certainty, the subjective assurance in handling the cate- gories of reason, came, all of a sudden, to the con- sciousness of philosophers: they concluded that those categories could not have their origin in experience —for the whole of experience, they said, was in oppo- sition to them. Consequently, whence do they origt- nate 2— And in India, as in Greece, the same mistake has been fallen into: “we must once have belonged to a higher world (instead of one very much lower, which would have been the truth!), we must have been Divine, for we possess reason!” In fact, noth- ing has hitherto had a more naive convincing power than the error of being, as it was formulated, for example, by the Eleatics; for it has in its favour every word, every sentence which we utter!—The oppo- nents of the Eleatics likewise yielded to the mislead- ing influence of their concept of being; Democritus among others, when he devised his atom... “Reason” in language: oh what a deceitful old female! I fear we do not get rid of God, because we still believe in grammar... 120 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS 6 People will be thankful if I compress into four theses such an essential and such a new insight. I thereby make it more easily understood; I thereby challenge contradiction. First Proposition. The grounds upon which “this” world has been designated as seeming, rather estab- lish its reality,— another kind of reality cannot pos- sibly be established. Second Proposition. The characteristics which have been assigned to the “true being” of things are the characteristics of non-being, of mothingness ; — the “true world” has been built up out of the contra- diction to the actual world: a seeming world in fact, in as far as it is merely an illusion of moral optics. Third Proposition. To fable about “another” world than this has no meaning at all, unless an instinct of calumniation, disparagement, and aspersion of life is powerful in us: if that be the case we take revenge on life, with the phantasmagoria of “another,” a “better” life. Fourth Proposition. To separate existence into a “true”? and a “seeming” world, either in the manner of Christianity, or in the manner of Kant (who was a wily Christian at last), is only a suggestion of déa- dence, —a symptom of deteriorating life ... That the artist values appearance more than reality is no objec- “REASON” IN PHILOSOPHY 121 tion against this proposition. For here “appearance” means reality once more, only select, strengthened, and corrected reality... The tragic artist is mo pessimist, —he rather says yea, even to all that is questionable and formidable; he is Dionysian ... HOW THE “TRUE WORLD” FINALLY BECAME A FABLE HISTORY OF AN ERROR 1 The true world attainable by the wise, the -pious, and the virtuous man,—he lives in it, he em- bodies tt. (Oldest form of the idea, relatively rational, simple, and convincing. Transcription of the proposition, “I, Plato, am the truth.’’) 2 The true world unattainable at present, but prom- ised to the wise, the pious, and the virtuous man (to the sinner who repents). (Progress of the idea: it becomes more refined, more insidious, more incomprehensible, — it Je- comes feminine, it becomes Christian.) 3 The true world unattainable, undemonstrable, and unable to be promised; but even as con- ceived, a comfort, an obligation, and an imperative. (The old sun still, but shining only through mist and scepticism; the idea become sublime, pale, northerly, Koenigsbergian.) 122 HOW THE “TRUE WORLD” BECAME A FABLE 123 4 The true world — unattainable? At any rate unattained. And being unattained also uzknown. Consequently also neither comforting, saving, nor obligatory: what obligation could anything un- known lay upon us? (Grey morning. First yawning of reason. Cock- crowing of Positivism.) 5 The “true world” —an idea neither good for anything, nor even obligatory any longer, —an idea become useless and superfluous ; consequently a refuted idea: let us do away with it! (Full day; breakfast; return of don sens and cheerfulness; Plato blushing for shame; infer- nal noise of all free intellects.) 6 We have done away with the true world: what world is left? perhaps the seeming? ... But no! iz doing away with the true, we have also done away with the seeming world! (Noon; the moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; climax of mankind; INCIPIT ZARATHUSHTRA.) MORALITY AS ANTINATURALNESS I All passions have a time when they are fatal only, when, with the weight of their folly, they drag their victim down; and they have a later, very much later period, when they wed with spirit, when they are “spiritualised.” Formerly, people waged war against passion itself, on account of the folly involved in it, they conspired for its annihilation, —all old morality monsters are unanimous on this point: “72 faut tuer les passions.’ The most notable formula for that view stands in the New Testament, in the Sermon on the Mount, where, let us say in passing, things are not at all regarded from an elevated point of view. For example, it is there said with application to sex- uality, “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.” Fort- unately no Christian acts according to this precept. To annihilate passions and desires merely in order to obviate their folly and its unpleasant results appears to us at present simply as an acute form of folly. We no longer admire the dentist who pulls out the teeth, that they may no longer cause pain. It may 124 MORALITY AS ANTINATURALNESS 125 be acknowledged, on the other hand, with some reason- ableness that, on the soil out of which Christianity has grown, the notion of a “spiritualisation” of passion could not at all be conceived. The primitive Church, as is well known, battled against the “in- ” telligent” in favour of the “poor in spirit: how could we expect from it an intelligent war against passion?— The Church fights against passion with excision in every sense: its practice, its “cure” is cas- tration. It never asks, “ How to spiritualise, beautify, and deify a desire?” —it has, at all times, laid the emphasis of discipline upon extermination (of sensu- ality, of pride, of ambition, of avarice, of revenge). — But to attack the passions at the root means to at- tack life itself at the root: the praxis of the Church is inimical to life . 2 The same means, castration, extirpation, is instinc- tively chosen in the struggle with a desire by those who are too weak of will and too degenerate to be able to impose due moderation upon themselves; those natures, which, to speak with a simile (and without a simile), need /a Trappe,— any definitive declaration of hostility, a gap between themselves and a passion. The radical means are indispensable only to the de- generate: weakness of will, or to speak more defi- nitely, the incapability of o¢ reacting in response to 126 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS a stimulus, is itself merely another form of degenera- tion. Radical hostility, deadly hostility against sensu- ality is always a critical symptom; one is thereby justified in making conjectures with regard to the general condition of such an extremist. Moreover, that hostility, that hatred, only reaches its height when such natures no longer possess sufficient strength for a radical cure,—for abjuring their “devil.” Sur- vey the whole history of priests and philosophers, that of artists also included, and you will see: the most virulent attacks on the senses are zot made by the impotent, or by ascetics, but by impossible as- cetics, those who would have required ascetic life . 3 The spiritualisation of sensuousness is called Jove ; it is a grand triumph over Christianity. Our spiritual- isation of osti/ity is another triumph. It consists in profoundly understanding the importance of having enemies: in short, in acting and reasoning the reverse of the former acting and reasoning. The Church al- ways wanted to exterminate its enemies: we, the im- moralists and Anti-Christians, see our advantage in the existence of the Church... In political matters also hostility has now become more spiritualised, — much more prudent, much more critical, much more forbear- ing. Almost every party conceives that it is advan- tageous for its self-maintenance if the opposite party MORALITY AS ANTINATURALNESS 127 does not lose its power; the same is true in grand politics. A new creation especially, eg. the new Empire, has more need of enemies than of friends: it is only in opposition that it feels itself indispensable, that it decomes indispensable ... Not otherwise do we comport ourselves towards the “inner enemy ;” there also we have spiritualised hostility, there also we have understood its worth. People are productive only at the cost of having abundant opposition; they only remain young provided the soul does not relax, does not long after peace... Nothing has become more alien to us than the desirability of former times, that of “peace of soul,” Christian desirability ; nothing makes us less envious than the moral cow and the plump comfortableness of good conscience. One has renounced gvand life, when one has re- nounced war... In many cases, to be sure, “peace of soul” is merely a misunderstanding — something different, which does not just know how to name itself more honestly. Without circumlocution and prejudice let us take a few cases. “Peace of soul” may, for example, be the mild radiation of a rich ani- mality into the moral (or religious) domain. Or the beginning of fatigue, the first shadow which the even- ing —every sort of evening—casts. Or a sign that the air is moist, that southern winds arrive. Or un- conscious gratitude for a good digestion (occasionally called ‘‘charitableness”). Or the quieting down of the 128 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS convalescent to whom all things have a new taste and who is waiting in expectancy. Or the condition which follows upon a full gratification of our ruling passion, the agreeable feeling of a rare satiety. Or the senile weakness of our will, of our desires, of our vices. Or laziness, persuaded by conceit to deck itself out in moral guise. Or the attainment of a certainty, even a dreadful certainty, after long suspense and torture through uncertainty. Or the expression of proficiency and mastery in doing, creating, effecting, and willing, tranquil breathing, attained “freedom of will”... Ywilight of the Idols: who knows? per- haps also just a modification of “peace of soul”... 