Works of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche from MobileReference
Homer and Classical Philology (1869) Translated by J. M. Kennedy
Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1872) Translated by Ian C. Johnston *
On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873)
We Philologists (1874) Translated By J. M. Kennedy*
Human All-Too-Human, A Book For Free Spirits (1878-79) Translated by Helen Zimmern, R. J. Hollingdale, and Marion Faber
Thus Spake Zarathustra (1885) Translated by Thomas Common
Beyond Good and Evil, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886) Translated by Helen Zimmern
The Antichrist: Curse on Christianity (1888) Translated by H. L. Mencken
The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms (1888) Translated By Anthony M. Ludovic
Untimely Meditations or; Thoughts out of Season Translated by Anthony M. Ludovici and Adrian Collins:
- David Strauss: The Confessor and the Writer (1873)
- Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (1876)
- On the Use and Abuse of History for Life (1874)
- Schopenhauer As Educator (1874)
Appendix:
Friedrich W. Nietzsche Biography
List of Works in Alphabetical Order
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Antichrist
Beyond Good and Evil
Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music
Case of Wagner, Nietzche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms
David Strauss: The Confessor and the Writer
Homer and Classical Philology
Human All-Too-Human
Mixed Opinions and Maxims
On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense
On the Use and Abuse of History for Life
Richard Wagner in Bayreuth
Schopenhauer As Educator
Thoughts out of Season
Thus Spake Zarathustra
Untimely Meditations
Wanderer and His Shadow
We Philologists
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The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music
by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Translated by Ian C. Johnston
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Friedrich W. Nietzsche Biography
1
We will have achieved much for the study of aesthetics when we come, not merely to a logical understanding, but also to the immediately certain apprehension of the fact that the further development of art is bound up with the duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, just as reproduction depends upon the duality of the sexes, their continuing strife and only periodically occurring reconciliation. We take these names from the Greeks who gave a clear voice to the profound secret teachings of their contemplative art, not in ideas, but in the powerfully clear forms of their divine world.
With those two gods of art, Apollo and Dionysus, we link our recognition that in the Greek world there exists a huge contrast, in origins and purposes, between visual (plastic) arts, the Apollonian, and the non-visual art of music, the Dionysian. Both very different drives go hand in hand, for the most part in open conflict with each other and simultaneously provoking each other all the time to new and more powerful offspring, in order to perpetuate for themselves the contest of opposites which the common word “Art” only seems to bridge, until they finally, through a marvelous metaphysical act, seem to pair up with each other and, as this pair, produce Attic tragedy, just as much a Dionysian as an Apollonian work of art.
In order to get closer to these two instinctual drives, let us think of them next as the separate artistic worlds of dreams and of intoxication, physiological phenomena between which we can observe an opposition corresponding to the one between the Apollonian and the Dionysian.
According to the ideas of Lucretius, the marvelous divine shapes first appeared to the mind of man in a dream. It was in a dream that the great artist saw the delightful anatomy of superhuman existence, and the Hellenic poet, questioned about the secrets of poetic creativity, would have recalled his dreams and given an explanation exactly similar to the one Hans Sachs provides in Die Meistersinger.
My friend, that is precisely the poet’s work- To figure out his dreams, mark them down. Believe me, the truest illusion of mankind Is revealed to him in dreams: All poetic art and poeticizing Is nothing but interpreting true dreams.
The beautiful appearance of the world of dreams, in whose creation each man is a complete artist, is the condition of all plastic art, indeed, as we shall see, an important half of poetry. We enjoy the form with an immediate understanding, all shapes speak to us, nothing is indifferent and unnecessary.
For all the very intense life of these dream realities, we nevertheless have the thoroughly disagreeable sense of their illusory quality. At least that is my experience. For their frequency, even normality, I can point to many witnesses and the utterances of poets. Even the philosophical man has the presentiment that this reality in which we live and have our being is an illusion, that under it lies hidden a second quite different reality. And Schopenhauer specifically designates as the trademark of philosophical talent the ability to recognize at certain times that human beings and all things are mere phantoms or dream pictures.
Now, just as the philosopher behaves in relation to the reality of existence, so the artistically excitable man behaves in relation to the reality of dreams. He looks at them precisely and with pleasure, for from these pictures he fashions his interpretation of life; from these events he rehearses his life. This is not merely a case of agreeable and friendly images which he experiences with a complete understanding. They also include what is serious, cloudy, sad, dark, sudden scruples, teasing accidents, nervous expectations, in short, the entire “divine comedy” of life, including the Inferno-all this moves past him, not just like a shadow play, for he lives and suffers in the midst of these scenes, yet not without that fleeting sensation of illusion. And perhaps several people remember, like me, amid the dangers and terrors of a dream, successfully cheering themselves up by shouting: “It is a dream! I want to dream it some more!” I have also heard accounts of some people who had the ability to set out the causal connection of one and the same dream over three or more consecutive nights. These facts are clear evidence showing that our innermost beings, the secret underground in all of us, experiences its dreams with deep enjoyment, as a delightful necessity.
The Greeks expressed this joyful necessity of the dream experience in their god Apollo, who, as god of all the plastic arts, is at the same time the god of prophecy. In accordance with the root meaning of his association with brightness, he is the god of light. He also rules over the beautiful appearance of the inner fantasy world. The higher truth, the perfection of this condition in contrast to the sketchy understanding of our daily reality, as well as the deep consciousness of a healing and helping nature in sleep and dreaming, is the symbolic analogy to the capacity to prophesy the truth, as well as to art in general, through which life is made possible and worth living. But also that delicate line which the dream image may not cross so as to work its effect pathologically (otherwise the illusion would deceive us as crude reality)-that line must not be absent from the image of Apollo, that boundary of moderation, that freedom from more ecstatic excitement, that fully calm wisdom of the god of images. His eye must be sun-like, in keeping with his origin. Even when he is angry and gazes with displeasure, the consecration of the beautiful illusion rests on him.
And so one may verify (in an eccentric way) what Schopenhauer says of the man trapped in the veil of Maja: “As on the stormy sea which extends without limit on all sides, howling mountainous waves rise up and sink and a sailor sits in a row boat, trusting the weak craft, so, in the midst of a world of torments, the solitary man sits peacefully, supported by and trusting in the principium individuationis [the principle of individuality]” (World as Will and Idea, Vol. I, p. 416). Yes, we could say of Apollo that the imperturbable trust in that principle and the calm sitting still of the man conscious of it attained its loftiest expression in him, and we may even designate Apollo himself as the marvelous divine image of the principium individuationis, from whose gestures and gaze all the joy and wisdom of illusion, together with its beauty, speak to us.
In the same place Schopenhauer also described for us the monstrous horror which seizes a man when he suddenly doubts his ways of comprehending illusion, when the sense of a foundation, in any one of its forms, appears to suffer a breakdown. If we add to this horror the ecstatic rapture, which rises up out of the same collapse of the principium individuationis from the innermost depths of human beings, yes, from the innermost depths of nature, then we have a glimpse into the essence of the Dionysian, which is presented to us most closely through the analogy to intoxication.
Either through the influence of narcotic drink, of which all primitive men and peoples speak, or through the powerful coming on of spring, which drives joyfully through all of nature, that Dionysian excitement arises. As its power increases, the subjective fades into complete forgetfulness of self. In the German Middle Ages under the same power of Dionysus constantly growing hordes waltzed from place to place, singing and dancing. In that St. John’s and St. Vitus’s dancing we recognize the Bacchic chorus of the Greeks once again, and its precursors in Asia Minor, right back to Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea [a riotous Babylonian festival].
There are men who, from a lack of experience or out of apathy, turn mockingly away from such phenomena as from a “sickness of the people,” with a sense of their own health and filled with pity. These poor people naturally do not have any sense of how deathly and ghost-like this very “Health” of theirs sounds, when the glowing life of the Dionysian throng roars past them. Under the magic of the Dionysian, not only does the bond between man and man lock itself in place once more, but also nature itself, now matter how alienated, hostile, or subjugated, rejoices again in her festival of reconciliation with her prodigal son, man. The earth freely offers up her gifts, and the beasts of prey from the rocks and the desert approach in peace. The wagon of Dionysus is covered with flowers and wreaths. Under his yolk stride panthers and tigers.
If someone were to transform Beethoven’s Ode to Joy into a painting and not restrain his imagination when millions of people sink dramatically into the dust, then we could come close to the Dionysian. Now is the slave a free man, now all the stiff, hostile barriers break apart, those things which necessity and arbitrary power or “saucy fashion” have established between men. Now, with the gospel of world harmony, every man feels himself not only united with his neighbour, reconciled and fused together, but also as if the veil of Maja has been ripped apart, with only scraps fluttering around before the mysterious original unity. Singing and dancing, man expresses himself as a member of a higher unity. He has forgotten how to walk and talk and is on the verge of flying up into the air as he dances. The enchantment speaks out in his gestures. Just as the animals speak and the earth gives milk and honey, so now something supernatural echoes out of him. He feels himself a god. He now moves in a lofty ecstasy, as he saw the gods move in his dream. The man is no longer an artist. He has become a work of art. The artistic power of all of nature, the rhapsodic satisfaction of the primordial unity, reveals itself here in the intoxicated performance. The finest clay, the most expensive marble-man-is here worked and chiseled, and the cry of the Eleusianian mysteries rings out to the chisel blows of the Dionysian world artist: “Do you fall down, you millions? World, do you have a sense of your creator?”
2
Up to this point, we have considered the Apollonian and its opposite, the Dionysian, as artistic forces which break forth out of nature itself, without the mediation of the human artist and in which the human artistic drive is for the time being satisfied directly – on the one hand as a world of dream images, whose perfection has no connection with an individual’s high level of intellect or artistic education, on the other hand, as the intoxicating reality, which once again does not respect the individual, but even seeks to abolish the individual and to restore him through a mystic feeling of collective unity. In comparison to these unmediated artistic states of nature, every artist is an “Imitator,” and, in fact, an artist either of Apollonian dream or Dionysian intoxication or, finally, as in Greek tragedy, for example, simultaneously an artist of intoxication and dreams. As the last, it is possible for us to imagine how he sinks down in the Dionysian drunkenness and mystical obliteration of the self, alone and apart from the rapturous throng, and how through the Apollonian effects of dream his own state now reveals itself to him, that is, his unity with the innermost basis of the world, in a metaphorical dream picture.
In accordance with these general assumptions and comparisons, let us now approach the Greeks, in order to recognize to what degree and to what heights the natural artistic drives had developed in them and how we are in a position to understand more deeply and assess the relationship of the Greek artist to his primordial images or, to use Aristotle’s expression, his “imitation of nature.”
In spite of all their literature on dreams and numerous dream anecdotes, we can speak of the dreams of the Greeks only hypothetically, although with fair certainty. Given the incredibly clear and accurate plastic capability of their eyes, along with their intelligent and open love of colour, one cannot go wrong in assuming that (to the shame all those born later) their dreams also had a logical causality of lines and circumferences, colours, and groupings, a sequence of scenes rather like their best bas reliefs, whose perfection would justify us, if such a comparison were possible, to describe the dreaming Greek man as a Homer and Homer as a dreaming Greek man, in a deeper sense than when modern man, with respect to his dreams, has the temerity to compare himself with Shakespeare
On the other hand, we do not need to speak merely hypothetically when we have to expose the immense gap which separates the Dionysian Greeks from the Dionysian barbarians. In all quarters of the old world (setting aside here the newer worlds), from Rome to Babylon, we can confirm the existence of Dionysian celebrations, of a type, at best, related to the Greeks in much the same way as the bearded satyr whose name and characteristics are taken from the goat is related to Dionysus himself. Almost everywhere, the central point of these celebrations consisted of an exuberant sexual promiscuity, whose waves flooded over all established family practices and traditional laws. The wildest bestiality of nature was here unleashed, creating an abominable mixture of lust and cruelty, which has always seemed to me the real witches’ potion.
From the feverish excitement of these festivals, knowledge of which reached the Greeks from all directions, by land and sea, they were apparently for a long time completely secure and protected through the figure of Apollo, drawn up in all his pride. Apollo could counter by holding up the head of Medusa in the face of the unequalled power of this crude and grotesque Dionysian force. Doric art has immortalized this majestic bearing of Apollo as he stands in opposition. This opposition became more dubious and even impossible as similar impulses gradually broke out from the deepest roots of Hellenic culture itself. Now the effect of the Delphic god, in a timely process of reconciliation, limited itself to taking the destructive weapon out of the hand of his powerful opponent.
This reconciliation is the most important moment in the history of Greek culture. Wherever we look the revolutionary effects of this experience manifest themselves. It was the reconciliation of two opponents, who from now on observed their differences with a sharp demarcation of the border line between them and with occasional gifts send to honour each other. Basically the gap was not bridged over. However, if we see how, under the pressure of this peace agreement, the Dionysian power revealed itself, then we now understand the meaning of the festivals of world redemption and days of transfiguration in the Dionysian orgies of the Greeks, in comparison with the Babylonian Sacaea, which turned human beings back into tigers and apes.
In these Greek festivals, for the first time nature achieves its artistic jubilee. In them, for the first time, the tearing apart of the principii individuationis [the individualizing principle] becomes an artistic phenomenon. Here that dreadful witches’ potion of lust and cruelty was without power. The strange mixture and ambiguity in the emotions of the Dionysian celebrant remind him, as healing potions remind him of deadly poison, of that sense that pain awakens joy, that the jubilation in his chest rips out cries of agony. From the most sublime joy echoes the cry of horror or the longingly plaintive lament over an irreparable loss. In those Greek festivals it was as if a sentimental feature of nature is breaking out, as if nature has to sigh over her dismemberment into separate individuals.
The language of song and poetry of such a doubly defined celebrant was for the Homeric Greek world something new and unheard of. Dionysian music especially awoke in that world fear and terror. If music was apparently already known as an Apollonian art, this music, strictly speaking, was a rhythmic pattern like the sound of waves, whose artistic power had developed for presenting Apollonian states of mind. The music of Apollo was Doric architecture expressed in sound, but only in intimate tones, characteristic of the cithara [a traditional stringed instrument}. The un-Apollonian character of Dionysian music keeps such an element of gentle caution at a distance, and with that turns music generally into emotionally disturbing tonal power, a unified stream of melody, and the totally incomparable world of harmony.
In the Dionysian dithyramb man is aroused to the highest intensity of all his symbolic capabilities. Something never felt before forces itself into expression-the destruction of the veil of Maja, the sense of oneness as the presiding genius of form, of nature itself. Now the essence of nature must express itself symbolically; a new world of symbols is necessary, the entire symbolism of the body, not just the symbolism of mouth, face, and words, but the full gestures of the dance-all the limbs moving to the rhythm. And then the other symbolic powers grow, those of music, rhythm, dynamics, and harmony-all with sudden spontaneity.
To grasp this total unleashing of all symbolic powers, man must already have attained that high level of freedom from the self which seeks to express itself symbolically in those forces. Because of this, the dithyrambic servant of Dionysus will understand only someone like himself. With what astonishment must the Apollonian Greek have gazed at him! With an amazement which was all the greater as he sensed with horror that all this may not be really foreign to him, that even his Apollonian consciousness was covering the Dionysian world in front of him, like a veil.
3
In order to grasp this point, we must dismantle that artistic structure of Apollonian culture, as it were, stone by stone, until we see the foundations on which it is built. Here we become aware for the first time of the marvelous Olympian divine forms, which stand on the pediments of this building and whose actions decorate its friezes all around in illuminating bas relief. If Apollo also stands among them, as a single god next to the others and without any claim to the pre-eminent position, we should not on that account let ourselves be deceived. The same instinct which made Apollo perceptible to the senses gave birth to the entire Olympian world in general. In this sense, we must value Apollo as the father of them all. What was the immense need out of which such an illuminating group of Olympic beings arose?
Anyone who steps up to these Olympians with another religion in his heart and seeks from them ethical loftiness, even sanctity or spiritual longing for the non-physical, for loving gazes filled with pity, must soon enough despondently turn his back on them in disappointment. For here there is no reminder of asceticism, spirituality, and duty. Here speaks to us only a full, indeed a triumphant, existence, in which everything present is worshipped, no matter whether it is good or evil. And thus the onlooker may well stand in real consternation in front of this fantastic excess of life, to ask himself with what magical drink in their bodies these high-spirited men could have enjoyed life so that wherever they look, Helen laughs back at them, that ideal image of their own existence, “hovering in sweet sensuousness.”.
However, we must summon back this onlooker who has already turned around to go away. “Don’t leave them. First listen to what Greek folk wisdom expresses about this very life which spreads out before you here with such inexplicable serenity. There is an old saying to the effect that King Midas for a long time hunted the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, in the forests, without catching him. When Silenus finally fell into the king’s hands, the king asked what was the best thing of all for men, the very finest. The daemon remained silent, motionless and inflexible, until, compelled by the king, he finally broke out into shrill laughter and said, ‘Suffering creature, born for a day, child of accident and toil, why are you forcing me to say what is the most unpleasant thing for you to hear? The very best thing for you is totally unreachable: not to have been born, not to exist, to be nothing. The second best thing for you, however, is this: to die soon.’”
What is the relationship between the Olympian world of the gods and this popular wisdom? It is like the relationship of the entrancing vision of the tortured martyr to his pain.
Now, as it were, the Olympic magic mountain reveals itself to us and shows us its roots. The Greek knew and felt the terror and horror of existence. In order to live at all, he must have placed in front of him the gleaming Olympians, born in his dreams. That immense distrust of the titanic forces of nature, that Moira [Fate] enthroned mercilessly above all knowledge, that vulture that devoured Prometheus, friend of man, that fatal lot drawn by wise Oedipus, that family curse on the House of Atreus, that Orestes compelled to kill his mother, in short, that entire philosophy of the woodland god, together with its mythical illustrations, from which the melancholy Etruscans died off, all that was overcome time after time by the Greeks (or at least hidden and removed from view) through the artistic middle world of the Olympians
In order to be able to live, the Greeks must have created these gods out of the deepest necessity. We can readily imagine the sequential development of these gods: through that instinctive Apollonian drive for beauty there developed by slow degrees out of the primordial titanic divine order of terror the Olympian divine order of joy, just as roses break forth out of thorny bushes. How else could a people so emotionally sensitive, so spontaneously desiring, so singularly capable of suffering have endured their existence, unless the same qualities manifested themselves in their gods, around whom flowed a higher glory. The same instinctual drive which summons art into life as the seductive replenishment for further living and the completion of existence also gave rise to the Olympian world, by which the Hellenic “Will” held before itself a transfiguring mirror.
In this way the gods justify the lives of men because they themselves live it-that is the only satisfactory theodicy! Existence under the bright sunshine of such gods is experienced as worth striving for in itself, and the essential pain of the Homeric men consists in the separation from that sunlight, above all in the fact that such separation is close at hand., so that we could say of them, with a reversal of the wisdom of Silenus, “the very worst thing for them was to die soon, the second worst was to die at all.” When the laments resound now, they tell of short-lived Achilles, of the changes in the race of men, transformed like leaves, of the destruction of the heroic age. It is not unworthy of the greatest heroes to long to live on, even as a day labourer. In the Apollonian stage, the “Will” so spontaneously demands to live on, the Homeric man fills himself with that feeling so much, that even his lament becomes a song of praise.
At this point we must point out that this harmony, this union of man with nature (something looked on enviously by more recent ages), for which Schiller coined the artistic slogan “naïve,” is in no way such a simple, inevitable, and, as it were, unavoidable condition (like a human paradise) which we necessarily run into at the door of every culture. Such a belief is possible only in an age which seeks to believe that Rousseau’s Emile is an artist and imagines it has found in Homer an artist like Emile raised in the bosom of nature. Wherever we encounter the “naïve” in art, we have to recognize the highest effect of Apollonian culture, something which always must come into existence to overthrow the kingdom of the Titans, to kill monsters, and through powerfully deluding images and joyful illusions to emerge victorious over the horrific depths of what we observe in the world and the most sensitive capacity for suffering. But how seldom does the naïve, that sense of being completely swallowed up in the beauty of appearance, succeed. For that reason, how inexpressibly noble is Homer, who, as a single person, was related to Apollonian popular culture as the single dream artist to his people’s capacity to dream and to nature in general.
Homeric “naïveté” is only to be understood as the complete victory of the Apollonian illusion. It is the sort of illusion which nature uses so frequently in order to attain her objectives. The true goal is concealed by a deluding image. We stretch our hands out toward this image, and nature reaches its goal through the deception. With the Greeks it was a case of the “Will” wishing to gaze upon itself through the transforming power of genius and the world of art. In order to celebrate itself, its creatures had to sense that they were worthy of being glorified-they must see themselves again in a higher sphere, without this complete world of contemplation affecting them as an imperative or as a reproach. This is the sphere of beauty, in which they saw their mirror images, the Olympians. With this mirror of beauty, the Hellenic “Will” fought against the talent for suffering and the wisdom of suffering which is bound up with artistic talent, and as a memorial of its victory Homer, the naïve artist, stands before us.
4
Using the analogy of a dream we can learn something about this naïve artist. If we recall how the dreamer, in the middle of his illusory dream world, calls out to himself, without destroying that world, “It is a dream. I want to continue dreaming,” and if we can infer, on the one hand, a deep inner delight at the contemplation of dreams, and, on the other, that he must have completely forgotten the pressing problems of his daily life, in order to be capable of dreaming at all with such an inner contemplative joy, then we may interpret all these phenomena, with the guidance of Apollo, the interpreter of dreams, in something like the manner which follows below.
To be sure, with respect to both halves of life, the waking and the dreaming states, the first one strikes us as disproportionately better, more important, more valuable, more worth living-the only way to live. Nevertheless I can assert (something of a paradox to all appearances) on the basis of the secret foundation of our essence, whose manifestation we are, precisely the opposite evaluation of dreams. For the more I become aware of those all-powerful natural artistic impulses and the fervent yearning for illusion contained in them, the desire to be redeemed through appearances, the more I feel myself forced to the metaphysical assumption that the true basis of being, the ever suffering and entirely contradictory primordial oneness, constantly uses the delightful vision, the joyful illusion, to redeem itself. We are compelled to experience this illusion, totally caught up in it and constituted by it, as the truly non-existent, that is, as a continuing development in time, space, and causality, in other words, as an empirical reality. But if we momentarily look away from our own “reality, " if we grasp our empirical existence and the world in general as an idea of the primordial oneness created in each moment, then we must consider our dreams as illusions of illusions, as well as an even higher fulfillment of the primordial hunger for illusion. For the same reasons, the innermost core of nature takes an indescribable joy in the naïve artist and naïve works of art, which is, in the same way, only “an illusion of an illusion.”
Rafael, himself one of those immortal “naïve” artists, in one of his allegorical paintings, has presented that issue of transforming an illusion into an illusion, the fundamental process of the naïve artist and Apollonian culture as well. In his Transfiguration the bottom half shows us, in the possessed boy, the despairing porters, and the helplessly frightened disciples, the mirror image of the eternal primordial pain, the sole basis of the world. The “illusion” here is the reflection of the eternal contradiction, the father of things. Now, out of this illusion there rises up, like an ambrosial fragrance, a new world of illusion, like a vision, invisible to those trapped in the first scene, something illuminating and hovering in the purest painless ecstasy, a shining vision to contemplate with eyes wide open.
Here we have before our very eyes in the highest symbolism of art that Apollonian world of beauty and its foundation, the frightening wisdom of Silenus, and we understand, through intuition, the reciprocal necessity for both of them. But Apollo confronts us once again as the divine manifestation of the principii individuationis [the individualizing principle], in which the eternally attained goal of the primordial oneness, its redemption through illusion, comes into being. He shows us, with his awe-inspiring gestures, how the entire world of torment is necessary, so that through it the individual is pushed to create the redemptive vision and then, absorbed in contemplation of that vision, sits quietly in his rowboat, tossing around in the middle of the ocean.
This deification of the principle of individualization, if it is thought of in general as commanding and proscriptive, understands only one law, that of the individual, that is, observing the limits of individualization, moderation in the Greek sense. Apollo, as the ethical divinity, demands moderation from his followers and self-knowledge, so that they can observe moderation. And so alongside the aesthetic necessity of beauty run the demands “Know thyself” and “Nothing in excess.” Arrogance and excess are considered the essentially hostile daemons of the non-Apollonian sphere, therefore characteristic of the pre-Apollonian period, the age of the Titans, and of the world beyond the Apollonian, that is, the barbarian world. Because of his Titanic love for mankind Prometheus had to be ripped apart by the vulture. For the sake of his excessive wisdom, which solved the riddle of the sphinx, Oedipus had to be overthrown in a bewildering whirlpool of evil. That is how the Delphic god interpreted the Greek past.
To the Apollonian Greeks the effect aroused by the Dionysian also seemed “Titanic” and “barbaric.” But they could not, with that response, conceal that they themselves were, nonetheless, internally related and similar to those deposed Titans and heroes. Indeed, they must have felt even more that their entire existence, with all its beauty and moderation, rested on some hidden underground of suffering and knowledge which was reawakened through that very Dionysian. And look! Apollo could not live without Dionysus! The “Titanic” and the “barbaric” were, in the end, every bit as necessary as the Apollonian.
And now let us imagine how in this world, constructed on illusion and moderation and restrained by art, the ecstatic sound of the Dionysian celebration rang out all around with a constantly tempting magic, how in such celebrations the entire excess of nature sang out loudly in joy, suffering, and knowledge, even in the most piercing scream. Let’s imagine what the psalm-chanting Apollonian artist, with his ghostly harp music could offer in comparison to this daemonic popular singing. The muses of the art of “illusion” withered away in the face of an art which spoke truth in its intoxicated state: the wisdom of Silenus cried out “Woe! Woe!” against the serene Olympian. Individualism, with all its limits and moderation, was destroyed in the self-forgetfulness of the Dionysian condition and forgot its Apollonian principles.
Excess revealed itself as the truth. The contradictory ecstasy born from of pain spoke of itself right out of the heart of nature. And so the Apollonian was canceled and destroyed, above all where the Dionysian penetrated. But it is just as certain that in those places where the first onslaught was halted, the high reputation and the majesty of the Delphic god manifested itself more firmly and threateningly than ever. For I can explain the Doric state and Doric art only as a constant Apollonian war camp. Only through an uninterrupted opposition to the Titanic-barbaric essence of the Dionysian could such a defiantly aloof art, protected on all sides with fortifications, such a harsh upbringing as a preparation for war, and such a cruel and ruthless basis for government endure.
Up to this point I have set out at some length what I observed at the opening of this essay: how the Dionysian and the Apollonian ruled the Hellenic world, in a constant sequence of births, one after the other, mutually intensifying each other, how, out of the “first” ages, with their battles of the Titans and their harsh popular philosophy, the Homeric world developed under the rule of the Apollonian drive for beauty, how this “naïve” magnificence is swallowed up once more by the breaking out of the Dionysian torrent, and how in opposition to this new power the Apollonian erected the rigid majesty of Doric art and the Doric world view.
If in this way the ancient history of the Greeks, in the struggle of these two hostile principles, falls into four major artistic periods, we are now impelled to ask more about the final stage of this development and striving, in case we should consider the last attained period, the one of Doric art, as the summit and intention of these artistic impulses. Here, the lofty and highly much praised artistic achievement of Attic tragedy and the dramatic dithyramb presents itself before our eyes, as the common goal of both artistic drives, whose secret marriage partnership, after a long antecedent struggle, celebrated itself with such a child, simultaneously Antigone and Cassandra.
5
We are now approaching the essential goal of our undertaking, which aims at a knowledge of the Dionysian-Apollonian genius and its works of art, or at least an intuitive understanding of its mysterious unity. Here now we raise the question of where that new seed first appears in the Hellenic world, the seed which later develops into tragedy and the dramatic dithyramb. On this question classical antiquity itself gives us illustrative evidence when it places Homer and Archilochus next to each other as the originators and torch-bearers of Greek poetry in paintings, cameos, and so on, in full confidence that only these two should be considered equally the original natures from whom a fire-storm flowed out over the entire later world of the Greeks.
Homer, the ancient self-absorbed dreamer, the archetype of the naïve Apollonian artist, now stares astonished at the passionate head of wild Archilochus, the fighting servant of the muses, battered by existence. In its interpretative efforts, our recent aesthetics has known only how to indicate that here the first “subjective” artist stands in contrast to the “objective” artist. This interpretation is of little use, since we recognize the subjective artist as a bad artist and demand in every art and every high artistic achievement, first and foremost, a victory over the subjective, redemption from the “I,” and the silence of every individual will and desire-indeed, we are incapable of accepting the slightest artistic creation as true, unless it has objectivity and a purely disinterested contemplation
Hence, our aesthetic must first solve the problem of how it is possible for the “lyricist” to be an artist. For he, according to the experience of all ages, always says “I” and sings out the entire chromatic sequence of the sounds of his passions and desires. This Archilochus immediately startles us, alongside Homer, through his cry of hate and scorn, through the drunken eruptions of his desire. By doing this, isn’t Archilochus (the first artist called subjective) essentially a non-artist? But then where does that veneration come from, which the Delphic oracle, the centre of “objective” art, showed to him, the poet, in very remarkable sayings.
Schiller has illuminated his own writing process with a psychological observation, inexplicable to him, which nevertheless does not appear questionable. He confesses that when he was in a state of preparation, before he actually started writing, he did not have something like a series of pictures, with a structured causality of ideas, in front of him, but rather a musical mood: “With me, feeling at first lacks a defined and clear object-that develops for the first time later on. A certain musical emotional state comes first, and from this, with me, the poetic idea then follows.”
Now, if we add the most important phenomenon of the entire ancient lyric, the union, universally acknowledged as natural, between the lyricist and the musician, even their common identity (in comparison with which our recent lyrics look like the image of a god without a head) then we can, on the basis of the aesthetic metaphysics we established earlier, account for the lyric poet in the following manner. He has, first of all, as a Dionysian artist, become entirely one with the primordial oneness of his painful contradictory nature and produces the reflection of this primordial oneness as music, if music can with justice be called a re-working of the world, its second coat. But now this music becomes perceptible to him once again, as in a metaphorical dream image, under the influence of Apollonian dreaming. That reflection, which lacks imagery and concepts, of the original pain in music, together with its redemption in illusion, gives rise now to a second reflection as the particular metaphor or illustration. The artist has already surrendered his subjectivity in the Dionysian process. The image which now reveals his unity with the heart of the world is a dream scene, which symbolizes that original contradiction and pain, together with the primordial joy in illusion. The “I” of the lyric poet thus echoes out of the abyss of being. What recent aestheticians mean by his “subjectivity” is mere fantasy.
When Archilochus, the first Greek lyric poet, announces his raging love and, at the same time, his contempt for the daughters of Lycambes, it is not his own passion which dances in front of us in an orgiastic frenzy. We see Dionysus and the maenads; we see the intoxicated reveler Archilochus sunk down in sleep-as Euripides describes in the Bacchae, asleep in a high Alpine meadow in the midday sun-and now Apollo steps up to him and touches him with his laurel. The Dionysian musical enchantment of the sleeper now, as it were, flashes around him fiery images, lyrical poems, which are called, in their highest form, tragedies and dramatic dithyrambs.
The plastic artist as well as his relation, the epic poet, is absorbed in the pure contemplation of images. The Dionysian musician lacks any image and is in himself only and entirely the original pain and original reverberation of that image. The lyrical genius feels a world of images and metaphors grow up out of the mysteriously unified state of renunciation of the self. These have a colour, causality, and speed entirely different from that world of the plastic artist and the writer of epic. While the last of these (the epic poet) lives in these pictures and only in them with joyful contentment and does not get tired of contemplating them with love, right down to the smallest details. Even the image of the angry Achilles is for him only a picture whose expressions of anger he enjoys with that dream joy in illusions, so that he, by this mirror of appearances, is protected against the development of that sense of unity and being fused together with the forms he has created. By contrast, the images of the lyric poet are nothing but himself and, as it were, only different objectifications of himself. He can say “I” because he is the moving central point of that world. Only this “I” is not the same as the “I” of the awake, empirically real man, but the single “I” of true and eternal being in general, the “I” resting on the foundation of things. Through its portrayal the lyrical genius sees right into the very basis of things.
Now let’s imagine how he looks upon himself among these likenesses, as a non-genius, that is, as his own “Subject,” the entire unruly crowd of subjective passions and striving of his will aiming at something particular, which seems real to him. If it now seems as if the lyrical genius and the non-genius bound up with him were one and the same and as if he first spoke that little word “I” about himself, then this illusion could no longer deceive us, not at least in the way it deceived those who have defined the lyricist as a subjective poet.
To tell the truth, Archilochus, the man of passionately burning love and hate, is only a vision of the genius who is no longer Archilochus any more but a world genius and who expresses his primordial pain symbolically in Archilochus as a metaphor for man. That subjectively willing and desiring man Archilochus can never ever be a poet. It is not at all essential that the lyric poet see directly in front of him the phenomenon of the man Archilochus as a reflection of eternal being. Tragedy shows how far the visionary world of the lyric poet can distance itself from that phenomenon clearly standing near at hand.
Schopenhauer, who did not hide from the difficulty which the lyric poet creates for the philosophical observer of art, believed that he had discovered a solution (something which I cannot go along with) when in his profound metaphysics of music he found a way setting the difficulty decisively to one side, as I believe I have done in his spirit and with due honour to him. He describes the essential nature of song as follows:.
The consciousness of the singer is filled with the subject of willing, that is, his own willing, often as an unleashed satisfied willing (joy), but also, and more often, as a restricted willing (sorrow). It is always a mobile condition of the heart: emotional and passionate. However, alongside this condition, the singer simultaneously, through a glimpse at the surrounding nature, becomes aware of himself as a subject of the pure, will-less knowledge, whose imperturbable, blessed tranquilly now enters to contrast the pressure of his always dull, always still limited willing. The sensation of this contrast, this game back and forth, is basically what expresses itself in the totality of the song and what, in general, creates the lyrical state. In this state, pure understanding, as it were, comes to us, to save us from willing and the pressures of willing. We follow along, but only moment by moment. The will, the memory of our personal goals, constantly interrupts this calm contemplation of ours, over and over again, but the next beautiful setting, in which pure will-less knowledge presents itself to us, always, once again, releases us from willing. Hence, in the song and the lyrical mood, willing (our personal interest in our own purposes) and pure contemplation in the setting which presents itself are miraculously mixed up together. We seek and imagine relationships between them both. The subjective mood, the emotional state of the will, communicates with the surroundings we contemplate, and the latter, in turn, gives its colour to our mood, in a reflex action. The true song is the expression of this entire emotional condition, mixed and divided in this way.” (World as Will and Idea, I, 295)
Who can fail to recognize in this description that here the lyric has been characterized as an incompletely realized art, a leap, as it were, which seldom attains its goal, indeed, as a semi-art, whose essence must consist of the fact that the will and pure contemplation, that is, the unaesthetic and the aesthetic conditions, must be miraculously mixed up together? In contrast to this, we maintain that the entire opposition, which even Schopenhauer uses as a measurement of value to classify art, that opposition of the subjective and the objective, has generally no place in aesthetics, since the subject, the willing individual demanding his own egotistical purposes, can only be thought of as an enemy of art not as its origin.
But insofar as the subject is an artist, he is already released from his individual willing and has become, so to speak, a medium through which a subject of true being celebrates its redemption. For we need to be clear on this point, above everything else (to our humiliation or ennoblement): the entire comedy of art does not present itself for us in order to make us better or to educate us-even less so that we should be the true creators of the art world. We should really look upon ourselves as beautiful pictures and artistic projections of the true creator, and in that significance as works of art we have our highest value, for only as an aesthetic phenomena are existence and the world eternally justified, while, of course, our own consciousness of this significance of ours is no different from the consciousness which soldiers painted on canvas have of the battle portrayed there.
Hence our entire knowledge of art is basically completely illusory, because, as knowing people, we are not one with or identical to that being who, as the single creator and spectator of that comedy of art, prepares for itself an eternal enjoyment. Only to the extent that the genius in the act of artistic creation is fused with that primordial artist of the world, does he know anything about the eternal nature of art, only in that state in which (as in the weird picture of fairy tales) he can miraculously turn his eyes and contemplate himself. Now he is simultaneously subject and object, all at once poet, actor, and spectator.
6
With respect to Archilochus, learned scholarship has revealed that he introduced the folk song into literature and that, because of this achievement, he earned his place next to Homer in the universal estimation of the Greeks. But what is the folk song in comparison to the completely Apollonian epic poem? What else but the perpetuum vestigum [the eternal mark] of a union between the Apollonian and the Dionysian? Its tremendous expansion, extending to all peoples and constantly increasing with new births, testifies to us how strong that artistic duality of nature is: which, to use an analogy, leaves its trace behind in the folk song just as the orgiastic movements of a people leave their traces in its music. Indeed, it must also be historically demonstrable how that period rich in folk songs at the same time was stirred in the strongest manner by Dionysian trends, something which we have to recognize as the foundation and precondition of folk songs.
But to begin with, we must view the folk song as the musical mirror of the world, as the primordial melody, which seeks for a parallel dream image of itself and expresses this in poetry. The melody is thus primary and universal, for which reason it can undergo many objectifications, in several texts. It is also far more important and more essential in the naïve evaluations of the people. Melody gives birth to poetry from itself, over and over again. The forms of the strophes in the folk song indicate that to us. I have always observed this phenomenon with astonishment, until I finally came up with this explanation. Whoever looks at a collection of folk songs, for example, Des Knaben Wunderhorn [The Boy’s Miraculous Horn] with this theory in mind will find countless examples of how the continually fecund melody emits fiery showers of images all around. These images, with their bright colours, sudden alteration, and their wild momentum, reveal a power completely foreign to the epic illusion and its calm forward progress. From the standpoint of epic this uneven and irregular word of images in the lyric is easy to condemn-something no doubt the solemn rhapsodists of the Apollonian celebrations did in the age of Terpander.
Thus, in the poetry of the folk song we see the language of poetry most strongly pressured to imitate music. Hence, with Archilochus a new world of poetry begins, something which conflicts very profoundly with the Homeric world. Here we have demonstrated the one possible relationship between poetry and music, word and tone: word, image, and idea look for metaphorical expression in music and experience the power of music. In this sense we can distinguish two main streams in the history of the language of the Greek people: language which imitates appearance and images and language which imitates the world of music.
Let’s think for a moment more deeply about the linguistic difference in colour, syntactic structure, and vocabulary between Homer and Pindar in order to grasp the significance of this contrast. It will become crystal clear to some that between Homer and Pindar the orgiastic flute melodies of Olympus must have rung out, music which even in the time of Aristotle, in the midst of an infinitely more sophisticated music, drove people into raptures of drunken enthusiasm and with their natural effects no doubt stimulated all the poetical forms of expression of contemporaries to imitate them.
I recall here a well-known phenomenon of our own times, something which strikes our aestheticians as objectionable. Again and again we experience how a Beethoven symphony makes it necessary for the individual listener to talk in images, even if it’s true that the collection of different worlds of imagery created by a musical piece really looks fantastically confused, even contradictory. The most proper style of our aestheticians is to exercise their lame wits on such a collection and to overlook the phenomenon which is really worth explaining. Even when the tone poet has spoken in images about his composition, for example, when he describes a symphony as a pastoral, one movement as “A Scene by the Brook,” and another as “A Frolicking Meeting of Peasants,” these expressions are in any event only metaphors, images born out of the music and not some objective condition imitated by the music. These notions cannot teach us anything at all about the Dionysian content of the music and have no exclusive value alongside other pictures.
Now, we have only to transfer this process of unloading music into pictures to a large, youthful, linguistically creative population in order to sense how the strophic folk song arose and how the entire linguistic capability was stimulated by a new principle, the imitation of music. If we can thus consider the lyrical poem as the mimetic efflorescence of music in pictures and ideas, then we can now ask the following question: “What does music look like in the mirror of imagery and ideas?” It appears as the will, taking that word in Schopenhauer’s sense, that is, as the opposite to the aesthetic, pure, contemplative, will-less state. Here we should differentiate as sharply as possible the idea of being from the idea of appearance. For it is impossible for music, given its nature, to be the will, because if that were the case we would have to ban music entirely from the realm of art. For the will consists of what is inherently unaesthetic. But music appears as the will.
In order to express that appearance in images, the lyric poet needs all the excitement of passion, from the whispers of affection right to the ravings of lunacy. Under the impulse to speak of music in Apollonian metaphors, he understands all nature and himself in nature only as eternal willing, desiring, yearning. However, insofar as he interprets music in images, he is resting in the still tranquility of the sea of Apollonian observation, no matter how much everything which he contemplates through that medium of music is moving around him, pushing and driving. Indeed, if he looks at himself through that same medium, his own image reveals itself to him in a condition of emotional dissatisfaction. His own willing, yearning, groaning, and cheering are for him a metaphor which he interprets the music for himself. This is the phenomenon of the lyric poet: as an Apollonian genius he interprets the music through the image of the will, while he himself, fully released from the greed of his will, is a pure, untroubled eye of the sun.
This entire discussion firmly maintains that the lyric is just as dependent on the spirit of music as is music itself. In its complete freedom, music does not use image and idea, but only tolerates them as something additional to itself. The poetry of the lyricist can express nothing which was not already latent in the immense universality and validity of the music, which forces him to speak in images. The world symbolism of music for this very reason cannot in any way be overcome by or reduced to language, because music addresses itself symbolically to the primordial contradiction and pain in the heart of the original oneness, and thus presents in symbolic form a sphere which is above all appearances and prior to them. In comparison with music, each appearance is far more a mere metaphor. Hence, language, the organ and symbol of appearances, never ever converts the deepest core of music to something external, but always remains, as long as it involves itself with the imitation of music, only in superficial contact with the music. The full eloquence of lyric poetry cannot bring us one step closer to the deepest meaning of music.
7
We must now seek assistance from all the artistic principles laid out above in order to find our way correctly through the labyrinth – a descriptive term we have to use to designate the origin of Greek tragedy. I don’t think I’m saying anything illogical when I claim that the problem of this origin has not once been seriously formulated up to now, let alone solved, no matter how frequently the scattered scraps of ancient tradition have been put together in combinations with one another and then again ripped apart.
This tradition tells us very emphatically that tragedy developed out of the tragic chorus and originally consisted only of a chorus and nothing else. This fact requires us to look into the heart of this tragic chorus as the essential original drama, without allowing ourselves to be satisfied in any way with the common styles of talking about art – that the chorus is the ideal spectator or had the job of standing in for the people over against the royal area of the scene.
That last mentioned point, a conceptual explanation which sounds so lofty for many politicians (as though the invariable moral law was presented by the democratic Athenians in the people’s chorus, which was always proved right in matters dealing with their kings’ passionate acts of violence and excess) may have been suggested by a word from Aristotle. But such an idea has no influence on the original formation of tragedy, since all the opposition between people and ruler and every political-social issue in general is excluded from those purely religious origins. Looking with hindsight back on the classical form of the chorus known to us in Aeschylus and Sophocles we might well consider it blasphemous to talk of a premonition of the “constitutional popular representation” here. Others, however, have not been deterred from this blasphemous assertion. The ancient political organizations had no practical knowledge of a constitutional popular representation and they never once “had a hopeful premonition” of such things in their tragedies.
Much more famous than this political explanation of the chorus is A. W. Schlegel’s idea. He recommended that we consider the chorus to some extent as a sample embodiment of the crowd of onlookers, as the “ideal spectator.” This view, combined with that historical tradition that originally the tragedy consisted entirely of the chorus, reveals itself for what it is, a crude and unscholarly, although dazzling, claim. But the glitter survives only in the compact form of the expression, from the real German prejudice for everything which is called “ideal,” and from our momentary astonishment.
For we are astonished, as soon as we compare the theatre public we know well with that chorus and ask ourselves whether it would be at all possible on the basis of this public to derive some idealization analogous to the tragic chorus. We silently deny this and then are surprised by the audacity of Schlegel’s claim as well as by the totally different nature of the Greek general public. For we had always thought that the proper spectator, whoever he might be, must always remain conscious that he has a work of art in front of him, not an empirical reality. By contrast, the tragic chorus of the Greeks is required to recognize the shapes on the stage as living, existing people. The chorus of Oceanids really believes that they see the Titan Prometheus in front of them and consider themselves every bit as real as the god of the scene.
And is that supposed to be the highest and purest type of spectator, a person who, like the Oceanids, considers Prometheus vitally alive and real? Would it be a mark of the ideal spectator to run up onto the stage and free the god from his torment? We had believed in an aesthetic public and considered the individual spectator sufficiently capable, the more he was in a position to take the work of art as art, that is, aesthetically. This saying of Schlegel’s indicates to us that the completely ideal spectator lets the scenic world work on him, not aesthetically at all, but vitally and empirically. “Oh, what about these Greeks!” we sigh, “they are knocking over our aesthetics!” But once we get used to that idea, we repeat Schlegel’s saying every time we talk about the chorus.
But that emphatic tradition speaks here against Schlegel. The chorus in itself, without the stage, that is, the primitive form of tragedy, and that chorus of ideal spectators are not compatible. What sort of artistic style would we have if from this the idea of the spectator we derived, as its essential form, the “spectator in himself” (the pure spectator). The spectator without a play is a contradictory idea. We suspect that the birth of tragedy cannot be explained either from the high estimation of the moral intelligence of the masses or from the idea of the spectator without a play. And we consider this problem too profound to be touched by such superficial styles of commentary.
Schiller has already provided an infinitely more valuable insight into the meaning of the chorus in the famous preface to the Bride from Messina-the chorus viewed as a living wall which tragedy draws about itself in order to separate itself cleanly from the real world and to protect its ideal space and its poetical freedom for itself. With this as his main weapon Schiller fought against the common idea of naturalism, against the common demand for illustionistic dramatic poetry. While in the theatre daytime might be only artistic and stage architecture only symbolic, and the nature of the metrical language might have an ideal quality, nevertheless, on the whole, a misconception still ruled: it was not enough, Schiller claimed, that people merely tolerated as poetic freedom what was the essence of all poetry. The introduction of the chorus, according to Schiller, was the decisive step with which war was declared openly and nobly against naturalism in art.
Such a way of looking at things is the one, it strikes me, for which our age (which considers itself so superior) uses the dismissive catch phrase “pseudo-idealism.” I suspect, by contrast, that with our present worship of naturalism and realism we are situated at the opposite pole from all idealism, namely, in the region of a wax works collection. In that, too, there is an art, as in certain romance novels of the present time. Only let no one pester us with the claim that with this we have overthrown the artistic “pseudo-idealism” of Schiller and Goethe.
Of course, it is an “ideal” stage on which, following Schiller’s correct insight, the Greek satyr chorus, the chorus of the primitive tragedy, customarily strolled, a stage lifted high above over the real strolling stage of mortal men. For this chorus the Greeks constructed a suspended hovering framework of an imaginary natural condition and on it placed imaginary natural beings. Tragedy grew up out of this foundation and, for that very reason, has, from its inception, been spared the embarrassing business of counterfeiting reality.
That is not to say that it is a world arbitrarily fantasized somewhere between heaven and earth. It is much rather a world possessing the same reality and credibility for the devout Greek as the world of Olympus, together with its inhabitants. The satyr as the Dionysian chorus member lives in a reality permitted by religion, sanctioned by myth and culture. The fact that tragedy begins with him, that out of him the Dionysian wisdom of tragedy speaks, is a phenomenon as foreign to us here as the development of tragedy out of the chorus generally.
Perhaps we can reach a starting point for this discussion when I offer the claim that the satyr himself, the imaginary natural being, is related to the cultural person in the same way that Dionysian music is related to civilization. On this last point Richard Wagner states that civilization is neutralized by music in the same way lamplight is by daylight. In just such a manner, I believe, the cultured Greek felt himself neutralized by the sight of the chorus of satyrs. This is the most direct effect of Dionysian tragedy: generally, the state and society, the gap between man and man give way to an invincible feeling of unity which leads back to the heart of nature.
The metaphysical consolation, which as I have already indicated, true tragedy leaves us, that at the bottom of everything, in spite of all the transformations in phenomena, life is indestructibly power and delightful, this consolation appears in lively clarity as the chorus of satyrs, the chorus of natural beings, who live, as it were, behind civilization, who cannot disappear, and who, in spite of all the changes in generations and a people’s history, always remain the same. With this chorus, the profound Greek, capable of the most delicate and the most severe suffering, consoled himself, the man who looked around with a daring gaze in the middle of the terrifying destructive instincts of so-called world history and equally into the cruelty of nature and who is in danger of longing for the denial of the will of Buddhism. Art saves him, and through art life saves him.
The ecstasy of the Dionysian state, with its destruction of the customary manacles and boundaries of existence, contains, of course, for as long as it lasts a lethargic element, in which everything personally experienced in the past is immersed. Through this gulf of oblivion, the world of everyday reality and the Dionysian reality separate from each other. As soon as that daily reality comes back again into consciousness, one feels it as something disgusting. The fruit of this condition is an ascetic condition, in which one denies the power of the will.
In this sense the Dionysian man has similarities to Hamlet. Both have had a real glimpse into the essence of things. They have understood, and it now disgusts them to act, for their actions can change nothing in the eternal nature of things. They perceive as ridiculous or humiliating the fact that it is expected of them that they should set right a world turned upside down. The knowledge kills action, for action requires a state of being in which we are covered with the veil of illusion. That is what Hamlet has to teach us, not that really venal wisdom about John-a-Dreams, who cannot move himself to act because of too much reflection, too many possibilities, so to speak. It’s not a case of reflection. No! The true knowledge, the glimpse into the cruel truth overcomes the driving motive to act, both in Hamlet as well as in the Dionysian man.
Now no consolation has any effect. His longing goes out over the world, even beyond the gods themselves, toward death. Existence is denied, together with its blazing reflection in the gods or an immortal afterlife. In the consciousness of once having glimpsed the truth, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of being; now he understands the symbolism in the fate of Ophelia; now he recognizes the wisdom of the forest god Silenus. It disgusts him.
Here the will in in the highest danger. Thus, to be saved, it comes close to the healing magician, art. Art alone can turn those thoughts of disgust at the horror or absurdity of existence into imaginary constructs, which permit living to continue. These constructs are the Sublime as the artistic mastering of the horrible and the Comic as the artistic release from disgust at the absurd. The chorus of satyrs in the dithyramb is the saving fact of Greek art. The emotional fits I have just described play themselves out by means of the world of these Dionysian attendants.
8
The satyr and the idyllic shepherd of our more recent times are both the epitome of a longing directed toward the primordial and natural, but with what a strong fearless grip the Greek held onto his men from the woods, and how timidly and weakly modern man toys with the flattering image of a delicate and gentle flute-playing shepherd! The Greek who had not been worked on as yet by any knowledge which kept culture imprisoned saw nature in his satyr, and so he did not yet mistake satyrs for apes. Quite the contrary: the satyr was the primordial image of man, the expression of his highest and strongest emotions, as an inspired reveler, enraptured by the approach of the god, as a sympathetic companion, in whom the suffering of the god was repeated, as a messenger bringing wisdom from the deepest heart of nature, as a perceptible image of the sexual omnipotence of nature, which the Greek was accustomed to observing with reverent astonishment.
The satyr was something sublime and divine-that’s how he must have seemed especially to the painfully broken gaze of the Dionysian man, who would have been insulted by our well groomed fictitious shepherd. His eye lingered with sublime satisfaction on the exposed, vigorous, and magnificent script of nature. Here the illusion of culture was wiped away by the primordial image of man. Here the real man revealed himself, the bearded satyr who cried out with joy to his god. In comparison with him the man of culture was reduced to a misleading caricature. Schiller was also right to see in these matters the start of tragic art: the chorus is a living wall against the pounding reality, because it-the satyr chorus-presents existence more genuinely, truly, and completely than does the civilized person, who generally considers himself the only reality.
The sphere of poetry does not lie beyond this world as the fantastic impossibility of a poet’s brain. It wants to be exactly the opposite, the unadorned expression of the truth, and it must therefore cast off the false costume of that truth thought up by the man of culture. The contrast of this real truth of nature and the cultural lie which behaves as if it is the only reality is similar to the contrast between the eternal core of things, the thing-in-itself, and the total world of appearances. And just as tragedy, with its metaphysical consolation, draws attention to the eternal life of that existential core in the continuing destruction of appearances, so the symbolism of the satyr chorus already expresses metaphorically that primordial relationship between the thing-in-itself and appearances. That idyllic shepherd of modern man is only a counterfeit, the totality of cultural illusions which he counts as nature. The Dionysian Greek wants truth and nature in their highest power: he seems himself transformed into a satyr.
The enraptured horde of those who served Dionysus rejoiced under the influence of such moods and insights, whose power transformed them before their very eyes, so that they imagined themselves as restored natural geniuses, as satyrs. The later constitution of the tragic chorus is the artistic imitation of that natural phenomenon, in which now a division was surely necessary between the Dionysian spectators and those under the Dionysian enchantment. But we must always remind ourselves that the public in Attic tragedy re-discovered itself in chorus of the orchestra and that basically there was no opposition between the public and the chorus. For everything is only a huge sublime chorus of dancing and singing satyrs or of those people who permit themselves to be represented by these satyrs.
We must now appropriate that saying of Schlegel’s in a deeper sense. The chorus is the “ideal spectator,” insofar as it is the only onlooker, the person who sees the visionary world of the scene. A public of spectators, as we know it, was unknown to the Greeks. In their theatre, given the way the spectators’ space was built up in terraces, raised up in concentric rings, it was possible for everyone quite literally to look out over the collective cultural world around him and with a complete perspective to imagine himself a member of the chorus. Given this insight, we can call the chorus, in its primitive stages of the prototypical tragedy, the self-reflection of Dionysian men, a phenomenon which we can make out most clearly in the experience of the actor, who, if he is really gifted, sees perceptibly before his eyes the image of the role he has to play, hovering there for him to grasp.
The satyr chorus is, first and foremost, a vision of the Dionysian mass, just as, in turn, the world of the acting area is a vision of this satyr chorus. The power of this vision is strong enough to dull and desensitize the impression of “reality,” the sight of the cultured people ranged in their rows of seats all around. The form of the Greek theatre is a reminder of a solitary mountain valley. The architecture of the scene appears as an illuminated picture of a cloud, which the Bacchae gaze upon, as they swarm down from the mountain heights, as the majestic setting in the middle of which the image of Dionysus is revealed.
This primitive artistic illusion, which we are putting into words here to explain the tragic chorus, is, from the perspective of our scholarly views about the basic artistic process, almost offensive, although nothing can be more obvious than that the poet is only a poet because of the fact that he sees himself surrounded by shapes which live and act in front of him and into whose innermost being he gazes. Through some peculiar weakness in our modern talent, we are inclined to imagine that primitive aesthetic phenomenon in too complicated and abstract a manner.
For the true poet, metaphor is not a rhetorical trope, but a representative image which really hovers in front of him in the place of an idea. The character is for him not a totality put together from individual traits collected bit by bit, but a living person, insistently there before his eyes, which differs from the similar vision of the painter only through its continued further living and acting. Why does Homer give us descriptions so much more vivid than all the poets? Because he sees so much more around him. We speak about poetry so abstractly because we all tend to be poor poets. The aesthetic phenomenon is fundamentally simple: if someone just possesses the capacity to see a living game going on and to live all the time surrounded by hordes of ghosts, then that man is a poet. If someone just feels the urge to change himself and to speak out from other bodies and souls, then that person is a dramatist.
Dionysian excitement is capable of communicating this artistic talent to an entire multitude, so that they see themselves surrounded by such a horde of ghosts with which they know they are innerly one. This dynamic of the tragic chorus is the original dramatic phenomenon: to see oneself transformed before one’s eyes and now to act as if one really had entered another body, another character. This process stands right at the beginning of the development of drama. Here is something different from the rhapsodist, who never fuses with his images, but, like the painter, sees them with an observing eye outside himself. In this drama there is already a surrender of individuality by entering into a strange nature. And this phenomenon breaks out like an epidemic; an entire horde feels itself enchanted in this way.
For this reason the dithyramb is essentially different from every other choral song. The virgins who move solemnly to Apollo’s temple with laurel branches in their hands singing a processional song as they go, remain who they are and retain their names as citizens. The dithyrambic chorus is a chorus of transformed people, for whom their civic past, their social position, is completely forgotten. They have become their god’s timeless servants, living beyond all regions of society. All other choral lyrics of the Greeks are only an immense intensification of the Apollonian solo singer; whereas in the dithyramb a congregation of unconscious actors stands before us, who look upon each other as transformed. Enchantment is the precondition for all dramatic art. In this enchantment the Dionysian reveler sees himself as a satyr, and then, in turn, as a satyr he looks at his god. That is, in his transformed state he sees a new vision outside himself as an Apollonian fulfillment of his condition. With this new vision drama is complete.
With this knowledge in mind, we must understand Greek tragedy as the Dionysian chorus which over and over again constantly discharges itself in an Apollonian world of images. Those choral passages interspersed through tragedy are thus, as it were, the maternal bosom of the entire dialogue so-called, that is, of the totality of the stage word, the drama itself. This primordial basis of tragedy sends its vision pulsing out in several discharges following one after the other, a vision which is entirely a dream image and therefore epic in nature, but, on the other hand, as an objectification of a Dionysian state, it presents not the Apollonian consolation in illusion, but its opposite, the smashing of individuality and becoming one with primordial being. With this, drama is the Apollonian projection of Dionysian knowledge and effects, and thus is separated by an immense gulf from epic.
This conception of ours provides a full explanation for the chorus of Greek tragedy, the symbol for the total frenzied Dionysian multitude. While, given what we are used to with the role of the chorus on the modern stage, especially the chorus in opera, we are totally unable to grasp how this tragic chorus could be older, more original, even more important than the real “action” (as tradition tell us so clearly), while we cannot then figure out why, given that traditionally high importance and original preeminence, that chorus would be put together only out of lowly serving creatures, at first only out of goat-like satyrs, and while for us the orchestra in front of the acting area remains a constant enigma, we have now come to the insight that the acting area together with the action is basically and originally thought of only as a vision, that the single “reality” is the chorus itself, which creates the vision out of itself and speaks of that with the entire symbolism of dance, tone, and word.
This chorus in its vision gazes at its lord and master Dionysus and is thus always the chorus of servants. The chorus sees how Dionysus, the god, suffers and glorifies himself, and thus it does not itself act. But in this role, as complete servants in relation to the god, the chorus is nevertheless the highest (that is, the Dionysian) expression of nature and, like nature, thus in its frenzy speaks the language of oracular wisdom, as the sympathetic as well as wise person reporting the truth from the heart of the world. So arises that fantastic and apparently offensive figure of the wise and frenzied satyr, who is, at the same time, “the naïve man” in contrast to the god: an image of nature and its strongest drives, a symbol of that and at the same time the announcer of its wisdom and art: musician, poet, dancer, visionary-in a single person.
According to this insight and to the tradition, Dionysus, the essential stage hero and centre of the vision, was not really present in the very oldest periods of tragedy, but was only imagined as present. That is, originally tragedy was only “chorus” and not “drama.” Later the attempt was made to show the god as real and then to present in a way visible to every eye the form of the vision together with the transfiguring setting. At that point “drama” in the strict sense begins. Now the dithyrambic chorus takes on the task of stimulating the mood of the listeners right up to the Dionysian level, so that when the tragic hero appeared on the stage, they did not see something like an awkward masked person but a visionary shape born, as it were, out of their own enchantment.
If we imagine Admetus thinking deeply about his recently departed wife Alcestis and pining away in his spiritual contemplation of her, and how suddenly is led up to him an image of a woman of similar form and similar gait, but in disguise, if we imagine his sudden trembling anticipation, his emotional comparisons, his instinctive conviction-then we have an analogy to the sensation with which the aroused Dionysian spectator sees the god stride onto the stage, with whose suffering he has already become one. Spontaneously he transfers the whole picture of the god, which like magic trembles in his soul, onto that masked form and dissolves the reality of that figure as if in a ghostly unreality. This is the Apollonian dream state, in which the world of day veils itself and a new world, clearer, more comprehensible, more moving than the first, and yet shadow-like generates itself anew in a continuing series of changes before our eyes.
With this in mind, we can recognize in tragedy a drastic contrast of styles: speech, colour, movement, dynamics of speech appear in the Dionysian lyric of the chorus and also in the Apollonian dream world of the scene as expressive spheres completely separate from each other. The Apollonian illusions, in which Dionysus objectifies himself, are no longer “an eternal sea, a changing weaving motion, a glowing sense of living” (as is the case with the music of the chorus), no longer those powers which are only felt and cannot be turned into poetic images, in which the frenzied servant of Dionysus feels the approach of the god. Now, from the acting area the clarity and solemnity of the epic form speaks to him; now Dionysus no longer speaks through forces but as an epic hero, almost with the language of Homer.
9
Everything which comes to the surface in the Apollonian part of Greek tragedy, in the dialogue, looks simple, translucent, and beautiful. In this sense the dialogue is an image of the Greeks, whose nature reveals itself in dancing, because in dancing the greatest power is only latent, betraying its presence in the lithe and rich movement. The language of the Sophoclean heroes surprises us by its Apollonian clarity and brightness, so that we immediately imagine that we are glimpsing the innermost basis of their being, with some astonishment that the path to this foundation is so short.
However, once we look away from the character of the hero as it surfaces and becomes perceptible (a character which is basically nothing more than a light picture cast onto a dark wall, that is, an illusion through and through) we penetrate further into the myth which projects itself in this bright reflection. At that point we suddenly experience a phenomenon which is the reverse of a well known optical one. When we make a determined attempt to look directly at the sun and turn away blinded, we have dark coloured specks in front of our eyes, like a remedy. Those illuminated illusory pictures of the Sophoclean heroes are the reverse of that: briefly put, the Apollonian of the mask, necessary creations of a glimpse into the inner terror of nature, are like bright spots to heal us from the horrifying night of the disabled gaze. Only in this sense can we think of correctly grasping the serious and significant idea of “Greek serenity”; whereas nowadays we run into the false idea of this as a condition of safe contentment with all of life’s paths and bridges
The most painful figure of the Greek stage, the unlucky Oedipus, is understood by Sophocles as the noble man who is destined for error and misery in spite of his wisdom, but who at the end through his immense suffering exerts a beneficial effect around him which is effective on those different from him. The noble man does not sin-that’s what the profound poet wishes to tell us: through Oedipus’ actions every law, every natural principle of order, indeed, the entire moral world may collapse, but because of these actions a higher circle of consequences is created, which will found a new world on the ruins of the old world which has been overthrown. Insofar as the poet is also a religious thinker, that is what he says to us. As a poet, he shows us first a wonderfully complicated legal knot, which the judge, link by link, undoes, in the process destroying himself. The real joy for the Greek in this dialectical solution is so great that a sense of powerful serenity invests the entire work, which breaks the sting of the dreadful pre-conditions which started the process.
In Oedipus in Colonus we run into this same serenity, but elevated by an immeasurable transformation. Unlike the old man afflicted with excessive suffering, a man who merely suffers as the victim of everything which happens to him, now we have the unearthly serenity which descends from the sphere of the gods and indicates to us that the hero in his purely passive conduct achieves his highest action, which reaches out far over his own life (whereas his conscious striving in his earlier life led him to pure passivity). Thus for the mortal eye the inextricably tangled legal knot of the Oedipus story is slowly untangled, and the most profound human joy suffuses us with this divine dialectical companion piece.
If we have here correctly explained the poet, one can still ask whether the content of the myth has been exhausted in that explanation. And here we see that the entire conception of the poet is nothing other than that illuminated image which nature as healer holds up before us after a glimpse into the abyss. Oedipus the murderer of his father, the husband of his mother, Oedipus the solver of the riddle of the sphinx! What does the secret trinity of these fatal events tell us? There is a very ancient folk belief, especially in Persia, that a wise magus could be born only out of incest. With hindsight on Oedipus as the solver of riddles and emancipator of his mother, what we have to interpret right away is the fact that right there where, through prophecy and magical powers, the spell of present and future is broken, that rigid law of individuation and the essential magic of nature in general, then an immense natural horror (for example, incest) must have come first as the original cause. For how could we compel nature to yield up its secrets, if not for the fact that we fight back against her and win, that is, if not for the fact that we commit unnatural actions?
I see this idea stamped out in that dreadful trinity of Oedipus’s three fates: the same man who solved the riddle of nature (the ambiguous sphinx) must also break the most sacred natural laws when he murders his father and marries his mother. Indeed, the myth seems to want to whisper to us that wisdom-especially Dionysian wisdom-is something horrific and hostile to nature, that a man who through his knowledge pushes nature into the destructive abyss, has to experience in himself the disintegration of nature. “The lance of knowledge turns itself against the wise man. Wisdom is a crime against nature.” The myth calls out such frightening statements to us. But, like a ray of sunlight, the Greek poet touches the sublime and fearful Memnon’s Column of Myth, so that the myth suddenly begins to play out Sophoclean melodies.
Now I’m going to compare the glory of passivity with the glory of activity which illuminates Aeschylus’s Prometheus. What Aeschylus the thinker had to say to us here, but what Aeschylus as a poet could only hint at through a metaphorical picture-that’s what young Goethe knew how to reveal in the bold words of his Prometheus:
“Here I sit-I make men in my own image, a race like me, to suffer, to weep, to enjoy life and rejoice, and then to pay no attention, like me.”
Man, rising up into something Titanic, is victorious over his own culture and compels the gods to unite with him, because in his self-controlled wisdom he holds their existence and the limits to their authority in his hand. The most marvelous thing in that poem of Prometheus, which is, according to its basic concepts, is a hymn celebrating impiety, is, however, the deep Aeschylean impulse for justice. The immeasurable suffering of the brave “individual”, on the one hand, and, on the other, the peril faced by the gods, even a presentiment of the twilight of the gods, the compelling power for a metaphysical oneness, for a reconciliation of both these worlds of suffering-all this is a powerful reminder of the central point and major claim of the Aeschylean world view, which sees fate (Moira) enthroned over gods and men as eternal justice.
With respect to the astonishing daring with which Aeschylus places the Olympian world on his scales of justice, we must remind ourselves that the deep-thinking Greek had an unshakably firm basis for metaphysical thinking in his mystery cults, and that he could unload all his skeptical moods onto the Olympians. The Greek artist, in particular, in looking back on these divinities, felt a dark sense of reciprocal dependency. And this sense is symbolized especially in Aeschylus’s Prometheus. The Titanic artist (Prometheus) found in himself the defiant belief that he could make men and, at the very least, destroy Olympian gods-all this through his higher wisdom, which he, of course, was compelled to atone for in eternal suffering. The magnificent capability of the great genius, for whom eternal suffering itself is too cheap a price, the harsh pride of the artist-that is the content and soul of Aeschylean poetry; whereas, Sophocles in his Oedipus makes his case by sounding out the victory song of the holy man.
But also this meaning which Aeschylus gave the myth does not fill the astonishing depth of its terror. The artist’s joy in being, the serenity of artistic creativity in spite of that impiety, is only a light picture of cloud and sky, which mirrors itself in a dark ocean of sorrow. The Prometheus saga is a primordial possession of the Aryan population collectively and documentary evidence of their talent for the profoundly tragic. In fact, it could be the case that for the Aryan being this myth has the same defining meaning as the myth of the Fall has for the Semitic peoples, and that both myths are, to some degree, related, as brother and sister.
The pre-condition of this Prometheus myth is the extraordinary value which a naïve humanity associates with fire as the true divine protector of that rising culture. But the fact that man freely controls fire and does not receive it merely as a gift from heaven, as a stirring lightning flash or warming rays of the sun, appeared to these contemplative primitive men as an outrage, a crime against divine nature. And so right there the first philosophical problem posed an awkward insoluble contradiction between man and god and pushed it right up to the door of that culture, like a boulder. The best and loftiest thing which mankind can share is achieved through a crime, and people must now accept the further consequences, namely, the entire flood of suffering and troubles with which the offended divine presences afflict the nobly ambitious human race. Such things must happen-an austere notion which, through the value which it gives to a crime, stands in a curious contrast to the Semitic myth of the Fall, in which curiosity, lying falsehoods, temptation, lust, in short, a row of predominantly female emotions are look upon as the origin of evil.
What distinguishes the Aryan conception is the lofty view of an active transgression as the essentially Promethean virtue. With this, the ethical basis of pessimistic tragedy is established together with the justification of human evil, that is, human guilt as the penalty for that sin. The impiety in the essence of things-that’s what the thinking Aryan is not inclined to quibble away. The contradiction in the heart of the world reveals itself to him as the interpenetration of different worlds, for example, a divine and human world, each one of which is right in its separate way but which must suffer for its individuality as the two worlds come close together.
With this heroic push of the individual into the universal, with this attempt to stride out over the limits of individuation and to wish to be oneself a world being, man suffers in himself the contradiction hidden in things, that is, he violates the laws and he suffers. Just as among the Aryans crime is seen as male, and among the Semites sin is seen as female, so the original crime was committed by a man, the original sin by a woman. In this connection, the chorus of witches [in Goethe’s Faust] says:
We’re not so particular in what we say: Woman takes a thousand steps to get her way. But no matter how quickly she hurries on, With just one leap the man will get it done.
Anyone who understands this innermost core of the Prometheus saga, namely, the imperative requirement that the individual striving like a Titan has to fall into crime, must also sense at the same time the un-Apollonian quality of this pessimistic concept. For Apollo wants to make these separate individual worlds tranquil precisely because he establishes the border line between them and, with his demands for self-knowledge and moderation, always reminds us once again of the most sacred laws of the world. However, to prevent this Apollonian tendency from freezing form into Egyptian stiffness and frigidity and to prevent the movement of the entire ocean from dying away, through the attempts of the Apollonian tendency to prescribe to the individual waves their path and extent, from time to time the high flood of the Dionysian destroys those small circles in which the one-sided Apollonian will seeks to confine the Greek spirit. Now suddenly a tidal wave of the Dionysian takes the single small individual crests on its back, just as the brother of Prometheus, the Titan Atlas, shouldered the Earth. This Titanic impulse to become something like the Atlas of all individuals and to bear them on one’s wide back, higher and higher, further and further, is the common link between the Promethean and the Dionysian.
In this view, the Aeschylean Prometheus is a Dionysian mask; while, in that previously mentioned deep desire for justice Aeschylus betrays to those who understand his paternal descent from Apollo, the god of individuation and the limits of justice. And the double nature of the Aeschylean Prometheus, his simultaneously Dionysian and Apollonian nature, can be expressed in an understandable way with the following words: “Everything present is just and unjust and both aspects are equally justified.”
That is your world! That’s what one calls a world!
10
It is an incontestable tradition that Greek tragedy in its oldest form had as its subject only the suffering of Dionysus and that for a long time later the individually present stage heroes were only Dionysus. But with the same certainty we can assert that right up to the time of Euripides Dionysus never ceased being the tragic hero, that all the famous figures of the Greek theatre, like Prometheus, Oedipus, and so on, are only masks of that primordial hero Dionysus. The fact that behind all these masks stands a divinity, that is the fundamental reason for the frequently admired characteristic “ideality” of those well known figures.
Someone (I don’t know who) asserted that all individuals, as individuals, have to be taken as comic and thus untragic, that the Greeks in general could not tolerate individuals in their tragic theatre. In fact, they seem to have felt this way. That Platonic distinction between and evaluation of the “idea” in contrast to the “idol” in connection with likenesses lies deeply grounded in the nature of the Greeks. But for us to make use of Plato’s terminology, we would have to talk of the tragic figures of the Greek stage in something like the following terms: the one truly real Dionysus appears in a multiplicity of shapes, in the mask of a struggling hero and, as it were, bound up in the nets of the individual will. So now the god made manifest talks and acts in such a way that he looks like an erring, striving, suffering individual. The fact that he appears in general with this epic definition and clarity is the effect of Apollo, the interpreter of dreams, who indicates to the chorus its Dionysian state by this metaphorical appearance.
In reality, however, that hero is the suffering Dionysus of the mysteries, that god who experiences the suffering of the individual in himself, the god about whom the amazing myths tell how he, as a child, was dismembered by the Titans and now in this condition is venerated as Zagreus. Through this is revealed the idea that this dismemberment, the essentially Dionysian suffering, is like a transformation into air, water, earth, and fire, that we also have to look upon the condition of individuation as the source and basis for all suffering, as something in itself reprehensible. From the laughing of this Dionysus arose the Olympian gods, from his tears arose mankind. In that existence as dismembered god Dionysus has the dual nature of a cruelly savage daemon and a lenient, gentle master.
The initiates in the Eleusinian mysteries hoped for a rebirth of Dionysus, which we now can understand as the mysterious end of individuation. The initiate’s song of jubilation cried out to this approaching third Dionysus. And only with this hope was there a ray of joy on the face of the fragmented world, torn apart into individuals, just as myth reveals in the picture of the eternal sorrow of sunken Demeter, who rejoices again for the first time when someone says to her that she might be able once again to give birth to Dionysus. In these established concepts we already have assembled all the components of a profound and pessimistic world view, together with the mysterious teachings of tragedy: the basic acknowledgement of the unity of all existing things, the idea of individuation as the ultimate foundation of all evil, art as the joyful hope that the spell of individuation is there for us to break, as a premonition of a re-established unity.
It has been pointed out earlier that the Homeric epic is the poetry of Olympian culture, with which it sang its own song of victory over the terrors of the fight against the Titans. Now, under the overwhelming influence of tragic poetry, the Homeric myths were newly reborn and show in this metamorphosis that by now the Olympian culture is overcome by an even deeper world view. The defiant Titan Prometheus reported to his Olympian torturer that for the first time his rule was threatened by the highest danger, unless he quickly joined forces with him. In Aeschylus we acknowledge the union of the frightened Zeus, worried about the end of his power, with the Titan.
Thus the earlier age of the Titans is belatedly brought back from Tartarus into the light once more. The philosophy of wild and naked nature looks with the unconcealed countenance of truth at the myths of the Homeric world dancing past it. Before the flashing eyes of this goddess, those myths grow pale and tremble, until they press the mighty fist of the Dionysian artist into the service of the new divinity. The Dionysian truth takes over the entire realm of myth as the symbol of its knowledge and speaks of this knowledge, partly in the public culture of the tragedy and partly in the secret celebrations of the dramatic mystery celebrations, but always in the disguise of the old myths. What power was it which liberated Prometheus from his vultures and transformed myth to a vehicle of Dionysian wisdom? It was the Herculean power of music. Music, which attained its highest manifestation in tragedy, had the power to interpret myth with a new significance in the most profound manner, something we have already described before as the most powerful capacity of music.
For it is the lot of every myth gradually to creep into the crevice of an assumed historical reality and to become analyzed as a unique fact in answer to the historical demands of some later time or other. The Greek were already fully on their way to labeling cleverly and arbitrarily the completely mythical dreams of their youth as historical, pragmatic, and youthful history. For this is the way religions tend to die out, namely, when the mythical pre-conditions of a religion, under the strong, rational eyes of an orthodox dogmatism become classified as a closed totality of historical events and people begin anxiously to defend the credibility of their myths, but to resist the naturally continuing life and growth of those myths, and when the feeling for the myth dies out and in its place the claim to put religion on a historical footing steps onto the scene.
The newly born genius of Dionysian music now seized these dying myths, and in its hands myth blossomed again, with colours which it had never shown before, with a scent which stirred up a longing premonition of a metaphysical world. After this last flourishing, myth collapsed, its leaves grew pale, and soon the mocking Lucians of antiquity grabbed up the flowers, scattered around by all winds, colourless and withered. Through tragedy myth attains its most profound content, its most expressive form. It lifts itself up again, like a wounded hero, and with the excessive power and wise tranquilly of a dying man, its eyes burn with its last powerful light.
What did you want, you rascal Euripides, when you sought to force this dying man once more into your service? He died under your powerful hands. And now you had to use a counterfeit, masked myth, which was able only to dress itself up with the old splendour, like Hercules’s monkey. And as myth died with you, so died the genius of music as well. Even though you plundered with greedy hands all the gardens of music, you achieved only a counterfeit masked music. And because you abandoned Dionysus, you were then abandoned by Apollo. Even if you hunted out all the passions from their beds and charmed them into your circle, even though you sharpened and filed a really sophisticated dialectic for the speeches of your heroes, nevertheless your heroes have only counterfeit, masked passions and speak only a counterfeit, masked language.
