The extent to which things will become ever more ‘artistic’ in Europe. – Even today, in this transitional period in which so many forms of coercion have lost their power, the need to make a living still forces nearly all European men to adopt a particular role – their so-called profession. A few retain the freedom, an apparent freedom, to choose this role themselves; for most of them it is chosen. The result is strange enough. Almost all Europeans, at an advanced age, confuse themselves with their role; they become the victims of their ‘good performance’; they themselves have forgotten how much they were determined by accidents, moods, and arbitrariness at the time that their ‘profession’ was decided – and how many other roles they may have been able to play; for now it is too late! Upon deeper consideration, the role has actually become character; and artifice, nature. There were times when men believed with unyielding confidence, even with piety, in their predestination for just this business, just this way of making a living, and utterly refused to acknowledge the element of accident, role, and caprice. With the help of this faith, estates, guilds, and inherited trade privileges were able to establish those monsters, the broad-based social pyramids that distinguished the middle ages and to which one can credit at least one thing: durability (and durability is a first-rank value on earth). But there are contrary ages, the truly democratic ones, in which people unlearn this faith and a certain audacious faith and opposite viewpoint moves steadily into the foreground – the Athenian faith that first became noticeable in the Periclean age;15 the American faith which is increasingly becoming the European faith as well, where the individual is convinced he can do just about anything and is up to playing any role; and everyone experiments with himself, improvises, experiments again, enjoys experimenting, where all nature ends and becomes art…When the Greeks had fully accepted this faith in roles – the faith of artistes, if you will – they underwent, as is well known, step by step an odd metamorphosis that is not in every respect worthy of imitation: they really became actors; as such they captivated and overcame the whole world – finally even the ‘power that overcame the whole world’ itself (for it was not, as innocents tend to say, Greek culture that conquered Rome, but the graeculus histrio16). But what I fear, what even today one could grasp with one’s hands if one felt like grasping it, is that we modern men are pretty much on the same road; and every time man starts to discover the extent to which he is playing a role and the extent to which he can be an actor, he becomes an actor…With this, a new human flora and fauna emerges that cannot grow in firmer and more limited ages – or that would at least be formally condemned and suspected of lacking honour; it is thus that the most interesting and maddest ages always emerge, in which ‘the actors’, all types of actors, are the real masters. Precisely because of this, another human type becomes ever more disadvantaged and is finally made impossible; above all, the great ‘architects’: the strength to build is now paralysed; the courage to make far-reaching plans is discouraged; the organizational geniuses become scarce – who still dares to undertake works that would require millennia to complete? For what is dying out is that fundamental faith on the basis of which someone could calculate, promise, anticipate the future in a plan on that grand scale, and sacrifice the future to his plan – namely, the basic faith that man has worth and sense only in so far as he is a stone in a great edifice; to this end he must be firm above all, a ‘stone’…above all not an actor! To put it briefly – oh, people will keep silent about it for a long time! – what from now on will never again be built, can never again be built, is – a society in the old sense of the term; to build that, everything is lacking, mainly the material. We are all no longer material for a society; this is a timely truth! It is a matter of indifference to me that at present the most shortsighted, perhaps the most honest, at any rate the noisiest human type that we have today – our good socialists – believe, hope, dream, and above all shout and write pretty much the opposite. For even now one reads their slogan for the future ‘free society’ on all tables and walls. Free society? Well, well! But surely you know, gentlemen, what one needs to build that? Wooden iron!17 The famous wooden iron! And it need not even be wooden…