4 —I formulate a principle. All naturalism in mo- rality, ze. all healthy morality, is ruled by an instinct of life,—-some command of life is fulfilled by adopt- ing a certain canon of “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not,” some hindrance and inimical agency on the way of life is thereby removed. Avtinatural morality, on the other hand (z.e. almost every morality which has hitherto been taught, reverenced, and preached), directs itself straight agazmst the instincts of life,— it con- demns those instincts, sometimes secretly, at other times loudly and insolently. Saying that “God looks on the heart,” it negatives the lowest and the highest vital desirings, and takes God as the enemy of life... MORALITY AS ANTINATURALNESS 129 The saint in whom God finds his highest satisfaction is the ideal castrate... Life is at an end where the “Kingdom of God” begins... 5 If the wickedness of such a mutiny against life as has become almost sacrosanct in Christian morality has been understood, something else has, fortunately, been understood besides: the uselessness, the unreal- ity, the absurdity, and the deceitfulness of such a mutiny. For a condemnation of life on the part of a living being is ultimately just the symptom of a certain kind of life: the question whether rightly or wrongly is not at all raised thereby. We would have to have a position outside of life, and yet have to know it as well as each and all who have lived it, to be authorised to touch on the problem of the worth of life at all: sufficient reason to convince us that for us the problem is inaccessible. Speaking of values, we speak under the influence of the inspiration and the optics of life: life itself compels us to fix values; life itself values through us, when we fix values . It follows therefrom that even that andtinaturalness in morality (which takes God as the counter-principle and condemnation of life) is but an evaluation of life, —of which life? of which kind of life?—But I have already given the answer: of declining, weakened, fatigued, condemned life. Morality, as it has hitherto K 130 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS been understood —as it was last formulated by Scho- penhauer as ‘denial of will to life” —is the actual adécadence instinct which makes out of itself an impera- tive: it says, “Perish!’”’—it is the valuation of the condemned... 6 Let us consider in the last place what maiveté it manifests to say, “Man ought to be so and so!” Reality exhibits to us an enchanting wealth of types, the luxuriance of a prodigality of forms and trans- formations; and some paltry hod-man of a moralist says with regard to it, “No! man ought to be differ- ent!” ... He even knows Zow man ought to be, this parasite and bigot: he paints himself on the wall and says, “Ecce homo!” ... But even if the moralist directs himself merely to the individual and says, “You ought to be so and so,” he still continues to make himself ridiculous. The individual, in his ante- cedents and in his consequents, is a piece of fate, an additional law, an additional necessity for all that now takes place and will take place in the future. To say to him, “Alter thyself,” is to require everything to alter itself, even backward also... And in reality there have been consistent moralists; they wanted man to be otherwise, — namely, virtuous; they wanted him fashioned in their likeness, as a bigot: For that purpose they denied the world. No insignificant mad- MORALITY AS ANTINATURALNESS 131 ness! No modest form of presumption! ... Moral- ity, in as far as it condemns in itself, and not from regards, considerations, or purposes of life, is a specific error with which we must have no sympathy, it is a degenerate idiosyncrasy which has caused an unut- terable amount of harm! ... We others, we immor- alists, on the contrary, have opened our hearts for the reception of every kind of intelligence, conception, and approbation. We do not readily deny, we glory in being affirmative. Our eyes have always opened more and more for that economy which still uses and knows how to use for its advantage all that is rejected by the holy delirium of the priest, of the dzseased reason of the priest; for that economy in the law of life which even derives advantage from the offensive species of bigots, priests, and the virtuous, — what advantage? —But we immoralists ourselves are the answer... THE FOUR GREAT ERRORS I Error of confounding cause and effect.— There is no more dangerous error than confounding consequence with cause: I call it the intrinsic depravity of reason. Nevertheless, this error belongs to the most ancient and the most modern habitudes of the human race: it is consecrated even among us; it bears the names, “religion” and “morality.” It is contained in every proposition which religion and morality formulate: priests, and legislators in morals, are the originators of this depravity of reason. I take an example: every- body knows the book of the celebrated Cornaro, in which he recommends his spare diet as a recipe for a long and happy life, —for a virtuous life also. Few books have been read so much; even yet many thou- sand copies of it are annually printed in England. I believe hardly any book (the Bible by right excepted) has caused so much harm, has shortened so many lives, as this well-meant curiosity. The source of this mis- chief is in confounding consequence with cause. The candid Italian saw in his diet the cause of his long life, while the pre-requisite to long life, the extraor- 132 THE FOUR GREAT ERRORS 133 dinary slowness of the metabolic process, small con- sumption, was the cause of his spare diet. He was not at liberty to eat little or much; his frugality — was not of “free will;” he became sick when he ate more. He who is not a carp, however, not only does well to eat properly, but is obliged to do so. A scholar of oury day, with his rapid consumption of nerve-force, would kill himself with the régime of Cornaro. Cvrede experto. — 2 The most universal formula which lies at the basis of every religious and moral system is, “Do so and so, refrain from so and so—then you will be happy! In case of disobedience . . .” Every system of moral- ity, every religion zs this imperative ;—I call it the great original sin of reason, zmmortal unreason. In my mouth, that formula transforms into its inversion —the first example of my “Transvaluation of all Values :”’ a man well constituted, a “fortunate man,” has to do certain actions, and instinctively avoids other actions; he introduces the arrangement which he rep- resents physiologically into his relations to men and things. In a formula: his virtue is the vesu/t of his good fortune... Long life and an abundant pos- terity are zot the rewards of virtue: the very slowing of the metabolic process, which among other things, has in its train a long life, an abundant posterity, in short, Covnarism is rather virtue itself. — The Church 134 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS and morality say that “a family, a people, is ruined through vice and luxury.” My re-established reason says that when a people is perishing, when it degener- ates physiologically, vice and luxury follow therefrom (z.e. the need of continually stronger and more frequent stimulants, such as every exhausted nature is ac- quainted with). This young man becomes pale and withered at an early age. His friends say that this or that sickness is the cause of it. My opinion is that the fact of his becoming sick, the fact of his inability to withstand the sickness, was from the first the consequence of an impoverished life and heredi- tary exhaustion. The newspaper readers say that this party ruins itself by such and such an error. My higher politics say that a party which commits such errors is at its end—its instincts are no longer to be relied upon. Every error, whatever it may be, is the result of degeneration of instinct, disgregation of will: we thereby almost define the dad. Everything good is instinct—-and consequently easy, necessary, free. Trouble is an objection, the God is typically distin- guished from the hero (in my language: the “ight feet are the first attribute of Divinity). 3 Error of false causality.