11
Greek tragedy died in a manner different from all its ancient sister arts: it died by suicide, as a result of an insoluble (hence tragic) conflict; whereas, all the others passed away in advanced old age with the most beautiful and tranquil deaths. If it is an appropriately happy natural condition to depart from life with beautiful descendants and without any painful strains in one’s life, the end of those ancient artistic genres manifests to us such a fortunate natural state of things. They disappeared slowly, and their more beautiful children were already standing there before their dying gaze, impatiently lifting their heads in courageous gestures. By contrast, with the death of Greek tragedy there was created an immense emptiness, profoundly felt everywhere. Just as the Greek sailors at the time of Tiberius heard from some isolated island the shattering cry “The great god Pan is dead,” so now, like a painful lament, rang out throughout the Greek world, “Tragedy is dead! Poetry itself is lost with it! Away, away with you, you stunted, emaciated epigones! Off with you to hell, so you can for once eat your fill of the crumbs from your former masters!”
If now a new form of art blossomed which paid tribute to tragedy as its predecessor and mistress, it was looked upon with fright, because while it carried the characteristics of its mother, they were the same ones she had shown in her long death struggle. Tragedy’s death struggle was fought by Euripides, and this later art form is known as New Attic Comedy. In it the atrophied form of tragedy lived on, as a monument to tragedy’s extremely laborious and violent death.
Looking at things this way makes understandable the passionate fondness the poets of the newer comedies felt for Euripides. Thus, Philemon’s wish (to be hanged immediately so that he could seek out Euripides in the underworld, provided only he could be convinced that the dead man was still in possession of his wits) is no longer something strange. However, if we ask ourselves to indicate, briefly and without claiming to say anything in detail, what Euripides might have in common with Menander and Philemon and what was so excitingly exemplary and effective for them in Euripides, it is enough to say that the spectator in Euripides is brought up onto the stage. Anyone who recognizes the material out of which the Promethean tragedians before Euripides created their heroes and how remote from them was any intention of bringing the true mask of reality onto the stage will see clearly the totally deviant tendencies of Euripides.
As a result of Euripides, the man of ordinary life pushed his way out of the spectators’ space and up onto the acting area. The mirror in which earlier only great and bold features had been shown now displayed a painful fidelity which conscientiously reflected the unsuccessful features of nature. Odysseus, the typical Greek of the older art, now sank in the hands of the newer poets into the figure of Graeculus, who from now on stands right at the centre of dramatic interest as the good hearted, clever slave. What Euripides in Aristophanes’ Frogs gives himself credit for as a service, namely, that through his household medicines he freed tragic art of its pompous hustle and bustle, that point we can trace above all in his tragic heroes.
Essentially the spectator now saw and heard his double on the Euripidean stage and was happy that that character understood how to talk so well. But this was not the only delight. People themselves learned from Euripides how to speak. He praises himself on this very point in the contest with Aeschylus-how through him the people learned to observe in an artistic way, with the keenest sophistication, to judge, and to draw consequences. Because of this complete transformation in public language he also made the new comedy possible. For from that time on there was nothing mysterious about how ordinary life could appear on stage and what language it would use.
Middle-class mediocrity, on which Euripides built all his political hopes, now came into prominence. Up to that point, in tragedy the demi-god and in comedy the intoxicated satyr or semi-human had determined the nature of the language. And so the Aristophanic Euripides gave himself high praise for how he presented common, well-known, ordinary living and striving, which any person was capable of judging. If now the entire crowd philosophized, administered their lands and goods with tremendous astuteness, and carried on their own legal matters, well then, he claimed, that was to his credit and the achievement of the wisdom which he had drummed into the people.
The new comedy could now direct its attention to such a prepared and enlightened crowd, for whom Euripides became, to some extent, the choir master. Only this time the chorus of spectators had to have practice. As soon as the chorus was well trained to sing in the Euripidean musical key, a style of drama like a chess game arose, the new comedy, with its continuing triumph of sly shrewdness. But Euripides, the leader of the chorus, was incessantly praised. Indeed, people would have let themselves be killed in order to learn more from him, if they had not been aware that tragic poets were just as dead as tragedy itself.
With tragedy the Greeks had surrendered their faith in immortality, not merely the faith in an ideal past, but also the faith in an ideal future. The saying from the well-known written epitaph, “as an old man negligent and trivial” is applicable also to the old age of Hellenism. The instantaneous, the witty, the foolish, and the capricious-these are its loftiest divinities, the fifth state, that of the slave (or at least the feelings of a slave) now come to rule. And if it is possible to talk still of a “Greek serenity,” it is the serenity of the slave, who has no idea how to take responsibility for anything difficult, how to strive for anything great, or how to value anything in the past or future higher than the present.
It was this appearance of “Greek serenity” which so outraged the profound and fearful natures of the first four centuries of Christianity. To them this feminine flight from seriousness and terror, this cowardly self-satisfaction with comfortable consumption, seemed not only despicable but also the essentially anti-Christian frame of mind. And to the influence of this outrage we can ascribe the fact that the view of Greek antiquity as a time of rose-coloured serenity lasted for centuries with almost invincible tenacity, as if Greek antiquity had never produced a sixth century, with its birth of tragedy, its mystery cults, its Pythagoras and Heraclitus, indeed, as if the artistic works of the great age simply did not exist-although these works, each and every one of them, cannot be explained at all on the grounds of such a senile joy in existence and serenity, moods appropriate to a slave, or of things which testify to a completely different world view as the basis of their existence.
Finally, when it is asserted that Euripides brought the spectator onto the stage in order to make him really capable for the first time of judging drama, it may appear as if the older tragic art had not resolved its false relationship to the spectator, and people might be tempted to value the radical tendency of Euripides to attain an appropriate relationship between the art work and the public as a progressive step beyond Sophocles. However, the “public” is only a word and not at all a constant, firm thing of value. Why should an artist be duty-bound to accommodate himself to a power whose strength is only in numbers?
And if, with respect to his talent and intentions, he senses that he is superior to every one of these spectators, how could he feel more respect for the common expression of all these capacities inferior to his own than for the most highly talented individual spectator. To tell the truth, no Greek artist handled his public over a long lifetime with greater daring and self-satisfaction than Euripides. As the masses threw themselves at his feet, he nonetheless, with a sublime act of defiance, threw his own individual attitudes in their faces, those same attitudes with which he had conquered the masses. If this genius had had the slightest reverence for the pandemonium of the public, he would have broken apart under the cudgel blows of his failures long before the middle of his lifetime.
Taking this into account, we see that our expression-Euripides brought the spectator onto the stage, in order to make the spectator capable of making judgments-was only provisional and that we have to seek out a deeper understanding of his dramatic tendencies. By contrast, it is well known everywhere how Aeschylus and Sophocles during their lifetime and, indeed, well beyond that, stood in full possession of popular favour, and thus, given these predecessors of Euripides, there is no point in talking about a misunderstanding between the art work and the public. What drove the richly talented artist (Euripides), constantly under the urge to create, away from the path above which shone the sun of the greatest poetic names and the cloudless sky of popular approval? What curious consideration of the spectator led him to go against the spectator? How could he be contemptuous of his public out of a high respect for his public?
The solution to the riddle posed immediately above is this: Euripides felt himself as a poet higher than the masses, but not higher than two of his spectators. He brought the masses up onto the stage. Those two spectators he honoured as the only judges capable of rendering a verdict and as the masters of all his art. Following their instructions and reminders, he transposed the entire world of feelings, passions, and experiences, which up to that point had appeared in the rows of spectators as an invisible chorus in every celebratory presentation, into the souls of his stage heroes. Following the demands of these two judges, he sought out for his heroes new characters, a new language, and a new tone. In the vote of these two spectators alone he heard judgment pronounced on his creation, just as much as he heard encouragement promising victory, when he saw himself once again condemned by the justice of the general public.
The first of these two spectators is Euripides himself, Euripides the thinker, not the poet. Of him we can say that the extraordinarily richness of his critical talent, like that of Lessing, constantly stimulated, even if it did not create, an additional productive artistic drive. With this talent, with all the clarity and agility of his critical thinking, Euripides sat in the theatre and struggled to recognize the masterpieces of his great predecessors, as with a painting darkened by age, feature by feature, line by line. And here he encountered something familiar to those who know the profound secrets of Aeschylean tragedy: he became aware of something incommensurable in each feature and in each line, a certain deceptive clarity and, at the same time, an enigmatic depth, the infinity of the background.
The clearest figure still always had a comet’s tail attached to it, which seemed to hint at the unknown, the inexplicable. The same duality lay over the construction of the drama, as well as over the meaning of the chorus. And how ambiguously the solution of the ethical problems remained for him. How questionable the handling of the myths! How unequal the division of luck and disaster! Even in the language of the old tragedies there was a great deal he found offensive or, at least, enigmatic. He especially found too much pomp and circumstance for simple relationships, too many figures of speech and monstrosities for the straightforward characters. So he sat there in the theatre, full of uneasy thoughts, and, as a spectator, he came to realize that he did not understand his great predecessors. Since his reason counted for him as the root of all enjoyment and creativity, he had to ask himself and look around to see if there was anyone who thought the way he did and could in the same way attest to that incommensurability of the old drama.
But the public, including the best individuals among them, met him only with a suspicious smile. No one could explain to him why his reflections about and objections to the great masters might be correct. And in this agonizing condition he found the other spectator, who did not understand tragedy and therefore did not value it. United with him, Euripides could dare to begin emerging from his isolation to fight the immense battle against the art works of Aeschylus and Sophocles-not with critical writings, but as a dramatic poet, who sets up the presentation of his tragedy in opposition to the tradition.
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Before we designate this other spectator by name, let’s linger here a moment to reconsider that characteristic duality and incommensurability at the heart of Aeschylean tragedy (something we described earlier). Let us think about how strange we find the chorus and the hero of those tragedies, which were not able to reconcile with what we are used to or with our traditions, until we recognized that duality itself as the origin and essence of Greek tragedy, as the expression of two artistic drives woven together, the Apollonian and the Dionysian.
To cut that primordial and all-powerful Dionysian element out of tragedy and to rebuild tragedy as a pure, new, and un-Dionysian art, morality, and world view – that has now revealed itself to us very clearly as the tendency of Euripides. Near the end of his life, Euripides himself propounded as emphatically as possible the question about the value and meaning of this tendency in a myth to his contemporaries. Should the Dionysian exist at all? Should we not eradicate it forcefully from Greek soil? Of course we should, the poet says to us, if only it were possible, but the god Dionysus is too powerful. The most intelligent opponent, like Pentheus in the Bacchae, is unexpectedly charmed by Dionysus and runs from him in this enchanted state to his destruction.
To cut that primordial and all-powerful Dionysian element out of tragedy and to rebuild tragedy as a pure, new, and un-Dionysian art, morality, and world view-that has now revealed itself to us very clearly as the tendency of Euripides. Near the end of his life, Euripides himself propounded as emphatically as possible the question about the value and meaning of this tendency in a myth to his contemporaries. Should the Dionysian exist at all? Should we not eradicate it forcefully from Greek soil? Of course we should, the poet says to us, if only it were possible, but the god Dionysus is too powerful. The most intelligent opponent, like Pentheus in the Bacchae, is unexpectedly charmed by Dionysus and runs from him in this enchanted state to his destruction.
The judgment of the two old men, Cadmus and Tiresias, seems also to be the judgment of the aged poet: the mind of the cleverest individual does not throw away that old folk tradition, that eternally propagating reverence for Dionysus; indeed, where such amazing powers are concerned, it is appropriate at least to demonstrate a diplomatically prudent show of joining in. But even with that, the god might still possibly take offense at such a lukewarm participation and transform the diplomat finally into a dragon (as happens here with Cadmus).
The poet tells us this, a poet who fought throughout his long life against Dionysus with heroic force, only to conclude his life finally with a glorification of his opponent and a suicide, like a man suffering from vertigo who, in order to escape the dreadful dizziness, which he can no longer endure, throws himself off a tower. That tragedy is a protest against the practicality of his artistic program, and that program had already succeeded! A miracle had taken place: just when the poet recanted, his program was already victorious. Dionysus had already been chased off the tragic stage, and by a daemonic power speaking out from Euripides. But Euripides was, to some extent, only a mask. The divinity which spoke out of him was not Dionysus, and not Apollo, but an entirely new-born daemon called Socrates.
This is the new opposition: the Dionysian and the Socratic. And from this contrast, Greek tragedy perished as a work of art. No matter now how much Euripides might seek to console us with his retraction, he was unsuccessful. The most magnificent temple lay in ruins. What use to us are the laments of the destroyer and his awareness that it had been the most beautiful of all temples? And even if Euripides himself, as a punishment, has been turned into a dragon by the artistic critics of all ages, who can be satisfied with this paltry compensation?
Let’s get closer now to this Socratic project, with which Euripides fought against and conquered Aeschylean tragedy.
What purpose (that’s the question we need to ask at this point) could Euripides’ intention to ground drama solely on the un-Dionysian have had, if we assume its implementation had the very highest ideals? What form of drama remained, if it was not to be born from the womb of music, in that mysterious half-light of the Dionysian? All it could be was dramatic epic, an Apollonian art form in which the tragical effect is naturally unattainable.
This is not a matter of the content of the represented events. I might even assert that in Goethe’s proposed Nausikaa it would have been impossible to make the suicide of that idyllic being (which was to be carried out in the fifth act) grippingly tragic, for the power of the Apollonian epic is so extraordinary that it magically transforms the most horrific things through that joy in and redemption through appearances right before our very eyes. The poet of the dramatic epic cannot completely fuse with his pictures, any more than the epic rhapsodist can. It is always a matter of still calm, tranquil contemplation with open eyes, a state which sees the images in front of it. The actor in this dramatic epic remains, in the most profound sense, still a rhapsodist; the consecration of the inner dream lies upon all his actions, so that he is never completely an actor.
How is Euripides’ work related with respect to this ideal of Apollonian drama? It is just like the relationship of the solemn rhapsodist of the olden times to the younger attitude, whose nature is described in Plato’s Ion: “When I say something sad, my eyes fill with tears. But if what I say is horrifying and terrible, then the hairs on my head stand on end from fright, and my heart knocks.” Here we do not see any more the epic dissolution of the self in appearances, the disinterested coolness of the real actor, who remain, even in his highest achievements, totally appearance and delight in appearances. Euripides is the actor with the beating heart, with his hair standing on end. He designs his work as a Socratic thinker, and he carries it out as a passionate actor.
Euripides is a pure artist neither in planning his work nor in carrying it out. Thus the Euripidean drama is simultaneously a cool and fiery thing, equally capable of freezing or burning. It is impossible for it to attain the Apollonian effect of the epic, while, on the other hand, it has divorced itself as much as possible from the Dionysian elements, and now, in order to work at all, it needs new ways to arouse people, methods which can no longer lie within either of the two individual artistic drives of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. These method of arousing people are detached paradoxical ideas, substituted for Apollonian objects of contemplation, and fiery emotional effects, substituted for Dionysian enchantment. The fiery effects are, to be sure, imitated with a high degree of realism, but the ideas and emotional effects are not in the slightest way imbued with the spirit of art.
If we have now recognized that Euripides did not succeed in basing his drama solely on Apollonian principles, that his un-Dionysian tendencies much rather led him astray into an inartistic naturalism, we are now able to move closer to the essential quality of his Socratic aesthetics, whose most important law runs something like this: “Everything must be understandable in order to be beautiful,” a corollary to the Socratic saying, “Only the knowledgeable person is virtuous.” With this canon at hand, Euripides measured all the individual features and justified them according to this principle: the language, characters, dramatic construction, the choral music.
What we habitually assess so frequently in Euripides, in comparison with Sophoclean tragedy, as a poetical deficiency and a backward step is for the most part the product of his emphatic critical process, his daring intelligence. Let the Euripi dean prologue serve as an example of what that rationalistic method produces. Nothing can be more offensive to our stage techniques than the prologue in Euripides’s plays. That a single person should step forward at the beginning of a work and explain who he is, what has gone on before the action starts, what has happened up to this point, and even what will occur in the unfolding of the work, that would strike a modern poetical dramatist as a wanton, inexcusable abandonment of all the effects of suspense. If we know everything which is going to happen, who will want to sit around waiting to see that it really does happen? For here there is nothing like the stimulating relationship between a prophetic dream and a later real event. Euripides thought quite differently about the matter.
The effect of tragedy never depends on epic suspense, on the tempting uncertainty about what will happen now and later. It depends far more on those great rhetorical-lyrical scenes in which the passion and dialectic of the main hero swelled up into a wide and powerful storm. Everything was preparing for pathos, not for action. What did not prepare the way for paths was considered disposable. But what hinders most seriously the listener’s delighted devotion to such scenes is any missing part, any gap in the network of the previous events. As long as the listener still has to figure out what this or that person means, what gives rise to this or that conflict in motives or purposes, then his full immersion in the suffering and action of the main character, his breathless sympathy with and fear for them are not possible. The Aeschylean-Sophoclean tragedies made use of the most elegant artistic methods in the opening scenes to provide the spectators, as if by chance, all the necessary clues to understand everything, a technique in which their noble artistry proves its worth by allowing the necessary features to appear, but, so to speak, as something masked and accidental.
But Euripides still believed he noticed that during these first scenes the spectator was oddly disturbed having to figure out the simple arithmetic of the previous events so that the poetical beauties and the pathos of the exposition was lost on him. Therefore Euripides set up the prologue even before the exposition and put it in the mouth of a person whom people could trust-a divinity would necessarily confirm the outcome of the tragedy for the public, more or less, and take away any doubts about the reality of the myth, in a manner similar to the way in which Descartes could establish the reality of the empirical world through an appeal to the truthfulness of God and his inability to lie. At the end of his drama, Euripides once again made use of this same divine truthfulness in order to confirm his hero’s future for the public. That is the task of the notorious deus ex machina. Between the epic prologue and epilogue lay the lyrical, dramatic present, the essential “drama.”
So Euripides as a poet is, above all, the echo of his conscious knowledge, and it is precisely this which confers upon him such a memorable place in the history of Greek art.
In view of his critically productive creativity it must have often struck him that he must be bringing alive in drama the opening of Anaxagoras’s text, the first lines of which go as follows: “In the beginning everything was a confused mixture, but then came reason and created order.” And if, among philosophers, Anaxagoras, with his concept of mind, seems to be the first sober man among total drunkards, so Euripides might have conceptualized his relationship to the other poets with a similar image. So long as the single creator of order and ruler of all, the mind, was still excluded from artistic creativity, everything was still mixed up in a chaotic primordial pudding. That’s how Euripides must have thought about it; that’s how he, the first “sober” poet must have passed sentence on the “drunken” poets.
What Sophocles said about Aeschylus-that he does what’s right, without being aware of it-was certainly not said in any Euripidean sense. Euripides would have conceded only that Aeschylus created improperly because he created without any conscious awareness. Even the god-like Plato speaks of the creative capability of poets and how this is not a conscious understanding, but for the most part only ironically, and he draws a comparison with the talent of prophets and dream interpreters, for the poet is not able to write until he has lost his conscious mind and reason no longer resides in him. Euripides undertook the task (which Plato also took on) to show the world the opposite of the “irrational” poet. His basic aesthetic principle, “everything must be conscious in order to be beautiful,” is, as I have said, the corollary to the Socratic saying, “Everything must be conscious in order to be good.”
With this in mind, it is permissible for us to assess Euripides as the poet of Socratic aesthetics. Socrates, however, was that second spectator, who did not understand the old tragedy and therefore did not value it. With Socrates as his ally, Euripides dared to be the herald of a new artistic creativity. If old tragedy perished in this development, then Socratic aesthetics is the murdering principle. Insofar as the fight was directed against the Dionysian of the older art, we recognize in Socrates the enemy of Dionysus, the new Orpheus, who roused himself against Dionysus, and who, although destined to be torn apart by the maenads of the Athenian Court of Justice, nevertheless himself made the powerful god fly away. Dionysus, as before, when he fled from Lycurgus, King of the Edoni, saved himself in the depths of the sea, that is, in the mysterious floods of a secret cult which would gradually overrun the entire world.
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That Socrates had a close relationship to Euripides’ project did not escape their contemporaries in ancient times, and the clearest expression for this happy intuition is the rumour floating around Athens that Socrates was in the habit of helping Euripides with his poetry. Both names were invoked by the supporters of the “good old days” when it was time to list the present popular leaders whose influence had brought about a situation in which the old strength of mind and body manifested at the Battle of Marathon was being increasingly sacrificed for a dubious way of explaining things, in a continuing erosion of the physical and mental powers.
This was the tone-half indignation, half contempt-in which Aristophanic comedy habitually talked of these men, to the irritation of the newer generations, who, although happy enough to betray Euripides, were always totally amazed that Socrates appeared in Aristophanes as the first and most important sophist, the mirror and essence of all sophistic ambitions. As a result, they took consolation in putting Aristophanes himself in the stocks as an impudent lying Alcibiades of poetry. Without here defending the profound instinct of Aristophanes against such attacks, I will proceed to demonstrate the close interrelationship between Socrates and Euripides as the ancients saw it. It’s particularly important to remember in this connection that Socrates, as an opponent of tragic art, never attended the performance of a tragedy, and only joined the spectators when a new piece by Euripides was being produced. The best known connection, however, is the close juxtaposition of both names in the oracular pronouncements of the Delphic Oracle, which indicated that Socrates was the wisest of men and at the same time delivered the judgment that Euripides captured second prize in the contest for wisdom.
Sophocles was the third person named in this hierarchy, the man who could praise himself in comparison with Aeschylus by saying that he (Sophocles) did what was right because he knew what was right. Obviously the degree of clarity in these men’s knowledge was the factor that designated them collectively as the three “wise men” of their time.
But the most pointed statement about this new and unheard of high opinion of knowledge and reason was uttered by Socrates, when he claimed that he was the only person to assert that he knew nothing; whereas, in his critical wandering about in Athens conversing with the greatest statesmen, orators, poets, and artists, everywhere he ran into people who imagined they knew things. Astonished, he recognized that all these famous people had no correct and clear insight into their occupations and carried out their work instinctually. “Only from instinct”- with this expression we touch upon the heart and centre of the Socratic project.
With this expression Socratic thought condemns existing art as well as contemporary ethics. Wherever he directs his searching gaze, he sees a lack of insight and the power of delusion, and from this he infers the inner falsity and worthlessness of present conditions. On the basis of this one point, Socrates believed he had to correct existence. He, one solitary individual, stepped forward with an expression of contempt and superiority, as the pioneer of a brand new style of culture, art, and morality, into that world, a scrap of which we would count it an honour to catch.
That is the immensely disturbing thing which grips us about Socrates whenever we run into him and which over and over again always stimulates us to find out the meaning and intention of this man, the most problematic figure of ancient times. Who is the man who can dare, as an individual, to deny the very essence of Greece, which with Homer, Pindar, Aeschylus, Phidias, Pericles, Pythia, and Dionysus is certainly worthy of our highest veneration? What daemonic force is it that could dare to sprinkle this magic drink into the dust? What demi-god is it to whom the ghostly chorus of the noblest specimens of humanity had to cry out: “Alas, alas! You have destroyed our beautiful world with your mighty fist. It is collapsing, falling to pieces!”
A key to the heart of Socrates is offered by that amazing phenomenon indicated by the term Socrates’s daimonon. Under special circumstances in which his immense reasoning power was stalled in doubt, he resolved his irresolution firmly with a divine voice which expressed itself at such times. When this voice came, it always sounded a cautionary note. In this totally strange character instinctive wisdom reveals itself only in order to confront the conscious knowledge now and then as an impediment. Whereas in all productive men instinct is the truly creative and affirming power, and consciousness acts as a critical and cautioning reaction, in Socrates the instinct becomes the critic, consciousness becomes the creator-truly a monstrous defect.
Now, we see here a grotesque defect in mythical consciousness, so that Socrates can be considered specifically a non-mystic man in whom the logical character has become too massive through excessive use, just like instinctive wisdom in the mystic. On the other hand, it was impossible for that logical drive, as it appeared in Socrates, to turn against itself. In its unfettered rush it demonstrates a natural power of the sort we meet, to our shuddering surprise, only in the very greatest instinctive powers. Anyone who has sensed in the Platonic texts the merest scent of the god-like naïveté and confidence in the direction of Socrates’s teaching has also felt how that immense drive wheel of Socratic logic is, at it were, in motion behind Socrates and how we have to see this behind Socrates, as if we were looking through a shadow.
That he himself had a premonition of this relationship comes out in the dignified seriousness with which he assessed his divine calling everywhere, even before his judges. To censure him for this is as impossible as it is to approve of his influence on the removal of instinct. When Socrates was hauled before the assembly of the Greek state, there was only one form of sentence for this irreconcilable conflict, namely, banishment. People should have expelled him beyond the borders as something enigmatic, unclassifiable, and inexplicable, so that some future world could not justly charge the Athenians with acting shamefully.
The fact that death and not exile was pronounced over him Socrates himself appears to have brought about, fully clear about what he was doing and without the natural horror of death. He went to his death with the same tranquility Plato describes him showing as he leaves the Symposium, the last drinker in the early light of dawn, beginning a new day, while behind him, on the benches and the ground, his sleeping dinner companions stay behind, to dream of Socrates the truly erotic man. The dying Socrates was the new ideal of the noble Greek youth, never seen before. Right in the vanguard, the typical Greek youth, Plato, prostrated himself before Socrates’s picture with all the fervent adoration of his passionately enthusiastic soul.
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Let’s now imagine that one great Cyclops eye of Socrates focused on tragedy, that eye in which the beautiful madness of artistic enthusiasm never glowed – let’s imagine how it was impossible for that eye to peer into the Dionysian abyss with a feeling of pleasure. Then what must that eye have seen in the “lofty and highly praised” tragic art, as Plato calls it? Something really unreasonable, with causes without effects, actions which apparently had no causes, and as a whole so varied and with so many different elements that any reasonable person had to reject it, but dangerous tinder for sensitive and easily excitable minds. We know which single form of poetry Socrates understood: Aesop’s fables. And no doubt his reaction involved that smiling complacency with which the noble and good Gellert in his fable of the bee and the hen sings the praises of poetry:
You see in me the use of poetry- To tell the man without much sense A picture image of the truth of things.
But for Socrates tragic art did not seem “to speak the truth” at all, apart from the fact that it did address itself to those “without much sense,” and thus not to philosophers, a double excuse to keep one’s distance from it. Like Plato, he assigned it to the art of cosmetics, which present only a pleasant surface, not the useful, and he therefore demanded that his disciples abstain and stay away from such unphilosophical temptations, with so much success that the young poet of tragedy, Plato, immediately burned his poetical writing in order to be able to become Socrates’s student. But where invincible talents fought against the Socratic instructions, his power, together with the force of his immense personality, was always still strong enough to force poetry itself into new attitudes, unknown up until then.
An example of this is Plato himself. To be sure, in his condemnation of tragedy and art in general he did not remain back behind the naïve cynicism of his master. But completely from artistic necessity he had to create an art form related directly to the existing art forms which he had rejected. The major criticism which Plato made about the old art-that it was the imitation of an illusion and thus belonged to a lower level than the empirical world-must above all not be directed against his new work of art. And so we see Plato exerting himself to go beyond reality and to present the Idea which forms basis of that pseudo-reality.
With that, however, the thinker Plato reached by a detour the very place where, as a poet, he had always been at home and from where Sophocles and all the old art was protesting against Plato’s criticism. If tragedy had assimilated all earlier forms of art, so the same holds true, in an odd way, for Plato’s dialogues, which were created from a mixture of all available styles and forms and hover between explanation, lyric, drama, prose and poetry, right in the middle, and in so doing broke through the strict old law about the unity of stylistic form. The Cynic philosophers went even further along the same path. With their excessively garish and motley collection of styles, weaving back and forth between prose and metrical forms, they produced the literary image of “raving Socrates,” which they were in the habit of presenting in their own lives.
The Platonic dialogue was, so to speak, the boat on which the shipwreck of the old poetry, along with all its children, was saved. Pushed together into a single narrow space and with an anxious Socrates at the helm they humbly set off now into a new world, which never could see enough fantastic images of this event. Plato really gave all later worlds the image of a new form of art, the image of the novel, which can be characterized as an infinitely intensified Aesopian fable, in which the relative priorities of poetry and dialectical philosophy were the same as the relative priorities of that very philosophy and theology for many hundreds of years. Poetry, in other words, was subservient. This was poetry’s new position, the place into which Plato forced it under the influence of the daemonic Socrates.
Now philosophical ideas grew up around art and forced it to cling to the trunk of dialectic. Apollonian tendencies metamorphosed into logical systematizing, something corresponding to what we noticed with Euripides, as well as a translation of the Dionysian into naturalistic effects. Socrates, the dialectical hero in Platonic drama, reminds us of the changed nature of the Euripidean hero, who has to defend his actions with reasons and counter-reasons and thus frequently runs the risk of losing our tragic sympathy. For who can fail to recognize the optimistic element in the heart of dialectic, which celebrates a jubilee with every conclusion and can breathe only in a cool conscious brightness, that optimistic element, which, once pushed into tragedy, gradually overruns its Dionysian regions and necessarily drives them to self-destruction, right to their death leap into middle-class drama.
Let people merely recall the consequences of the Socratic sayings “Virtue is knowledge; sin arises only from ignorance; the virtuous person is the happy person.” In these three basic forms of optimism lies the death of tragedy. For now the virtuous hero must be a dialectician. Now there must be a perceptible link between virtue and knowledge, belief and morality. Now the transcendental vision of justice in Aeschylus is lowered to the flat and impertinent principle of “poetical justice” with its customary deus ex machina.
What does this new Socratic optimistic stage world look like with respect to the chorus and the whole musical-Dionysian basis for tragedy in general? All that seem to be something accidental, a reminder of the origin of tragedy which we can well do without, because we have come to realize that the chorus can be understood only as the origin of tragedy and the tragic in general. Already in Sophocles the chorus reveals itself as something of an embarrassment, an important indication that even with him the Dionysian stage of tragedy was beginning to fall apart. He did not dare to trust the Chorus to carry the major share of the action, but limited its role to such an extent that it appears almost as one of the actors, just as if it had been lifted out of the orchestra into the scene. This feature naturally destroys its nature completely, no matter how much Aristotle approved of this arrangement of the chorus.
This demotion in the position of the chorus, which Sophocles certainly recommended in his dramatic practice and, according to tradition, even in a written text, is the first step toward the destruction of the chorus, whose phases in Euripides, Agathon, and the New Comedy followed with breakneck speed one after the other. Optimistic dialectic, with its syllogistic whip, drove music out of tragedy, that is, it destroyed the essence of tragedy, which can be interpreted only as a manifestation and imaginary presentation of Dionysian states, as a perceptible symbolizing of music, as the dream world of a Dionysian intoxication.
We have noticed an anti-Dionysian tendency already effective before Socrates, which only achieves in him an expression of incredible brilliance. Now we must not shrink back from the question of where such a phenomenon as Socrates points. For we are not in a position, given the Platonic dialogues, to see that phenomenon as a force of totally negative dissolution. And so, while it’s true that the immediate effect of the Socratic drive was to bring about the destruction of Dionysian tragedy, the profound living experiences of Socrates himself force us to the question whether or not there must necessarily be only an antithetical relationship between Socrates’s doctrines and art and whether the birth of an “artistic Socrates” is in general something of a contradiction.
Where culture is concerned, that despotic logician now and then had the feeling of a gap, an emptiness, a partial sense of reproach for a duty he might have neglected. As he explains to his friends in prison, often one and the same dream apparition came to him, always with the words, “Socrates, practise music!” He calmed himself, right up to his last days, with the interpretation that his philosophizing was the highest musical art, and believed that it was incorrect that a divinity would remind him of “common, popular music.” Finally in prison he came to understand how, in order to relieve his conscience completely, to practice that music which he had considered insignificant. And in this mood, he composed a poem to Apollo and rendered a few of Aesop’s fables in verse.
What drove him to this practice was something like the voice of his warning daemon. It was his Apollonian insight that, like a barbarian king, he did not understand a divine image and was in danger of sinning against a divinity through his failure to understand. That statement of Socrates’s dream vision is the single indication of his thinking about something perhaps beyond the borders of his logical nature. So he had to ask himself: Have I always labeled unintelligible things I could not understand? Perhaps there is a kingdom of wisdom which is forbidden to the logician? Perhaps art is even a necessary correlative and supplement to scientific understanding?
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In the sense of this last ominous question we must how discuss how the influence of Socrates has spread out over later worlds, right up to the present and even into all future ages, like a constantly growing shadow in the evening sun, and how that influence always makes necessary the re-creation of art (I mean art in its most profound and widest metaphysical sense) and through its own immortality guarantees the immortality of art. For this fact to be acknowledged, before it was established that all art inherently depended on the Greeks, from Homer right up to Socrates, we had to deal with these Greeks as the Athenians dealt with Socrates. Almost every age and cultural stage has at some time or another sought in an ill-tempered frame of mind to free itself of the Greeks, because in comparison with the Greeks, all their achievements, apparently fully original and admired in all sincerity, suddenly appeared to lose their colour and life and were reduced to unsuccessful copies, even caricatures.
And so a heartfelt inner anger constantly kept breaking out against that arrogant little nation which dared throughout time to define everything that was not produced in its own country as “barbaric” Who were these Greeks, people asked themselves, who had achieved only an ephemeral historical glitter, only ridiculously restricted institutions, only an ambiguous competence in morality, who could even be identified with hateful vices, yet who had nevertheless taken a pre-eminent place among nations for their value and special importance, something fitted for a genius among the masses? Unfortunately people were not lucky enough to find the cup of hemlock which can do away with such a being, for all the poisons they created-envy, slander, and inner anger-were insufficient to destroy that self-satisfied magnificence.
Hence, confronted by the Greeks, people have been ashamed and afraid. It seems that an individual who values the truth above everything else might dare to propose as true the notion that the Greeks drive the chariot of our culture and every other one, but that almost always the wagon and the horses are inferior material and cannot match the glory of their drivers, who then consider it funny to whip such a team into the abyss, over which they themselves jump with a leap worthy of Achilles.
To demonstrate that Socrates also merits such a place among the drivers of the chariot, it is sufficient to recognize him as typifying a form of existence inconceivable before him, the type known as Theoretical Man. Our next task is to reach some insight about the meaning and purpose of such a man. The theoretical man, like the artist, takes an infinite satisfaction in the present and is, like the artist, protected by that satisfaction from the practical effects of pessimism with its lynx eyes which glow only in the darkness. But while the artist, in his revelation of the truth, always keeps his enchanted gaze hanging on what still remains hidden after his revelation, theoretical man enjoys and remains satisfied with the covers which have been thrown off and takes his greatest delight in the process of continually successful unveiling, a success which his own power has brought about.
There would be no scientific knowledge if it concerned itself only with that one naked goddess and had nothing else to do. For then its disciples would have to feel like those people who want to dig a hole straight through the earth, and one among them sees that, even with the greatest lifelong effort, he is in a position to dig through only a really small piece of the immense depths, and that piece will be covered over in front of his very eyes by the work of the person next to him, so that a third person would apparently do well to select a new place for the tunneling efforts he undertakes on his own initiative.
Now, if one person convincingly demonstrates that it is impossible to reach the antipodes by this direct route, who will want to continue to work on in the old depths, unless there was a possibility in the meantime that he would be happy finding some valuable rock or discovering some natural law? For that reason, Lessing, the most noble theoretical man, dared to state that for him the search for the truth counted for more than truth itself. That statement unmasks the fundamental secret of scientific knowledge, to the astonishment, even the anger, of scientists. Now, of course, alongside this single recognition, excessively truthful and brave, stands a profound but delusive image, which first came into the world in the person of Socrates, that unshakeable faith that thinking, guided by the idea of causality, might reach into the deepest abyss of being, and that thinking is capable of, not just understanding being, but even correcting it. This lofty metaphysical delusion is inherent in scientific research and leads it over and over again to its limits, at which point it must turn itself into art, something which is really predictable in this mechanical process.
With the torch of this idea, let’s look at Socrates. To us he appears as the first person who was capable not only of living under the guidance of this scientific instinct, but also of dying under it (something much more difficult). Therefore the picture of the dying Socrates as a man raised above fear of death by knowledge and reason is the emblazoned shield hanging over the entranceway to scientific research, reminding every individual of his purpose, namely, to make existence intelligible and thus apparently justified. Of course, when reasoning cannot succeed in this endeavour, myth must finally serve, something which I have just noted as the necessary consequence, indeed, even the purpose of, science.
Anyone who clearly sees how, after Socrates, that mystagogue of knowledge, one philosophical school after another, like wave after wave, arose in turn, and how an unimaginable universal greed for knowledge through the full extent of the educated world steered knowledge around on the high seas as the essential task for every person of greater capabilities, a greed which it has been impossible since then completely to expel from scientific knowledge, and how through this universal greed a common net of thinking was cast over the entire earth for the first time (with even glimpses of the rule-bound workings of an entire solar system)-whoever reminds himself of all this, together with that astonishingly high pyramid of contemporary knowledge, cannot deny that in Socrates we see a turning point and vortex of so-called world history.
Imagine for a moment the following scenario: if the incalculable sum of all the energy which has been used in pursuit of this world project is spent not in the service of knowledge but on the practical (i.e., egotistical) aims of individuals and peoples, then in all probability the instinctive delight in living would be so weakened in universal wars of destruction and continuing migrations of people that, with suicide being a common occurrence, the individual, perhaps out of a sense of duty, would have to see death as a final rest and, like the inhabitants of the Fiji Islands, the son would strangle his parents, the friend would strangle his friend. A practical pessimism, which could give rise to a dreadful ethic of mass murder out of sympathy, such a belief is present and was present all over the world, wherever art did not appear in some form or other, especially in religion and science, as a remedy and a defense against that pestilence.
With respect to this practical pessimism, Socrates is the original picture of the theoretical optimist, who in the belief (which I have described) that we could discover the nature of things conferred upon knowing and discovering the power of a universal medicine and understood evil-in-itself as error. To push forward with that reasoning and to separate true knowledge from appearance and error seem to the Socratic man to be the noblest, even the single truly human vocation, just as that mechanism of ideas, judgments, and conclusions has been valued, from Socrates on, as the highest activity and the most admirable gift of nature, above all other faculties. Even the noblest moral deeds, the sympathetic emotions, self-sacrifice, heroism and that calmness in the soul (so difficult to attain), which the Apollonian Greeks called sophrosyne-all these were derived by Socrates and his like-minded descendants right up to the present from the dialectic of knowledge and therefore described as teachable.
Whoever has experienced the delight of a Socratic discovery and feels how this, in ever-widening rings, seeks to enclose the entire world of phenomena, will experience no spur capable of pushing him into existence more intense than the desire to complete that conquest and to weave a solid impenetrable net. To a man so minded, the Platonic Socrates appears as the teacher of an entirely new form of “Greek serenity” and of a blissful existence which seeks to discharge itself in actions. And these actions will consist, for the most part, like those of a mid-wife, of things concerned with the education of noble disciples, in order to produce an endless supply of geniuses.
But now science, incited by its powerful delusion, speeds on inexorably right to its limits, at which point the optimism hidden in the essence of logic fails. For the circumference of the circle of science has an infinity of points, and while it is still impossible to see how that circumference could ever be completely measured, nevertheless the noble, talented man, before the middle of his life, inevitably comes up against some border point on that circumference, where he stares at something which cannot be illuminated. When, at this point, he sees to his horror how logic turns around on itself and finally bites its own tail, then a new form of knowledge breaks through, the acknowledgement of the tragic, which in order merely to be endured, requires art as a protector and healer.
If we look at the loftiest realms of the world streaming around us, our eyes strengthened and refreshed by the Greeks, we become aware of that greed of insatiably optimistic knowledge (which Socrates previews for us) turning into tragic resignation and a need for art, even if it’s true that this same greed, in its lower levels, must express itself as hostile to art and must especially loathe Dionysian tragic art, as I have already explained in the example of the conflict between Aeschylean tragedy and Socratic doctrine.
Here we are now knocking, with turbulent feelings, on the door of the present and future: Will that transformation lead to continuously new configurations of genius and straight to the music-playing Socrates? Will that wide net of art, whether in the name of religion or of science, fly over existence always more tightly and delicately, or is it determined that it will be ripped to shreds by the restless barbaric impulses and hurly-burly which we now call “the present.” We are standing here on the sidelines as lookers on, worried but not without hope, for we are being permitted to witness that immense struggle and transition. Ah, but there is a magic spell in these battles: whoever looks at them must also fight them!
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By setting out this historical example, we have attempted to clarify how tragedy surely dies away with the disappearance of the spirit of music, since tragedy can arise only out of this spirit. To mitigate the strangeness of this claim and, on the other hand, to indicate the origin of this idea of ours, we must now openly face up to analogous phenomena of the present time. We must stride right into the midst of those battles which, as I have just said, are being waged in the loftiest spheres of our present world between the insatiably optimistic desire to know and the artistic need for tragedy.
In this discussion, I shall omit all the other opposing drives which have in every age worked against art (especially against tragedy) and which at present have taken hold to such an extent that, for example, in the art of the theatre, only farces and ballets achieve a fairly rich profit with their fragrant blooms, which are perhaps not for everyone. I shall speak only of the most illustrious opposition to the tragic world view: by that I mean research scholarship, optimistic to the core of its being, with its father Socrates perched on the pinnacle. Shortly I shall also indicate by name the forces which seem to me to guarantee a new birth of tragedy and who knows what other blessed hopes for the German character!
Before we leap into the middle of this battle, let us wrap ourselves in the armour of the knowledge we seized upon earlier. In opposition to all those eager to derive art from a single principle as the necessary living origin of every work of art, I keep my eyes fixed on both those artistic divinities of the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysus, and recognize in them the living and clear representatives of two art worlds, very different in their deepest being and their highest goals. Apollo stands before me as the transfigured genius of the principium individuationis [the individualizing principle], through which release is only to be truly attained in illusion. However, under the mystical joyous cries of Dionysus, the spell of individuation shatters and the way lies open to the maternal source of being, to the innermost core of things.
This tremendous difference, which opens up a yawning gap between plastic art as Apollonian and music as Dionysian art became more or less obvious to only one great thinker, when he, without any prompting from the symbolism of the Greek gods, recognized the different character of music and the origin of all other arts from it, because music is not, like all the others art forms, images of appearances, but an immediate reflection of the will itself, and also because it presents itself as the metaphysical counterpart to all physical things in the world, the thing-in-itself as counterpart to all appearances (Schopenhauer, World as Will and Idea, I, p. 310).
On the basis of this most significant way of understanding all aesthetics, which, taken seriously, marks the first beginning of aesthetics, Richard Wagner, to confirm its lasting truth, set his stamp, when he established in his Beethoven that music must be assessed on aesthetic principles entirely different from those for all fine arts and not at all according to the category of beauty, although an erroneous aesthetics, in the service of a misleading and degenerate art, has become accustomed to the idea of beauty asserting itself in the world of images and to demand from music an effect similar to the effect of plastic arts, namely, the arousal of satisfaction in beautiful forms.
After my recognition of that tremendous opposition, I sensed in myself a strong urge to approach the essence of Greek tragedy and, in so doing, the deepest insight into the Hellenic genius. Now for the first time I believed I was capable of the magical task of posing the basic problem of tragedy in my own mind, over and above the jargon of our customary aesthetics. Through that, such an strange idiosyncratic glimpse into the Hellenic was granted to me that it had to appear to me as if our classical-Hellenistic scholarship (which is so proud of itself) had up to this point known, for the most part, only how to gloat over games with shadows and trivialities.
We may be able perhaps to touch on this original problem with the following question: What aesthetic effect arises when those separate powers of art, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, come to operate alongside each other? Or, put more briefly, what is the relationship between music and images and ideas? Richard Wagner applauded Schopenhauer on this very point for the restrained clarity and perceptiveness of his explanation. Schopenhauer spoke his views on this matter in the greatest detail in the following place (which I will quote again here in full, from World as Will and Idea, I, p. 309):
As a result of all this, we can look upon the world of appearance, or nature, and music as two different expressions of the same thing, which itself is thus the only analogy mediating between the two of them. Thus, an understanding of this thing is required in order to have insight into that analogy. Consequently, music, when considered as an expression of the world, is universal to the highest degree, something which even has a relationship with the universality of ideas, rather like the way these are related to particular things. Its universality is, however, in no way the empty universality of abstractions, but something of an entirely different kind, bound up with a thoroughly clear certainty. In this, music is like geometric figures and numbers, which are the universal forms of all possible objects of experience and applicable to them all a priori [before experience], although they are not abstract but vivid and always fixed.
All possible efforts, excitements, and expressions of the will, all those processes inside human beings, which reason subsumes under the broad negative concept of feelings, are there to express through the infinite number of possible melodies, but always in the universality of mere form, without matter, always only according to the thing-in-itself, not according to its appearance, like its innermost soul, without the body.
From these inner relationships which music has with the true essence of all things, we can also account for the fact that when an appropriate music is heard in any scene, business, action, or environment, this music appears to open up to us the most secret sense of these things, and seems to come forward as the most correct and clearest commentary on them. In the same way, for the man who surrenders himself entirely to the experience of a symphony it appears as if he saw all the possible events of life and the world drawn over into himself. Nevertheless, he cannot, if he thinks about it, perceive any similarity between that game of sounds and the things which come into his mind.
For music is, as mentioned, different from all other arts, in that it is not a portrayal of appearances, or more correctly, the adequate objectification of the will, but the unmediated portrayal of the will itself, as well as the metaphysical complement of all physical things in the world, presenting the thing-in-itself as complement to all appearances. We could, therefore, call the world the embodiment of music just as much as the embodiment of the will. And that’s why it is understandable that music is capable of bringing out every painting, even every scene of real life and the world, with an immediate and higher significance and, of course, to do that all the more, the closer the analogy of its melody to the inner spirit of the given phenomenon. On this point we base the fact that we can set a poem to music as a song or as a vivid presentation in pantomime or as both in an opera. Such individual pictures of men’s lives, given a foundation in the universal speech of music, are not bound to music and do not correspond with music by a compelling necessity, but they stand in relation to music as a random example to a universal idea. They present in the clarity of the real the very thing which music expresses in the universality of mere form.
For melodies are, to a certain extent, like general ideas, an abstraction from the real. For reality, the world of separate things, supplies clear phenomena, remarkable and individual things, the single case, to both the universality of ideas and the universality of melodies. Both of these universals, however, are, from a certain point of view, contrary, since ideas consist only of forms abstracted first from perception, rather like the stripped away outer skin of things, and are thus really and entirely abstractions.; whereas, music, by contrast, gives the heart of the thing, the innermost core, which comes before all particular shapes. This relationship is easily expressed properly in the language of the scholastics: ideas are the universalia post rem (universals after the fact); music, however, gives the universalia ante rem (universals before the fact), and reality the universalia in re (universals in the fact).
The fact that in general there can be a connection between a musical composition and a perceptible presentation rests on the point that, as stated, both are only very different expressions of same inner essence of the world. Now, when in a particular case such a connection is truly present and the composer has known how to express in the universal language of music the dynamics of the will, which constitutes the core of the event, then the melody of the song, the music of the opera, is full of expression. The composer’s discovery of the analogy between both must, however, issue from the immediate realization of the world essence, unknown to his reason, and must not be an imitation, conveyed in ideas with conscious intentionality. Otherwise the music does not express the inner essence, that is, the will itself, but only imitates inadequately its appearance."
Following what Schopenhauer has taught, we also understand music as the language of the unmediated will and feel our imaginations stirred to shape that spirit world which speaks to us invisibly and nonetheless in such a vital manner and to embody it in ourselves through a metaphorical illustration. By contrast, image and idea, under the influence of a truly appropriate music, reach an elevated significance. Thus, Dionysian art customarily works in two ways on Apollonian artistic potential: music arouses us to consider an image, in some way similar to the Dionysian universality, and music then permits that image to come forward with the highest significance.
From this intelligible observation and without any deeper considerations of unapproachable things, I conclude that music is capable of generating myth (that is the most meaningful example) and, indeed, of giving birth to the tragic myth, that myth which speaks of the recognition of the Dionysian among the Greeks. I have explained the phenomenon of the lyric poet, and after that how music in the lyric poet strives to make known its essence in Apollonian pictures. Let us now imagine that music at its highest intensity also must seek to reach its highest representation. Thus, we must consider it possible that music also knows how to find the symbolic expression for its essentially Dionysian wisdom. And where else will we have to look for this expression, if not in tragedy and in the idea of tragedy generally?
From the essence of art as it is commonly understood according to the single categories of illusion and beauty it is genuinely impossible to derive the tragic. Only with reference to the spirit of music do we understand a joy in the destruction of the individual. Now, individual examples of such a destruction makes clear the eternal phenomenon of Dionysian art, which brings into expression the will in its omnipotence out from behind, so to speak, the principium individuationis, the life beyond all appearances and eternal life, in spite of all destruction.
The metaphysical joy in the tragic is a translation of the instinctive unconscious Dionysian wisdom into the language of the image. The hero, the highest manifestation of the will, is destroyed, and we are happy at that, because, after all, he is only an illusion, and the eternal life of the will is not disturbed by his destruction. “We believe in eternal life,” so tragedy calls out, while the music is the unmediated idea of this life. The work of the plastic artist has an entirely purpose: Here Apollo overcomes the suffering of the individual through the bright exaltation in the eternity of the illusion. Here beauty is victorious over the suffering inherent in life. The pain is, in a certain sense, brushed away from the face of nature. In Dionysian art and in its tragic symbolism this same nature speaks to us with its true, undisguised voice: “Be as I am! Under the incessantly changing phenomena the eternal primordial mother, always forcing things into existence, always satisfied with the changing nature of appearances!”
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Dionysian art also wants to convince us of the eternal delight in existence. But we must seek this delight, not in appearances, but behind them. We must recognize how everything which comes into being must be ready for a painful destruction. We are forced to gaze directly into the terror of individual existence but, in the process, must not become paralyzed. A metaphysical consolation tears us momentarily out of the hustle and bustle of changing forms. For a short time we really are the primordial essence itself and feel its unbridled lust for and joy in existence. The struggle, torment, and destruction of appearances we now consider necessary, on account of the excess of countless forms of existence forcefully thrusting themselves into life, and of the exuberant fecundity of the world’s will. We are transfixed by the raging barbs of this torment in the very moment when we become, as it were, one with the immeasurable primordial delight in existence and when we sense the indestructible and eternal nature of this Dionysian joy. In spite of fear and compassion, we are fortunate vital beings, not as individuals, but as the one force of Life, with whose procreative joy we have been fused.
The story of how Greek tragedy arose tells us now with clear certainty how the Greeks’ tragic work of art really was born out of the spirit of music. With this idea we think we have, for the first time, reached a true understanding of the original and astonishing meaning of the chorus. At the same time, however, we must concede that the significance of the tragic myth explained previously, to say nothing of Greek philosophy, was never entirely clear to the Greek poets. Their heroes speak to a certain extent more superficially than they act, and the myth does not really find its adequate objectification in the spoken word.
The structure of the scenes and the vivid images reveal a deeper wisdom than the poet himself can grasp in words and ideas. We can make the same observation about Shakespeare, whose Hamlet, for example, similarly speaks in a more superficial manner than he acts, so that we derive the above mentioned study of Hamlet, not from the words, but from the deepest view and review of the totality of the work. With respect to Greek tragedy, which, of course, comes to us only as a drama of words, I have even suggested that that incongruity between myth and word can easily seduce us into considering it shallower and more empty of meaning than it is, and thus to assume a more superficial action than it must have had according to the testimony of the ancients. For we easily forget that what the poet as a wordsmith could not achieve, the attainment of the highest intellectualization and idealization of myth, he could achieve successfully at any time as a creating musician.
Admittedly through scholarship we must recreate the extraordinary power of the musical effects in order to receive something of that incomparable consolation necessarily characteristic of true tragedy. But we would experience this extraordinary musical power for what it is only if we were Greeks, because considering the entire development of Greek music, which is well known, quite familiar to us, and infinitely richer by comparison, we believe we are hearing only youthful songs, sung with only a timid sense of their power. The Greeks are, as the Egyptian priests say, eternal children, and where tragic art is concerned, only children who do not know what an exalted toy has arisen under their hands, something which will be destroyed.
Every struggle of the spirit of music for pictorial and mythic revelation, which becomes increasingly intense from the beginning of the lyric right up to Attic tragedy, suddenly breaks apart, right after developing in full luxuriant bloom, and, so to speak, disappears from the surface of Hellenic art, although the Dionysian world view born out of this struggle lives on in the mysteries and in its most amazing transformations and degeneration never stops attracting serious natures to it. Isn’t it possible that it will rise from its mystical depths as art once more?
At this point we are concerned with the question whether the power whose hostile effects broke tragedy has sufficient power for all time to hinder the artistic re-growth of tragedy and the tragic world view. If the old tragedy was derailed by the dialectical drive for knowledge and by the optimism of scholarly research, we might have to infer from this fact an eternal struggle between the theoretical and the tragic world views. And only after the spirit of knowledge is taken right to its limits and its claim to universal validity destroyed by the establishment of that limit would it be possible to hope for a re-birth of tragedy. For a symbol of such a cultural form, we would have to set up Socrates the player of music, in the sense talked about earlier. By this opposition I understand with respect to the spirit of scholarly research the belief (which first came to light in the person of Socrates) that our understanding of nature can be grounded and that knowledge has a universal healing power.
Whoever remembers the most immediate consequences of this restless forward driving spirit of scientific knowledge will immediately recall how it destroyed myth and how through this destruction poetry was driven out of its naturally ideal soil as something from now on without a home. If we have correctly ascribed to music the power to bring about out of itself a re-birth of myth, then we will have to seek out the spirit of science on that very path where it has its hostile encounter with the myth-creating power of music. This occurred in the development of the new Attic dithyramb, whose music no longer expressed the inner essence, the will itself, but only gave back an inadequate appearance in an imitation delivered through ideas. From such innerly degenerate music those with a true musical nature turned away with the same aversion which they had displayed before the art-killing tendency of Socrates.
The instinct of Aristophanes (which grasped issues so surely) was certainly right when he linked together Socrates himself, the tragedies of Euripides, and the music of the new writers of dithyrambs, hating each of them and smelling in all three of them the characteristics of a degenerate culture. Through that new dithyramb, music is criminally turned into a mimetic demonstration of appearances, for example, a battle or storm at sea, and in the process is totally robbed of all its power to create myths. For when music seeks only to arouse our indulgence by compelling us to find external analogies between an event in life or nature and certain rhythmic figures and characteristic musical sounds, when our understanding is supposed to be satisfied with the recognition of these analogies, then we are dragged down into a mood in which a conception of the mythic is impossible. For myth must be vividly felt as a single instance of universality and truth staring into the infinite.
Truly Dionysian music works on us as a universal mirror reflecting the will of the world. Each vivid event reflected in this mirror widens out at once for our feelings into the image of an eternal truth. By contrast, the sound painting of the new dithyramb immediately strips such a vivid event of its mythic character. Now the music has become a feeble copy of a phenomenon and, in the process, infinitely poorer than the phenomenon itself. Through this impoverishment the phenomenon itself is even lowered in our feelings, so that now, for example, a battle imitated in this kind of music plays itself feebly out in marches, trumpet calls, and so forth, and our imagination is held back precisely by these superficialities.
Painting with music is thus in every respect the opposite to the myth creating power of true music. Through the former a phenomenon becomes more impoverished than it is, whereas through Dionysian music the individual phenomenon becomes richer and widens into an image of the world. It was a powerful victory of the non-Dionysian spirit when, in the development of the new dithyramb, it alienated music from itself and pushed it down to be the slave of appearances. Euripides, who, in a higher sense, must have had a thoroughly unmusical nature, is for this very reason an ardent supporter of the new dithyrambic music and uses all its stock effects and styles with the open-handedness of a thief.
From another perspective we see the force of this un-Dionysian spirit in action directing its effects against myth, when we turn our gaze toward the way in which the way in which the presentation of character and the psychological complexities get way out of hand in the tragedies of Sophocles. The character cannot be allowed to broaden out any more into an eternal type, but, by contrast, must appear an individual through the artistic qualifications and shading, through the most delicate clarity of every line, so that the spectator generally no longer experiences the myth but the commanding naturalism of the artist, his power of imitation.
Here also we become aware of the victory of appearances over the universal and of the delight in the particular, rather like an anatomical specimen. Already we breathe the air of a theoretical world, which values the scientific insight higher than the artistic mirror image of a universal principle. The movement along the line of increasing characterization quickly goes further. While Sophocles still paints whole characters and yokes their sophisticated development to myth, Euripides already paints only large individual character traits, which are capable of expressing themselves in violent passions. In the new Attic comedy there are masks with only one expression, reckless old men, deceived pimps, mischievous slaves in an inexhaustible repetition.
Where now has the myth-building spirit of music gone? What is left now for music is music of stimulation or memory, that is, either music as a means of stimulating jaded and worn out nerves or sound painting. As far as the first is concerned, the text is largely irrelevant. Already in Euripides, when his heroes or chorus first start to sing, things get really out of hand. What must it have been like with his unapologetic successors?
However, the new un-Dionysian spirit manifests itself with the utmost clarity in the conclusions of the new plays. In the old tragedy, the metaphysical consolation was there to feel at the conclusion. Without that, the delight in tragedy simply cannot be explained. The sound of reconciliation from another world echoes most purely perhaps in Oedipus at Colonus. But as soon as the genius of music flew away from tragedy, tragedy is, in the strong sense of the term, dead. For out of what are people now able to create that metaphysical consolation?
Consequently, people looked for an earthly solution to tragic dissonance. After the hero was sufficiently tortured by fate, he was paid a well earned reward in an impressive marriage, in divine testament to his honour. The hero became a gladiator, to whom people gave his freedom, after he had been well beaten and was covered with wounds. The deus ex machina moved in to take the place of metaphysical consolation. I will not say that the tragic world view was destroyed entirely and completely by the surging spirit of the un-Dionysian. We only know that it must have fled out of art as if into the underworld, degenerating into a secret cult.
But over the widest surface area of Hellenistic existence raged the consuming wind of that spirit which announces itself in the form of “Greek serenity,” to which I referred earlier as an impotent and unproductive delight in life. This serenity is a counterpart to the marvelous “naïveté” of the old Greeks, which we must see-in accordance with its given characteristics-as the flowering of Apollonian culture, blossoming out of a dark abyss, as the victory over suffering, the wisdom of suffering, which the Hellenic will gains through its ability to mirror beauty.
The noblest form of that other form of “Greek serenity,” the Alexandrian, is the cheerfulness of the theoretical man. It manifests the same characteristic features I already derived out of the idea of the un-Dionysian: it fights against Dionysian wisdom and art; it strives to dissolve myth; it places an earthy consonance in place of a metaphysical consolation, indeed a particular deus ex machina, namely, the god of machines and crucibles, that is, the force of nature, recognized and used in the service of a higher egoism; it believes in correcting the world through knowledge, a life led by scientific knowledge, and thus is really in a position to confine the individual man in the narrowest circle of problems which can be solved, inside which he can cheerfully say to life: “I want you. You are worth knowing.”
18
It’s an eternal phenomenon: the voracious will always finds a way to keep its creatures alive and force them on to further living by an illusion spread over things. One man is fascinated by the Socratic desire for knowledge and the delusion that with it he’ll be able to cure the eternal wound of existence. Another is caught up by the seductively beautiful veil of art fluttering before his eyes; yet another by the metaphysical consolation that underneath the hurly-burly of appearances eternal life flows on indestructibly, to say nothing of the more common and almost more powerful illusions which the will holds ready at all times. In general, these three stages of illusion are only for nobly endowed natures, those who feel the weight and difficulty of existence with more profound reluctance and who need to be deceived out of this reluctance by these exquisite stimulants. Everything we call culture emerges from these stimulants: depending on the proportions of the mixture we have a predominantly Socratic or artistic or tragic culture – or if you’ll permit historical examples – there is either an Alexandrian or a Hellenic or a Buddhist culture.
Our entire modern world is trapped in the net of Alexandrian culture and recognizes as its ideal the theoretical man, equipped with the highest intellectual powers and working in the service of science, a man for whom Socrates is the prototype and progenitor. All our methods of education originally have this ideal in view. Every other existence has struggled on with difficulty alongside this ideal as a way of life we permit, not as one we intend. For a long time now, it’s been almost frightening to sense how an educated person here is found only in the form of the scholar. Even our literary arts have had to develop out of scholarly imitations, and in the main effect of rhyme we recognize still the development of our poetical form out of artificial experiments with what is essentially really a scholarly language, not one native to us.
To a true Greek how incomprehensible must Faust have appeared, that man of modern culture, who is inherently intelligible to us-Faust, who storms dissatisfied through all faculties, his drive for knowledge making him devoted to magic and the devil. We have only to stand him beside Socrates for comparison in order to recognize that modern man is beginning to have a premonition of the limits of that Socratic desire for knowledge and is yearning for a coastline somewhere in the wide and desolate sea of knowledge. When Goethe once remarked to Eckermann, with reference to Napoleon, “Yes, my good man, there is also a productivity in actions,” in a delightfully naïve way he was reminding us that the non-theoretical human being is something implausible and astonishing to modern man, so that we had to have the wisdom of a Goethe to find out that such a strange form of existence is comprehensible, even forgivable.
And now we must not conceal from ourselves what lies hidden in the womb of this Socratic culture! An optimism that thinks itself all powerful! Well, people should not be surprised when the fruits of this optimism ripen, when a society that has been thoroughly leavened with this kind of culture, right down to the lowest levels, gradually starts trembling in an extravagant turmoil of desires, when the belief in earthly happiness for everyone, when faith in the possibility of such a universal knowledge culture gradually changes into the threatening demand for such an Alexandrian earthly happiness, into the invocation of a Euripidean deus ex machina!
People should take note: Alexandrian culture requires a slave class in order to be able to exist over time, but with its optimistic view of existence, it denies the necessity for such a class and thus, when the effect of its beautiful words of seduction and reassurance about the “dignity of human beings” and the “dignity of work” has worn off, it gradually moves towards a horrific destruction. There is nothing more frightening than a barbarian slave class which has learned to think of its existence as an injustice and is preparing to take revenge, not only for itself, but for all generations.
In the face of such threatening storms, who dares appeal with sure confidence to our pale and exhausted religions, which themselves in their foundations have degenerated into scholarly religions, so that myth, the essential precondition for all religions, is already everywhere paralyzed-even in this area that optimistic spirit which we have just described as the germ of destruction of our society has gained control.
While the disaster slumbering in the bosom of theoretical culture gradually begins to worry modern man and while he, in his uneasiness, reaches into the treasure of his experience for ways to avert the danger, without any inherent faith in these means, and while he also begins to have a premonition of his own particular consequences, some great and widely gifted natures have, with incredibly careful thought, known how to use the tools of science to set out the boundaries and relative nature of knowledge itself and, in the process, decisively to deny the claim of science to universal validity and universal goals. With proofs like this, for the first time that delusion which presumes with the help of causality to be able to ground the innermost essence of things has become recognized for what it is.
The immense courage and wisdom of Kant and Schopenhauer achieved the most difficult victory, the one over the optimism lying concealed in the essential nature of logic, which is, in turn, the foundation of our culture. While this logic, based on aeternae veritates [eternal truths] which it did not consider open to objection, had believed that all the riddles of the world could be recognized and resolved and had treated space, time, and causality as totally unconditional laws with the most universal validity, Kant showed how these really served only to raise mere appearance, the work of Maja, to the only reality, the highest reality, and to set it in place as the innermost and true essence of things and thus to make true knowledge of this essence impossible, that is, to use an expression of Schopenhauer, to get the dreamer to sleep even more soundly (World as Will and Idea, I, 498).
With this recognition there is introduced a culture which I venture to describe as a tragic culture. Its most important distinguishing feature is that wisdom replaces knowledge as the highest goal, a wisdom which, undeceived by the seductive diversions of science, turns its unswerving gaze towards the all-encompassing picture of the world and, with a sympathetic feeling of love, seeks in that world to grasp eternal suffering as its own suffering. Let’s imagine a growing generation with this fearless gaze, this heroic attraction for what is immense; let’s imagine the bold step of these dragon slayers, the proud daring with which they turn their backs on all the doctrines of weakness belonging to that optimism, in order to “live resolutely,” fully and completely. Would that not require the tragic man of this culture in his self-education for seriousness and terror to desire a new art, the art of metaphysical consolation, to desire tragedy as the Helen which belongs to him and to have to cry out with Faust:
With my desire’s power, should I not call Into this life the fairest form of all?
However, now that Socratic culture has been shaken on two sides-once by the fear of its own consequences, which it is definitely beginning to sense, and, in addition, because it is itself no longer convinced of the eternal validity of its foundations with that earlier naïve trust-it can hang onto the sceptre of its infallibility only with trembling hands. So it’s a sorry spectacle-how the dance of its thinking dashes longingly after new forms in order to embrace them and then how, like Mephistopheles with the seductive Lamia, it suddenly, with a shudder, lets them go.
That is, in fact, the characteristic mark of that fracture which everyone habitually talks about as the root malady of modern culture, that theoretical man is afraid of his own consequences and, in his dissatisfaction, no longer dares to commit himself to the fearful ice currents of existence. He runs anxiously up and down along the shore. He no longer wants to have anything completely, any totality with all the natural cruelty of things. That’s how much the optimistic way of seeing things has mollycoddled him. At the same time he feels how a culture which has been built on the principles of science must collapse when it begins to become illogical, that is, when it begins to run back, away from its own consequences.
Our art reveals this general distress: in vain people use imitation to lean on all the great productive periods and natures; in vain they gather all “world literature” around modern man to bring him consolation and place him in the middle of artistic styles and artists of all ages, so that he may, like Adam with the animals, give them a name. But he remains an eternally hungry man, the “critic” without joy and power, the Alexandrian man, who is basically a librarian and copy editor and goes miserably blind from the dust of books and printing errors.
19
We can designate the innermost form of this Socratic culture most precisely when we call it the culture of opera, for in this area our Socratic culture, with characteristic naiveté, has expressed its wishes and perceptions – something astonishing to us if we bring the genesis of opera and the facts of the development of opera together with the eternal truths of the Apollonian and the Dionysian.
First, I recall the emergence of the stilo rappresentativo [the representational style] and of recitative. Is it credible that this entirely externalized opera music, something incapable of worship, could be accepted and preserved with wildly enthusiastic favour, as if it were the rebirth of all true music, in an age in which Palestrina’s inexpressibly awe-inspiring and sacred music had just arisen? On the other hand, who would make the diversion-loving voluptuousness of those Florentine circles or the vanity of its dramatic singers responsible for such a rapidly spreading love of opera? The fact that in the same age, indeed, in the same peoples, alongside the vaulted structure of Palestrina’s harmonies, which the entire Christian Middle Ages had developed, there awoke that passion for a half-musical way of speaking-that I can only explain by some tendency beyond art, something also at work in the very nature of recitative.
To the listener who wishes to hear clearly the word under the singing, there corresponds the singer who speaks more than he sings and who intensifies the expressions of pathos in half-singing. Through this intensification of pathos he makes the words easier to understand and overpowers what’s left of the musical half. The real danger now threatening him is that at an inopportune moment he may give the music the major emphasis, so that the pathos in the speech and the clarity of the words necessarily disappear. On the other hand, he always feels the urge for musical release and a virtuoso presentation of his voice. Here the “poet” comes to his assistance, the man who knows how to provide him sufficient opportunities for lyrical interjections, repetitions of words and sentences, and so on, places where the singer can now rest in a purely musical element, without considering the words. This alternation of only half-sung speech full of urgent emotion and interjections which are all singing, which lies at the heart of the stilo rappresentativo, this rapidly changing effort at one moment to affect the understanding and imagination of the listener and at another to work on his musical senses, is something so completely unnatural and at the same time so innerly contradictory to the Dionysian and Apollonian artistic drives that we must conclude that the origin of recitative lies outside all artistic instincts.
According to this account, we should define recitative as the mixing of epic and lyric performing, but not at all in an innerly consistent blending, which could never have been attained with such entirely disparate things, but the most external conglutination, in the style of a mosaic, something the like of which has no model whatsoever in the realm of nature and experience. But this was not the opinion of those inventors of recitative. Rather they-along with their age-believed that through that stilo rappresentativo the secret of ancient music had been resolved and that only through it could one explain the tremendous effect of an Orpheus, Amphion, and, indeed, even of Greek tragedy. The new style was valued as the re-awakening of the most effective music-the music of the ancient Greeks. In fact, under the universal and totally popular conception of the Homeric world as the primitive world, people allowed themselves to surrender to the dream that they had now climbed down back once more into the paradisal beginnings of humankind, when music necessarily must have had that superb purity, power, and innocence which the poets knew how to talk about so movingly in their pastoral plays.
Here we see the innermost development of this truly modern style of art, the opera. A powerful need forces itself out in art, but it is a need of an unaesthetic sort: the yearning for the idyllic, the belief in a primordial existence of the artistic and good man. Recitative served as the rediscovered language of that primordial man, and opera as the rediscovered land of that idyllic or heroically good being, who in all his actions at the same time follows a natural artistic drive, who sings at least something in everything he has to say, so that, given the slightest emotional arousal, he can immediately sing out in full voice.
For us now it is unimportant that contemporary humanists used this newly created picture of the paradisal artist to fight against the old church idea of human beings as inherently corrupt and lost, so that opera is to be understood as the opposing dogma of good people, something in which they simultaneously discovered a way of consoling themselves against that pessimism to which the seriously minded people of that time, given the horrifying uncertainties of all social conditions, were attracted most strongly. It’s enough for us to recognize how the real magic and thus the origin of this new artistic form lies in the satisfaction of an entirely unaesthetic need, in the optimistic glorification of man as such, in its view of primitive man as naturally good and artistic man. This operatic principle has gradually transformed itself into a threatening and terrible demand, which we, faced with the socialist movement of the present day, can no longer fail to hear. The “good primitive man” wants his rights: what paradisal prospects!
Alongside this point I set another equally clear confirmation of my opinion that opera is constructed on the same principles as our Alexandrian culture. Opera is the birth of theoretical man, of the critical layman, not of the artist-one of the strangest facts in the history of all the arts. It was the demand of completely unmusical listeners that people had to hear the words above all, so that a rebirth of music was only to be expected when some way of singing was discovered according to which the words of the text rule over the counterpoint the way a lord rules his servants. For the words (they said) are nobler than the accompanying harmonic system just as the soul is nobler than the body. In the beginning of opera, the union of music, image, and word was treated according to the amateurish and unmusical crudity of these views. The first experiments with the sense of this aesthetic were launched in distinguished amateur circles in Florence by the poets and singers patronized there.
The man who is artistically impotent produces for himself a form of art precisely because he is the inherently inartistic man. Because he has no sense of the Dionysian depths of music, for his own sake he transforms musical taste into easy to understand verbal and musical rhetoric of the passions in stilo rappresentativo and into the voluptuousness of the art of singing. Because he is incapable of seeing a vision, he presses mechanics and decorative artists into his service. Because he has no idea how to grasp the true essence of the artist, he conjures up right in front of him the “artistic primitive man” to suit his own taste, that is, the man who, when passionate, sings and speaks verse. He dreams himself back in an age in which passion was sufficient to produce songs and poems, as if that feeling has ever been in a position to create something artistic. The precondition of opera is a false belief about the artistic process; it is, in fact, the idyllic faith that in reality every sensitive man is an artist. According to the meaning of this belief, opera is the expression of lay amateurs in art, something which dictates its laws with the cheerful optimism of theoretical man.
If we wanted to bring together into a single conception both of these ideas I have just described in connection with the origin of opera, all we would have left to do is to speak of an idyllic tendency in opera-and the only things we would need to use are Schiller’s way of expressing himself and his explanation. He claimed that nature and the ideal are either an object of sorrow, when the former is represented as lost and the latter as unattained or both are an object of joy, when they are represented as real. The first produces the elegy in a narrower sense, and the other produces the idyll in its broadest sense. And right away we must draw attention to the common characteristic of both of these ideas in the genesis of opera-that in them the ideal does not register as unattained and nature does not register as lost.
According to this feeling, there was a primordial time for man when he lay on the heart of nature and, with this state of nature, simultaneously attained the ideal of humanity in paradisal goodness and artistry. We all are said to have descended from these perfect primitive men, indeed, we still were their faithful image-we only had to cast some things away from us in order to recognize ourselves once again as these primitive people, thanks to a voluntary renunciation of superfluous scholarship, of lavish culture.
Through his operatic imitation of Greek tragedy, the educated man of the Renaissance let himself be led back to such a harmony of nature and the ideal, to an idyllic reality. He used this tragedy, as Dante used Virgil, to be brought right up to the gates of paradise, while from this point on he strode even further on his own and passed over from an imitation of the highest Greek art form to a “restoration of all things,” to a copy of man’s original art world.
What a confident good nature there is in these audacious attempts, right in the bosom of theoretical culture! Something to be explained only by the comforting faith that “man in himself” is the eternally virtuous hero of opera, the eternally piping or singing shepherd, who must always in the end rediscover himself as such, should he find out at some time or other that he has really lost himself for a while-something which is only the fruit of that optimism which here arises out of the depths of the Socratic world view, like a sweetly seductive fragrant column of air.
Hence among the characteristics of opera there is no sense at all of that elegiac pain of eternal loss-there is rather the cheerfulness of an eternal rediscovery, the comfortable joy in an idyllic reality which man can at least imagine for himself at all times. But in doing this, man may perhaps at some point suspect that this imagined reality is nothing other than a fantastically silly indulgence. Anyone able to measure this against the fearful seriousness of true nature and to compare it with the actual primitive scenes of the beginnings of humanity would have to cry out in disgust-Get rid of that phantom!
Nevertheless, we would be deceiving ourselves if we believed that such a playful being as opera could be chased away simply by a powerful shout, like a ghost. Whoever wants to destroy opera must undertake the struggle against that Alexandrine cheerfulness which expresses its favourite idea so naively in opera; in fact, opera is its real artistic form. But what can we expect for art itself from the effect of a form of art whose origins in general do not lie in the aesthetic realm but which have rather stolen from a half moralistic sphere over into the realm of art and which can deceive people about its hybrid origin only now and then?
On what juices does this parasitic operatic being feed itself, if not from the sap of true art? Are we not to assume that, under the influence of opera’s idyllic seductions and its Alexandrine arts of flattering, the highest task of art, the one we should take really seriously-saving the eye from a glimpse into the horror of the night and through the healing balm of illusion rescuing the subject from the spasms brought about by the strivings of the will-would degenerate into a trend to empty and scattered diversion? What happens to the eternal truths of the Dionysian and the Apollonian in such a mixture of styles of the sort I have set down as the essence of the stilo rappresentativo, where the music is considered the servant and the libretto the master, where the music is compared to the body and the libretto to the soul, where the highest goal at best will aim at a descriptive tone painting, as it was earlier with the new Attic dithyramb, where the music is completely alienated from its true office, which is to be a Dionysian world-mirror, so that the only thing left for it is to imitate the essential forms of appearances, like a slave of phenomena, and to arouse superficial entertainment in the play of lines and proportions?
A rigorous examination shows how this fatal influence of opera on music coincides precisely with the entire development of modern music. The optimism lurking in the genesis of opera and in the essence of the culture represented through opera succeeded with alarming speed in stripping music of its Dionysian world meaning and stamping on it a formally playful and entertaining character. This transformation can only be compared to something like the metamorphosis of Aeschylean man into the Alexandrian cheerful man.
