Our ultimate gratitude to art. – Had we not approved of the arts and invented this type of cult of the untrue, the insight into general untruth and mendacity that is now given to us by science – the insight into delusion and error as a condition of cognitive and sensate existence – would be utterly unbearable. Honesty would lead to nausea and suicide. But now our honesty has a counterforce that helps us avoid such consequences: art, as the good will to appearance. We do not always keep our eyes from rounding off, from finishing off the poem; and then it is no longer eternal imperfection that we carry across the river of becoming – we then feel that we are carrying a goddess, and are proud and childish in performing this service. As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable to us, and art furnishes us with the eye and hand and above all the good conscience to be able to make such a phenomenon of ourselves. At times we need to have a rest from ourselves by looking at and down at ourselves and, from an artistic distance, laughing at ourselves or crying at ourselves; we have to discover the hero no less than the fool in our passion for knowledge; we must now and then be pleased about our folly in order to be able to stay pleased about our wisdom! And precisely because we are at bottom grave and serious human beings and more weights than human beings, nothing does us as much good as the fool’s cap: we need it against ourselves – we need all exuberant, floating, dancing, mocking, childish, and blissful art lest we lose that freedom over things that our ideal demands of us. It would be a relapse for us, with our irritable honesty, to get completely caught up in morality and, for the sake of the overly severe demands that we there make on ourselves, to become virtuous monsters and scarecrows. We have also to be able to stand above morality – and not just to stand with the anxious stiffness of someone who is afraid of slipping and falling at any moment, but also to float and play above it! How then could we possibly do without art and with the fool? – And as long as you are in any way ashamed of yourselves, you do not yet belong amongst us!
1 See above, ‘Preface’, footnote 5, p. 8.
2 The standard epithet of the Greek god Poseidon, who was thought to rule the seas and be responsible for earthquakes, is ‘earth-shaker’ (see Iliad VII .445, VIII .201, IX .362, etc.).
3 The German term Nietzsche uses here means both ‘dead’ and ‘made immortal’.
4 ‘action at a distance’
5 A talent is a large sum of money. I have been unable to discover the origin of this story.
6 ‘Long live comedy!’
7 Aristotle doesn’t actually say exactly this, but see his Nichomachean Ethics 1123b.6–8 and Rhetoric 1361a. 6–7.
8 Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868) wrote thirty-six operas in the years between 1810 and 1829, then retired, devoting the remaining forty years of his life to culinary pleasures in Paris. Vincenzo Bellini’s (1801–35) most famous opera is Norma. The music of Rossini and Bellini was very highly regarded by Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), the modern philosopher who influenced the young Nietzsche most deeply.
9 Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (4 vols., 1715–35) by Alain-René Lesage is one of the original picaresque novels.
10 The Roman city of Pompeii, near present-day Naples, was preserved by being covered in ash by an eruption of the volcano Vesuvius in AD 79. Excavation of the site began in the mid-nineteenth century. Nietzsche visited Naples and its environs several times. The ‘vulgarity’ of which he speaks is probably the prominent display of a variety of forms of erotic art.
11 In his Poetics (chapter 6, 1449b.24ff.) Aristotle says that tragedy has its effect by producing ‘pity/compassion’ and ‘fear’ in the audience.
12 Athenian dramatist of the fifth century BC
13 See above, Book II footnote 8, p. 77. In Opera and Drama Wagner claims that Rossini had reduced opera to absolute melody, destroying its dramatic content and so opera itself.
14 ‘dry recitative’. ‘Recitative’ is a style of composing vocal music that tries to keep the musical form as close as possible to the cadences of normal speech. ‘Dry’ recitative is one in which the musical texture is sparse and the voice or voices are accompanied only by a minimal number of instruments (e.g. keyboard and violoncello).
15 Richard Wagner (1813–83) in his theoretical writings returned again and again to the question of the proper relation between words and music in opera.
16 Nietzsche takes this anecdote from Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation (vol. I, Book 3, § 36) where it is used to illustrate the complete discrepancy between, on the one hand, the kind of intelligence used in everyday experience, science, and mathematics (ability, according to Schopenhauer, to subsume things under the ‘principle of sufficient reason’) and, on the other, aesthetic contemplation. The Iphigenia in question is the play by the French dramatist Jean Racine (1639–99).
17 ‘Spirit’; the word often refers to a lively imagination.