—It was always believed that we knew what a cause was; but whence did we derive our knowledge, or, more exactly, our belief THE FOUR GREAT ERRORS 135 that we knew about the matter? Out of the domain of the celebrated “inner facts,” none of which have hitherto proved themselves actual. We believed that we ourselves acted causally in the exercise of will; we thought ¢here, at least, we had surprised causality in the very act. In like manner people did not doubt that all the axtecedentia of an action, its causes, were to be sought in consciousness, and would be redis- covered therein, if sought for—as ‘“motives:” for otherwise man would not have been free to act, he would not have been answerable for his actions. Finally, who would have disputed that a thought is caused? that the ego causes the thought? ... Of those three “inner facts” by which causality appeared to be guaranteed, the first and most convincing is that of wzll as a cause; the conception of conscious- ness (“spirit”) as cause, and later still that of the ego (the “subject”) as cause, are merely posthumous and have originated when causality, derived from will, was established as a given fact—-as empiricism .. . In the meantime we have changed our mind. We no Jonger believe a word of it all) The “inner world” is full of phantoms and will-o’-the-wisps: will is one of them. Will no longer moves anything, consequently also it no longer explains anything,—it merely ac- companies proceedings, it can also be absent. The so-called “ motive” —another error. Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness, some accompaniment of 136 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS an act, which conceals the antecedentia of an act rather than manifests them. And above all the ego! It has become a fable, a fiction, a play upon words; it has altogether ceased to think, to feel, and to will!... What follows therefrom? There are no spiritual causes at all! The whole of the alleged empiricism that seemed to be in their favour has gone to the devil! That follows therefrom!— And we had made a fine abuse of that “empiricism:” we had created the world on that basis, as a world of causes, as a world of will, as a world of spirit. The oldest psychology and the longest maintained has here been at work, it has really done nothing else. According to this psychology, every occurrence was an action, every action was the result of a will; the world, according to it, became a plurality of acting agents; an acting agent (a “subject’’) was insinuated into every occurrence. Man has projected outside himself his three “inner facts,’ that in which he believed firmest of all, will, spirit, and the ego, — he only derived the conception of being from the conception of the ego, he posited “things” as existing according to his own likeness, according to his con- ception of the ego as cause. What wonder that later on he always just rediscovered in things what he had concealed in them?—The thing itself, we repeat, the conception of a thing—a reflection merely of the belief in the ego as a cause... And even your atom, Messrs. the Mechanists and Physicists, how \ THE FOUR GREAT ERRORS 137 much error, how much rudimentary psychology, yet remains in your atom!— Not to speak of the “thing in itself,” the horrendum pudendum of metaphysicians ! The error of spirit as a cause, confounded with reality ! And made the measure of reality! And called God /— 4 Error of imaginary causes.—To start from the dream. For a definite sensation resulting, for example, from the distant shot of a cannon, there is a cause subsequently foisted on (often quite a little romance in which the dreamer himself is the hero). The sensa- tion, in the meantime, persists as a sort of resonance ; it waits, as it were, until the causal impulse permits it to move into the foreground of consciousness —— now no longer as a fortuitous incident, but as “meaning.” The cannon shot appears in a causal connection, with a seeming inversion of time. The later, the motiva- tion, is first realised, often with a hundred details which pass like lightning; the shot follows... What has happened? The ideas generated by a certain bodily state were mistaken for its cause.— As a matter of fact, we do just the same when we are awake. Most. of our general sensations — every sort of check, press~ ure, tension, or explosion in the play and counter-. play of organs, especially the condition of the nervus- sympathicus — excite our causal impulse; we want a reason for feeling so and so,—for feeling ill or well. 138 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS It never suffices us merely to establish the fact that we feel so and so: we only acknowledge this fact —we only become conscious of it— when we have furnished it with some kind of motivation.—The recollection, which in such cases becomes active without our being aware of it, calls up earlier conditions of the same kind, and the causal interpretations associated with them, —vnot their causality. The belief that the associated ideas, the accompanying proceedings of consciousness, have been the’ causes, is also, to be sure, called up by recollection. There thus originates an adbituation to a fixed causal interpretation, which, in truth, checks the investigation of causes, and even excludes it. 5 Psychological explanation. — To trace back some- thing unknown to something known, relieves, quiets, and satisfies, besides giving a sensation of power. There is danger, disquiet, and solicitude associated with the unknown,—the primary instinct aims at doing away with these painful conditions. First prin- ciple: any explanation whatsoever is better than none. Since, after all, it is only a question of wanting to get rid of depressing ideas, people are not specially careful about the means for getting rid of them: the first conception, by which the unknown declares itself to be something known, is so pleasing that it is “taken as true.” Proof of desive (“power’’) as criterion of THE FOUR GREAT ERRORS 139 truth.— The causal impulse is thus conditioned and excited by the feeling of terror. The “why” is in- tended, if possible, not so much for furnishing the cause on its own account, as for furnishing a species of cause—a quieting, liberating, alleviating cause. The first result of this need is that something already known, something experienced, something inscribed in the memory, is assigned as cause. The new, the un- experienced, the strange are excluded from being a cause. — Thus there is not only a mode of explanation sought for as cause, but a sedect and privileged mode of explanation— that by means of which the feeling of the strange, the new, and the unexperienced, has been most quickly and most frequently got rid of, — the most common explanations. — Result: a particular mode of assigning causes preponderates more and more, concentrates itself into a system, and finally becomes predominant, t.e. simply excluding other causes and explanations. — The banker immediately thinks of “business,” the Christian of “sin,” and the girl of her love. 6 The whole domain of morality and religion comes under this conception of imaginary causes. — “ Explana- tion” of unpleasant general feelings:—They are de- termined by beings hostile to us (evil spirits: the most striking case —mistaking hysterics for witches). 140 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS They are determined by conduct not to be approved of (the feeling of “sin,” a physiological unpleasantness — one always finds rea- sons for being discontented with one’s self). They are determined as punishments, as a requital for something we should not have done, for dezag otherwise than we ought to be (audaciously generalised by Schopenhauer into a thesis in which morality appears undisguised, of “sinfulness,” foisted on to as the actual poisoner and calumniator of life: “every sore pain, whether bodily or mental, indicates what we deserve, for it could not come upon us, unless we deserved it.” Welt als Wille und Vorstellung 2, 666). They are determined as consequences of inconsiderate actions, which turn out badly (the emotions, the senses, - assigned as cause, as “ guilty;” states of physiological trouble explained as “deserved” by means of other states of trouble). — Explanations of pleasant general feelings: —They are determined by trust in God. They are determined by the consciousness of good conduct (so-called “good conscience,” a physiological condition sometimes so like a good digestion as to be mistaken for it). They are determined by the suc- cessful issue of undertakings (a maive fallacy: the successful issue of an undertaking does not at all produce any pleasant general feelings in a hypochon- driac, or in a Pascal). They are determined by faith, hope, and love —the Christian virtues. —In fact, all these presumed explanations are resulting conditions, THE FOUR GREAT ERRORS 141 and as it were translations of pleasant and unpleasant feelings into a false dialect: we are in a condition to be hopeful, decause our fundamental physiological feel- ing is again strong and rich; we trust in God, because the feeling of fulness and of strength gives us peace. — Morality and religion belong entirely to the Psy- chology of Error: in every individual case. cause and consequence are confounded; or truth is confounded with the result of what is deléeved to be true; or a condition of consciousness is confounded with the causation of this condition. 