If in the explanation given above we have been right to link the disappearance of the Dionysian spirit with an extremely striking but so far unexplained transformation and degeneration of Greek man, what hopes must revive in us when the most certain favourable signs bring us the guarantee of the gradual awakening of the Dionysian spirit in our contemporary world! It is not possible that the divine power of Hercules should remain always impotent in voluptuous bondage to Omphale. Out of the Dionysian foundation of the German spirit a power has arisen which has nothing in common with the most basic assumptions of Socratic culture, something those assumptions cannot explain or excuse. Rather from the point of view of this culture it is experienced as something terrible which cannot be explained, as something overpoweringly hostile-and that is German music, above all as it is to be understood in its forceful orbit from Bach to Beethoven, from Beethoven to Wagner.
Even in the best of circumstances what can the Socratic man of our day, greedy for knowledge, begin to make of this daemon rising from the inexhaustible depths? Neither from the lacework or arabesques of operatic melodies nor with the help of the arithmetic abacus of fugue and contrapuntal dialectic will a formula reveal itself in whose triple-powered light people can render that daemon obsequious and compel it to speak. What a spectacle when our aestheticians nowadays, with the fishing net of “beauty” all their own, strike at and try to catch that musical genius roaming about in front of them with incredible life, with movements which will not be judged according to eternal beauty any more than according to notions of the sublime. We should only inspect these patrons of music in person and at close quarters, when they cry out so tirelessly “Beauty! Beauty!” to see whether they look like educated and discriminating darling children of nature or whether they are not rather seeking a deceptively euphemistic form for their own crudity, an aesthetic pretext for their characteristically unfeeling sobriety. Here, for example, I’m thinking of Otto Jahn.
But the liar and hypocrite should beware of German music, for in the midst of all our culture it is precisely the one unalloyed pure and purifying fire spirit out from which and towards which all things move in a double orbit, as in the doctrine of the great Heraclitus of Ephesus: everything which we now call culture, education, and civilization must at some point appear before the unerring judge Dionysus. Furthermore, let’s remember how the spirit of German philosophy in Kant and Schopenhauer, streaming from the same springs, was able to annihilate the contented joy in existence of scholarly Socratism by demonstrating its boundaries, and how with this demonstration an infinitely deeper and more serious consideration of ethical questions and art was introduced, which we can truly describe as Dionysian wisdom conceptually understood.
Where does the mystery of this unity between German music and German philosophy point if not to a new form of existence, about whose meaning we can inform ourselves only by speculating on the basis of analogies with the Greeks? For the Greek model has this immeasurable value for us who stand on the border line between two different forms of existence-that in it are stamped all those transitions and struggles in a classically instructive form, except that we are, as it were, living through the great high points of Greek being in the reverse order. For example, we seem to be moving now out of an Alexandrian period backwards into a period of tragedy.
At the same time, we feel as if the birth of a tragic time period for the German spirit only means a return to itself, a blessed re-discovery of self, after immensely powerful forces from outside had for a long time forced it into servitude under their form, since that spirit, so far as form is concerned, lived in helpless barbarism. And now finally after its return home to the original spring of its being, it can dare to stride in here before all peoples, bold and free, without the guiding reins of Roman civilization. If only it can now understand how to learn all the time from a single people, the Greeks-being capable of learning from them is already a high honour and a remarkable distinction. And when have we needed these most eminent of mentors more than now, when we are experiencing the rebirth of tragedy and are in danger of not knowing where it is coming from or of being able to interpret where it is going?
20
At some point under the gaze of an incorruptible judge we may determine in what ages and in which men up to now the German spirit has struggled most powerfully to learn from the Greeks. And if we can assume with some confidence that this extraordinary praise must be awarded to the noblest cultural struggles of Goethe, Schiller, and Winckelmann, then we would certainly have to add that since that time and the most recent developments of that battle, the attempt to attain a culture and to reach the Greeks by the same route has become incomprehensibly weaker and weaker.
In order to avoid being forced into total despair about the German spirit, shouldn’t we conclude from all this that in some important point or other these fighters were not successful in penetrating the Hellenic spirit and creating a lasting bond of love between German and Greek culture? And beyond that, perhaps an unconscious recognition of this failure gives rise in serious people to the enervating doubt whether, after such predecessors, they could go even further than these men had along this cultural path and reach their goal at all. For that reason since that time we’ve seen judgments about the educational value of the Greeks degenerate in the most disturbing way. We can hear expressions of sympathetic condescension in the most varied encampments of the spirit and of the lack of spirit. In other places a completely ineffectual sweet talk flirts with “Greek harmony,” “Greek beauty,” and “Greek cheerfulness.”
And precisely in the circles which could dignify themselves by drawing tirelessly from the Greek river bed in order to benefit German education-the circles of teachers in the institutes of higher education-people have learned best to come to terms with the Greeks early and in a comfortable manner, often with a sceptical abandoning of the Hellenic ideal and a total reversal of the real purpose of classical studies. In general, anyone in these circles who hasn’t completely exhausted himself in the effort to be a dependable corrector of old texts or a microscopic studier of language, like some natural historian may perhaps also seek to acquire Greek antiquity “historically,” as well as other antiquities, but in any case following the methods of our present scholarly writing, along with their supercilious expressions.
If, as a result, the real cultural power of our institutions of higher learning has certainly never been lower and weaker than at present, if the “journalist,” the paper slave of the day, has won his victory over the professors so far as culture is concerned and the only thing still left for the latter is the frequently experienced metamorphosis which has them also moving around these days with the speech styles of a journalist, with the “light elegance” of this sphere, like cheerful well-educated butterflies, then how awkward and confusing it must be for people living in such a present and educated in this manner to stare at that phenomenon of the revival of the Dionysian spirit and the rebirth of tragedy, something which may only be understood by some analogy to the most profound principles of the as yet incomprehensible Hellenic genius.
There is no other artistic period in which so-called culture and true art have stood more alienated from and averse to each other than what we witness with our own eyes nowadays. We understand why such a weak culture despises true art, for it fears such art will destroy it. But surely an entire form of culture, i.e., the Socratic-Alexandrian, must have run its full life after being able to culminate in such a delicate and insignificant point as our present culture.
When heroes like Schiller and Goethe couldn’t succeed in breaking down that enchanted door which leads to the Hellenic magic mountain, when for all their most courageous struggles they reached no further than that yearning gaze which Goethe’s Iphigeneia sent from barbaric Tauris over the sea towards her home, what is left for the imitators of such heroes to hope for, unless from some totally different side, untouched by all the efforts of previous culture, the door might suddenly open on its own-to the accompaniment of the mysterious sound of the reawakened music of tragedy.
Let no one try to detract from our belief in a still imminent rebirth of Hellenic antiquity, for that’s the only place where we find our hope for a renewal and reformation of the German spirit through the fiery magic of music. What would we otherwise know to name which amid the desolation and weariness of contemporary culture could awaken some comforting expectation for the future? We look in vain for a single powerfully branching root, for a spot of fertile and healthy soil-but everywhere there is dust, sand, ossification, and decay. Here a desperate, isolated man couldn’t choose a better symbol than the knight with Death and the Devil, as Dürer has drawn him for us, the knight in armour with the hard bronze gaze, who knows how to make his way along his terrible path, without wavering at his horrific companions-and yet without any hope, alone with his horse and hound. Such a Dürer knight was our Schopenhauer: he lacked all hope, but he wanted the truth. There is no one like him.
But how suddenly that wilderness of such an exhausted culture as the one I have just sketched out so gloomily changes when the Dionysian magic touches it! A tempest seizes everything worn out, rotten, broken apart, and stunted, wraps it in a red whirling cloud of dust, and lifts it like a vulture up into the air. In our bewilderment, our gaze seeks out what has disappeared, for what we see has risen up as if from oblivion into golden light, so full and green, so richly alive, so immeasurable and full of longing. Tragedy sits in the midst of this superfluity of life, suffering, and joy; with awe-inspiring delight it listens to a distant melancholy song, which tells of the mothers of being whose names are Delusion, Will, and Woe.
Yes, my friends, believe with me in the Dionysian life and in the rebirth of tragedy. The age of the Socratic man is over: crown yourselves with ivy, take the thyrsus stalk in your hand, and don’t be amazed when tigers and panthers lie down fawning at your feet. Only now you must dare to be tragic men, for you will be redeemed. You are to lead the Dionysian celebratory procession from India to Greece! Arm yourselves for a hard battle, but have faith in the miracles of your god!
21
Moving back from this tone of exhortation into a mood suitable for contemplation, I repeat that only from the Greeks can we learn what such a miraculously sudden awakening of tragedy can mean for the innermost fundamental life of a people. It is the people of tragic mystery who fight the Persian wars, and again the people who carried on these wars uses tragedy as an essential potion in their recovery. Who would have supposed that such a people, after being stirred right to their innermost being for several generations by the strongest paroxysms of the Dionysian demon, were still capable of a regular and powerful outpouring of the simplest political feeling, the most natural instinctive feeling for their homeland, the original manly desire to fight?
Nonetheless, if we always sense in that remarkable extension of oneself into one’s surroundings associated with Dionysian arousal how Dionysian release from the shackles of individuality registers at first as a heightened indifference-even apathy and hostility-to the political instincts, on the other hand, Apollo, the nation builder, is also the genius of the principium individuationis [individualizing principle], and a sense of state and homeland cannot survive without an affirmation of the individual personality.
From ecstatic experience there is only one way out for a people, the route to Indian Buddhism, which, with its longing for nothingness, in order to be endurable requires those rare ecstatic states with their ascent above space, time, and individuality. These states, in their turn, demand a philosophy which teaches people to use some idea to overcome the unimaginable dreariness of intermediate states. In cases where the political drives are considered unconditionally valid, it’s equally necessary for a people to turn to the path of the most extreme forms of secularization. The most magnificent but also the most terrifying example of this is the Roman empire.
Standing between India and Rome and forced to make a tempting choice, the Greeks succeeded in inventing a third form in classical purity. Of course, they did not make use of it for long, but for that very reason they made it immortal. That fact that the darlings of the gods die early holds in all things, but it’s equally certain that then they live among the gods for ever. So people should not demand from the noblest thing of all that it should possess the hard-wearing durability of leather-that crude toughness characteristic of the Roman national impulses, for example, probably does not belong to the necessary predicates of perfection.
But if we ask what remedies made it possible for the Greek in their great period, with the extraordinary strength of their Dionysian and political drives, not to exhaust themselves either with an ecstatic brooding or in a consuming pursuit of world power and worldly honour, but to reach that marvelous mixture-just as a noble wine makes one feel fiery and meditative at the same time-then we must keep in mind the immense power of tragedy, which stimulated the entire people, purifying them and giving them release. We will first sense its highest value when it confronts us, as with the Greeks, as the essence of all prophylactic healing potions, as the mediator between the strongest and inherently most disastrous characteristics of a people.
Tragedy draws the highest ecstatic music into itself, so that, with the Greeks, as with us, it immediately brings music to perfection. But then it places the tragic myth and the tragic hero next to the music, who then, like a powerful Titan, takes the whole Dionysian world on his back and thus relieves us of it. On the other hand with the same tragic myth, in the person of the tragic hero, tragedy knows how to redeem us from the avid pressure for this existence and with a warning hand reminds us of another state of being and a higher pleasure for which the struggling hero, full of foreboding, is preparing himself, not through his victory but through his destruction.
Tragedy places between the universal validity of its music and the listener sensitive to the Dionysian an awe-inspiring parable-the myth-and with that gives rise to an illusion, as if the music is only the production’s highest device for bringing life to the plastic world of myth. Trusting in this noble deception, tragedy can now move its limbs in the dithyrambic dance and abandon itself unconsciously to an ecstatic feeling of freedom in which it would not dare to revel without that deception.
The myth protects us from the music, while it, by contrast, immediately gives the music its highest freedom. In return, the music gives back to the tragic myth, as a return gift, an urgent and convincing metaphysical significance, of a kind which words and pictures never could attain without its help. And particularly through the music there comes over the spectator of tragedy that certain presentiment of the highest joy, the road to which leads through destruction and negation, so that he thinks what he hears is like the innermost abyss of things speaking to him out loud.
If in these last sentences I have perhaps tried to provide only a provisional expression of this complex idea, something immediately intelligible to few people, at this very point I cannot refrain from encouraging my friends to a further attempt and from asking them to prepare themselves with a single example of our common experience in order to recognize a general principle.
With this example, I must not refer to those who use the images of the action in the scenes-the words and emotions of active people-in order with their help to come closer to the feeling of the music. For none of them speaks music as a mother tongue, and, for all that help, they proceed no further than the lobbies of musical perception, without ever being able to touch its innermost shrine. Some of these who take this road, like Gervinus, don’t even succeed in reaching the lobby. But I must turn only to those who have an immediate relationship with music and who find in it, as it were, their mother’s womb, those who stand bound up with things almost exclusively through an unconscious musical relationship.
To these true musicians I direct the question: Can they imagine a person capable of perceiving the third act of Tristan and Isolde as an immense symphonic movement, getting no help from words and images, without suffocating from a convulsive spreading of all the wings of his soul? A man who, as in this case, has set his ear, so to speak, on the heart chambers of the world’s will, who feels in himself the raging desire for existence pouring forth into all the veins of the world as a thundering rainstorm or as the most delicately spraying brook-would such a man not fall apart on the spot? Could he endure hearing in the suffering glass case of human individuality the echo of countless desires-and cries of woe from the “wide space of the world’s night,” without, in the midst of this shepherd’s medley of metaphysics, inexorably flying off to his original home? But what if nonetheless such a work could be perceived as a totality, without the denial of individual existence, what if such a creation could be produced without shattering its creator-where do we get the solution to such a contradiction?
Here between our highest musical excitement and this music the tragic myth and the tragic hero interpose themselves, basically only as a parable of the most universal facts of all, about which only music can speak directly. However, if we felt as purely Dionysian beings, then myth would be entirely ineffectual as a parable and would remain there beside us unnoticed. It would not make us turn our ears away for an instant from listening to the echo of the universalia ante rem [the universal before the fact].
But here the Apollonian power breaks through, preparing for the reintegration of shattered individuality with the healing balm of blissful illusion. Suddenly we think we see only Tristan, motionless and dazed, as he asks himself, “The old melody-what does it awaken for me?” And what earlier struck us as an empty sigh from the centre of being now only says to us something like “the barren, empty sea.” And where we imagined we were dying in a convulsive inner working out of all our feelings with only a little linking us to this existence, now we hear and see only the hero mortally wounded and yet not dying, with his cry full of despair, “Longing! Longing! In death still yearning not to die from yearning!” And when earlier, after such an excess and such a huge number of torments consuming us, the jubilation of the horns, almost like an extreme agony, cuts through our hearts, there stands between us and this “jubilation in itself” the celebrating Kurwenal, turned towards the ship carrying Isolde. No matter how powerful the compassion gripping us inside, in a certain sense, nonetheless, this compassion saves us from the primordial suffering of the world, just as the symbolic picture of myth saves us from the immediate look at the highest world idea, just as thoughts and words save us from the unrestrained outpouring of the unconscious will. Because of that marvelous Apollonian deception it seems to us as if the empire of music confronted us as a plastic world, as if only Tristan’s and Isolde’s destiny had been formed and stamped out in pictures in the most delicate and expressive of all material.
Thus the Apollonian rescues us from Dionysian universality and delights us with individuals. It attaches our aroused feelings of sympathy to them, and with them it satisfies our sense of beauty, our longing for great and awe-inspiring forms. It presents images of life to us and provokes us to a thoughtful grasp of the kernel of life contained in them. With the immense power of imagery, ideas, ethical instruction, and sympathetic arousal, the Apollonian lifts man up out of his ecstatic self-destruction and blinds him to the universality of the Dionysian process, leading him to the delusion that he is watching just one image of the world (for example, Tristan and Isolde) and that the music only helps him see it better and with greater profundity.
What can the skilful healing power of Apollo’s magic not achieve, if it can even excite in us this delusion, so that it seems as if the Dionysian is really working to serve the Apollonian, capable of intensifying its effects-in fact, as if the music was essentially an artistic presentation of an Apollonian content?
With that pre-established harmony which reigns between the perfect drama and its music, drama attains an extreme degree of vividness, something which verbal drama cannot approach. In the independently moving melodic lines all the living forms in the scene simplify themselves into the clarity of curved lines, and the juxtaposition of these lines sounds out to us, sympathizing in the most delicate way with the action as it moves forward. As this happens, the relation of things becomes immediately audible to us in a more sensuously perceptible way, which has nothing abstract about it at all, as we also recognize through it that only in these relations does the essence of a character and of a melodic line clearly reveal itself.
And while the music compels us in this way to see more and more profoundly than ever and the scenic action spreads itself in front of us like a delicate spider’s web, our inner view of the world of the stage is infinitely widened and illuminated from within. What could a word poet offer analogous to this-someone who struggles with a very imperfect mechanism in indirect ways to attain with words and ideas that inner expansion of the vivid world of the stage and its inner illumination? Musical tragedy, of course, also uses the word, but at the same time it can set beside it the fundamental basis and origin of that word and reveal to us from inside what that word has become.
But nonetheless we could just as surely claim about this depiction of the action that it is only a marvelous appearance, i.e., that previously mentioned Apollonian delusion, through whose effects we should be relieved of the Dionysian surge and excess. In fact, the relationship between music and drama is fundamentally the reverse-the music is the essential idea of the word, and the drama is only a reflection of this idea, its isolated silhouette.
This identity between the melodic line and the living form, between the harmony and the relations of the characters in that form, is true in an sense opposite to what it might seem to be for us as we look at musical tragedy. We may well stir up the form in the most visible way, enliven and illuminate it from within, but it always remains only an appearance, from which there is no bridge leading to true reality, to the heart of the world. But music speaks out from this heart, and though countless appearances could clothe themselves in the same music, they would never exhaust its essence-they would always be only its external reflection.
And, of course, with the complex relationship between music and drama nothing is explained and everything is confused by the popular and entirely false contrast between the soul and the body. But among our aestheticians it’s precisely the unphilosophical crudity of this contrast which seems to have become, for reasons nobody knows, a well known article of faith, while they have learned nothing about the difference between the appearance and the thing-in-itself or, for similarly unknown reasons, don’t want to learn anything.
If one result of our analysis might be that the Apollonian in tragedy, thanks to its deception, emerges victorious over the primordial Dionysian elements of music and makes use of these for its own purposes, that is, for the highest dramatic clarity, a very important reservation naturally follows: at the most essential point of all that Apollonian deception is broken up and destroyed. Drama, which, with the help of music, spreads out in front of us with such innerly illuminated clarity in all its movements and forms, as if we were seeing the fabric on the loom while the shuttle moves back and forth, achieves its effect as a totality which lies beyond all the artistic workings of the Apollonian. In the total action of tragedy the Dionysian regains its superiority once more. Tragedy ends with a tone which never could resound from the realm of Apollonian art.
And as that happens, the Apollonian deception reveals itself for what it is, as the veil which, so long as the tragedy is going on, has covered the essentially Dionysian effect. But this Dionysian effect is nonetheless so powerful that at the end it drives the Apollonian drama itself into a sphere where it begins to speak with Dionysian wisdom and where it denies itself and its Apollonian visibility. So we could truly symbolize the complex relationship between the Apollonian and the Dionysian in tragedy with the fraternal bond between both divinities: Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo, but Apollo finally speaks the language of Dionysus, and with that the highest goal of tragedy and art in general is attained.
22
An attentive friend should remind himself, from his own experience, of the pure and unmixed effect of a truly musical tragedy. I think I have described what this effect is like, attending to both aspects of it, so that he will now know how to clarify his own experience for himself. For he will recall how, confronted with the myth unfolding in front of him, he felt himself raised up to some sort of omniscience, as if now the visual power of his eyes was not merely a force dealing with surfaces but was capable of penetrating within, as if, with the help of the music, he could see in front him the turbulent feelings of the will, the war of motives, the growing storm of passions as something which is, as it were, sensuously present, like an abundance of living lines and figures in motion, and thus as if he could plunge into the most delicate secrets of unknown emotions.
As he becomes conscious of this highest intensification of his instincts which aim for clarity and transfiguration, nonetheless he feels with equal certainty that this long series of Apollonian artistic effects does not produce that delightful indifference of will-less contemplation which the sculptor and the epic poet-that is, the genuine Apollonian artist-bring out in him with their works of art, that is, the justification of the world of the individual attained in that contemplation, which is the peak and essence of Apollonian art. He looks at the transfigured world of the stage and yet denies it.
He sees the tragic hero in front of him in his epic clarity and beauty and, nonetheless, takes pleasure in his destruction. He understands the scenic action to its innermost core, and yet joyfully flies off into the incomprehensible. He feels the actions of the hero as justified and is, nonetheless, still more uplifted when these actions destroy the one who initiated them. He shudders at the suffering which the hero is about to encounter and, nonetheless, because of it has a premonition of a higher, much more overpowering joy. He perceives more things and more profoundly than ever before and yet wishes he were blind.
Where would we be able to derive this miraculous division of the self, this collapse of the Apollonian climax, if not from Dionysian magic, which, while it apparently excites the Apollonian feelings to their highest point, nevertheless can still force this exuberance of Apollonian art into its service? The tragic myth can only be understood as a symbolic picture of Dionysian wisdom by means of Apollonian art. It leads the world of appearances to its limits where it denies itself and once again seeks to fly back into the bosom of the true and single reality, at which point it seems, like Isolde, to sing its metaphysical swan song.
In the surging torrents of seas of my desires, in resounding tones of fragrant waves, in the blowing All of the world’s breath- to drown, to sink down to lose consciousness- the highest joy.
So we remember the experiences of the truly aesthetic listener, the tragic artist himself, as he, like a voluptuous divinity of individualism, creates his forms-in which sense his work can scarcely be understood as an “imitation of nature”-and as his immense Dionysian drive then devours this entire world of appearances in order to allow him, through its destruction, to have a premonition of the original and highest artistic joy in the primordial One.
Of course, our aestheticians don’t know what to write about this return journey to our original home, about the fraternal bond of the brother gods of art in tragedy, any more than they do about the Apollonian or the Dionysian excitement of the listener, while they never weary of characterizing as the essential feature of the tragic the struggle of the hero with fate, the victory of a moral world order, or the purging of the emotions achieved by tragedy. Such tireless efforts lead me to the thought that in general they may be men incapable of aesthetic excitement, so that when they hear a tragedy perhaps they think of themselves only as moral beings.
Since Aristotle, there has not yet been an explanation of the tragic effect from which one might be able to infer aesthetic conditions or the aesthetic capability of the listener. Sometimes pity and fear are supposed to be pushed by the serious action to an discharge which brings relief. At other times, we are supposed to feel enthusiastic and elevated because of the victory of good and noble principles, by the sacrifice of the hero, taking that as a service to a moral world order.
I have no doubt that for countless men that and only that is precisely the effect of tragedy. But this reveals equally clearly that all these people, together with their aesthetic interpreters, have experienced nothing of tragedy as the highest art. That pathological purgation, the catharsis of Aristotle, which the philologues are uncertain whether to count a medical or a moral phenomenon, brings to mind a remarkable idea of Goethe’s. “Without a living pathological interest,” he says, “I have also never succeeded in working on any kind of tragic situation, and therefore I prefer to avoid it rather than seek it out. Could it perhaps be the case that among the merits of the ancients the highest degree of the pathetic was also only aesthetic play for them, while with us the truth of nature must be there as well in order for such a work to be produced?”
After our glorious experiences we can now answer yes to this profound question-after we have experienced with wonder precisely this musical tragedy, how truly the highest degree of the pathetic can be, for all that, only an aesthetic game. For that reason, we’re justified in claiming that only now can the primordial phenomenon of the tragic be described with some success. Anyone who nowadays still provides explanations in terms of those surrogate effects from spheres beyond aesthetics and doesn’t sense that he has risen above the pathological and moralistic processes may well despair of his aesthetic nature. For that condition we recommend as an innocent substitute the interpretation of Shakespeare the way Gervinus does it with the diligent search for “poetic justice.”
So with the rebirth of tragedy the aesthetic listener is also born again, in whose place up to this point a strange quid pro quo habitually sat in the theatre space, with half moral and half scholarly demands-the “critic.” In his sphere so far everything has been only synthetic and whitewashed with the appearance of life. The performing artist in fact didn’t really know what he could begin to do with a listener who behaved so critically, and therefore he, together with dramatist or opera composer who inspired him, peered anxiously for the last remnants of life in this discriminating, barren creature incapable of enjoying itself.
But up to this point the general public has consisted of this sort of “critic.” Through education and the press, the student, the school child, indeed even the most harmless female creature has been prepared, without being aware of it, to perceive a work of art in a similar manner. The more noble natures among the artists, faced with such a public, counted on exciting moral and religious forces, and the call for “a moral world view” stepped in vicariously, where, in fact, a powerful artistic magic should have entranced the real listener. Alternatively, dramatists with a pronounced and at least exciting proclivity for contemporary political and social issues brought out such clear productions that the listener could forget his critical exhaustion and let himself go with feelings like patriotism or militaristic moments, or in front of the speaker’s desk in parliament or with judicial sentences for crimes and vices. And that necessarily led to an alienation from true artistic purposes and directly to a culture of attitudinizing.
But here there stepped in, what in every artificial art up to now has intervened, a ragingly quick deprivation of that very attitudinizing, so that, for example, the view that the theatre should be used as an institution for the moral education of a people, something taken serious in Schiller’s day, is already counted among the incredible antiquities of an education which has been superceded. As the critic came to rule in the theatre and concert and the journalist in the schools and the press in society, art degenerated into an object of entertainment of the basest sort, and the aesthetic critic was used as a way of binding together in a vain, scattered, selfish, and, beyond this, pitifully unoriginal society, of which we can get some sense in Schopenhauer’s parable of the porcupines, so there has never been a time when there has been so much chatter about art and when people think so little of it. But can’t we still associate with someone who is in a position to entertain himself with Beethoven and Shakespeare? Everyone may answer this question according to his own feelings-with his answer he will at any rate demonstrate what he imagines by the word “culture,” provided he seeks to answer the question at all and is not already struck dumb with astonishment.
By contrast, someone with a nobler and more naturally refined ability-even if he also has gradually turned into a critical barbarian in the manner described above-could say something about an unexpected and entirely incomprehsible effect of the sort which something like a happily successful production of Lohengrin had on him, except perhaps he didn’t have a hand which could advise him and clearly lead him, so that that incomprehensibly varied and totally incomparable sensation which so shook him at the time remained a single example and, after a short period of illumination, died out, like a mysterious star. That was the moment he had a presentiment of what an aesthetic listener is.
23
Anyone who wants an accurate test for himself to see how closely related he is to the truly aesthetic listener or how much he belongs with the Socratic-critical community could sincerely ask himself about the feelings with which he receives some miracle presented on stage. In that situation, for example, does he feel offended in his historical sense, which organizes itself on strict psychological causality, or does he, in a spirit of generosity, as it were, make a concession to the miracle as something comprehensible in childhood but foreign to him, or does he suffer anything else at all in that process?
For in doing this he will be able to measure how far, in general, he is capable of understanding the myth, the concentrated image of the world, which, as an abbreviation of appearance, cannot work without the miracle. However, it’s likely that almost everyone in a strict test would feel himself so thoroughly corrupted by the critical-historical spirit of our culture that he could make the previous existence of the myth credible only with something scholarly, by compromising with some abstractions. However, without myth that culture forfeits its healthy creative natural power: only a horizon reorganized through myth completes the unity of an entire cultural movement.
Through myth all the powers of illusion and of Apollonian dream are first rescued from their random wandering around. The images of myth must be the unseen, omnipresent demonic sentries under whose care the young soul matures and by whose signs a man interprets his life and struggles for himself. Even the state knows no more powerful unwritten laws than the mythical foundation which guarantees its connection to religion, its growth out of mythic ideas.
Alongside that let’s now place abstract people, those who are not led by myths, as well as abstract education, abstract customs, abstract law, the abstract state. Let’s remember the disorderly roaming of artistic fantasy which is not restrained by any secret myth. Let’s imagine a culture which has no fixed and sacred primordial seat but which is condemned to exhaust all possibilities and to live on a meagre diet from all other cultures-and there we have the present, the result of that Socratism whose aim is to destroy myth.
And now the man without a myth stands there, eternally hungry, in the midst of all past ages, rummaging around and digging as he looks for roots, even if he has to shovel for them in the most remote ancient times. What is revealed in the immense historical need of this dissatisfied modern culture, the gathering up of countless other cultures, the consuming desire to know, if not the loss of myth, the loss of the mythic homeland, of the mythic maternal womb?
Let’s ask ourselves whether the feverish and eerie inner excitements of this culture is something other than a starving man’s greedy snatch and grab for food-and who would still want to give such a culture anything, when nothing which it gobbles down satisfies it and when, at its touch, the most powerful and healthiest nourishment usually changes into “history and criticism.”
We would also have to experience painful despair over our German being, if it is already inextricably intermixed in a similar way with its culture, or, indeed, if they have become a single unit, as we can observe, to our horror, with civilized France. What for a long time constituted the great merit of France and the cause of its huge superiority-that very unity of being in people and culture-should make us, when we look at it, praise our luck and give thanks that such a questionable culture has had nothing in common up to this point with the noble core of our people’s character.
Instead of that, all our hopes are reaching out yearningly towards the perception that under his restless cultural life jumping around here and there and these cultural convulsions lies hidden a glorious, innerly healthy, and age-old power, which naturally only begins to stir into powerful motion at tremendous moments and then goes on dreaming once again about a future awakening. Out of this abyss the German Reformation arose. In its choral music there rang out for the first time the future style of German music. Luther’s choral works sounded as profound, courageous, spiritual, as exhuberantly good and tender as the first Dionysian call rising up out of the thickly growing bushes at the approach of spring. In answer to it came the competing echo of that solemn procession of Dionysian dreamers, whom we have to thank for German music and whom we will thank for the rebirth of the German myth!
I know that now I have to take the sympathetic friend who is following me to a lofty place for lonely contemplation, where he will have only a few travelling companions. By way of encouragement I call out to him that we have to keep hold of those leaders who illuminate the way for us, the Greeks. Up to now in order to purify our aesthetic awareness, we have borrowed from them both of those images of the gods, each of whom rules a specific artistic realm, and by considering Greek tragedy, we came to an awareness of their mutual contact and intensification.
To us the downfall of Greek tragedy must seem to have occurred through a remarkable tearing apart of both of these primordial artistic drives. And this event corresponded to a degeneration and transformation of the character of the Greek people-something which demands from us some serious reflection about how necessarily and closely art and people, myth and custom, tragedy and the state are fundamentally intertwined.
That downfall of tragedy was at the same time the downfall of myth. Up to that point the Greeks were instinctively compelled to tie everything they lived through immediately to their myths-in fact, to understand that experience only through this link. By doing that, even the most recent present moment had to appear to them at once sub species aeterni [under the eye of eternity] and thus, in a certain sense, to be timeless. In this stream of the timeless, however, the state and art both plunged equally, in order to find in it rest from the weight and the greed of the moment. And a people (as well as a person, by the way) is only worth as much as it can stamp upon its experiences the mark of the eternal, for in that way it is, as it were, relieved of the burden of the world and demonstrates its unconscious inner conviction of the relativity of time and of the True, that is, of the metaphysical meaning of life.
Something quite different from this happens when a people begins to understand itself historically and to smash up the mythic bastions standing around it. It is customary for a decisive secularization, a breach with the unconscious metaphysics of its earlier existence, with all the ethical consequences, to be tied in with this process. Greek art and especially Greek tragedy above all checked the destruction of myth. People had to destroy them in order to be able to live detached from their home soil, unrestrained in the wildness of thought, custom, and action.
But now this metaphysical drive still tries to create, even in a toned down form, a transfiguration for itself, in the Socratism of science which pushes toward life. But on the lower steps this very drive led only to a feverish search, which gradually lost itself in a pandemonium of myths and superstitions from all over the place all piled up together. For all that, the Hellene still sat in the middle this pile with an unquenched heart, until he understood to mask that fever, like Graeculus, with Greek cheerfulness and Greek negligence or to plunge completely into some stupefying oriental superstition or other.
In the most obvious way, since the reawakening of Alexandrian-Roman antiquity in the fifteenth century after a long and difficult to describe interval, we have come closer to this condition. Up on the heights this same abundant desire for knowledge, the same dissatisfied happiness in discovery, the same immense secularization, alongside a homeless wandering around, a greedy thronging at foreign tables, a reckless idolizing of the present or a lifeless numbed turning away-with everything sub specie saeculi [under the eye of the secular age], of the “present age.”
These same symptoms lead us to suspect the same lack at the heart of this culture-the destruction of myth. It seems hardly possible that transplanting a foreign myth would enjoy any lasting success, without irreparably damaging the tree in the transplant. Perhaps it is at some point strong and healthy enough to slice out this foreign element with a fearful struggle, but usually it must proliferate its diseased condition, sick and faded.
We have such a high regard for the pure and powerful core of the German being that it is precisely there we dare to expect from it that elimination of powerfully planted foreign elements and consider it possible that the German spirit will come back into an awareness of itself on its own. Perhaps some people will think that this spirit would have start its struggle with the elimination of the Romantic But at that point he has to remember an external preparation and encouragement in the victorious courage and bloody glory of the recent war but search for the inner necessity in the competitive striving always to be worthy of the noble pioneers on this road, including Luther just as much as our great artists and poets.
But let him never believe that he can fight such a battle without his house gods, without his mythic homeland, without a “bringing back” of all German things! And if the German in his hesitation should look around him for a leader who will take him back again to his long lost home land, whose roads and pathways he hardly knows any more, let him only listen to the sweet enticing call of the Dionysian bird hovering above him seeking to show him the way.
24
Among the characteristic artistic effects of musical tragedy we had to stress an Apollonian illusion through which we are supposedly rescued from immediate unity of being with the Dionysian music, while our musical excitement can discharge itself in an Apollonian sphere, in a visible middle world which interposed itself. By doing this we though we had noticed how, through this discharge, that this middle world of the scenic action, the drama in general, to a certain degree became visible and comprehensible from within, in a way which is unattainable in all other Apollonian art. Hence, it was here, where the Apollonian is energized and raised aloft, as it were, through the spirit of the music, we had to recognize the highest intensification of its power and, therefore, in the fraternal bond of Apollo and Dionysus the highest point of both Apollonian and Dionysian artistic aims.
Of course, the projected Apollonian image with this inner illumination through music does not achieve the effect characteristic of the weaker degrees of Apollonian art-what epic or animated stone are capable of, compelling the contemplating eye to that calm delight in the world of the individual. In spite of a higher animation and clarity, that effect will not permit itself to be attained
We looked at drama and with a penetrating gaze forced our way into the inner moving world of its motives-and nonetheless for us it was as if only an allegorical picture passed before us, whose most profound meaning we thought we could almost guess and which we wanted to pull aside, like a curtain, in order to look at the primordial image behind it. The brightest clarity of the image did not satisfy us. For this seemed to hide just as much as it revealed. And while, with its allegorical-like revelation, it seemed to promise to rip aside the veil, to disclose the mysterious background, once again that penetrating light illuminating everything held the eye in its spell and held it from penetrating any more deeply.
Anyone who has not had the experience of having to watch and, at the same time, of yearning to go above and beyond watching will have difficulty imagining how definitely and clearly these two processes exist together and are felt alongside each other as one observes the tragic myth. However, the truly aesthetic spectators will confirm for me that among the peculiar effects of tragedy this co-existence may be the most remarkable.
If we now translate this phenomenon going on in the aesthetic spectator into an analogous process in the tragic artist, we will have understood the genesis of the tragic myth. He shares with the Apollonian sphere of art the full joy in appearances and in watching-at the same time he denies this joy and has an even higher satisfaction in the destruction of the visible world of appearances.
The content of the tragic myth is at first an epic event with the glorification of the struggling hero. But what is the origin of that inherently mysterious feature, the fact that the suffering in the fate of the hero, the most painful victories, the most agonizing opposition of motives, in short, the exemplification of that wisdom of Silenus, or, expressing it aesthetically, of the ugly and dissonant, in so many countless forms, is presented with such fondness, always renewed-and precisely in the richest and youngest age of a people? Do we not perceive in all this a higher pleasure?
For the fact that in life things are really so tragic would at least account for the development of an art form-if art is not only an imitation of natural reality but a metaphysical supplement to that reality, set beside it in order to overcome it. And the tragic myth, in so far as it belongs to art at all, also participates fully in this general purpose of art to provide metaphysical transfiguration. But what does it transfigure, when it leads out the world of appearance in the image of the suffering hero? Least of all the “Reality” of this world of appearances, for it says directly to us: “Look here! Look right here! This is your life! Tis is the hour hand on the clock of your existence!”
And does the myth show us this life in order to transfigure it for us? If not, in what does the aesthetic joy consist with which we also allow these images to pass in front of us? I ask about aesthetic delight and know full well that many of these images can in addition now and then still produce a moral pleasure, for example, in the form of pity or a moral triumph. But whoever wants to derive the effect of the tragic merely from these moral origins-as, of course, has been customary in aesthetics for far too long-should not think that he has then done anything for art, which above all must demand purity in its realm. For an explanation of the tragic myth the very first demand is that he seek that joy characteristic of it in the purely aesthetic sphere, without reaching over into the territory of pity, fear, and the morally sublime. How can the ugly and dissonant, the content of the tragic myth, excite an aesthetic delight?
Here it is necessary for us to vault with a bold leap into a metaphysics of art, in which I repeat an earlier sentence-that existence and the world appear justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon. It’s in this sense that the tragic myth has to convince us that even the ugly and dissonant are an artistic game, which the will, in the eternal abundance of its joy, plays with itself. But there’s a direct way to make this ur-phenomenon of Dionysian art, so difficult to comprehend, completely understandable and to enable one to grasp it immediately-through the miraculous meaning of musical dissonance, the way the music, set next to the world, is the only thing that can give an idea of what it means to understand a justification of the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. The joy which the tragic myth produces has the same homeland as the delightful sensation of dissonance in music. The Dionysian, together with its primordial joy felt even in pain, is the common birth womb of music and the tragic myth.
Thus, shouldn’t we have made that difficult problem of the tragic effect really much easier now that we have called on the relation of musical dissonance to help us? For now we understand what it means in tragedy to want to keep looking and at the same time to yearn for something beyond what we see. We would have to characterize this condition in relation to the artistic use of dissonance precisely as the fact that we want to keep listening and at the same time yearn to get beyond what we hear.
That striving for the infinite, the wing beat of longing, associated with the highest delight in clearly perceived reality, reminds us that in both states we must recognize a Dionysian phenomenon, which always reveals to us all over again the playful cracking apart and destruction of the world of the individual as the discharge of primordial delight, in a manner similar to the one in which gloomy Heraclitus compares the force constructing the world to a child who playfully sets stones here and there, builds sand piles, and then knocks them down again.
And thus in order to assess the Dionysian capability of a people correctly, we have to think not just about their music; we must also to think about their tragic myth as the second feature of that capacity. Given this closest of relationships between music and myth, now we can in a similar way assume that a degeneration or deprivation of one of them will be linked to a decline in the other, if a weakening of myth in general manifests itself in a weakening of the Dionysian capability.
But concerning both of these, a look at the development of the German being should leave us in no doubt: in the opera as well as in the abstract character of our myth-deprived existence, in an art which has sunk down to mere entertainment as well as in a life guided by concepts, that inartistic and equally life-draining nature of Socratic optimism stands revealed.
For our consolation, however, there are indications that in spite of everything the German spirit rests and dreams in magnificent health, its profundity and Dionysian power undamaged, like a knight sunk down in slumber in an inaccessible abyss. And from this abyss, the Dionysian song rises up to us in order to make us understand that this German knight is also still dreaming his age-old Dionysian myth in solemn blissful visions. Let no one believe that the German spirit has lost for ever its mythic homeland, when it still understands so clearly the voice of the birds which tell of that homeland. One day it will find itself awake in all the morning freshness of an immense sleep. Then it will kill dragons, destroy the crafty dwarf, and awake Brunnhilde-and even Wotan’s spear itself will not be able to block its way.
My friends, you who have faith in Dionysian music, you also know what tragedy means to us. In it we have the tragic myth, reborn from music-and in it you must hope for everything and forget what is most distressing! The most painful thing, however, for all of us is this-the long degradation under which the German genius, alienated from house and home, has lived in service to that crafty dwarf. You understand my words-as you also will understand my hopes as I conclude.
25
Music and tragic myth are equally an expression of the Dionysian capacity of a people and are inseparable from each other. Both derive from an artistic realm that lies beyond the Apollonian. Both transfigure a region in whose joyful chords dissonance as well as the terrible image of world fade delightfully away. Both play with the sting of joylessness, trusting in the extreme power of their magical arts. Through this play both justify the existence of even the “worst of worlds.” Here the Dionysian shows itself, measured against the Apollonian, as the eternal and primordial artistic force, which summons the entire world of appearances into existence. In its midst a new transfiguring illusion becomes necessary in order to keep alive the living world of the individual. Could we imagine some human development of dissonance – and what is a man other than that? – then this dissonance, in order to capable of life, would need a marvelous illusion, which covered it with a veil of beauty over its essential being. This is the true artistic purpose of Apollo, in whose name we put together all those countless illusions of beautiful appearances which render existence at every moment in general worth living and push us to experience the next moment.
But in this process, from that basis for all existence, the Dionysian bed rock of the world, only as much can come into the consciousness of the human individual as can be overcome once more by that Apollonian power of transfiguration, so that both of these artistic drives are compelled to display their powers in a strictly mutual proportion, in accordance with the law of eternal justice. Where Dionysian power rises up as impetuously as we are seeing it rise, there Apollo must already have come down to us, hidden in a cloud. The next generation may well see the richest his beautiful effects.
However, the fact that this effect is necessary each man will experience most surely through his intuition, if he once, even in a dream, feels himself set back into the life of the ancient Greeks. As he wanders under high Ionic colonnades, glancing upwards to a horizon marked off with pure and noble lines, with reflections of his transfigured form beside him in shining marble, around him people solemnly striding or moving delicately, with harmoniously sounding lutes and a speech of rhythmic gestures-faced with this constant stream of beauty, would he not have to extend his hand to Apollo and cry out: “Blessed Hellenic people! How great Dionysus must be among you, if the Delphic god thinks such magic necessary to heal your dithyrambic madness!” To a person in such a mood as this, however, an old Athenian, looking at him with the noble eye of Aeschylus, might reply: “But, you strange foreigner, how much must these people have suffered in order to be able to become so beautiful! But now follow me to the tragedy and sacrifice with me in the temple of both divinities.”
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The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms
by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Translated By Anthony M. Ludovic
Electronically Developed by MobileReference
The Case of Wagner: A Musicians Problem: -Preface- | -1- | -2- | -3- | -4- | -5- | -6- | -7- | -8- | -9- | -10- | -11- | -12-
Nietzsche Contra Wagner
Selected Aphorisms from Nietzsche’s Retrospect of his Years of Friendship with Wagner
Friedrich W. Nietzsche Biography
The Case of Wagner: A Musician’s Problem
Preface
I am writing this to relieve my mind. It is not malice alone which makes me praise Bizet at the expense of Wagner in this essay. Amid a good deal of jesting I wish to make one point clear which does not admit of levity. To turn my back on Wagner was for me a piece of fate, to get to like anything else whatever afterwards was for me a triumph. Nobody, perhaps, had ever been more dangerously involved in Wagnerism, nobody had defended himself more obstinately against it, nobody had ever been so overjoyed at ridding himself of it. A long history!–Shall I give it a name?–If I were a moralist, who knows what I might not call it! Perhaps a piece of self-mastery .–But the philosopher does not like the moralist, neither does he like high-falutin’ words….
What is the first and last thing that a philosopher demands of himself? To overcome his age in himself, to become “timeless.” With what then does the philosopher have the greatest fight? With all that in him which makes him the child of his time. Very well then! I am just as much a child of my age as Wagner– i.e. , I am a decadent. The only difference is that I recognised the fact, that I struggled against it. The philosopher in me struggled against it.
My greatest preoccupation hitherto has been the problem of decadence , and I had reasons for this. “Good and evil” form only a playful subdivision of this problem. If one has trained one’s eye to detect the symptoms of decline, one also understands morality,–one understands what lies concealed beneath its holiest names and tables of values: e.g. , impoverished life, the will to nonentity, great exhaustion. Morality denies life…. In order to undertake such a mission I was obliged to exercise self-discipline:–I had to side against all that was morbid in myself including Wagner, including Schopenhauer, including the whole of modern humanity .–A profound estrangement, coldness and soberness towards all that belongs to my age, all that was contemporary: and as the highest wish, Zarathustra’s eye, an eye which surveys the whole phenomenon–mankind–from an enormous distance,–which looks down upon it.–For such a goal–what sacrifice would not have been worth while? What “self-mastery”! What “self-denial”!
The greatest event of my life took the form of a recovery . Wagner belongs only to my diseases.
Not that I wish to appear ungrateful to this disease. If in this essay I support the proposition that Wagner is harmful , I none the less wish to point out unto whom, in spite of all, he is indispensable–to the philosopher. Anyone else may perhaps be able to get on without Wagner: but the philosopher is not free to pass him by. The philosopher must be the evil conscience of his age,–but to this end he must be possessed of its best knowledge. And what better guide, or more thoroughly efficient revealer of the soul, could be found for the labyrinth of the modern spirit than Wagner? Through Wagner modernity speaks her most intimate language: it conceals neither its good nor its evil: it has thrown off all shame. And, conversely, one has almost calculated the whole of the value of modernity once one is clear concerning what is good and evil in Wagner. I can perfectly well understand a musician of to-day who says: “I hate Wagner but I can endure no other music.” But I should also understand a philosopher who said, “Wagner is modernity in concentrated form.” There is no help for it, we must first be Wagnerites….
1.
Yesterday–would you believe it?–I heard Bizet’s masterpiece for the twentieth time. Once more I attended with the same gentle reverence; once again I did not run away. This triumph over my impatience surprises me. How such a work completes one! Through it one almost becomes a “masterpiece” oneself–And, as a matter of fact, each time I heard Carmen it seemed to me that I was more of a philosopher, a better philosopher than at other times: I became so forbearing, so happy, so Indian, so settled …. To sit for five hours: the first step to holiness!–May I be allowed to say that Bizet’s orchestration is the only one that I can endure now? That other orchestration which is all the rage at present–the Wagnerian–is brutal, artificial and “unsophisticated” withal, hence its appeal to all the three senses of the modern soul at once. How terribly Wagnerian orchestration affects me! I call it the Sirocco . A disagreeable sweat breaks out all over me. All my fine weather vanishes.
Bizet’s music seems to me perfect. It comes forward lightly, gracefully, stylishly. It is lovable, it does not sweat. “All that is good is easy, everything divine runs with light feet”: this is the first principle of my aesthetics. This music is wicked, refined, fatalistic, and withal remains popular,–it possesses the refinement of a race, not of an individual. It is rich. It is definite. It builds, organises, completes, and in this sense it stands as a contrast to the polypus in music, to “endless melody”. Have more painful, more tragic accents ever been heard on the stage before? And how are they obtained? Without grimaces! Without counterfeiting of any kind! Free from the lie of the grand style!–In short: this music assumes that the listener is intelligent even as a musician,–thereby it is the opposite of Wagner, who, apart from everything else, was in any case the most ill-mannered genius on earth (Wagner takes us as if … , he repeats a thing so often that we become desperate,–that we ultimately believe it).
And once more: I become a better man when Bizet speaks to me. Also a better musician, a better listener . Is it in any way possible to listen better?–I even burrow behind this music with my ears. I hear its very cause. I seem to assist at its birth. I tremble before the dangers which this daring music runs, I am enraptured over those happy accidents for which even Bizet himself may not be responsible.–And, strange to say, at bottom I do not give it a thought, or am not aware how much thought I really do give it. For quite other ideas are running through my head the while…. Has any one ever observed that music emancipates the spirit? gives wings to thought? and that the more one becomes a musician the more one is also a philosopher? The grey sky of abstraction seems thrilled by flashes of lightning; the light is strong enough to reveal all the details of things; to enable one to grapple with problems; and the world is surveyed as if from a mountain top–With this I have defined philosophical pathos–And unexpectedly answers drop into my lap, a small hailstorm of ice and wisdom, of problems solved . Where am I? Bizet makes me productive. Everything that is good makes me productive. I have gratitude for nothing else, nor have I any other touchstone for testing what is good.
2.
Bizet’s work also saves; Wagner is not the only “Saviour.” With it one bids farewell to the damp north and to all the fog of the Wagnerian ideal. Even the action in itself delivers us from these things. From Merimee it has this logic even in passion, from him it has the direct line, inexorable necessity, but what it has above all else is that which belongs to sub-tropical zones–that dryness of atmosphere, that limpidezza of the air. Here in every respect the climate is altered. Here another kind of sensuality, another kind of sensitiveness and another kind of cheerfulness make their appeal. This music is gay, but not in a French or German way. Its gaiety is African; fate hangs over it, its happiness is short, sudden, without reprieve. I envy Bizet for having had the courage of this sensitiveness, which hitherto in the cultured music of Europe has found no means of expression,–of this southern, tawny, sunburnt sensitiveness…. What a joy the golden afternoon of its happiness is to us! When we look out, with this music in our minds, we wonder whether we have ever seen the sea so calm . And how soothing is this Moorish dancing! How, for once, even our insatiability gets sated by its lascivious melancholy!–And finally love, love translated back into Nature ! Not the love of a “cultured girl!”–no Senta-sentimentality.[1] But love as fate, as a fatality, cynical, innocent, cruel,–and precisely in this way Nature ! The love whose means is war, whose very essence is the mortal hatred between the sexes!–I know no case in which the tragic irony, which constitutes the kernel of love, is expressed with such severity, or in so terrible a formula, as in the last cry of Don Jose with which the work ends:
“Yes, it is I who have killed her, I–my adored Carmen!”
–Such a conception of love (the only one worthy of a philosopher) is rare: it distinguishes one work of art from among a thousand others. For, as a rule, artists are no better than the rest of the world, they are even worse–they misunderstand love. Even Wagner misunderstood it. They imagine that they are selfless in it because they appear to be seeking the advantage of another creature often to their own disadvantage. But in return they want to possess the other creature…. Even God is no exception to this rule, he is very far from thinking “What does it matter to thee whether I love thee or not?”–He becomes terrible if he is not loved in return " L’amour –and with this principle one carries one’s point against Gods and men– est de tous les sentiments le plus egoiste, et par consequent, lorsqu’il est blesse, le moins genereux " (B. Constant).
3.
Perhaps you are beginning to perceive how very much this music improves me?– Il faut mediterraniser la musique. and I have my reasons for this principle (“Beyond Good and Evil,” pp. 216 et seq. ) The return to Nature, health, good spirits, youth, virtue !–And yet I was one of the most corrupted Wagnerites…. I was able to take Wagner seriously. Oh, this old magician! what tricks has he not played upon us! The first thing his art places in our hands is a magnifying glass: we look through it, and we no longer trust our own eyes–Everything grows bigger, even Wagner grows bigger …. What a clever rattlesnake. Throughout his life he rattled “resignation,” “loyalty,” and “purity” about our ears, and he retired from the corrupt world with a song of praise to chastity!–And we believed it all….
–But you will not listen to me? You prefer even the problem of Wagner to that of Bizet? But neither do I underrate it; it has its charm. The problem of salvation is even a venerable problem. Wagner pondered over nothing so deeply as over salvation: his opera is the opera of salvation. Someone always wants to be saved in his operas,–now it is a youth; anon it is a maid,–this is his problem –And how lavishly he varies his leitmotif ! What rare and melancholy modulations! If it were not for Wagner, who would teach us that innocence has a preference for saving interesting sinners? (the case in “Tannhauser”). Or that even the eternal Jew gets saved and settled down when he marries? (the case in the “Flying Dutchman”). Or that corrupted old females prefer to be saved by chaste young men? (the case of Kundry). Or that young hysterics like to be saved by their doctor? (the case in “Lohengrin”). Or that beautiful girls most love to be saved by a knight who also happens to be a Wagnerite? (the case in the “Mastersingers”). Or that even married women also like to be saved by a knight? (the case of Isolde). Or that the venerable Almighty, after having compromised himself morally in all manner of ways, is at last delivered by a free spirit and an immoralist? (the case in the “Ring”). Admire, more especially this last piece of wisdom! Do you understand it? I–take good care not to understand it…. That it is possible to draw yet other lessons from the works above mentioned,–I am much more ready to prove than to dispute. That one may be driven by a Wagnerian ballet to desperation– and to virtue! (once again the case in “Tannhauser”). That not going to bed at the right time may be followed by the worst consequences (once again the case of “Lohengrin”).–That one can never be too sure of the spouse one actually marries (for the third time, the case of “Lohengrin”). “Tristan and Isolde” glorifies the perfect husband who, in a certain case, can ask only one question: “But why have ye not told me this before? Nothing could be simpler than that!” Reply:
“That I cannot tell thee. And what thou askest, That wilt thou never learn.”
“Lohengrin” contains a solemn ban upon all investigation and questioning. In this way Wagner stood for the Christian concept, “Thou must and shalt believe “. It is a crime against the highest and the holiest to be scientific…. The “Flying Dutchman” preaches the sublime doctrine that woman can moor the most erratic soul, or to put it into Wagnerian terms “save” him. Here we venture to ask a question. Supposing that this were actually true, would it therefore be desirable?–What becomes of the “eternal Jew” whom a woman adores and enchains ? He simply ceases from being eternal, he marries,–that is to say, he concerns us no longer.–Transferred into the realm of reality, the danger for the artist and for the genius–and these are of course the “eternal Jews”–resides in woman: adoring women are their ruin. Scarcely any one has sufficient character not to be corrupted–“saved” when he finds himself treated as a God–he then immediately condescends to woman.–Man is a coward in the face of all that is eternally feminine, and this the girls know.–In many cases of woman’s love, and perhaps precisely in the most famous ones, the love is no more than a refined form of parasitism , a making one’s nest in another’s soul and sometimes even in another’s flesh–Ah! and how constantly at the cost of the host!
We know the fate of Goethe in old-maidish moralin-corroded Germany. He was always offensive to Germans, he found honest admirers only among Jewesses. Schiller, “noble” Schiller, who cried flowery words into their ears,–he was a man after their own heart. What did they reproach Goethe with?–with the Mount of Venus, and with having composed certain Venetian epigrams. Even Klopstock preached him a moral sermon; there was a time when Herder was fond of using the word “Priapus” when he spoke of Goethe. Even “Wilhelm Meister” seemed to be only a symptom of decline, of a moral “going to the dogs”. The “Menagerie of tame cattle,” the worthlessness of the hero in this book, revolted Niebuhr, who finally bursts out in a plaint which Biterolf [2] might well have sung: “nothing so easily makes a painful impression as when a great mind despoils itself of its wings and strives for virtuosity in something greatly inferior, while it renounces more lofty aims .” But the most indignant of all was the cultured woman–all smaller courts in Germany, every kind of “Puritanism” made the sign of the cross at the sight of Goethe, at the thought of the “unclean spirit” in Goethe.–This history was what Wagner set to music. He saves Goethe, that goes without saying; but he does so in such a clever way that he also takes the side of the cultured woman. Goethe gets saved: a prayer saves him, a cultured woman draws him out of the mire .
–As to what Goethe would have thought of Wagner?–Goethe once set himself the question, “what danger hangs over all romanticists–the fate of romanticists?”–His answer was: “To choke over the rumination of moral and religious absurdities.” In short: Parsifal …. The philosopher writes thereto an epilogue: Holiness –the only remaining higher value still seen by the mob or by woman, the horizon of the ideal for all those who are naturally short-sighted. To philosophers, however, this horizon, like every other, is a mere misunderstanding, a sort of slamming of the door in the face of the real beginning of their world,–their danger, their ideal, their desideratum…. In more polite language: La philosophie ne suffit pas au grand nombre. Il lui faut la saintete….
4.
I shall once more relate the history of the “Ring”. This is its proper place. It is also the history of a salvation except that in this case it is Wagner himself who is saved–Half his lifetime Wagner believed in the Revolution as only a Frenchman could have believed in it. He sought it in the runic inscriptions of myths, he thought he had found a typical revolutionary in Siegfried.–“Whence arises all the evil in this world?” Wagner asked himself. From “old contracts”: he replied, as all revolutionary ideologists have done. In plain English: from customs, laws, morals, institutions, from all those things upon which the ancient world and ancient society rests. “How can one get rid of the evil in this world? How can one get rid of ancient society?” Only by declaring war against “contracts” (traditions, morality). This Siegfried does. He starts early at the game, very early–his origin itself is already a declaration of war against morality–he is the result of adultery, of incest…. Not the saga, but Wagner himself is the inventor of this radical feature, in this matter he corrected the saga…. Siegfried continues as he began: he follows only his first impulse, he flings all tradition, all respect, all fear to the winds. Whatever displeases him he strikes down. He tilts irreverently at old god-heads. His principal undertaking, however, is to emancipate woman,–“to deliver Brunnhilda.”… Siegfried and Brunnhilda, the sacrament of free love, the dawn of the golden age, the twilight of the Gods of old morality– evil is got rid of …. For a long while Wagner’s ship sailed happily along this course. There can be no doubt that along it Wagner sought his highest goal.–What happened? A misfortune. The ship dashed on to a reef; Wagner had run aground. The reef was Schopenhauer’s philosophy; Wagner had stuck fast on a contrary view of the world. What had he set to music? Optimism? Wagner was ashamed. It was moreover an optimism for which Schopenhauer had devised an evil expression,– unscrupulous optimism. He was more than ever ashamed. He reflected for some time; his position seemed desperate…. At last a path of escape seemed gradually to open before him–what if the reef on which he had been wrecked could be interpreted as a goal, as the ulterior motive, as the actual purpose of his journey? To be wrecked here, this was also a goal:– Bene navigavi cum naufragium feci … and he translated the “Ring” into Schopenhauerian language. Everything goes wrong, everything goes to wrack and ruin, the new world is just as bad as the old one:–Nonentity, the Indian Circe beckons … Brunnhilda, who according to the old plan had to retire with a song in honour of free love, consoling the world with the hope of a socialistic Utopia in which “all will be well”; now gets something else to do. She must first study Schopenhauer. She must first versify the fourth book of “The World as Will and Idea.” Wagner was saved…. Joking apart, this was a salvation. The service which Wagner owes to Schopenhauer is incalculable. It was the philosopher of decadence who allowed the artist of decadence to find himself.–
5.
The artist of decadence. That is the word. And here I begin to be serious. I could not think of looking on approvingly while this decadent spoils our health–and music into the bargain. Is Wagner a man at all? Is he not rather a disease? Everything he touches he contaminates. He has made music sick.
A typical decadent who thinks himself necessary with his corrupted taste, who arrogates to himself a higher taste, who tries to establish his depravity as a law, as progress, as a fulfilment.
And no one guards against it. His powers of seduction attain monstrous proportions, holy incense hangs around him, the misunderstanding concerning him is called the Gospel,–and he has certainly not converted only the poor in spirit to his cause!
I should like to open the window a little:–Air! More air!–
The fact that people in Germany deceive themselves concerning Wagner does not surprise me. The reverse would surprise me. The Germans have modelled a Wagner for themselves, whom they can honour: never yet have they been psychologists; they are thankful that they misunderstand. But that people should also deceive themselves concerning Wagner in Paris! Where people are scarcely anything else than psychologists. And in Saint Petersburg! Where things are divined, which even Paris has no idea of. How intimately related must Wagner be to the entire decadence of Europe for her not to have felt that he was decadent! He belongs to it, he is its protagonist, its greatest name…. We bring honour on ourselves by elevating him to the clouds–For the mere fact that no one guards against him is in itself already a sign of decadence. Instinct is weakened, what ought to be eschewed now attracts. People actually kiss that which plunges them more quickly into the abyss.–Is there any need for an example? One has only to think of the regime which anaemic, or gouty, or diabetic people prescribe for themselves. The definition of a vegetarian: a creature who has need of a corroborating diet. To recognise what is harmful as harmful, to be able to deny oneself what is harmful, is a sign of youth, of vitality. That which is harmful lures the exhausted: cabbage lures the vegetarian. Illness itself can be a stimulus to life but one must be healthy enough for such a stimulus!–Wagner increases exhaustion– therefore he attracts the weak and exhausted to him. Oh, the rattlesnake joy of the old Master precisely because he always saw “the little children” coming unto him!
I place this point of view first and foremost: Wagner’s art is diseased. The problems he sets on the stage are all concerned with hysteria; the convulsiveness of his emotions, his over-excited sensitiveness, his taste which demands ever sharper condimentation, his erraticness which he togged out to look like principles, and, last but not least, his choice of heroes and heroines, considered as physiological types (–a hospital ward!–): the whole represents a morbid picture; of this there can be no doubt. Wagner est une nevrose . Maybe, that nothing is better known to-day, or in any case the subject of greater study, than the Protean character of degeneration which has disguised itself here, both as an art and as an artist. In Wagner our medical men and physiologists have a most interesting case, or at least a very complete one. Owing to the very fact that nothing is more modern than this thorough morbidness, this dilatoriness and excessive irritability of the nervous machinery, Wagner is the modern artist par excellence , the Cagliostro of modernity. All that the world most needs to-day, is combined in the most seductive manner in his art,–the three great stimulants of exhausted people: brutality , artificiality and innocence (idiocy).
Wagner is a great corrupter of music. With it, he found the means of stimulating tired nerves,–and in this way he made music ill. In the art of spurring exhausted creatures back into activity, and of recalling half-corpses to life, the inventiveness he shows is of no mean order. He is the master of hypnotic trickery, and he fells the strongest like bullocks. Wagner’s success –his success with nerves, and therefore with women–converted the whole world of ambitious musicians into disciples of his secret art. And not only the ambitious, but also the shrewd …. Only with morbid music can money be made to-day; our big theatres live on Wagner.
6.
–Once more I will venture to indulge in a little levity. Let us suppose that Wagner’s success could become flesh and blood and assume a human form; that, dressed up as a good-natured musical savant, it could move among budding artists. How do you think it would then be likely to express itself?–
My friends, it would say, let us exchange a word or two in private. It is easier to compose bad music than good music. But what, if apart from this it were also more profitable, more effective, more convincing, more exalting, more secure, more Wagnerian ?… Pulchrum est paucorum hominum. Bad enough in all conscience! We understand Latin, and perhaps we also understand which side our bread is buttered. Beauty has its drawbacks: we know that. Wherefore beauty then? Why not rather aim at size, at the sublime, the gigantic, that which moves the masses ?–And to repeat, it is easier to be titanic than to be beautiful; we know that….
We know the masses, we know the theatre. The best of those who assemble there,–German youths, horned Siegfrieds and other Wagnerites, require the sublime, the profound, and the overwhelming. This much still lies within our power. And as for the others who assemble there,–the cultured cretins , the blase pigmies, the eternally feminine, the gastrically happy, in short the people–they also require the sublime, the profound, the overwhelming. All these people argue in the same way. “He who overthrows us is strong; he who elevates us is godly; he who makes us wonder vaguely is profound.”–Let us make up our mind then, my friends in music: we do want to overthrow them, we do want to elevate them, we do want to make them wonder vaguely. This much still lies within our powers.
In regard to the process of making them wonder: it is here that our notion of “style” finds its starting-point. Above all, no thoughts! Nothing is more compromising than a thought! But the state of mind which precedes thought, the labour of the thought still unborn, the promise of future thought, the world as it was before God created it–a recrudescence of chaos…. Chaos makes people wonder….
In the words of the master: infinity but without melody.
In the second place, with regard to the overthrowing,–this belongs at least in part, to physiology. Let us, in the first place, examine the instruments. A few of them would convince even our intestines (–they throw open doors, as Handel would say), others becharm our very marrow. The colour of the melody is all-important here, the melody itself is of no importance. Let us be precise about this point. To what other purpose should we spend our strength? Let us be characteristic in tone even to the point of foolishness! If by means of tones we allow plenty of scope for guessing, this will be put to the credit of our intellects. Let us irritate nerves, let us strike them dead: let us handle thunder and lightning,–that is what overthrows….
But what overthrows best, is passion .–We must try and be clear concerning this question of passion. Nothing is cheaper than passion! All the virtues of counterpoint may be dispensed with, there is no need to have learnt anything,–but passion is always within our reach! Beauty is difficult: let us beware of beauty!… And also of melody! However much in earnest we may otherwise be about the ideal, let us slander, my friends, let us slander,–let us slander melody! Nothing is more dangerous than a beautiful melody! Nothing is more certain to ruin taste! My friends, if people again set about loving beautiful melodies, we are lost!…
First principle : melody is immoral. Proof : “Palestrina”. Application : “Parsifal.” The absence of melody is in itself sanctifying….
And this is the definition of passion. Passion–or the acrobatic feats of ugliness on the tight-rope of enharmonic–My friends, let us dare to be ugly! Wagner dared it! Let us heave the mud of the most repulsive harmonies undauntedly before us. We must not even spare our hands! Only thus, shall we become natural ….
And now a last word of advice. Perhaps it covers everything– Let us be idealists! –If not the cleverest, it is at least the wisest thing we can do. In order to elevate men we ourselves must be exalted. Let us wander in the clouds, let us harangue eternity, let us be careful to group great symbols all around us! Sursum! Bumbum! –there is no better advice. The “heaving breast” shall be our argument, “beautiful feelings” our advocates. Virtue still carries its point against counterpoint. “How could he who improves us, help being better than we?” man has ever thought thus. Let us therefore improve mankind!–in this way we shall become good (in this way we shall even become “classics”–Schiller became a “classic”). The straining after the base excitement of the senses, after so-called beauty, shattered the nerves of the Italians: let us remain German! Even Mozart’s relation to music–Wagner spoke this word of comfort to us–was at bottom frivolous….
Never let us acknowledge that music “may be a recreation,” that it may “enliven,” that it may “give pleasure.” Never let us give pleasure! –we shall be lost if people once again think of music hedonistically…. That belongs to the bad eighteenth century…. On the other hand, nothing would be more advisable (between ourselves) than a dose of– cant, sit venia verbo . This imparts dignity.–And let us take care to select the precise moment when it would be fitting to have black looks, to sigh openly, to sigh devoutly, to flaunt grand Christian sympathy before their eyes. “Man is corrupt who will save him? what will save him? " Do not let us reply. We must be on our guard. We must control our ambition, which would bid us found new religions. But no one must doubt that it is we who save him, that in our music alone salvation is to be found…. (See Wagner’s essay, “Religion and Art.”)
7.
Enough! Enough! I fear that, beneath all my merry jests, you are beginning to recognise the sinister truth only too clearly–the picture of the decline of art, of the decline of the artist. The latter, which is a decline of character, might perhaps be defined provisionally in the following manner: the musician is now becoming an actor, his art is developing ever more and more into a talent for telling lies . In a certain chapter of my principal work which bears the title “Concerning the Physiology of Art,”[3] I shall have an opportunity of showing more thoroughly how this transformation of art as a whole into histrionics is just as much a sign of physiological degeneration (or more precisely a form of hysteria), as any other individual corruption, and infirmity peculiar to the art which Wagner inaugurated: for instance the restlessness of its optics, which makes it necessary to change one’s attitude to it every second. They understand nothing of Wagner who see in him but a sport of nature, an arbitrary mood, a chapter of accidents. He was not the “defective,” “ill-fated,” “contradictory” genius that people have declared him to be. Wagner was something complete , he was a typical decadent , in whom every sign of “free will” was lacking, in whom every feature was necessary. If there is anything at all of interest in Wagner, it is the consistency with which a critical physiological condition may convert itself, step by step, conclusion after conclusion, into a method, a form of procedure, a reform of all principles, a crisis in taste.
At this point I shall only stop to consider the question of style . How is decadence in literature characterised? By the fact that in it life no longer animates the whole. Words become predominant and leap right out of the sentence to which they belong, the sentences themselves trespass beyond their bounds, and obscure the sense of the whole page, and the page in its turn gains in vigour at the cost of the whole,–the whole is no longer a whole. But this is the formula for every decadent style: there is always anarchy among the atoms, disaggregation of the will,–in moral terms: “freedom of the individual,”–extended into a political theory " equal rights for all.” Life, equal vitality, all the vibration and exuberance of life, driven back into the smallest structure, and the remainder left almost lifeless. Everywhere paralysis, distress, and numbness, or hostility and chaos both striking one with ever increasing force the higher the forms of organisation are into which one ascends. The whole no longer lives at all: it is composed, reckoned up, artificial, a fictitious thing.
In Wagner’s case the first thing we notice is an hallucination, not of tones, but of attitudes. Only after he has the latter does he begin to seek the semiotics of tone for them. If we wish to admire him, we should observe him at work here: how he separates and distinguishes, how he arrives at small unities, and how he galvanises them, accentuates them, and brings them into pre-eminence. But in this way he exhausts his strength the rest is worthless. How paltry, awkward, and amateurish is his manner of “developing,” his attempt at combining incompatible parts. His manner in this respect reminds one of two people who even in other ways are not unlike him in style–the brothers Goncourt; one almost feels compassion for so much impotence. That Wagner disguised his inability to create organic forms, under the cloak of a principle, that he should have constructed a “dramatic style” out of what we should call the total inability to create any style whatsoever, is quite in keeping with that daring habit, which stuck to him throughout his life, of setting up a principle wherever capacity failed him. (In this respect he was very different from old Kant, who rejoiced in another form of daring, i.e. : whenever a principle failed him, he endowed man with a “capacity” which took its place…) Once more let it be said that Wagner is really only worthy of admiration and love by virtue of his inventiveness in small things, in his elaboration of details,–here one is quite justified in proclaiming him a master of the first rank, as our greatest musical miniaturist who compresses an infinity of meaning and sweetness into the smallest space. His wealth of colour, of chiaroscuro, of the mystery of a dying light, so pampers our senses that afterwards almost every other musician strikes us as being too robust. If people would believe me, they would not form the highest idea of Wagner from that which pleases them in him to-day. All that was only devised for convincing the masses, and people like ourselves recoil from it just as one would recoil from too garish a fresco. What concern have we with the irritating brutality of the overture to the “Tannhauser”? Or with the Walkyrie Circus? Whatever has become popular in Wagner’s art, including that which has become so outside the theatre, is in bad taste and spoils taste. The “Tannhauser” March seems to me to savour of the Philistine; the overture to the “Flying Dutchman” is much ado about nothing; the prelude to “Lohengrin” was the first, only too insidious, only too successful example of how one can hypnotise with music (–I dislike all music which aspires to nothing higher than to convince the nerves). But apart from the Wagner who paints frescoes and practises magnetism, there is yet another Wagner who hoards small treasures: our greatest melancholic in music, full of side glances, loving speeches, and words of comfort, in which no one ever forestalled him,–the tone-master of melancholy and drowsy happiness…. A lexicon of Wagner’s most intimate phrases–a host of short fragments of from five to fifteen bars each, of music which nobody knows …. Wagner had the virtue of decadents ,–pity….
8.
–“Very good! But how can this decadent spoil one’s taste if perchance one is not a musician, if perchance one is not oneself a decadent ?”–Conversely! How can one help it! Just you try it!–You know not what Wagner is: quite a great actor! Does a more profound, a more ponderous influence exist on the stage? Just look at these youthlets,–all benumbed, pale, breathless! They are Wagnerites: they know nothing about music,–and yet Wagner gets the mastery of them. Wagner’s art presses with the weight of a hundred atmospheres: do but submit, there is nothing else to do…. Wagner the actor is a tyrant, his pathos flings all taste, all resistance, to the winds.
–Who else has this persuasive power in his attitudes, who else sees attitudes so clearly before anything else! This holding-of-its-breath in Wagnerian pathos, this disinclination to have done with an intense feeling, this terrifying habit of dwelling on a situation in which every instant almost chokes one.—-
Was Wagner a musician at all? In any case he was something else to a much greater degree *–that is to say, an incomparable * histrio , the greatest mime, the most astounding theatrical genius that the Germans have ever had, our scenic artist par excellence . He belongs to some other sphere than the history of music, with whose really great and genuine figure he must not be confounded. Wagner and Beethoven–this is blasphemy–and above all it does not do justice even to Wagner…. As a musician he was no more than what he was as a man, he became a musician, he became a poet, because the tyrant in him, his actor’s genius, drove him to be both. Nothing is known concerning Wagner, so long as his dominating instinct has not been divined.
Wagner was not instinctively a musician. And this he proved by the way in which he abandoned all laws and rules, or, in more precise terms, all style in music, in order to make what he wanted with it, i.e. , a rhetorical medium for the stage, a medium of expression, a means of accentuating an attitude, a vehicle of suggestion and of the psychologically picturesque. In this department Wagner may well stand as an inventor and an innovator of the first order– he increased the powers of speech ** of music to an incalculable degree –he is the Victor Hugo of music as language, provided always we allow that under certain circumstances music may be something which is not music, but speech–instrument– ancilla dramaturgica . Wagner’s music, not in the tender care of theatrical taste, which is very tolerant, is simply bad music, perhaps the worst that has ever been composed. When a musician can no longer count up to three, he becomes “dramatic,” he becomes “Wagnerian”….
Wagner almost discovered the magic which can be wrought even now by means of music which is both incoherent and elementary . His consciousness of this attains to huge proportions, as does also his instinct to dispense entirely with higher law and style . The elementary factors–sound, movement, colour, in short, the whole sensuousness of music–suffice. Wagner never calculates as a musician with a musician’s conscience, all he strains after is effect, nothing more than effect. And he knows what he has to make an effect upon!–In this he is as unhesitating as Schiller was, as any theatrical man must be; he has also the latter’s contempt for the world which he brings to its knees before him. A man is an actor when he is ahead of mankind in his possession of this one view, that everything which has to strike people as true, must not be true. This rule was formulated by Talma: it contains the whole psychology of the actor, it also contains–and this we need not doubt–all his morality. Wagner’s music is never true.
–But it is supposed to be so: and thus everything is as it should be. As long as we are young, and Wagnerites into the bargain, we regard Wagner as rich, even as the model of a prodigal giver, even as a great landlord in the realm of sound. We admire him in very much the same way as young Frenchmen admire Victor Hugo–that is to say, for his “royal liberality.” Later on we admire the one as well as the other for the opposite reason: as masters and paragons in economy, as prudent amphitryons. Nobody can equal them in the art of providing a princely board with such a modest outlay.–The Wagnerite, with his credulous stomach, is even sated with the fare which his master conjures up before him. But we others who, in books as in music, desire above all to find substance , and who are scarcely satisfied with the mere representation of a banquet, are much worse off. In plain English, Wagner does not give us enough to masticate. His recitative–very little meat, more bones, and plenty of broth–I christened " alla genovese “: I had no intention of flattering the Genoese with this remark, but rather the older recitativo , the recitativo secco . And as to Wagnerian leitmotif , I fear I lack the necessary culinary understanding for it. If hard pressed, I might say that I regard it perhaps as an ideal toothpick, as an opportunity of ridding one’s self of what remains of one’s meal. Wagner’s “arias” are still left over. But now I shall hold my tongue.
9.