18 ‘It is a great thing to keep silent’ (Martial IV.80.6). Martial was a Roman epigrammatist who lived in the first century A D.
19 French dramatist (1606–84) who wrote a number of tragedies on ancient subjects
20 Archilochus (seventh century Be) and his slightly younger contemporary Alcaeus were early Greek poets who became models for the writing of poetry in Latin, for instance by Horace (first century Be).
21 The Roman poet Sextus Propertius (first century Be) cites the Greek poets Callimachus and Philetas (both fourth/third century Be) as models (2.34.31–2; 3.1.1; 3.9.42–3). The Sicilian bucolic poet Theocritus (early third century Be) also revered Philetas.
22 ‘Roman empire’
23 A group of philosophers centred in Southern Italy who claimed to be followers of Pythagoras (sixth century Be). They led a life of ritual purity and were especially devoted to the study of mathematics and harmonics.
24 ‘ferocity of the soul’
25 This anecdote about Terpander (seventh century Be), one of the earliest Greek musicians who can be identified as a historical figure, is reported in chapter 42 of On Music, a short treatise (almost certainly incorrectly) attributed to Plutarch. The fifth-century (Be) Sicilian politician, philosopher, and shaman Empedocles had a keen interest in all sorts of purgatives. Damon was a fifth-century (Be) Athenian politician and theorist of music who was particularly interested in the effects of music on the soul. Plato’s discussion of this topic in Book III of Republic is probably influenced by his views, and Plato actually mentions him at 400B. This anecdote is recounted in Martianus Capella (probably fifth century AD), De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii IX.926.
26 ‘ferocity’
27 ‘musical phrase, tune, melody’. It is unclear on what Nietzsche is basing this etymological speculation.
28 Pausanias X.5.7
29 Not actually to be found in Homer, but a proverbial Greek saying. See Aristotle, Metaphysics 983a.3 and Solon, Fragment 21 (Diels).
30 In Byron’s tragedy Manfred (1817) the hero is burdened with excessive knowledge and tries in vain to attain forgetfulness.
31 The legendary Orpheus was supposed to be able to do extraordinary things, such as bringing his wife back to life from the dead, through the power of his music.
32 an important Italian dramatist (1749–1803)
33 In addition to his political writings (e.g. The Social Contract) Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) wrote an important autobiography, the Confessions (1781).
34 Vita Nuova (‘New Life’) is a collection of Dante Alighieri’s (1265–1321) poems connected by prose commentaries of a semi-autobiographical kind.
35 Variant of the famous saying by the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (late sixth century Be): ‘War is the father of all things.’ This is number 53 in the standard collections (Diels-Kranz).
36 Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837); Italian lyric poet, also admired for his prose writings, notably Operette Morali (1827). The French writer Prosper Mérimée (1803–70) is now perhaps best known as the author of a ‘Carmen’ on which the libretto of the opera of that name by Bizet is based. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) was an American ‘Transcendentalist’ writer highly regarded by Nietzsche. Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) was an English prose writer.
37 See above, Book I, footnote 3, p. 31.
38 See above, Book I, footnote 27, p. 55.
39 French Encyclopedist who defended a form of hedonistic materialism in his major work On the Spirit (1758)
40 French politician and writer (1741–94). Nietzsche’s source for most of the material in this section is Histoire de Chamfort, sa vie et ses œuvres by P.-J. Stahl (Paris, no date of publication given), a book which Nietzsche had in his library.
41 An important political figure in the early stages of the French Revolution, admired by Nietzsche: see The Genealogy of Morality 1.10.
42 French novelist (1783–1842). He was born Marie Henri Beyle, ‘Stendhal’ being a pseudonym.
43 French politician and theorist whose What is the Third Estate? (1789) had great influence on the early course of the French Revolution.
44 ‘Ah, my friend, I am finally about to leave this world in which the heart must either break or plate itself with steel.’
45 British writer on history and politics (1795–1881).
46 Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar
47 Act III, Scene 3 and Act IV, Scene 3
48 Nietzsche read and cited Shakespeare in the translation by Schlegel and Tieck. The text gives the English original. The italics are Nietzsche’s own.
49 The outspoken anti-clericalism of Voltaire (see above, Book I, footnote 27, p. 55) gave him the reputation of being an atheist.