7 Ervor of free will,— Now we have no longer sym- pathy with the notion of “free will:” we know only too well what it is—the most disreputable of all theological devices for the purpose of making men “re- sponsible” in their sense of the word, that is, for the purpose of making them dependent on theologians . . Here, I only give the psychology of the process of making men responsible. — Wherever responsibility is sought after, it is usually the instinct prompting to punish and condemn which seeks after it. Becoming has been divested of its innocence when any mode of being whatsoever is traced back to will, to purposes, or acts of responsibility: the dogma of will has prin- cipally been invented for the purpose of punishment, ze. with the intention of finding guilty. The whole 142 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS of old psychology, will-psychology, would have been impossible but for the fact that its originators (the ‘priests at the head of the old commonwealths) wanted to create for themselves a right to impose punish- ment — or a right for God to do so... Men were imagined to be “free,” in order that they might be condemned and punished,— in order that they might become guilty: consequently every activity ad to be thought of as voluntary, the origin of every activity had to be thought of as residing in consciousness (whereby the most absolute false-coinage in psycholo- gicis was made a principle of psychology itself . . .). Now when we have entered upon a movement in the opposite direction, when we immoralists especially en- deavour with all our power to remove out of the world the notions of guilt and punishment, and seek to cleanse psychology, history, nature, social institu- tions and sanctions from these notions, there is not in our eyes any more fundamental antagonism than that of theologians, who, with the notion of a “moral order of the world,” go on tainting the innocence of becoming with “punishment” and “guilt.” Christianity is the hangman’s metaphysics. 8 What alone can our teaching be?—That no one gives a man his qualities, neither God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors, nor he himself (the latter THE FOUR GREAT ERRORS 143 absurd idea here put aside has been taught as ‘‘intel- ligible freedom” by Kant, perhaps also by Pilato). Vo one is responsible for existing at all, for being formed so and so, for being placed under those cir- cumstances and in this environment. His own destiny cannot be disentangled from the destiny of all else in past and future. He is oft the result of a special purpose, a will, or an aim, the attempt is of here made to reach an “ideal of man,” an “ideal of happi- ness,” or an “ideal of morality ;”—it is absurd to try to skunt off man’s nature towards some goal. We have invented the notion of a “goal:” in reality a goal is Jacking ... Weare necessary, we are part of destiny, we belong to the whole, we exzs¢ in the whole, —there is nothing which could judge, measure, com- pare, or condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, and condemn the whole.. . But there ts nothing outside of the whole!— This only ts the grand emancipation: that no one be made respon- sible any longer, that the mode of being be not traced back to a causa prima, that the world be not regarded as a unity, either as sensorium or as “spirit ;” —it is only thereby that the zznocence of becoming is again restored ... The concept of “God” has hitherto been the greatest objection to existence ... We deny God, we deny responsibility by denying God: it is only thereby that we save the world. — THE “IMPROVERS” OF MANKIND I It is known what I require of philosophers — namely, to take up their position beyond good and evil, to be superior to the illusion of moral sentiment. This requirement follows from a principle which I formu- lated for the first time, — namely, that there ts no such thing as a moral fact. Moral sentiment has this in common with religious sentiment: it believes in reali- ties which do not exist. Morality is only an inter- pretation of certain phenomena, or, more definitely, a misinterpretation of them. Moral sentiment belongs, like religious sentiment, to a stage of ignorance in which the very notion of the real, the distinction be- tween the real and the imaginary, is yet lacking: accordingly, at such a stage of intellectual develop: ment, “truth” designates nothing but what we at present call “fancies.” In so far the moral sentiment is never to be taken literally: as such it contains noth- ing but absurdity. As semezotic, however, its worth remains inestimable: it reveals, at least to the initiated, the most important realities of civilisations, and inter- 144 THE “IMPROVERS” OF MANKIND 145 nal operations which did not £zow sufficient to “ under- stand” themselves. Morality is merely sign language, merely symptomatology ; one has to know beforehand what it deals with, in order to derive advantage from it. 2 A first example, and quite preliminary. At all times efforts have been made to “improve” human beings: it is that above all things which has been termed morality. The most different tendencies, however, are concealed under the same name. The saming of animal man, as well as the breeding of a particular species of human beings, has been called “improving ;” only these zodlogical termini express realities, — reali- ties, indeed, of which the typical “improver,” the priest, knows nothing—does not want to know any- thing ... To call the taming of an animal the “improving” of it, sounds almost like a joke to our ears. Anybody who knows what goes on in menag- eries will be doubtful about the “improving” of animals there. They are weakened, they are made less mis- chievous, they become sick by the depressing emotion of fear, by pain, wounds, and hunger. — It is precisely the same with tamed man whom the priest has “im- proved.” In the early Middle Ages, when in fact the Church was a menagerie more than anything else, the finest specimens of the “blond beast” were every- where pursued —the distinguished Germanics for ex- L 146 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS ample were “improved.” Afterwards, however, how did such a Germanic look when “improved,” when seduced into the monastery? Like a caricature of man, like an abortion: he had become a “sinner,” he stuck fast in the cage, he had got shut up in the midst of nothing but frightful notions ... And now he lay there, sick, miserable, ill-disposed towards himself; full of hatred against the vital instincts, full of suspicion with regard to everything still strong and happy. In short, a Christian... Physiologically explained: in combat with the animal, the only means for making it weak can be to sicken it. The Church understood this : it vuzned man, it weakened him, — but it claimed to have “improved” him... 3 Let us take the other case of so-called morality, the case of dveeding a distinct race and species. Indian morality, sanctioned into a religion as the “ Law of Manu,” furnishes the grandest example. The task is here set to breed no fewer than four races all at once: a priestly race, a warrior race, a trading and agricultural race, and, finally, a menial race, the Sudras. Here we are obviously no longer among the tamers of animals; a race of men a hundred times milder and more reasonable is presupposed, even to conceive the plan of such a system of breeding. One recovers breath on stepping into this healthier, higher, and THE “IMPROVERS” OF MANKIND 147 wider world out of the sickroom air and prison air of Christianity. How paltry is the New Testament in comparison with Manu, what a bad odour it has! — But that organisation also required to be formidable, —not, this time, in combat with the beast, but with zts own antithesis, the non-caste man, the mishmash man, the Chandala. And again it had no other ex- pedient for making him harmless, for making him weak, except making him sick, —it was the struggle with the “great number.” Perhaps there is nothing more repugnant to our feelings than ‘hose precau- tionary measures of Indian morality. The third edict, for example (Avadana-Sastra I), “concerning unclean potherbs,” ordains that the sole food allowed to the Chandalas shall be garlic and onions, considering that the holy writings forbid giving them grain, grain- bearing fruits, watery, and fire. The same edict ordains that the water they require must neither be taken out of rivers, springs, or ponds, but only out of the entrances to swamps, and out of holes made by the footsteps of animals. In the same manner they are forbidden both to wash their clothes and fo wash themselves, since the water, which is conceded to them as a favour, must only be used to quench their thirst. Finally, there is a prohibition forbidding the Sudra women to assist the Chandala women at child-birth, in like manner also a prohibition forbidding the latter to assist one another on such occasions . . .