Even in his general sketch of the action, Wagner is above all an actor. The first thing that occurs to him is a scene which is certain to produce a strong effect, a real actio, [4] with a basso-relievo of attitudes; an overwhelming scene, this he now proceeds to elaborate more deeply, and out of it he draws his characters. The whole of what remains to be done follows of itself, fully in keeping with a technical economy which has no reason to be subtle. It is not Corneille’s public that Wagner has to consider, it is merely the nineteenth century. Concerning the “actual requirements of the stage” Wagner would have about the same opinion as any other actor of to-day, a series of powerful scenes, each stronger than the one that preceded it,–and, in between, all kinds of clever nonsense. His first concern is to guarantee the effect of his work; he begins with the third act, he approves his work according to the quality of its final effect. Guided by this sort of understanding of the stage, there is not much danger of one’s creating a drama unawares. Drama demands inexorable logic: but what did Wagner care about logic? Again I say, it was not Corneille’s public that he had to consider; but merely Germans! Everybody knows the technical difficulties before which the dramatist often has to summon all his strength and frequently to sweat his blood: the difficulty of making the plot seem necessary and the unravelment as well, so that both are conceivable only in a certain way, and so that each may give the impression of freedom (the principle of the smallest expenditure of energy). Now the very last thing that Wagner does is to sweat blood over the plot; and on this and the unravelment he certainly spends the smallest possible amount of energy. Let anybody put one of Wagner’s “plots” under the microscope, and I wager that he will be forced to laugh. Nothing is more enlivening than the dilemma in “Tristan,” unless it be that in the “Mastersingers.” Wagner is no dramatist; let nobody be deceived on this point. All he did was to love the word “drama”–he always loved fine words. Nevertheless, in his writings the word “drama” is merely a misunderstanding (– and a piece of shrewdness: Wagner always affected superiority in regard to the word “opera”–), just as the word “spirit” is a misunderstanding in the New Testament.–He was not enough of a psychologist for drama; he instinctively avoided a psychological plot–but how?–by always putting idiosyncrasy in its place…. Very modern–eh? Very Parisian! very decadent!… Incidentally, the plots that Wagner knows how to unravel with the help of dramatic inventions, are of quite another kind. For example, let us suppose that Wagner requires a female voice. A whole act without a woman’s voice would be impossible! But in this particular instance not one of the heroines happens to be free. What does Wagner do? He emancipates the oldest woman on earth, Erda. “Step up, aged grandmamma! You have got to sing!” And Erda sings. Wagner’s end has been achieved. Thereupon he immediately dismisses the old lady. “Why on earth did you come? Off with you! Kindly go to sleep again!” In short, a scene full of mythological awe, before which the Wagnerite wonders all kinds of things….
–“But the substance of Wagner’s texts! their mythical substance, their eternal substance”–Question: how is this substance, this eternal substance tested? The chemical analyst replies: Translate Wagner into the real, into the modern,–let us be even more cruel, and say into the bourgeois! And what will then become of him?–Between ourselves, I have tried the experiment. Nothing is more entertaining, nothing more worthy of being recommended to a picnic-party, than to discuss Wagner dressed in a more modern garb: for instance Parsifal, as a candidate in divinity, with a public-school education (–the latter, quite indispensable for pure foolishness). What surprises await one! Would you believe it, that Wagner’s heroines one and all, once they have been divested of the heroic husks, are almost indistinguishable from Mdme. Bovary!–just as one can conceive conversely, of Flaubert’s being well able to transform all his heroines into Scandinavian or Carthaginian women, and then to offer them to Wagner in this mythologised form as a libretto. Indeed, generally speaking, Wagner does not seem to have become interested in any other problems than those which engross the little Parisian decadents of to-day. Always five paces away from the hospital! All very modern problems, all problems which are at home in big cities! do not doubt it!… Have you noticed (it is in keeping with this association of ideas) that Wagner’s heroines never have any children?–They cannot have them…. The despair with which Wagner tackled the problem of arranging in some way for Siegfried’s birth, betrays how modern his feelings on this point actually were.–Siegfried “emancipated woman”–but not with any hope of offspring.–And now here is a fact which leaves us speechless: Parsifal is Lohengrin’s father! How ever did he do it?–Ought one at this juncture to remember that “chastity works miracles”?…
Wagnerus dixit princeps in castitate auctoritas.
10.
And now just a word en passant concerning Wagner’s writings: they are among other things a school of shrewdness . The system of procedures of which Wagner disposes, might be applied to a hundred other cases,–he that hath ears to hear let him hear. Perhaps I may lay claim to some public acknowledgment, if I put three of the most valuable of these procedures into a precise form.
Everything that Wagner cannot do is bad.
Wagner could do much more than he does; but his strong principles prevent him.
Everything that Wagner can do, no one will ever be able to do after him, no one has ever done before him, and no one must ever do after him. Wagner is godly.
These three propositions are the quintessence of Wagner’s writings;–the rest is merely–“literature”.
–Not every kind of music hitherto has been in need of literature; and it were well, to try and discover the actual reason of this. Is it perhaps that Wagner’s music is too difficult to understand? Or did he fear precisely the reverse–that it was too easy,–that people might not understand it with sufficient difficulty ?–As a matter of fact, his whole life long, he did nothing but repeat one proposition: that his music did not mean music alone! But something more! Something immeasurably more!… " Not music alone “– no musician would speak in this way. I repeat, Wagner could not create things as a whole; he had no choice, he was obliged to create things in bits, with “motives,” attitudes, formulae, duplications, and hundreds of repetitions, he remained a rhetorician in music,–and that is why he was at bottom forced to press “this means” into the foreground. “Music can never be anything else than a means”: this was his theory, but above all it was the only practice that lay open to him. No musician however thinks in this way.–Wagner was in need of literature, in order to persuade the whole world to take his music seriously, profoundly, “because it meant an infinity of things”, all his life he was the commentator of the “Idea.”–What does Elsa stand for? But without a doubt, Elsa is “the unconscious mind of the people " (–“when I realised this, I naturally became a thorough revolutionist”–).
Do not let us forget that, when Hegel and Schelling were misleading the minds of Germany, Wagner was still young: that he guessed, or rather fully grasped, that the only thing which Germans take seriously is–“the idea,”–that is to say, something obscure, uncertain, wonderful; that among Germans lucidity is an objection, logic a refutation. Schopenhauer rigorously pointed out the dishonesty of Hegel’s and Schelling’s age,–rigorously, but also unjustly, for he himself, the pessimistic old counterfeiter, was in no way more “honest” than his more famous contemporaries. But let us leave morality out of the question, Hegel is a matter of taste …. And not only of German but of European taste!… A taste which Wagner understood!–which he felt equal to! which he has immortalised!–All he did was to apply it to music–he invented a style for himself, which might mean an “infinity of things,”–he was Hegel’s heir…. Music as “Idea.”–
And how well Wagner was understood!–The same kind of man who used to gush over Hegel, now gushes over Wagner, in his school they even write Hegelian.[5] But he who understood Wagner best, was the German youthlet. The two words “infinity” and “meaning” were sufficient for this: at their sound the youthlet immediately began to feel exceptionally happy. Wagner did not conquer these boys with music, but with the “idea”:–it is the enigmatical vagueness of his art, its game of hide-and-seek amid a hundred symbols, its polychromy in ideals, which leads and lures the lads. It is Wagner’s genius for forming clouds, his sweeps and swoops through the air, his ubiquity and nullibiety–precisely the same qualities with which Hegel led and lured in his time!–Moreover in the presence of Wagner’s multifariousness, plenitude and arbitrariness, they seem to themselves justified–“saved”. Tremulously they listen while the great symbols in his art seem to make themselves heard from out the misty distance, with a gentle roll of thunder, and they are not at all displeased if at times it gets a little grey, gruesome and cold. Are they not one and all, like Wagner himself, on quite intimate terms with bad weather, with German weather! Wotan is their God, but Wotan is the God of bad weather…. They are right, how could these German youths–in their present condition,–miss what we others, we halcyonians , miss in Wagner? i.e. : la gaya scienza ; light feet, wit, fire, grave, grand logic, stellar dancing, wanton intellectuality, the vibrating light of the South, the calm sea–perfection….
11.
–I have mentioned the sphere to which Wagner belongs–certainly not to the history of music. What, however, does he mean historically?– The rise of the actor in music : a momentous event which not only leads me to think but also to fear.
In a word: “Wagner and Liszt.” Never yet have the “uprightness” and “genuineness” of musicians been put to such a dangerous test. It is glaringly obvious: great success, mob success is no longer the achievement of the genuine,–in order to get it a man must be an actor!–Victor Hugo and Richard Wagner–they both prove one and the same thing: that in declining civilisations, wherever the mob is allowed to decide, genuineness becomes superfluous, prejudicial, unfavourable. The actor, alone, can still kindle great enthusiasm.–And thus it is his golden age which is now dawning,–his and that of all those who are in any way related to him. With drums and fifes, Wagner marches at the head of all artists in declamation, in display and virtuosity. He began by convincing the conductors of orchestras, the scene-shifters and stage-singers, not to forget the orchestra:–he “delivered” them from monotony…. The movement that Wagner created has spread even to the land of knowledge: whole sciences pertaining to music are rising slowly, out of centuries of scholasticism. As an example of what I mean, let me point more particularly to Riemann’s services to rhythmics; he was the first who called attention to the leading idea in punctuation–even for music (unfortunately he did so with a bad word; he called it “phrasing”).–All these people, and I say it with gratitude, are the best, the most respectable among Wagner’s admirers–they have a perfect right to honour Wagner. The same instinct unites them with one another; in him they recognise their highest type, and since he has inflamed them with his own ardour they feel themselves transformed into power, even into great power. In this quarter, if anywhere, Wagner’s influence has really been beneficent . Never before has there been so much thinking, willing, and industry in this sphere. Wagner endowed all these artists with a new conscience: what they now exact and obtain from themselves, they had never exacted before Wagner’s time–before then they had been too modest. Another spirit prevails on the stage since Wagner rules there the most difficult things are expected, blame is severe, praise very scarce,–the good and the excellent have become the rule. Taste is no longer necessary, nor even is a good voice. Wagner is sung only with ruined voices: this has a more “dramatic” effect. Even talent is out of the question. Expressiveness at all costs, which is what the Wagnerian ideal–the ideal of decadence–demands, is hardly compatible with talent. All that is required for this is virtue–that is to say, training, automatism, “self-denial”. Neither taste, voices, nor gifts, Wagner’s stage requires but one thing: Germans! … The definition of a German: an obedient man with long legs…. There is a deep significance in the fact that the rise of Wagner should have coincided with the rise of the “Empire”: both phenomena are a proof of one and the same thing–obedience and long legs.–Never have people been more obedient, never have they been so well ordered about. The conductors of Wagnerian orchestras, more particularly, are worthy of an age, which posterity will one day call, with timid awe, the classical age of war .
Wagner understood how to command; in this respect, too, he was a great teacher. He commanded as a man who had exercised an inexorable will over himself–as one who had practised lifelong discipline: Wagner was, perhaps, the greatest example of self-violence in the whole of the history of art (–even Alfieri, who in other respects is his next-of-kin, is outdone by him. The note of a Torinese).
12.
This view, that our actors have become more worthy of respect than heretofore, does not imply that I believe them to have become less dangerous…. But who is in any doubt as to what I want,–as to what the three requisitions are concerning which my wrath and my care and love of art, have made me open my mouth on this occasion?
That the stage should not become master of the arts.
That the actor should not become the corrupter of the genuine.
That music should not become an art of lying.
Friedrich Nietzsche.
Postscript
The gravity of these last words allows me at this point to introduce a few sentences out of an unprinted essay which will at least leave no doubt as to my earnestness in regard to this question. The title of this essay is: “What Wagner has cost us.”
One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. Even to-day a vague feeling that this is so, still prevails. Even Wagner’s success, his triumph, did not uproot this feeling thoroughly. But formerly it was strong, it was terrible, it was a gloomy hate throughout almost three-quarters of Wagner’s life. The resistance which he met with among us Germans cannot be too highly valued or too highly honoured. People guarded themselves against him as against an illness,–not with arguments–it is impossible to refute an illness,–but with obstruction, with mistrust, with repugnance, with loathing, with sombre earnestness, as though he were a great rampant danger. The aesthetes gave themselves away when out of three schools of German philosophy they waged an absurd war against Wagner’s principles with “ifs” and “fors”–what did he care about principles, even his own!–The Germans themselves had enough instinctive good sense to dispense with every “if” and “for” in this matter. An instinct is weakened when it becomes conscious: for by becoming conscious it makes itself feeble. If there were any signs that in spite of the universal character of European decadence there was still a modicum of health, still an instinctive premonition of what is harmful and dangerous, residing in the German soul, then it would be precisely this blunt resistance to Wagner which I should least like to see underrated. It does us honour, it gives us some reason to hope: France no longer has such an amount of health at her disposal. The Germans, these loiterers par excellence , as history shows, are to-day the most backward among the civilised nations of Europe; this has its advantages,–for they are thus relatively the youngest.
One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. It is only quite recently that the Germans have overcome a sort of dread of him,–the desire to be rid of him occurred to them again and again.[6] Does anybody remember a very curious occurrence in which, quite unexpectedly towards the end, this old feeling once more manifested itself? It happened at Wagner’s funeral. The first Wagner Society, the one in Munich, laid a wreath on his grave with this inscription, which immediately became famous: “Salvation to the Saviour!” Everybody admired the lofty inspiration which had dictated this inscription, as also the taste which seemed to be the privilege of the followers of Wagner. Many also, however (it was singular enough), made this slight alteration in it: “Salvation from the Saviour”–People began to breathe again–
One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. Let us try to estimate the influence of this worship upon culture. Whom did this movement press to the front? What did it make ever more and more pre-eminent?–In the first place the layman’s arrogance, the arrogance of the art-maniac. Now these people are organising societies, they wish to make their taste prevail, they even wish to pose as judges in rebus musicis et musicantibus . Secondly: an ever increasing indifference towards severe, noble and conscientious schooling in the service of art, and in its place the belief in genius, or in plain English, cheeky dilettantism (–the formula for this is to be found in the Mastersingers ). Thirdly, and this is the worst of all: Theatrocracy –, the craziness of a belief in the pre-eminence of the theatre, in the right of the theatre to rule supreme over the arts, over Art in general…. But this should be shouted into the face of Wagnerites a hundred times over: that the theatre is something lower than art, something secondary, something coarsened, above all something suitably distorted and falsified for the mob. In this respect Wagner altered nothing: Bayreuth is grand Opera–and not even good opera…. The stage is a form of Demolatry in the realm of taste, the stage is an insurrection of the mob, a plebiscite against good taste…. The case of Wagner proves this fact: he captivated the masses–he depraved taste, he even perverted our taste for opera!–
One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. What has Wagner-worship made out of spirit? Does Wagner liberate the spirit? To him belong that ambiguity and equivocation and all other qualities which can convince the uncertain without making them conscious of why they have been convinced. In this sense Wagner is a seducer on a grand scale. There is nothing exhausted, nothing effete, nothing dangerous to life, nothing that slanders the world in the realm of spirit, which has not secretly found shelter in his art, he conceals the blackest obscurantism in the luminous orbs of the ideal. He flatters every nihilistic (Buddhistic) instinct and togs it out in music; he flatters every form of Christianity, every religious expression of decadence. He that hath ears to hear let him hear: everything that has ever grown out of the soil of impoverished life, the whole counterfeit coinage of the transcendental and of a Beyond found its most sublime advocate in Wagner’s art, not in formulae (Wagner is too clever to use formulae), but in the persuasion of the senses which in their turn makes the spirit weary and morbid. Music in the form of Circe … in this respect his last work is his greatest masterpiece. In the art of seduction “Parsifal” will for ever maintain its rank as a stroke of genius…. I admire this work. I would fain have composed it myself. Wagner was never better inspired than towards the end. The subtlety with which beauty and disease are united here, reaches such a height, that it casts so to speak a shadow upon all Wagner’s earlier achievements: it seems too bright, too healthy. Do ye understand this? Health and brightness acting like a shadow? Almost like an objection?… To this extent are we already pure fools…. Never was there a greater Master in heavy hieratic perfumes–Never on earth has there been such a connoisseur of paltry infinities, of all that thrills, of extravagant excesses, of all the feminism from out the vocabulary of happiness! My friends, do but drink the philtres of this art! Nowhere will ye find a more pleasant method of enervating your spirit, of forgetting your manliness in the shade of a rosebush…. Ah, this old magician, mightiest of Klingsors; how he wages war against us with his art, against us free spirits! How he appeals to every form of cowardice of the modern soul with his charming girlish notes! There never was such a mortal hatred of knowledge! One must be a very cynic in order to resist seduction here. One must be able to bite in order to resist worshipping at this shrine. Very well, old seducer! The cynic cautions you– cave canem ….
One pays dearly for having been a follower of Wagner. I contemplate the youthlets who have long been exposed to his infection. The first relatively innocuous effect of it is the corruption of their taste. Wagner acts like chronic recourse to the bottle. He stultifies, he befouls the stomach. His specific effect: degeneration of the feeling for rhythm. What the Wagnerite calls rhythmical is what I call, to use a Greek metaphor, “stirring a swamp.” Much more dangerous than all this, however, is the corruption of ideas. The youthlet becomes a moon-calf, an “idealist”. He stands above science, and in this respect he has reached the master’s heights. On the other hand, he assumes the airs of a philosopher, he writes for the Bayreuth Journal ; he solves all problems in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Master. But the most ghastly thing of all is the deterioration of the nerves. Let any one wander through a large city at night, in all directions he will hear people doing violence to instruments with solemn rage and fury, a wild uproar breaks out at intervals. What is happening? It is the disciples of Wagner in the act of worshipping him…. Bayreuth is another word for a Hydro. A typical telegram from Bayreuth would read bereits bereut (I already repent). Wagner is bad for young men; he is fatal for women. What medically speaking is a female Wagnerite? It seems to me that a doctor could not be too serious in putting this alternative of conscience to young women; either one thing or the other. But they have already made their choice. You cannot serve two Masters when one of these is Wagner. Wagner redeemed woman; and in return woman built Bayreuth for him. Every sacrifice, every surrender: there was nothing that they were not prepared to give him. Woman impoverishes herself in favour of the Master, she becomes quite touching, she stands naked before him. The female Wagnerite, the most attractive equivocality that exists to-day: she is the incarnation of Wagner’s cause: his cause triumphs with her as its symbol…. Ah, this old robber! He robs our young men: he even robs our women as well, and drags them to his cell…. Ah, this old Minotaur! What has he not already cost us? Every year processions of the finest young men and maidens are led into his labyrinth that he may swallow them up, every year the whole of Europe cries out “Away to Crete! Away to Crete!”….
Second Postscript
It seems to me that my letter is open to some misunderstanding. On certain faces I see the expression of gratitude; I even hear modest but merry laughter. I prefer to be understood here as in other things. But since a certain animal, the worm of Empire, the famous Rhinoxera , has become lodged in the vineyards of the German spirit, nobody any longer understands a word I say. The Kreus-Zeitung has brought this home to me, not to speak of the Litterarisches Centralblatt . I have given the Germans the deepest books that they have ever possessed–a sufficient reason for their not having understood a word of them…. If in this essay I declare war against Wagner–and incidentally against a certain form of German taste, if I seem to use strong language about the cretinism of Bayreuth, it must not be supposed that I am in the least anxious to glorify any other musician. Other musicians are not to be considered by the side of Wagner. Things are generally bad. Decay is universal. Disease lies at the very root of things. If Wagner’s name represents the ruin of music, just as Bernini’s stands for the ruin of sculpture, he is not on that account its cause. All he did was to accelerate the fall,–though we are quite prepared to admit that he did it in a way which makes one recoil with horror from this almost instantaneous decline and fall to the depths. He possessed the ingenuousness of decadence: this constituted his superiority. He believed in it. He did not halt before any of its logical consequences. The others hesitated–that is their distinction. They have no other. What is common to both Wagner and “the others” consists in this: the decline of all organising power, the abuse of traditional means, without the capacity or the aim that would justify this. The counterfeit imitation of grand forms, for which nobody nowadays is strong, proud, self-reliant and healthy enough, excessive vitality in small details; passion at all costs; refinement as an expression of impoverished life, ever more nerves in the place of muscle. I know only one musician who to-day would be able to compose an overture as an organic whole: and nobody else knows him.[7] He who is famous now, does not write better music than Wagner, but only less characteristic, less definite music:–less definite, because half measures, even in decadence, cannot stand by the side of completeness. But Wagner was complete, Wagner represented thorough corruption, Wagner has had the courage, the will, and the conviction for corruption. What does Johannes Brahms matter?… It was his good fortune to be misunderstood by Germany; he was taken to be an antagonist of Wagner–people required an antagonist!–But he did not write necessary music, above all he wrote too much music!–When one is not rich one should at least have enough pride to be poor!… The sympathy which here and there was meted out to Brahms, apart from party interests and party misunderstandings, was for a long time a riddle to me, until one day through an accident, almost, I discovered that he affected a particular type of man. He has the melancholy of impotence. His creations are not the result of plenitude, he thirsts after abundance. Apart from what he plagiarises, from what he borrows from ancient or exotically modern styles–he is a master in the art of copying,–there remains as his most individual quality a longing …. And this is what the dissatisfied of all kinds, and all those who yearn, divine in him. He is much too little of a personality, too little of a central figure…. The “impersonal,” those who are not self-centred, love him for this. He is especially the musician of a species of dissatisfied women. Fifty steps further on, and we find the female Wagnerite–just as we find Wagner himself fifty paces ahead of Brahms.–The female Wagnerite is a more definite, a more interesting, and above all, a more attractive type. Brahms is touching so long as he dreams or mourns over himself in private–in this respect he is modern;–he becomes cold, we no longer feel at one with him when he poses as the child of the classics…. People like to call Brahms Beethoven’s heir: I know of no more cautious euphemism–All that which to-day makes a claim to being the grand style in music is on precisely that account either false to us or false to itself. This alternative is suspicious enough: in itself it contains a casuistic question concerning the value of the two cases. The instinct of the majority protests against the alternative; “false to us”–they do not wish to be cheated;–and I myself would certainly always prefer this type to the other (“False to itself”). This is my taste.–Expressed more clearly for the sake of the “poor in spirit” it amounts to this: Brahms or Wagner…. Brahms is not an actor.–A very great part of other musicians may be summed up in the concept Brahms–I do not wish to say anything about the clever apes of Wagner, as for instance Goldmark: when one has “The Queen of Sheba” to one’s name, one belongs to a menagerie,–one ought to put oneself on show.–Nowadays all things that can be done well and even with a master hand are small. In this department alone is honesty still possible. Nothing, however, can cure music as a whole of its chief fault, of its fate, which is to be the expression of general physiological contradiction,–which is, in fact, to be modern.
The best instruction, the most conscientious schooling, the most thorough familiarity, yea, and even isolation, with the Old Masters,–all this only acts as a palliative, or, more strictly speaking, has but an illusory effect, because the first condition of the right thing is no longer in our bodies; whether this first condition be the strong race of a Handel or the overflowing animal spirits of a Rossini. Not everyone has the right to every teacher: and this holds good of whole epochs.–In itself it is not impossible that there are still remains of stronger natures, typical unadapted men, somewhere in Europe: from this quarter the advent of a somewhat belated form of beauty and perfection, even in music, might still be hoped for. But the most that we can expect to see are exceptional cases. From the rule, that corruption is paramount, that corruption is a fatality,–not even a God can save music.
Epilogue
And now let us take breath and withdraw a moment from this narrow world which necessarily must be narrow, because we have to make enquiries relative to the value of persons . A philosopher feels that he wants to wash his hands after he has concerned himself so long with the “Case of Wagner”. I shall now give my notion of what is modern . According to the measure of energy of every age, there is also a standard that determines which virtues shall be allowed and which forbidden. The age either has the virtues of ascending life, in which case it resists the virtues of degeneration with all its deepest instincts. Or it is in itself an age of degeneration, in which case it requires the virtues of declining life,–in which case it hates everything that justifies itself, solely as being the outcome of a plenitude, or a superabundance of strength. AEsthetic is inextricably bound up with these biological principles: there is decadent aesthetic, and classical aesthetic,–“beauty in itself” is just as much a chimera as any other kind of idealism.–Within the narrow sphere of the so-called moral values, no greater antithesis could be found than that of master-morality and the morality of Christian valuations: the latter having grown out of a thoroughly morbid soil. (–The gospels present us with the same physiological types, as do the novels of Dostoiewsky), the master-morality (“Roman,” “pagan,” “classical,” “Renaissance”), on the other hand, being the symbolic speech of well-constitutedness, of ascending life, and of the Will to Power as a vital principle. Master-morality affirms just as instinctively as Christian morality denies (“God,” “Beyond,” “self-denial,”–all of them negations). The first reflects its plenitude upon things,–it transfigures, it embellishes, it rationalises the world,–the latter impoverishes, bleaches, mars the value of things; it suppresses the world. “World” is a Christian term of abuse. These antithetical forms in the optics of values, are both necessary: they are different points of view which cannot be circumvented either with arguments or counter-arguments. One cannot refute Christianity: it is impossible to refute a diseased eyesight. That people should have combated pessimism as if it had been a philosophy, was the very acme of learned stupidity. The concepts “true” and “untrue” do not seem to me to have any sense in optics.–That, alone, which has to be guarded against is the falsity, the instinctive duplicity which would fain regard this antithesis as no antithesis at all: just as Wagner did,–and his mastery in this kind of falseness was of no mean order. To cast side-long glances at master-morality, at noble morality (–Icelandic saga is perhaps the greatest documentary evidence of these values), and at the same time to have the opposite teaching, the “gospel of the lowly,” the doctrine of the need of salvation, on one’s lips!… Incidentally, I admire the modesty of Christians who go to Bayreuth. As for myself, I could not endure to hear the sound of certain words on Wagner’s lips. There are some concepts which are too good for Bayreuth … What? Christianity adjusted for female Wagnerites, perhaps by female Wagnerites–for, in his latter days Wagner was thoroughly feminini generis –? Again I say, the Christians of to-day are too modest for me…. If Wagner were a Christian, then Liszt was perhaps a Father of the Church!–The need of salvation , the quintessence of all Christian needs, has nothing in common with such clowns; it is the most straightforward expression of decadence, it is the most convincing and most painful affirmation of decadence, in sublime symbols and practices. The Christian wishes to be rid of himself. Le moi est toujours haissable. Noble morality, master-morality, on the other hand, is rooted in a triumphant saying of yea to one’s self ,–it is the self-affirmation and self-glorification of life; it also requires sublime symbols and practices; but only “because its heart is too full.” The whole of beautiful art and of great art belongs here; their common essence is gratitude. But we must allow it a certain instinctive repugnance to decadents , and a scorn and horror of the latter’s symbolism: such things almost prove it. The noble Romans considered Christianity as a foeda superstitio : let me call to your minds the feelings which the last German of noble taste–Goethe–had in regard to the cross. It is idle to look for more valuable, more necessary contrasts.[8]
But the kind of falsity which is characteristic of the Bayreuthians is not exceptional to-day. We all know the hybrid concept of the Christian gentleman. This innocence in contradiction, this “clean conscience” in falsehood, is rather modern par excellence , with it modernity is almost defined. Biologically, modern man represents a contradiction of values , he sits between two stools, he says yea and nay in one breath. No wonder that it is precisely in our age that falseness itself became flesh and blood, and even genius! No wonder Wagner dwelt amongst us! It was not without reason that I called Wagner the Cagliostro of modernity…. But all of us, though we do not know it, involuntarily have values, words, formulae, and morals in our bodies, which are quite antagonistic in their origin–regarded from a physiological standpoint, we are false …. How would a diagnosis of the modern soul begin? With a determined incision into this agglomeration of contradictory instincts, with the total suppression of its antagonistic values, with vivisection applied to its most instructive case. To philosophers the “Case of Wagner” is a windfall –this essay, as you observe, was inspired by gratitude.
Nietzsche Contra Wagner
THE BRIEF OF A PSYCHOLOGIST
Preface
The following chapters have been selected from past works of mine, and not without care. Some of them date back as far as 1877. Here and there, of course, they will be found to have been made a little more intelligible, but above all, more brief. Read consecutively, they can leave no one in any doubt, either concerning myself, or concerning Wagner: we are antipodes. The reader will come to other conclusions, too, in his perusal of these pages: for instance, that this is an essay for psychologists and not for Germans…. I have my readers everywhere, in Vienna, St Petersburg, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Paris, and New York–but I have none in Europe’s Flat-land–Germany…. And I might even have something to say to Italians whom I love just as much as I … Quousque tandem, Crispi … Triple alliance: a people can only conclude a mesalliance with the “Empire.”…
Friedrich Nietzsche.
Turin, Christmas 1888 .
Wherein I Admire Wagner.
I believe that artists very often do not know what they are best able to do. They are much too vain. Their minds are directed to something prouder than merely to appear like little plants, which, with freshness, rareness, and beauty, know how to sprout from their soil with real perfection. The ultimate goodness of their own garden and vineyard is superciliously under-estimated by them, and their love and their insight are not of the same quality. Here is a musician who is a greater master than anyone else in the discovering of tones, peculiar to suffering, oppressed, and tormented souls, who can endow even dumb misery with speech. Nobody can approach him in the colours of late autumn, in the indescribably touching joy of a last, a very last, and all too short gladness; he knows of a chord which expresses those secret and weird midnight hours of the soul, when cause and effect seem to have fallen asunder, and at every moment something may spring out of nonentity. He is happiest of all when creating from out the nethermost depths of human happiness, and, so to speak, from out man’s empty bumper, in which the bitterest and most repulsive drops have mingled with the sweetest for good or evil at last. He knows that weary shuffling along of the soul which is no longer able either to spring or to fly, nay, which is no longer able to walk, he has the modest glance of concealed suffering, of understanding without comfort, of leave-taking without word or sign; verily as the Orpheus of all secret misery he is greater than anyone, and many a thing was introduced into art for the first time by him, which hitherto had not been given expression, had not even been thought worthy of art–the cynical revolts, for instance, of which only the greatest sufferer is capable, also many a small and quite microscopical feature of the soul, as it were the scales of its amphibious nature–yes indeed, he is the master of everything very small. But this he refuses to be! His tastes are much more in love with vast walls and with daring frescoes!… He does not see that his spirit has another desire and bent–a totally different outlook–that it prefers to squat peacefully in the corners of broken-down houses: concealed in this way, and hidden even from himself, he paints his really great masterpieces, all of which are very short, often only one bar in length–there, only, does he become quite good, great and perfect, perhaps there alone.–Wagner is one who has suffered much–and this elevates him above other musicians.–I admire Wagner wherever he sets himself to music–
Wherein I Raise Objections.
With all this I do not wish to imply that I regard this music as healthy, and least of all in those places where it speaks of Wagner himself. My objections to Wagner’s music are physiological objections. Why should I therefore begin by clothing them in aesthetic formulae? AEsthetic is indeed nothing more than applied physiology–The fact I bring forward, my " petit fait vrai ,” is that I can no longer breathe with ease when this music begins to have its effect upon me; that my foot immediately begins to feel indignant at it and rebels: for what it needs is time, dance, march; even the young German Kaiser could not march to Wagner’s Imperial March,–what my foot demands in the first place from music is that ecstasy which lies in good walking, stepping and dancing. But do not my stomach, my heart, my circulation also protest? Are not my intestines also troubled? And do I not become hoarse unawares? … in order to listen to Wagner I require Geraudel’s Pastilles…. And then I ask myself, what is it that my whole body must have from music in general? for there is no such thing as a soul…. I believe it must have relief: as if all animal functions were accelerated by means of light, bold, unfettered, self-reliant rhythms, as if brazen and leaden life could lose its weight by means of delicate and smooth melodies. My melancholy would fain rest its head in the haunts and abysses of perfection; for this reason I need music. But Wagner makes one ill–What do I care about the theatre? What do I care about the spasms of its moral ecstasies in which the mob–and who is not the mob to-day?–rejoices? What do I care about the whole pantomimic hocus-pocus of the actor? You are beginning to see that I am essentially anti-theatrical at heart. For the stage, this mob art par excellence , my soul has that deepest scorn felt by every artist to-day. With a stage success a man sinks to such an extent in my esteem as to drop out of sight; failure in this quarter makes me prick my ears, makes me begin to pay attention. But this was not so with Wagner, next to the Wagner who created the most unique music that has ever existed there was the Wagner who was essentially a man of the stage, an actor, the most enthusiastic mimomaniac that has perhaps existed on earth, even as a musician. And let it be said en passant that if Wagner’s theory was “drama is the object, music is only a means”–his practice was from beginning to end “the attitude is the end, drama and even music can never be anything else than means.” Music as the manner of accentuating, of strengthening, and deepening dramatic poses and all things which please the senses of the actor; and Wagnerian drama only an opportunity for a host of interesting attitudes!–Alongside of all other instincts he had the dictatorial instinct of a great actor in everything and, as I have already said, as a musician also.–On one occasion, and not without trouble, I made this clear to a Wagnerite pur sang ,–clearness and a Wagnerite! I won’t say another word. There were reasons for adding; “For heaven’s sake, be a little more true unto yourself! We are not in Bayreuth now. In Bayreuth people are only upright in the mass; the individual lies, he even lies to himself. One leaves oneself at home when one goes to Bayreuth, one gives up all right to one’s own tongue and choice, to one’s own taste and even to one’s own courage, one knows these things no longer as one is wont to have them and practise them before God and the world and between one’s own four walls. In the theatre no one brings the finest senses of his art with him, and least of all the artist who works for the theatre,–for here loneliness is lacking; everything perfect does not suffer a witness…. In the theatre one becomes mob, herd, woman, Pharisee, electing cattle, patron, idiot–Wagnerite: there, the most personal conscience is bound to submit to the levelling charm of the great multitude, there the neighbour rules, there one becomes a neighbour.”
Wagner As A Danger.
The aim after which more modern music is striving, which is now given the strong but obscure name of “unending melody,” can be clearly understood by comparing it to one’s feelings on entering the sea. Gradually one loses one’s footing and one ultimately abandons oneself to the mercy or fury of the elements: one has to swim. In the solemn, or fiery, swinging movement, first slow and then quick, of old music–one had to do something quite different; one had to dance. The measure which was required for this and the control of certain balanced degrees of time and energy, forced the soul of the listener to continual sobriety of thought.–Upon the counterplay of the cooler currents of air which came from this sobriety, and from the warmer breath of enthusiasm, the charm of all good music rested–Richard Wagner wanted another kind of movement,–he overthrew the physiological first principle of all music before his time. It was no longer a matter of walking or dancing,–we must swim, we must hover…. This perhaps decides the whole matter. “Unending melody” really wants to break all the symmetry of time and strength; it actually scorns these things–Its wealth of invention resides precisely in what to an older ear sounds like rhythmic paradox and abuse. From the imitation or the prevalence of such a taste there would arise a danger for music–so great that we can imagine none greater–the complete degeneration of the feeling for rhythm, chaos in the place of rhythm…. The danger reaches its climax when such music cleaves ever more closely to naturalistic play-acting and pantomime, which governed by no laws of form, aim at effect and nothing more…. Expressiveness at all costs and music a servant, a slave to attitudes–this is the end….
What? would it really be the first virtue of a performance (as performing musical artists now seem to believe), under all circumstances to attain to a haut-relief which cannot be surpassed? If this were applied to Mozart, for instance, would it not be a real sin against Mozart’s spirit,–Mozart’s cheerful, enthusiastic, delightful and loving spirit? He who fortunately was no German, and whose seriousness is a charming and golden seriousness and not by any means that of a German clodhopper…. Not to speak of the earnestness of the “marble statue”…. But you seem to think that all music is the music of the “marble statue”?–that all music should, so to speak, spring out of the wall and shake the listener to his very bowels?… Only thus could music have any effect! But on whom would the effect be made? Upon something on which a noble artist ought never to deign to act,–upon the mob, upon the immature! upon the blases! upon the diseased! upon idiots! upon Wagnerites !…
A Music Without A Future.
Of all the arts which succeed in growing on the soil of a particular culture, music is the last plant to appear; maybe because it is the one most dependent upon our innermost feelings, and therefore the last to come to the surface–at a time when the culture to which it belongs is in its autumn season and beginning to fade. It was only in the art of the Dutch masters that the spirit of mediaeval Christianity found its expression–, its architecture of sound is the youngest, but genuine and legitimate, sister of the Gothic. It was only in Handel’s music that the best in Luther and in those like him found its voice, the Judeo-heroic trait which gave the Reformation a touch of greatness-the Old Testament, not the New, become music. It was left to Mozart, to pour out the epoch of Louis XIV., and of the art of Racine and Claude Lorrain, in ringing gold; only in Beethoven’s and Rossini’s music did the Eighteenth Century sing itself out–the century of enthusiasm, broken ideals, and fleeting joy . All real and original music is a swan song–Even our last form of music, despite its prevalence and its will to prevail, has perhaps only a short time to live, for it sprouted from a soil which was in the throes of a rapid subsidence,–of a culture which will soon be submerged . A certain catholicism of feeling, and a predilection for some ancient indigenous (so-called national) ideals and eccentricities, was its first condition. Wagner’s appropriation of old sagas and songs, in which scholarly prejudice taught us to see something German par excellence –now we laugh at it all, the resurrection of these Scandinavian monsters with a thirst for ecstatic sensuality and spiritualisation–the whole of this taking and giving on Wagner’s part, in the matter of subjects, characters, passions, and nerves, would also give unmistakable expression to the spirit of his music provided that this music, like any other, did not know how to speak about itself save ambiguously: for musica is a woman …. We must not let ourselves be misled concerning this state of things, by the fact that at this very moment we are living in a reaction, in the heart itself of a reaction. The age of international wars, of ultramontane martyrdom, in fact, the whole interlude-character which typifies the present condition of Europe, may indeed help an art like Wagner’s to sudden glory, without, however, in the least ensuring its future prosperity . The Germans themselves have no future….
We Antipodes.
Perhaps a few people, or at least my friends, will remember that I made my first plunge into life armed with some errors and some exaggerations, but that, in any case, I began with hope in my heart. In the philosophical pessimism of the nineteenth century, I recognised–who knows by what by-paths of personal experience–the symptom of a higher power of thought, a more triumphant plenitude of life, than had manifested itself hitherto in the philosophies of Hume, Kant and Hegel!–I regarded tragic knowledge as the most beautiful luxury of our culture, as its most precious, most noble, most dangerous kind of prodigality; but, nevertheless, in view of its overflowing wealth, as a justifiable luxury . In the same way, I began by interpreting Wagner’s music as the expression of a Dionysian powerfulness of soul. In it I thought I heard the earthquake by means of which a primeval life-force, which had been constrained for ages, was seeking at last to burst its bonds, quite indifferent to how much of that which nowadays calls itself culture, would thereby be shaken to ruins. You see how I misinterpreted, you see also, what I bestowed upon Wagner and Schopenhauer–myself…. Every art and every philosophy may be regarded either as a cure or as a stimulant to ascending or declining life: they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers:–those that suffer from overflowing vitality , who need Dionysian art and require a tragic insight into, and a tragic outlook upon, the phenomenon life,–and there are those who suffer from reduced vitality, and who crave for repose, quietness, calm seas, or else the intoxication, the spasm, the bewilderment which art and philosophy provide. Revenge upon life itself–this is the most voluptuous form of intoxication for such indigent souls!… Now Wagner responds quite as well as Schopenhauer to the twofold cravings of these people,–they both deny life, they both slander it but precisely on this account they are my antipodes.–The richest creature, brimming over with vitality,–the Dionysian God and man, may not only allow himself to gaze upon the horrible and the questionable; but he can also lend his hand to the terrible deed, and can indulge in all the luxury of destruction, disaggregation, and negation,–in him evil, purposelessness and ugliness, seem just as allowable as they are in nature–because of his bursting plenitude of creative and rejuvenating powers, which are able to convert every desert into a luxurious land of plenty. Conversely, it is the greatest sufferer and pauper in vitality, who is most in need of mildness, peace and goodness–that which to-day is called humaneness–in thought as well as in action, and possibly of a God whose speciality is to be a God of the sick, a Saviour, and also of logic or the abstract intelligibility of existence even for idiots (–the typical “free-spirits,” like the idealists, and “beautiful souls,” are decadents –); in short, of a warm, danger-tight, and narrow confinement, between optimistic horizons which would allow of stultification…. And thus very gradually, I began to understand Epicurus, the opposite of a Dionysian Greek, and also the Christian who in fact is only a kind of Epicurean, and who, with his belief that “faith saves,” carries the principle of Hedonism as far as possible –far beyond all intellectual honesty…. If I am ahead of all other psychologists in anything, it is in this fact that my eyes are more keen for tracing those most difficult and most captious of all deductions, in which the largest number of mistakes have been made,–the deduction which makes one infer something concerning the author from his work, something concerning the doer from his deed, something concerning the idealist from the need which produced this ideal, and something concerning the imperious craving which stands at the back of all thinking and valuing–In regard to all artists of what kind soever, I shall now avail myself of this radical distinction: does the creative power in this case arise from a loathing of life, or from an excessive plenitude of life? In Goethe, for instance, an overflow of vitality was creative, in Flaubert–hate: Flaubert, a new edition of Pascal, but as an artist with this instinctive belief at heart: " Flaubert est toujours haissable, l’homme n’est rien, l’oeuvre est tout “…. He tortured himself when he wrote, just as Pascal tortured himself when he thought–the feelings of both were inclined to be “non-egoistic.” … “Disinterestedness”–principle of decadence, the will to nonentity in art as well as in morality.
Where Wagner Is At Home.
Even at the present day, France is still the refuge of the most intellectual and refined culture in Europe, it remains the high school of taste: but one must know where to find this France of taste. The North-German Gazette , for instance, or whoever expresses his sentiments in that paper, thinks that the French are “barbarians,”–as for me, if I had to find the blackest spot on earth, where slaves still required to be liberated, I should turn in the direction of Northern Germany…. But those who form part of that select France take very good care to conceal themselves ; they are a small body of men, and there may be some among them who do not stand on very firm legs–a few may be fatalists, hypochondriacs, invalids; others may be enervated, and artificial,–such are those who would fain be artistic,–but all the loftiness and delicacy which still remains to this world, is in their possession. In this France of intellect, which is also the France of pessimism, Schopenhauer is already much more at home than he ever was in Germany, his principal work has already been translated twice, and the second time so excellently that now I prefer to read Schopenhauer in French (–he was an accident among Germans, just as I am–the Germans have no fingers wherewith to grasp us; they haven’t any fingers at all,–but only claws). And I do not mention Heine– l’adorable Heine , as they say in Paris–who long since has passed into the flesh and blood of the more profound and more soulful of French lyricists. How could the horned cattle of Germany know how to deal with the delicatesses of such a nature!–And as to Richard Wagner, it is obvious, it is even glaringly obvious, that Paris is the very soil for him, the more French music adapts itself to the needs of l’ame moderne , the more Wagnerian it will become,–it is far enough advanced in this direction already.–In this respect one should not allow one’s self to be misled by Wagner himself–it was simply disgraceful on Wagner’s part to scoff at Paris, as he did, in its agony in 1871…. In spite of it all, in Germany Wagner is only a misapprehension.–who could be more incapable of understanding anything about Wagner than the Kaiser, for instance?–To everybody familiar with the movement of European culture, this fact, however, is certain, that French romanticism and Richard Wagner are most intimately related. All dominated by literature, up to their very eyes and ears–the first European artists with a universal literary culture,–most of them writers, poets, mediators and minglers of the senses and the arts, all fanatics in expression , great discoverers in the realm of the sublime as also of the ugly and the gruesome, and still greater discoverers in passion, in working for effect, in the art of dressing their windows,–all possessing talent far above their genius,–virtuosos to their backbone, knowing of secret passages to all that seduces, lures, constrains or overthrows; born enemies of logic and of straight lines, thirsting after the exotic, the strange and the monstrous, and all opiates for the senses and the understanding. On the whole, a daring dare-devil, magnificently violent, soaring and high-springing crew of artists, who first had to teach their own century–it is the century of the mob–what the concept “artist” meant. But they were ill ….
Wagner As The Apostle Of Chastity.
Is this the German way? Comes this low bleating forth from German hearts? Should Teutons, sin repenting, lash themselves, Or spread their palms with priestly unctuousness, Exalt their feelings with the censer’s fumes, And cower and quake and bend the trembling knee, And with a sickly sweetness plead a prayer? Then ogle nuns, and ring the Ave-bell, And thus with morbid fervour out-do heaven? Is this the German way? Beware, yet are you free, yet your own Lords. What yonder lures is Rome, Rome’s faith sung without words.
There is no necessary contrast between sensuality and chastity, every good marriage, every genuine love affair is above this contrast; but in those cases where the contrast exists, it is very far from being necessarily a tragic one. This, at least, ought to hold good of all well-constituted and good-spirited mortals, who are not in the least inclined to reckon their unstable equilibrium between angel and petite bete , without further ado, among the objections to existence, the more refined and more intelligent like Hafis and Goethe, even regarded it as an additional attraction. It is precisely contradictions of this kind which lure us to life…. On the other hand, it must be obvious, that when Circe’s unfortunate animals are induced to worship chastity, all they see and worship therein, is their opposite–oh! and with what tragic groaning and fervour, may well be imagined–that same painful and thoroughly superfluous opposition which, towards the end of his life, Richard Wagner undoubtedly wished to set to music and to put on the stage, And to what purpose? we may reasonably ask.
And yet this other question can certainly not be circumvented: what business had he actually with that manly (alas! so unmanly) “bucolic simplicity,” that poor devil and son of nature–Parsifal, whom he ultimately makes a catholic by such insidious means–what?–was Wagner in earnest with Parsifal? For, that he was laughed at, I cannot deny, any more than Gottfried Keller can…. We should like to believe that “Parsifal” was meant as a piece of idle gaiety, as the closing act and satyric drama, with which Wagner the tragedian wished to take leave of us, of himself, and above all of tragedy , in a way which befitted him and his dignity, that is to say, with an extravagant, lofty and most malicious parody of tragedy itself, of all the past and terrible earnestness and sorrow of this world, of the most ridiculous form of the unnaturalness of the ascetic ideal, at last overcome. For Parsifal is the subject par excellence for a comic opera…. Is Wagner’s “Parsifal” his secret laugh of superiority at himself, the triumph of his last and most exalted state of artistic freedom, of artistic transcendence–is it Wagner able to laugh at himself? Once again we only wish it were so; for what could Parsifal be if he were meant seriously ? Is it necessary in his case to say (as I have heard people say) that “Parsifal” is “the product of the mad hatred of knowledge, intellect, and sensuality?” a curse upon the senses and the mind in one breath and in one fit of hatred? an act of apostasy and a return to Christianly sick and obscurantist ideals? And finally even a denial of self, a deletion of self, on the part of an artist who theretofore had worked with all the power of his will in favour of the opposite cause, the spiritualisation and sensualisation of his art? And not only of his art, but also of his life? Let us remember how enthusiastically Wagner at one time walked in the footsteps of the philosopher Feuerbach. Feuerbach’s words “healthy sensuality” struck Wagner in the thirties and forties very much as they struck many other Germans–they called themselves the young Germans–that is to say, as words of salvation. Did he ultimately change his mind on this point? It would seem that he had at least had the desire of changing his doctrine towards the end…. Had the hatred of life become dominant in him as in Flaubert? For “Parsifal” is a work of rancour, of revenge, of the most secret concoction of poisons with which to make an end of the first conditions of life, it is a bad work . The preaching of chastity remains an incitement to unnaturalness: I despise anybody who does not regard “Parsifal” as an outrage upon morality.–
How I Got Rid Of Wagner.
Already in the summer of 1876, when the first festival at Bayreuth was at its height, I took leave of Wagner in my soul. I cannot endure anything double-faced. Since Wagner had returned to Germany, he had condescended step by step to everything that I despise–even to anti-Semitism…. As a matter of fact, it was then high time to bid him farewell: but the proof of this came only too soon. Richard Wagner, ostensibly the most triumphant creature alive; as a matter of fact, though, a cranky and desperate decadent , suddenly fell helpless and broken on his knees before the Christian cross…. Was there no German at that time who had the eyes to see, and the sympathy in his soul to feel, the ghastly nature of this spectacle? Was I the only one who suffered from it?–Enough, the unexpected event, like a flash of lightning, made me see only too clearly what kind of a place it was that I had just left,–and it also made me shudder as a man shudders who unawares has just escaped a great danger. As I continued my journey alone, I trembled. Not long after this I was ill, more than ill–I was tired ;–tired of the continual disappointments over everything which remained for us modern men to be enthusiastic about, of the energy, industry, hope, youth, and love that are squandered everywhere ; tired out of loathing for the whole world of idealistic lying and conscience-softening, which, once again, in the case of Wagner, had scored a victory over a man who was of the bravest; and last but not least, tired by the sadness of a ruthless suspicion–that I was now condemned to be ever more and more suspicious, ever more and more contemptuous, ever more and more deeply alone than I had been theretofore. For I had no one save Richard Wagner…. I was always condemned to the society of Germans….
Henceforward alone and cruelly distrustful of myself, I then took up sides–not without anger– against myself and for all that which hurt me and fell hard upon me; and thus I found the road to that courageous pessimism which is the opposite of all idealistic falsehood, and which, as it seems to me, is also the road to me – to my mission …. That hidden and dominating thing, for which for long ages we have had no name, until ultimately it comes forth as our mission,–this tyrant in us wreaks a terrible revenge upon us for every attempt we make either to evade him or to escape him, for every one of our experiments in the way of befriending people to whom we do not belong, for every active occupation, however estimable, which may make us diverge from our principal object:–aye, and even for every virtue which would fain protect us from the rigour of our most intimate sense of responsibility. Illness is always the answer, whenever we venture to doubt our right to our mission, whenever we begin to make things too easy for ourselves. Curious and terrible at the same time! It is for our relaxation that we have to pay most dearly! And should we wish after all to return to health, we then have no choice: we are compelled to burden ourselves more heavily than we had been burdened before….
The Psychologist Speaks.
The oftener 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 being suffocated by sympathy: he needs greater hardness and cheerfulness than any other man. For the corruption, the ruination of higher men, is in fact the rule: it is terrible to have such a rule always before our eyes. The manifold torments of the psychologist who has discovered this ruination, who discovers once, and then discovers almost repeatedly throughout all history, this universal inner “hopelessness” of higher men, this eternal “too late!” in every sense–may perhaps one day be the cause of his “going to the dogs” himself. In almost every psychologist we may see a tell-tale predilection in favour of intercourse with commonplace and well-ordered men: and this betrays how constantly he requires healing, that he needs a sort of flight and forgetfulness, away from what his insight and incisiveness–from what his “business”–has laid upon his conscience. A horror of his memory is typical of him. He is easily silenced by the judgment of others, he hears with unmoved countenance how people honour, admire, love, and glorify, where he has opened his eyes and seen –or he even conceals his silence by expressly agreeing with some obvious opinion. Perhaps the paradox of his situation becomes so dreadful that, precisely where he has learnt great sympathy *, together with * great contempt , the educated have on their part learnt great reverence. And who knows but in all great instances, just this alone happened: that the multitude worshipped a God, and that the “God” was only a poor sacrificial animal! Success has always been the greatest liar–and the “work” itself, the deed , is a success too; the great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer, are disguised in their creations until they can no longer be recognised, the “work” of the artist, of the philosopher, only invents him who has created it, who is reputed to have created it, the “great men,” as they are reverenced, are poor little fictions composed afterwards; in the world of historical values counterfeit coinage prevails .
Those great poets, for example, such as Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopardi, Kleist, Gogol (I do not dare to mention much greater names, but I imply them), as they now appear, and were perhaps obliged to be: men of the moment, sensuous, absurd, versatile, light-minded and quick to trust and to distrust, with souls in which usually some flaw has to be concealed, often taking revenge with their works for an internal blemish, often seeking forgetfulness in their soaring from a too accurate memory, idealists out of proximity to the mud:–what a torment these great artists are and the so-called higher men in general, to him who has once found them out! We are all special pleaders in the cause of mediocrity. It is conceivable that it is just from woman–who is clairvoyant in the world of suffering, and, alas! also unfortunately eager to help and save to an extent far beyond her powers–that they have learnt so readily those outbreaks of boundless sympathy which the multitude, above all the reverent multitude, overwhelms with prying and self-gratifying interpretations. This sympathising invariably deceives itself as to its power; woman would like to believe that love can do everything –it is the superstition peculiar to her. Alas, he who knows the heart finds out how poor, helpless, pretentious, and blundering even the best and deepest love is–how much more readily it destroys than saves….
The intellectual loathing and haughtiness of every man who has suffered deeply–the extent to which a man can suffer, almost determines the order of rank–the chilling uncertainty with which he is thoroughly imbued and coloured, that by virtue of his suffering he knows more than the shrewdest and wisest can ever know, that he has been familiar with, and “at home” in many distant terrible worlds of which " you know nothing!”–this silent intellectual haughtiness, this pride of the elect of knowledge, of the “initiated,” of the almost sacrificed, finds all forms of disguise necessary to protect itself from contact with gushing 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, along with a certain ostentatious boldness of taste which takes suffering lightly, and puts itself on the defensive against all that is sorrowful and profound. There are “cheerful men” who make use of good spirits, because they are misunderstood on account of them–they wish to be misunderstood. There are “scientific minds” who make use of science, because it gives a cheerful appearance, and because love of science leads people to conclude that a person is shallow–they wish to mislead to a false conclusion. There are free insolent spirits which would fain conceal and deny that they are at bottom broken, incurable hearts–this is Hamlet’s case: and then folly itself can be the mask of an unfortunate and alas! all too dead-certain knowledge.
Epilogue.
I have often asked myself whether I am not much more deeply indebted to the hardest years of my life than to any others. According to the voice of my innermost nature, everything necessary, seen from above and in the light of a superior economy, is also useful in itself–not only should one bear it, one should love it…. Amor fati : this is the very core of my being–And as to my prolonged illness, do I not owe much more to it than I owe to my health? To it I owe a higher kind of health, a sort of health which grows stronger under everything that does not actually kill it!– To it, I owe even my philosophy …. Only great suffering is the ultimate emancipator of spirit, for it teaches one that vast suspiciousness which makes an X out of every U, a genuine and proper X, i.e. , the antepenultimate letter. Only great suffering; that great suffering, under which we seem to be over a fire of greenwood, the suffering that takes its time–forces us philosophers to descend into our nethermost depths, and to let go of all trustfulness, all good-nature, all whittling-down, all mildness, all mediocrity,–on which things we had formerly staked our humanity. I doubt whether such suffering improves a man; but I know that it makes him deeper …. Supposing we learn to set our pride, our scorn, our strength of will against it, and thus resemble the Indian who, however cruelly he may be tortured, considers himself revenged on his tormentor by the bitterness of his own tongue. Supposing we withdraw from pain into nonentity, into the deaf, dumb, and rigid sphere of self-surrender, self-forgetfulness, self-effacement: one is another person when one leaves these protracted and dangerous exercises in the art of self-mastery, one has one note of interrogation the more, and above all one has the will henceforward to ask more, deeper, sterner, harder, more wicked, and more silent questions, than anyone has ever asked on earth before…. Trust in life has vanished; life itself has become a problem .–But let no one think that one has therefore become a spirit of gloom or a blind owl! Even love of life is still possible,–but it is a different kind of love…. It is the love for a woman whom we doubt….
The rarest of all things is this: to have after all another taste–a second taste. Out of such abysses, out of the abyss of great suspicion as well, a man returns as though born again, he has a new skin, he is more susceptible, more full of wickedness; he has a finer taste for joyfulness; he has a more sensitive tongue for all good things; his senses are more cheerful; he has acquired a second, more dangerous, innocence in gladness; he is more childish too, and a hundred times more cunning than ever he had been before.
Oh, how much more repulsive pleasure now is to him, that coarse, heavy, buff-coloured pleasure, which is understood by our pleasure-seekers, our “cultured people,” our wealthy folk and our rulers! With how much more irony we now listen to the hubbub as of a country fair, with which the “cultured” man and the man about town allow themselves to be forced through art, literature, music, and with the help of intoxicating liquor, to “intellectual enjoyments.” How the stage-cry of passion now stings our ears; how strange to our taste the whole romantic riot and sensuous bustle, which the cultured mob are so fond of, together with its aspirations to the sublime, to the exalted and the distorted, have become. No: if we convalescents require an art at all, it is another art—a mocking, nimble, volatile, divinely undisturbed, divinely artificial art, which blazes up like pure flame into a cloudless sky! But above all, an art for artists, only for artists ! We are, after all, more conversant with that which is in the highest degree necessary–cheerfulness, every kind of cheerfulness, my friends!… We men of knowledge, now know something only too well: oh how well we have learnt by this time, to forget, not to know, as artists!… As to our future: we shall scarcely be found on the track of those Egyptian youths who break into temples at night, who embrace statues, and would fain unveil, strip, and set in broad daylight, everything which there are excellent reasons to keep concealed.[9] No, we are disgusted with this bad taste, this will to truth, this search after truth “at all costs;” this madness of adolescence, “the love of truth;” we are now too experienced, too serious, too joyful, too scorched, too profound for that…. We no longer believe that truth remains truth when it is unveiled ,–we have lived enough to understand this…. To-day it seems to us good form not to strip everything naked, not to be present at all things, not to desire to “know” all. " Tout comprendre c’est tout mepriser. “… “Is it true,” a little girl once asked her mother, “that the beloved Father is everywhere?–I think it quite improper,”–a hint to philosophers…. The shame with which Nature has concealed herself behind riddles and enigmas should be held in higher esteem. Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons for not revealing her reasons? *… Perhaps her name, to use a Greek word is * Baubo ?–Oh these Greeks, they understood the art of living! For this it is needful to halt bravely at the surface, at the fold, at the skin, to worship appearance, and to believe in forms, tones, words, and the whole Olympus of appearance ! These Greeks were superficial–from * profundity …. And are we not returning to precisely the same thing, we dare-devils of intellect who have scaled the highest and most dangerous pinnacles of present thought, in order to look around us from that height, in order to look down * from that height? Are we not precisely in this respect– Greeks ? Worshippers of form, of tones, of words? Precisely on that account– artists ?
Selected Aphorisms from Nietzsche’s Retrospect of His Years of Friendship with Wagner.
( Summer 1878. )
My blunder was this, I travelled to Bayreuth with an ideal in my breast, and was thus doomed to experience the bitterest disappointment. The preponderance of ugliness, grotesqueness and strong pepper thoroughly repelled me.
I utterly disagree with those who were dissatisfied with the decorations, the scenery and the mechanical contrivances at Bayreuth. Far too much industry and ingenuity was applied to the task of chaining the imagination to matters which did not belie their epic origin. But as to the naturalism of the attitudes, of the singing, compared with the orchestra!! What affected, artificial and depraved tones, what a distortion of nature, were we made to hear!
We are witnessing the death agony of the last Art : Bayreuth has convinced me of this.
My picture of Wagner, completely surpassed him; I had depicted an ideal monster –one, however, which is perhaps quite capable of kindling the enthusiasm of artists. The real Wagner, Bayreuth as it actually is, was only like a bad, final proof, pulled on inferior paper from the engraving which was my creation. My longing to see real men and their motives, received an extraordinary impetus from this humiliating experience.
This, to my sorrow, is what I realised; a good deal even struck me with sudden fear. At last I felt, however, that if only I could be strong enough to take sides against myself and what I most loved I would find the road to truth and get solace and encouragement from it–and in this way I became filled with a sensation of joy far greater than that upon which I was now voluntarily turning my back.
I was in love with art, passionately in love, and in the whole of existence saw nothing else than art–and this at an age when, reasonably enough, quite different passions usually possess the soul.
Goethe said: “The yearning spirit within me, which in earlier years I may perhaps have fostered too earnestly, and which as I grew older I tried my utmost to combat, did not seem becoming in the man, and I therefore had to strive to attain to more complete freedom.” Conclusion?–I have had to do the same.
He who wakes us always wounds us.
I do not possess the talent of being loyal, and what is still worse, I have not even the vanity to try to appear as if I did.
He who accomplishes anything that lies beyond the vision and the experience of his acquaintances,–provokes envy and hatred masked as pity,–prejudice regards the work as decadence, disease, seduction. Long faces.
I frankly confess that I had hoped that by means of art the Germans would become thoroughly disgusted with decaying Christianity –I regarded German mythology as a solvent, as a means of accustoming people to polytheism.
What a fright I had over the Catholic revival!!
It is possible neither to suffer sufficiently acutely from life, nor to be so lifeless and emotionally weak, as to have need of Wagner’s art, as to require it as a medium. This is the principal reason of one’s opposition to it, and not baser motives; something to which we are not driven by any personal need, and which we do not require , we cannot esteem so highly.
It is a question either of no longer requiring Wagner’s art, or of still requiring it.
Gigantic forces lie concealed in it: it drives one beyond its own domain .
Goethe said: “Are not Byron’s audacity, sprightliness and grandeur all creative? We must beware of always looking for this quality in that which is perfectly pure and moral. All greatness is creative the moment we realise it.” This should be applied to Wagner’s art.
We shall always have to credit Wagner with the fact that in the second half of the nineteenth century he impressed art upon our memory as an important and magnificent thing. True, he did this in his own fashion, and this was not the fashion of upright and far-seeing men.
Wagner versus the cautious, the cold and the contented of the world–in this lies his greatness–he is a stranger to his age–he combats the frivolous and the super-smart–But he also fights the just, the moderate, those who delight in the world (like Goethe), and the mild, the people of charm, the scientific among men–this is the reverse of the medal.
Our youth was up in arms against the soberness of the age. It plunged into the cult of excess, of passion, of ecstasy, and of the blackest and most austere conception of the world.
Wagner pursues one form of madness, the age another form. Both carry on their chase at the same speed, each is as blind and as unjust as the other.
It is very difficult to trace the course of Wagner’s inner development–no trust must be placed in his own description of his soul’s experiences. He writes party-pamphlets for his followers.
It is extremely doubtful whether Wagner is able to bear witness about himself.
There are men who try in vain to make a principle out of themselves . This was the case with Wagner.
Wagner’s obscurity concerning final aims; his non-antique fogginess.
All Wagner’s ideas straightway become manias; he is tyrannised over by them. How can such a man allow himself to be tyrannised over in this way ! For instance by his hatred of Jews. He kills his themes like his “ideas,” by means of his violent love of repeating them. The problem of excessive length and breadth; he bores us with his raptures.
" C’est la rage de voulour penser et sentir au dela de sa force " (Doudan). The Wagnerites.
Wagner whose ambition far exceeds his natural gifts, has tried an incalculable number of times to achieve what lay beyond his powers–but it almost makes one shudder to see some one assail with such persistence that which defies conquest–the fate of his constitution.
He is always thinking of the most extreme expression,–in every word. But in the end superlatives begin to pall.
There is something which is in the highest degree suspicious in Wagner, and that is Wagner’s suspicion. It is such a strong trait in him, that on two occasions I doubted whether he were a musician at all.
The proposition: “in the face of perfection there is no salvation save love,”[10] is thoroughly Wagnerian. Profound jealousy of everything great from which he can draw fresh ideas. Hatred of all that which he cannot approach, the Renaissance, French and Greek art in style.
Wagner is jealous of all periods that have shown restraint : he despises beauty and grace, and finds only his own virtues in the “Germans,” and even attributes all his failings to them.
Wagner has not the power to unlock and liberate the soul of those he frequents. Wagner is not sure of himself, but distrustful and arrogant. His art has this effect upon artists, it is envious of all rivals.
Plato’s Envy. He would fain monopolise Socrates. He saturates the latter with himself, pretends to adorn him, and tries to separate all Socratists from him in order himself to appear as the only true apostle. But his historical presentation of him is false, even to a parlous degree: just as Wagner’s presentation of Beethoven and Shakespeare is false.
When a dramatist speaks about himself he plays a part: this is inevitable. When Wagner speaks about Bach and Beethoven he speaks like one for whom he would fain be taken. But he impresses only those who are already convinced, for his dissimulation and his genuine nature are far too violently at variance.
Wagner struggles against the “frivolity” in his nature, which to him the ignoble (as opposed to Goethe) constituted the joy of life.
Wagner has the mind of the ordinary man who prefers to trace things to one cause. The Jews do the same: one aim , therefore one Saviour. In this way he simplifies German and culture; wrongly but strongly.
Wagner admitted all this to himself often enough when in private communion with his soul. I only wish he had also admitted it publicly. For what constitutes the greatness of a character if it is not this, that he who possesses it is able to take sides even against himself in favour of truth.
Wagner’s Teutonism.
That which is un-German in Wagner. He lacks the German charm and grace of a Beethoven, a Mozart, a Weber; he also lacks the flowing, cheerful fire ( Allegro con brio ) of Beethoven and Weber. He cannot be free and easy without being grotesque. He lacks modesty, indulges in big drums, and always tends to surcharge his effect. He is not the good official that Bach was. Neither has he that Goethean calm in regard to his rivals.
Wagner always reaches the high-water mark of his vanity when he speaks of the German nature (incidentally it is also the height of his imprudence); for, if Frederick the Great’s justice, Goethe’s nobility and freedom from envy, Beethoven’s sublime resignation, Bach’s delicately transfigured spiritual life,–if steady work performed without any thought of glory and success, and without envy, constitute the true German qualities, would it not seem as if Wagner almost wished to prove he is no German?
Terrible wildness, abject sorrow, emptiness, the shudder of joy, unexpectedness,–in short all the qualities peculiar to the Semitic race! I believe that the Jews approach Wagner’s art with more understanding than the Aryans do.
A passage concerning the Jews, taken from Taine.–As it happens, I have misled the reader, the passage does not concern Wagner at all.–But can it be possible that Wagner is a Jew? In that case we could readily understand his dislike of Jews.[11]
Wagner’s art is absolutely the art of the age : an aesthetic age would have rejected it. The more subtle people amongst us actually do reject it even now. The coarsifying of everything aesthetic.–Compared with Goethe’s ideal it is very far behind. The moral contrast of these self-indulgent burningly loyal creatures of Wagner, acts like a spur , like an irritant and even this sensation is turned to account in obtaining an effect .
What is it in our age that Wagner’s art expresses? That brutality and most delicate weakness which exist side by side, that running wild of natural instincts, and nervous hyper-sensitiveness, that thirst for emotion which arises from fatigue and the love of fatigue.–All this is understood by the Wagnerites.
Stupefaction or intoxication constitute all Wagnerian art. On the other hand I could mention instances in which Wagner stands higher , in which real joy flows from him.
The reason why the figures in Wagner’s art behave so madly, is because he greatly feared lest people would doubt that they were alive.
Wagner’s art is an appeal to inartistic people; all means are welcomed which help towards obtaining an effect. It is calculated not to produce an artistic effect but an effect upon the nerves in general .
Apparently in Wagner we have an art for everybody , because coarse and subtle means seem to be united in it. Albeit its pre-requisite may be musico-aesthetic education, and particularly with moral indifference.
In Wagner we find the most ambitious combination of all means with the view of obtaining the strongest effect whereas genuine musicians quietly develop individual genres .
Dramatists are borrowers –their principal source of wealth–artistic thoughts drawn from the epos. Wagner borrowed from classical music besides. Dramatists are constructive geniuses, they are not inventive and original as the epic poets are. Drama takes a lower rank than the epos: it presupposes a coarser and more democratic public.
Wagner does not altogether trust music . He weaves kindred sensations into it in order to lend it the character of greatness. He measures himself on others; he first of all gives his listeners intoxicating drinks in order to lead them into believing that it was the music that intoxicated them .
The same amount of talent and industry which makes the classic, when it appears some time too late , also makes the baroque artist like Wagner.
Wagner’s art is calculated to appeal to short-sighted people–one has to get much too close up to it (Miniature): it also appeals to long-sighted people, but not to those with normal sight.
Contradictions in the Idea of Musical Drama.
Just listen to the second act of the “Goetterdaemmerung,” without the drama. It is chaotic music, as wild as a bad dream, and it is as frightfully distinct as if it desired to make itself clear even to deaf people. This volubility with nothing to say is alarming. Compared with it the drama is a genuine relief.–Is the fact that this music when heard alone, is, as a whole intolerable (apart from a few intentionally isolated parts) in its favour ? Suffice it to say that this music without its accompanying drama, is a perpetual contradiction of all the highest laws of style belonging to older music: he who thoroughly accustoms himself to it, loses all feeling for these laws. But has the drama been improved thanks to this addition? A symbolic interpretation has been affixed to it, a sort of philological commentary, which sets fetters upon the inner and free understanding of the imagination–it is tyrannical. Music is the language of the commentator, who talks the whole of the time and gives us no breathing space. Moreover his is a difficult language which also requires to be explained. He who step by step has mastered, first the libretto (language!), then converted it into action in his mind’s eye, then sought out and understood, and became familiar with the musical symbolism thereto: aye, and has fallen in love with all three things: such a man then experiences a great joy. But how exacting ! It is quite impossible to do this save for a few short moments,–such tenfold attention on the part of one’s eyes, ears, understanding, and feeling, such acute activity in apprehending without any productive reaction, is far too exhausting!–Only the very fewest behave in this way: how is it then that so many are affected? Because most people are only intermittingly attentive, and are inattentive for sometimes whole passages at a stretch; because they bestow their undivided attention now upon the music, later upon the drama, and anon upon the scenery–that is to say they take the work to pieces .–But in this way the kind of work we are discussing is condemned: not the drama but a moment of it is the result, an arbitrary selection. The creator of a new genre should consider this! The arts should not always be dished up together,–but we should imitate the moderation of the ancients which is truer to human nature.
Wagner reminds one of lava which blocks its own course by congealing, and suddenly finds itself checked by dams which it has itself built. There is no Allegro con fuoco for him.
I compare Wagner’s music, which would fain have the same effect as speech, with that kind of sculptural relief which would have the same effect as painting. The highest laws of style are violated, and that which is most sublime can no longer be achieved.
The general heaving, undulating and rolling of Wagner’s art.
In regard to Wagner’s rejection of form, we are reminded of Goethe’s remark in conversation with Eckermann: “there is no great art in being brilliant if one respects nothing.”
Once one theme is over, Wagner is always embarrassed as to how to continue. Hence the long preparation, the suspense. His peculiar craftiness consisted in transvaluing his weakness into virtues.–
The lack of melody and the poverty of melody in Wagner. Melody is a whole consisting of many beautiful proportions, it is the reflection of a well-ordered soul. He strives after melody; but if he finds one, he almost suffocates it in his embrace.
The natural nobility of a Bach and a Beethoven, the beautiful soul (even of a Mendelssohn) are wanting in Wagner. He is one degree lower.
Wagner imitates himself again and again–mannerisms. That is why he was the quickest among musicians to be imitated. It is so easy.
Mendelssohn who lacked the power of radically staggering one (incidentally this was the talent of the Jews in the Old Testament), makes up for this by the things which were his own, that is to say: freedom within the law, and noble emotions kept within the limits of beauty.
Liszt , the first representative of all musicians, but no musician . He was the prince, not the statesman. The conglomerate of a hundred musicians’ souls, but not enough of a personality to cast his own shadow upon them.
The most wholesome phenomenon is Brahms , in whose music there is more German blood than in that of Wagner’s. With these words I would say something complimentary, but by no means wholly so.
In Wagner’s writings there is no greatness or peace, but presumption. Why?
Wagner’s Style. –The habit he acquired, from his earliest days, of having his say in the most important matters without a sufficient knowledge of them, has rendered him the obscure and incomprehensible writer that he is. In addition to this he aspired to imitating the witty newspaper article, and finally acquired that presumption which readily joins hands with carelessness “and, behold, it was very good.”
I am alarmed at the thought of how much pleasure I could find in Wagner’s style, which is so careless as to be unworthy of such an artist.
In Wagner, as in Brahms, there is a blind denial of the healthy, in his followers this denial is deliberate and conscious.
Wagner’s art is for those who are conscious of an essential blunder in the conduct of their lives. They feel either that they have checked a great nature by a base occupation, or squandered it through idle pursuits, a conventional marriage, &c. &c.
In this quarter the condemnation of the world is the outcome of the condemnation of the ego.
Wagnerites do not wish to alter themselves in any way, they live discontentedly in insipid, conventional and brutal circumstances–only at intervals does art have to raise them as by magic above these things. Weakness of will.
Wagner’s art is for scholars who do not dare to become philosophers: they feel discontented with themselves and are generally in a state of obtuse stupefaction–from time to time they take a bath in the opposite conditions .
I feel as if I had recovered from an illness: with a feeling of unutterable joy I think of Mozart’s Requiem . I can once more enjoy simple fare.
I understand Sophocles’ development through and through–it was the repugnance to pomp and pageantry.
I gained an insight into the injustice of idealism , by noticing that I avenged myself on Wagner for the disappointed hopes I had cherished of him.
I leave my loftiest duty to the end, and that is to thank Wagner and Schopenhauer publicly, and to make them as it were take sides against themselves.
I counsel everybody not to fight shy of such paths (Wagner and Schopenhauer). The wholly unphilosophic feeling of remorse, has become quite strange to me.
Wagner’s Effects.
We must strive to oppose the false after-effects of Wagner’s art. If he, in order to create Parsifal, is forced to pump fresh strength from religious sources, this is not an example but a danger.
I entertain the fear that the effects of Wagner’s art will ultimately pour into that torrent which takes its rise on the other side of the mountains, and which knows how to flow even over mountains. [12]
Footnotes
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Senta is the heroine in the “Flying Dutchman”– Tr.
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A character in “Tannhauser.”– Tr .
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See “The Will to Power,” vol. ii., authorised English edition.– Tr.
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- 4.* Note.* –It was a real disaster for aesthetics when the word drama got to be translated by “action.” Wagner is not the only culprit here, the whole world does the same,–even the philologists who ought to know better. What ancient drama had in view was grand pathetic scenes *,–it even excluded action (or placed it * before the piece or behind the scenes). The word drama is of Doric origin, and according to the usage of the Dorian language it meant “event,” “history,”–both words in a hieratic sense. The oldest drama represented local legends, “sacred history,” upon which the foundation of the cult rested (–thus it was not “action,” but fatality. δρ¶ν in Doric has nothing to do with action).
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Hegel and his school wrote notoriously obscure German.– Tr.
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Was Wagner a German at all? There are reasons enough for putting this question. It is difficult to find a single German trait in his character. Great learner that he was, he naturally imitated a great deal that was German–but that is all. His very soul contradicts everything which hitherto has been regarded as German, not to mention German musicians!–His father was an actor of the name of Geyer…. That which has been popularised hitherto as “Wagner’s life” is fable convenue if not something worse. I confess my doubts on any point which is vouched for by Wagner alone. He was not proud enough to be able to suffer the truth about himself. Nobody had less pride than he. Like Victor Hugo he remained true to himself even in his biography,–he remained an actor.
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This undoubtedly refers to Nietzsche’s only disciple and friend, Peter Gast– Tr.
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My “Genealogy of Morals” contains the best exposition of the antithesis " noble morality " and " Christian morality “; a more decisive turning point in the history of religious and moral science does not perhaps exist. This book, which is a touchstone by which I can discover who are my peers, rejoices in being accessible only to the most elevated and most severe minds: the others have not the ears to hear me. One must have one’s passion in things, wherein no one has passion nowadays.
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An allusion to Schiller’s poem: “Das verschleierte Bild zu Sais.”– Tr.
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What Schiller said of Goethe.– Tr.
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See note on page 37.
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It should be noted that the German Catholic party is called the Ultramontane Party. The river which can thus flow over mountains is Catholicism, towards which Nietzsche thought Wagner’s art to be tending.– Tr.
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Homer and Classical Philology
by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Translated by J. M. Kennedy
Electronically Developed By MobileReference
Friedrich W. Nietzsche Biography
Inaugural Address delivered at University of Basel, 28th of May 1869.
At the present day no clear and consistent opinion seems to be held regarding Classical Philology. We are conscious of this in the circles of the learned just as much as among the followers of that science itself. The cause of this lies in its many-sided character, in the lack of an abstract unity, and in the inorganic aggregation of heterogeneous scientific activities which are connected with one another only by the name “Philology.” It must be freely admitted that philology is to some extent borrowed from several other sciences, and is mixed together like a magic potion from the most outlandish liquors, ores, and bones. It may even be added that it likewise conceals within itself an artistic element, one which, on aesthetic and ethical grounds, may be called imperatival-an element that acts in opposition to its purely scientific behaviour. Philology is composed of history just as much as of natural science or aesthetics: history, in so far as it endeavours to comprehend the manifestations of the individualities of peoples in ever new images, and the prevailing law in the disappearance of phenomena; natural science, in so far as it strives to fathom the deepest instinct of man, that of speech; aesthetics, finally, because from various antiquities at our disposal it endeavours to pick out the so-called “classical” antiquity, with the view and pretension of excavating the ideal world buried under it, and to hold up to the present the mirror of the classical and everlasting standards. That these wholly different scientific and aesthetico-ethical impulses have been associated under a common name, a kind of sham monarchy, is shown especially by the fact that philology at every period from its origin onwards was at the same time pedagogical. From the standpoint of the pedagogue, a choice was offered of those elements which were of the greatest educational value; and thus that science, or at least that scientific aim, which we call philology, gradually developed out of the practical calling originated by the exigencies of that science itself.
