What is romanticism? – It may be recalled, at least among my friends, that initially I approached the modern world with a few crude errors and over-estimations and, in any case, with hope. I understood – on the basis of who knows what personal experiences? – the philosophical pessimism of the nineteenth century as if it were a symptom of a higher force of thought, of more audacious courage, and of more victorious fullness of life than had characterized the eighteenth century, the age of Hume, Kant, Condillac,39 and the sensualists: thus, tragic insight struck me as the distinctive luxury of our culture, its most precious, noblest and most dangerous squandering; but still, in view of its over-richness, as its permitted luxury. Similarly, I explained German music to myself as the expression of a Dionysian might of the German soul: I believed I heard in it the earthquake through which some pent-up primordial force is finally released – indifferent about whether it sets everything else which is called culture atremble.40 You see that what I misjudged both in philosophical pessimism and in German music was what constitutes its actual character – its romanticism. What is romanticism? Every art, every philosophy can be considered a cure and aid in the service of growing, struggling life: they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two types of sufferers: first, those who suffer from a superabundance of life – they want a Dionysian art as well as a tragic outlook and insight into life; then, those who suffer from an impoverishment of life and seek quiet, stillness, calm seas, redemption from themselves through art and insight, or else intoxication, paroxysm, numbness, madness. All romanticism in art and in knowledge fits the dual needs of the latter type, as did (and do) Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner, to name the most famous and prominent romantics that I misunderstood at the time – not, incidentally, to their disadvantage, one might in all fairness concede. He who is richest in fullness of life, the Dionysian god and man, can allow himself not only the sight of what is terrible and questionable but also the terrible deed and every luxury of destruction, decomposition, negation; in his case, what is evil, nonsensical, and ugly almost seems acceptable because of an overflow in procreating, fertilizing forces capable of turning any desert into bountiful farmland. Conversely, he who suffers most and is poorest in life would need mainly mildness, peacefulness, goodness in thought and in deed – if possible, also a god who truly would be a god for the sick, a ‘saviour’; as well as logic, the conceptual comprehensibility of existence – for logic soothes, gives confidence – in short, a certain warm, fear-repelling narrowness and confinement to optimistic horizons. Thus I gradually came to understand Epicurus, the antithesis of a Dionysian pessimist, and equally the ‘Christian’, who really is simply a kind of Epicurean and, like him, essentially a romantic; and my vision grew keener for that most difficult and insidious form of backward inference with which the most mistakes are made – the inference from the work to the maker, from the ideal to the one who needs it, from every manner of valuation to the commanding need behind it. Nowadays I avail myself of this primary distinction concerning all aesthetic values: in every case I ask, ‘Is it hunger or superabundance that have become creative here?’ At first glance, a different distinction may appear more advisable – it’s far more noticeable – namely, the question of whether the creation was caused by a desire for fixing, for immortalizing, for being, or rather by a desire for destruction, for change, for novelty, for future, for becoming. However, both types of desires prove ambiguous upon closer examination, and can be interpreted under the first scheme, which seems preferable to me. The desire for destruction, for change and for becoming can be the expression of an overflowing energy pregnant with the future (my term for this is, as is known, ‘Dionysian’); but it can also be the hatred of the ill-constituted, deprived, and underprivileged one who destroys and must destroy because what exists, indeed all existence, all being, outrages and provokes him. To understand this feeling, take a close look at our anarchists. The will to immortalize also requires a dual interpretation. It can be prompted, first, by gratitude and love; art of such origin will always be an art of apotheosis, dithyrambic perhaps like Rubens;41 blissfully mocking like Hafis;42 bright and gracious like Goethe, spreading a Homeric light and splendour over all things. But it can also be the tyrannical will of someone who suffers deeply, who struggles, is tortured, and who would like to stamp as a binding law and compulsion what is most personal, singular, narrow, the real idiosyncrasy of his suffering, and who as it were takes revenge on all things by forcing, imprinting, branding his image on them, the image of his torture. The latter is romantic pessimism in its most expressive form, be it Schopenhauer’s philosophy of will or Wagner’s music – romantic pessimism, the last great event in the fate of our culture. (That there could be a completely different pessimism, a classical one – this intuition and vision belongs to me as inseparable from me, as my proprium43 and ipsissimum;44 only the word ‘classical’ offends my ears; it has become far too trite, round, and indistinct. I call this pessimism of the future – for it is coming! I see it coming! – Dionysian pessimism.)