— The result 148 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS of such sanitary regulations did not fail to appear: deadly epidemics, frightful sexual diseases, and, in con- sequence thereof, the “law of the knife” once more, which ordained circumcision for the male children and the removal of the /abia minora in the females. — Manu himself says: “The Chandalas are the fruit of adultery, incest, and crime (this is the zecessary con- sequence of the concept of breeding). They shall only have the rags of corpses for clothing, for vessels they shall only have broken pottery, for ornaments old iron, for the worship of God only the evil spirits; they shall wander from place to place without repose. They are forbidden to write from left to right, or to use the right hand in writing: the use of the right hand and from-left-to-right are reserved exclusively for the vért- uous, for persons of race.” 4 These enactments are sufficiently instructive: here for once we have Avyan humanity, perfectly pure, perfectly original, — we learn that the idea of “ pure blood” is the contrary of a harmless idea. On the other hand, it becomes manifest in wfzch nation the hatred, the Chandala hatred against this “humanity,” has immortalised itself, where it has become religion, and genius ... From this point of view the Gospels are documents of the first importance, and the book THE “IMPROVERS” OF MANKIND 149 of Enoch even more so. Christianity springing out of a Jewish root, and only comprehensible as a growth of this soil, represents the movement counter to every morality of breeding, of race, and of privilege: it is antt-Aryan religion par excellence: Christianity, the transvaluation of all Aryan values, the triumph of Chandala values, the gospel preached to the poor and lowly, the collective insurrection against “race” of all the down-trodden, the wretched, the ill-constituted, the misfortunate,— undying Chandala revenge as re- ligion of love... 5 The morality of dreeding and the morality of tam- ing are perfectly worthy of one another as regards the expedients for achieving their ends: we may lay it down as our highest proposition, that in order to create morality, it is necessary to have the absolute will to the contrary. This is the great, the unearthly problem which I have longest applied myself to: the psychology of the “improvers” of mankind. A small and modest matter after all, so-called pia fraus, gave me the first access to this problem: pia fraus, the heritage of all philosophers and priests who have “improved” mankind. Neither Manu, nor Plato, nor Confucius, nor the Jewish and Christian teachers, have ever doubted of their right to use falsehood. They 150 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS have not doubted with regard to quite other rights... Expressed in a formula one might say that a// the measures hitherto used for the purpose of moralising mankind, have been fundamentally zmoral. — WHAT THE GERMANS LACK I Among Germans at present, it is not sufficient to have esprit; one must appropriate it practically, one must presume to have it. Perhaps I know the Germans, perhaps I may even say a few truths to them. Modern Germany exhibits a great amount of hereditary and indoctrinated ca- pacity, so that it can even spend prodigally for a while its accumulated treasure of force. It is wot a high civilisation that has here gained the ascendency, still less a delicate taste, or a superior “beauty” of the instincts, but mandier virtues than any other country in Europe can exhibit. Much good humour and self- respect, much firmness in dealing with one another, in reciprocity of obligations, much laboriousness, much endurance, and a hereditary moderation which re- quires the goad rather than the brake. I also add that here there is still obedience, without its being hu- miliating . . . And nobody despises his opponent . . . It is obviously my wish to be just to the Germans: I should not like to be unfaithful to myself in this 151 152 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS matter, — consequently I have to tell them what I ob- ject to. It costs dear to attain to power: power stupefies ... The Germans—they were once called the nation of thinkers; do they really at present think at all?— The Germans are bored with intellect now- a-days, they mistrust it, politics swallow up all serious- ness for really intellectual matters, — “ Deutschland, Deutschland iiber alles,’1 1 fear that has been the end of German philosophy... “Are there German philosophers? are there German poets? are there good German books?” people ask me abroad: I blush; but with the courage which is peculiar to me even in desperate cases, I answer, “Yes, Bismarck !’’ — Could I even dare to confess what books people read now- a-days?... Accursed instinct of mediocrity !— 2 — Who has not had melancholy reflections con- cerning the possibilities of German esfrit/ But this nation has arbitrarily stupefied itself for nearly a thou- sand years: nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, been more wickedly misused. Recently, a third has been introduced, with which alone every refined and bold activity of intellect can be wiped out— music, our constipated, consti- pating German music.— How much moody heaviness, 1 The German national hymn. WHAT THE GERMANS LACK 153 lameness, humidity, and dressing-gown mood, how much deer is in German intelligence! How is it really possible that young men, who consecrate their exist- ence to the most intellectual ends, do not feel in themselves the first instinct of intellectuality, the se/f- preservative instinct of intellect —and drink beer?.. . The alcoholism of the learned youth is perhaps no interrogative sign with reference to their learnedness —one can be very learned even without esprit, — but in every other respect it remains a problem.— Where do we not find it, the mild intellectual degeneration caused by beer! I once laid my finger on an instance of such degeneration, a case almost become celebrated —that of our first German freethinker, the shrewd David Strauss, who degenerated into an author of a drinking-saloon gospel and a “ New Belief.” Not with impunity had he made his vow in verses to the “lovely brunette” 1— loyalty to death... 3 —I spoke of German esprit'to the effect that it becomes coarser and shallower. Is that enough? In reality, it is something quite different which frightens me; German seriousness, German profundity, and Ger- man fassion in intellectual matters, are more and more on the decline. Pathos has altered, not merely intel 1 Beer. 154 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS lectuality.—I come in contact now and then with German universities: what an atmosphere prevails among their scholars, what withered, contented, and lukewarm intellectuality! It would be a great mis- understanding if a person should adduce German sci- ence by way of objection to me, and, besides, it would be a proof that he had not read a word of my writings. For seventeen years I have not tired of showing the intellectually enervating influence of our modern scien- tific pursuits. The severe helotism to which the im- mense extent of the sciences at present condemns every individual, is a.principal reason why the more fully, more richly, and more profoundly endowed natures no longer find suitable education and suitable educators. There is nothing from which our civilisation suffers more than from the superfluity of presumptuous hod- men and fragmental humanities; our universities are, against their will, the real forcing houses for this mode of stunted growth of intellectual instincts. And all Europe has already an idea of it— grand politics de- ceive nobody ... Germany is more and more re- garded as the flat-land of Europe.—I still seek for a German with whom 7 might be serious in my own way,— how much more for one with whom I could be cheerful! TZzw2lzght of the Idols: ah! who can conceive at present from what seriousness a philosopher here recruits himself! Our cheerfulness is what is least understood .. . WHAT THE GERMANS LACK 155 4 Let us make an estimate. It is not only manifest that German civilisation declines, there is also sufficient reason for it. No one can ultimately spend more than he possesses :—that is true of individuals, it is true also of nations. If we expend our means on power, grand politics, economy, international commerce, par- liamentarism, or military interests, —if we give away the quantity of understanding, seriousness, will, and self-overcoming, which constitutes us, on ¢his side, it is lacking on the other. Civilisation and the state — let us not delude ourselves with regard to the matter —are antagonists: ‘civilised state” is merely a modern idea. The one lives on the other, the one flourishes at the expense of the other. All great periods of civilisation are periods of political décadence : whatever has been great as regards civilisation, has been non-political, even anti-politzcal, —Goethe’s heart opened on the phenomenon of Napoléon, —it closed on the “War of Liberation”... At the same time that Germany comes forward as a great power, France acquires a changed importance as a power of civilisa- tion. Much new intellectual seriousness and passion is already transferred to Paris; the question of pessi- mism, for example; the question of Wagner, and almost all psychological and artistic questions are there dis- cussed in an incomparably more refined and more 156 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS thorough manner than in Germany,—the Germans themselves are zucapacitated for that kind of serious- ness. —In the history of European civilisation there is one-thing especially which the rise of the “ Empire” indicates: a displacement of the centre of gravity. Everybody is aware of it already: in the most im- portant matter—and that is civilisation—-the Ger- mans are no longer of any account. It is asked: have you even a single intellect to point to that counts in Europe, as your Goethe, your Hegel, your Hein- rich Heine, and your Schopenhauer counted ?— There is no end of astonishment that there is no longer a single German philosopher.