These philological aims were pursued sometimes with greater ardour and sometimes with less, in accordance with the degree of culture and the development of the taste of a particular period; but, on the other hand, the followers of this science are in the habit of regarding the aims which correspond to their several abilities as the aims of philology; whence it comes about that the estimation of philology in public opinion depends upon the weight of the personalities of the philologists!
At the present time-that is to say, in a period which has seen men distinguished in almost every department of philology-a general uncertainty of judgment has increased more and more, and likewise a general relaxation of interest and participation in philological problems. Such an undecided and imperfect state of public opinion is damaging to a science in that its hidden and open enemies can work with much better prospects of success. And philology has a great many such enemies. Where do we not meet with them, these mockers, always ready to aim a blow at the philological “moles,” the animals that practise dust-eating ex professo, and that grub up and eat for the eleventh time what they have already eaten ten times before. For opponents of this sort, however, philology is merely a useless, harmless, and inoffensive pastime, an object of laughter and not of hate. But, on the other hand, there is a boundless and infuriated hatred of philology wherever an ideal, as such, is feared, where the modern man falls down to worship himself, and where Hellenism is looked upon as a superseded and hence very insignificant point of view. Against these enemies, we philologists must always count upon the assistance of artists and men of artistic minds; for they alone can judge how the sword of barbarism sweeps over the head of every one who loses sight of the unutterable simplicity and noble dignity of the Hellene; and how no progress in commerce or technical industries, however brilliant, no school regulations, no political education of the masses, however widespread and complete, can protect us from the curse of ridiculous and barbaric offences against good taste, or from annihilation by the Gorgon head of the classicist.
Whilst philology as a whole is looked on with jealous eyes by these two classes of opponents, there are numerous and varied hostilities in other directions of philology; philologists themselves are quarrelling with one another; internal dissensions are caused by useless disputes about precedence and mutual jealousies, but especially by the differences-even enmities-comprised in the name of philology, which are not, however, by any means naturally harmonised instincts.
Science has this in common with art, that the most ordinary, everyday thing appears to it as something entirely new and attractive, as if metamorphosed by witchcraft and now seen for the first time. Life is worth living, says art, the beautiful temptress; life is worth knowing, says science. With this contrast the so heartrending and dogmatic tradition follows in a theory, and consequently in the practice of classical philology derived from this theory. We may consider antiquity from a scientific point of view; we may try to look at what has happened with the eye of a historian, or to arrange and compare the linguistic forms of ancient masterpieces, to bring them at all events under a morphological law; but we always lose the wonderful creative force, the real fragrance, of the atmosphere of antiquity; we forget that passionate emotion which instinctively drove our meditation and enjoyment back to the Greeks. From this point onwards we must take notice of a clearly determined and very surprising antagonism which philology has great cause to regret. From the circles upon whose help we must place the most implicit reliance-the artistic friends of antiquity, the warm supporters of Hellenic beauty and noble simplicity-we hear harsh voices crying out that it is precisely the philologists themselves who are the real opponents and destroyers of the ideals of antiquity. Schiller upbraided the philologists with having scattered Homer’s laurel crown to the winds. It was none other than Goethe who, in early life a supporter of Wolf’s theories regarding Homer, recanted in the verses- With subtle wit you took away
Our former adoration:
The Iliad, you may us say,
Was mere conglomeration.
Think it not crime in any way:
Youth’s fervent adoration
Leads us to know the verity,
And feel the poet’s unity.
The reason of this want of piety and reverence must lie deeper; and many are in doubt as to whether philologists are lacking in artistic capacity and impressions, so that they are unable to do justice to the ideal, or whether the spirit of negation has become a destructive and iconoclastic principle of theirs. When, however, even the friends of antiquity, possessed of such doubts and hesitations, point to our present classical philology as something questionable, what influence may we not ascribe to the outbursts of the “realists” and the claptrap of the heroes of the passing hour? To answer the latter on this occasion, especially when we consider the nature of the present assembly, would be highly injudicious; at any rate, if I do not wish to meet with the fate of that sophist who, when in Sparta, publicly undertook to praise and defend Herakles, when he was interrupted with the query: “But who then has found fault with him?” I cannot help thinking, however, that some of these scruples are still sounding in the ears of not a few in this gathering; for they may still be frequently heard from the lips of noble and artistically gifted men-as even an upright philologist must feel them, and feel them most painfully, at moments when his spirits are downcast. For the single individual there is no deliverance from the dissensions referred to; but what we contend and inscribe on our banner is the fact that classical philology, as a whole, has nothing whatsoever to do with the quarrels and bickerings of its individual disciples. The entire scientific and artistic movement of this peculiar centaur is bent, though with cyclopic slowness, upon bridging over the gulf between the ideal antiquity–which is perhaps only the magnificent blossoming of the Teutonic longing for the south-and the real antiquity; and thus classical philology pursues only the final end of its own being, which is the fusing together of primarily hostile impulses that have only forcibly been brought together. Let us talk as we will about the unattainability of this goal, and even designate the goal itself as an illogical pretension-the aspiration for it is very real; and I should like to try to make it clear by an example that the most significant steps of classical philology never lead away from the ideal antiquity, but to it; and that, just when people are speaking unwarrantably of the overthrow of sacred shrines, new and more worthy altars are being erected. Let us then examine the so-called Homeric question from this standpoint, a question the most important problem of which Schiller called a scholastic barbarism.
The important problem referred to is the question of the personality of Homer.
We now meet everywhere with the firm opinion that the question of Homer’s personality is no longer timely, and that it is quite a different thing from the real “Homeric question.” It may be added that, for a given period-such as our present philological period, for example-the centre of discussion may be removed from the problem of the poet’s personality; for even now a painstaking experiment is being made to reconstruct the Homeric poems without the aid of personality, treating them as the work of several different persons. But if the centre of a scientific question is rightly seen to be where the swelling tide of new views has risen up, i.e. where individual scientific investigation comes into contact with the whole life of science and culture-if any one, in other words, indicates a historico-cultural valuation as the central point of the question, he must also, in the province of Homeric criticism, take his stand upon the question of personality as being the really fruitful oasis in the desert of the whole argument. For in Homer the modern world, I will not say has learnt, but has examined, a great historical point of view; and, even without now putting forward my own opinion as to whether this examination has been or can be happily carried out, it was at all events the first example of the application of that productive point of view. By it scholars learnt to recognise condensed beliefs in the apparently firm, immobile figures of the life of ancient peoples; by it they for the first time perceived the wonderful capability of the soul of a people to represent the conditions of its morals and beliefs in the form of a personality. When historical criticism has confidently seized upon this method of evaporating apparently concrete personalities, it is permissible to point to the first experiment as an important event in the history of sciences, without considering whether it was successful in this instance or not.
It is a common occurrence for a series of striking signs and wonderful emotions to precede an epoch-making discovery. Even the experiment I have just referred to has its own attractive history; but it goes back to a surprisingly ancient era. Friedrich August Wolf has exactly indicated the spot where Greek antiquity dropped the question. The zenith of the historico-literary studies of the Greeks, and hence also of their point of greatest importance-the Homeric question-was reached in the age of the Alexandrian grammarians. Up to this time the Homeric question had run through the long chain of a uniform process of development, of which the standpoint of those grammarians seemed to be the last link, the last, indeed, which was attainable by antiquity. They conceived the Iliad and the Odyssey as the creations of one single Homer; they declared it to be psychologically possible for two such different works to have sprung from the brain of one genius, in contradiction to the Chorizontes, who represented the extreme limit of the scepticism of a few detached individuals of antiquity rather than antiquity itself considered as a whole. To explain the different general impression of the two books on the assumption that one poet composed them both, scholars sought assistance by referring to the seasons of the poet’s life, and compared the poet of the Odyssey to the setting sun. The eyes of those critics were tirelessly on the lookout for discrepancies in the language and thoughts of the two poems; but at this time also a history of the Homeric poem and its tradition was prepared, according to which these discrepancies were not due to Homer, but to those who committed his words to writing and those who sang them. It was believed that Homer’s poem was passed from one generation to another viva voce, and faults were attributed to the improvising and at times forgetful bards. At a certain given date, about the time of Pisistratus, the poems which had been repeated orally were said to have been collected in manuscript form; but the scribes, it is added, allowed themselves to take some liberties with the text by transposing some lines and adding extraneous matter here and there. This entire hypothesis is the most important in the domain of literary studies that antiquity has exhibited; and the acknowledgment of the dissemination of the Homeric poems by word of mouth, as opposed to the habits of a book-learned age, shows in particular a depth of ancient sagacity worthy of our admiration. From those times until the generation that produced Friedrich August Wolf we must take a jump over a long historical vacuum; but in our own age we find the argument left just as it was at the time when the power of controversy departed from antiquity, and it is a matter of indifference to us that Wolf accepted as certain tradition what antiquity itself had set up only as a hypothesis. It may be remarked as most characteristic of this hypothesis that, in the strictest sense, the personality of Homer is treated seriously; that a certain standard of inner harmony is everywhere presupposed in the manifestations of the personality; and that, with these two excellent auxiliary hypotheses, whatever is seen to be below this standard and opposed to this inner harmony is at once swept aside as un-Homeric. But even this distinguishing characteristic, in place of wishing to recognise the supernatural existence of a tangible personality, ascends likewise through all the stages that lead to that zenith, with ever-increasing energy and clearness. Individuality is ever more strongly felt and accentuated; the psychological possibility of a single Homer is ever more forcibly demanded. If we descend backwards from this zenith, step by step, we find a guide to the understanding of the Homeric problem in the person of Aristotle. Homer was for him the flawless and untiring artist who knew his end and the means to attain it; but there is still a trace of infantile criticism to be found in Aristotle-i.e., in the naive concession he made to the public opinion that considered Homer as the author of the original of all comic epics, the Margites. If we go still further backwards from Aristotle, the inability to create a personality is seen to increase; more and more poems are attributed to Homer; and every period lets us see its degree of criticism by how much and what it considers as Homeric. In this backward examination, we instinctively feel that away beyond Herodotus there lies a period in which an immense flood of great epics has been identified with the name of Homer.
Let us imagine ourselves as living in the time of Pisistratus: the word “Homer” then comprehended an abundance of dissimilarities. What was meant by “Homer” at that time? It is evident that that generation found itself unable to grasp a personality and the limits of its manifestations. Homer had now become of small consequence. And then we meet with the weighty question: What lies before this period? Has Homer’s personality, because it cannot be grasped, gradually faded away into an empty name? Or had all the Homeric poems been gathered together in a body, the nation naively representing itself by the figure of Homer? Was the person created out of a conception, or the conception out of a person? This is the real “Homeric question,” the central problem of the personality.
The difficulty of answering this question, however, is increased when we seek a reply in another direction, from the standpoint of the poems themselves which have come down to us. As it is difficult for us at the present day, and necessitates a serious effort on our part, to understand the law of gravitation clearly-that the earth alters its form of motion when another heavenly body changes its position in space, although no material connection unites one to the other-it likewise costs us some trouble to obtain a clear impression of that wonderful problem which, like a coin long passed from hand to hand, has lost its original and highly conspicuous stamp. Poetical works, which cause the hearts of even the greatest geniuses to fail when they endeavour to vie with them, and in which unsurpassable images are held up for the admiration of posterity-and yet the poet who wrote them with only a hollow, shaky name, whenever we do lay hold on him; nowhere the solid kernel of a powerful personality. “For who would wage war with the gods: who, even with the one god?” asks Goethe even, who, though a genius, strove in vain to solve that mysterious problem of the Homeric inaccessibility.
The conception of popular poetry seemed to lead like a bridge over this problem-a deeper and more original power than that of every single creative individual was said to have become active; the happiest people, in the happiest period of its existence, in the highest activity of fantasy and formative power, was said to have created those immeasurable poems. In this universality there is something almost intoxicating in the thought of a popular poem: we feel, with artistic pleasure, the broad, overpowering liberation of a popular gift, and we delight in this natural phenomenon as we do in an uncontrollable cataract. But as soon as we examine this thought at close quarters, we involuntarily put a poetic mass of people in the place of the poetising soul of the people: a long row of popular poets in whom individuality has no meaning, and in whom the tumultuous movement of a people’s soul, the intuitive strength of a people’s eye, and the unabated profusion of a people’s fantasy, were once powerful: a row of original geniuses, attached to a time, to a poetic genus, to a subject-matter.
Such a conception justly made people suspicious. Could it be possible that that same Nature who so sparingly distributed her rarest and most precious production-genius-should suddenly take the notion of lavishing her gifts in one sole direction? And here the thorny question again made its appearance: Could we not get along with one genius only, and explain the present existence of that unattainable excellence? And now eyes were keenly on the lookout for whatever that excellence and singularity might consist of. Impossible for it to be in the construction of the complete works, said one party, for this is far from faultless; but doubtless to be found in single songs: in the single pieces above all; not in the whole. A second party, on the other hand, sheltered themselves beneath the authority of Aristotle, who especially admired Homer’s “divine” nature in the choice of his entire subject, and the manner in which he planned and carried it out. If, however, this construction was not clearly seen, this fault was due to the way the poems were handed down to posterity and not to the poet himself-it was the result of retouchings and interpolations, owing to which the original setting of the work gradually became obscured. The more the first school looked for inequalities, contradictions, perplexities, the more energetically did the other school brush aside what in their opinion obscured the original plan, in order, if possible, that nothing might be left remaining but the actual words of the original epic itself. The second school of thought of course held fast by the conception of an epoch-making genius as the composer of the great works. The first school, on the other hand, wavered between the supposition of one genius plus a number of minor poets, and another hypothesis which assumed only a number of superior and even mediocre individual bards, but also postulated a mysterious discharging, a deep, national, artistic impulse, which shows itself in individual minstrels as an almost indifferent medium. It is to this latter school that we must attribute the representation of the Homeric poems as the expression of that mysterious impulse.
All these schools of thought start from the assumption that the problem of the present form of these epics can be solved from the standpoint of an aesthetic judgment-but we must await the decision as to the authorised line of demarcation between the man of genius and the poetical soul of the people. Are there characteristic differences between the utterances of the man of genius and the poetical soul of the people?
This whole contrast, however, is unjust and misleading. There is no more dangerous assumption in modern aesthetics than that of popular poetry and individual poetry, or, as it is usually called, artistic poetry. This is the reaction, or, if you will, the superstition, which followed upon the most momentous discovery of historico-philological science, the discovery and appreciation of the soul of the people. For this discovery prepared the way for a coming scientific view of history, which was until then, and in many respects is even now, a mere collection of materials, with the prospect that new materials would continue to be added, and that the huge, overflowing pile would never be systematically arranged. The people now understood for the first time that the long-felt power of greater individualities and wills was larger than the pitifully small will of an individual man;[1] they now saw that everything truly great in the kingdom of the will could not have its deepest root in the inefficacious and ephemeral individual will; and, finally, they now discovered the powerful instincts of the masses, and diagnosed those unconscious impulses to be the foundations and supports of the so-called universal history. But the newly-lighted flame also cast its shadow: and this shadow was none other than that superstition already referred to, which popular poetry set up in opposition to individual poetry, and thus enlarged the comprehension of the people’s soul to that of the people’s mind. By the misapplication of a tempting analogical inference, people had reached the point of applying in the domain of the intellect and artistic ideas that principle of greater individuality which is truly applicable only in the domain of the will. The masses have never experienced more flattering treatment than in thus having the laurel of genius set upon their empty heads. It was imagined that new shells were forming round a small kernel, so to speak, and that those pieces of popular poetry originated like avalanches, in the drift and flow of tradition. They were, however, ready to consider that kernel as being of the smallest possible dimensions, so that they might occasionally get rid of it altogether without losing anything of the mass of the avalanche. According to this view, the text itself and the stories built round it are one and the same thing.
Now, however, such a contrast between popular poetry and individual poetry does not exist at all; on the contrary, all poetry, and of course popular poetry also, requires an intermediary individuality. This much-abused contrast, therefore, is necessary only when the term individual poem is understood to mean a poem which has not grown out of the soil of popular feeling, but which has been composed by a non-popular poet in a non-popular atmosphere-something which has come to maturity in the study of a learned man, for example.
With the superstition which presupposes poetising masses is connected another: that popular poetry is limited to one particular period of a people’s history and afterwards dies out-which indeed follows as a consequence of the first superstition I have mentioned. According to this school, in the place of the gradually decaying popular poetry we have artistic poetry, the work of individual minds, not of masses of people. But the same powers which were once active are still so; and the form in which they act has remained exactly the same. The great poet of a literary period is still a popular poet in no narrower sense than the popular poet of an illiterate age. The difference between them is not in the way they originate, but it is their diffusion and propagation, in short, tradition. This tradition is exposed to eternal danger without the help of handwriting, and runs the risk of including in the poems the remains of those individualities through whose oral tradition they were handed down.
If we apply all these principles to the Homeric poems, it follows that we gain nothing with our theory of the poetising soul of the people, and that we are always referred back to the poetical individual. We are thus confronted with the task of distinguishing that which can have originated only in a single poetical mind from that which is, so to speak, swept up by the tide of oral tradition, and which is a highly important constituent part of the Homeric poems.
Since literary history first ceased to be a mere collection of names, people have attempted to grasp and formulate the individualities of the poets. A certain mechanism forms part of the method: it must be explained-i.e., it must be deduced from principles–why this or that individuality appears in this way and not in that. People now study biographical details, environment, acquaintances, contemporary events, and believe that by mixing all these ingredients together they will be able to manufacture the wished-for individuality. But they forget that the punctum saliens, the indefinable individual characteristics, can never be obtained from a compound of this nature. The less there is known about the life and times of the poet, the less applicable is this mechanism. When, however, we have merely the works and the name of the writer, it is almost impossible to detect the individuality, at all events, for those who put their faith in the mechanism in question; and particularly when the works are perfect, when they are pieces of popular poetry. For the best way for these mechanicians to grasp individual characteristics is by perceiving deviations from the genius of the people; the aberrations and hidden allusions: and the fewer discrepancies to be found in a poem the fainter will be the traces of the individual poet who composed it.
All those deviations, everything dull and below the ordinary standard which scholars think they perceive in the Homeric poems, were attributed to tradition, which thus became the scapegoat. What was left of Homer’s own individual work? Nothing but a series of beautiful and prominent passages chosen in accordance with subjective taste. The sum total of aesthetic singularity which every individual scholar perceived with his own artistic gifts, he now called Homer.
This is the central point of the Homeric errors. The name of Homer, from the very beginning, has no connection either with the conception of aesthetic perfection or yet with the Iliad and the Odyssey. Homer as the composer of the Iliad and the Odyssey is not a historical tradition, but an aesthetic judgment.
The only path which leads back beyond the time of Pisistratus and helps us to elucidate the meaning of the name Homer, takes its way on the one hand through the reports which have reached us concerning Homer’s birthplace: from which we see that, although his name is always associated with heroic epic poems, he is on the other hand no more referred to as the composer of the Iliad and the Odyssey than as the author of the Thebais or any other cyclical epic. On the other hand, again, an old tradition tells of the contest between Homer and Hesiod, which proves that when these two names were mentioned people instinctively thought of two epic tendencies, the heroic and the didactic; and that the signification of the name “Homer” was included in the material category and not in the formal. This imaginary contest with Hesiod did not even yet show the faintest presentiment of individuality. From the time of Pisistratus onwards, however, with the surprisingly rapid development of the Greek feeling for beauty, the differences in the aesthetic value of those epics continued to be felt more and more: the Iliad and the Odyssey arose from the depths of the flood and have remained on the surface ever since. With this process of aesthetic separation, the conception of Homer gradually became narrower: the old material meaning of the name “Homer” as the father of the heroic epic poem, was changed into the aesthetic meaning of Homer, the father of poetry in general, and likewise its original prototype. This transformation was contemporary with the rationalistic criticism which made Homer the magician out to be a possible poet, which vindicated the material and formal traditions of those numerous epics as against the unity of the poet, and gradually removed that heavy load of cyclical epics from Homer’s shoulders.
So Homer, the poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, is an aesthetic judgment. It is, however, by no means affirmed against the poet of these epics that he was merely the imaginary being of an aesthetic impossibility, which can be the opinion of only very few philologists indeed. The majority contend that a single individual was responsible for the general design of a poem such as the Iliad, and further that this individual was Homer. The first part of this contention may be admitted; but, in accordance with what I have said, the latter part must be denied. And I very much doubt whether the majority of those who adopt the first part of the contention have taken the following considerations into account.
The design of an epic such as the Iliad is not an entire whole, not an organism; but a number of pieces strung together, a collection of reflections arranged in accordance with aesthetic rules. It is certainly the standard of an artist’s greatness to note what he can take in with a single glance and set out in rhythmical form. The infinite profusion of images and incidents in the Homeric epic must force us to admit that such a wide range of vision is next to impossible. Where, however, a poet is unable to observe artistically with a single glance, he usually piles conception on conception, and endeavours to adjust his characters according to a comprehensive scheme.
He will succeed in this all the better the more he is familiar with the fundamental principles of aesthetics: he will even make some believe that he made himself master of the entire subject by a single powerful glance.
The Iliad is not a garland, but a bunch of flowers. As many pictures as possible are crowded on one canvas; but the man who placed them there was indifferent as to whether the grouping of the collected pictures was invariably suitable and rhythmically beautiful. He well knew that no one would ever consider the collection as a whole; but would merely look at the individual parts. But that stringing together of some pieces as the manifestations of a grasp of art which was not yet highly developed, still less thoroughly comprehended and generally esteemed, cannot have been the real Homeric deed, the real Homeric epoch-making event. On the contrary, this design is a later product, far later than Homer’s celebrity. Those, therefore, who look for the “original and perfect design” are looking for a mere phantom; for the dangerous path of oral tradition had reached its end just as the systematic arrangement appeared on the scene; the disfigurements which were caused on the way could not have affected the design, for this did not form part of the material handed down from generation to generation.
The relative imperfection of the design must not, however, prevent us from seeing in the designer a different personality from the real poet. It is not only probable that everything which was created in those times with conscious aesthetic insight, was infinitely inferior to the songs that sprang up naturally in the poet’s mind and were written down with instinctive power: we can even take a step further. If we include the so-called cyclic poems in this comparison, there remains for the designer of the Iliad and the Odyssey the indisputable merit of having done something relatively great in this conscious technical composing: a merit which we might have been prepared to recognise from the beginning, and which is in my opinion of the very first order in the domain of instinctive creation. We may even be ready to pronounce this synthetisation of great importance. All those dull passages and discrepancies-deemed of such importance, but really only subjective, which we usually look upon as the petrified remains of the period of tradition-are not these perhaps merely the almost necessary evils which must fall to the lot of the poet of genius who undertakes a composition virtually without a parallel, and, further, one which proves to be of incalculable difficulty?
Let it be noted that the insight into the most diverse operations of the instinctive and the conscious changes the position of the Homeric problem; and in my opinion throws light upon it.
We believe in a great poet as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey-but not that Homer was this poet.
The decision on this point has already been given. The generation that invented those numerous Homeric fables, that poetised the myth of the contest between Homer and Hesiod, and looked upon all the poems of the epic cycle as Homeric, did not feel an aesthetic but a material singularity when it pronounced the name “Homer.” This period regards Homer as belonging to the ranks of artists like Orpheus, Eumolpus, Daedalus, and Olympus, the mythical discoverers of a new branch of art, to whom, therefore, all the later fruits which grew from the new branch were thankfully dedicated.
And that wonderful genius to whom we owe the Iliad and the Odyssey belongs to this thankful posterity: he, too, sacrificed his name on the altar of the primeval father of the Homeric epic, Homeros.
Up to this point, gentlemen, I think I have been able to put before you the fundamental philosophical and aesthetic characteristics of the problem of the personality of Homer, keeping all minor details rigorously at a distance, on the supposition that the primary form of this widespread and honeycombed mountain known as the Homeric question can be most clearly observed by looking down at it from a far-off height. But I have also, I imagine, recalled two facts to those friends of antiquity who take such delight in accusing us philologists of lack of piety for great conceptions and an unproductive zeal for destruction. In the first place, those “great” conceptions-such, for example, as that of the indivisible and inviolable poetic genius, Homer-were during the pre-Wolfian period only too great, and hence inwardly altogether empty and elusive when we now try to grasp them. If classical philology goes back again to the same conceptions, and once more tries to pour new wine into old bottles, it is only on the surface that the conceptions are the same: everything has really become new; bottle and mind, wine and word. We everywhere find traces of the fact that philology has lived in company with poets, thinkers, and artists for the last hundred years: whence it has now come about that the heap of ashes formerly pointed to as classical philology is now turned into fruitful and even rich soil.[2]
And there is a second fact which I should like to recall to the memory of those friends of antiquity who turn their dissatisfied backs on classical philology. You honour the immortal masterpieces of the Hellenic mind in poetry and sculpture, and think yourselves so much more fortunate than preceding generations, which had to do without them; but you must not forget that this whole fairyland once lay buried under mountains of prejudice, and that the blood and sweat and arduous labour of innumerable followers of our science were all necessary to lift up that world from the chasm into which it had sunk. We grant that philology is not the creator of this world, not the composer of that immortal music; but is it not a merit, and a great merit, to be a mere virtuoso, and let the world for the first time hear that music which lay so long in obscurity, despised and undecipherable? Who was Homer previously to Wolf’s brilliant investigations? A good old man, known at best as a “natural genius,” at all events the child of a barbaric age, replete with faults against good taste and good morals. Let us hear how a learned man of the first rank writes about Homer even so late as 1783: “Where does the good man live? Why did he remain so long incognito? Apropos, can’t you get me a silhouette of him?”
We demand thanks-not in our own name, for we are but atoms-but in the name of philology itself, which is indeed neither a Muse nor a Grace, but a messenger of the gods: and just as the Muses descended upon the dull and tormented Boeotian peasants, so Philology comes into a world full of gloomy colours and pictures, full of the deepest, most incurable woes; and speaks to men comfortingly of the beautiful and godlike figure of a distant, rosy, and happy fairyland.
It is time to close; yet before I do so a few words of a personal character must be added, justified, I hope, by the occasion of this lecture.
It is but right that a philologist should describe his end and the means to it in the short formula of a confession of faith; and let this be done in the saying of Seneca which I thus reverse- “Philosophia facta est quae philologia fuit.”
By this I wish to signify that all philological activities should be enclosed and surrounded by a philosophical view of things, in which everything individual and isolated is evaporated as something detestable, and in which great homogeneous views alone remain. Now, therefore, that I have enunciated my philological creed, I trust you will give me cause to hope that I shall no longer be a stranger among you: give me the assurance that in working with you towards this end I am worthily fulfilling the confidence with which the highest authorities of this community have honoured me.
Footnotes:
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Of course Nietzsche saw afterwards that this was not so. – TR.
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Nietzsche perceived later on that this statement was, unfortunately, not justified. – TR.
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The End|Go to top
Human All-Too-Human, A Book For Free Spirits
by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Translated by Helen Zimmern, R. J. Hollingdale, and Marion Faber
Electronically Developed by MobileReference
Preface
I - Of First and Last Things
II - On the History of the Moral Sensations
III - The Religious Life
IV - From the Souls of Artists and Writers
V - Tokens of Higher and Lower Culture
VI - Man in Society
VII - Woman and Child
VIII - A Glance at the State
IX - Man Alone by Himself
An Epilogue- Among Friends
**First Sequel: Mixed Opinions and Maxims **
**Second Sequel: The Wanderer and His Shadow **
Friedrich W. Nietzsche Biography
Preface
1
Often enough, and always with great consternation, people have told me that there is something distinctive in all my writings, from the “Birth of Tragedy” to the most recently published “Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future” [subtitle of Beyond Good and Evil]. All of them, I have been told, contain snares and nets for careless birds, and an almost constant, unperceived challenge to reverse one’s habitual estimations and esteemed habits. “What’s that? Everything is only – human, all too human?” With such a sigh one comes from my writings, they say, with a kind of wariness and distrust even toward morality, indeed tempted and encouraged in no small way to become the spokesman for the worst things: might they perhaps be only the best slandered? My writings have been called a school for suspicion, even more for contempt, fortunately also for courage and, in fact, for daring. Truly, I myself do not believe that anyone has ever looked into the world with such deep suspicion, and not only as an occasional devil’s advocate, but every bit as much, to speak theologically, as an enemy and challenger of God. Whoever guesses something of the consequences of any deep suspicion, something of the chills and fears stemming from isolation, to which every man burdened with an unconditional difference of viewpoint is condemned, this person will understand how often I tried to take shelter somewhere, to recover from myself, as if to forget myself entirely for a time (in some sort of reverence, or enmity, or scholarliness, or frivolity, or stupidity); and he will also understand why, when I could not find what I needed, I had to gain it by force artificially, to counterfeit it, or create it poetically. (And what have poets ever done otherwise? And why else do we have all the art in the world?) What I always needed most to cure and restore myself, however, was the belief that I was not the only one to be thus, to see thus – I needed the enchanting intuition of kinship and equality in the eye and in desire, repose in a trusted friendship; I needed a shared blindness, with no suspicion or question marks, a pleasure in foregrounds, surfaces, what is near, what is nearest, in everything that has color, skin, appearance. Perhaps one could accuse me in this regard of some sort of “art,” various sorts of finer counterfeiting: for example, that I had deliberately and willfully closed my eyes to Schopenhauer’s blind will to morality, at a time when I was already clear-sighted enough about morality; similarly, that I had deceived myself about Richard Wagner’s incurable romanticism, as if it were a beginning and not an end; similarly, about the Greeks; similarly about the Germans and their future – and there might be a whole long list of such similarlies. But even if this all were true and I were accused of it with good reason, what do you know, what could you know about the amount of self-preserving cunning, or reason and higher protection that is contained in such self-deception – and how much falseness I still require so that I may keep permitting myself the luxury of my truthfulness?…Enough, I am still alive; and life has not been devised by morality: it wants deception, it lives on deception – but wouldn’t you know it? Here I am, beginning again, doing what I have always done, the old immoralist and birdcatcher, I am speaking immorally, extra-morally, “beyond good and evil.”
2
Thus then, when I found it necessary, I invented once upon a time the “free spirits,” to whom this discouragingly encouraging book with the title “Human, All Too Human,” is dedicated. There are no such " free spirits” nor have there been such, but, as already said, I then required them for company to keep me cheerful in the midst of evils (sickness, loneliness, foreignness – acedia, inactivity) as brave companions and ghosts with whom I could laugh and gossip when so inclined and send to the devil when they became bores – as compensation for the lack of friends. That such free spirits will be possible some day, that our Europe will have such bold and cheerful sights amongst her sons of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, actually and bodily, and not merely, as in my case, as the shadows of a hermit’s phantasmagoria – I should be the last to doubt thereof. Already I see them coming, slowly; and perhaps I am doing something to hasten their coming when I describe in advance under what auspices I see them originate, and upon what paths I see them come.
3
One may conjecture that a spirit in whom the type “free spirit” will one day become ripe and sweet to the point of perfection has had its decisive experience in a great liberation and that previously it was all the more a fettered spirit and seemed to be chained forever to its pillar and corner. What fetters the fastest? What bonds are all but unbreakable? In the case of men of a high and select kind they will be their duties: that reverence proper to youth, that reserve and delicacy before all that is honored and revered from of old, that gratitude for the soul out of which they have grown, for the hand which led them, for the holy place where they learned to worship – their supreme moments themselves will fetter them the fastest, lay upon them the most enduring obligation. The great liberation comes from those who are thus fettered suddenly, like the shock of an earthquake: the youthful soul is all at once convulsed, torn loose, torn away – it itself does not know what is happening. A drive and impulse rules and masters it like a command; a will and desire awakens to go off, anywhere, at any cost; a vehement dangerous curiosity for an undiscovered world flames and flickers in all its senses. “Better to die than to go on living here” – thus resounds the imperious voice and temptation: and this “here,” this “at home” is everything it had hitherto loved! A sudden terror and suspicion of what it loved, a lightning-bolt of contempt for what it called “duty,” a rebellious, arbitrary, volcanically erupting desire for travel, strange places, estrangement, coldness, soberness, frost, a hatred for love, perhaps a desecrating blow and glance backwards to where it formerly loved and worshipped, perhaps a hot blush of shame at what it has just done and at the same time an exultation that it has done it, a drunken, inwardly exultant shudder which betrays that a victory has been won – a victory? over what? over whom? an enigmatic, question-packed, questionable victory, but the first victory nonetheless: such bad and painful things are part of the history of the great liberation. It is at the same time a sickness that can destroy the man who has it, this first outbreak of strength and will to self-determination, to evaluating on one’s own account, this will to free will: and how much sickness is expressed in the wild experiments and singularities through which the liberated prisoner now seeks to demonstrate his mastery over things! He prowls cruelly around with an unslaked lasciviousness; what he captures has to expiate the perilous tension of his pride; what excites him he tears apart. With a wicked laugh he turns round whatever he finds veiled and through some sense of shame or other spared and pampered: he puts to the test what these things look like when they are reversed. It is a matter of arbitrariness with him, and pleasure in arbitrariness, if he now perhaps bestows his favor on what had hitherto a bad repute – if he inquisitively and temptingly haunts what is specially forbidden. Behind all his toiling and weaving – for he is restlessly and aimlessly on his way as if in a desert – stands the question mark of a more and more perilous curiosity. “Can all values not be turned round? and is good perhaps evil? and God only an invention and finesse of the Devil? Is everything perhaps in the last resort false? And if we are deceived, are we not for that very reason also deceivers? must we not be deceivers? – such thoughts as these tempt him and lead him on, ever further away, ever further down. Solitude encircles and embraces him, ever more threatening, suffocating, heart-tightening, that terrible goddess and **mater saeva cupidinum **[“wild mother of the passions”] – but who today knows what solitude is?…
4
From this morbid isolation, from the desert of these years of temptation and experiment, it is still a long road to that tremendous overflowing certainty and health which may not dispense even with sickness, as a means and fish-hook of knowledge, to that mature freedom of spirit which is equally self-mastery and discipline of the heart and permits access to many and contradictory modes of thought – to that inner spaciousness and indulgence of superabundance which excludes the danger that the spirit may even on its own road perhaps lose itself and become infatuated and remain seated intoxicated in some corner or other, to that superfluity of formative, curative, molding and restorative forces which is precisely the sign of great health, that superfluity which grants to the free spirit the dangerous privilege of living experimentally and of being allowed to offer itself to adventure: the master’s privilege of the free spirit! In between there may lie long years of convalescence, years full of variegated, painfully magical transformations ruled and led along by a tenacious will to health which often ventures to clothe and disguise itself as health already achieved. There is a midway condition which a man of such a destiny will not be able to recall without emotion: it is characterized by a pale, subtle happiness of light and sunshine, a feeling of bird-like freedom, bird-like altitude, bird-like exuberance, and a third thing in which curiosity is united with a tender contempt. A “free spirit” – this cool expression does one good in every condition, it is almost warming. One lives no longer in the fetters of love and hatred, without yes, without no, near or far as one wishes, preferably slipping away, evading, fluttering off, gone again, again flying aloft; one is spoiled, as everyone is who has at some time seen a tremendous number of things beneath him – and one becomes the opposite of those who concern themselves with things which have nothing to do with them. Indeed, the free spirit henceforth has to do only with things – and how many things! – with which he is no longer concerned…
5
A step further in convalescence: and the free spirit again draws near to life – slowly, to be sure, almost reluctantly, almost mistrustfully. It again grows warmer around him, yellower, as it were; feeling and feeling for others acquire depth, warm breezes of all kinds blow across him. It seems to him as if his eyes are only now open to what is close at hand. He is astonished and sits silent: where had he been? These close and closest things: how changed they seemed! what bloom and magic they have acquired! He looks back gratefully – grateful to his wandering, to his hardness and self-alienation, to his viewing of far distances and bird-like flights in cold heights. What a good thing he had not always stayed “at home,” stayed “under his own roof” like a delicate apathetic loafer! He had been beside himself: no doubt of that. Only now does he see himself – and what surprises he experiences as he does so! What unprecedented shudders! What happiness even in the weariness, the old sickness, the relapses of the convalescent! How he loves to sit sadly still, to spin out patience, to lie in the sun! Who understands as he does the happiness that comes in winter, the spots of sunlight on the wall! They are the most grateful animals in the world, also the most modest, these convalescents and lizards again half turned towards life: – there are some among them who allow no day to pass without hanging a little song of praise on the hem of its departing robe. And, speaking seriously, it is a radical cure for all pessimism (the well-known disease of old idealists and falsehood-mongers) to become ill after the manner of these free spirits, to remain ill a good while, and then grow well (I mean “better “) for a still longer period. It is wisdom, practical wisdom, to prescribe even health for oneself for a long time only in small doses.
6
At that time it may finally happen that, under the sudden illumination of a still stressful, still changeable health, the free, ever freer spirit begins to unveil the riddle of that great liberation which had until then waited dark, questionable, almost untouchable in his memory. If he has for long hardly dared to ask himself: “why so apart? so alone? renouncing everything I once reverenced? renouncing reverence itself? why this hardness, this suspiciousness, this hatred for your own virtues?” – now he dares to ask it aloud and hears in reply something like an answer. “You shall become master over yourself, master also over your virtues. Formerly they were your masters; but they must be only your instruments beside other instruments. You shall get control over your For and Against and learn how to display first one and then the other in accordance with your higher goal. You shall learn to grasp the sense of perspective in every value judgment – the shifting, distortion, and apparent teleology of the horizons and everything that belongs to perspective; also the amount of stupidity which opposite values involve, and all the intellectual loss with which every every For and Against has to be paid for. You shall learn to grasp the necessary injustice in every For and Against, injustice as inseparable from life, life itself as conditioned by the sense of perspective and its injustice. You shall above all see with your own eyes where injustice is always at its greatest: where life has developed at its smallest, narrowest, neediest, most incipient and yet cannot avoid taking itself as the goal and measure of things and for the sake of its own preservation secretly and meanly and ceaselessly crumbling away and calling into question the higher, greater, richer – you shall see with your own eyes the problem of order of rank, and how power and right and spaciousness of perspective grow into the heights together. You shall” – enough: from now on the free spirit knows what “you shall” he has obeyed, and he also knows what he now can, what only now he – may do…
7
Thus does the free spirit answer himself with regard to the riddle of emancipation, and ends therewith, while he generalises his case, in order thus to decide with regard to his experience. “As it has happened to me,” he says to himself, “so must it happen to everyone in whom a mission seeks to embody itself and to ‘come into the world.’” The secret power and necessity of this mission will operate in and upon the destined individuals like an unconscious pregnancy – long before they have had the mission itself in view and have known its name. Our destiny rules over us, even when we are not yet aware of it; it is the future that makes laws for our today. Granted that it is the problem of the gradations of rank, of which we may say that it is our problem, we free spirits; now only in the midday of our life do we first understand what preparations, detours, tests, experiments, and disguises the problem needed, before it was permitted to rise before us, and how we had first to experience the most manifold and opposing conditions of distress and happiness in soul and body, as adventurers and circumnavigators of the inner world called “man,” as surveyors of all the “higher” and the “one-above-another,” also called “man” – penetrating everywhere, almost without fear, rejecting nothing, losing nothing, tasting everything, cleansing everything from all that is accidental, and, as it were, sifting it out – until at last we could say, we free spirits, “Here – a new problem! Here a long ladder, the rungs of which we ourselves have sat upon and mounted – which we ourselves at some time have been! Here a higher place, a lower place, an under-us, an immeasurably long order, a hierarchy which we see; here – our problem!”
8
No psychologist or augur will be in doubt for a moment as to what stage of the development just described the following book belongs (or is assigned to). But where are these psychologists nowadays? In France, certainly; perhaps in Russia; assuredly not in Germany. Reasons are not lacking why the present-day Germans could still even count this as an honour to them – bad enough, surely, for one who in this respect is un-German in disposition and constitution! This German book, which has been able to find readers in a wide circle of countries and nations – it has been about ten years going its rounds – and must understand some sort of music and piping art, by means of which even coy foreign ears are seduced into listening – it is precisely in Germany that this book has been most negligently read, and worst listened to; what is the reason? “It demands too much,” I have been told, “it appeals to men free from the pressure of coarse duties, it wants refined and fastidious senses, it needs superfluity – superfluity of time, of clearness of sky and heart, of otium [leisure, idleness] in the boldest sense of the term – purely good things, which we Germans of today do not possess and therefore cannot give.” After such a polite answer my philosophy advises me to be silent and not to question further; besides, in certain cases, as the proverb points out, one only remains a philosopher by being – silent.
Friedrich Nietzsche
NICE, Spring 1886.
First Division - Of First and Last Things
1
The chemistry of concepts and sensations. – Almost all the problems of philosophy once again pose the same form of question as they did two thousand years ago: how can something originate in its opposite, for example rationality in irrationality, the sentient in the dead, logic in unlogic, disinterested contemplation in covetous desire, living for others in egoism, truth in error? Metaphysical philosophy has hitherto surmounted this difficulty by denying that the one originates in the other and assuming for the more highly valued thing a miraculous source in the very kernel and being of the “thing in itself.” Historical philosophy, on the other hand, which can no longer be separated from natural science, the youngest of all philosophical methods, has discovered in individual cases (and this will probably be the result in every case) that there are no opposites, except in the customary exaggeration of popular metaphysical interpretations, and that a mistake in reasoning lies at the bottom of this antithesis: according to this explanation there exists, strictly speaking, neither an unegoistic action nor completely disinterested contemplation; both are only sublimations, in which the basic element seems almost to have dispersed and reveals itself only under the most painstaking observation. All we require, and what can be given us only now the individual sciences have attained their present level, is a chemistry of the moral, religious and aesthetic conceptions and sensations, likewise of all the agitations we experience within ourselves in cultural and social intercourse, and indeed even when we are alone: what if this chemistry would end up by revealing that in this domain too the most glorious colors are derived from base, indeed from despised materials? Will there be many who desire to pursue such researches? Mankind likes to put questions of origins and beginnings out of its mind: must one not be almost inhuman to detect in oneself a contrary inclination?
2
Family failing of philosophers. – All philosophers have the common failing of starting out from man as he is now and thinking they can reach their goal through an analysis of him. They involuntarily think of “man” as an **aeterna veritas **[something everlastingly true], as something that remains constant in the midst of all flux, as a sure measure of things. Everything the philosopher has declared about man is, however, at bottom no more than a testimony as to the man of a very limited period of time. Lack of historical sense is the family failing of all philosophers; many, without being aware of it, even take the most recent manifestation of man, such as has arisen under the impress of certain religions, even certain political events, as the fixed form from which one has to start out. They will not learn that man has become, that the faculty of cognition has become; while some of them; while some of them would have it that the whole world is spun out of this faculty of cognition. Now, everything essential in the development of mankind took place in primeval times, long before the four thousand years we more or less know about; during these years mankind may well not have altered very much. But the philosopher here sees “instincts” in man as he now is and assumes that these belong to the unalterable facts of mankind and to that extent could provide a key to the understanding of the world in general: the whole of teleology is constructed by speaking of the man of the last four millennia as of an eternal man towards whom all things in the world have had a natural relationship from the time he began. But everything has become: there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths. Consequently what is needed from now on is historical philosophizing, and with it the virtue of modesty.
3
Estimation of unpretentious truths. – It is the mark of a higher culture to value the little unpretentious truths which have been discovered by means of rigorous method more highly than the errors handed down by metaphysical ages and men, which blind us and make us happy. At first, one has scorn on his lips for unpretentious truths, as if they could offer no match for the others: they stand so modest, simple, sober, even apparently discouraging, while the other truths are so beautiful, splendid, enchanting, or even enrapturing. But truths that are hard won, certain, enduring, and therefore still of consequence for all further knowledge are the higher; to keep to them is manly, and shows bravery, simplicity, restraint. Eventually, not only the individual, but all mankind will be elevated to this manliness, when men finally grow accustomed to the greater esteem for durable, lasting knowledge and have lost all belief in inspiration and a seemingly miraculous communication of truths.
The admirers of forms, with their standard of beauty and sublimity, will, to be sure, have good reason to mock at first, when esteem for unpretentious truths and the scientific spirit first comes to rule, but only because either their eye has not yet been opened to the charm of the simplest form, or because men raised in that spirit have not yet been fully and inwardly permeated by it, so that they continue thoughtlessly to imitate old forms (and poorly, too, like someone who no longer really cares about the matter). Previously, the mind was not obliged to think rigorously; its importance lay in spinning out symbols and forms. That has changed; that importance of symbols has become the sign of lower culture. Just as our very arts are becoming ever more intellectual and our senses more spiritual, and as, for example, that which is sensually pleasant to the ear is judged quite differently now than a hundred years ago, so the forms of our life become ever more spiritual – to the eye of older times uglier, perhaps, but only because it is unable to see how the realm of internal, spiritual beauty is continually deepening and expanding, and to what extent a glance full of intelligence can mean more to all of us now than the most beautiful human body and the most sublime edifice.
4
Astrology and the like. – It is probable that the objects of religious, moral, and aesthetic sensibility likewise belong only to the surface of things, although man likes to believe that here at least he is touching the heart of the world. Because those things make him so deeply happy or unhappy, he deceives himself, and shows the same pride as astrology, which thinks the heavens revolve around the fate of man. The moral man, however, presumes that that which is essential to his heart must also be the heart and essence of all things.
5
Misunderstanding of the dream. – The man of the ages of barbarous primordial culture believed that in the dream he was getting to know a second real world: here is the origin of all metaphysics. Without the dream, one would have had no occasion to divide the world into two. The dissection into soul and body is also connected with the oldest idea of the dream, likewise the postulation of a life of the soul ["Seelenscheinleib”], thus the origin of all beliefs in spirits and probably also of the belief in gods. “The dead live on, for they appear to the living in dreams”: that was the conclusion one formerly drew, throughout many millennia.
6
The scientific spirit is powerful in the part, not in the whole. – The distinct, smallest fields of science are treated purely objectively. On the other hand, the general, great sciences, taken as a whole, pose the question (a very unobjective question, to be sure): what for? to what benefit? Because of this concern about benefit, men treat the sciences less impersonally as a whole than in their parts. Now, in philosophy – the top of the whole scientific pyramid – the question of the benefit of knowledge itself is posed automatically and each philosophy has the unconscious intention of ascribing to knowledge the greatest benefit. For this reason, all philosophies have so much high-flying metaphysics and so much wariness of the seemingly insignificant explanations of physics. For the importance of knowledge for life ought to appear as great as possible. Here we have the antagonism between individual scientific fields and philosophy. The latter, like art, wishes to render the greatest possible depth and meaning to life and activity. In the sciences, one seeks knowledge and nothing more – whatever the consequences may be. Until now, there has been no philosopher in whose hands philosophy has not become an apology for knowledge. In this way, at least, every one is an optimist, by thinking that knowledge must be accorded the highest usefulness. All philosophers are tyrannized by logic: and logic, by its nature, is optimism.
7
The troublemaker in science. – Philosophy divorced itself from science when it inquired which knowledge of the world and life could help man to live most happily. This occurred in the Socratic schools: out of a concern for happiness man tied off the veins of scientific investigation – and does so still today.
8
Pneumatic explanation of nature. – Metaphysics explains nature’s scriptures as if pneumatologically, the way the church and its scholars used to explain the Bible. It takes a lot of intelligence to apply to nature the same kind of strict interpretive art that philologists today have created for all books: with the intention simply to understand what the scripture wants to say, but not to sniff out, or even presume, a double meaning. Just as we have by no means overcome bad interpretive art in regard to books, and one still comes upon vestiges of allegorical and mystical interpretation in the best-educated society, so it stands too in regard to nature – in fact much worse.
9
Metaphysical world. – It is true, there could be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed. We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off. This is a purely scientific problem and one not very well calculated to bother people overmuch; but all that has hitherto mad metaphysical assumptions valuable, terrible, delightful to them, all that has begotten these assumptions, is passion, error and self-deception; the worst of all methods of acquiring knowledge, not the best of all, have taught belief in them. When one has disclosed these methods as the foundation of all extant religions and metaphysical systems one has refuted them! Then that possibility still remains over; but one can do absolutely nothing with it, not to speak of letting happiness, salvation and life depend on the gossamer of such a possibility. – For one could assert nothing at all of the metaphysical world except that it was a being-other; it would be a thing with negative qualities. – Even if the existence of such a world were never so well demonstrated, it is certain that knowledge of it would be the most useless of all knowledge: more useless even than knowledge of the chemical composition of water must be to the sailor in danger of shipwreck.
10
The harmlessness of metaphysics in the future. – As soon as the origins of religion, art, and morality have been described, so that one can explain them fully without resorting to the use of metaphysical intervention at the beginning and along the way, then one no longer has as strong an interest in the purely theoretical problem of the “thing-in-itself” and “appearance.” For however the case may be, religion, art, and morality do not enable us to touch the “essence of the world in itself.” We are in the realm of idea, no “intuition” can carry us further. With complete calm we will let physiology and the ontogeny of organisms and concepts determine how our image of the world can be so very different from the disclosed essence of the world.
11
Language as putative science. – The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world. The sculptor of language was not so modest as to believe that he was only giving things designations, he conceived rather that with words he was expressing supreme knowledge of things; language is, in fact, the first stage of the occupation with science. Here, too, it is the belief that the truth has been found out of which the mightiest sources of energy have flowed. Very much subsequently – only now – it dawns on men that in their belief in language they have propagated a tremendous error. Happily, it is too late for the evolution of reason, which depends on this belief, to be again put back. – Logic too depends on presuppositions with which nothing in the real world corresponds, for example on the presupposition that there are identical things, that the same thing is identical at different points of time: but this science came into existence through the opposite belief (that such conditions do obtain in the real world). It is the same with mathematics, which would certainly not have come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no real circle, no absolute magnitude.
12
Dream and culture. – Memory is that function of the brain which is most greatly impaired by sleep – not that it relaxes entirely, but it is brought back to a state of imperfection, as it might have been in everyone, when awake and by day, during mankind’s primeval age. Arbitrary and confused as it is, it continually mistakes things on the basis of the most superficial similarities; but it was the same arbitrariness and confusion with which the tribes composed their mythologies, and even now travelers regularly observe how greatly the savage inclines to forgetfulness, how, after he strains his memory briefly, his mind begins to stagger about, and he produces lies and nonsense simply because he is weary. But all of us are like the savage when we dream. Faulty recognitions and mistaken equations are the basis of the poor conclusions which we are guilty of making in dreams, so that when we recollect a dream clearly, we are frightened of ourselves, because we harbor so much foolishness within.
The utter clarity of all dream-ideas, which presupposes an unconditional belief in their reality, reminds us once again of the state of earlier mankind in which hallucinations were extraordinarily frequent, and sometimes seized whole communities, whole nations simultaneously. Thus, in our sleep and dreams, we go through the work of earlier mankind once more.
13
The logic of the dream. – When one sleeps, the nervous system is constantly excited by manifold internal stimuli: almost all the organs secrete and are active; the blood circulates turbulently; the position of the sleeper, his blankets, influence his feelings variously; the stomach digests and disturbs other organs with its movements; the intestines turn; the placement of the head occasions unusual positions of the muscles; the feet, without shoes, their soles not pressing on the floor, cause a feeling of unusualness, as does the different way the whole body is clothed after its daily change and variation, and all this excites by its unusualness the whole system, including the brain functions. Thus there are a hundred occasions for the mind to be surprised and to search for reasons for this excitation: the dream, however, is the searching for, and the imagining of, the causes for these excited feelings, i.e., the supposed causes. For example, if one ties two straps around one’s feet, one may dream that two snakes are coiled around one’s feet. This is at first a hypothesis, then a belief, accompanied by a pictorial idea and elaboration: “These snakes must be the cause of that feeling which I, the sleeper, am having” – thus judges the mind of the sleeper. What is thus inferred to have been the near past becomes the present through the excited imagination. Thus everybody knows from experience how quickly one blends a strong sound – e.g., the toiling of bells or cannon shots – into his dream, i.e., how he explains them ex post facto through his dream, in such a way that he supposes that he experiences first the causal circumstances and then this sound.
But how is it that the mind of the dreamer always errs so greatly, while the same mind awake tends to be so sober, careful, and skeptical about hypotheses? Why does he think the first best hypothesis that explains a feeling is enough to believe in it at once? (For when dreaming, we believe in the dream as if it were reality; that is, we take our hypothesis for fully proven.)
I suppose: as man even now infers in dreams, mankind inferred for many thousands of years also when awake; the first causa that occurred to the mind to explain anything that required explanation sufficed and was considered the truth. (According to the tales of travelers, savages proceed this way even today.) This old aspect of humanity lives on in us in our dreams, for it is the basis upon which higher reason developed, and is still developing, in every human: dreams take us back again to distant conditions of human culture and put a means at our disposal for understanding them better. Dream-thought is so easy for us now because, during mankind’s immense periods of development, we have been so well drilled in just this form of fantastic and cheap explanation from the first, best idea. In this way dreaming is recuperation for a brain which must satisfy by day the stricter demands made on thought by higher culture.
A related occurrence when we are awake can be viewed as a virtual gate and antechamber to the dream. If we close our eyes, the brain produces a multitude of impressions of light and colors, probably as a kind of postlude and echo to all those effects of light which penetrate it by day. Now, however, our reason (in league with imagination) immediately works these plays of color, formless in themselves, into definite figures, forms, landscapes, moving groups. Once again, the actual process is a kind of conclusion from the effect to the cause; as the mind inquires about the origin of these light impressions and colors, it assumes those figures and shapes to be the cause. They seem to be the occasion of those colors and lights, because the mind is used to finding an occasioning cause for every color and every light impression it receives by day, with eyes open. Here, then, the imagination keeps pushing images upon the mind, using in their production the visual impressions of the day – and this is precisely what dream imagination does. That is, the supposed cause is deduced from the effect and imagined after the effect. All this with an extraordinary speed, so that, as with a conjurer, judgment becomes confused, and a sequence can appear to be a synchronism, or even a reversed sequence.
We can infer from these processes, how late a more acute logical thinking, a rigorous application of cause and effect, developed; even now, our functions of reason and intelligence reach back instinctively to those primitive forms of deductions, and we live more or less half our lives in this state. The poet, too, the artist, attributes his moods and states to causes that are in no way the true ones; to this extent he reminds us of an older mankind, and can help us to understand it.
14
Resonance. – All intense moods bring with them a resonance of related feelings and moods; they seem to stir up memory. Something in us remembers and becomes aware of similar states and their origin. Thus habitual, rapid associations of feelings and thoughts are formed, which, when they follow with lightning speed upon one another, are eventually no longer felt as complexes, but rather as unities. In this sense, one speaks of moral feelings, religious feelings, as if they were all unities; in truth they are rivers with a hundred sources and tributaries. As is so often the case, the unity of the word does not guarantee the unity of the thing.
15
No inside and outside in the world. – Just as Democritus applied the concepts of above and below to infinite space, where they have no meaning, so philosophers in general apply the concept “inside and outside” to the essence and appearance of the world. They think that with deep feelings man penetrates deep into the inside, approaches the heart of nature. But these feelings are deep only to the extent that they regularly stimulate, almost imperceptibly, certain complicated groups of thoughts, which we call deep. A feeling is deep because we hold the accompanying thought to be deep. But the deep thought can nevertheless be very far from the truth, as is, for example, every metaphysical thought. If one subtracts the added elements of thought from the deep feeling, what remains is intense feeling, which guarantees nothing at all about knowledge except itself, just as strong belief proves only its own strength, not the truth of what is believed.
16
Appearance and thing-in-itself. – Philosophers are accustomed to place themselves before life and experience – before that which they call the world of appearance – as if before a painting that has been unrolled once and for all and unchangingly displays almost the same event: this event, they think, must be interpreted correctly in order to draw a conclusion as to the being which produced the painting: that is to say, as to the thing-in-itself, which is seen as the sufficient reason for the world of appearance. More rigorous logicians, on the other hand, after they had strictly established the concept of the metaphysical as that of the unconditioned, consequently also the unconditioning, denied any connection between the unconditioned (the metaphysical world) and the world known to us: so that what appears in appearance is precisely not the thing-in-itself, and any conclusion from the former to the latter is to be rejected. Both parties, however, overlook the possibility that this painting – that which we men call life and experience – has gradually become, is indeed still fully in process of becoming, and should thus not be regarded as a fixed magnitude from which one might draw a conclusion as to the originator (the sufficient reason) or even reject such a conclusion. Because we have for millennia made moral, aesthetic, religious demands on the world, looked upon it with blind desire, passion or fear, and abandoned ourselves to the bad habits of illogical thinking, this world has gradually become so marvelously variegated, frightful, meaningful, soulful, it has acquired color – but we have been the colorists: it is the human intellect that has made appearances appear and transported its erroneous basic conceptions into things. Only late, very late, does the intellect stop to think: and now the world of experience and the thing-in-itself seem so extraordinarily different and separate that it rejects any conclusion about the latter from the former, or else, in an awful, mysterious way, it demands the abandonment of our intellect, of our personal will in order to come to the essential by becoming essential. On the other hand, other people have gathered together all characteristic traits of our world of appearances (that is, our inherited idea of the world, spun out of intellectual errors) and, instead of accusing the intellect, have attacked the essence of things for causing this real, very uncanny character of the world, and have preached salvation from being.
The steady and arduous progress of science, which will ultimately celebrate its greatest triumph in an ontogeny of thought, will deal decisively with all these views. Its conclusion might perhaps end up with this tenet: That which we now call the world is the result of a host of errors and fantasies which have gradually arisen in the course of the total evolution of organic nature, have become entwined with one another and are now inherited by us as the accumulated treasure of the entire past – as a treasure: for the value of our humanity depends on it. Rigorous science is in fact able to detach us from this ideational world only to a slight extent (something we by no means desire), in that it is unable to break significantly the power of ancient habits of feeling. But it can gradually and step by step illuminate the history of how this world as idea arose – and raise us above the whole thing at least for moments at a time. Perhaps we then recognize that the thing-in-itself is worthy of Homeric laughter: it appeared to be so much, indeed everything, and is actually empty, that is to say empty of meaning.
17
Metaphysical explanations. – A young person appreciates metaphysical explanations because they show him something highly meaningful in matters he found unpleasant or despicable. If he is dissatisfied with himself, his feeling is relieved if he can recognize in that which he so disapproves of in himself the innermost riddle of the world or its misery. To feel less responsible, and at the same time to find things more interesting: that is the twofold benefit which he owes to metaphysics. Later, of course, he comes to distrust the whole method of metaphysical explanation; then perhaps he understands that those same effects are to be obtained just as well and more scientifically in another way; he understands that physical and historical explanations bring about at least as much that feeling of irresponsibility, and that his interest in life and its problems is kindled perhaps even more thereby.
18
Basic questions of metaphysics. – Once the ontogeny of thought is written, the following sentence by an excellent logician will be seen in a new light: “The original general law of the knowing subject consists in the inner necessity of knowing each object in itself, in its own being, as an object identical with itself, that is, self-existing and fundamentally always the same and unchangeable, in short, as a substance.” [Afrikan Spir, Thought and Reality] This law, too, which is here called “original,” also evolved. Some day the gradual origin of this tendency in lower organisms will be shown, how the dull mole’s eyes of these organizations at first see everything as identical; how then, when the various stimuli of pleasure and unpleasure become more noticeable, different substances are gradually distinguished, but each one with One attribute, that is, with one single relationship to such an organism. The first stage of logic is judgment, whose essence consists, as the best logicians have determined, in belief. All belief is based on the feeling of pleasure or pain in relation to the feeling subject. A new, third feeling as the result of two preceding feelings is judgment in its lowest form. Initially, we organic beings have no interest in a thing, other than in its relationship to us with regard to pleasure and pain. Between those moments in which we become aware of this relationship (i.e., the states of sensation) lie those states of quiet, of non-sensation. Then we find the world and every thing in it without interest; we notice no change in it (just as even now, a person who is intensely interested in something will not notice that someone is passing by him). To a plant, all things are normally quiet, eternal, each thing identical to itself. From the period of low organisms, man has inherited the belief that there are identical things (only experience which has been educated by the highest science contradicts this tenet). From the beginning, the first belief of all organic beings may be that the whole rest of the world is One and unmoved.
In that first stage of logic, the thought of causality is furthest removed. Even now, we believe fundamentally that all feelings and actions are acts of free will; when the feeling individual considers himself, he takes each feeling, each change, to be something isolated, that is, something unconditioned, without a context. It rises up out of us, with no connection to anything earlier or later. We are hungry, but do not think initially that the organism wants to be kept alive. Rather, that feeling seems to assert itself without reason or purpose; it isolates itself and takes itself to be arbitrary. Thus the belief in freedom of the will is an initial error of all organic beings, as old as the existence in them of stirrings of logic. Belief in unconditioned substances and identical things is likewise an old, original error of all that is organic. To the extent that all metaphysics has dealt primarily with substance and freedom of the will, however, one may characterize it as that science which deals with the basic errors of man – but as if they were basic truths.
19
Number. – The laws of numbers were invented on the basis of the initially prevailing error that there are various identical things (but actually there is nothing identical) or at least that there are things (but there is no “thing”). The assumption of multiplicity always presumes that there is something, which occurs repeatedly. But this is just where error rules; even here, we invent entities, unities, that do not exist.
Our feelings of space and time are false, for if they are tested rigorously, they lead to logical contradictions. Whenever we establish something scientifically, we are inevitably always reckoning with some incorrect quantities; but because these quantities are at least constant (as is, for example, our feeling of time and space), the results of science do acquire a perfect strictness and certainty in their relationship to each other. One can continue to build upon them-up to that final analysis, where the mistaken basic assumptions, those constant errors, come into contradiction with the results, for example, in atomic theory. There we still feel ourselves forced to assume a “thing” or a material “substratum” that is moved, while the entire scientific procedure has pursued the task of dissolving everything thing-like (material) into movements. Here, too, our feeling distinguishes that which is moving from that which is moved, and we do not come out of this circle, because the belief in things has been tied up with our essential nature from time immemorial.
When Kant says “the understanding does not draw its laws from nature, it prescribes them to nature,” [Immanuel Kant: Prolegomena, 36] this is wholly true in respect to the concept of nature which we are obliged to attach to nature (nature = world as idea, that is, as error), but which is the summation of a host of errors of the understanding.
To a world that is not our idea, the laws of numbers are wholly inapplicable: these are valid only in the human world.
20
A few rungs down. – One level of education, itself a very high one, has been reached when man gets beyond superstitious and religious concepts and fears and, for example, no longer believes in the heavenly angels or original sin, and has stopped talking about the soul’s salvation. Once he is at this level of liberation, he must still make a last intense effort to overcome metaphysics. Then, however, a retrograde movement is necessary: he must understand both the historical and the psychological justification in metaphysical ideas. He must recognize how mankind’s greatest advancement came from them and how, if one did not take this retrograde step, one would rob himself of mankind’s finest accomplishments to date.
With regard to philosophical metaphysics, I now see a number of people who have arrived at the negative goal (that all positive metaphysics is an error), but only a few who climb back down a few rungs. For one should look out over the last rung of the ladder, but not want to stand on it. Those who are most enlightened can go only as far as to free themselves of metaphysics and look back on it with superiority, while here, as in the hippodrome, it is necessary to take a turn at the end of the track.
21
Presumed triumph of skepticism. – Let us accept for the moment the skeptical starting point: assuming there were no other, metaphysical world and that we could not use any metaphysical explanations of the only world known to us, how would we then look upon men and things? One can imagine this; it is useful to do so, even if one were to reject the question of whether Kant and Schopenhauer proved anything metaphysical scientifically. For according to historical probability, it is quite likely that men at some time will become skeptical about this whole subject. So one must ask the question: how will human society take shape under the influence of such an attitude? Perhaps the scientific proof of any metaphysical world is itself so difficult that mankind can no longer keep from distrusting it. And if one is distrustful of metaphysics, then we have, generally speaking, the same consequences as if metaphysics had been directly refuted and one were no longer permitted to believe in it. The historical question about mankind’s unmetaphysical views remains the same in either case.
22
Disbelief in the “monumentum aere perennius.” [“A memorial lasting longer than bronze (Horace).”]* * – * *One crucial disadvantage about the end of metaphysical views is that the individual looks his own short life span too squarely in the eye and feels no strong incentives to build on enduring institutions, designed for the ages. He wants to pick the fruit from the tree he has planted himself, and therefore no longer likes to plant those trees which require regular care over centuries, trees that are destined to overshade long successions of generations. For metaphysical views lead one to believe that they offer the conclusive foundation upon which all future generations are henceforth obliged to settle and build. The individual is furthering his salvation when he endows a church, for example, or a monastery; he thinks it will be credited to him and repaid in his soul’s eternal afterlife; it is work on the eternal salvation of his soul.
Can science, too, awaken such a belief in its results? To be sure, its truest allies must be doubt and distrust. Nevertheless, the sum of indisputable truths, which outlast all storms of skepticism and all disintegration, can in time become so large (in the dietetics of health, for example), that one can decide on that basis to found “eternal” works. In the meanwhile, the contrast between our excited ephemeral existence and the long-winded quiet of metaphysical ages is still too strong, because the two ages are still too close to each other; the individual runs through too many inner and outer evolutions himself to dare to set himself up permanently, once and for all, for even the span of his own life. When a wholly modern man intends, for example, to build a house, he has a feeling as if he were walling himself up alive in a mausoleum.
23
Age of comparisons. – The less men are bound by their tradition, the greater the internal stirring of motives; the greater, accordingly, the external unrest, the whirling flow of men, the polyphony of strivings. Who today still feels a serious obligation to bind himself and his descendants to one place? Who feels that anything is seriously binding? Just as all artistic styles of the arts are imitated one next to the other, so too are all stages and kinds of morality, customs, cultures.
Such an age gets its meaning because in it the various world views, customs, cultures are compared and experienced next to one another, which was not possible earlier, when there was always a localized rule for each culture, just as all artistic styles were bound to place and time. Now, man’s increased aesthetic feeling will decide definitively from among the many forms which offer themselves for comparison. It will let most of them (namely all those that it rejects) die out. Similarly, a selection is now taking place among the forms and habits of higher morality, whose goal can be none other than the downfall of baser moralities. This is the age of comparisons! That is its pride – but also by rights its sorrow. Let us not be afraid of this sorrow! Instead, we will conceive the task that this age sets us to be as great as possible. Then posterity will bless us for it – a posterity that knows it has transcended both the completed original folk cultures, as well as the culture of comparison, but that looks back on both kinds of culture as on venerable antiquities, with gratitude.
24
Possibility of progress. – When a scholar of the old culture vows no longer to have anything to do with men who believe in progress, he is right. For the old culture has its greatness and goodness behind it, and an historical education forces one to admit that it can never again be fresh. To deny this requires an intolerable obtuseness or an equally insufferable enthusiasm. But men can consciously decide to develop themselves forward to a new culture, whereas formerly they developed unconsciously and by chance. Now they can create better conditions for the generation of men, their nourishment, upbringing, instruction; they can administer the earth as a whole economically, can weigh the strengths of men, one against the other, and employ them. The new, conscious culture kills the old culture, which, seen as a whole, led an unconscious animal-and-vegetable life; it also kills the distrust of progress: progress is possible. I mean to say, it is premature and almost nonsensical to believe that progress must of necessity come about; but how could one deny that it is possible? Conversely, progress in the sense of the old culture, and by means of it, is not even conceivable. Even if romantic fantasizing still uses the word “progress” about its goals (e.g., completed, original folk cultures) it is in any event borrowing that image from the past: its thinking and imagining in this area lack all originality.
25
Private and public morality. – Since belief has ceased that a God broadly directs the destinies of the world and that, all the apparent twists and turns in its path notwithstanding, is leading mankind gloriously upward, man has to set himself ecumenical goals embracing the whole earth. The former morality, namely Kant’s, demanded of the individual actions which one desired of all men: that was a very naive thing; as if everyone knew without further ado what mode of action would benefit the whole of mankind, that is, what actions at all are desirable; it is a theory like that of free trade, presupposing that universal harmony must result of itself in accordance with innate laws of progress. Perhaps some future survey of the requirements of mankind will show that it is absolutely not desirable that all men should act in the same way, but rather that in the interest of ecumenical goals whole tracts of mankind ought to have special, perhaps under certain circumstances even evil tasks imposed upon them. – In any event, if mankind is not to destroy itself through such conscious universal rule, it must first of all attain to a hitherto altogether unprecedented knowledge of the preconditions of culture as a scientific standard for ecumenical goals. Herein lies the tremendous task facing the great spirits of the coming century.
26
Reaction as progress. – Sometimes there appear rough, violent, and impetuous spirits, who are nevertheless backward; they conjure up once again a past phase of mankind. They serve as proof that the new tendencies which they are opposing are still not strong enough, that something is lacking there; otherwise, those conjurers would be opposed more effectively. For example, Luther’s Reformation proves that in his century all the impulses of freedom of the spirit were still uncertain, delicate, juvenescent. Science could not yet raise her head. Indeed, the whole Renaissance appears like an early spring, which almost gets snowed away. But in our century, too, Schopenhauer’s metaphysics proved that the scientific spirit is still not strong enough. Thus, in Schopenhauer’s teaching the whole medieval Christian worldview and feeling of man could again celebrate a resurrection, despite the defeat, long since achieved, of all Christian dogmas. His teaching is infused with much science, but what rules it is not science but rather the old, well-known “metaphysical need.” Certainly one of the greatest and quite inestimable benefits we gain from Schopenhauer is that he forces our feeling for a time back to older, powerful forms of contemplating the world and men, to which other paths could not so readily lead us. History and justice benefit greatly. I believe that without Schopenhauer’s aid, no one today could so easily do justice to Christianity and its Asian cousins; to attempt to do so based on the Christianity still existing today is impossible. Only after this great triumph of justice, only after we have corrected in such an essential point the historical way of thinking that the Enlightenment brought with it, may we once again carry onward the banner of the Enlightenment, the banner with the three names: Petrarch, Erasmus, Voltaire. Out of reaction, we have taken a step forward.
27
Substitute for religion. – One thinks he is speaking well of philosophy when he presents it as a substitute religion for the people. In spiritual economy, transitional spheres of thought are indeed necessary occasionally, for the transition from religion to scientific contemplation is a violent, dangerous leap, something inadvisable. To that extent, it is right to recommend philosophy. But in the end one also has to understand that the needs that religion has satisfied and philosophy is now supposed to satisfy are not immutable; they can be weakened and exterminated. Consider, for example, that Christian distress of mind that comes from sighing over one’s inner depravity and care for one’s salvation – all concepts originating in nothing but errors of reason and deserving, not satisfaction, but obliteration. A philosophy can be useful either by satisfying those needs or by eliminating them; for they are acquired needs, temporally limited, based on assumptions that contradict those of science. It is preferable to use art for this transition, for easing a heart overburdened with feelings; those ideas are entertained much less by art than by a metaphysical philosophy. Beginning with art, one can more easily move on to a truly liberating philosophical science.
28
Disreputable words. – Away with those tedious, worn-out words “optimism” and “pessimism.” Every day there is less and less cause to use them; only babblers still cannot do without them. For why in the world should anyone want to be an optimist if he does not have to defend a God who must have created the best of all possible worlds, given that he himself is goodness and perfection? What thinking person still needs the hypothesis of a god?
Nor is there cause for a pessimistic confession, if one does not have an interest in irritating the advocates of God, the theologians or the theologizing philosophers, and energetically asserting the opposite claim, namely that evil reigns, that unpleasure is greater than pleasure, that the world is a botched job, the manifestation of an evil will to life. But who worries about theologians these days (except the theologians)?
All theology and its opposition aside, it is self-evident that the world is not good and not evil, let alone the best or the worst, and that these concepts “good” and “evil” make sense only in reference to men. Perhaps even there, as they are generally used, they are not justified: we must in every case dispense with both the reviling and the glorifying view of the world.
29
Intoxicated by the blossoms’ fragrance. – The ship of mankind, it is thought, has an ever greater draft, the more it is laden; it is believed that the deeper man thinks, the more delicate his feelings; the higher he esteems himself, the farther his distance from the other animals (the more he appears as the genius among animals), the nearer he will come to the true essence of the world and knowledge of it. This he does indeed through science, but he thinks he does it more through his religions and arts. These are, to be sure, a flower of civilization, but by no means nearer to the root of the world than is its stem. One does not understand the essence of things through art and religion, although nearly everyone is of that opinion. Error has made man so deep, delicate, inventive as to bring forth such blossoms as religions and arts. Pure knowledge would have been incapable of it. Whoever revealed to us the essence of the world would disappoint us all most unpleasantly. It is not the world as a thing-in-itself, but the world as idea (as error) that is so rich in meaning, deep, wonderful, pregnant with happiness and unhappiness. This conclusion leads to a philosophy of the logical denial of the world, which, by the way, can be combined just as well with a practical affirmation of the world as with its opposite.
30
Bad habits in making conclusions. – The most common false conclusions of men are these: a thing exists, therefore it is legitimate. Here one is concluding functionality from viability, and legitimacy from functionality. Furthermore, if an opinion makes us glad, it must be true; if its effect is good, it in itself must be good and true. Here one is attributing to the effect the predicate “gladdening,” “good,” in the sense of the useful, and providing the cause with the same predicate “good,” but now in the sense of the logically valid. The reversal of the proposition is: if a thing cannot prevail and maintain itself, it must be wrong; if an opinion tortures and agitates, it must be false. The free spirit, who comes to know all too well the error of this sort of deduction and has to suffer from its consequences, often succumbs to the temptation of making contrary deductions, which are in general naturally just as false: if a thing cannot prevail, it must be good; if an opinion troubles and disturbs, it must be true.
31
The illogical necessary. – Among the things that can drive a thinker to despair is the knowledge that the illogical is necessary for man and that much good comes from it. It is so firmly lodged in the passions, in speech, in art, in religion, and generally in everything which endows life with value, that one cannot extricate it without doing irreparable harm to these beautiful things. Only the very naive are capable of thinking that the nature of man can be transformed into a purely logical one; but, if there were degrees of approximation to this goal, how much would not have to vanish along this path! Even the most rational man needs nature again from time to time, that is, his illogical basic attitude to all things.
32
Unfairness necessary. – All judgments about the value of life have developed illogically and therefore unfairly. The impurity of the judgment lies first in the way the material is present (that is very incompletely), second, in the way it is assessed, and third, in the fact that every separate part of the material again results, as is absolutely necessary, from impure knowledge. No experience of a man, for example, however close he is to us, can be so complete that we would have a logical right to evaluate him in toto. All evaluations are premature, and must be so. Finally, the gauge by which we measure, our own nature, is no unchangeable quantity; we have moods and vacillations; yet we would have to know ourselves to be a fixed gauge if we were to evaluate fairly the relationship of any one thing to ourselves. Perhaps it will follow from all this that one ought not to judge at all; if only one could live without evaluating, without having disinclinations and inclinations! For all disinclination depends upon an evaluation, just as does all inclination. Man cannot experience a drive to or away from something without the feeling that he is desiring what is beneficial and avoiding what is harmful, without evaluating knowingly the merit of the goal. We are from the start illogical and therefore unfair beings, and this we can know: it is one of the greatest and most insoluble disharmonies of existence.
