Epilogue. – But as I finally slowly, slowly paint this gloomy question mark and am still willing to remind my readers of the virtues of reading in the right way – oh, what forgotten and unknown virtues! – it strikes me that I hear all around myself most malicious, cheerful, hobgoblinlike laughter: the spirits of my book are themselves descending upon me, pulling my ears and calling me to order. ‘We can’t stand it anymore’, they shout, ‘stop, stop this raven-black music! Are we not surrounded by bright mid-morning? And by soft ground and green grass, the kingdom of the dance? Was there ever a better hour for gaiety? Who will sing us a song, a morning song, so sunny, so light, so full-fledged that it does not chase away the crickets55 but instead invites them to join in the singing and dancing? And even plain, rustic bagpipes would be better than the mysterious sounds, such bog-cries, voices from the crypt, and marmot whistles with which you have so far regaled us in your wilderness, my Mr. Hermit and Musician of the Future!56 No! Not such sounds! Let us rather strike up more pleasant, more joyous tones!’57 Does it please you now, my impatient friends? Well then, who wouldn’t like to please you? My bagpipes are already waiting; my throat, too – it may sound a bit rough, but put up with it; after all, we’re in the mountains. At least what you are about to hear is new; and if you don’t understand it, if you misunderstand the singer, what does it matter? This happens to be ‘the singer’s curse’.58 You will be able to hear his music and tune so much the better, and so much the better will you be able to dance to his pipe. Is that what you want?
1 See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason B 670, 799.
2 ‘sly, knowing all the tricks, devious’. Nietzsche uses the plural of this word which in the singular is used in the Odyssey (e.g. Book I, line i) to describe Odysseus.
3 Probably a reference to Dr Paul Rée (1849–1901), author of Der Ursprung der moralischen Empfindungen (1877) and Die Entstehung des Gewissens (1885). Nietzsche refers again to Rée in the Preface to ‘On the Genealogy of Morality’ (Cambridge, 1994).
4 See i Corinthians 2:4. Originally this seems to have referred to the view that Christianity was true because it was possible effectively to cure illnesses and drive out demons by invoking the name of Jesus. By the eighteenth century (in Germany) the doctrine had been transformed into the view that Christianity was true because firm belief in Jesus gave the believer power in the form of an optimistic attitude towards life that would make it possible to cope effectively with adversity.
5 ‘jingoistic xenophobia’
6 ‘true truth’
7 see Turgenev (1818–83) Fathers and Sons (1862); Dostoyevsky, The Possessed.
8 ‘unreasonable’
9 Spinoza, Ethica, Book IV, props. 18–25 (esp. Scholium to prop. 18)
10 ‘religious people’
11 ‘discipline of the will’
12 A Christian religious group founded in 1722 in the town of Herrnhut (Germany). Members of the group de-emphasized technical points of religious doctrine and theology in favour of individual emotional experience and fraternal forms of living.
13 ‘force of inertia’
14 German philosopher (1646–1716) who held that we had perceptions of which we were not aware; see his Monadology, §14.
15 The mid-fifth century BC, named after Pericles, the Athenian statesman who was in power during that period and who was thought by some to embody some of its salient virtues.
16 ‘little Greek actor’. ‘Graeculus’ (‘little Greek’) was used by Romans as a term of contempt; see Juvenal 3.78.
17 Common expression in German for something that cannot exist, like ‘square circle’.
18 See above, Book v, footnote 14, p. 212.
19 See above, Book I, footnote 6, p. 37.
20 ‘accident’ in the sense of ‘inessential property’
21 See Kant’s Preface to Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics (1783).
22 See Hegel’s Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences (1830 edn), § 368 (especially the Zusatz).
23 ‘causally’
24 See Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation vol. I, Book 4, and vol. II, chapters 46 and 49.
25 Nineteenth-century German philosopher who drew eclectically on both Hegel and Schopenhauer to develop a pessimistic ‘philosophy of the unconscious’
26 The 1870s were a period of such economic prosperity that they are sometimes referred to as the ‘Era of Foundations’ (of various business enterprises).
27 Deservedly forgotten nineteenth-century German philosopher
28 ‘psychological elegance’
29 In his Philosophic der Erlösung (2 vols., 1876–7): Phillip Batz – ‘Mainlander’ is a pseudonym – makes much of the virtues of virginity (and of suicide). He committed suicide when the second volume of this work appeared, at the age of thirty-five.
30 First line of a poem written in 1841 by Hoffmann von Fallersleben. At the time of its composition ‘Germany’ was no more than a geographical expression for a congeries of independent political entities. In this context the words were a call to put national unification – the creation of a ‘Germany’ – above all regional and local political loyalties. Once unification was attained (in 1871), the words could come to bear a more aggressive meaning in an international context (‘Let Germany be above all other nations’). In 1797 Haydn had composed a melody, deriving it from an existing Croatian folktune, which he used to set the words ‘Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser’ (‘God Save Kaiser Franz’). Until 1918 this was the anthem of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1922 Fallersleben’s poem was put together with Haydn’s melody and the result proclaimed the German National Anthem.
31 ‘from the point of view of the species’
32 ‘religious people’
33 North African rhetorician, theologian and bishop (AD 354–430)
34 See above, Book II, footnote 9, p. 78.
35 See above, Book I, footnote 16, p. 49. In this case see vol. I, p. 112.
36 Goethe, Faust I, line 1637; the line continues: ‘… that you are a human being among humans’.
37 ‘in arts and letters’
38 Wagner, Opera and Drama (1850–1), Introduction
39 French empiricist philosopher (1715–80)
40 Nietzsche expressed these views in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872).
41 Flemish Baroque painter (1577–1640)
42 Persian lyric poet of the fourteenth century; especially well-known in Germany because of Goethe’s great partiality for his poetry
43 ‘(my) own’
44 ‘(my) ownmost’
45 If Nietzsche is trying to draw a distinction here between ‘praxis’ and ‘practice’, rather than just rhetorically repeating himself, it is not clear what the distinction is.
46 In Odyssey Book X11 Odysseus tells how he outwitted the sirens, female singers who lure passing sailors to their death by singing irresistibly. He says he had himself bound to the mast of his ship so that he could hear the song, but could not do anything self-destructive, and that he had the ears of his crew stopped with wax so that they didn’t hear the song at all, and continued to row undisturbed. Nietzsche refers to this story again in Beyond Good and Evil § 230, where he speaks, very puzzlingly, of man standing ‘before the rest of nature, with intrepid Oedipus eyes and sealed Odysseus ears…’ Odysseus’ ears were not sealed – but equally, Oedipus’ eyes, at the end, could not see.
47 ‘intellectual love of god’; see Ethics, Book V, props. 32–37.
48 English social thinker (1820–1903) who combined evolutionary beliefs with a form of utilitarianism; he believed that human history would lead to an ideal state in which egoism and altruism were reconciled.
49 Musical sign indicating that a note or pause may be held for longer than its value would usually prescribe
50 See above, footnote to p. i.
51 European decorative style so called because it is intended to look Chinese. Because of the slight artistic value of much that was produced in this style it has the connotation of insignificant, insubstantial, vapid, frivolous.
52 Referring to Claude-Henri Saint-Simon (1760–1825), a French utopian socialist
53 Legendary Athenian misanthrope, who is the subject of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens
54 ‘sitting upon it day and night’
55 Grille means both ‘cricket’ and ‘bad mood’.
56 Wagner referred to his own music as ‘the music of the future’.
57 from Schiller’s Ode to Joy, used in the choral conclusion to the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony
58 Title of a ballad by Ludwig Uhland (1787–1862)