— 2 5 In all higher education in Germany, the main thing has been lost: the exd, as well as the means for reaching it. That education, culture, itself, is the end—and zot “the Empire;” that for this end there is need of educators — not public-school teach- ers and university scholars: that has been forgotten Educators are necessary, who are themselves educated — superior, noble intellects, who are proved every moment, who are proved whether they speak or are silent, mature and sweetened civilisations, — not the learned lubbers which the public-schools and universities at present offer to the youths as “higher nurses.’ The educators ave lacking (save the excep- WHAT THE GERMANS LACK 157 tions of exceptions) —the primary pre-requisite of education: hence the décadence of German civilisation. —One of those rarest exceptions is my worthy friend, Jacob Burckhardt of Bale: it is to him, above all, that Bale owes its pre-eminence in Humanity. — What the “higher schools” of Germany actually realise, is a brutal training in order that, with the least possible loss of time, an immense number of young men may be fitted to be used, used up, as gov- ernment officials. ‘“ Higher education” and zmmense numbers —that is a contradiction in principle. All higher education belongs to the exceptions only: one has to be privileged to have a right to so high a priv- ilege. All that is great, all that is fine, can never be a common possession: pulchrum est paucorum hominum.— What determines the décadence of Ger- man civilisation? That “higher education” is no longer a privilege —democratism of “universal,” com- munised “culture” ... Not to forget that military privileges compel the to0-great-attendance at the higher schools, which means their ruin.— In the Germany of to-day no one is any longer at liberty to give his children a noble education: our “higher” schools are all of them adapted to the most equivocal mediocrity, as regards their teachers, plans of study, and educa- tional aims. And everywhere there is an unbecom- ing haste, as if something were wrong, when the young man of twenty-three is not yet “finished,” 158 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS does not yet know the answer to the “main ques- tion:” what calling?—A higher class of men, let it be said, do not like “callings,” precisely because they know they are called ... They have time, they take their time, they do not at all think about getting “finished ;’’—at thirty years of age a person is a beginner, a child in the sphere of high civilisa- tion.— Our over-filled public-schools, our overloaded, stupefied public-school teachers are a scandal: there may perhaps be motives for defending this condition of things, as the professors of Heidelberg have done recently, — there are no reasons for it. 6 In order not to come short of my special mode (which is affirmative, and only deals mediately and involuntarily with contradiction and criticism), I at once state the three tasks for the fulfilment of which educators are required. The youth have to learn to see, they have to learn to ¢hink, they have to learn to speak and write: the object in all three cases is a noble civilisation. — To learn to see—to accustom the eye to quietness, to patience, to reserve; to post- pone judgment, to survey and comprehend each case from all sides. This is the first preliminary schooling for intellectuality: ot to react immediately upon a stimulus, but to get the checking, the settling in- stincts in hand. Learning to see, as I understand it, WHAT THE GERMANS LACK 159 is almost the same thing as in unphilosophical lan- guage is called strong will: the essential thing there is just wot to “will,’—the adbzlity to defer decision. All spiritlessness, all vulgarity rests on the inability to offer resistance to a stimulus— people are obliged to react, they follow every impulse. In many cases such a compulsion is already morbidness, décadence, a symptom of exhaustion, —almost all that unphilo- sophical crudeness designates by the word “vice,” is merely that physiological inability ot to react.—A practical application of having learned to see:— As learners, people will in general have become slow, mistrustful, and reluctant. With hostile quietude they will let the strange and the zew of every description approach at first, — they will withdraw their hand, so as not to be touched by it. The being open by all doors, the servile prostration before every insig- nificant fact, the continuous lurking to put one’s self, to throw one’s self among other people and other things, in short, vaunted modern “objectivity” is bad taste, it is ignoble par excellence. — 7 Learning to think: people have no longer any notion of it in our schools. Even in the universi- ties, even among philosophical scholars themselves, logic begins to die out, alike as a theory, as a prac- tice, and as a profession. Let anyone read German 160 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS books: there is no longer the remotest recollection that a technique, a plan of instruction, and a will to reach proficiency are required for thinking, —that thinking requires to be learned as dancing requires to be learned, as a mode of dancing... Who among the Germans as yet knows by ‘experience that refined tremor which zmble feet in the field of intellect communicate to all muscles!—the stiff dolt- ishness of intellectual bearing, the c/wmsy hand in grasp- ing —that is German in such a degree that abroad it is altogether confounded with the German nature. The German has no fingers for xuances ... That the Ger- mans have even endured their philosophers, more es- pecially that most deformed conceptual cripple that has ever existed, the great Kant, gives no small concept of German elegance.— In effect, no form of dancing can be excluded from a high-class education —ability to dance with the feet, with concepts, and with words: have I still to say one must be capable of it with the fen also—one must learn to write? — But at this point I should become a perfect puzzle to German readers... ROVING EXPEDITIONS OF AN INOPPOR- TUNE PHILOSOPHER I My impracticables.— Seneca, or the toreador of virtue. Rousseau, or return to nature zz tmpuris naturalibus. Schiller, or the moral Trumpeter of Sackingen. — Dante, or the hyena foetising in tombs. — Kant, or cant as an intelligible character. — Victor Hugo, or Pharos in the sea of absurdity. — Zzszt, or the school of running —after women. — George Sand, or lactea ubertas; i.e. the milk-cow with “the fine style.” — Michelet, or enthusiasm which strips off the coat... Carlyle, or pessimism as an undigested dinner. — Fohkn Stuart Mill, or offensive transparency. — Les fréres de Goncourt, or the two Ajaxes struggling with Homer. Music by Offenbach. — Zo/a, or “the delight to stink.” 2 Renan. — Divinity, or the perversion of reason by “original sin” (Christianity): witness Renan, who, whenever he ventures a more general affirmation or negation, fails to catch the point with painful regu- larity. For example, he would like to unite into one M 161 162 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS la science and Ja noblesse; la science, however, belongs to democracy —that is perfectly obvious. He desires, with no little ambition, to represent an intellectual aristocratism; but at the same time he lies on his knees (and not on his knees only) before the anti- thetical doctrine, the évangile des humbles ... What is the good of all freethinking, modernism, gibing, and wry-necked dexterity, if you continue to be a Christian, a Roman Catholic, and even a priest, in your intestines! Renan’s ingenuity lies in his seduc- tiveness, just as in the case of the Jesuit and the con- fessor; the broad priestly smirk is not lacking in his intellectuality, —like all priests he only becomes dan- gerous when he loves. Nobody equals him in his fac- ulty for idolising in a fatally dangerous manner . This spirit of Renan, a spirit which exervates, is an additional calamity for poor, sick, feeble-willed France. 3 Sainte-Beuve. — Nothing of a man; full of petty resentment against all masculine intellects. Wanders about delicate, curious, tired, “pumping” people, — a female after all, with a woman’s revengefulness and a woman’s sensuousness. As a psychologist a genius for médisance,; inexhaustibly rich in expedients for the purpose; nobody understands better how to mix poison with praise. Plebeian in his lowest instincts and allied with the vessentiment of Rousseau: conse- EXPEDITIONS OF AN INOPPORTUNE PHILOSOPHER 163 quently a Romanticist —for Rousseau’s instinct grunts and yearns for revenge under all romantisme. A revo- lutionist, though held tolerably in check by fear. Ill at ease in presence of everything possessing strength (public opinion, the Academy, the Court, and even Port Royal). Embittered against all greatness in men and things, against all that believes in itself. Poet enough and half-woman enough to be sensible of greatness as a power; continually turning like the celebrated worm, because he continually feels himself trodden upon. As a critic, without a standard, with- out firmness, and without backbone, with the tongue of the cosmopolitan /éertin in favour of variety, but even without sufficient courage to confess the /zber- tinage. As an historian, without a philosophy, with- out the power of philosophic vision,—on that account declining the task of passing judgment in all great questions, holding up “objectivity” as a mask. He behaves otherwise, however, with regard to all mat- ters where a delicate, worn-out taste is the highest tribunal; there he really has the courage of himself, pleasure in himself —there he is a master. — In some respects a prototype of Baudelaire. — 4 The Jmitatio Christi is one of the books which I cannot hold in my hand without a_ physiological resistance: it exhales a parfum of the eternally femi- 164 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS nine, for which one has to be French—or Wagnerian This saint has such a way of speaking about love that even the Parisiennes become curious. — I am told that A. Comte, that shvewdest of Jesuits, who wanted to lead his fellow countrymen to Rome by the indirect route of science, inspired himself by this book. I believe it: the “religion of the heart”... 