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Error about life necessary for life. – Every belief in the value and worth of life is based on impure thinking and is only possible because the individual’s sympathy for life in general, and for the suffering of mankind, is very weakly developed. Even uncommon men who think beyond themselves at all do not focus on life in general, but rather on limited parts of it. If one knows how to keep his attention primarily on exceptions, that is, on the great talents and pure souls, if one takes their coming into existence to be the goal of all world evolution and rejoices in their activity, then one may believe in the value of life – for one is overlooking other men, which is to say, thinking impurely. And likewise, if one does focus on all men, but takes only one type of drive, the less egoistical type, as valid and excuses mankind in respect to its other drives, then too one can hope something about mankind as a whole, and believe to this extent in the value of life – in this case, too, through impurity of thought. But whichever is the case, such a stance makes one an exception among men. Most men tolerate life without grumbling too much and believe thus in the value of existence, but precisely because everyone wills himself alone and stands his ground alone, and does not step out of himself as do those exceptional men, everything extrapersonal escapes his notice entirely, or seems at the most a faint shadow. Thus the value of life for ordinary, everyday man is based only on his taking himself to be more important than the world. The great lack of fantasy from which he suffers keeps him from being able to empathize with other beings, and he therefore participates in their vicissitudes and suffering as little as possible. He, on the other hand, who would be truly able to participate in it would have to despair about the value of life; if he were able to grasp and feel mankind’s overall consciousness in himself, he would collapse with a curse against existence – for mankind, as whole, has no goal and consequently, considering the whole affair, man cannot find his comfort and support in it, but rather his despair. If, in everything he does, he considers the ultimate aimlessness of men, his own activity acquires the character of squandering in his eyes. But to feel squandered as mankind (and not just as an individual), as we see the single blossom squandered by nature, is a feeling above all feelings.
But who is capable of it? Certainly only a poet – and poets always know how to comfort themselves.
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Some reassurance. – But does not our philosophy then turn into tragedy? Does not truth become an enemy of life, an enemy of what is better? A question seems to weigh down our tongues, and yet not want to be uttered: whether one is capable of consciously remaining in untruth, or, if one had to do so, whether death would not be preferable? For there is no “ought” anymore. Morality to the extent that it was an “ought” has been destroyed by our way of reflection, every bit as much as religion. Knowledge can allow only pleasure and unpleasure, benefit and harm, as motives. But how will these motives come to terms with the feeling for truth? These motives, too, have to do with errors (to the extent that inclination and disinclination, and their very unfair measurements, essentially determine, as we have said, our pleasure and unpleasure). All human life is sunk deep in untruth; the individual cannot pull it out of this well without growing profoundly annoyed with his entire past, without finding his present motives (like honor) senseless, and without opposing scorn and disdain to the passions that urge one on to the future and to the happiness in it. If this is true, is there only one way of thought left, with despair as a personal end and a philosophy of destruction as a theoretical end?
I believe that a man’s temperament determines the aftereffect of knowledge; although the aftereffect described above is possible in some natures, I could just as well imagine a different one, which would give rise to a life much more simple, more free of affects than the present one. The old motives of intense desire would still be strong at first, due to old, inherited habit, but they would gradually grow weaker under the influence of cleansing knowledge. Finally one would live among men and with oneself as in nature, without praise, reproaches, overzealousness, delighting in many things as in a spectacle that one formerly had only to fear. One would be free of appearance and would no longer feel the goading thought that one was not simply nature, or that one was more than nature. Of course, as I said, a good temperament would be necessary – a secure, mild, and basically cheerful soul; such a disposition would not need to be on guard for tricks and sudden explosions, and its expressions would have neither a growling tone nor sullenness – those familiar bothersome traits of old dogs and men who have lain a long time chained up. Rather, a man from whom the ordinary chains of life have fallen in such measure that he continues to live on only to better his knowledge must be able to renounce without envy and chagrin much, indeed almost everything, that other men value. He must be content with that free, fearless hovering over men, customs, laws and the traditional evaluations of things, which is for him the most desirable of states. He is glad to communicate his joy in this state, and perhaps he has nothing else to communicate, which is, to be sure, one renunciation, one self-denial the more. But if one nevertheless wants more from him, with a benevolent shake of the head he will indicate his brother, the free man of action, and perhaps not conceal a little scorn: for that man’s “freedom” is another matter entirely.
Second Division - On the History of the Moral Sensations
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The advantages of psychological observation. – That meditating on things human, all too human (or, as the learned phrase goes, “psychological observation”) is one of the means by which man can ease life’s burden; that by exercising this art, one can secure presence of mind in difficult situations and entertainment amid boring surroundings; indeed, that from the thorniest and unhappiest phases of one’s own life one can pluck maxims and feel a bit better thereby: this was believed, known – in earlier centuries. Why has it been forgotten in this century, when many signs point, in Germany at least, if not throughout Europe, to the dearth of psychological observation? Not particularly in novels, short stories, and philosophical meditations, for these are the work of exceptional men; but more in the judging of public events and personalities; most of all we lack the art of psychological dissection and calculation in all classes of society, where one hears a lot of talk about men, but none at all about man. Why do people let the richest and most harmless source of entertainment get away from them? Why do they not even read the great masters of the psychological maxim any more? For it is no exaggeration to say that it is hard to find the cultured European who has read La Rochefoucauld and his spiritual and artistic cousins [Vauvenargues, Champfort and Stendhal]. Even more uncommon is the man who knows them and does not despise them. But even this unusual reader will probably find much less delight in those artists than their form ought to give him; for not even the finest mind is capable of adequate appreciation of the art of the polished maxim if he has not been educated to it, has not been challenged by it himself. Without such practical learning one takes this form of creating and forming to be easier than it is; one is not acute enough in discerning what is successful and attractive. For that reason present-day readers of maxims take a relatively insignificant delight in them, scarcely a mouthful of pleasure; they react like typical viewers of cameos, praising them because they cannot love them, and quick to admire but even quicker to run away.
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Objection. – Or might there be a counterargument to the thesis that psychological observation is one of life’s best stimulants, remedies, and palliatives? Might one be so persuaded of the unpleasant consequences of this art as to intentionally divert the student’s gaze from it? Indeed, a certain blind faith in the goodness of human nature, an inculcated aversion to dissecting human behavior, a kind of shame with respect to the naked soul, may really be more desirable for a man’s overall happiness than the trait of psychological sharpsightedness, which is helpful in isolated instances. And perhaps the belief in goodness, in virtuous men and actions, in an abundance of impersonal goodwill in the world has made men better, in that it has made them less distrustful. If one imitates Plutarch’s heroes with enthusiasm and feels an aversion toward tracing skeptically the motives for their actions, then the welfare of human society has benefited (even if the truth of human society has not). Psychological error, and dullness in this area generally, help humanity forward; but knowledge of the truth might gain more from the stimulating power of an hypothesis like the one La Rochefoucauld places at the beginning of the first edition of his Sentences et maximes morales: “Ce que le monde nomme vertu n’est d’ordinaire qu’un fantome formé par nos passions, a qui on donne un nom honnete pour faire impunément ce qu’on veut.” [“That which the world calls virtue is usually nothing but a phantom formed by our passions to which we give an honest name so as to do what we wish with impunity.” – La Rochefoucauld: Réflexions, sentences et maximes morales.] La Rochefoucauld and those other French masters of soul searching (whose company a German, the author of Psychological Observations [written by Paul Rée, 1875] , has recently joined) are like accurately aimed arrows, which hit the mark again and again, the black mark of man’s nature. Their skill inspires amazement, but the spectator who is guided not by the scientific spirit, but by the humane spirit, will eventually curse an art which seems to implant in the souls of men a predilection for belittling and doubt.
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Nevertheless. – However credit and debit balances may stand: at its present state as a specific individual science the awakening of moral observation has become necessary, and mankind can no longer be spared the cruel sight of the moral dissecting table and its knives and forceps. For now that science rules which asks after the origin and history of moral feelings and which tries as it progresses to pose and solve the complicated sociological problems; the older philosophy doesn’t even acknowledge such problems and has, with paltry evasions, always avoided investigation of the origin and history of the moral sensations. With what consequences is now very clearly apparent, since it has been demonstrated in many instances how the errors of the greatest philosophers usually have their point of departure in a false explanation of certain human actions and sensations; how an erroneous analysis of so-called selfless behavior, for example, can be the basis for a false ethics, religion and mythological monsters are then in turn called to buttress it, and the shadow of these dismal spirits in the end falls even across physics and the entire perception of the world. But if it is a fact that the superficiality of psychological observation has laid the most dangerous traps for human judgment and conclusions, and continues to lay them anew, then what we need now is a persistence in work that does not tire of piling stone upon stone, pebble upon pebble; we need a sober courage to do such humble work without shame and to defy any who disdain it. It is true that countless individual remarks about things human and all too human were first detected and stated in those social circles which would make every sort of sacrifice not for scientific knowledge, but for a witty coquetry. And because the scent of that old homeland (a very seductive scent) has attached itself almost inextricably to the whole genre of the moral maxim, the scientific man instinctively shows some suspicion towards this genre and its seriousness. But it suffices to point to the outcome: already it is becoming clear that the most serious results grow up from the ground of psychological observation. Which principle did one of the keenest and coolest thinkers, the author of the book On the Origin of the Moral Sensations [written by Paul Rée, 1876-7] , arrive at through his incisive and piercing analysis of human actions? “The moral man,” he says, “stands no nearer to the intelligible (metaphysical) world than does the physical man.” Perhaps at some point in the future this principle, grown hard and sharp by the hammerblow of historical knowledge, can serve as the axe laid to the root of men’s “metaphysical need” (whether as more of a blessing than as a curse for the general welfare, who can say?). In any event, it is a tenet with the most weighty consequences, fruitful and frightful at the same time, and seeing into the world with that Janus-face which all great insights have.
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How beneficial. – Let us table the question, then, of whether psychological observation brings more advantage or harm upon men. What is certain is that it is necessary, for science cannot do without it. Science, however, takes as little consideration of final purposes as does nature; just as nature sometimes brings about the most useful things without having wanted to, so too true science, which is the imitation of nature in concepts, will sometimes, nay often, further man’s benefit and welfare and achieve what is useful – but likewise without having willed it. Whoever feels too wintry in the breeze of this kind of observation has perhaps too little fire in him. Let him look around meanwhile, and he will perceive diseases which require cold poultices, and men who are so “molded” out of glowing spirit that they have great trouble in finding an atmosphere cold and biting enough for them anywhere. Moreover, as all overly earnest individuals and peoples have a need for frivolity; as others, who are overly excitable and unstable, occasionally need heavy, oppressive burdens for their health’s sake; so should not we – the more spiritual men of an age that is visibly being set aflame more and more – reach for all quenching and cooling means available to remain at least as steady, harmless, and moderate as we now are and thus render service to this age at some future time as a mirror and self-reflection of itself? –
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The fable of intelligible freedom. – The principal stages in the history of the sensations by virtue of which we make anyone accountable for his actions, that is to say, of the moral sensations, are as follows. First of all, one calls individual actions good or bad quite irrespective of their motives but solely on account of their useful or harmful consequences. Soon, however, one forgets the origin of these designations and believes that the quality “good” and “evil” is inherent in the actions themselves, irrespective of their consequences: thus committing the same error as that by which language designates the stone itself as hard, the tree itself as green – that is to say, by taking for cause that which is effect. Then one consigns the being good or being evil to the motives and regards the deeds in themselves as morally ambiguous. One goes further and accords the predicate good or evil no longer to the individual motive but to the whole nature of a man out of whom the motive grows as the plant does from the soil. Thus one successively makes men accountable for the effects they produce, then for their actions, then for their motives, and finally for their nature. Now one finally discovers that this nature, too, cannot be accountable, in as much as it is altogether a necessary consequence and assembled from the elements and influences of things past and present: that is to say, that man can be made accountable for nothing, not for his nature, nor for his motives, nor for his actions, nor for the effect he produces. One has thereby attained to the knowledge that the history of the moral sensations if the history of an error, the error of accountability, which rests on the error of freedom of will.
Schopenhauer, on the other hand, concluded as follows: because certain actions produce displeasure (“consciousness of guilt”), there must exist a sense of accountability; for there would be no ground for this feeling of displeasure if not only all human actions were determined by necessity (as they actually do, according to this philosopher’s insight), but man himself acquired his entire nature with this same necessity (which Schopenhauer denies). From the fact of that feeling of displeasure, Schopenhauer believes he can demonstrate a freedom which man must have acquired somehow, not in respect of his actions but in respect to his nature: freedom to be thus or thus, that is to say, not to act thus or thus. From the esse [being], the sphere of freedom and accountability, there follows in his opinion the operari [action, manner of acting] – the sphere of strict causality, necessity and unaccountability. That feeling of displeasure appears to relate to the operari, to be sure – to that extent it is an error – in truth, however, to the esse, which is the deed of the free will, the basic cause of the existence of an individual: man becomes that which he wills to become, his willing precedes his existence.
Here the erroneous conclusion is drawn that from the fact of a feeling of displeasure there can be inferred the justification, the rational admissibility of this feeling of displeasure; and from this erroneous conclusion Schopenhauer arrives at his fantastic concept of so-called intelligible freedom. But a feeling of displeasure after a deed is absolutely not obliged to be rational; on the contrary, it cannot be, since it rests precisely on the erroneous presupposition that that deed need not have taken place of necessity. Thus: it is because man regards himself as free, not because he is free, that he feels remorse and pangs of conscience.
This feeling is, moreover, something one can disaccustom oneself to, and many people do not feel it at all in respect of actions which evoke it in others. It is a very changeable thing, tied to the evolution of morality and culture and perhaps present in only a relatively brief span of world-history.
No one is accountable for his deeds, no one for his nature; to judge is the same thing as to be unjust. This also applies when the individual judges himself. The proposition is as clear as daylight, and yet here everyone prefers to retreat back into the shadows and untruth: from fear of the consequences.
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The over-animal. – The beast in us wants to be lied to; morality is a white lie, to keep it from tearing us apart. Without the errors inherent in the postulates of morality, man would have remained an animal. But as it is he has taken himself to be something higher and has imposed stricter laws upon himself. He therefore has a hatred of those stages of man that remain closer to the animal state, which explains why the slave used to be disdained as a nonhuman, a thing.
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The unchangeable character. – In the strict sense, it is not true that one’s character is unchangeable; rather, this popular tenet means only that during a man’s short lifetime the motives affecting him cannot normally cut deeply enough to destroy the imprinted writing of many millennia. If a man eighty thousand years old were conceivable, his character would in fact be absolutely variable, so that out of him little by little an abundance of different individuals would develop. The brevity of human life misleads us to many an erroneous assertion about the qualities of man.
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Morality and the ordering of the good. – The accepted hierarchy of the good, based on how a low, higher, or a most high egoism desires that thing or the other, decides today about morality or immorality. To prefer a low good (sensual pleasure, for example) to one esteemed higher (health, for example) is taken for immoral, likewise to prefer comfort to freedom. The hierarchy of the good, however, is not fixed and identical at all times. If someone prefers revenge to justice, he is moral by the standard of an earlier culture, yet by the standard of the present culture he is immoral. “Immoral” then indicates that someone has not felt, or not felt strongly enough, the higher, finer, more spiritual motives which the new culture of the time has brought with it. It indicates a backward nature, but only in degree.
The hierarchy itself is not established or changed from the point of view of morality; nevertheless an action is judged moral or immoral according to the prevailing determination.
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Cruel men as backward. – We must think of men who are cruel today as stages of earlier cultures, which have been left over; in their case, the mountain range of humanity shows openly its deeper formations, which otherwise lie hidden. They are backward men whose brains, because of various possible accidents of heredity, have not yet developed much delicacy or versatility. They show us what we all were, and frighten us. But they themselves are as little responsible as a piece of granite for being granite. In our brain, too, there must be grooves and bends which correspond to that state of mind, just as there are said to be reminders of the fish state in the form of certain human organs. But these grooves and bends are no longer the bed in which the river of our feeling courses.
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Gratitude and revenge. – The reason the man of power is grateful is this. His benefactor has, through the help he has given him, as it were laid hands on the sphere of the man of power and intruded into it: now, by way of requital, the man of power in turn lays hands on the sphere of his benefactor through the act of gratitude. It is a milder form of revenge. If he did not have the compensation of gratitude, the man of power would have appeared unpowerful and thenceforth counted as such. That is why every community of the good, that is to say originally the powerful, places gratitude among its first duties. Swift suggested [Actually, it was Alexander Pope.] that men are grateful in the same degree as they are revengeful.
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Twofold prehistory of good and evil. – The concept good and evil has a twofold prehistory: firstly in the soul of the ruling tribes and castes. He who has the power to requite, good with good, evil with evil, and also actually practices requital – is, that is to say, grateful and revengeful – is called good; he who is powerless and cannot requite counts as bad. As a good man one belongs to the “good,” a community which has a sense of belonging together because all the individuals in it are combined with one another through the capacity for requital. As a bad man one belongs to the “bad,” to a swarm of subject, powerless people who have no sense of belonging together. The good are a caste, the bad a mass like grains of sand. Good and bad is for a long time the same thing as noble and base, master and slave. On the other hand, one does not regard the enemy as evil: he can requite. In Homer the Trojan and the Greek are both good. It is not he who does us harm but he who is contemptible who counts as bad. In the community of the good, goodness is hereditary; it is impossible for a bad man to grow out of such good soil. Should one of the good men nevertheless do something unworthy of good men, one resorts to excuses; one blames God, for example, saying that he struck the good man with blindness and madness.
Then in the soul of the subjected, the powerless. Here every other man, whether he be noble or base, counts as inimical, ruthless, cruel, cunning, ready to take advantage. Evil is the characterizing expression for man, indeed for every living being one supposes to exist, for a god, for example; human, divine mean the same thing as diabolical, evil. Signs of goodness, benevolence, sympathy are received fearfully as a trick, a prelude with a dreadful termination, a means of confusing and outwitting, in short as refined wickedness. When this disposition exists in the individual a community can hardly arise, at best the most rudimentary form of community: so that wherever this conception of good and evil reigns the downfall of such individuals, of their tribes and races, is near.
Our present morality has grown up in the soil of the ruling tribes and castes.
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Sympathy more painful than suffering. – There are cases where sympathy for suffering is more painful than actual suffering. When one of our friends is guilty of something ignominious, for example, we feel it more painfully than when we ourselves do it. For we believe in the purity of his character more than he does. Thus our love for him (probably because of this very belief) is more intense than his own love for himself. Even if his egoism suffers more than our egoism, in that he has to feel the bad consequences of his fault more intensely, our selflessness (this word must never be taken literally, but only as a euphemism) is touched more intensely by his guilt than is his selflessness.
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Hypochondria. – There are people who become hypochondriacs out of compassion and concern for another; the kind of pity which results is nothing less than a disease. Similarly, there is a Christian hypochrondria which befalls those lonely, religious-minded people who continually visualize to themselves the suffering and death of Christ.
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Economy of kindness. – Kindness and love, the most curative herbs and agents in human intercourse, are such precious finds that one would hope these balsamlike remedies would be used as economically as possible; but this is impossible. Only the boldest utopians would dream of the economy of kindness.
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Goodwill. – Among the small but endlessly abundant and therefore very effective things that science ought to heed more than the great, rare things, is goodwill. I mean those expressions of a friendly disposition in interactions, that smile of the eye, those handclasps, that ease which usually envelops nearly all human actions. Every teacher, every official brings this ingredient to what he considers his duty. It is the continual manifestation of our humanity, its rays of light, so to speak, in which everything grows. Especially within the narrowest circle, in the family, life sprouts and blossoms only by this goodwill. Good nature, friendliness, and courtesy of the heart are ever-flowing tributaries of the selfless drive and have made much greater contributions to culture than those much more famous expressions of this drive, called pity, charity, and self-sacrifice. But we tend to underestimate them, and in fact there really is not much about them that is selfless. The sum of these small doses is nevertheless mighty; its cumulative force is among the strongest of forces.
Similarly, there is much more happiness to be found in the world than dim eyes can see, if one calculates correctly and does not forget all those moments of ease which are so plentiful in every day of every human life, even the most oppressed.
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Desire to arouse pity. – In the most noteworthy passage of his self-portrait (first published in 1658), La Rochefoucauld certainly hits the mark when he warns all reasonable men against pity, when he advises them to leave it to those common people who need passions (because they are not directed by reason) to bring them to the point of helping the sufferer and intervening energetically in a misfortune [La Rochefoucauld: Réflexions, sentences et maximes morales.]. For pity, in his (and Plato’s) judgment, weakens the soul. Of course one ought to express pity, but one ought to guard against having it; for unfortunate people are so stupid that they count the expression of pity as the greatest good on earth.
Perhaps one can warn even more strongly against having pity for the unfortunate if one does not think of their need for pity as stupidity and intellectual deficiency, a kind of mental disorder resulting from their misfortune (this is how La Rochefoucauld seems to regard it), but rather as something quite different and more dubious. Observe how children weep and cry, so that they will be pitied, how they wait for the moment when their condition will be noticed. Or live among the ill and depressed, and question whether their eloquent laments and whimpering, the spectacle of their misfortune, is not basically aimed at hurting those present. The pity that the spectators then express consoles the weak and suffering, inasmuch as they see that, despite all their weakness, they still have at least one power: the power to hurt. In this feeling of superiority of which the manifestation of pity makes him conscious, the unfortunate man gains a sort of pleasure; in the conceit of his imagination he is still of sufficient importance to cause affliction in the world. Thus the thirst for pity is a thirst for self-enjoyment, and at the expense of one’s fellow men. It reveals man in the complete inconsideration of his most intimate dear self, but not precisely in his “stupidity,” as La Rochefoucauld thinks.
In social dialogue, three-quarters of all questions and answers are framed in order to hurt the participants a little bit; this is why many men thirst after society so much: it gives them a feeling of their strength. In these countless, but very small doses, malevolence takes effect as one of life’s powerful stimulants, just as goodwill, dispensed in the same way throughout the human world, is the perennially ready cure.
But will there be many people honest enough to admit that it is a pleasure to inflict pain? That not infrequently one amuses himself (and well) by offending other men (at least in his thoughts) and by shooting pellets of petty malice at them? Most people are too dishonest, and a few men are too good, to know anything about this pudendum [source of shame]. So they may try to deny that Prosper Merimée is right when he says, “Sachez aussi qu’il n’y a rien de plus commun que de faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire.” [“Know, too, that there is nothing more common than to do evil for the pleasure of doing it.” – Prosper Merimée: Lettres à une inconnue. In 1831 Mérimée started a long correspondence with a young girl Jenny Dacquin, which was published as Lettres à une inconnue (1873) – “Letters to an Unknown Girl.”]
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How appearance becomes being. – Even when in the deepest distress, the actor ultimately cannot cease to think of the impression he and the whole scenic effect is making, even for example at the burial of his own child; he will weep over his own distress and the ways in which it expresses itself, as his own audience. The hypocrite who always plays one and the same role finally ceases to be a hypocrite. Priests, for example, who are usually conscious or unconscious hypocrites when they are young men, finally end by becoming natural, and then they really are priests, with no affectation. Or if the father does not get that far, perhaps the son, using his father’s headway, inherits the habit. If someone wants to seem to be something, stubbornly and for a long time, he eventually finds it hard to be anything else. The profession of almost every man, even the artist, begins with hypocrisy, as he imitates from the outside, copies what is effective. The man who always wears the mask of a friendly countenance eventually has to gain power over benevolent moods without which the expression of friendliness cannot be forced – and eventually then these moods gain power over him, and he is benevolent.
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The point of honesty in deception. – In all great deceivers there occurs a noteworthy process to which they owe their power. In the actual act of deception, among all the preparations, the horror in the voice, expression, gestures, amid the striking scenery, the belief in themselves overcomes them. It is this that speaks so miraculously and convincingly to the onlookers. The founders of religions are distinguished from those other great deceivers by the fact that they do not come out of this condition of self-deception: or, very infrequently, they do have those clearer moments, when doubt overwhelms them; but they usually comfort themselves by foisting these clearer moments off on the evil adversary. Self-deception must be present, so that both kinds of deceivers can have a grand effect. For men will believe something is true, if it is evident that others believe in it firmly.
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Alleged levels of truth. – One common false conclusion is that because someone is truthful and upright toward us he is speaking the truth. Thus the child believes his parents’ judgments, the Christian believes the claims of the church’s founders. Likewise, people do not want to admit that all those things which men have defended with the sacrifice of their lives and happiness in earlier centuries were nothing but errors. Perhaps one calls them levels of truth. Basically, however, one thinks that if someone honestly believed in something and fought for his belief and died it would be too unfair if he had actually been inspired by a mere error. Such an occurrence seems to contradict eternal justice. Therefore the hearts of sensitive men always decree in opposition to their heads that there must be a necessary connection between moral actions and intellectual insights. Unfortunately, it is otherwise, for there is no eternal justice.
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The lie. – Why do men usually tell the truth in daily life? Certainly not because a god has forbidden lying. Rather it is because, first, it is more convenient: for lies demand imagination, dissembling, and memory (which is why Swift says that the man who tells a lie seldom perceives the heavy burden he is assuming: namely, he must invent twenty other lies to make good the first [Nietzsche quotes from Swift’s Humoristische Werke 2, 188 (Stuttgart: 1844)]). Then, it is because it is advantageous in ordinary circumstances to say directly: I want this, I did that, and so on; that is, because the path of obligation and authority is safer than that of cunning.
If a child has been raised in complicated domestic circumstances, however, he will employ the lie naturally, and will always say instinctively that which corresponds to his interests. A feeling for truth, a distaste for lying in and of itself, is alien to him and inaccessible; and so he lies in complete innocence.
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To suspect morality because of belief. – No power can maintain itself if only hypocrites represent it. However many “worldly” elements the Catholic Church may have, its strength rests on those priestly natures, still numerous, who make life deep and difficult for themselves, and whose eye and emaciated body speak of nightly vigils, fasting, fervent prayers, perhaps even flagellation. These men shock others and worry them: what if it were necessary to live like that? – this is the horrible question that the sight of them brings to the tongue. By spreading this doubt they keep reestablishing a pillar of their power. Not even the most freeminded dare to resist so selfless a man with the hard sense for truth, and say: “You who are deceived, do not deceive others.”
Only a difference of insight separates them from this man, by no means a difference of goodness or badness; but if one does not like a thing, one generally tends to treat it unjustly, too. Thus one speaks of the Jesuits’ cunning and their infamous art, but overlooks what self-conquest each single Jesuit imposes upon himself, and how that lighter regimen preached in Jesuit textbooks is certainly not for their own benefit, but rather for the layman’s. Indeed, one might ask if we the enlightened, using their tactics and organization, would be such good instruments, so admirably self-mastering, untiring, and devoted.
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Triumph of knowledge over radical evil. – The man who wants to gain wisdom profits greatly from having thought for a time that man is basically evil and degenerate: this idea is wrong, like its opposite, but for whole periods of time it was predominant and its roots have sunk deep into us and into our world. To understand ourselves we must understand it; but to climb higher, we must then climb over and beyond it. We recognize that there are no sins in the metaphysical sense; but, in the same sense, neither are there any virtues; we recognize that this entire realm of moral ideas is in a continual state of fluctuation, that there are higher and deeper concepts of good and evil, moral and immoral. A man who desires no more from things than to understand them easily makes peace with his soul and will err (or “sin,” as the world calls it) at the most out of ignorance, but hardly out of desire. He will no longer want to condemn and root out his desires; but his single goal, governing him completely, to understand as well as he can at all times, will cool him down and soften all the wildness in his disposition. In addition, he has rid himself of a number of tormenting ideas; he no longer feels anything at the words “pains of hell,” “sinfulness,” “incapacity for the good”: for him they are only the evanescent silhouettes of erroneous thoughts about life and the world.
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Morality as the self-division of man. – A good author whose heart is really in his subject wishes that someone would come and annihilate him by presenting the same subject with greater clarity and resolving all the questions contained in it. The girl in love wishes that she might prove the devoted faithfulness of her love through her lover’s faithlessness. The soldier wishes that he might fall on the battlefield for his victorious fatherland, for in the victory of his fatherland his greatest desire is also victorious. The mother gives the child what she takes from herself: sleep, the best food, in some instances even her health, her wealth.
Are all these really selfless states, however? Are these acts of morality miracles because they are, to use Schopenhauer’s phrase, “impossible and yet real”? Isn’t it clear that, in all these cases, man is loving something of himself, a thought, a longing, an offspring, more than something else of himself; that he is thus dividing up his being and sacrificing one part for the other? Is it something essentially different when a pigheaded man says, “I would rather be shot at once than move an inch to get out of that man’s
The inclination towards something (a wish, a drive, a longing) is present in all the above-mentioned cases; to yield to it, with all its consequences, is in any case not “selfless.” In morality, man treats himself not as an individuum, but as a dividuum. [Terms of Scholastic philosophy: individuum: that which cannot be divided without destroying its essence, dividuum: that which is composite and lacks an individual essence.]
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What one can promise. – One can promise actions, but not feelings, for the latter are involuntary. He who promises to love forever or hate forever or be forever faithful to someone is promising something that is not in his power. He can, however, promise those actions that are usually the consequence of love, hatred, or faithfulness, but that can also spring from other motives: for there are several paths and motives to an action. A promise to love someone forever, then, means, “As long as I love you I will render unto you the actions of love; if I no longer love you, you will continue to receive the same actions from me, if for other motives.” Thus the illusion remains in the minds of one’s fellow men that the love is unchanged and still the same.
One is promising that the semblance of love will endure, then, when without self-deception one vows everlasting love.
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Intellect and morality. – One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one has given. One must have strong powers of imagination to be able to have pity. So closely is morality bound to the quality of the intellect.
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Desire to avenge and vengeance. – To have thoughts of revenge and execute them means to be struck with a violent – but temporary – fever. But to have thoughts of revenge without the strength or courage to execute them means to endure a chronic suffering, a poisoning of body and soul. A morality that notes only the intentions assesses both cases equally; usually the first case is assessed as worse (because of the evil consequences that the act of revenge may produce). Both evaluations are short-sighted.
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The ability to wait. – Being able to wait is so hard that the greatest poets did not disdain to make the inability to wait the theme of their poetry. Thus Shakespeare in his Othello, Sophocles in his Ajax, who, as the oracle suggests, might not have thought his suicide necessary, if only he had been able to let his feeling cool for one day more. He probably would have outfoxed the terrible promptings of his wounded vanity and said to himself: “Who, in my situation, has never once taken a sheep for a warrior? Is that so monstrous? On the contrary, it is something universally human.” Ajax might have consoled himself thus.
Passion will not wait. The tragedy in the lives of great men often lies not in their conflict with the times and the baseness of their fellow men, but rather in their inability to postpone their work for a year or two. They cannot wait.
In every duel, the advising friends have to determine whether the parties involved might be able to wait a while longer. If they cannot, then a duel is reasonable, since each of the parties says to himself: “Either I continue to live, and the other must die at once, or vice versa.” In that case, to wait would be to continue suffering the horrible torture of offended honor in the presence of the offender. And this can be more suffering than life is worth.
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Reveling in revenge. – Crude men who feel themselves insulted tend to assess the degree of insult as high as possible, and talk about the offense in greatly exaggerated language, only so they can revel to their heart’s content in the aroused feelings of hatred and revenge.
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The value of belittling. – Not a few, perhaps the great majority of men, find it necessary, in order to maintain their self-respect and a certain effectiveness in their actions, to lower and belittle the image they form of everyone they know. Since, however, the number of inferior natures is greater, and since it matters a great deal whether they have that effectiveness or lose it –
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Those who flare up. – We must beware of the man who flares up at us as of someone who has once made an attempt upon our life. For that we are still alive is due to his lacking the power to kill. If looks could kill, we would long ago have been done for. It is an act of primitive culture to bring someone to silence by making physical savageness visible, by inciting fear.
In the same way, the cold glance which elegant people use with their servants is a vestige from those castelike distinctions between man and man, an act of primitive antiquity. Women, the guardians of that which is old, have also been more faithful in preserving this cultural remnant.
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Where honesty may lead. – Someone had the unfortunate habit of speaking out from time to time quite honestly about the motives for his actions, motives which were as good and as bad as those of all other men. At first, he gave offense, then he awoke suspicion, and at length he was virtually ostracized and banished. Finally, justice remembered this depraved creature on occasions when it otherwise averted or winked its eye. His want of silence about the universal secret, and his irresponsible inclination to see what no one wants to see – his own self – brought him to prison and an untimely death.
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Punishable, never punished. – Our crime against criminals is that we treat them like scoundrels.
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Sancta simplicitas [holy simplicity] of virtue. – Every virtue has its privileges, one being to deliver its own little bundle of wood to the funeral pyre of a condemned man.
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Morality and success. – It is not only the witnesses of a deed who often measure its moral or immoral nature by its success. No, the author of a deed does so, too. For motives and intentions are seldom sufficiently clear and simple, and sometimes even memory seems to be dimmed by the success of a deed, so that one attributes false motives to his deed, or treats inessential motives as essential. Often it is success that gives to a deed the full, honest lustre of a good conscience; failure lays the shadow of an uneasy conscience upon the most estimable action. This leads to the politician’s well-known practice of thinking: “Just grant me success; with it I will bring all honest souls to my side – and make myself honest in my own sight.”
In a similar way, success can take the place of more substantial arguments. Even now, many educated people think that the victory of Christianity over Greek philosophy is a proof of the greater truth of the former – although in this case it is only that something more crude and violent has triumphed over something more spiritual and delicate. We can determine which of them has the greater truth by noting that the awakening sciences have carried on point for point with the philosophy of Epicurus, but have rejected Christianity point for point.
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Love and justice. – Why do we overestimate love to the disadvantage of justice, saying the nicest things about it, as if it were a far higher essence than justice? Isn’t love obviously more foolish? Of course, but for just that reason so much more pleasant for everyone. Love is foolish, and possesses a rich horn of plenty; from it she dispenses her gifts to everyone, even if he does not deserve them, indeed, even if he does not thank her for them. She is as nonpartisan as rain, which (according to the Bible and to experience) rains not only upon the unjust, but sometimes soaks the just man to the skin, too.
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Executions. – How is it that every execution offends us more than a murder? It is the coldness of the judges, the painful preparations, the understanding that a man is here being used as a means to deter others. For guilt is not being punished, even if there were guilt; guilt lies in the educators, the parents, the environment, in us, not in the murderer – I am talking about the motivating circumstances.
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Hope. – Pandora brought the box with the evils and opened it. It was the gods’ gift to man, on the outside a beautiful, enticing gift, called the “box of good fortune.” Then all the evils, those lively, winged beings, flew out of it. Since that time, they roam around and do harm to men by day and night. One single evil had not yet slipped out of the box. As Zeus had wished, Pandora slammed the top down and it remained inside. So now man has the box of good fortune in his house forever and thinks the world of the treasure. It is at his service; he reaches for it when he fancies it. For he does not know that the box which Pandora brought was the box of evils, and he takes the remaining evil for the greatest worldly good – it is hope, for Zeus did not want man to throw his life away, no matter how much the other evils might torment him, but rather to go on letting himself be tormented anew. To that end, he gives man hope. In truth, it is the most evil of evils because it prolongs man’s torment.
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Degree of moral inflammability unknown. – Whether or not our passions reach the point of red heat and guide our whole life depends on whether or not we have been exposed to certain shocking sights or impressions – for example a father falsely executed, killed or tortured; an unfaithful wife; a cruel ambush by an enemy. No one knows how far circumstances, pity, or indignation may drive him; he does not know the degree of his inflammability. Miserable, mean conditions make one miserable; it is usually not the quality of the experiences but rather the quantity that determines the lower and the higher man, in good and in evil.
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The martyr against his will. – In one party, there was a man who was too anxious and cowardly ever to contradict his comrades. They used him for every service; they demanded everything of him, because he was more afraid of the bad opinions of his companions than of death itself. His was a miserable, weak soul. They recognized this and on the basis of those qualities they made him first into a hero and finally into a martyr. Although the cowardly man always said “no” inwardly, he always said “yes” with his lips, even on the scaffold, when he died for the views of his party. Next to him stood one of his old comrades, who tyrannized him so by word and glance that he really did suffer death in the most seemly way, and has since been celebrated as a martyr and a man of great character.
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Everyday rule-of-thumb. – One will seldom go wrong to attribute extreme actions to vanity, moderate ones to habit, and petty ones to fear.
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Misunderstanding about virtue. – The man who has come to know vice in connection with pleasure, like the man who has a pleasure-seeking youth behind him, imagines that virtue must be associated with displeasure. On the other hand, the man who has been greatly plagued by his passions and vices longs to find peace and his soul’s happiness in virtue. Thus it is possible that two virtuous people will not understand each other at all.
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The ascetic. – The ascetic makes a necessity of virtue.
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The honor of the person applied to the cause. – We universally honor acts of love and sacrifice for the sake of one’s neighbor, wherever we find them. In this way we heighten the value of the things loved in that way, or for which sacrifices are made, even though they are in themselves perhaps not worth much. A valiant army convinces us about the cause for which it is fighting.
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Ambition as a surrogate for moral sense. – Any character lacking in ambition must not be without a moral sense. Ambitious people make do without it, and have almost the same success. Thus the sons of humble families with no ambition will usually turn into complete cads very quickly, having once lost their moral sense.
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Vanity enriches. – How poor the human spirit would be without vanity! Instead it is like a warehouse, replete and forever replenishing its stock. It lures customers of every kind; they can find almost everything, have everything, assuming that they bring the right kind of coin (admiration) with them.
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Old age and death. – Disregarding the demands made by religion one might well ask: why should it be more laudable for an old man who senses the decline of his powers to await his slow exhaustion and dissolution than in full consciousness to set himself a limit? Suicide is in this case a wholly natural obvious action, which as a victory for reason ought fairly to awaken reverence: and did awaken it in those ages when the heads of Greek philosophy and the most upright Roman patriots were accustomed to die by suicide. Conversely, the compulsion to prolong life from day to day, anxiously consulting doctors and accepting the most painful, humiliating conditions, without the strength to come nearer the actual goal of one’s life: this is far less worthy of respect. Religions provide abundant excuses to escape the need to kill oneself: this is how they insinuate themselves with those who are in love with life.
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Errors of the sufferer and the doer. – When a rich man takes a possession from a poor one (for example, a prince robs a plebian of his beloved) an error arises in the poor man: he thinks the rich man must be utterly infamous to take from him the little that he has. But the rich man does not feel nearly so deeply the value of a single possession because he is used to having many: thus he cannot transport himself into the soul of the poor man and has not committed nearly so great an injustice as the latter supposes. Each has a false idea of the other. The injustice of the mighty, which enrages us most in history, is by no means as great as it appears. Simply the inherited feeling of being a higher being, with higher pretensions, makes one rather cold, and leaves the conscience at peace. Indeed, none of us feels anything like injustice when there is a great difference between ourselves and some other being, and we kill a gnat, for example, without any twinge of conscience. So it is no sign of wickedness in Xerxes (whom even all the Greeks portray as exceptionally noble) when he takes a son from his father and has him cut to pieces, because the father had expressed an anxious and doubtful distrust of their entire campaign. In this case the individual man is eliminated like an unpleasant insect; he stands too low to be allowed to keep on arousing bothersome feelings in a world ruler. Indeed, no cruel man is cruel to the extent that the mistreated man believes. The idea of pain is not the same as the suffering of it. It is the same with an unjust judge, with a journalist who misleads public opinion by little dishonesties. In each of these cases, cause and effect are experienced in quite different categories of thought and feeling; nevertheless, it is automatically assumed that the perpetrator and sufferer think and feel the same, and the guilt of the one is therefore measured by the pain of the other.
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The skin of the soul. – Just as the bones, flesh, intestines, and blood vessels are enclosed by skin, which makes the sight of a man bearable, so the stirrings and passions of the soul are covered up by vanity: it is the skin of the soul.
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The sleep of virtue. – When virtue has slept, she will get up more refreshed.
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Refinement of shame. – * *Men are not ashamed to think something dirty, but they are ashamed when they imagine that others might believe them capable of these dirty thoughts.
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Malice is rare. – Most men are much too concerned with themselves to be malicious.
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The index of the scales. – We praise or blame according to whether the one or the other offers a greater opportunity for our power of judgement to shine out.
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Luke 18:14, improved. [Luke 18, 14: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.] – He who humbleth himself wants to be exalted.
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Prevention of suicide. – There is a justice according to which we take a man’s life, but no justice according to which we take his death: that is nothing but cruelty.
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Vanity. – We care about the good opinion of others first because it is profitable, and then because we want to give others joy (children want to give joy to their parents, pupils to their teachers, men of good will to all other men). Only when someone holds the good opinion of others to be .important without regard to his interests or his wish to give joy, do we speak of vanity. In this case, the man wants to give joy to himself, but at the expense of his fellow men, in that he either misleads them to a false opinion about himself or aims at a degree of “good opinion” that would have to cause them all pain (by arousing their envy). Usually the individual wants to confirm the opinion he has of himself through the opinion of others and strengthen it in his own eyes; but the mighty habituation to authority (which is as old as man) also leads many to base their own belief in themselves upon authority, to accept it only from the hand of others. They trust other people’s powers of judgment more than their own.
In the vain man, interest in himself, his wish to please himself, reaches such a peak that he misleads others to assess him wrongly, to overvalue him greatly, and then he adheres to their authority; that is, he brings about the error and then believes in it.
One must admit, then, that vain men want to please not only others, but also themselves, and that they go so far as to neglect their own interests thereby; for they are often concerned to make their fellow men ill-disposed, hostile, envious, and thus destructive toward them, only for the sake of having pleasure in themselves, self-enjoyment.
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Limit of human love. – Any man who has once declared the other man to be a fool, a bad fellow, is annoyed when that man ends by showing that he is not.
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Moralité larmoyante [tearful morality]. – How much pleasure we get from morality! Just think what a river of agreeable tears has flowed at tales of noble, generous actions. This one of life’s delights would vanish away if the belief in complete irresponsibility were to get the upper hand.
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Origin of justice. – Justice (fairness) originates between parties of approximately equal power, as Thucydides correctly grasped (in the terrible colloquy between the Athenian and Melian ambassadors): where there is no clearly recognizable superiority of force and a contest would result in mutual injury producing no decisive outcome the idea arises of coming to an understanding and negotiating over one another’s demands: the characteristic of exchange is the original characteristic of justice. Each satisfies the other in that each gets what he values more than the other. Each man gives the other what he wants, to keep henceforth, and receives in turn that which he wishes. Justice is thus requital and exchange under the presupposition of an approximately equal power position: revenge therefore belongs originally within the domain of justice, it is an exchange. Gratitude likewise.
Justice goes back naturally to the viewpoint of an enlightened self-preservation, thus to the egoism of the reflection: “to what end should I injure myself uselessly and perhaps even then not achieve my goal?”
So much for the origin of justice. Since, in accordance with their intellectual habits, men have forgotten the original purpose of so-called just and fair actions, and especially because children have for millennia been trained to admire and imitate such actions, it has gradually come to appear that a just action is an unegoistic one: but it is on this appearance that the high value accorded it depends; and this high value is, moreover, continually increasing, as all valuations do: for something highly valued is striven for, imitated, multiplied through sacrifice, and grows as the worth of the toil and zeal expended by each individual is added to the worth of the valued thing.
How little moral would the world appear without forgetfulness! A poet could say that God has placed forgetfulness as a doorkeeper on the threshold of the temple of human dignity.
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Of the right of the weaker. – If one party, a city under siege, for example, submits under certain conditions to a greater power, its reciprocal condition is that this first party can destroy itself, burn the city, and thus make the power suffer a great loss. Thus there is a kind of equalization, on the basis of which rights can be established. Preservation is to the enemy’s advantage.
Rights exist between slaves and masters to the same extent, exactly insofar as the possession of his slave is profitable and important to the master. Rights originally extend just as far as one appears valuable, essential, permanent, invincible, and the like, to the other. In this regard even the weaker of the two has rights, though they are more modest. Thus the famous dictum: “unusquisque tantum juris habet, quantum potentia valet” (or, more exactly, “quantum potentia valere creditur”). [Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus, ch. 2, section 8: “each man has as much right as he has power”; “as he is believed to have power.” Quoted by Schopenhauer in Parerga and Paralipomena 2, 258.]
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The three phases of morality until now. – The first sign that an animal has become human is that his behavior is no longer directed to his momentary well-being, but rather to his enduring well-being, that is, that man has thus become attuned to utility and purpose: then for the first time the free rule of reason bursts forth. A still higher state is reached when man acts according to the principle of honor, by means of which he finds his place in society, submitting to commonly held feelings; that raises him high above the phase in which he is guided only by personal usefulness. Now he shows and wants to be shown – respect; that is, he understands his advantage as dependent on his opinion of others and their opinion of him. Finally, at the highest stage of morality until now, he acts according to his own standard of things and men; he himself determines for himself and others what is honorable, what is profitable. He has become the lawgiver of opinions, in accordance with the ever more refined concept of usefulness and honor. Knowledge enables him to prefer what is most useful, that is, general usefulness to personal usefulness, and the respectful recognition of what has common, enduring value to things of momentary value. He lives and acts as a collective-individual.
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Morality of the mature individual. – Until now man has taken the true sign of a moral act to be its impersonal nature; and it has been shown that in the beginning all impersonal acts were praised and distinguished in respect to the common good. Might not a significant transformation of these views be at hand, now when we see with ever greater clarity that precisely in the most personal respect the common good is also greatest; so that now it is precisely the strictly personal action which corresponds to the current concept of morality (as a common profit)? To make a whole person of oneself and keep in mind that person’s greatest good in everything one does – this takes us further than any pitying impulses and actions for the sake of others. To be sure, we all still suffer from too slight a regard for our own personal needs; it has been poorly developed. Let us admit that our mind has instead been forcibly diverted from it and offered in sacrifice to the state, to science, to the needy, as if it were something bad which had to be sacrificed. Now too we wish to work for our fellow men, but only insofar as we find our own highest advantage in this work; no more, no less. It depends only on what ones understands by one’s advantage. The immature, undeveloped, crude individual will also understand it most crudely.
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Custom and what is in accordance with it. – To be moral, to act in accordance with custom, to be ethical means to practice obedience towards a law or tradition established from of old. Whether one submits to it gladly or with difficulty makes no difference; enough that one submits. We call “good” the man who does the moral thing as if by nature, after a long history of inheritance – that is, easily, and gladly, whatever it is (he will, for example, practice revenge when that is considered moral, as in the older Greek culture). He is called good because he is good “for” something. But because, as mores changed, goodwill, pity, and the like were always felt to be “good for” something, useful, it is primarily the man of goodwill, the helpful man, who is called “good.” To be evil is to be “not moral” (immoral), to practice bad habits, go against tradition, however reasonable or stupid it may be. To harm one’s fellow, however, has been felt primarily as injurious in all moral codes of different times, so that when we hear the word “bad” now, we think particularly of voluntary injury to one’s fellow. When men determine between moral and immoral, good and evil, the basic opposition is not “egoism” and “selflessness,” but rather adherence to a tradition or law, and release from it. The origin of the tradition makes no difference, at least concerning good and evil, or an immanent categorical imperative; but is rather above all for the purpose of maintaining a community, a people. Every superstitious custom, originating in a coincidence that is interpreted falsely, forces a tradition that it is moral to follow. To release oneself from it is dangerous, even more injurious for the community than for the individual (because the divinity punishes the whole community for sacrilege and violation of its rights, and the individual only as a part of that community). Now, each tradition grows more venerable the farther its origin lies in the past, the more it is forgotten; the respect paid to the tradition accumulates from generation to generation; finally the origin becomes sacred and awakens awe; and thus the morality of piety is in any case much older than that morality which requires selfless acts.
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Pleasure in custom. – An important type of pleasure, and thus an important source of morality, grows out of habit. One does habitual things more easily, skillfully, gladly; one feels a pleasure at them, knowing from experience that the habit has stood the test and is useful. A morality one can live with has been proved salutary, effective, in contrast to all the as yet unproven new experiments. Accordingly, custom is the union of the pleasant and the useful; in addition, it requires no thought. As soon as man can exercise force, he exercises it to introduce and enforce his mores, for to him they represent proven wisdom. Likewise, a community will force each individual in it to the same mores. Here is the error: because one feels good with one custom, or at least because he lives his life by means of it, this custom is necessary, for he holds it to be the only possibility by which one can feel good; the enjoyment of life seems to grow out of it alone. This idea of habit as a condition of existence is carried right into the smallest details of custom: since lower peoples and cultures have only very slight insight into the real causality, they make sure, with superstitious fear, that everything take the same course; even where a custom is difficult, harsh, burdensome, it is preserved because it seems to be highly useful. They do not know that the same degree of comfort can also exist with other customs and that even higher degrees of comfort can be attained. But they do perceive that all customs, even the harshest, become more pleasant and mild with time, and that even the severest way of life can become a habit and thus a pleasure.
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Pleasure and social instinct. – From his relationship to other men, man gains a new kind of pleasure, in addition to those pleasurable feelings which he gets from himself. In this way he widens significantly the scope of his pleasurable feelings. Perhaps some of these feelings have come down to him from the animals, who visibly feel pleasure when playing with each other, particularly mothers playing with their young. Next one might think of sexual relations, which make virtually every lass seem interesting to every lad (and vice versa) in view of potential pleasure. Pleasurable feeling based on human relations generally makes man better; shared joy, pleasure taken together, heightens this feeling; it gives the individual security, makes him better-natured, dissolves distrust and envy: one feels good oneself and can see the other man feel good in the same way. Analogous expressions of pleasure awaken the fantasy of empathy, the feeling of being alike. Shared sorrows do it, too: the same storms, dangers, enemies. Upon this basis man has built the oldest covenant, whose purpose is to eliminate and resist communally any threatening unpleasure, for the good of each individual. And thus social instinct grows out of pleasure.
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The innocent element in so-called evil acts. – All “evil” acts are motivated by the drive to preservation or, more exactly, by the individual’s intention of procuring pleasure and avoiding displeasure; so motivated, however, they are not evil. “Giving pain in and of itself” does not exist, except in the brain of philosophers, nor does “giving pleasure in and of itself” (pity, in the Schopenhauerian sense). In conditions preceding organized states, we kill any being, be it ape or man, that wants to take a fruit off a tree before we do, just when we are hungry and running up to the tree. We would treat the animal the same way today, if we were hiking through inhospitable territory.
Those evil actions which outrage us most today are based on the error that that man who harms us has free will, that is, that he had the choice not to do this bad thing to us. This belief in his choice arouses hatred, thirst for revenge, spite, the whole deterioration of our imagination; whereas we get much less angry at an animal because we consider it irresponsible. To do harm not out of a drive for preservation, but for requital – that is the result of an erroneous judgment, and is therefore likewise innocent. The individual can, in conditions preceding the organized state, treat others harshly and cruelly to intimidate them, to secure his existence through such intimidating demonstrations of his power. This is how the brutal, powerful man acts, the original founder of a state, who subjects to himself those who are weaker. He has the right to do it, just as the state now takes the right. Or rather, there is no right that can prevent it. The ground for all morality can only be prepared when a greater individual or collective-individual, as, for example, society or the state, subjects the individuals in it, that is, when it draws them out of their isolatedness and integrates them into a union. Force precedes morality; indeed, for a time morality itself is force, to which others acquiesce to avoid unpleasure. Later it becomes custom, and still later free obedience, and finally almost instinct: then it is coupled to pleasure, like all habitual and natural things, and is now called virtue.
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Shame. – Shame exists wherever there is a “mysterium”; this is a religious concept that was widely prevalent in the older period of human culture. Everywhere there were circumscribed areas, to which divine right forbade entrance, except under certain conditions: at first these were spatial areas, in that certain places were not to be trodden upon by the foot of the unconsecrated, who would feel horror and fear in their vicinity. This feeling was frequently carried over to other relationships, to sexual relationships, for example, which were to he removed from the eyes of youth (for its own good), as a privilege and adytum [innermost chamber of a temple, where oracles are delivered] of maturity. Many gods were thought to be active in protecting and furthering the observance of these relationships, watching over them as guardians in the nuptial chamber. (This is why this chamber is called the harem, “sanctuary,” in Turkish, which is the same word commonly used for the vestibules of mosques.) Likewise kingship, as a center radiating power and splendor, is to the humble subject a mysterium full of secrecy and shame; it has many aftereffects, which can still be felt in peoples who are otherwise in no way ashamed. In the same way, that whole world of inner states, the so-called “soul,” is still a mysterium to all nonphilosophers since from time immemorial it was thought worthy of divine origin, divine intercourse: thus it is a sacred mystery and awakens shame.
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Judge not. – When we consider earlier periods, we must be careful not to fall into unjust abuse. The injustice of slavery, the cruelty in subjugating persons and peoples, cannot be measured by our standards. For the instinct for justice was not so widely developed then. Who has the right to reproach Calvin of Geneva for burning Dr. Serveto? [Miguel Serveto (1511-53): Spanish doctor and theologian. Calvin allegedly denounced him to the Inquisition as a unitarian; he was burned in Geneva.] His was a consistent act, flowing out of his convictions, and the Inquisition likewise had its reasons; it is just that the views dominant then were wrong and resulted in a consistency that we find harsh, because we now find those views so alien. Besides, what is the burning of one man compared to the eternal pains of hell for nearly everyone! And yet this much more terrible idea used to dominate the whole world without doing any essential damage to the idea of a god. In our own time, we treat political heretics harshly and cruelly, but because we have learned to believe in the necessity of the state we are not as sensitive to this cruelty as we are to that cruelty whose justification vie reject. Cruelty to animals, by children and Italians, stems from ignorance; namely, in the interests of its teachings, the church has placed the animal too far beneath man.
Likewise, in history much that is frightful and inhuman, which one would almost like not to believe, is mitigated by the observation that the commander and the executor are different people: the former does not witness his cruelty and therefore has no strong impression of it in his imagination; the latter is obeying a superior and feels no responsibility. Because of a lack of imagination, most princes and military leaders can easily appear to be harsh and cruel, without being so.
Egoism is not evil, for the idea of one’s “neighbor” (the word has a Christian origin and does not reflect the truth) is very weak in us; and we feel toward him almost as free and irresponsible as toward plants and stones. That the other suffers must be learned; and it can never be learned completely.
102
“Man’s actions are always good.” – We do not accuse nature of immorality when it sends us a thunderstorm and makes us wet: why do we call the harmful man immoral? Because in the first case, we assume necessity, and in the second a voluntarily governing free will. But this distinction is in error. Furthermore, even intentional injury is not called immoral in all circumstances: without hesitating, we intentionally kill a gnat, for example, simply because we do not like its buzz; we intentionally punish the criminal and do him harm, to protect ourselves and society. In the first case it is the individual who does harm intentionally, for self-preservation or simply to avoid discomfort; in the second case the state does the harm. All morality allows the intentional infliction of harm for self-defense; that is, when it is a matter of self-preservation! But these two points of view suffice to explain all evil acts which men practice against other men; man wants to get pleasure or resist unpleasure; in some sense it is always a matter of self-preservation. Socrates and Plato are right: whatever man does, he always acts for the good; that is, in a way that seems to him good (useful) according to the degree of his intellect, the prevailing measure of his rationality.
103
Harmlessness of malice. – Malice does not aim at the suffering of the other in and of itself, but rather at our own enjoyment, for example, a feeling of revenge or a strong nervous excitement.
Every instance of teasing shows that it gives us pleasure to release our power on the other person and experience an enjoyable feeling of superiority. Is the immoral thing about it, then, to have pleasure on the basis of other people’s displeasure? Is Schadenfreude devilish, as Schopenhauer says ["Schadenfreude”: pleasure in another’s suffering. – Schopenhauer: The Two Main Problems of Ethics, 200.225; Parerga and Paralipomena 2, 231.]? Now, in nature, we take pleasure in breaking up twigs, loosening stones, fighting with wild animals, in order to gain awareness of our own strength. Is the knowledge, then, that another person is suffering because of us supposed to make immoral the same thing about which we otherwise feel no responsibility? But if one did not have this knowledge, one would not have that pleasure in one’s own superiority, which can reveal itself only in the suffering of the other, in teasing, for example. All joy in oneself is neither good nor bad; where should the determination come from that to have pleasure in oneself one may not cause displeasure in others? Solely from the point of view of utility, that is, from consideration of the consequences, of possible displeasure, when the injured party or the state representing him leads us to expect requital and revenge; this alone can have been the original basis for denying oneself these actions.
Pity does not aim at the pleasure of others any more than malice (as we said above) aims at the pain of others, per se. For in pity at least two (maybe many more) elements of personal pleasure are contained, and it is to that extent self-enjoyment: first of all, it is the pleasure of the emotion (the kind of pity we find in tragedy) and second, when it drives us to act, it is the pleasure of our satisfaction in the exercise of power. If, in addition, a suffering person is very close to us, we reduce our own suffering by our acts of pity.
Aside from a few philosophers, men have always placed pity rather low in the hierarchy of moral feelings – and rightly so.
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Self-defense. – If we accept self-defense as moral, then we must also accept nearly all expressions of so-called immoral egoism; we inflict harm, rob or kill, to preserve or protect ourselves, to prevent personal disaster; where cunning and dissimulation are the correct means of self-preservation, we lie. To do injury intentionally, when it is a matter of our existence or security (preservation of our well-being) is conceded to be moral; the state itself injures from this point of view when it imposes punishment. Of course, there can be no immorality in unintentional injury; there coincidence governs. Can there be a kind of intentional injury where it is not a matter of our existence, the preservation of our well-being? Can there be an injury out of pure malice, in cruelty, for example? If one does not know how painful an action is, it cannot be malicious; thus the child is not malicious or evil to an animal: he examines and destroys it like a toy. But do we ever completely know how painful an action is to the other person? As far as our nervous system extends, we protect ourselves from pain; if it extended further, right into our fellow men, we would not do harm to anyone (except in such cases where we do it to ourselves, that is, where we cut ourselves in order to cure ourselves, exert and strain ourselves to be healthy). We conclude by analogy that something hurts another, and through our memory and power of imagination we ourselves can feel ill at such a thought. But what difference remains between a toothache and the ache (pity) evoked by the sight of a toothache? That is, when we injure out of so-called malice, the degree of pain produced is in any case unknown to us; but in that we feel pleasure in the action (feeling of our own power, our own strong excitement) the action takes place to preserve the well-being of the individual and thus falls within a point of view similar to that of self-defense or a white lie. No life without pleasure; the struggle for pleasure is the struggle for life. Whether the individual fights this battle in ways such that men call him good or such that they call him evil is determined by the measure and makeup of his intellect.
105
A rewarding justice. – The man who has fully understood the theory of complete irresponsibility can no longer include the socalled justice that punishes and rewards within the concept of justice, if that consists in giving each his due. For the man who is punished does not deserve the punishment: he is only being used as the means to frighten others away from certain future actions; likewise, the man who is rewarded does not deserve this reward; he could not act other than as he did. Thus a reward means only an encouragement, for him and others, to provide a motive for subsequent actions: praise is shouted to the runner on the track not to the one who has reached the finish line. Neither punishment nor reward are due to anyone as his; they are given to him because it is useful, without his justly having any claims on them. One must say, “The wise man rewards not because men have acted rightly,” just as it was said, “The wise man punishes not because men have acted badly, but so they will not act badly.” If we were to dispense with punishment and reward, we would lose the strongest motives driving men away from certain actions and toward other actions; the advantage of man requires that they continue; and in that punishment and reward, blame and praise affect vanity most acutely, the same advantage also requires that vanity continue.
106
At the waterfall. – When we see a waterfall, we think we see freedom of will and choice in the innumerable turnings, windings, breakings of the waves; but everything is necessary; each movement can be calculated mathematically. Thus it is with human actions; if one were omniscient, one would be able to calculate each individual action in advance, each step in the progress of knowledge, each error, each act of malice. To be sure, the acting man is caught in his illusion of volition; if the wheel of the world were to stand still for a moment and an omniscient, calculating mind were there to take advantage of this interruption, he would be able to tell into the farthest future of each being and describe every rut that wheel will roll upon. The acting man’s delusion about himself, his assumption that free will exists, is also part of the calculable mechanism.
107
Unaccountability and innocence. – The complete unaccountability of man for his actions and his nature is the bitterest draught the man of knowledge has to swallow if he has been accustomed to seeing in accountability and duty the patent of his humanity. All his judgments, distinctions, dislikes have thereby become worthless and wrong: the deepest feeling he had offered a victim or a hero was misdirected; he may no longer praise, no longer blame, for it is nonsensical to praise and blame nature and necessity. Just as he loves a good work of art, but does not praise it, because it can do nothing about itself, just as he regards a plant, so he must regard the actions of men and his own actions. He can admire their strength, beauty, abundance, but he may not find any earned merit in them: chemical processes, and the clash of elements, the agony of the sick man who yearns for recovery, these have no more earned merit than do those inner struggles and crises in which a man is torn back and forth by various motives until he finally decides for the most powerful – as is said (in truth until the most powerful motive decides about us). But all these motives, whatever great names we give them, have grown out of the same roots which are thought to hold the evil poisons. Between good and evil actions there is no difference in type; at most, a difference in degree. Good actions are sublimated evil actions; evil actions are good actions become coarse and stupid. The individual’s only demand, for self-enjoyment (along with the fear of losing it), is satisfied in all circumstances: man may act as he can, that is, as he must, whether in deeds of vanity, revenge, pleasure, usefulness, malice, cunning, or in deeds of sacrifice, pity, knowledge. His powers of judgment determine where a man will let this demand for self-enjoyment take him. In each society, in each individual, a hierarchy of the good is always present, by which man determines his own actions and judges other people’s actions. But this standard is continually in flux; many actions are called evil, and are only stupid, because the degree of intelligence which chose them was very low. Indeed, in a certain sense all actions are stupid even now, for the highest degree of human intelligence which can now be attained will surely be surpassed. And then, in hindsight, all our behavior and judgments will appear as inadequate and rash as the behavior and judgments of backward savage tribes now seem to us inadequate and rash.
To understand all this can cause great pain, but afterwards there is consolation. These pains are birth pangs. The butterfly wants to break through his cocoon; he tears at it, he rends it: then he is blinded and confused by the unknown light, the realm of freedom. Men who are capable of that suffering (how few they will be!) will make the first attempt to see if mankind can transform itself from a moral into a knowing mankind. In those individuals, the sun of a new gospel is casting its first ray onto the highest mountaintop of the soul; the fog is condensing more thickly than ever, and the brightest light and cloudiest dusk lie next to each other. Everything is necessity: this is the new knowledge, and this knowledge itself is necessity. Everything is innocence: and knowledge is the way to insight into this innocence. If pleasure, egoism, vanity are necessary for the generation of moral phenomena and their greatest flower, the sense for true and just knowledge; if error and confusion of imagination were the only means by which mankind could raise itself gradually to this degree of self-illumination and self-redemption – who could scorn those means? Who could be sad when he perceives the goal to which those paths lead? Everything in the sphere of morality has evolved; changeable, fluctuating, everything is fluid, it is true: but everything is also streaming onward – to one goal. Even if the inherited habit of erroneous esteeming, loving, hating continues to govern us, it will grow weaker under the influence of growing knowledge: a new habit, that of understanding, non-loving, nonhating, surveying is gradually being implanted in us on the same ground, and in thousands of years will be powerful enough perhaps to give mankind the strength to produce wise, innocent (conscious of their innocence) men as regularly as it now produces unwise, unfair men, conscious of their guilt – these men are the necessary first stage, but not the opposite of those to come.
Third Division - The Religious Life.
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The twofold struggle against misfortune. – When a misfortune strikes us, we can overcome it either by removing its cause or else by changing the effect it has on our feelings, that is, by reinterpreting the misfortune as a good, whose benefit may only later become clear. Religion and art (as well as metaphysical philosophy) strive to effect a change in our feeling, in part by changing the way we judge experiences (for example, with the aid of the tenet, “Whom the Lord loves, he chastens”) and in part by awakening a pleasure in pain, in emotion generally (which is where tragic art has its starting point). The more a person tends to reinterpret and justify, the less will he confront the causes of the misfortune and eliminate them; a momentary palliation and narcotization (as used, for example, for a toothache) is also enough for him in more serious suffering. The more the rule of religions and all narcotic arts decreases, the more squarely do men confront the real elimination of the misfortune – of course, this is bad for the tragic poets (there being less and less material for tragedy, because the realm of inexorable, invincible fate grows ever smaller) but it is even worse for the priests (for until now they fed on the narcotization of human misfortunes).
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Sorrow is knowledge. – How gladly one would exchange the false claims of priests-that there is a God who demands the Good from us, who is guardian and witness of each act, each moment, each thought, who loves us and wants the best for us in every misfortune – how gladly one would exchange these claims for truths which would be just as salutary, calming, and soothing as those errors! But there are no such truths; at the most, philosophy can oppose those errors with other metaphysical fictions (basically also untruths). But the tragic thing is that we can no longer believe those dogmas of religion and metaphysics, once we have the rigorous method of truth in our hearts and heads, and yet on the other hand, the development of mankind has made us so delicate, sensitive, and ailing that we need the most potent kind of cures and comforts – hence arises the danger that man might bleed to death from the truth he has recognized. Byron expressed this in his immortal lines:
Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most
must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth,
the tree of knowledge is not that of life.
[Byron: Manfred, Act I, Scene I.]
There is no better cure for such cares than to conjure up the festive frivolity of Horace, at least for the worst hours and eclipses of the soul, and with him to say to yourself:
**quid aeternis minorem
consiliis animum fatigas?
cur non sub alta vel platano vel hac
pinu jacentes – ***
*[why torment your mind, which is unequal to it, with counsel for eternity; why not come and lie under this tall plane tree, or this pine…? (Horace: Odes II, 11)]
Of course, any degree of frivolity or melancholy is better than a romantic regression and desertion, an approach to Christianity in any form; for one can simply not engage in Christianity, given the present state of knowledge, without hopelessly soiling his intellectual conscience and abandoning it to himself and to others. Those pains may be distressing enough, but without pains one cannot become a leader and educator of mankind; and woe to him who would try to lead and no longer had that clean conscience!
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Truth in religion. – During the Enlightenment, people did not do justice to the significance of religion, there is no doubt of that. But it is just as certain that in the subsequent opposition to the Enlightenment they went a good piece beyond justice, by treating religions with love or even infatuation, and adjudging them to have, for example, a deeper, even the very deepest understanding of the world. It was for science to divest this understanding of its dogmatic trappings in order to possess the “truth” in unmythical form. Thus all opponents of the Enlightenment claimed that the religions stated sensu allegorico [with the sense of an allegorical representation], so the masses would understand, that age-old wisdom which is wisdom in and of itself, inasmuch as all true modern science has always led to it instead of away from it. In this way, a harmony, even identity of views, would obtain between mankind’s oldest sages and all later ones, and the progress of knowledge (should one wish to speak of such a thing) would refer not to its substance but rather to its communication. This whole view of religion and science is erroneous through and through; and no one would dare to profess it still today, had not Schopenhauer used his eloquence to take it under his protection, this eloquence which rings out so loudly, and yet reaches its listeners only after a generation. As surely as one can gain much for the understanding of Christianity and other religions from Schopenhauer’s religious and moral interpretation of men and the world, so surely was he in error about the value of religion with respect to knowledge. In this regard he himself was simply the too tractable student of the scientific teachers of his time, who all cherished romanticism and had renounced the spirit of the Enlightenment; born into our present age, he would have found it impossible to speak of the **sensus allegoricus *of religion; rather, he would have done honor to truth, as was his wont, with the words: Never, neither indirectly nor directly, neither as a dogma nor as an allegory, has religion yet held any truth. [Schopenhauer: Parerga and Paralipomena, 2, “On Religion.”] For out of fear and need each religion is born, creeping into existence on the byways of reason. Perhaps at one time, when endangered by science, it included some fabricated philosophical theory in its system, so that it could be found there later; but this is a theologian’s trick from the period when a religion is already doubting itself. These tricks of theology, which of course were practiced very early on in Christianity, the religion of a scholarly age, steeped in philosophy, led to that superstition about a sensus allegoricus. Even more, they led to the habit of philosophers (particularly those half-men, the poetic philosophers and the philosophizing artists) of treating all feelings which they found in themselves as if they were essential to man in general, and thus to the habit of granting their own religious feelings a significant influence on the conceptual structure of their systems. Because philosophers often philosophized in traditional religious habits, or at least under the old inherited power of that “metaphysical need,” they arrived at dogmas that in fact greatly resembled Jewish or Christian or Indian religious doctrines, resembled them in the way children tend to resemble their mothers. In this case, however, the fathers weren’t sure of the maternity (as can happen) but rather, in the innocence of their amazement, told tales of a family resemblance of all religions and sciences. In reality there is no relationship nor friendship nor even enmity between religion and real science: they live on different stars. Any philosophy that allows a religious comet to trail off ablaze into the darkness of its last prospects makes suspicious everything about itself that it presents as science; presumably all this too is religion, although decked out as science. – Incidentally, if all peoples were to agree about certain religious things, the existence of a god for example (which, by the way, is not so in this case), then this would only be a counterargument to those things that were maintained, the existence of a god for example: the consensus gentium and *hominum [consensus of all mankind] in general can in fairness only pertain to foolishness. Conversely there is no consensus omnium sapientium [consensus of all the sages] regarding a single thing, with the exception spoken of in Goethe’s lines:
Alle die Weisesten aller der Zeiten
Lächeln und winken und stimmen mit ein:
Töricht, auf Bessrung der Toren zu harren!
Kinder der Klugheit, o habet die Narren
Eben zum Narren auch, wie sich’s gehört!
[All the wisest of all time
Smile, nod and agree with one thing:
It is foolish to wait for fools to grow wise!
Children of cleverness, regard fools
Always as fools, as they deserve!
– Goethe: “Kophtisches Lied,” lines 3-7.]
Saying it without rhythm or rhyme, and applying it to our case: it is the consensus sapientium that any consensus gentium is foolishness.
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Origin of the religious cult. – If we imagine ourselves back in the times when religious life was in fullest flower, we find a fundamental conviction which we no longer share, and because of which we see the gates to the religious life closed to us once and for all: it concerns nature and our interaction with it. People in those times do not yet know anything of natural laws; neither for the earth nor for the heavens is there a “must”: a season, the sunshine; the rain can come, or also fail to appear. There is no concept whatsoever of natural causality. When one rows, it is not the rowing that moves the ship; rather rowing is simply a magical ceremony by which one compels a demon to move it. All illnesses, death itself, are the result of magical influences. There is never anything natural about becoming ill or dying; the whole idea of a “natural development” is lacking (it first begins to dawn on the older Greeks, that is, in a very late phase of mankind, with the conception of a moira [fate] which reigned over the gods). When someone shoots with bow and arrow, an irrational hand and strength is always at work; if springs suddenly dry up, one thinks first of subterranean demons and their mischief; it has to be the arrow of a god whose invisible influence causes a man to drop suddenly. In India (according to Lubbock [Sir John Lubbock (1834-1913), English historian: On the Origin of Civilization.]), a carpenter makes sacrifices to his hammer, his axe, and his other tools; in the same way does a Brahman handle the pencil with which he writes, a soldier his weapons of battle, a mason his trowel, a worker his plow. In the mind of religious men, all nature is the sum of the actions of conscious and intentioned beings, an enormous complex of arbitrariness. There is nothing outside ourselves about which we are allowed to conclude that it will become thus and so, must be thus and so: we ourselves are what is more or less certain, calculable. Man is the rule, nature is irregularity: in this tenet lies the basic conviction that governs primitive, religiously productive ancient cultures. We present-day men experience precisely the reverse: the richer a man feels inwardly, the more polyphonic he is as a subject, the more powerfully nature’s symmetry affects him. With Goethe, we all recognize in nature the great means of soothing the modern soul; we hear the stroke of the greatest clock with a longing to rest, to become settled and still, as if we could drink this symmetry into ourselves, and thus come finally to an enjoyment of our own selves. Formerly it was the reverse: if we think back to primitive, early tribal states, or if we closely observe present-day savages, we find them most strongly directed by law, by tradition: the individual is almost automatically bound to it, and moves with the uniformity of a pendulum. To him nature – uncomprehended, frightful, mysterious nature – must seem to be the realm of freedom, of choice, of a higher power, a seemingly superhuman level of existence, a god. Now, every individual in those times and conditions feels that his existence, his happiness, that of his family, the state, the success of all enterprises, depends on those arbitrary acts of nature: some natural events must take place at the right time, others must fail to take place. How can one exercise an influence on these terrible unknowns? How can one bind the realm of freedom? The individual wonders and asks himself anxiously: “Is there no means, through tradition and law, to make those powers as governed by rule as you are yourself?” – The thinking of men who believe in magic and miracles is bent on imposing a law on nature; and in short, the religious cult is the result of this thinking. The problem that those men set themselves is most closely related to this one: how can the weaker tribe nevertheless dictate laws to the stronger, direct it, and guide its actions (as they relate to the weaker tribe)? At first one will be reminded of the most harmless kind of pressure, that pressure one exerts when one has courted someone’s affections. By entreaties and prayers, by submissiveness, by committing oneself to regular tributes and gifts, by flattering glorifications, it is also possible to exert pressure on the forces of nature, by making them favorably inclined: love binds and is bound. Then one can seal contracts, by which one commits oneself reciprocally to certain behavior, puts up pledges and exchanges vows. But much more important is a kind of more powerful pressure through magic. Just as man knows how to use the help of a magician to hurt a stronger enemy and keep him afraid, just as love spells are effective from afar, so the weaker man believes he can also direct the more powerful spirits of nature. The main means of all magic is to gain power over something that belongs to the other, hair, nails, some food from his table, even his picture or his name. With such apparatus one can then proceed to do magic, for the basic assumption is that there is something physical to everything spiritual; with its help one can bind the spirit, harm it, destroy it. The physical furnishes the ways and means by which to catch the spiritual. Just as man now directs man, so he also directs some one spirit of nature; for the spirit too has its physical aspect, by which it can be caught. The tree and, compared with it, the seed from which it sprang: this puzzling juxtaposition seems to prove that one and the same spirit is embedded in both forms, now little, now big. A stone that starts to roll suddenly is the body in which a spirit acts; if there is a block of stone lying on a lonely heath, it seems impossible that human strength should have brought it there; thus the stone must have moved itself there, that is, it must be housing a spirit. Everything that has a body is accessible to magic, including spirits of nature. If a god is virtually bound to his image, then one can also exert direct pressure against him (by refusing him sacrificial nourishment, by flagellation, enchainment and the like). To exact the wanting favor of their god, who has left them in the lurch, the humble people in China entwine his image with rope, tear it down, drag it in the streets through heaps of mud and dung: “You dog of a spirit,” they say, “we let you dwell in a splendid temple, we covered you prettily in gold, fed you well, sacrificed to you, and yet you are so ungrateful.” In Catholic lands, similar violent measures have also been taken during this century against images of saints or of the Virgin Mary when during plagues or droughts, for example, they did not want to do their duty. – All these magical relationships to nature have called into being countless ceremonies; finally when the confusion of them has grown too great, one tries to order them, systematize them, so that one thinks he is guaranteeing the favorable course of the whole process of nature, particularly the great cycle of the seasons, by a parallel course of a system of proceedings. The meaning of the religious cult is to direct nature, and cast a spell on her to human advantage, that is, to impose a lawfulness on her, which she does not have at the start; whereas in present times, man wishes to understand the lawfulness of nature in order to submit to it. In short, the religious cult is based on ideas of magic between man and man; and the magician is older than the priest. But it is likewise based on other and more noble ideas; it presumes a sympathetic relationship of man to man, the existence of goodwill, gratitude, hearing supplicants, of contracts between enemies, of bestowal of pledges, of demand for protection of property. Even in very primitive stages of culture, man does not confront nature as a powerless slave, he is not necessarily her involuntary servant: in the Greek stage of religion, especially in the relationship to the Olympian gods, there is the thought of a coexistence of two castes, one nobler and more powerful, the other less noble; but according to their origin both belong together somehow and are of one kind; they need not be ashamed before one another. That is the noble element in Greek religiosity.
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On viewing certain ancient sacrificial utensils. – The combination of farce, even obscenity, with religious feeling, shows us how some feelings are disappearing: the sensibility that this is a possible mixture is vanishing; we understand only historically that it once existed, in festivals of Demeter and Dionysos, at Christian passion plays and mystery plays. But even we are still familiar with the sublime in league with the burlesque, for example, the sentimental blended with the ludicrous – and this a later age will perhaps no longer understand.