50 See World as Will and Representation, vol. I, Book 4, § 54, and vol. II, Book 2, §§ 19, 4.
51 Ibid., vol. I, Book 4, § 60 and vol. II, Book 2, § 25
52 Ibid., vol. I, Book 2, § 28; vol. II, Book 3, § 38, and vol. II, Book 4, § 41
53 French naturalist (1744–1829) who believed that acquired characteristics could be biologically inherited
54 See World as Will and Representation, vol. I, Book 3, § 38.
55 ‘The principle of individuation’. Schopenhauer believed that the reality of the universe was an undifferentiated Will which however appeared to us as a world of distinct things subject to the ‘principle of individuation’. Ibid., vol. I, Book 2, § 23, and vol. I, Book 4, § 68
56 Ibid., vol. II, Book 4, § 49
57 The third opera in Wagner’s four-part cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen tells the story of the hero Siegfried, who can be taken to represent an energetic, unspoiled humanity of the future.
58 Notorious eighteenth-century charlatan
59 Wagner: ‘Bericht an Seine Majestat den König Ludwig II. von Bayern über eine in München zu errichtende deutsche Musikschule’; Schopenhauer: ‘Über Schriftstellerei und Stil’ in his Parerga und Paralipomena (vol. 11, chapter 23)
60 Wagner: Das Judentum in der Musik (1850); Schopenhauer: ‘Zur Rechtslehre und Politik’ in Parerga und Paralipomena (vol. II, chapter 9, § 132) (Jews should have civil rights, but it is ‘absurd’ to grant them rights of political participation), ‘Über die Universitüts-Philosophie’ in Parerga und Paralipomena (vol. I) (One of the major defects of ‘modern’ philosophy, especially that of Hegel, is that it has imposed on itself the task of arguing for the truth of a ‘Jewish mythology’) etc.
61 Wagner: Religion und Kunst (1880); Schopenhauer: World as Will and Representation, vol. II, Book 4, § 41
62 Wagner, Religion und Kunst (1880). In Act I of Parsifal Gurnemanz lectures the young Parsifal on the evils of killing animals. Schopenhauer, ‘Preisschrift über die Grundlage der Moral’ § 19. In this essay, as generally, Schopenhauer connects proto-animal-liberation views with anti-Semitism (see above, Book II, footnote 60), arguing that Europeans treat animals badly because the Old Testament posits an absolute distinction between animals and humans, and claiming that anyone not ‘chloroformed by the foetor Iudaicus [Jewish stench]’ would see that animals and humans were essentially the same and thus should be treated with similar compassion.
63 Goethe’s highly overwrought novel The Sufferings of Young Werther tells the story of a young man who is unhappy in love and shoots himself. When real young men began dressing and acting like Werther, and a few actually shot themselves, citing his example, Goethe decided he needed to intervene and had these words placed as a motto before the second edition of the text(1775)-
64 Nietzsche quotes from his own essay orginally published as part of Untimely Meditations (1876).
65 See above, Book I, footnote 27, p. 55 and Book II, footnote 49, p. 95.
66 See above, Book I, footnote 3, p. 31.
67 French political theorist (1689–1755)
68 The eldest son of the King of France and heir apparent to the throne was called ‘the Dauphin’. In order to ensure that his son received the best education possible the French king Louis XIV had a special edition of Greek and Latin authors made ‘in usum Delphini’ (i.e. ‘for the use of the Dauphin’). This edition deleted passages from the works that were considered objectionable for one reason or another. In usum Delphinorum means ‘for the use of Dauphins’.
69 This is an extraordinary statement, which must reflect Nietzsche’s selective view of Italian opera. In particular, the chorus of Hebrew slaves from Verdi’s Nabucco (1842), ‘Va pensiero’, became one of the most famous patriotic songs of the Italian Risorgimento.
70 Poem by Goethe from his novel Wilhelm Meister, Book 11, chapter 11.
71 Goethe and Beethoven, walking together in the spa town of Teplitz, encountered the Empress and her entourage. The staunch republican Beethoven tried to get Goethe to follow his example of not making way for the Imperial Suite, but Goethe, who was for decades an official at the small German court of Weimar, politely stepped aside and removed his hat as the Empress passed.
72 Goethe describes Beethoven thus in a letter to the former’s friend Zelter of 2 September 1812.
73 This probably refers to Chancellor Bismarck (‘foremost statesman’) and Emperor Wilhelm I (‘imperial mouthpiece’).