5 G. Eliot.—They have got rid of Christian God, and now think themselves obliged to cling firmer than ever to Christian morality: that is Exglish con- sistency; we shall not lay the blame of it on ethical girls 4 la Eliot. In England for every little emanci- pation from divinity, people have to re-acquire respect- | ability by becoming moral fanatics in an awe-inspiring manner. That is the penalty they have to pay there. — With us it is different. When we give up Christian belief, we thereby deprive ourselves of the right to maintain a stand on Christian morality. This is zot at all obvious of itself; we have again and again to make this point clear, in defiance of English shallow- pates. Christianity is a system, a view of things, consistently thought out and complete. If we break out of it a fundamental idea, the belief in God, we thereby break the whole into pieces: we have no longer anything determined in our grasp. Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know EXPEDITIONS OF AN INOPPORTUNE PHILOSOPHER 165 what is good for him and what is evil; he believes in God, who alone knows. Christian morality is a command, its origin is transcendent, it is beyond all criticism, beyond all right of criticism; it has solely truth, if God is truth, —it stands or falls with the belief in God.—TIf in fact the English imagine they know, of their own accord, “intuitively” what is good and evil, if they consequently imagine they have no more need of Christianity as a guarantee of morality ; that itself is merely the result of the ascendency of Christian valuation, and an expression of its strength and profundity: to such extent that the origin of English morality has been forgotten: to such an extent that the strictly conditional character of its right to existence is no longer perceived. Morality is not as yet a problem for the English. .. 6. George Sand. —TI read the first “ Letters d’un Voya- geur:” like all derived from Rousseau, false, artificial, inflated, exaggerated. I cannot stand this variegated wall paper style; nor the vulgar ambition for gener- ous feelings. But the worst, surely, is the woman’s coquetry with masculine characteristics, with the manners of ill-bred boys.— How cold she must have been withal, this insufferable artist! She wound her- self up like a timepiece—and wrote... Cold like Hugo, like Balzac, like all Romanticists, as soon as 166 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS they began to write! And how self-complacently she may then have reposed, this productive writing cow, who, like her master Rousseau himself, had in her something German in the bad sense, and at all events, was only possible owing to the decline of French taste!— But Renan adores her... 7 A moral for psychologists. — Never to occupy one’s self with colportage psychology! Never to observe for the sake of observing! That results in false optics, in squinting, in something forced and exagger- ated. Experiencing, as a desire to experience —that does not do. In experiencing anything, one must not look towards one’s self; every look then becomes an “evil eye.’ A born psychologist is instinctively on his guard against seeing for the sake of seeing; the same is true of the born painter. He never works “according to nature,’—he leaves the sifting and expressing of the “case,” of “nature,” or of the “experienced,” to his instinct, to his camera obscura... He only becomes conscious of what is general, the conclusion, the result; he is unacquainted with that arbitrary abstracting from single cases.— What is the result when people do otherwise? for example, when they carry on colportage psychology after the manner of great and small Parisian romanciers? That mode of business lies in wait, as it were, for the actual, it EXPEDITIONS OF AN INOPPORTUNE PHILOSOPHER 167 brings home a handful of curiosities every evening .. . But let us only see what finally results from it.—A pile of daubs, at the best a mosaic, in every case, something pieced together, disquieting, loud-coloured. The Goncourts are the worst sinners in this respect ; they do not put three sentences together, which are not simply painful to the eye, to the psychologist-eye. —Nature, estimated artistically, is no model. It exag- gerates, it distorts, it leaves gaps. Nature is accident. Studying “according to nature” seems to me a bad sign; it betrays subjection, weakness, fatalism; this lying-in-the-dust before petzts fazts is unworthy of a complete artist. Seeing what zs—that belongs to another species of intellects, to the amti-artistic, to the practical. One has to know who one is... 8 A psychology of the artist.—To the existence of art, to the existence of any zsthetic activity or perception whatsoever, a preliminary psychological condition is indispensable, namely, ecstasy. Ecstasy must first have intensified the sensitiveness of the whole mech- anism; until this takes place art is not realised. All kinds of ecstasy, however differently conditioned, pos- sess this power; above all the ecstasy of sexual ex- citement, the oldest and most primitive form of ecstasy. In like manner the ecstasy which follows in the train of all great desires, of all strong emotions ; the ecstasy 168 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS of the feast, of the contest, of a daring deed, of victory, of all extreme agitation; the ecstasy of cru- elty; the ecstasy in destruction; the ecstasy under certain meteorological influences —for example, spring ecstasy ; or under the influence of narcotics; finally, the ecstasy of will, the ecstasy of an overcharged and surging will.— The essential thing in ecstasy is the feeling of increased power and profusion. Out of this feeling we impart to things, we constrain them to accept something from us, we force them by violence ; —this proceeding is called zdealising. Let us here free ourselves from a prejudice: idealising does mot consist, as is commonly believed, in an abstraction or deduction of the insignificant or the contingent. An immense forcing out of principal traits is rather the decisive characteristic, so that the others thereby disappear. 9 In this condition we enrich everything out of our own profusion; what we see, and what we wish for we see enlarged, crowded, strong, and overladen with power. He who, in this condition, transforms things till they mirror his power, —till they are reflections of his perfection. This constraint to transform into the perfect is—art. Everything that he is not, neverthe- less becomes for him a delight in himself; in art man EXPEDITIONS OF AN INOPPORTUNE PHILOSOPHER 169 enjoys himself as perfection. —It would be allowable to imagine an opposite state of things, a specific anti-artisticalness of instinct-——a mode of being which would impoverish everything, attenuate everything, make everything consumptive. In fact, history fur- nishes us with abundance of such anti-artists, persons with starved lives, who must necessarily lay hold of things, drain them, and make them more emaciated. This is the case with the genuine Christian, Pascal, for example ; a Christian, who is at the same time an artist, 7s not to be found. Let no one be childish enough to refer me to the case of Raphael, or to any homceopathic Christian of the nineteenth century. Raphael said yea, he did yea; consequently Raphael: was no Christian . 10 What do the antithetical notions Afollinian and. Dionysian (which I have introduced into zsthetics), imply, when we conceive of them both as modes of ecstasy? Apollinian ecstasy above all keeps the eye on the alert so that it acquires the faculty of vision. The painter, the sculptor, and the epic poet, are visionaries par excellence. In the Dionysian condi- tion, on the other hand, the entire emotional system is excited, and has its energies augmented; so that it discharges itself simultaneously by all channels of 170 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS expression, and forces the faculties of representation, of imitation, of transfiguration, of metamorphosis — all kinds of mimicry and acting—into activity at one and the same time. The essential thing is the easi- ness of the metamorphosis, the zxcapaczty to resist a stimulus (similar to the case of certain hysterical patients, who also act every réle at every hint). It is impossible for Dionysian man not to understand any suggestion, he overlooks no symptom of emotion, he possesses the highest manifestation of knowing and divining instinct, as also the highest develop- ment of communicative art. He assumes every ex- ternal appearance, every emotion; he changes himself continually. — Music, as we understand it at present, is also a collective excitement and collective dis- charge of the emotions, nevertheless it is only the survival of a much wider world of emotional expres- sion, a mere vestduum of