113
Christianity and antiquity. – When we hear the ancient bells growling on a Sunday morning we ask ourselves: Is it really possible! This, for a Jew, crucified 2000 years ago, who said he was God’s son? The proof of such a claim is lacking. Certainly the Christian religion is an antiquity projected into our times from remote prehistory; and the fact that the claim is believed – whereas one is otherwise so strict in examining pretensions – is perhaps the most ancient piece of this heritage. A god who begets children with a mortal woman; a sage who bids men work no more, have no more courts, but look for the signs of the impending end of the world; a justice that accepts the innocent as a vicarious sacrifice; someone who orders his disciples to drink his blood; prayers for miraculous interventions; sins perpetrated against a god, atoned for by a god; fear of a beyond to which death is the portal; the form of the cross as a symbol in a time that no longer knows the function and ignominy of the cross – how ghoulishly all this touches us, as if from the tomb of a primeval past! Can one believe that such things are still believed?
114
What is un-Hellenic in Christianity. – The Greeks did not see the Homeric gods above them as masters and themselves below them as servants, as did the Jews. They saw, as it were, only the reflection of the most successful specimens of their own caste, that is, an ideal, not a contrast to their own nature. They felt related to them, there was a reciprocal interest, a kind of symmachia. Man thinks of himself as noble when he gives himself such gods, and puts himself into a relationship similar to that of the lesser nobility to the higher. Whereas the Italic peoples have a regular peasant religion, with continual fearfulness about evil and capricious powers and tormentors. Where the Olympian gods retreated, there Greek life too grew gloomier and more fearful. – Christianity, on the other hand, crushed and shattered man completely, and submerged him as if in deep mire. Then, all at once, into his feeling of complete confusion, it allowed the light of divine compassion to shine, so that the surprised man, stunned by mercy, let out a cry of rapture, and thought for a moment that he carried all of heaven within him. All psychological inventions of Christianity work toward this sick excess of feeling, toward the deep corruption of head and heart necessary for it. Christianity wants to destroy, shatter, stun, intoxicate: there is only one thing it does not want: moderation, and for this reason, it is in its deepest meaning barbaric, Asiatic, ignoble, un-Hellenic.
115
Being religious to one’s advantage. – There are sober and efficient men on whom religion is embroidered like the hem of a higher humanity. These men do well to remain religious: it beautifies them. – All men who have no expertise with any weapon (mouth and pen counting as weapons) become servile: for such men, religion is very useful, for here servility takes on the appearance of a Christian virtue and is surprisingly beautified. – People who think their daily lives too empty and monotonous easily become religious: this is understandable and forgivable; however, they have no right to demand religiosity from those whose daily life does not pass in emptiness and monotony.
116
The everyday Christian. – If the Christian dogmas of a revengeful God universal sinfulness election by divine grace and the danger of eternal damnation were true, it would be a sign of weak-mindedness and lack of character not to become a priest, apostle or hermit and, in fear and trembling, to work solely on one’s own salvation; it would be senseless to lose sight of ones eternal advantage for the sake of temporal comfort. If we may assume that these things are at any rate believed true, then the everyday Christian cuts a miserable figure; he is a man who really cannot count to three, and who precisely on account of his spiritual imbecility does not deserve to be punished so harshly as Christianity promises to punish him.
117
On the shrewdness of Christianity. – It is a trick of Christianity to teach the utter worthlessness, sinfulness, and despicableness of man in general so loudly that disdain for one’s fellow men becomes impossible. “Let him sin as he will, he is essentially no different from me; I am the one who is in all ways unworthy and despicable,” the Christian tells himself. But this feeling too has lost its sharpest sting because the Christian does not believe in his individual despicableness: he is wicked simply because he is a man, and calms himself a bit with the tenet: we are all of one kind.
118
Change of cast. – As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.
119
Destiny of Christianity. – Christianity came into existence in order to lighten the heart; but now it has first to burden the heart so as afterwards to be able to lighten it. Consequently it shall perish.
120
Proof by pleasure. – An agreeable opinion is accepted as true: this is the proof by pleasure (or, as the church says, the proof by strength), that all religions are so proud of, whereas they ought to be ashamed. If the belief did not make us happy, it would not be believed: how little must it then be worth!
121
Dangerous game. – Whoever allows room in himself again for religious feeling these days must also allow it to grow: he cannot do otherwise. Then his nature gradually changes: it favors that which is dependent on or near to the religious element; the whole range of his judgment and feeling is befogged, overcast with religious shadows. Feeling cannot stand still: be on your guard!
122
Blind pupils. – As long as a man knows very well the strength and weaknesses of his teaching, his art, his religion, its power is still slight. The pupil and apostle who, blinded by the authority of the master and by the piety he feels toward him, pays no attention to the weaknesses of a teaching, a religion, and soon usually has for that reason more power than the master. The influence of a man has never yet grown great without his blind pupils. To help a perception to achieve victory often means merely to unite it with stupidity so intimately that the weight of the latter also enforces the victory of the former.
123
Demolition of churches. – There is not enough religion in the world even to destroy religions.
124
Sinlessness of man. – Once man has grasped “how sin came into the world” (which is to say, through errors of reason, due to which men take each other – and the individual takes himself for much blacker and more wicked than is actually the case), then his whole mood is greatly improved, and men and world seem at times to be in such a halo of harmlessness as to make him utterly contented. Amid nature, man is always the child per se. This child might once dream an oppressive, terrifying dream, but when he opens his eyes, he always finds himself in paradise again.
125
Irreligiosity of artists. – Homer is so at home among his gods, and takes such delight in them as a poet that he surely must have been deeply irreligious. He took what popular belief offered him (a paltry, crude, in part horrible superstition) and dealt as freely as a sculptor with his clay, that is, with the same openness Aeschylus and Aristophanes possessed, and which in more recent times has distinguished the great artists of the Renaissance, as well as Shakespeare and Goethe.
126
Art and strength of false interpretation. – All the visions, horrors, exhaustions and raptures of the saint are familiar states of illness, which, based on deep-rooted religious and psychological errors, he simply interprets otherwise, that is, not as illnesses. – Thus the daemon of Socrates likewise is perhaps a disease of the ear, which he explains in accordance with his prevailing moral thinking, but other than how it would be explained today. It is no different with the madness and ravings of prophets and oracular priests: it is always the degree of knowledge, imagination, ambition, morality in the head and heart of the interpreters that has made so much out of them. One of the greatest effects of men whom we call geniuses and saints is that they exact interpreters who misunderstand them, to the good of mankind.
127
Reverence for madness. – Because it was observed that an excited state would often clear the mind and produce happy ideas, it was thought that through the states of greatest excitement one would partake of the happiest ideas and inspirations. And so the madman was revered as the wise man and oracle giver. This is based on a false conclusion.
128
Promises of science. – Modern science has as its goal the least pain and the longest life possible – that is, a kind of eternal happiness: to be sure, a very modest kind in comparison with the promises of religions.
129
Forbidden generosity. – There is not enough love and goodness in the world for us to be permitted to give any of it away to imaginary things.
130
Continuance of the religious cult in the heart. – The Catholic Church, and before it all the cults of antiquity, commanded the whole range of means by which man is set into unusual moods and torn away from the cold calculation of his advantage, or pure, rational thinking. A church reverberating with deep sounds; muted, regular, restrained invocations of a priestly host that instantaneously transmits its tension to the congregation so that it listens almost fearfully, as if a miracle were in the making; the atmosphere of the architecture that, as the dwelling of a divinity, extends into the indefinite and makes one fear the movings of the divinity in all its dark spaces – who would want to return such goings-on to man, once the assumptions for them are no longer believed? Nevertheless, the results of all that have not been lost: the inner world of sublime, tender, intuitive, deeply contrite, blissfully hopeful moods was begotten in man primarily through the religious cult; what now exists of it in the soul was raised at the time of its sprouting, growing, and flowering.
131
Religious aftereffects. – However much one thinks he has lost the habit of religion, he has not lost it to the degree that he would not enjoy encountering religious feelings and moods without any conceptual content as, for example, in music. And if a philosophy shows us the justification of metaphysical hopes, of a deep peace of the soul to be attained therefrom, and, for example, speaks of the “whole, certain gospel in the glance of Raphael’s Madonna,” [Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Idea I, 486.] then we approach such statements and explanations with an especially warm disposition. Here it is easier for the philosopher to make his proofs; what he wants to give accords with a heart that gladly takes. We notice here how less careful free thinkers actually object only to the dogmas, but know very well the magic of religious feeling; it hurts them to let the latter go, for the sake of the former. – Scientific philosophy has to be very careful about smuggling in errors on the basis of that need (an acquired and, consequently, also transitory need). Even logicians [like Afrikan Spir: Thought and Reality I, 312.] speak of “intuitions” of truth in morality and art (for example, the intuition “that the essence of things is one”), which should be forbidden them. Between painstakingly deduced truths and such “intuited” things there remains the unbridgeable gap that the former are due to the intellect, the latter to need. Hunger does not prove that any food to satisfy it exists, but it wishes the food. “To intuit” does not mean to recognize the existence of a thing to any extent, but rather to hold it to be possible, in that one wishes or fears it. “Intuition” takes us not one step farther into the land of certainty. – We believe instinctively that the religiously tinged sections of a philosophy are better proved than the others. But basically it is the reverse; we simply have the inner wish that it might be so – that is, that what gladdens might be also true. This wish misleads us into buying bad reasons as good ones.
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On the Christian need for redemption. – If we reflect carefully, it ought to be possible to arrive at an explanation for the process in a Christian’s soul that is called the need for redemption, an explanation that is free of mythology, that is, a purely psychological one. Of course, until now psychological explanations of religious states and processes have been in some disrepute, in that a theology that calls itself free has been up to its bootless mischief in this area; for from the start, as the spirit of its founder Schleiermacher [Frederich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), Protestant theologian] allows us to assume, “free theology” was aiming at the preservation of the Christian religion and the continuance of Christian theologists, who were to gain a new anchor, and above all a new occupation, in the psychological analysis of religious “facts.” Undeterred by such predecessors, we venture to present the following interpretation of the phenomenon in question. Man is conscious of certain actions that rank low in the customary hierarachy of actions; in fact, he discovers within himself a tendency to these kinds of actions, a tendency that seems to him almost as unchangeable as his whole nature. How he would like to try his luck in that other category of actions, those that are generally esteemed to be the topmost and highest; how he would like to feel full of a good consciousness, which is said to follow a selfless way of thinking! But unfortunately it does not go beyond this wish: the dissatisfaction about being unable to satisfy the wish is added to all the other kinds of dissatisfaction that his lot in life generally, or the consequences of those actions, termed evil, have aroused in him. Thus he develops a deep discontent and searches for a doctor who might be able to put an end to this discontent and all its causes. – This condition would not be felt so bitterly if man would only compare himself dispassionately to other men; then he would have no reason to be dissatisfied with himself to any special degree; he would only be sharing the common burden of human dissatisfaction and imperfection. But he compares himself to a being who is solely capable of those actions called selfless and who lives in the continual consciousness of a selfless way of thinking: God. Because he is looking into this bright mirror, his own nature appears so clouded, so abnormally distorted. Next, the thought of this other being makes him fearful, in that it hovers in his imagination as a punishing justice; in every possible experience, large or small, he thinks he recognizes its anger, its menace, and he even thinks he has a presentiment of the whiplashes it will deliver as judge and executioner. Who helps him in this danger, which by its prospect of an immeasurable duration of punishment, surpasses in horror all other terrors of the imagination?
133
Before we present the further consequences of this condition, we want to avow that man has arrived at this condition not through his “guilt” and “sin,” but rather through a series of errors of reason, that if his nature seemed dark and hateful to him to that degree, it was the fault of the mirror, and that that mirror was his creation, the very imperfect creation of human imagination and powers of judgment. First, any being who would be capable of purely selfless actions only is more fabulous than the phoenix. It cannot even be imagined clearly because from the start the whole concept of “selfless action,” if carefully examined, evaporates into the air. Never has a man done anything that was only for others, and without any personal motivation. Indeed, how could he do anything that had no reference to himself, that is, with no inner compulsion (which would have to be based on a personal need)? How could the ego act without ego? – A God who conversely is all love, as is occasionally assumed, would not be capable of one single selfless action, which should remind us of a thought of Lichtenberg’s [Quoted from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s Vermischte Schriften [Miscellaneous Writings] (Göttingen: 1867), I, 83.], taken, to be sure, from a more common sphere: “It is impossible for us to feel for others, as the saying goes. We feel only for ourselves. The principle sounds harsh, but it is not, if it is only understood correctly. We love neither father nor mother nor wife nor child, but rather the agreeable feelings that they give us.” Or, as La Rochefoucauld says, “si on croit aimer sa maîtresse pour l’amour d’elle, on est bien trompé.” [“If we believe we love our mistress for love of her we are very much mistaken.” – La Rochefoucauld: Réflexions, sentences et maximes morales, 37, Nr. 374.] For the explanation of why actions of love are evaluated more highly than others, namely because of their usefulness rather than their essence, see the above-mentioned investigations On the Origin of the Moral Sensations. But if a man should want to embody Love, quite like that God, to do everything for others, nothing for himself, it is already impossible from the start, because he has to do a great deal for himself in order to be able to do anything at all for the sake of others. Next, it assumes the other person is egoist enough to accept those sacrifices, that life for his sake, over and over again: so men of love and self-sacrifice have an interest in the continued existence of loveless egoists incapable of self-sacrifice, and the highest morality, in order to endure, would have virtually to compel the existence of immorality (by which, to be sure, it would cancel itself out). – Furthermore, the idea of a God disturbs and humiliates as long as it is believed, but given the present state of comparative ethnology, its origin can no longer be in doubt; and with insight into that origin, the belief disappears. The Christian who compares his nature to God is like Don Quixote, who underestimates his own bravery because he is preoccupied with the miraculous deeds of heroes out of chivalric novels; in both cases, the standard of measure being used belongs to the realm of fable. But if the idea of God disappears, so too does the feeling of “sin” as a transgression against divine precepts, as a stain on a creature consecrated to God. Then what probably remains is that discontent which is very intimately bound up with and related to the fear of punishment by a secular justice, or the fear of men’s disrespect; but discontent from the pangs of conscience, the sharpest sting in the feeling of guilt, has been stopped short when one perceives that through one’s actions one may have transgressed against human tradition, human statutes and regulations, but that one has not yet jeopardized the “eternal salvation of the soul” and its relation to the divinity. If in the end man succeeds in convincing himself philosophically that all actions are unconditionally necessary and completely irresponsible, and if he takes this conviction into his flesh and blood, those vestiges of the pangs of conscience disappear, too.
134
If the Christian has, as we said, come to feel self-contempt through certain errors, through a false, unscientific interpretation of his actions and feelings, he must notice with the greatest astonishment how that condition of contempt, of remorse, of displeasure generally, does not last; how occasionally there are .hours when it is all blown away from his soul and he feels free and courageous again. In truth, pleasure in oneself and contentment with one’s own strength, in league with the inevitable weakening of any great excitation, have gained the victory: man loves himself again; he feels it – but this very love, this new self-esteem, seems unbelievable to him; he can see in it only the wholly undeserved downpouring of a merciful light from above. If he previously thought he saw warnings, threats, punishments, and every kind of sign of divine anger in all occurrences, so now he reads divine goodness into his experiences: one event seems to be loving, another seems to be a helpful hint, a third, and particularly his whole joyful mood, seems to be proof that God is merciful. As previously, in a state of discontent, he interpreted his actions wrongly, so now he misinterprets his experiences. He understands his mood as the consoling effect of a power governing outside himself; the love with which he fundamentally loves himself, appears as divine love; that which he calls mercy and a prelude to redemption is in truth self-pardon, self-redemption.
135
Thus a certain false psychology, a certain kind of fantasy in interpreting motives and experiences, is the necessary prerequisite for becoming a Christian and experiencing the need for redemption. With the insight into this aberration of reason and imagination, one ceases to be a Christian.
136
Of Christian asceticism and holiness. – However much individual thinkers have tried to represent the rare manifestations of morality that tend to be called asceticism and holiness as something miraculous, which to examine in the light of a rational explanation would be almost sacrilege and profanation, so strong, on the other hand, is the temptation to this sacrilege. Throughout history, a powerful impulse of nature has led men to protest generally against those manifestations; science to the extent it is, as we have said, an imitation of nature, permits itself to protest at least against the claim of their inexplicability, even inaccessibility. To be sure, it has not yet been successful; those manifestations are still unexplained, to the great delight of the above-mentioned admirers of the morally miraculous. For in general, the unexplained should be thoroughly inexplicable, the inexplicable thoroughly unnatural, supernatural, miraculous – so goes the demand in the souls of all religious men and metaphysicians (artists, too, if they are also thinkers). Whereas the scientific man sees in this demand the “evil principle.” The general, first probability one arrives at when considering asceticism and holiness is that their nature is complex: for almost everywhere, within both the physical and the moral world, the ostensibly miraculous has been successfully traced back to complicated and multiply-conditioned causes. Let us venture first to isolate certain impulses in the souls of saints and ascetics, and in conclusion to imagine them entwined.
137
There exists a defiance of oneself that includes among its most sublime expressions various forms of asceticism. For some men have such an intense need to exercise their strength and love of power that, lacking other objects or because they have always otherwise failed, it finally occurs to them to tyrannize certain parts of their own being, as if they were sections or stages of their selves. Thus some thinkers will confess to views that clearly do not serve to increase or improve their reputation; some virtually beg to be despised by others, whereas it would be easy for them to retain respect by being silent. Others retract earlier opinions and are not afraid to be called inconsistent thereafter; on the contrary, that is what they try for, behaving like high-spirited horsemen who like their horse best only when it has become wild, skittish, covered with sweat. Thus man climbs on dangerous paths into the highest mountains in order to mock his own fearfulness and his shaking knees; thus the philosopher confesses to views of asceticism, humility and holiness, by which light his own image is most grievously made ugly. This shattering of oneself, this scorn for one’s own nature, this spernere se sperni [“answer contempt with contempt”], which religions have made so much out of, is actually a very high degree of vanity. The whole morality of the Sermon on the Mount belongs here; man takes. a truly voluptuous pleasure in violating himself by exaggerated demands and then deifying this something in his soul that is so tyrannically taxing. In each ascetic morality, man prays to one part of himself as a god and also finds it necessary to diabolize the rest. –
138
Man is not equally moral at all times – this is well known. If one judges his morality by his capacity for great sacrificial resolve and self-denial (which, when it has become constant and habitual, is holiness), man is most moral in affect; greater excitation offers him new motives, which he, when sober and cool as usual, perhaps did not think himself capable of. How can this be? Probably because of the relatedness of everything great and highly exciting: once man has been brought into a state of extraordinary tension, he can decide as easily to take frightful revenge as to make a frightful break with his need for revenge. Under the influence of the powerful emotion, he wants in any event what is great, powerful, enormous, and if he notices by chance that to sacrifice his own self satisfies as well or better than to sacrifice the other person, then he chooses that. Actually, all he cares about is the release of his emotion; to relieve his tension, he may gather together his enemies’ spears and bury them in his own breast. Mankind had to be educated through long habituation to the idea that there is something great in self-denial, and not only in revenge; a divinity that sacrifices itself was the strongest and most effective symbol of this kind of greatness. The triumph over the enemy hardest to conquer, the sudden mastery of an emotion: that is how this denial appeared; and to this extent it counted as the height of morality. In truth, it has to do with the exchange of one idea for another, while the heart remains at the same pitch, the same volume. Men who have sobered up and are resting from an emotion no longer understand the morality of those moments, but the admiration of all who witnessed in them supports these men; pride consoles them, when the emotion and the understanding for their deed have faded. Thus those acts of self-denial are basically not moral either, insofar as they are not done strictly with regard for other people; rather the other person simply offers the tense heart an opportunity to relieve itself, by that self-denial.
139
In some respects, the ascetic too is trying to make life easy for himself, usually by completely subordinating himself to the will of another or to a comprehensive law and ritual, rather in the way the Brahman leaves absolutely nothing to his own determination, but determines himself at each minute by a holy precept. This subordination is a powerful means of becoming master of oneself; one is occupied, that is, free of boredom, and yet has no willful or passionate impulse; after a deed is completed, there is no feeling of responsibility, and therefore no agony of regret. One has renounced his own will once and for all, and this is easier than to renounce it only occasionally, just as it is easier to give up a desire entirely than to moderate it. If we remember man’s, present attitude towards the state, we find there too that an unqualified obedience is more convenient than a qualified one. The saint, then, makes his life easier by that complete abandonment of his personality, and a man is fooling himself when he admires that phenomenon as the most heroic feat of morality. In any event, it is harder to assert one’s personality without vacillation or confusion than to free oneself from it in the manner described; it also takes much more intellect and thought.
140
After having discovered in many of the more inexplicable actions, expressions of that pleasure in emotion per se, I would also discern in self-contempt (which is one of the signs of saintliness) and likewise in self-tormenting behavior (starvation and scourges, dislocation of limbs, simulated madness) a means by which those natures combat the general exhaustion of their life-force (of their nerves): they use the most painful stimulants and horrors in order to emerge, for a time at least, from that dullness and boredom into which their great spiritual indolence and that subordination to a foreign will described above have so often let them sink.
141
The most common means that the ascetic and saint uses in order to make his life more bearable and entertaining consists in occasionally waging war and alternating victory and defeat. To do this he needs an opponent, and finds him in the so-called “inner enemy.” He exploits particularly his tendency to vanity, ambition, and love of power, as well as his sensual desires, to allow himself to see his life as a continuing battle and himself as the battlefield on which good and evil spirits struggle, with alternating results. It is well known that regularity of sexual intercourse moderates the sensual imagination, even almost suppresses it and, conversely, that it is unleashed and made dissolute by abstinence or irregularity in intercourse. Many Christian saints’ imaginations were exceedingly dirty; thanks to their theory that these desires were real demons who raged in them, they did not feel very responsible; to this feeling of irresponsibility, we owe the so instructive honesty of their confessions. It was in their interest that the battle always be entertained to some degree, for, as we said, their bleak life was entertained by it. But in order that the battle appear important enough to arouse continuing interest and admiration in the nonsaints, sensuality had to be more and more calumniated and branded; indeed, the danger of eternal damnation became so closely linked to these things that quite probably for whole generations, Christians conceived children with a bad conscience, indubitably doing great harm to mankind. And yet truth is standing on its head here, which is especially unseemly for truth. To be sure, Christianity had said that each man is conceived and born in sin, and in the insufferable superlative Christianity of Caldéron [Pedro Caldéron de la Barca (1600-82): Spanish dramatist; quoted by Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Idea I, 300.419.] this thought had been knotted together and tangled up once again, so that he ventured the craziest paradox there can be, in the well-known lines:
the greatest guilt of man
is that he was born.
[Pedro Calderón de la Barca: “La vida es sueño,” I 2]
In all pessimistic religions, the act of procreation is felt to be bad per’se, but this feeling is by no means a general, human one; not even the judgment of all pessimists is the same on this point. Empedocles, for example, knows nothing of shame, devil, sin in all things erotic; rather, on the great meadow of calamity, he sees one single salutary and hopeful apparition: Aphrodite. For him she is the guarantee that strife will not prevail indefinitely, but will eventually give the scepter to a gentler daemon. Practicing Christian pessimists, as we said, had an interest in seeing a different opinion in power; for the loneliness and spiritual desolation of their lives, they needed an ever-active and generally recognized enemy, by opposing and conquering whom they again and again portrayed themselves to the unsaintly as half-incomprehensible, supernatural beings. When finally, as a consequence of their way of life and their destroyed health, this enemy took flight forever, they knew at once how to see their inner self populated by new demons. The scales of arrogance and humility, in vacillation up and down, entertained their brooding minds as finely as the alternation of desire and serenity. At that time psychology served not only to throw suspicion on everything human, but also to revile it, to scourge it, to crucify it; man wanted to consider himself as bad and evil as possible; he sought out fear for the salvation of his soul, despair about his own strength. Everything natural, to which man attaches the idea of badness, sinfulness (as is still his habit in regard to the erotic, for example) burdens him, clouds his imagination, makes his glance timid, lets him quarrel with himself and makes him unsure, lacking confidence; even his dreams acquire the flavor of his troubled conscience. And yet this suffering about the natural is in the reality of things totally unfounded; it is only the consequence of opinions about things. It is easy to see how men become worse by labeling the unavoidably natural as bad and later feeling it to be so constituted. It is the device of religion, and of those metaphysicians who want to think of man as evil and sinful by nature, to have him cast suspicion on nature and to make himself bad; for he learns thus to experience himself as bad, since he cannot take off the dress of nature. Gradually, after a long life of nature, he feels so oppressed by such a burden of sins that supernatural powers become necessary to lift this burden; and with that, the need for redemption, which we have already discussed, enters the scene, corresponding to no real sinfulness but rather only to an imagined one. If one goes through the individual moral statements of the documents of Christianity, one will find everywhere that the demands have been exaggerated so that man cannot satisfy them; the intention is not that he become more moral, but rather that he feel as sinful as possible. If man had not found this feeling agreeable, why should he have produced such an idea and been attached to it for so long? As in the ancient world an immeasurable strength of spirit and inventiveness was employed to increase joy in life through ceremonial worship, so in the age of Christianity an equally immeasurable amount of spirit has been offered up to a different striving: man was to feel sinful in all ways and excited, animated, inspired thereby. Excite, animate, inspire at all costs – is that not the watchword of an enervated, overripe, overcultivated age? The circle of all natural feelings had been run through a hundred times, the soul had grown tired of them; then the saint and ascetic invented a new category of life-stimuli. They presented themselves to everyone, not actually for the many to imitate, but rather as a frightening and yet delightful spectacle, which was performed on that border between this world and the afterworld, where everyone used to think he perceived, now heavenly gleams of light, now eerie tongues of flame glowing up from the depths. The eye of the saint, focused on the meaning of a short earthly life, frightful in every way, focused on the imminence of the final decision about an endless new life to come, this burnt-out eye, in a half-wasted body, made men of the old world tremble to their depths. To look at, to look away from with a shudder, to sense again the fascination of the spectacle, to yield to it, have one’s fill of it, until the feverish soul shivers aglow and chilled this was the last pleasure which the ancient world invented, after it had itself grown indifferent even to the sight of animal and human contests.
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To sum up what we have said: that disposition which the saint, or evolving saint, enjoys is constituted of elements that we all know quite well. However, under the influence of other than religious ideas, they show themselves in different colors and then tend to suffer men’s censure as intensely as, when decorated by religion and the ultimate questions of existence, they can count on admiration, even worship – or at least they could count on it in earlier times. Sometimes the saint exercises a defiance against himself, which is a close relative of the love of power, and which gives even the most solitary man a feeling of power; sometimes his bloated sensibility leaps from the longing to give his passions free rein to the longing to make them collapse like wild stallions, powerfully driven by a proud soul. Sometimes he wants the complete cessation of all bothersome, tormenting, irritating feelings, a waking sleep, a continuing repose in the lap of a dull, animal-like or vegetative indolence; sometimes he seep out battle and provokes it in himself, because boredom holds its yawning visage up to him. He scourges his self-deification with self-contempt and cruelty; he takes pleasure in the wild uprising of his desires, and in the sharp pain of sin, even in the idea of being lost; he knows how to set a trap for his emotions, for his most extreme love of power, for example, so that it changes over into the emotion of the most extreme humiliation, and his agitated soul is pulled to pieces by this contrast. And finally, when he yearns for visions, conversations with the dead, or with divine beings, it is basically a rare form of voluptuousness that he desires, perhaps that voluptuousness in which all others are wound together in one knot. Novalis [(1772-1801)], by experience and instinct one of the authorities in questions of saintliness, pronounces the whole secret with naive joy: “It is a wonder indeed that the association of voluptuousness, religion and cruelty has not long ago made men take notice of their intimate relationship and common intention.”
143
Not that which the saint is, but that which he signifies in the minds of nonsaints, gives him his value in world-history. Because people were mistaken about him, interpreting his inner states incorrectly and divorcing him from themselves as radically as possible as something completely beyond compare and strangely superhuman, he acquired the extraordinary strength with which he could control the imagination of whole peoples, whole ages. He himself did not know himself; he himself understood the script of his moods, inclinations, actions by an interpretive art which was as exaggerated and artificial as the pneumatical interpretation of the Bible. The queer, sick elements in his nature, coupled as they were with spiritual poverty, inadequate knowledge, ruined health, overstimulated nerves, were as hidden from his eye as from the eye of the onlooker. He was not an especially good man, and even less an especially wise man. But he signified something that was to surpass human proportions in goodness and wisdom. Belief in him supported the belief in the divine and the miraculous, in a religious meaning of all existence, in an imminent Judgment Day. By the evening light of the apocalyptic sun that shone over the Christian peoples, the shadowy figure of the saint grew to enormous size, indeed to such a height that even in our time, which no longer believes in God, there are still plenty of thinkers who believe in the saint.
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It is self-evident that this portrait of the saint, which is sketched according to the average member of the whole type, can be opposed by other portraits that might result in a more favorable impression. Isolated exceptions to this type stand out, whether by their great gentleness and benevolence, or by the magic of their unusual energy; others are attractive in the highest degree because certain delusions diffuse streams of light over their whole being, as for example is the case with the famous founder of Christianity, who thought he was God’s only begotten son, and therefore without sin; so that through a fantasy (which one should not judge too harshly, because the whole ancient world is aswarm with sons of gods) he reached the same goal: the feeling of utter sinlessness, utter freedom from responsibility – a feeling that everyone can now attain through science.
I have also left out the Indian holy men, who are an intermediate stage between the Christian saint and the Greek philosopher, and to that extent do not represent a pure type. Buddhists demanded knowledge, science (as far as there was one), superiority to other men by logical discipline and training of thought as a sign of sainthood, as much as the same qualities are rejected and calumniated as a sign of unholiness in the Christian world.
Fourth Division - From the Souls of Artists and Writers
145
What is perfect is supposed not to have become. – In the case of everything perfect we are accustomed to abstain from asking how it became: we rejoice in the present fact as though it came out of the ground by magic. Here we are probably still standing under the aftereffect of a primeval mythological invention. We still almost feel (for example in a Greek temple such as that at Paestum) that a god must one morning have playfully constructed his dwelling out of these tremendous weights: at other times that a stone suddenly acquired by magic a soul that is now trying to speak out of it. The artist knows that his work produces its full effect when it excites a belief in an improvisation, a belief that it came into being with a miraculous suddenness; and so he may assist this illusion and introduce these elements of rapturous restlessness, of blindly groping disorder, of attentive reverie that attend the beginning of creation into his art as a means of deceiving the soul of the spectator or auditor into a mood in which he believes that the complete and perfect has suddenly emerged instantaneously. – The science of art has, it goes without saying, most definitely to counter this illusion and to display the bad habits and false conclusions of the intellect by virtue of which it allows the artist to ensnare it.
146
The artist’s sense of truth. – With regard to knowledge of truths, the artist has a weaker morality than the thinker; he will on no account let himself be deprived of brilliant and profound interpretations of life, and defends himself against temperate and simple methods and results. He is apparently fighting for the higher worthiness and meaning of mankind; in reality he will not renounce the most efficacious presuppositions for his art, the fantastical, mythical, uncertain, extreme, the sense of the symbolical, the over-valuation of personality, the belief that genius is something miraculous – he considers, therefore, the continuance of his art of creation as more important than the scientific devotion to truth in every shape, however simple this may appear.
147
Art as raiser of the dead. – Art also fulfils the task of preservation and even of brightening up extinguished and faded memories; when it accomplishes this task it weaves a rope round the ages and causes their spirits to return. It is, certainly, only a phantom-life that results therefrom, as out of graves, or like the return in dreams of our beloved dead, but for some moments, at least, the old sensation lives again and the heart beats to an almost forgotten time. Hence, for the sake of the general usefulness of art, the artist himself must be excused if he does not stand in the front rank of the Enlightenment and progressive masculinization of man; all his life long he has remained a child or a youth, and has stood still at the point where he was overcome by his artistic impulse; the feelings of the first years of life, however, are acknowledged to be nearer to those of earlier times than to those of the present century. Unconsciously it becomes his mission to make mankind more childlike; this is his glory and his limitation.
148
Poets as the lighteners of life. – Poets, inasmuch as they desire to lighten the life of man, either divert his gaze from the wearisome present, or assist the present to acquire new colours by means of a life which they cause to shine out of the past. To be able to do this, they must in many respects themselves be beings who are turned towards the past, so that they can be used as bridges to far distant times and ideas, to dying or dead religions and cultures. Actually they are always and of necessity epigones. There are, however, certain drawbacks to their means of lightening life – they appease and heal only temporarily, only for the moment; they even prevent men from labouring towards a genuine improvement in their conditions, inasmuch as they remove and apply palliatives to precisely that passion of discontent that induces to action.
149
The slow arrow of beauty. – The noblest kind of beauty is that which does not transport us suddenly, which does not make stormy and intoxicating impressions (such a kind easily arouses disgust), but that which slowly filters into our minds, which we take away with us almost unnoticed, and which we encounter again in our dreams; but which, however, after having long lain modestly on our hearts, takes entire possession of us, fills our eyes with tears and our hearts with longing. What is it that we long for at the sight of beauty? We long to be beautiful, we fancy it must bring much happiness with it. But that is a mistake.
150
The animation of art. – Art raises its head where religions relax their hold. It takes over many feelings and moods engendered by religion, lays them to its heart, and itself becomes deeper, more full of soul, so that it is capable of transmitting exultation and enthusiasm, which it previously was not able to do. The abundance of religious feelings which have grown into a stream are always breaking forth again and desire to conquer new kingdoms, but the growth of the Enlightenment undermined the dogmas of religion and inspired a fundamental mistrust of them – so that the feelings, thrust by the Enlightenment out of the religious sphere, throw themselves into art, in a few cases into political life, even straight into science. Everywhere where human endeavour wears a loftier, gloomier aspect, it may be assumed that the fear of spirits, incense, and church-shadows have remained attached to it.
151
How meter beautifies. – Meter casts a veil over reality [See: Goethe to Schiller, May 5, 1798.]; it causes various artificialities of speech and obscurities of thought; by the shadow it throws upon thought it sometimes conceals it, and sometimes brings it into prominence. As shadow is necessary to beauty, so the “dull” is necessary to lucidity. Art makes the aspect of life endurable by throwing over it the veil of obscure thought.
152
The art of the ugly soul. – Art is confined within too narrow limits if it be required that only the orderly, respectable, well-behaved soul should be allowed to express itself therein. As in the plastic arts, so also in music and poetry: there is an art of the ugly soul side by side with the art of the beautiful soul; and the mightiest effects of art, the crushing of souls, moving of stones and humanising of beasts, have perhaps been best achieved precisely by that art.
153
Art makes heavy the heart of the thinker. – How strong metaphysical need is and how difficult nature renders our departure from it may be seen from the fact that even in the free spirit, when he has cast off everything metaphysical, the loftiest effects of art can easily produce a resounding of the long silent, even broken, metaphysical string – it may be, for instance, that at a passage in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony he feels himself floating above the earth in a starry dome with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to shine round him, and the earth to sink farther and farther away. – If he becomes conscious of this state, he feels a deep pain at his heart, and sighs for the man who will lead back to him his lost darling, be it called religion or metaphysics. In such moments his intellectual character is put to the test.
154
Playing with life. – The lightness and frivolity of the Homeric imagination was necessary to calm and occasionally to raise the immoderately passionate temperament and acute intellect of the Greeks. If their intellect speaks, how harsh and cruel does life then appear! They do not deceive themselves, but they intentionally weave lies round life. Simonides [Simonides (c. 556 to c. 468 BC), Greek poet] advised his countrymen to look upon life as a game; earnestness was too well-known to them as pain (the gods so gladly hear the misery of mankind made the theme of song), and they knew that through art alone misery might be turned into pleasure. As a punishment for this insight, however, they were so plagued with the love of romancing that it was difficult for them in everyday life to keep themselves free from falsehood and deceit; for all poetic nations have such a love of falsehood, and yet are innocent withal. Probably this occasionally drove the neighboring nations to desperation.
155
The belief in inspiration. – It is to the interest of the artist that there should be a belief in sudden suggestions, so-called inspirations; as if the idea of a work of art, of poetry, the fundamental thought of a philosophy shone down from heaven like a ray of grace. In reality the imagination of the good artist or thinker constantly produces good, mediocre, and bad, but his power of judgment, most clear and practised, rejects and chooses and joins together, just as we now learn from Beethoven’s notebooks that he gradually composed the most beautiful melodies, and in a manner selected them, from many different attempts. He who makes less severe distinctions, and willingly abandons himself to imitative memories, may under certain circumstances be come a great improvisatore; but artistic improvisation ranks low in comparison with serious and laboriously chosen artistic thoughts. All great men were great workers, unwearied not only in invention but also in rejection, reviewing, transforming, and arranging.
156
Inspiration again. – If the productive power has been suspended for a length of time, and has been hindered in its outflow by some obstacle, there comes at last such a sudden outpouring, as if an immediate inspiration were taking place without previous inward working, consequently a miracle. This constitutes the familiar deception, in the continuance of which, as we have said, the interest of all artists is rather too much concerned. The capital has only accumulated, it has not suddenly fallen down from heaven. Moreover, such apparent inspirations are seen elsewhere, for instance in the realm of goodness, of virtue and of vice.
157
The sufferings of genius and their value. – The artistic genius desires to give pleasure, but if his mind is on a very high plane he does not easily find any one to share his pleasure; he offers entertainment but nobody accepts it. This gives him, in certain circumstances, a comically touching pathos; for he has really no right to force pleasure on men. He pipes, but none will dance: can that be tragic? Perhaps. – As compensation for this deprivation, however, he finds more pleasure in creating than the rest of mankind experiences in all other species of activity. His sufferings are considered as exaggerated, because the sound of his complaints is louder and his tongue more eloquent; and yet sometimes his sufferings are really very great; but only because his ambition and his envy are so great. The learned genius, like Kepler and Spinoza, is usually not so covetous and does not make such an exhibition of his really greater sufferings and deprivations. He can reckon with greater certainty on future fame and can afford to do without the present, whilst an artist who does this always plays a desperate game that makes his heart ache. In very rare cases, when in one and the same individual are combined the genius of power and of knowledge and the moral genius, there is added to the above-mentioned pains that species of pain which must be regarded as the most curious exception in the world; an extra- and supra-personal sensibility attuned to a nation, to humanity, to all civilisation, to all suffering existence, which acquires its value through its connection with particularly difficult and remote perceptions (pity in itself is worth but little). But by what standard, on what scales can we measure whether or not it is genuine? Is it not almost imperative to be mistrustful of all who speak of possessing sensiblities of this sort?
158
Fatality of greatness. – Every great phenomenon is succeeded by degeneration, especially in the domain of art. The example of greatness incites all vainer natures to extreme imitation or attempts to outdo; in addition to which, all great talents have the fatal property of suppressing many weaker shoots and forces and as it were laying nature waste all around them. The most fortunate thing that can happen in the evolution of an art is that several geniuses appear together and keep one another in bounds; in the course of this struggle the weaker and tenderer natures too will usually be granted light and air.
159
Art dangerous to the artist. – When art seizes violently on an individual it draws him back to the conceptions of those ages in which art flourished most mightily, and then it effects a retrogression in him. The artist acquires increasing reverence for sudden excitations, believes in gods and demons, instills a soul into nature, hates the sciences, becomes changeable of mood as were the men of antiquity and longs for an overthrowing of everything unfavorable to art, and he does this with all the vehemence and unreasonableness of a child. The artist is in himself already a retarded being, inasmuch as he has halted at games that pertain to youth and childhood: to this there is now added his gradual retrogression to earlier times. Thus there at last arises a violent antagonism between him and the men of his period, of his own age, and his end is gloomy; just as, according to the tales told in antiquity, Homer and Aeschylus at last lived and died in melancholia.
160
Created people. – When we say the dramatist (and the artist in general) actually creates characters, this is a nice piece of deception and exaggeration in the existence and dissemination of which art celebrates one of its unintentional and as it were superfluous triumphs. In reality we understand very little of an actual living person and generalize very superficially when we attribute to him this or that character: well, the poet adopts the same very imperfect posture towards man as we do, in that his sketches of men are just as superficial as is our knowledge of men. There is much illusion involved in these created characters of the artists; they are in no way living products of nature, but, like painted people, a little too thin, they cannot endure inspection from close to. And if one should even venture to say that the character of the ordinary living man is often self-contradictory and that created by the dramatist the ideal that hovered dimly before the eye of nature, this would be quite wrong. An actual human being is something altogether necessary (even in those so-called contradictions), but we do not always recognize this necessity. The invented human being, the phantasm, desires to signify something necessary, but only in the eyes of those who comprehend even an actual human being only in a crude, unnatural simplification: so that a couple of striking, often repeated characteristics, with a great deal of light on them and a great deal of shadow and twilight around them, suffice to meet all their demands. They are thus quite ready to treat phantasms as actual, necessary human beings because they are accustomed when dealing with actual human beings to take a phantasm, a silhouette, an arbitrary abridgment for the whole. – That the painter and the sculptor, of all people, give expression to the “idea” of the human being is mere fantasizing and sense-deception: one is being tyrannized over by the eye when one says such a thing, since this sees even of the human body only the surface, the skin; the inner body, however, is just as much part of the idea. Plastic art wants to make characters visible on the outside; the art of speech employs the word to the same end, it delineates the character in sounds. Art begins from the natural ignorance of mankind as too his interior (both bodily and as regards character): it does not exist for physicists or philosophers.
161
Self-overestimation in the belief in artists and philosophers. – We all think that a work of art, an artist, is proved to be of high quality if it seizes hold on us and profoundly moves us. But for this to be so our own high quality in judgment and sensibility would first have to have been proved: which is not the case. Who in the realm of the plastic arts has moved and enraptured more than Bernini, who has produced a mightier effect than that post-Demosthenes rhetor [Hegesias of Magnesia] who introduced the Asiatic style and caused it to predominate for two centuries? Such a predomination over entire centuries proves nothing in regard to the quality or lasting validity of a style; that is why one should never be too firm in one’s faith in any artist: for such a faith is not only faith in the veracity of our sensibility but also in the infallibility of our judgment, while our judgment or sensibility, or both of them, can themselves be too coarse or too refined, exaggerated or gross. The blessings and raptures conferred by a philosophy or a religion likewise prove nothing in regard to their truth: just as little as the happiness the madman enjoys from his idée fixe proves anything in regard to its rationality.
162
Cult of the genius out of vanity. – Because we think well of ourselves, but nonetheless never suppose ourselves capable of producing a painting like one of Raphael’s or a dramatic scene like one of Shakespeare’s, we convince ourselves that the capacity to do so is quite extraordinarily marvelous, a wholly uncommon accident, or, if we are still religiously inclined, a mercy from on high. Thus our vanity, our self-love, promotes the cult of the genius: for only if we think of him as being very remote from us, as a miraculum, does he not aggrieve us (even Goethe, who was without envy, called Shakespeare his star of the most distant heights ["William! Stern der schönsten Ferne”: from Goethe’s, “Between Two Worlds”]; in regard to which one might recall the lines: “the stars, these we do not desire” [from Goethe’s, “Comfort in Tears”]). But, aside from these suggestions of our vanity, the activity of the genius seems in no way fundamentally different from the activity of the inventor of machines, the scholar of astronomy or history, the master of tactics. All these activities are explicable if one pictures to oneself people whose thinking is active in one direction, who employ everything as material, who always zealously observe their own inner life and that of others, who perceive everywhere models and incentives, who never tire of combining together the means available to them. Genius too does nothing except learn first how to lay bricks then how to build, except continually seek for material and continually form itself around it. Every activity of man is amazingly complicated, not only that of the genius: but none is a “miracle.” – Whence, then, the belief that genius exists only in the artist, orator and philosopher? that only they have “intuition”? (Whereby they are supposed to possess a kind of miraculous eyeglass with which they can see directly into “the essence of the thing”!) It is clear that people speak of genius only where the effects of the great intellect are most pleasant to them and where they have no desire to feel envious. To call someone “divine” means: “here there is no need for us to compete.” Then, everything finished and complete is regarded with admiration, everything still becoming is undervalued. But no one can see in the work of the artist how it has become; that is its advantage, for wherever one can see the act of becoming one grows somewhat cool. The finished and perfect art of representation repulses all thinking as to how it has become; it tyrannizes as present completeness and perfection. That is why the masters of the art of representation count above all as gifted with genius and why men of science do not. In reality, this evaluation of the former and undervaluation of the latter is only a piece of childishness in the realm of reason.
163
The serious workman. – Do not talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can name great men of all kinds who were very little gifted. The acquired greatness, became “geniuses” (as we put it), through qualities the lack of which no one who knew what they were would boast of: they all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole; they allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole. the recipe for becoming a good novelist, for example, is easy to give, but to carry it out presupposes qualities one is accustomed to overlook when one says “I do not have enough talent.” One has only to make a hundred or so sketches for novels, none longer than two pages but of such distinctness that every word in them is necessary; one should write down anecdotes each day until one has learned how to give them the most pregnant and effective form; one should be tireless in collecting and describing human types and characters; one should above all relate things to others and listen to others relate, keeping one’s eyes and ears open for the effect produced on those present, one should travel like a landscape painter or costume designer; one should excerpt for oneself out of the individual sciences everything that will produce an artistic effect when it is well described, one should, finally, reflect on the motives of human actions, disdain no signpost to instruction about them and be a collector of these things by day and night. One should continue in this many-sided exercise some ten years: what is then created in the workshop, however, will be fit to go out into the world. – What, however, do most people do? They begin, not with the parts, but with the whole. Perhaps they chance to strike a right note, excite attention and from then on strike worse and worse notes, for good, natural reasons. – Sometimes, when the character and intellect needed to formulate such a life-plan are lacking, fate and need take their place and lead the future master step by step through all the stipulations of his trade.
164
Peril and profit in the cult of the genius. – The belief in great, superior, fruitful spirits is not necessarily, yet nonetheless is very frequently associated with that religious or semi-religious superstition that these spirits are of supra-human origin and possess certain miraculous abilities by virtue of which they acquire their knowledge by quite other means than the rest of mankind. One ascribes to them, it seems, a direct view of the nature of the world, as it were a hole in the cloak of appearance, and believes that, by virtue of this miraculous seer’s vision, they are able to communicate something conclusive and decisive about man and the world without the toil and rigorousness required by science. As long as there continue to be those who believe in the miraculous in the domain of knowledge one can perhaps concede that these people themselves derive some benefit from their belief, inasmuch as through their unconditional subjection to the great spirits they create for their own spirit during its time of development the finest form of discipline and schooling. On the other hand, it is at least questionable whether the superstitious belief in genius, in its privileges and special abilities, is of benefit to the genius himself if it takes root in him. It is in any event a dangerous sign when a man is assailed by awe of himself, whether it be the celebrated Caesar’s awe of Caesar or the awe of one’s own genius now under consideration; when the sacrificial incense which is properly rendered only to a god penetrates the brain of the genius, so that his head begins to swim and he comes to regard himself as something supra-human. The consequences that slowly result are: the feeling of irresponsibility, of exceptional rights, the belief that he confers a favor by his mere presence, insane rage when anyone attempts even to compare him with others, let alone to rate him beneath them, or to draw attention to lapses in his work. Because he ceases to practice criticism of himself, at last one pinion after the other falls out of his plumage: that superstitious eats at the roots of his powers and perhaps even turns him into a hypocrite after his powers have fled from him. For the great spirits themselves it is therefore probably more beneficial if they acquire an insight into the nature and origin of their powers, if they grasp, that is to say, what purely human qualities have come together in them and what fortunate circumstances attended them: in the first place undiminished energy, resolute application to individual goals, great personal courage, then the good fortune to receive an upbringing which offered in the early years the finest teachers, models and methods. To be sure, when their goal is the production of the greatest possible effect, unclarity with regard to oneself and that semi-insanity superadded to it has always achieved much; for what has been admired and envied at all times has been that power in them by virtue of which they render men will-less and sweep them away into the delusion that the leaders they are following are supra-natural. Indeed, it elevates and inspires men to believe that someone is in possession of supra-natural powers: to this extent Plato was right to say [Plato: Phaedrus, 244a] that madness has brought the greatest of blessings upon mankind. – In rare individual cases this portion of madness may, indeed, actually have been the means by which such a nature, excessive in all directions, was held firmly together: in the life of individuals, too, illusions that are in themselves poisons often play the role of healers; yet, in the end, in the case of every “genius” who believes in his own divinity the poison shows itself to the same degree as his “genius” grows old: one may recall, for example, the case of Napoleon, whose nature certainly grew into the mighty unity that sets him apart from all men of modern times precisely through his belief in himself and his star and through the contempt for men that flowed from it; until in the end, however, this same belief went over into an almost insane fatalism, robbed him of his acuteness and swiftness of perception, and became the cause of his destruction.
165
Genius and nullity. – It is precisely the original heads among the artists, those who draw on resources that are their own, who can sometimes produce the empty and hollow, while the more dependent natures, the so-called talents, full of recollections of everything imaginable are able even when they are at their weakest to produce something tolerable. If the originals are deserted by themselves recollection renders them no aid: they become empty.
166
The public. – The people really demands of tragedy no more than to be thoroughly moved so as for once to have a good cry; the artist who sees a new tragedy, on the other hand, takes pleasure in the ingenious technical inventions and artifices, in the handling and appointment of the material, in the new application of old motifs and old ideas. – His attitude is the aesthetic attitude to the work of art, that of the creator; the one first described, which pays attention only to the material, is that of the people. Of the man between them there is nothing to be said; he is neither people nor artist and does not know what he wants: thus his pleasure, too, is obscure and slight.
167
Artistic education of the public. – If the same motif has not been treated in a hundred different ways by various masters, the public never learns to get beyond interest in the material alone; but once it has come to be familiar with the motif from numerous versions of it, and thus no longer feels the charm of novelty and anticipation, it will then be able to grasp and enjoy the nuances and subtle new inventions in the way it is treated.
168
The artist and his following must keep in step. – Progress from one stylistic level to the next must proceed so slowly that not only the artists but the auditors and spectators too can participate in this progress and know exactly what is going on. Otherwise there suddenly appears that great gulf between the artist creating his works on a remote height and the public which, no longer able to attain to that height, at length disconsolately climbs back down again deeper than before. For when the artist no longer raises his public up, it swiftly sinks downwards, and it plunges the deeper and more perilously the higher a genius has borne it, like the eagle from whose claws the tortoise it has carried up into the clouds falls to its death.
169
Origin of the comic. – If one considers that man was for many hundreds of thousands of years an animal in the highest degree accessible to fear and that everything sudden and unexpected bade him prepare to fight and perhaps to die that even later on, indeed, in social relationships all security depended on the expected and traditional in opinion and action then one cannot be surprised if whenever something sudden and unexpected in word and deed happens without occasioning danger or injury man becomes wanton, passes over into the opposite of fear: the anxious, crouching creature springs up, greatly expands – man laughs. This transition from momentary anxiety to short-lived exuberance is called the comic. In the phenomenon of the tragic, on the other hand, man passes swiftly from great, enduring wantonness and great fear and anguish; since, however, great, enduring wantonness and high spirits is much rarer among mortals than occasions for fear, there is much more of the comic than the tragic in the world; we laugh much more often than we are profoundly shaken.
170
Artist’s ambition. – The Greek artists, the tragedians for example, poetized in order to conquer; their whole art cannot be thought of apart from contest: Hesiod’s good Eris, ambition, gave their genius its wings. Now this ambition demands above all that their work should preserve the highest excellence in their own eyes, as they understand excellence, that is to say, without reference to a dominating taste or the general opinion as to what constitutes excellence in a work of art; and thus Aeschylus and Euripides were for a long time unsuccessful until they had finally educated judges of art who assessed their work according to the standards they themselves laid down. It is thus they aspire to victory over their competitors as they understand victory, a victory before their own seat of judgment, they want actually to be more excellent; then they exact agreement from others as to their own assessment of themselves and confirmation of their own judgment. To aspire to honor here means: “to make oneself superior and to wish this superiority to be publicly acknowledged.” If the former is lacking and the latter nonetheless still demanded, one speaks of vanity. If the latter is lacking and its absence not regretted, one speaks of pride.
171
The necessary in a work of art. – Those who talk so much of the necessary in a work of art exaggerate, if thy are artists, in majorem artis gloriam [“to the greater glory of art”], or, if they are laity, out of ignorance. The forms of a work of art which express the ideas contained in it, its mode of speech that is to say, always have something easy-going about them, like all forms of speech. The sculptor can add many little details or leave them out: the performer likewise, whether he be an actor or, in the realm of music, a virtuoso or conductor. These many little details and elaborations today appeal to him, tomorrow nor; they exist for the sake of the artist rather than for that of art, for he too, given the rigorousness and self-constraint the representation of his principal idea demands of him, occasionally requires sweetmeats and playthings if he is not to grow sullen and morose.
172
Causing the master to be forgotten. – The pianist who performs the work of a master will have played best when he makes his listeners forget the master, when it seems as though he is relating a tale from his own life or is experiencing something at that very moment. To be sure, if he himself is nothing of consequence his listeners will execrate the loquacity with which he tells us about himself. He thus has to know how to engage the imagination of his listeners on his own behalf. Conversely, it is this which accounts for all the weaknesses and follies of “the virtuoso.”
173
Corriger la fortune [compensate for the deliverances of fate]. – Evil chances occur in the lives of great artists such as compel a painter, for instance, to leave his finest picture in the form of mere hurried sketches, or which compelled Beethoven, for example, to leave behind to us in many great sonatas (as is the case of the great B major [Beethoven’s piano sonata no. 29 in B flat major, Op. 106, “Hammerklavier.”]) only an unsatisfactory piano arrangement of a symphony. Here the artist coming after ought to try posthumously to amend the life of the master: which is what he would do, for example, who, as a master of orchestration, should waken to life for us that symphony now lying in the death-trance of the piano.
174
Diminution. – There are many things, events or people which cannot endure being reduced to scale. The Laokoon group cannot be reduced to a trinket; it needs to be large. But it is much rarer for something small by nature to be able to endure enlargement; which is why biographers will always have better success in diminishing the size of a great man than in enlarging that of a small one.
175
Sensuality in contemporary art. – Artists nowadays often go wrong when they labor to make their works of art produce a sensual effect; for their spectators or auditors are no longer in possession of a full sensuality and the effect which, quite contrary to his intention, the artist’s work produces upon them is a feeling of “saintliness” closely related to boredom. – Their sensuality perhaps commences just where the artist’s ceases; thus they encounter one another at one point at the most.
176
Shakespeare as moralist. – Shakespeare reflected a great deal on the passions and from his temperament probably had very intimate access to many of them (dramatists are in general somewhat wicked men). But, unlike Montaigne, he was incapable of discoursing on them; instead of which he placed observations about the passions into the mouths of impassioned characters: a practice which, though counter to nature, makes his plays so full of ideas they make all others seem empty and can easily arouse in us a repugnance to them. – The maxims of Schiller (which are almost always based on ideas either false or trite) are designed purely for the theater, and as such they are extremely effective: while Shakespeare’s do honor to his model, Montaigne, and contain entirely serious ideas in a polished form, but are for that reason too remote and subtle for the theater public and thus ineffective.
177
Getting oneself heard well. – One has to know, not only how to play well, but also how to get oneself heard well. The violin in the hands of the greatest master will emit only a chirp if the room is too big; and then the master sounds no better than any bungler.
178
The effectiveness of the incomplete. – Just as figures in relief produce so strong an impression on the imagination because they are as it were on the point of stepping out of the wall but have suddenly been brought to a halt, so the relief-like, incomplete presentation of an idea, of a whole philosophy, is sometimes more effective than its exhaustive realization: more is left for the beholder to do, he is impelled to continue working on that which appears before him so strongly etched in light and shadow, to think it through to the end, and to overcome even that constraint which has hitherto prevented it from stepping forth fully formed.
179
Against originality. – When art dresses itself in the most worn-out material it is most easily recognized as art.
180
Collective spirit. – A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.
181
Twofold misjudgment. – The misfortune suffered by clear-minded and easily understood writers is that they are taken for shallow and thus little effort is expended on reading them: and the good fortune that attends the obscure is that the reader toils at them and ascribes to them the pleasure he has in fact gained from his own zeal.
182
Relationship to science. – They lack a true interest in a science who begins to become enthusiastic about it only when they themselves have made discoveries in it.
183
The key. – A man of significance may set great store by an idea and all the insignificant laugh and mock at him for it: to him it is a key to hidden treasure-chambers, while to them it is no more than a piece of old iron.
184
Untranslatable. – It is neither the best nor the worst in a book that is untranslatable in it.
185
Author’s paradoxes. – The so-called paradoxes of an author to which a reader takes exception very often stand not at all in the author’s book but in the reader’s head.
186
Wit. – The wittiest authors evoke the least perceptible smile.
187
The antithesis. – The antithesis is the narrow gateway through which error most likes to creep into truth.
188
Thinkers as stylists. – Most thinkers write badly because they communicate to us not only their thoughts but also the thinking of their thoughts.
189
Thought in poetry. – The poet conducts thoughts along festively, in the carriage of rhythm: usually because they are incapable of walking on foot.
190
Sin against the spirit of the reader. – If the author denies his talent merely so as to place himself on a level with his reader, he commits the only mortal sin the latter will never forgive him – supposing, that is, he notices it. One may say anything ill of a man one likes: but in the way one says it one must know how to restore his vanity again.
191
Limit of honesty. – Even the most honest writer lets fall a word too many when he wants to round off a period.
192
The best author. – The best author will be he who is ashamed to become a writer.
193
Draconian law against writers. – Writers ought to be treated as malefactors who deserve to be freed or pardoned only in the rarest cases: this would be a way of preventing the proliferation of books.
194
The licensed fools of modern culture. – Our feuilletonists are like licensed medieval court fools: it is the same category of people. Half-rational, witty, excessive, silly, they are sometimes there only to soften the atmosphere of pathos with whimsy and chatter, and to drown out with their shouting the all too ponderous, solemn tintinnabulation of great events. Formerly they were in the service of princes and nobles; now they serve political parties, for a good part of the people’s old submissiveness in dealing with their prince still lives on in party feeling and party discipline. However, the whole class of modern men of letters is not far removed from the feuilletonists writers; they are the “licensed fools of modern culture,” who are judged more mildly if they are taken as not quite accountable. To think of writing as one’s life’s profession should by rights be considered a kind of madness.
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After the Greeks. – Knowledge today is greatly hindered by the fact that all words have become hazy and inflated through centuries of exaggerated feeling. The higher stage of culture, which places itself under the rule of knowledge (though not under its tyranny), requires a much greater sobriety of feeling and a stronger concentration of words – in this the Greeks in the age of Demosthenes preceded us. Extravagance characterizes all modern writings; even if they are written simply, the words in them are still felt too eccentrically. Rigorous reflection, compression, coldness, plainness (even taken intentionally to the limits) – in short, restraint of feeling and taciturnity: that alone can help. – Such a cold way of writing and feeling, incidentally, is now very attractive by its contrast; and therein, of course, lies a new danger. For bitter cold can be as good a stimulant as a high degree of heat.
196
Good narrators, bad explainers. – Good narrators can display in the actions of their characters an admirable psychological certainty and consistency, which often stands in downright ludicrous contrast to their lack of skill in thinking psychologically. Thus their culture appears at one moment as excellently high as in the next it appears regrettably low. Too often it even happens that they are obviously explaining the actions and natures of their own heroes incorrectly – there is no doubt about it, as improbable as it sounds. The greatest pianist may have thought only a little about technical requirements and the special virtue, vice, use and educability of each finger (dactylic ethics), and make crude errors when he speaks about such things.
197
Writing of acquaintances and their readers. – We read the writings of acquaintances (friends and enemies) doubly, inasmuch as our knowledge keeps whispering alongside, “That is by him, a sign of his inner nature, his experience, his gift;” and, on the other hand, a different kind of knowledge tries to ascertain what the yield of the work itself is, what esteem it deserves aside from its author, what enrichment of learning it brings with it. As is self evident, these two kinds of reading and weighing interfere with one another. Even a conversation with a friend will produce good fruits of knowledge only when both people finally think solely of the matter at hand and forget that they are friends.
198
Sacrifice of rhythm. – Good writers change the rhythm of some sentences simply because they do not credit the ordinary reader with the ability to grasp the meter of the sentence in its first version. So they simplify it for the reader, by choosing better-known rhythms. – Such consideration for the contemporary reader’s lack of rhythmical ability has already elicited some sighs, for much has already been sacrificed to it. – Do good musicians experience the same thing?
199
The incomplete as artistic stimulant. – Incompleteness is often more effective than completeness, especially in eulogies. For such purposes, one needs precisely a stimulating incompleteness as an irrational element that simulates a sea for the listener’s imagination, and, like fog, hides its opposite shore, that is, the limitation of the subject being praised. If one mentions the well-known merits of a man, and is exhaustive and expansive in doing so, it always gives rise to the suspicion that these are his only merits. He who praises completely places himself above the man being praised; he seems to take him in at a glance. For that reason, completeness has a weakening effect.
200
Warning to writers and teachers. – He who has once written, and feels in himself the passion of writing, acquires from almost all he does and experiences only that which can be communicated through writing. He no longer thinks of himself but of the writer and his public: he desires insight, but not for his own private use. He who is a teacher is usually incapable of any longer doing anything for his own benefit, he always thinks of the benefit of his pupils, and he takes pleasure in knowledge of any kind only insofar as he can teach it. He regards himself in the end as a thoroughfare of knowledge and as a means and instrument in general, so that he has ceased to be serious with regard to himself. [Beyond Good and Evil, 63: “Whoever is a teacher through and through takes all things seriously only in relation to his students – even himself.”]
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Bad writers necessary. – There will always have to be bad writers, for they reflect the taste of undeveloped, immature age groups, who have needs as much as the mature do. If human life were longer, there would be more of the individuals who have matured than of the immature, or at least as many. But as it is, the great majority die too young, which means there are always many more undeveloped intellects with bad taste. Moreover, these people demand satisfaction of their needs with the greater vehemence of youth, and they force the existence of bad authors.
202
Too near and too far. – Often reader and author do not understand each other because the author knows his theme too well and finds it almost boring, so that he leaves out the examples he knows by the hundred; but the reader is strange to the matter and finds it poorly substantiated if the examples are withheld from him.
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A vanished preparation for art. – Of all the things the grammar school did, the most valuable was its training in Latin style, for this was an artistic exercise, while all other occupations were aimed solely at learning. To put the German essay first is barbarism, for we have no classical German style developed by a tradition of public eloquence; but if one wants to use the German essay to further the practice of thinking, it is certainly better if one ignores the style entirely for the time being, thus distinguishing between exercise in thinking and in describing. The latter should be concerned with multiple versions of a given content, and not with independent invention of the content. Description only, with the content given, was the assignment of Latin style, for which the old teachers possessed a long-since-lost refinement of hearing. Anyone who in the past learned to write well in a modern language owed it to this exercise (now one is obliged to go to school under the older French teachers); and still further: he gained a concept of the majesty and difficulty of form, and was prepared for art in general in the only possible right way: through practice.
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Dark and too bright side by side. – Writers who do not know how to express their thoughts clearly in general, will in particular prefer to select the strongest, most exaggerated terms and superlatives: this produces an effect as of torchlights along confusing forest paths.
205
Painting in writing. – When portraying important objects, one will do best to take the colors for the painting from the object itself, as would a chemist, and then to use them as would an artist, allowing the design to develop out of the distinctions and blendings of the colors. In this way, the painting acquires something of the thrilling innate quality that makes the object itself significant.
206
Books which teach one to dance. – There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were merely a mood or a whim, elicit a feeling of high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure.
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Uncompleted thoughts. – Just as youth and childhood have value in themselves (as much as the prime of life) and are not to be considered a mere transition or bridge, so too do unfinished thoughts have their own value. Thus we must not pester a poet with subtle interpretations, but should take pleasure in the uncertainty of his horizon, as if the road to various other thoughts were still open. We stand on the threshold; we wait as if a treasure were being dug up; it is as if a lucky trove of profundity were about to be found. The poet anticipates something of the thinker’s pleasure in finding a central thought and in doing so makes us covetous, so that we snatch at it. But it flutters past over our heads, showing the loveliest butterfly wings – and yet it slips away from us.
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The book become almost human. – Every writer is surprised anew when a book, as soon as it has separated from him, begins to take on a life of its own. He feels as if one part of an insect had been severed and were going its own way. Perhaps he almost forgets the book; perhaps he rises above the views set down in it; perhaps he no longer understands it and has lost those wings on which he soared when he devised that book. Meanwhile, it goes about finding its readers, kindles life, pleases, horrifies, fathers new works, becomes the soul of others’ resolutions and behavior – in short, it lives like a being fitted out with mind and soul and yet it is nevertheless not human. – The most fortunate author is one who is able to say as an old man that all he had of life-giving, invigorating, uplifting, enlightening thoughts and feelings still lives on in his writings, and that he himself is only the gray ash, while the fire has been rescued and carried forth everywhere. – If one considers, then, that a man’s every action, not only his books, in some way becomes the occasion for other actions, decisions, and thoughts; that everything which is happening is inextricably tied to everything which will happen; then one understands the real immortality, that of movement: what once has moved others is like an insect in amber, enclosed and immortalized in the general intertwining of all that exists.
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Joy in age. – The thinker or artist whose better self has fled into his works feels an almost malicious joy when he sees his body and spirit slowly broken. into and destroyed by time; it is as if he were in a corner, watching a thief at work on his safe, all the while knowing that it is empty and that all his treasures have been rescued.
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Quiet fruitfulness. – The born aristocrats of the spirit are not too zealous: their creations appear and fall from the tree on a quiet autumn evening unprecipitately, in due time, not quickly pushed aside by something new. The desire to create continually is vulgar and betrays jealousy, envy, ambition. If one is something one rally does not need to make anything – and one nonetheless does very much. There exists above the “productive” man a yet higher species.
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Achilles and Homer. – It is always as between Achilles and Homer: the one has the experience, the sensation, the other describes it. A true writer only bestows words on the emotions and experiences of others, he is an artist so as to divine much from the little he himself has felt. Artists are by no means men of great passion but they often pretend to be, in the unconscious feeling that their painted passions will seem more believable if their own life speaks for their experience in this field. One has only to let oneself go, to abandon self-control, to give rein to one’s anger or desires: at once all the world cries: how passionate he is! But deep-rooted passion, passion which gnaws at the individual and often consumes him, is a thing of some consequence: he who experiences such passion certainly does not describe it in dramas, music or novels. Artists are often unbridled individuals to the extent that they are not artists: but that is something else.
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Old doubts over the effect of art. – Are fear and pity really discharged by tragedy, as Aristotle has it [Poetics, 1449b; Politics, 1341b], so that the auditor goes home colder and more placid? Do ghost stories make one less fearful and superstitious? It is true in the case of certain physical events, the enjoyment of love for example, that with the satisfaction of a need an alleviation and temporary relaxation of the drive occurs. But fear and pity are not in this sense needs of definite organs which want to be relieved. And in the long run a drive is, through practice in satisfying it, intensified, its periodical alleviation notwithstanding. It is possible that in each individual instance fear and pity are mitigated and discharged: they could nonetheless grow greater as a whole through the tragic effect in general, and Plato could still be right when he says that through tragedy one becomes generally more fearful and emotional. The tragic poet himself would then necessarily acquire a gloomy, disheartened view of the world and a soft, susceptible, tearful soul, and it would likewise accord with Plato’s opinion of the matter if the tragic poet and with him whole city communities which take especial delight in him should degenerate to ever greater unbridledness and immoderation. – But what right has our age to offer an answer to Plato’s great question concerning the moral influence of art at all? Even if we possessed art – what influence of any kind does art exercise among us?
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Pleasure in nonsense. – How can man take pleasure in nonsense? For wherever in the world there is laughter this is the case; one can say, indeed, that almost everywhere there is happiness there is pleasure in nonsense. The overturning of experience into its opposite, of the purposive into the purposeless, of the necessary into the arbitrary, but in such a way that this event causes no harm and is imagined as occasioned by high spirits, delights us, for it momentarily liberates us from the constraint of the necessary, the purposive and that which corresponds to our experience which we usually see as our inexorable masters; we play and laugh when the expected (which usually makes us fearful and tense) discharges itself harmlessly. It is the pleasure of the slave at the Saturnalia.
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Ennoblement of reality. – Because men once took the aphrodisiacal drive to be a godhead, showing worshipful gratitude when they felt its effect, that emotion has in the course of time been permeated with higher kinds of ideas, and thus in fact greatly ennobled. By virtue of this idealizing art, some peoples have turned diseases into great beneficial forces of culture: the Greeks, for example, who in earlier centuries suffered from widespread nervous epidemics (similar to epilepsy and the St. Vitus Dance) and created the glorious prototype of the bacchante from them. – For the health of the Greeks was not at all robust; – their secret was to honor illness like a god, too, if only it were powerful.
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Music. – Music is, of and in itself, not so significant for our inner world, nor so profoundly exciting, that it can be said to count as the immediate language of feeling; but its primeval union with poetry has deposited so much symbolism into rhythmic movement, into the varying strength and volume of musical sounds, that we now suppose it to speak directly to the inner world and to come from the inner world. Dramatic music becomes possible only when the tonal art has conquered an enormous domain of symbolic means, through song, opera and a hundred experiments in tone-painting. “Absolute music” is either form in itself, at a primitive stage of music in which sounds made in tempo and at varying volume gave pleasure as such, or symbolism of form speaking to the understanding without poetry after both arts had been united over a long course of evolution and the musical form had finally become entirely enmeshed in threads of feeling and concepts. Men who have remained behind in the evolution of music can understand in a purely formalistic way the same piece of music as the more advanced understand wholly symbolically. In itself, no music is profound or significant, it does not speak of the “will” or of the “thing-in-itself”; the intellect could suppose such a thing only in an age which had conquered for musical symbolism the entire compass of the inner life. It was the intellect itself which first introduced this significance into sounds: just as, in the case of architecture, it likewise introduced a significance into the relations between lines and masses which is in itself quite unknown to the laws of mechanics.
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Gesture and language. – Imitation of gesture is older than language, and goes on involuntarily even now, when the language of gesture is universally suppressed, and the educated are taught to control their muscles. The imitation of gesture is so strong that we cannot watch a face in movement without the innervation of our own face (one can observe that feigned yawning will evoke natural yawning in the man who observes it). The imitated gesture led the imitator back to the sensation expressed by the gesture in the body or face of the one being imitated. This is how we learned to understand one another; this is how the child still learns to understand its mother. In general, painful sensations were probably also expressed by a gesture that in its turn caused pain (for example, tearing the hair, beating the breast, violent distortion and tensing of the facial muscles). Conversely, gestures of pleasure were themselves pleasurable and were therefore easily suited to the communication of understanding (laughing as a sign of being tickled, which is pleasurable, then served to express other pleasurable sensations). – As soon as men understood each other in gesture, a symbolism of gesture could evolve. I mean, one could agree on a language of tonal signs, in such a way that at first both tone and gesture (which were joined by tone symbolically) were produced, and later only the tone. – It seems that in earlier times, something must often have occurred much like what is now going on before our eyes and ears in the development of music; namely of dramatic music: while music without explanatory dance and miming (language of gesture) is at first empty noise, long habituation to that juxtaposition of music and gesture teaches the ear an immediate understanding of the tonal figures. Finally, the ear reaches a level of rapid understanding such that it no longer requires visible movement, and understands the composer without it. Then we are talking about absolute music, that is, music in which everything can be understood symbolically, without further aids.
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The desensualization of higher art. – Because the artistic development of modern music has forced the intellect to undergo an extraordinary training, our ears have become increasingly intellectual. Thus we can now endure much greater volume, much greater “noise,” because we are much better trained than our forefathers were to listen for the reason in it. All our senses have in fact become somewhat dulled because we always inquire after the reason, what “it means” and no longer what “it is.” Such a dullness is betrayed, for example, by the unqualified rule of tempered notes. For now those ears still able to make the finer distinctions, say, between C-sharp and D-flat are exceptions. In this regard, our ear has become coarsened. Furthermore, the ugly side of the world, originally inimical to the senses, has been won over for music. Its area of power to express the sublime, the frightful, and the mysterious, has thus been astonishingly extended. Our music makes things speak that before had no tongue. Similarly, some painters have made the eye more intellectual, and have gone far beyond what was previously called a joy in form and color. Here, too, that side of the world originally considered ugly has been conquered by artistic understanding. – What is the consequence of all this? The more the eye and ear are capable of thought, the more they reach that boundary line where they become unsensual. Joy is transferred to the brain; the sense organs themselves become dull and weak. More and more, the symbolic replaces that which exists – and so, as surely as on any other path, we arrive along this one at barbarism. For the present, it is still said that the world is uglier than ever, but it means a more beautiful world than ever existed. But the more the perfumed fragrance of meaning is dispersed and evaporated, the rarer will be those who can still perceive it. And the rest will stay put at ugliness, seeking to enjoy it directly; such an attempt is bound to fail. Thus we have in Germany a twofold trend in musical development: on the one side, a group of ten thousand with ever higher, more delicate pretensions, ever more attuned to “what it means”; and on the other side, the vast majority, which each year is becoming ever more incapable of understanding meaning, even in the form of sensual ugliness, and is therefore learning to reach out with increasing pleasure for that which is intrinsically ugly and repulsive, that is, the basely sensual.
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Stone is more stony than it used to be. – In general we no longer understand architecture; at least we do not do so nearly as well as we understand music. We have grown out of the symbolism of lines and figures, just as we have weaned ourselves from the sound effects of rhetoric, and no longer imbibe this kind of cultural mother’s milk from the first moment of our lives. Everything in a Greek or Christian building originally signified something, and indeed something of a higher order of things: this feeling of inexhaustible significance lay about the building like a magic veil. Beauty entered this system only incidentally, without essentially encroaching upon the fundamental sense of the uncanny and exalted, of consecration by magic and the proximity of the divine; at most beauty mitigated the dread – but this dread was everywhere the presupposition. – What is the beauty of a building to us today? The same thing as the beautiful face of a mindless woman: something masklike.
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Religious origin of modern music. – Soulful music originates in the Catholicism that was reestablished following the Council of Trent [Council of Trent (1545) : producing the reform of the Roman church as the Counter-Reformation.], through Palestrina [Giovanni Palestrina (1525-94): Italian composer of nearly a hundred masses who eventually entered the priesthood. In Pfitzner’s opera, Palestrina, he is represented as divinely inspired to write a mass that persuaded the Council of Trent not to ban polyphonic music. Nietzsche – influenced by Palestrina – composed his “Miserere” for five part choir a cappella (written in 1860 as a contribution for the “Germania Society” at Schulpforta).], who helped the newly awakened, ardent, deeply moved spirit to ring out; with Bach, it also originates later, in Protestantism, insofar as it had been deepened by the Pietists [Lutheran followers of Phillip Jakob Spencer (1635-1705), whose movement began in Frankfurt in about 1670 and accorded to the individual immediate experience of the divine.] and released from its originally dogmatic nature. For both origins, a prerequisite and necessary preliminary stage was the involvement with music as it existed in the Renaissance and the pre-Renaissance, especially that scholarly occupation with music, a fundamentally scientific pleasure in harmonic feats and polyphony. On the other side, soulful music also had to be preceded by opera, in which the layman made known his protest against cold and overly-learned music, and tried to restore a soul to Polyhymnia [the muse of vocal music]. – Without that deeply religious change of heart, without the fading sound of a most inwardly agitated soul, music would have remained learned or operatic; the spirit of the Counter-Reformation is the spirit of modern music (for the Pietism in Bach’s music is also a kind of Counter-Reformation). This is how deeply we are indebted to religious life. – Music was the Counter-Renaissance in the domain of art; the later painting of Murillo [Bartolomé Murillo (1618-82): Spanish painter.] belongs to it, perhaps the Baroque style, too (more so in any event than architecture of the Renaissance or of antiquity). And even now we might ask, whether our modern music, if it could move stones, would assemble them into an ancient architecture? I doubt it very much. For what governs in this music – emotion, pleasure in heightened, all-embracing moods, a wish to come alive at any cost, rapid change of feeling, a strong relief-effect of light and shade, juxtaposition of ecstasy and naïveté – all that ruled the plastic arts once before, and created new principles of style; but this was neither in antiquity nor in the time of the Renaissance.