Dionysian histrionism. To make, music possible as a separate art, several of the senses—especially muscular sense — have here been eliminated (relatively at least, for to a certain extent all rhythm still speaks to our muscles); so that man no longer immediately imitates and gives bodily expression to every feeling. Nevertheless that is the Dionysian normal condition, at any rate the original condition: music is the slowly attained spe- cialisation of this condition at the cost of the facul- ties nearest akin to it. EXPEDITIONS OF AN INOPPORTUNE PHILOSOPHER I71 It The actor, the mime, the dancer, the musician, and the lyric poet are fundamentally akin in their instincts and one in their essence, but they have gradually specialised and separated from one another —till indeed they are in contradiction. The lyric poet remained longest united with the musician ; the actor remained longest connected with the dancer. — The architect represents neither a Dionysian, nor an Apollinian condition; here it is the great act of will, the will which removes mountains, ecstasy of strong will that is desirous of art. The most powerful men have always inspired architects; the architect has always been under the suggestion of power. In the work of architecture pride, triumph over gravity and will to power, are intended to display themselves ; architecture is a sort of eloquence of power embodied in forms, sometimes persuading, even flattering, and sometimes merely commanding. The highest feeling of power and security is expressed in that which has the grand style. Power which needs no further dem- onstration, which scorns to please, which answers un- willingly, which has no sense of any witness near it, which is without consciousness that there is opposi- tion to it, which reposes in @tse/f, fatalistic, a law among laws: ‘that is what speaks of itself as the grand style. 172 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS 12 I read the “Life of Thomas Carlyle,” that uncon- scious and unintended favce, that heroico-moral inter- pretation of dyspeptic conditions. — Carlyle, a man of strong words and attitudes, a rhetorician from xeces- sity, who was continually irritated by the longing for a strong belief avd the feeling of incapacity for it (in that respect a typical Romanticist!). The longing for a strong belief is ~o¢ evidence of a strong belief, rather the contrary. When one has this belief, one may allow one’s self the choice luxury of scepticism ; one is sufficiently sure, sufficiently resolute, and suffi- ciently bound for doing so. Carlyle deafens some- thing in his nature by the fortisstmo of his reverence for men of strong belief, and by his rage against the less stupid; he veguires noise. A constant, passionate insincerity towards himself —that is his proprium ; he is interesting, and will remain interesting thereby. In England, to be sure, he is admired precisely on account of his sincerity... Well, that is English; and in consideration that the English are the people of consummate canz?, it is not merely conceivable, but appropriate. After all, Carlyle is an English atheist, who aspires to honour for zo¢ being one. 13 Emerson.— Much more enlightened, more discur- sive, more varied, more refined than Carlyle, above EXPEDITIONS OF AN INOPPORTUNE PHILOSOPHER 173 all more fortunate ... One who instinctively nour- ishes himself solely with ambrosia, leaving alone what is indigestible in things. A man of taste in compar- ison with Carlyle. — Carlyle, who had much love for Emerson, said nevertheless, “He does not give ws enough to chew,” which may rightly be said, but not to Emerson’s prejudice. — Emerson possesses that kind-hearted and ingenuous cheerfulness, which dis- courages all sternness; he does not by any means know how old he is already, and how young he will yet be;—he could say of himself, with an expression of Lope de Vega: “yo me sucedo a mt mismo.” His mind always finds reasons for being contented, and even grateful; and now and then verges on the cheerful transcendence of that worthy man, who, re- turning from a love appointment, tanguam re bene gesta, said thankfully, “Ut destnt vires, tamen est laudanda voluptas.” — 14 Anti-Darwin. — As regards the celebrated “struggle for life,” it seems to me, in the meantime, to be more asserted than proved. It occurs, but only as an exception ; the general aspect of life is mot a state of want or hunger; it is rather a state of opulence, luxuriance, and even absurd prodigality, — where there is a struggle, it is a struggle for power.— We must not confound Malthus with nature. Granted, however, 174 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS that this struggle exists ——and in fact it does occur — its results, alas, are the reverse of what the Darwinian school wish, the reverse of what one might perhaps wish, in accordance with them: ‘it is prejudicial to the strong, the privileged, the fortunate exceptions. The species does zot grow in perfection: the weak again and again get the upper hand of the strong, —their large number, and their greater cunning are the cause of it. Darwin forgot the intellect (that was English !); the weak have move intellect... One must need in- tellect in order to acquire it; one loses it when it is no longer necessary. He who has strength rids him- self of intellect (“let it go hence!” is what people think in Germany at present, “the Hypire will re- main” ...). As is obvious, under intellect I com- prehend foresight, patience, craft, dissimulation, grand self-control, and all modifications of mzmicry. A great deal of so-called virtue is included under mimicry. 15 Psychologist casuistry.— This individual is an ex- pert in the knowledge of men: for what end is he actually studying men? He wants to get some little advantages over them, or even some great advantages, —he is a politicus! ... That individual is also an expert in the knowledge of men, and you say he 1 An allusion to Luther’s song, Eine feste Burg ist unser Gott! EXPEDITIONS OF AN INOPPORTUNE PHILOSOPHER I75 wants nothing for himself thereby, he is one of the grand “impersonal.” Look at him more carefully! Perhaps he even wants a more reprehensible advan- tage: to feel himself superior to men, to be allowed to look down on them, not to confound himself with them any longer. This “impersonal one” is a despiser of men; the former is the more humane species, what- ever appearance may indicate. He at least places himself on an equality with men, he places himself among them . 16 The psychological tact of the Germans seems to me to be called in question by a whole series of cases, a list of which my modesty prevents me from bringing forward. In one case a remarkable inducement will not be lacking to establish my thesis: I have a grudge against the Germans for having made a mistake about , Kant and his “back-door philosophy,” as I call it, — that was ot the type of intellectual honesty. — That other thing which I do not like to hear is a notorious “and:” the Germans say “Goethe avd Schiller;” I am afraid lest they say “Schiller and Goethe”... Is this Schiller not yet 4vown?—There are still worse “ands;” I have heard with my own ears, “ Schopen- hauer and Hartmann;” to be sure, only among uni- versity professors . 176 THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS 17 The most intellectual men, provided they are the most courageous, experience by far the most painful tragedies ; but they reverence life just on that account, because it places its most powerful hostile forces in opposition to them. 18 “Intellectual conscience.” — Nothing seems to me to be rarer at present than genuine hypocrisy. I have a strong suspicion that the mild air of our civilisation is not beneficial to this plant. Hypocrisy belongs to the ages of strong belief when people did not part with their own belief, even under the constraint of showing off another belief. At present people part with it; or, what is more common,. they provide themselves with a second belief, —in all cases they remain Lonest. Undoubtedly, there is at present a very much greater variety of convictions possible than there was for- merly: possible, that is to say they are permitted, they do no farm. Out of this state of things tolerance towards one’s self originates. - Tolerance towards one’s self permits of several convictions; these live together in agreement, —they take care, as everybody does at present, not to compromise themselves. What does one compromise one’s self with at present? If one is consistent. If one goes in a straight line. If one EXPEDITIONS OF AN INOPPORTUNE PHILOSOPHER 177 is less than quinquivocal. If one is genuine... I very much fear that modern man is simply too com- fortable for some vices; so that these die out alto- gether. Everything wicked which is determined by strong will — perhaps there is nothing wicked without strength of will—-degenerates to virtue in our luke- warm atmosphere... The few hypocrites I have become acquainted with, imitated hypocrisy ; they were actors, like almost every tenth man at present. — 19 Beautiful and ugly. — Nothing is more conditioned, let us say more restricted, than our sense of the beau- tiful. A person who would try to think of it as detached from the delight of man in man would imme- diately lose his footing. The “beautiful in itself” is merely an expression, not even a concept. In the beautiful, man posits himself*as the standard of per- fection; in select cases he worships himself in that standard.