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The Beyond in art. – It is not without profound sorrow that one admits to oneself that in their highest flights the artists of all ages have raised to heavenly transfiguration precisely those conceptions which we now recognize as false: they are the glorifiers of the religious and philosophical errors of mankind, and they could not have been so without believing in the absolute truth of these errors. If belief in such truth declines in general, if the rainbow-colors at the extreme limits of human knowledge and supposition grow pale, that species of art can never flourish again which, like the Divina Commedia, the pictures of Raphael, the frescoes of Michelangelo, the Gothic cathedrals, presupposes not only a cosmic but also a metaphysical significance in the objects of art. A moving tale will one day be told how there once existed such an art, such an artist’s faith.
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The revolution in poetry. – The stern constraint the French dramatists imposed upon themselves in regard to unity of action, of place and of time, to style, to construction of verse and sentence, to choice of words and ideas, was as vital a schooling as that of counterpoint and fugue in the development of modern music or as the Gorgian tropes in Greek rhetoric. To fetter oneself in this way can seem absurd; nonetheless there is no way of getting free of naturalization than that of first limiting oneself to what is most severe (perhaps also most capricious). Thus one gradually learns to walk with poise even upon narrow bridges spanning dizzying abysses and brings the highest suppleness of movement home as booty: as has been demonstrated to the eyes of everyone now living by the history of music. Here we see how the fetters grow looser step by step, until in the end it can appear as though they have been wholly thrown off: this appearance is the supreme outcome of a necessary evolution in art. No such gradual emergence out of self-imposed fetters has occurred in the case of modern poetry. Lessing made French form, that is to say the only modern artistic form, into a laughing-stock in Germany and pointed to Shakespeare, and thus we forewent the steady continuity of that unfettering and made a leap into naturalism – that is to say, back to the beginnings of art. Goethe attempted to rescue himself from this situation through his ability again and again to impose differing kinds of constraint upon himself; but even the most gifted can achieve only a continual experimentation once the thread of evolution has been broken. Schiller owed his relative firmness of form to having modeled himself on French tragedy, which, though he repudiated, he involuntarily respected, and maintained a degree of independence of Lessing (whose dramatic experiments he is known to have rejected). After Voltaire the French themselves were suddenly lacking in the great talents who could have led the evolution of tragedy out of constraint on to that appearance of freedom; later they too copied the Germans and made the leap into a kind of Rousseauesque state of nature in art and experimented. One only has to read Voltaire’s Mahomet from time to time to bring clearly before one’s soul what European culture has lost once and for all through this breach with tradition. Voltaire was the last great dramatist to subdue through Greek moderation a soul many-formed and equal to the mightiest thunderstorms of tragedy – he was able to do what no German has yet been able to do because the nature of the Frenchman is much more closely related to the Greek than is the nature of the German – just as he was also the last great writer to possess a Greek ear, Greek artistic conscientiousness, Greek charm and simplicity in the treatment of prose speech; just as he was, indeed, one of the last men able to unite in himself the highest freedom of spirit and an altogether unrevolutionary disposition without being inconsistent and cowardly. Since his time the modern spirit, with its restlessness, its hatred for bounds and moderation, has come to dominate in every domain, at first let loose by the fever of revolution and then, when assailed by fear and horror of itself, again laying constraints upon itself – but the constraints of logic, no longer those of artistic moderation. It is true that for a time unfettering enables us to enjoy the poetry of all peoples, all that has grown up in hidden places, the primitive, wild-blooming, strangely beautiful and gigantically irregular, from the folksong up to the “great barbarian” Shakespeare; we taste the joys of local color and costumes such as all artistic nations have hitherto been strangers to; we make abundant employment of the “barbaric advantages” of our age that Goethe urged against Schiller’s objections [Goethe to Schiller, June 27, 1797] so as to set the formlessness of his Faust in the most favorable light. But for how much longer? The inbreaking flood of poetry of all styles of all peoples must gradually sweep away all the soil in which a quiet, hidden growth would still have been possible; all poets must become experimenting imitators and foolhardy copiers, however great their powers may have been at first; the public, finally, which has forgotten how to see in the harnessing of the powers of representation, in the mastering of all the expedients of art and their organization, the actual artistic deed, must increasingly value artistic power for its own sake, indeed color for its own sake, the idea for its own sake, inspiration for its own sake, will consequently no longer enjoy the elements and terms of the work of art if not in isolation, and in the long run make the natural demand that the artist* must* also present them to it in isolation. One has indeed thrown off the “unreasonable” fetters of Franco-Hellenic art, but without noticing it has accustomed oneself to finding all fetters, all limitation unreasonable; and thus art moves towards its dissolution and in doing so ranges – which is extremely instructive, to be sure – through all the phases of its beginnings, its childhood, its imperfection, its former hazardous enterprises and extravagances: in going down to destruction it interprets its birth and becoming. One of the great upon whose instinct one can no doubt rely and whose theory lacked nothing except thirty years more practice – Lord Byron once said: “So far as poetry is concerned, the more I reflect on it, the more firmly am I convinced that we are all on the wrong path, every one of us. We all pursue a revolutionary system inwardly false – our own or the next generation will arrive at the same conviction.” [Byron to John Murray, Sept. 15 1817: “… With regard to poetry in general, I am convinced, the more I think of it, that he [Moore] and all of us – Scott, Southey, Wordsworth, Moore, Campbell, I, – are all in the wrong, one as much as another; that we are upon a wrong revolutionary poetical system, or systems, not worth a damn in itself, and from which none but Rogers and Crabbe are free; and that the present and next generations will finally be of this opinion….”] It is this same Byron who says: “I regard Shakespeare as the worst of all models, even though the most extraordinary of poets.” [Byron to Murray, July 14 1821: “Shakespeare’s the worst model, if a great poet.” (Nietzsche read these letters in a German edition of Byron, namely: Vermischte Schriften, Briefwechsel und Lebensgeschichte – “Assorted Writings, Letters and Life History” – translated by Ernst Ortlepp.)] And does the mature artistic insight that Goethe achieved in the second half of his life not at bottom say exactly the same thing? – that insight with which he gained such a start of a whole series of generations that one can assert that on the whole Goethe has not yet produced any effect at all and that his time is still to come? It is precisely because his nature held him for a long rime on the path of the poetical revolution, precisely because he savored most thoroughly all that had been discovered in the way of new inventions, views and expedients through that breach with tradition and as it were dug out from beneath the ruins of art, that his later transformation and conversion carries so much weight: it signifies that he felt the profoundest desire to regain the traditional ways of art and to bestow upon the ruins and colonnades of the temple that still remained their ancient wholeness and perfection at any rate with the eye of imagination if strength of arm should prove too weak to construct where such tremendous forces were needed even to destroy. Thus he lived in art as in recollection of true art: his writing had become an aid to recollection, to an understanding of ancient, long since vanished artistic epochs. His demands were, to be sure, having regard to the powers possessed by the modern age unfulfillable; the pain he felt at that fact was, however, amply counterbalanced by the joy of knowing that they once had been fulfilled and that we too can still participate in this fulfillment. Not individuals, but more or less idealized masks; no actuality, but an allegorical universalization; contemporary characters, local color evaporated almost to invisibility and rendered mythical; present-day sensibility and the problems of present-day society compressed to the simplest forms, divested of their stimulating, enthralling, pathological qualities and rendered ineffectual in every sense but the artistic; no novel material or characters, but the ancient and long-familiar continually reanimated and transformed: this is art as Goethe later understood it, as the Greeks and, yes, the French practiced it.
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What is left of art. – It is true that with certain metaphysical assumptions, art has a much greater value – if it is believed, for example, that one’s character is unchangeable and that the essence of the world is continually expressed in all characters and actions. Then the artist’s work becomes the image of what endures eternally. In our way of thinking, however, the artist can give his image validity only for a time, because man as a whole has evolved and is changeable, . and not even an individual is fixed or enduring. – The same is true of another metaphysical assumption: were our visible world only appearance, as metaphysicians assume, then art would come rather close to the real world; for there would be much similarity between the world of appearance and the artist’s world of dream images; the remaining difference would actually enhance the meaning of art rather than the meaning of nature, because art would portray the symmetry, the types and models of nature. – But such assumptions are wrong: what place remains for art, then, after this knowledge? Above all, for thousands of years, it has taught us to see every form of life with interest and joy, and to develop our sensibility so that we finally call out, “However it may be, life is good.” [Goethe, Der Bräutigam: “Wie es auch sei, das Leben, es ist gut.”] This teaching of art-to have joy in existence and to regard human life as a part of nature, without being moved too violently, as something that developed through laws – this teaching has taken root in us; it now comes to light again as an all-powerful need for knowledge. We could give art up, but in doing so we would not forfeit what it has taught us to do. Similarly, we have given up religion, but not the emotional intensification and exaltation it led to. As plastic art and music are the standard for the wealth of feeling really earned and won through religion, so the intense and manifold joy in life, which art implants in us, would still demand satisfaction were art to disappear. The scientific man is a further development of the artistic man.
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Evening twilight of art. – Just as in an old age one remembers one’s youth and celebrates festivals of remembrance, so will mankind soon stand in relation to art: it will be a moving recollection of the joys of youth. Perhaps art has never before been comprehended so profoundly or with so much feeling as it is now, when the magic of death seems to play around it. Recall that Greek city in south Italy which on one day of the year continued to celebrate their Greek festival and did so with tears and sadness at the fact that foreign barbarism was triumphing more and more over the customs they had brought with them; it is to be doubted whether the Hellenic has ever been so greatly savored, or its golden nectar imbibed with so much relish, as it was among these declining Hellenes. The artist will soon be regarded as a glorious relic, and we shall bestow upon him, as a marvelous stranger upon whose strength and beauty the happiness of former ages depended, honors such as we do not grant to others of our own kind. The best in us has perhaps been inherited from the sensibilities of earlier ages to which we hardly any longer have access by direct paths; the sun has already set, but the sky of our life still glows with its light, even though we no longer see it.
Fifth Division - Tokens of Higher and Lower Culture
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Ennoblement through degeneration. – History teaches that a race of people is best preserved where the greater number hold one common spirit in consequence of the similarity of their accustomed and indisputable principles: in consequence, therefore, of their common faith. Thus strength is afforded by good and thorough customs, thus is learnt the subjection of the individual, and strenuousness of character becomes a birth gift and afterwards is fostered as a habit. The danger to these communities founded on individuals of strong and similar character is that gradually increasing stupidity through transmission, which follows all stability like its shadow. It is on the more unrestricted, more uncertain and morally weaker individuals that depends the *spiritual progress *of such communities, it is they who attempt all that is new and manifold. Numbers of these perish on account of their weakness, without having achieved any specially visible effect; but generally, particularly when they have descendants, they flare up and from time to time inflict a wound on the stable element of the community. Precisely in this sore and weakened place the community is *inoculated *with something new; but its general strength must be great enough to absorb and assimilate this new thing into its blood. Deviating natures are of the utmost importance wherever there is to be progress. Every wholesale progress must be preceded by a partial weakening. The strongest natures *preserve *the type, the weaker ones help it to evolve. – * *Something similar happens in the case of individuals; a deterioration, a mutilation, even a vice and, above all, a physical or moral loss is seldom without its advantage. For instance, a sickly man in the midst of a warlike and restless race will perhaps have more chance of being alone and thereby growing quieter and wiser, the one-eyed man will possess one stronger eye, the blind man will have a deeper inward sight and will certainly have a keener sense of hearing. In so far it appears to me that the famous struggle for existence is not the only point of view from which an explanation can be given of the progress or strengthening of an individual or a race. Rather must two different things converge: firstly, the multiplying of stable strength through mental binding in faith and common feeling; secondly, the possibility of attaining to higher aims, through the fact that there are deviating natures and, in consequence, partial weakening and wounding of the stable strength; it is precisely the weaker nature, as the more delicate and free, that makes all progress at all possible. A people that is crumbling and weak in any one part, but as a whole still strong and healthy, is able to absorb the infection of what is new and incorporate it to its advantage. The task of education in a single individual is this: to plant him so firmly and surely that, as a whole, he can no longer be diverted from his path. Then, however, the educator must wound him, or else make use of the wounds which fate inflicts, and when pain and need have thus arisen, something new and noble can be inoculated into the wounded places. – With regard to the state, Machiavelli says that, “the form of government is of very small importance, although half-educated people think otherwise. The great goal of statecraft should be duration, which outweighs all else, inasmuch as it is more valuable than liberty.” It is only with securely founded and guaranteed duration that continual development and ennobling inoculation are at all possible. As a rule, however, authority, the dangerous companion of all duration, will rise in opposition to this.
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Free spirit a relative concept. – We call that man a free spirit who thinks otherwise than is expected of him in consideration of his origin, surroundings, position, and office, or by reason of the prevailing contemporary views. He is the exception, fettered spirits are the rule; these latter reproach him, saying that his free principles either have their origin in a desire to be remarkable or else cause free actions to be inferred – that is to say, actions which are not compatible with fettered morality. Sometimes it is also said that the cause of such and such free principles may be traced to mental perversity and extravagance; but only malice speaks thus, nor does it believe what it says, but wishes thereby to do an injury, for the free spirit usually bears the proof of his greater goodness and keenness of intellect written in his face so plainly that the fettered spirits understand it well enough. But the two other derivations of free spiritedness are honestly intended; as a matter of fact, many free spirits are created in one or other of these ways. For this reason, however, the tenets to which they attain in this manner might be truer and more reliable than those of the fettered spirits. In the knowledge of truth, what really matters is whether one possesses it, not the impulse under which it was sought, the way* *in which it was found. If the free spirits are right then the fettered spirits are wrong, and it is a matter of indifference whether the former have reached truth through immorality or the latter hitherto retained hold of untruths through morality. – Moreover, it is not essential to the free spirit that he should hold more correct views, but that he should have liberated himself from what was customary, be it successfully or disastrously. As a rule, however, he will have truth, or at least the spirit of truth-investigation, on his side; he demands reasons, the others demand faith.
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The origin of faith. – The fettered spirit does not take up his position from conviction, but from habit; he is a Christian, for instance, not because he had a comprehension of different creeds and could take his choice; he is an Englishman, not because he decided for England, but he found Christianity and England ready-made and accepted them without any reason, just as one who is born in a wine-country becomes a wine-drinker. Later on, perhaps, as he was a Christian and an Englishman, he discovered a few reasons in favor of his habit; these reasons may be upset, but he is not therefore upset in his whole position. For instance, let a fettered spirit be obliged to bring forward his reasons against bigamy and then it will be seen whether his holy zeal in favor of monogamy is based upon reason or upon custom. The adoption of guiding principles without reasons is called faith.
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*Reasons drawn *a posteriori on the basis of consequences. – All states and orders of society, professions, matrimony, education, law : all these find strength and duration only in the faith which the fettered spirits repose in them – that is, in the absence of reasons, or at least in the averting of inquiries as to reasons. The restricted spirits do not willingly acknowledge this, and feel that it is a pudendum. Christianity, however, which was very simple in its intellectual ideas, remarked nothing of this pudendum, required faith and nothing but faith, and passionately repulsed the demand for reasons; it pointed to the success of faith: “You will soon feel the advantages of faith,” it suggested, “and through faith shall ye be saved.” As an actual fact, the state pursues the same course, and every father brings up his son in the same way: “Only believe this,” he says, “and you will soon feel the good it does.” This implies, however, that the truth of an opinion is proved by its personal utility; the wholesomeness of a doctrine must be a guarantee for its intellectual surety and solidity. It is exactly as if an accused person in a court of law were to say, “My counsel speaks the whole truth, for only see what is the result of his speech: I shall be acquitted.” – Because the fettered spirits retain their principles on account of their utility, they suppose that the free spirit also seeks his own advantage in his views and only holds that to be true which is profitable to him. But as he appears to find profitable just the contrary of that which his compatriots or equals find profitable, these latter assume that his principles are dangerous to them; they say or feel, “He must not be right, for he is injurious to us.”
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The good, strong character. – The restriction of views, which habit has made instinct, leads to what is called strength of character. When any one acts from few but always from the same motives, his actions acquire great energy; if these actions accord with the principles of the fettered spirits they are recognized, and they produce, moreover, in those who perform them the sensation of a good conscience. Few motives, energetic action, and a good conscience compose what is called strength of character. The man of strong character lacks a knowledge of the many possibilities and directions of action; his intellect is fettered and restricted, because in a given case it shows him, perhaps, only two possibilities; between these two he must now of necessity choose, in accordance with his whole nature, and he does this easily and quickly because he has not to choose between fifty possibilities. The educating surroundings aim at fettering every individual, by always placing before him the smallest number of possibilities. The individual is always treated by his educators as if he were, indeed, something new, but should become a duplicate. If he makes his first appearance as something unknown, unprecedented, he must be turned into something known and precedented. In a child, the familiar manifestation of restriction is called a good character; in placing itself on the side of the fettered spirits the child first discloses its awakening common feeling; with this foundation of common sentiment, he will eventually become useful to his state or rank.
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The standards and values of the fettered spirits. – There are four species of things concerning which the restricted spirits say they are in the right. Firstly: all things that last are right; secondly: all things that are not burdens to us are right; thirdly: all things that are advantageous for us are right; fourthly: all things for which we have made sacrifices are right. The last sentence, for instance, explains why a war that was begun in opposition to popular feeling is carried on with enthusiasm directly after a sacrifice has been made for it. The free spirits, who bring their case before the forum of the fettered spirits, must prove that free spirits always existed, that free spiritedness is therefore enduring, that it will not become a burden, and, finally, that on the whole they are an advantage to the fettered spirits. It is because they cannot convince the restricted spirits on this last point that they profit nothing by having proved the first and second propositions.
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Esprit fort. – Compared with him who has tradition on his side and requires no reasons for his actions, the free spirit is always weak, especially in action; for he is acquainted with too many motives and points of view, and has, therefore, an uncertain and unpracticed hand. What means exist of nonetheless making him relatively strong, so that he will, at least, manage to survive, and will not perish ineffectually? What is the source of the strong spirit (esprit fort)?* *This is especially the question as to the production of genius. Whence comes the energy, the unbending strength, the endurance with which the one, in opposition to accepted ideas, endeavors to obtain an entirely individual knowledge of the world?
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The origin of genius. – The ingenuity with which a prisoner seeks the means of freedom, the most cold-blooded and patient employment of every smallest advantage, can teach us of what tools nature sometimes makes use in order to produce genius – a word which I beg will be understood without any mythological and religious flavor; she, nature, begins it in a dungeon and excites to the utmost its desire to free itself. – Or to give another picture: some one who has completely lost his way* *in a wood, but who with unusual energy strives to reach the open in one direction or another, will sometimes discover a new path which nobody knew previously – thus arise geniuses, who are credited with originality. – It has already been said that mutilation, crippling, or the loss of some important organ, is frequently the cause of the unusual development of another organ, because this one has to fulfill its own and also another function. This explains the source of many a brilliant talent. – These general remarks on the origin of genius may be applied to the special case, the origin of the perfect free spirit.
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Conjecture as to the origin of free-spiritism. – Just as the glaciers increase when in equatorial regions the sun shines upon the seas with greater force than hitherto, so may a very strong and spreading free-spiritism be a proof that somewhere or other the force of feeling has grown extraordinarily.
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The voice of history. – In general, history appears* *to teach the following about the production of genius: it ill-treats and torments mankind – calls to the passions of envy, hatred, and rivalry – drives them to desperation, people against people, throughout whole centuries! Then, perhaps, like a stray spark from the terrible energy thereby aroused, there flames up suddenly the light of genius; the will, like a horse maddened by the rider’s spur, thereupon breaks out and leaps over into another domain. – He who could attain to a comprehension of the production of genius, and desires to carry out practically the manner in which nature usually goes to work, would have to be just as evil and regardless as nature itself. – But perhaps we have not heard rightly.
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Value of the middle of the way. – Perhaps the engendering of genius is reserved to only a limited period of humanity. For one cannot expect the future of humanity to hold at the same time everything that only very particular conditions in some past time could produce – the amazing effects of religious feeling, for example. This has had its time, and many very good things can never grow again because they could grow from it alone. Thus there will never again be a religiously defined horizon to life and culture. Perhaps even the type of the saint is possible only along with a certain intellectual narrowness, which is apparently gone forever. And so, perhaps, has the highest level of intelligence been reserved for one single era of humanity; it came forth (and is coming forth, for we still live in this era) when, by way of exception, an extraordinary, long-accumulated energy of the will was diverted through inheritance to spiritual goals. This highest level will end when such wildness and energy are no longer cultivated. Perhaps mankind, in the middle of its path, the middle period of its existence, is nearer to its actual goal than it will be at the end. The energies that condition art, for example, could very well die out; pleasure in lying, in vagueness, in symbolism, in intoxication, in ecstasy, could come into disrepute. Indeed, once life is structured in a perfect state, then the present will no longer offer any theme for poetry whatsoever, and only backward people would still demand poetic unreality. They would then look back longingly to the times of the imperfect state, the half-barbaric society, to our times.
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Genius incompatible with the ideal state. – Socialists desire to produce a good life for the greatest number. If the enduring homeland of this good life, the perfect state, were really achieved, it would destroy the earth from which a man of great intellect, or any powerful individual grows: I mean great energy. When this state is achieved, mankind would have become too feeble to produce genius any longer. Should we not therefore wish that life retain its violent character, and that wild strengths and energies be called forth over and over again? Now, a warm, sympathetic heart desires precisely the elimination of that violent and wild character, and the warmest heart one can imagine would yearn for it most passionately; though this same passion would have had its fire, its warmth, even its existence from that wild and violent character of life. The warmest heart, then, desires the elimination of its rationale and its own destruction; that is, it wants something illogical; it is not intelligent. The highest intelligence and the warmest heart cannot coexist in one person, and a wise man who passes judgment on life also places himself above kindness, considering it only as something to be evaluated along with everything else in the sum of life. The wise man must oppose the extravagant wishes of unintelligent kindness, because he cares about the survival of his type, and the eventual genesis of the highest intellect. At least he will not further the establishment of the “perfect state,” if there is room there only for feeble individuals. Christ, on the other hand, whom we like to imagine as having the warmest of hearts, furthered men’s stupidity, took the side of the intellectually weak, and kept the greatest intellect from being produced: and this was consistent. We can predict that his opposite, the absolute wise man, will just as necessarily prevent the production of a Christ. – The state is a clever institution for protecting individuals from one another; if one goes too far in ennobling it, the individual is ultimately weakened by it, even dissolved – and thus the original purpose of the state is most thoroughly thwarted.
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The zones of culture. – For the sake of comparison, one can say that cultural eras correspond to various climactic belts, only that the former follow one another and do not, like the geographical zones, lie next to one another. In comparison with the temperate cultural zone, which it is our duty to enter, the past gives, on the whole, the impression of a tropical climate. Violent contrasts; abrupt alternation of day and night; heat and magnificent colors; reverence for everything sudden, mysterious, frightful; rapid onset of oncoming storms; everywhere the wasteful overflowing of nature’s horns of plenty; and on the other hand, in our culture, a light, though not brilliant sky; pure, rather unchanging air; briskness, even cold occasionally: thus the two zones contrast with one another. When we see how the most raging passions are overcome and broken with uncanny power by metaphysical ideas, we feel as if wild tigers in the tropics were being crushed before our eyes in the coils of monstrous snakes. Such things do not happen in our spiritual climate; our fantasy is temperate; even in dreams, we do not experience what earlier peoples saw when awake. But may we not be happy about this change, even admitting that artists are seriously impaired by the disappearance of tropical culture and find us nonartists a bit too sober? To this extent, artists are probably right in denying “progress,” for it can indeed at least be doubted that the last three thousand years show a course of progress in the arts; likewise, a metaphysical philosopher like Schopenhauer will have no cause to acknowledge progress, if he surveys the last four thousand years with reference to metaphysical philosophy and religion. – But for us, the very existence of the temperate cultural zone counts as progress.
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Renaissance and Reformation. – The Italian Renaissance contained within itself all the positive forces to which we owe modern culture: namely, liberation of thought, disdain for authority, the triumph of education over the arrogance of lineage, enthusiasm for science and men’s scientific past, the unshackling of the individual, an ardor for veracity and aversion to appearance and mere effect (which ardor blazed forth in a whole abundance of artistic natures who, with the highest moral purity, demanded perfection in their works and nothing but perfection). Yes, the Renaissance had positive forces which up to now have not yet again become so powerful in our modern culture. Despite all its flaws and vices, it was the Golden Age of this millennium. By contrast, the German Reformation stands out as an energetic protest of backward minds who had not yet had their fill of the medieval world view and perceived the signs of its dissolution – the extraordinary shallowness and externalization of religious life – not with appropriate rejoicing, but with deep displeasure. With their northern strength and obstinacy, they set men back, forced the Counter-Reformation, that is, a defensive Catholic Christianity, with the violence of a state of siege, delaying the complete awakening and rule of the sciences for two or three centuries, as well as making impossible, perhaps forever, the complete fusion of the ancient and modern spirit. The great task of the Renaissance could not be carried to its completion; this was hindered by the protest of the now backward German character (which in the Middle Ages had had enough sense to redeem itself by climbing over the Alps again and again). The fact that Luther survived at that time, and that his protest gathered strength, lay in the coincidence of an extraordinary political configuration: the Emperor protected him in order to use his innovation to apply pressure against the Pope, and likewise the Pope secretly favored him, in order to use the imperial Protestant princes as a counterweight against the Emperor. Without this strange concert of intent, Luther would have been burned like Huss [John Huss (1369-1415), religious teacher condemned for heresy and burned at Constance in 1415.] – and the dawn of the Enlightenment would have risen a bit earlier, perhaps, and with a splendor more beautiful than we can now imagine.
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Justice towards the evolving god. – If the whole history of culture looks like a confusion of ideas, evil and noble, true and false, and one gets almost seasick at the sight of these waves, then one understands what comfort lies in the idea of an evolving God; he reveals himself more and more in the metamorphoses and destinies of mankind; all is not blind mechanism, senseless, purposeless interplay of forces. The deification of evolution is a metaphysical outlook – as from a lighthouse along the sea of history – which gave comfort to a generation of scholars who had historicized too much. One must not become angry about it, however erroneous their idea may be. Only someone who, like Schopenhauer, denies development also feels nothing of the misery of those historical waves; and because he neither knows nor feels anything of that evolving God or the need to accept him, he can fairly let out his scorn.
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Fruit out of season. – Every better future that one wishes for mankind is also necessarily a worse future in some respects, for it is fanatical to believe that a new, higher stage of mankind would unite all the merits of earlier stages and would, for example, also have to produce the highest form of art. Rather, each season has its own merits and charms, and excludes those of the other seasons. Whatever has grown out of religion, and near it, cannot grow again, once religion has been destroyed. At the most, late-sprouting shoots can mislead us to delusions about it, as does the intermittent memory of the old art; a condition that may well betray the feeling of loss and privation, but is no proof of any force from which a new art could be born.
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The world’s increasing severity. – The higher the culture of a man rises, the greater the number of topics are removed from joking or mockery. Voltaire was heartily grateful to heaven for inventing marriage and the church, for taking such good care for our merriment. But he and his time, and the sixteenth century before him, mocked these topics to their limit; any joke about them today comes too late and especially much too cheap to tempt buyers. Now we inquire after causes; this is the age of seriousness. Who still cares to see the lighter side of the differences between reality and pretentious appearance, between that which man is and that which he wants to present? We feel these contrasts very differently when we seek their reasons. The more thoroughly a person understands life, the less he will mock, though in the end he might still mock the “thoroughness of his understanding.”
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Genius of culture. – If one were to dream up a genius of culture, what would be his nature? He uses lies, power, the most inconsiderate self-interest so confidently as his tools that he could only be called an evil, demonic creature; but his goals, which shine through here and there, are great and good. He is a centaur, half animal, half human, and even has angel’s wings at his head.
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Miraculous education. – Interest in education will gain great strength only at the moment when belief in a God and his loving care is given up, just as the art of healing could blossom only when belief in miraculous cures had ceased. But to date, all the world still believes in education as a miracle: one saw the most productive, mightiest men grow out of great disorder, confused goals, unfavorable circumstances: how could this properly happen? – Now we will look more closely, test more carefully, in these cases, too. No one will ever discover miracles. Under equal condition, many men continually perish, but in return, the single saved individual is usually the stronger, because he endured these unfavorable circumstances thanks to his indestructible innate strength, which he developed and augmented: this explains the miracle. An education that no longer believes in miracles will have to pay attention to three things: first, how much energy is inherited? Second, how can other new energy still be kindled? Third, how can the individual be adapted to those very diverse demands of culture, without their disturbing him and dissipating his uniqueness? In short, how can the individual be integrated into the counterpoint of private and public culture; how can he both sing the melody and simultaneously make it the accompaniment?
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The future of the physician. – There is no profession today that would permit such high aspirations as that of the physician, particularly since spirit physicians, the so-called spiritual advisers, may no longer practice their conjuring arts to public applause, and a cultured man avoids them. A physician’s highest intellectual development is no longer reached when he knows the best new methods, and is well practiced in them, able to make those swift deductions from effects to causes, for which diagnosticians are famed; he must in addition have an eloquence adaptable to each individual and capable of drawing the heart out of his body; a masculinity at whose sight even despondency (the worm-eaten spot in all ill people) is dispelled; a diplomat’s smoothness in mediating between those who need joy for their cure and those who must (and can) create joy for reasons of health; the subtlety of a police agent or lawyer in understanding the secrets of a soul without betraying them – in short, a good physician today needs all the tricks and privileges of all the other professions; thus armed, he is then in a position to become a benefactor to all of society, by increasing good works, spiritual joy and productivity; by warding off bad thoughts or intentions, and villainy (whose repulsive source is so often the belly); by producing a spiritual-physical aristocracy (as marriage broker and marriage censor); by well-meaning amputation of all so-called spiritual torments and pangs of conscience. Thus from a “medicine man” he will become a savior, and yet need neither to work miracles nor to be crucified.
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In the proximity of madness. – The sum of feelings, knowledge, experiences, that is, the whole burden of culture, has grown so great that the general danger is an overstimulation of nervous and mental powers; the cultivated classes of European countries are altogether neurotic, and almost every one of their great families has, in one of its branches, moved close to madness. It is true that we can now approach health in all kinds of ways, but in the main we still need a decrease of emotional tension, of the oppressive cultural burden, a decrease that, even if it must be bought with serious losses, does give us room for the great hope of a new Renaissance. We owe to Christianity, to the philosophers, poets, and musicians, a superabundance of deeply agitated feelings; to keep these from engulfing us, we must conjure up the spirit of science, which makes us somewhat colder and more skeptical, on the whole, and cools down particularly the hot flow of belief in ultimate truths, which Christianity, especially, has made so wild.
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Bell-founding of culture. – Culture came into being like a bell inside a mold of cruder, more common material, a mold of untruth, violence, an unbounded aggrandizement of all distinct egos, and all distinct peoples. Is it now time to remove this mold? Has the fluid solidified? Have the good, useful drives, the habits of nobler hearts, become so sure and universal that there is no longer any need to depend on metaphysics and the errors of religion, on harsh and violent acts, as the most powerful bond between man and man, people and people? – No sign from a god can help us any longer to answer this question: our own insight must decide. The earthly government of man as a whole must be taken into man’s own hands; his “omniscience” must watch with a sharp eye over the future fate of culture.
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The cyclops of culture. – When we behold those deeply-furrowed hollows in which glaciers have lain, we think it hardly possible that a time will come when a wooded, grassy valley, watered by streams, will spread itself out upon the same spot. So it is, too, in the history of mankind: the most savage forces beat a path, and are mainly destructive; but their work was nonetheless necessary, in order that later a gentler civilization might raise its house. The frightful energies – those which are called evil – are the cyclopean architects and road-makers of humanity.
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Circular orbit of humanity. – Perhaps the whole human race is only a temporally limited, developmental phase of a certain species of animal, so that man evolved from the ape and will evolve back to the ape again, while no one will be there to take any interest in this strange end of the comedy. Just as with the fall of Roman culture, and its most important cause, the spread of Christianity, there was a general increase of loathsomeness in man within the Roman empire, so the eventual fall of the general world culture might also cause men to be much more loathsome and finally animalistic, to the point of being apelike. – Precisely because we are able to keep this perspective in mind, we may be in a position to protect the future from such an end.
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Words of consolation of a progress grown desperate. – Our age gives the impression of being an interim; the old views on life, the old cultures are still evident in part, the new ones not yet sure and habitual, and therefore lacking in unity and consistency. It looks as if everything were becoming chaotic, the old dying out, the new not worth much and growing ever weaker. But this is what happens to the soldier who learns to march; for a time he is more uncertain and clumsy than ever because his muscles move, now to the old system, now to the new, and neither has yet decisively claimed the victory. We waver, but we must not become anxious about it, or surrender what has been newly won. Besides, we cannot go back to the old system; we have burned our bridges behind us. All that remains is to be brave, whatever may result. – Let us step forward, let’s get going! Perhaps our behavior will indeed look like progress; but if it does not, may we take consolation in the words of Frederick the Great: “Ah, mon cher Sulzer, vous ne connaissez pas assez cette race maudite, à laquelle nous appartenons.” [“Ah, my dear Sulzer, you have too little understanding of this wicked race to which we belong.”]
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Suffering from the cultural past. – Whoever has clearly understood the problem of culture suffers from a feeling similar to that of a man who has inherited riches that were acquired through illegal means, or a prince who rules because of his forefathers’ atrocities. He thinks of his origin with sadness, and is often ashamed, often irritable. The whole sum of the strength, will to life, and joy that he expends on his estate is often balanced by a deep weariness: he cannot forget his origin. He regards the future with melancholy: he knows in advance that his descendants will suffer from the past as he does.
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Manners. – Good manners disappear proportionately as the influence of the court and a self-contained aristocracy declines. This decrease can be observed clearly from decade to decade, if one has an eye for public events, which visibly become more and more vulgar. No one today understands how to pay homage or flatter with wit; this leads to the ludicrous fact that in cases where one must do homage (to a great statesman or artist, for example), one borrows the language of deepest feeling, of loyal and honorable decency-out of embarrassment and a lack of wit and grace. So men’s public, ceremonious encounters seem ever more clumsy, but more tender and honorable, without being so. – But will manners keep going downhill? I think, rather, that manners are going in a deep curve, and that we are nearing its low point. Now we inherit manners shaped by earlier conditions, and they are passed on and learned ever less thoroughly. But once society has become more certain of its intentions and principles, these will have a shaping effect, and there will be social manners, gestures, and expressions that must appear as necessary and simply natural as these intentions and principles are. Better division of time and labor; gymnastic exercise become the companion of every pleasant leisure hour; increased and more rigorous contemplation, which gives cleverness and suppleness even to the body – all this will come with it. – As this point one might, of course, think, somewhat scornfully, of our scholars: do they, who claim to be antecedents of the new culture, distinguish themselves by superior manners? Such is not the case, though their spirit may be willing enough: their flesh is weak. The past is still too strong in their muscles; they still stand in an unfree position, half secular clergymen, half the dependent educators of the upper classes; in addition, the pedantry of science and out-of-date, mindless methods have made them crippled and lifeless. Thus they are, bodily at least, and often three-quarters spiritually, too, still courtiers of an old, even senile culture, and, as such, senile themselves; the new spirit, which occasionally rumbles about in these old shells, serves for the meanwhile only to make them more uncertain and anxious. They are haunted by ghosts of the past, as well as ghosts of the future; no wonder that they neither look their best, nor act in the most obliging way.
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Future of science. – To the man who works and searches in it, science gives much pleasure; to the man who learns its results, very little. But since all important scientific truths must eventually become everyday and commonplace, even this small amount of pleasure ceases; just as we have long ago ceased to enjoy learning the admirable multiplication tables. Now, if science produces ever less joy in itself and takes ever greater joy in casting suspicion on the comforts of metaphysics, religion, and art, then the greatest source of pleasure, to which mankind owes almost its whole humanity, is impoverished. Therefore a higher culture must give man a double brain, two brain chambers, as it were, one to experience science, and one to experience nonscience. Lying next to one another, without confusion, separable, self-contained: our health demands this. In the one domain lies the source of strength, in the other the regulator. Illusions, biases, passions must give heat; with the help of scientific knowledge, the pernicious and dangerous consequences of overheating must be prevented. – If this demand made by higher culture is not satisfied, we can almost certainly predict the further course of human development: interest in truth will cease, the less it gives pleasure; illusion, error, and fantasies, because they are linked with pleasure, will reconquer their former territory step by step; the ruin of the sciences and relapse into barbarism follow next. Mankind will have to begin to weave its cloth from the beginning again, after having, like Penelope, destroyed it in the night. But who will guarantee that we will keep finding the strength to do so?
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Pleasure in knowledge. – Why is knowledge, the element of researchers and philosophers, linked to pleasure? First and foremost, because by it we gain awareness of our power – the same reason that gymnastic exercises are pleasurable even without spectators. Second, because, as we gain knowledge, we surpass older ideas and their representatives, become victors, or at least believe ourselves to be. Third, because any new knowledge, however small, makes us feel superior to everyone and unique in understanding this matter correctly. These three reasons for pleasure are the most important, but depending on the nature of the knower, there are still many secondary reasons. – At one unlikely place, my expostulation about Schopenhauer gives a not inconsiderable catalogue of these reasons, a tabulation to satisfy every experienced servant of knowledge, even if he would want to wish away the hint of irony that seems to lie on the pages. For if it is true that “a number of very human drives and urges have to be mixed together” for a scholar to come into being, that he is, to be sure, of a very noble metal, but not a pure one, and “consists of a complicated weave of very different impulses and stimulations,” then the same is also true of the origin and nature of the artist, philosopher, or moral genius – and whatever glorified great names there are in that essay. With regard to origin, everything human deserves ironic reflection: that is why there is such an excess of irony in the world.
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Loyalty as proof of soundness. – It is a perfect sign that a theory is good if, for forty years, its creator never comes to distrust it; but I contend that there has never been a philosopher who did not finally look down on the philosophy he invented in his youth with disdain, or at least suspicion. – But perhaps he did not speak about his change of mind publicly, for reasons of ambition or – as is more probable in nobler natures – out of sensitive consideration for his adherents.
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Increasing interest. – In the course of a man’s higher education, everything becomes interesting; he knows how to find the instructive side of a matter quickly, and to indicate the point where it can fill up a hole in his thinking, or confirm an idea. In the process, boredom vanishes more and more, as does excessive emotional excitability. Ultimately, he goes among men like a natural scientist among plants, and perceives his own self simply as a phenomenon that intensely stimulates his drive for knowledge.
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Superstition in simultaneity. – Simultaneous things are thought to be connected. Our relative dies far away, at the same time we dream about him-there you are! But countless relatives die without our dreaming about them. It is as with shipwrecked people who make vows: later, in the temple, one does not see the votive tablets of those who perished. – A man dies; an owl screeches; a clock stops; all in the same nocturnal hour: shouldn’t there be a connection there? This idea presumes a kind of intimacy with nature that flatters man. – Such superstition is found again in refined form in historians and painters of culture. They tend to have a kind of hydrophobia towards all senseless juxtapositions, even though these are so abundant in the life of individuals, and of peoples.
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Science furthers ability, not knowledge. – The value of having for a time rigorously pursued a rigorous science does not rest especially in its results: for in relation to the sea of worthy knowledge, these will be but a negligible little drop. But it brings forth an increase of energy, of deductive ability, of persistence; one has learned to gain one’s purpose purposefully. To this extent, in respect to all one does later, it is very valuable to have once been a scientific man.
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Youthful charm of science. – The search for truth still possesses the charm of standing everywhere in stark contrast to gray and tedious error; but this charm is in continual decline. Now, to be sure, we are still living in truth’s youthful era and are accustomed to pursue truth as though she were a beautiful girl; but what of the day when she shall have become a scowling old woman? In almost every science the fundamental insight is either discovered in its earliest years or it continues to be sought; how different a charm it then exerts from when everything essential has been discovered and only a pitiful late remainder is left for the seeker to cull (a sensation one can experience in certain historical disciplines).
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The statue of humanity. – The cultural genius acts like Cellini [Benvenuto Cellini (1500-71), Italian sculptor and goldsmith.], when he made the cast of his statue of Perseus: the liquified mass seemed to be insufficient, but he was determined to produce enough: so he threw into it keys and plates and whatever else came to hand. And just so does that genius throw in errors, vices, hopes, delusions, and other things of baser as well as nobler metal, for the statue of humanity must emerge and be completed; what does it matter if, here and there, inferior material is employed?
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A masculine culture. – Greek culture of the classical era is a masculine culture. As for women, Pericles, in his funeral oration, says everything with the words: “They are at their best when men speak about them as little as possible.” – The erotic relationship of men to youths was, on a level which we cannot grasp, the necessary, sole prerequisite of all male education (more or less in the way love affairs and marriage were for a long time the only way to bring about the higher education of women); the whole idealism of strength of the Greek character was thrown into that relationship, and the treatment of young people has probably never again been so aware, loving, so thoroughly geared to their excellence (virtus), as it was in the sixth and fifth centuries – in accordance with Hölderlin’s beautiful line, “the mortal gives of his best when loving” [Friedrich Holderlin (1770-1843): “denn liebend giebt der Sterbliche vom Besten” – Der Tod des Empedocles, ll. 1569-70.]. The more important this relationship was considered, the lower sank interaction with women: the perspective of procreation and lust-nothing further came into consideration; there was no spiritual intercourse with them, not even a real romance. If one considers further that woman herself was excluded from all kinds of competitions and spectacles, then the sole higher entertainment remaining to her was religious worship. – To be sure, when Electra and Antigone were portrayed in tragedies, the Greeks tolerated it in art, although they did not like it in life; just as we now do not tolerate anything with pathos in life, but like to see it in art. – Women had no task other than to produce beautiful, powerful bodies, in which the character of the father lived on as intact as possible, and thus to counteract the increasing overstimulation of nerves in such a highly developed culture. This kept Greek culture young for such a relatively long time. For in Greek mothers, the Greek genius returned again and again to nature.
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The prejudice in favor of bigness. – Men clearly overestimate everything big and conspicuous. This comes from their conscious or unconscious insight that it is very useful if someone throws all his strength into one area, and makes of himself, so to speak, one monstrous organ. Surely, for man himself, a uniform cultivation of his strengths is more useful and beneficial, for every talent is a vampire that sucks blood and strength out of the remaining strengths; and excessive productivity can bring the most gifted man almost to madness. Even within the arts, extreme natures attract notice much too much, but a much lesser culture is also necessary to let itself be captivated by them. Men submit from habit to anything that wants to have power.
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The tyrants of the spirit. – Only where the radiance of the myth falls is the life of the Greeks bright; elsewhere it is gloomy. Now, the Greek philosophers deprived themselves of precisely this myth: is it not as if they wanted to move out of the sunshine into shadows and gloom? But no plant avoids the light; fundamentally these philosophers were only seeking a brighter sun, the myth was not pure, not lucid enough for them. They discovered this light in their knowledge, in that which each of them called his “truth.” But in those days knowledge still possessed a greater luster; it was still young and as yet knew little of the perils and difficulties of its path; it could still hope to reach the midpoint of being with a single leap and thence solve the riddle of the universe. These philosophers possessed a firm belief in themselves and their “truth” and with it they overthrew all their contemporaries and predecessors; each of them was a warlike brutal tyrant. Perhaps happiness in the belief that one was in possession of the truth has never been greater in the history of the world, but nor, likewise, has the severity, arrogance, tyrannical and evil in such a belief. They were tyrants, that is to say, that which every Greek wanted to be and what everyone was when he could be. Perhaps Solon alone constitutes an exception; he says in his poems how he disdained personal tyranny. But he did it for love of his work, of his lawgiving; and to be a lawgiver is a more sublimated form of tyranny. Parmenides also gave laws, Pythagoras and Empedocles probably did also; Anaximander founded a city. Plato was the incarnate desire to become the supreme philosophical lawgiver and founder of states; he appears to have suffered terribly from the non-fulfillment of his nature, and towards the end of his life his soul became full of the blackest gall. The more the power of the Greek philosophers declined, the more they inwardly suffered from this bitterness and vituperativeness; when various sects came to the point of battling for their truths in the open street the souls of all these wooers of truth were totally choked with jealousy and spleen, the tyrannical element now raged as poison through their own bodies. These many petty tyrants would have liked to have eaten one another raw; not a spark of love was left in them, and all too little joy in their own knowledge. – In general, the rule that tyrants are usually murdered and that their posterity has but a brief existence also applies to the tyrants of the spirit. Their history is brief and violent; their posthumous influence ceases abruptly. Of all the great Hellenes it can be said that they seem to have come too late: such is the case with Aeschylus, with Pindar, with Demosthenes, with Thucydides; one further generation – and it is all over. That is what is uncanny and violent about Greek history. Nowadays, to be sure, we adhere to the gospel of the tortoise. To think historically today is almost to believe that at all times history has been made according to the principle: “as little as possible in the longest possible time!” Alas, Greek history moves so fast! Life has never since been lived so prodigally, so exorbitantly. I cannot convince myself that the history of the Greeks pursued that natural course for which it is so celebrated. They were much too multifariously gifted to have proceeded gradually in the step-by-step manner of the tortoise in its race with Achilles: and that is what is meant by natural evolution. With the Greeks everything goes quickly forwards, but it likewise goes quickly downwards; the movement of the whole machine is so accelerated that a single stone thrown into its wheels makes it fly to pieces. Socrates, for example, was such a stone; in a single night the evolution of philosophical science, hitherto so wonderfully regular if all too rapid, was destroyed. It is no idle question whether, if he had not come under the spell of Socratic, Plato might not have discovered an even higher type of philosophical man who is now lost to us forever. We gaze into the ages that preceded him as into a sculptor’s workshop of such types. The sixth and fifth centuries seem, however, to promise even more and higher things than they actually brought forth; it remained only a promise and proclamation. And yet there can hardly be a more grievous loss than the loss of a type, of a new, hitherto undiscovered highest possibility of the philosophical life. Even the older realized types have mostly come down to us ill-defined; all the philosophers from Thales to Democritus seem to me extraordinarily hard to discern; but whoever succeeded in recreating these figures would move among forms of the mightiest and purest type. This capacity is rare, to be sure; even the later Greeks who took notice of the older philosophy lacked it; Aristotle especially, seems to have no eyes in his head whenever he stands before those we have named. And so it seems as though these glorious philosophers had lived in vain, or as though their only function had been to prepare the way for the quarrelsome and loquacious hordes of the Socratic schools. Here, as aforesaid, there is a gap here, a breach in evolution; some great disaster must have occurred and the only statue from which we could have perceived the purpose and meaning of that great preparatory exercise in sculpting have miscarried or been shattered: what actually happened must forever remain a secret of the workshop. – That which eventuated among the Greeks – every great thinker, in the belief that he was the possessor of absolute truth, became a tyrant, so that in the case of the Greeks the history of the spirit exhibits the same violent, precipitate and perilous character as does their political history – this kind of event was not therewith exhausted: many things of the same sort have occurred right up to the most recent times, though they have gradually grown rarer and can hardly occur now with the same naive clarity of conscience as they did among the philosophers of Greece. For on the whole contradiction and skepticism now speak too powerfully and too loudly. The period of the tyrants of the spirit is past. In the spheres of higher culture there will always have to be a sovereign authority, to be sure – but this sovereign authority will hereafter lie in the hands of the oligarchs of the spirit. Their spatial and political division notwithstanding, they constitute a close-knit society whose members know and recognize one another, a thing which public opinion and the judgments of the writers for the popular papers may circulate as expressions of favor and disfavor. The spiritual superiority which formerly divided and created hostility now tends to unite: how could the individual keep himself aloft and, against every current, swim along his own course through life if he did not see here and there others of his own kind loving under the same conditions and take them by the hand, in struggle against both the ochlocratic character of the half-spirited and half-educated and the attempts that occasionally occur to erect a tyranny with the aid of the masses? The oligarchs have need of one another, they have joy in one another, they understand their signs of one another – but each of them is nonetheless free, he fights and conquers in his own place, and would rather perish than submit.
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Homer. – Even now, the greatest fact about Greek culture is that Homer became Panhellenic so soon. All the spiritual and human freedom the Greeks attained goes back to this fact. But at the same time it was also the actual doom of Greek culture, for, by centralizing, Homer made shallow and dissolved the more serious instincts of independence. From time to time an opposition to Homer arose from the depths of Hellenic feeling; but he always triumphed. All great spiritual powers exercise a suppressing effect in addition to their liberating one; but of course it makes a difference whether it is Homer or the Bible or science tyrannizing men.
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Talent. – In as highly developed a humanity as ours now is everyone acquires from nature access to many talents. Everyone possesses inborn talent, but few possess the degree of inborn and acquired toughness, endurance and energy actually to become a talent, that is to say to become what he is: which means to discharge it in works and actions
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The gifted either overvalued or undervalued. – Men who are gifted but unscientific value every token of spirit, whether it is on the right track or not; they desire above all that the man who has commerce with them should entertain them well with his spiritual capacities, should spur them on, inflame them, carry them away into serious undertakings and jesting, and in any event protect them as the mightiest amulet against boredom. Scientific natures, on the other hand, know that the talent for having ideas of all kinds must be rigorously curbed by the spirit of science; not that which glitters, shines, excites, but often insignificant seeming truth is the fruit he wishes to shake down from the tree of knowledge. Like Aristotle, he may not draw a distinction between “boring” and “gifted,” his daemon leads him through the desert as well as through tropical vegetation, so that he may everywhere take pleasure only in the real, valid, genuine. – This is why insignificant scholars harbor a distrust and suspicion of giftedness in general, and why, on the other hand, gifted people frequently harbor an aversion to science: as do, for example, almost all artists.
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Reason in school. – The school has no more important task than to teach rigorous thinking, cautious judgment and consistent reasoning; therefore it has to avoid all those things that are of no use for these operations, for example religion. For it can be sure that, if the bow of thought has been stretched too tight, human unclarity, habit and need will afterwards relax it again. But so long as its exerts influence it ought to extort that which distinguishes and is the essence of man: “reason and science, the supremest powers of man,” – as Goethe at least judges [Goethe: Faust I, 1851-1852.]. – The great naturalist von Baer [Karl Ernst von Baer (1792-1876)] sees the superiority of all Europeans when compared with Asiatics to lie in their inculcated ability to give reasons for what they believe, an ability the latter totally lack. Europe has attended the school of consistent and critical thinking; Asia still does not know how to distinguish between truth and fiction and is unaware whether its convictions stem from its own observation and correct thinking or from fantasies. – Reason in school has made Europe Europe: in the Middle Ages it was on the way to becoming again a piece and appendage of Asia – that is to say losing the scientific sense which it owed to the Greeks.
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Undervalued effect of grammar-school teaching. – The value of the grammar school is seldom sought in the things that are actually learned and safely brought home there, but in those that are taught but which the pupil acquires only with reluctance and shakes off again as quickly as he dares. The reading of the classics – every educated person admits this – is, wherever it is carried on, a monstrous procedure: before young people who are in no way whatever ripe for it, by teachers whose every word, often whose mere appearance, lays a blight on a good writer. But herein lies the value that usually goes unrecognized – that these teachers speak the abstract language of higher culture, ponderous and hard to understand but nonetheless a higher gymnastics for the head; that concepts, technical terms, methods, allusions continually occur in their language such as young people almost never hear in the conversation of their relations or in the street. If the pupils merely listen, their intellect will be involuntarily prepared for a scientific mode of thinking. It is not possible for them to emerge from this discipline as a pure child of nature quite untouched by the power of abstraction.
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Learning many languages. – To learn many languages fills the memory with words instead of with facts and ideas, even though in every man, memory is a vessel that can take in only a certain limited amount of content. Also, learning many languages is harmful in that it makes a man believe he is accomplished, and actually does lend a certain seductive prestige in social intercourse; it also does harm indirectly by undermining his acquisition of well-founded knowledge and his intention to earn men’s respect in an honest way. Finally, it is the ax laid to the root of any finer feeling for language within the native tongue; that is irreparably damaged and destroyed. The two peoples who produced the greatest stylists, the Greeks and the French, did not learn any foreign languages. – But because the commerce of men must become increasingly cosmopolitan and, for example, a proper merchant in London must be able to make himself a necessary evil. When it finally reaches an extreme, it will force mankind to find a remedy for it, and in some far-off future time everyone will know a new language, a language of commerce at first, then a language of intellectual intercourse generally, and this as surely as there will one day be air travel. Why else would the science of linguistics have studied the laws of language for a century and assessed what is necessary, valuable, and successful about each separate language!
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On the war history of the individual. – In an individual human life which passes through several cultures we find compressed together the conflict which is otherwise played out between two generations, between father and son: the closeness of the relationship aggravates this conflict, because each of the parties pitilessly draws into it the inner self of the other party that it knows so well; and thus this conflict will thus be most fought most bitterly within the single individual; here each new phase will trample over the earlier with cruel injustice and lack of understanding of its capacities and objectives.
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A quarter-of-an-hour earlier. – Occasionally we discover someone whose views are in advance of their time, but only to the extent that he anticipates the commonplace views of the next decade. He adheres to public opinion before it is public, that is to say he has fallen into the arms of a view that deserves to become trivial a quarter-of-an-hour earlier than others have. His fame, however, usually tends to be much noisier than the fame of the truly great and superior.
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The art of reading. – Every strong course is one-sided; it approaches the course of a straight line and like this is exclusive; that is to say, it does not touch many other courses, as weak parties and natures do so in their wavelike swayings back and forth: one must thus forgive the philologists too for being one-sided. Production and preservation of texts, together with their elucidation, pursued in a guild for centuries, has now finally discovered the correct methods; the entire Middle Ages was profoundly incapable of a strict philological elucidation, that is to say of a simple desire to understand what the author is saying – to have discovered these methods was an achievement, let no one undervalue it! It was only when the art of correct reading, that is to say philology, arrived at its summit that science of any kind acquired continuity and constancy.
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The art of drawing conclusions. – The greatest advance mankind has made lies in its having learned to draw correct conclusions. This is by no means so natural an accomplishment as Schopenhauer assumes when he says: “all are capable of drawing conclusions, few of judging” [Schopenhauer: The Two Main Problems of Ethics, 114.]; on the contrary, it was learned late and has even now not yet attained to dominance. The drawing of false conclusions was in earlier ages the rule: and the mythologies of all nations, their magic and their superstition, their religious cults, their laws are inexhaustible sources of proof of this proposition.
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Annual rings of individual culture. – The strengths and weaknesses of spiritual productivity depend far less on inherited talent than they do on the power of expansion bestowed with it. Most educated young people of thirty go back at around this early solstice of their lives and are from then on disinclined to make new spiritual changes. That is why an ongrowing culture at once needs for its salvation another generation, which in its turn, however, does not get very far: for to overtake the culture of his father the son must consume almost all the inherited energy that the father himself possessed at that stage of life when he begot his son; it is with the little bit left over that he goes past him (for, because the path is here being traversed a second time, progress is a little quicker; the son does not need to expend as much strength on learning what the father has learned). Men possessed of great power of expansion, such as Goethe for example, traverse as much as four successive generations would hardly be able to equal; for that reason, however, they advance ahead too quickly, so that other men overtake them only in the next century, and perhaps do not even completely overtake them, because the chain of culture, the smooth consistency of its evolution, is frequently weakened and interrupted. – The ordinary phases of spiritual culture attained to in the course of history are overtaken more and more speedily. Men at present begin by entering the realm of culture as children affected religiously and these sensations are at their liveliest in perhaps their tenth year, then pass over into feebler forms (pantheism) while at the same time drawing closer to science; they put God, immortality and the like quite behind them but fall prey to the charms of a metaphysical philosophy. At last they find this, too, unbelievable; art, on the other hand, seems to promise them more and more, so that for a time metaphysics continues just to survive transformed into art or as a mood of artistic transfiguration. But the scientific sense grows more and more imperious and leads the man away to natural science and history and especially to the most rigorous methods of acquiring knowledge, while art is accorded an ever gentler and more modest significance. All this nowadays usually takes place within a man’s first thirty years. It is the recapitulation of a curriculum at which mankind has been laboring for perhaps thirty thousand years.
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Retrogressed, not retarded. – Anyone who still begins his development with religious feelings and then continues living in metaphysics and art for a long time, has of course gone some distance backward, and begins his race against other modern men with a handicap. He is apparently losing ground and time. But by having dwelled in those realms where heat and energy are unleashed, and power keeps streaming like a volcanic river out of an everflowing spring, he then, once having left those domains in time, comes the more quickly forward; his feet have wings; his breast has learned to breathe more peacefully, longer, with more endurance. – He has drawn back, only in order to have enough room for his leap: so there can even be something terrible or threatening about his retrogression.
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A segment of our self as artistic object. – It is a sign of superior culture when men consciously remember and sketch a true picture of certain periods of their development, which lesser men live through almost without thought, wiping them off their soul’s tablet; this is the higher species of the art of painting, which only few people understand. To do it, it is necessary to isolate those phases artificially. Historical studies develop the capacity for this painting, for they continually challenge us, when faced with a piece of history, of the life of a nation or a man, to conjure up a quite distinct horizon of ideas, a definite strength of sensations, the predominance of this, the withdrawal of that. Historical sense consists of being able, on any given occasion, to reconstruct quickly such systems of ideas and sensations, as for example the impression of a temple on the basis of a few pillars and pieces of wall that chance to remain standing. The first result of it is that we comprehend our fellow men as being determined by such systems, and representatives of various cultures, that is to say as necessary, but as alterable. And conversely, that we are able to segregate parts of our own development and exhibit them in isolation.
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Cynic and Epicurean. – The Cynic recognizes the connection between the more highly cultivated man’s stronger and enhanced sufferings, and his profuse needs; he grasps, that is to say, that manifold opinions about beauty, propriety, becoming, and delight must give rise not only to sources of enjoyment, but also of repugnance. In accordance with this insight, he reverses his development by giving up many of these opinions and withdrawing from certain demands of culture. In that way, he achieves a feeling of freedom and invigoration, and gradually, when habit makes his way of life bearable, he does indeed feel repugnance less often and less acutely, and approximates a domesticated animal; in addition, however, everything charms him by its contrast and he can also scold and grumble to his heart’s content: so that in this way he again raises himself high above the animal’s world of sensations. – The Epicurean has the same viewpoint as the Cynic; between the two there is usually only a difference in temperament. Furthermore, the Epicurean uses his higher culture to make himself independent of prevailing opinions; only he lifts himself above them, while the Cynic merely remains at the stage of negation. He strolls as in calm, well-protected, half-dark passageways, while above him the treetops whip about in the wind, revealing to him how violently buffeted the world outside is. In the case of the Cynic, on the other hand, it is as though he walks about outside naked in the teeth of the wind, and hardens himself to the point of feeling nothing.
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Microcosm and macrocosm of culture. – Man makes the best discoveries about culture within himself when he finds two heterogeneous powers governing there. Given that a man loved the plastic arts or music as much as he was moved by the spirit of science, and that he deemed it impossible to resolve this contradiction by destroying the one and completely unleashing the other power, the only thing remaining to him is to turn himself into such a large hall of culture that both powers can be accommodated within it, even if at opposite ends, while between there reside mediating powers with the strength and authority to settle, if need be, any quarrels that break out. Such a hall of culture within the single individual would, however, bear the strongest resemblance to the cultural structure of entire epochs and, by analogy, provide continual instruction about them. For wherever grand cultural architecture has developed, its purpose has been to effect a harmony and concord between contending powers through an overwhelming assemblage of the other powers, but without the need to suppress them or clasp them in irons.
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Happiness and culture. – We are profoundly moved by the sight of the surroundings of our childhood: the garden house, the church with the graveyard, the pond and the woods – we see all these with a sense of suffering. We are gripped by self-pity, for what have we not gone through since that time! And here everything is still standing so motionless and eternal: we alone are so different, so in turmoil; we even rediscover certain people upon whom time has whetted its teeth as little as it has on an oak tree: peasants, fishermen, woodsmen – they are the same. – To be moved and to feel self-pity in the face of lower culture is a sign of a higher culture – this shows that happiness, at least, has not been increased by the latter. Whoever wishes to harvest happiness and contentment from life has only to avoid acquiring a higher culture.
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Parable of the dance. – Today we should consider it the decisive sign of great culture if someone possesses sufficient strength and flexibility to be as clear and rigorous in the domain of knowledge and, at other times, to give poetry, religion, and metaphysics a hundred paces advantage, as it were, and appreciate their power and beauty. A position of this sort, between two such different demands, is very difficult, for science presses for the absolute dominance of its methods, and if this is pressure is not relaxed, there arises the other danger of a feeble vacillation between different drives. However, to open up a view to the solution of this difficulty by means of a parable, one might recall that the dance is not the same thing as staggering wearily back and forth between different drives. High culture will resemble a daring dance: which is, as aforesaid, why one needs much strength and suppleness.
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On the alleviation of life. – A principal means of alleviating one’s life is to idealize all its processes; but from painting one should be well aware what idealization means. The painter requires that the viewer not look too hard or too close; he forces him back to a certain distance to view from there; he is obliged to presuppose that a viewer is at a fixed distance from his picture; indeed, he must even assume an equally fixed amount of visual acuity in his viewer; he may on no account waver about such things. So anyone who wants to idealize his life must not desire to see it too closely, and must keep his sight back at a certain distance. Goethe, for example, knew this trick well.
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Aggravation as alleviation and the reverse. – Much that aggravates man’s life at certain stages alleviates it at a higher stage because such men have come to know life’s more severe aggravations. The reverse likewise occurs: thus religion, for example, has a double face, depending on whether a man is looking up to it, in order to have his burden and distress taken from him, or whether he is looking down on it, as on the fetters fastened to him so that he may not rise too high into the air.
281
Higher culture is necessarily misunderstood. – A man who has strung his instrument with only two strings – like the scholars, who, apart from the drive to knowledge, have only an acquired religious drive – does not understand the kind of man who can play on more strings. It lies in the nature of higher, many-stringed culture that it is always falsely interpreted by the lower; as happens, for example, when art is taken for a disguised form of religiousness. Indeed, people who are only religious understand even science as a seeking on the part of the religious feeling, just as deaf-and-dumb do not know what music is if not visible movement.
282
Lamentation. – It is perhaps the advantages of our age that bring with them a decline and occasional underestimation of the vita contemplativa. But one must admit to himself that our age is poor in great moralists, that Pascal, Epictetus, Seneca, and Plutarch are now read but little, that work and industry – formerly in the retinue of the great goddess health – sometimes seem to rage like a disease. Because time for thinking and quietness in thinking are lacking, one no longer ponders deviant views: one contents oneself with hating them. With the tremendous acceleration of life, we grow accustomed to using our mind and eye for seeing and judging partially or inaccurately, and everyone is like the traveler who gets to know a land and its people from the train. An independent and cautious attitude towards knowledge is disparaged almost as a kind of madness, the free spirit is brought into disrepute, particularly by scholars, who miss in his art for reflecting on things their own thoroughness and antlike industry and would dearly love to banish him to a solitary corner of science: whereas he has the quite different and higher task of commanding from a lonely position the whole militia of scientific and learned men and showing them the paths to and goals of culture.. – Such a lament as has just been sung will probably one day have had its time and, when the genius of meditation makes a mighty reappearance, fall silent of its own volition.
283
Principal deficiency of active men. – Active men are generally wanting in the higher activity: I mean that of the individual. They are active as officials, businessmen, scholars, that is to say as generic creatures, but not as distinct individual and unique human beings; in this regard they are lazy. – It is the misfortune of the active that their activity is always a little irrational. One ought not to ask the cash-amassing banker, for example, what the purpose of his restless activity is: it is irrational. The active roll as the stone rolls, in obedience to the stupidity of the laws of mechanics. – As at all times, so now too, men are divided into the slaves and the free; for he who does not have two-thirds of his day to himself is a slave, let him be what he may otherwise: statesman, businessman, official, scholar.
284
In favor of the idle. – One sign that the valuation of the contemplative life has declined is that scholars now compete with men of action in a kind of precipitate pleasure, so that they seem to value this kind of pleasure more highly than that to which they are really entitled and which is in fact much more pleasurable. Scholars are ashamed of otium [leisure, idleness]. But there is something noble about leisure and idleness. – If idleness really is the beginning of all vice, then it is at any rate in the closest proximity to all virtue; the idle man is always a better man than the active. – But when I speak of leisure and idleness, you do not think I am alluding to you, do you, you sluggards? –
285
Modern restlessness. – The farther west one goes, the greater modern agitation becomes; so that to Americans the inhabitants of Europe appear on the whole to be ease-loving [ruheliebende] and epicurean beings, while in fact they too fly about pell-mell, like bees and wasps. This agitation is becoming so great that the higher culture can no longer allow its fruits to ripen; it is as if the seasons were following too quickly on one another. From lack of rest, our civilization is turning into a new barbarism. At no time have the active, that is to say the restless, counted for more. Therefore, one of the necessary correctives that must be applied to the character of humanity is a massive strengthening of the contemplative element. Yet even now every individual who is calm and steady in heart and head, already has the right to believe that he possesses not only a good temperament, but also a universally useful virtue, and that in preserving this virtue, he is even fulfilling a higher task.
286
The extent to which the man of action is lazy. – I believe that each person must have his own opinion concerning everything about which it is possible to have an opinion, because he himself is an individual, unique thing that adopts a new posture towards all other things such has never been adopted before. But laziness, which is at the bottom of the active man’s soul, hinders man from drawing water out of his own well. – It is the same with freedom of opinions as with health: both are individual; from neither can a universally valid concept be set up. What one individual needs for his health will make another ill, and for more highly developed natures, many means and ways to freedom of spirit may be ways and means to unfreedom.
287
Censor vitae [censor of life]. – For a long time, the inner state of a man who wants to become free in his judgments about life will be characterized by an alternation between love and hatred; he does not forget, and keeps a faithful account of all things, good and evil. Finally, when the whole tablet of his soul is written full with experiences, he will neither despise and hate existence nor will he love it: he will hover about it, now with a joyful eye, now with a sorrowful eye, and, like nature itself, be now of a summery, now of an autumnal disposition.
288
Incidental success. – Whoever seriously wants to become free, will in the process also lose, uncoerced, the inclination to faults and vices; he will also be prey ever more rarely to annoyance and ill-humor. For his will desires nothing more urgently than knowledge, and the means to it – that is, the enduring condition in which he is best able to engage in knowledge.
289
Value of illness. – The man who lies ill in bed sometimes perceives that it is usually his office, business, or society that has made him ill and caused him to lose all clear-mindedness about himself; he gains this wisdom from the leisure forced upon him by his illness.
290
Country sensibility. – If a man has not drawn firm, restful lines along the horizon of his life, like the lines drawn by the mountain and forest, his innermost will itself grows restless, distracted and covetous, as is the nature of the city-dweller: he has no happiness himself and bestows none on others.
291
Prudence of free spirits. – The liberal-minded, men who live for the sake of knowledge alone, will find they soon attain the external goal of their life, their definitive position in relation to society and the state, and will easily be content with, for example, a minor office or an income that just enables them to live; for they will organize their life in such a way that a great transformation of external circumstances, even an overturning of the political order, does not overturn their life with it. Upon all these things they expend as little energy as possible, so that they may dive down into the element of knowledge with all their accumulated strength and as it were with a deep breath. Thus they may hope to dive deep and perhaps get a view of the ground at the bottom. – Of whatever happens to him such a spirit will want to appropriate only the tip; he has no love for things in their entirety, in all the breadth and prolixity of their convolutions, for he has no wish to get himself entangled with them. – He too knows the weekdays of unfreedom, of dependence, of servitude. But from time to time he has to have a Sunday of freedom, or he will find life unendurable. – It is probable that even his love for other people will be prudent and somewhat short-breathed, for he wants to become involved with the world of affection and blindness only insofar as it is necessary for acquiring knowledge. He must trust that the genius of justice will put in a word on behalf of his disciple and protégé if accusing voices should call him poor in love. – There is in his way of living and thinking a refined heroism which disdains to offer itself to the veneration of the great masses, as his coarser brother does, and tends to go silently through the world and out of the world. Whatever labyrinths he may stray through, among whatever rocks his stream may make its tortuous way – if he emerges into the open air he will travel his road bright, light and almost soundlessly and let the sunshine play down into his very depths.
292
Forward. – And with that, forward on the path of wisdom with a bold step and full of confidence! However you may be, serve yourself as your own source of experience! Throw off discontent with your nature, forgive yourself your own ego, for in any event you possess in yourself a ladder with a hundred rungs upon which you can climb to knowledge. The age in which with regret you feel yourself thrown counts you happy on account of this good fortune; it calls to you to participate in experiences that men of a later age will perhaps have to forgo. Do not underestimate the value of having been religious; discover all the reasons by virtue of which you have still had a genuine access to art. Can you not, precisely with aid of these experiences, follow with greater understanding tremendous stretches of the paths taken by earlier mankind? Is it not on precisely this soil, which you sometimes find so displeasing, the soil of unclear thinking, that many of the most splendid fruits of more ancient cultures grew up? One must have loved religion and art like mother and nurse – otherwise one cannot grow wise. But one must be able to see beyond them, outgrow them; if one remains under their spell, one does not understand them. You must likewise be on familiar terms with history and with playing the cautious game with the scales “on the one hand – one the other hand.” Turn back and trace the footsteps of mankind as it made its great sorrowful way through the desert of the past: thus you will leatn in the sutest way whither all later mankind can and may not go again. And by your desiring with all your strength to see ahead how the knot of the future is going to be tied, your own life will acquire the value of an instrument and means to knowledge. You have it in your hands to achieve the absorption of all your experience – your experiments, errors, faults, delusions, passions, your love and your hope – into your goal without remainder. This goal is yourself to become a necessary chain of rings of culture and from this necessity to recognize the necessity inherent in the course of culture in general. When your gaze has become strong enough to see to the bottom of the dark well of your nature and your knowledge, perhaps you will also behold in its mirror the distant constellations of future cultures. Do you believe that such a life with such a goal is too laborious, too much lacking in everything pleasant? Then you have not yet learned that no honey is sweeter than that of knowledge, or that the clouds of affliction hovering over you will yet have to serve you as udders from which you will milk the milk of your refreshment. Only when you grow old will you come to realize how you have given ear to the voice of nature, that nature which rules the whole world through joy: the same life that has its apex in old age also has its apex in wisdom, in that gentle sunshine of a constant spiritual joyousness; both of them, old age and wisdom, you will encounter on the same mountain. ridge of life: so did nature will it. Then it is time, and no cause for anger, that the mists of death should approach. Towards the light – your last motion; a joyful shout of knowledge – your last sound.
Sixth Division - Man in Society
293
Benevolent dissembling. – In interaction with people, a benevolent dissembling is often required, as if we did not see through the motives for their behavior.
294
Copies. – Not infrequently, one encounters copies of important people; and, as with paintings, most people prefer the copy to the original.
295
The speaker. – We can speak very appropriately and yet in such a way that all the world cries out the reverse: that is when we are not speaking to all the world.
296
Lack of intimacy. – Lack of intimacy among friends is a mistake that cannot be censured without becoming irreparable.
297
On the art of giving. – To have to reject a gift, simply because it was not offered in the proper way, embitters us towards the giver.
298
The most dangerous party member. – In every party there is one who through his all too credulous avowal of the party’s principles incites the others to apostasy.
299
Advisor to the ill. – Whoever gives an ill man advice gains a feeling of superiority over him, whether the advice is accepted or rejected. For that reason, irritable and proud ill people hate advisors even more than their illness.
300
Twofold kind of equality. – The craving for equality can be expressed either by the wish to draw all others down to one’s level (by belittling, excluding, tripping them up) or by the wish to draw oneself up with everyone else (by appreciating, helping, taking pleasure in others’ success).
301
Countering embarrassment. – The best way to come to the aid of someone who is very embarrassed and to soothe him is to praise him resolutely.
302
Preference for specific virtues. – We do not place especial value on the possession of a virtue until we notice its total absence in our opponent.
303
Why one contradicts. – We often contradict an opinion, while actually it is only the tone with which it was advanced that we find disagreeable.
304
Trust and intimacy. – If* *someone assiduously seeks to force intimacy with another person, he usually is not sure whether he possesses that person’s trust. If someone is sure of being trusted, he places little value on intimacy.
305
Balance of friendship. – Sometimes in our relationship to another person, the right balance of friendship is restored when we put a few grains of injustice on our own side of the scale.
306
The most dangerous doctors. – The most dangerous doctors are those born actors who imitate born doctors with perfect deceptive art.
307
When paradoxes are appropriate. – At times, one can win clever people over to a principle merely by presenting it in the form of an outrageous paradox.
308
How brave people are won over. – Brave people are persuaded to an action when it is represented as more dangerous than it is.
309
Courtesies. – We count the courtesies shown to us by unpopular people as offenses.
310
Making them wait. – A sure way to provoke people and to put evil thoughts into their heads is to make them wait a long time. This gives rise to immorality.
311
Against trusting people. – People who give us their complete trust believe that they therefore have a right to our own. This conclusion is false: rights are not won by gifts.
312
Means of compensation. – If we have injured someone, giving him the opportunity to make a joke about us is often enough to provide him personal satisfaction, or even to win his good will.
313
Vanity of the tongue. – Whether a man hides his bad qualities and vices or confesses them openly, his vanity wants to gain an advantage by it in both cases: just note how subtly he distinguishes between those he will hide his bad qualities from and those he will face honestly and candidly.
314
Considerate. – The wish not to annoy anyone or injure anyone can be an equally good indication of a just, as of a fearful disposition.
315
Required for debate. – Whoever does not know how to put his thoughts on ice should not engage in the heat of argument.
316
Milieu and arrogance. – One unlearns arrogance when he knows he is always among men of merit; solitude breeds presumption. Young people are arrogant because they go about with their own kind, each of whom is nothing, but wishes to be important.
317
Motive for attack. – We attack not only to hurt a person, to conquer him, but also, perhaps, simply to become aware of our own strength.
318
Flattery. – People who want to flatter us to dull our caution in dealing with them are using a very dangerous tool, like a sleeping potion which, if it does not put us to sleep, keeps us only the more awake.
319
Good letter-writer. – The man who writes no books, thinks a lot, and lives in inadequate society will usually be a good letter-writer.
320
Most ugly. – It is to be doubted whether a well-traveled man has found anywhere in the world regions more ugly than in the human face.
321
The sympathetic. – Sympathetic natures, always helpful in a misfortune, are rarely the same ones who share our joy: when others are happy, they have nothing to do, become superfluous, do not feel in possession of their superiority, and therefore easily show dissatisfaction.
322
Relatives of a suicide. – The relatives of a suicide resent him for not having stayed alive out of consideration for their reputation.
323
Anticipating ingratitude. – The man who gives a great gift encounters no gratitude; for the recipient, simply by accepting it already has too much of a burden.
324
In dull society. – No one thanks the witty man for the courtesy of adapting himself to a society in which it is not courteous to display wit.
325
Presence of witnesses. – One is twice as happy to dive after a man who has fallen into the water if people are present who do not dare to.
326
Silence. – For both parties, the most disagreeable way of responding to a polemic is to be angry and keep silent: for the aggressor usually takes the silence as a sign of disdain.
327
The friend’s secret. – There will be but few people who, when at a loss for topics of conversation, will not reveal the more secret affairs of their friends.
328
Humanity. – The humanity of famous intellectuals consists in graciously losing the argument when dealing with the nonfamous.
329
The inhibited one. – Men who do not feel secure in social situations take every opportunity to demonstrate superiority over an intimate to whom they are superior; this they do publicly, before the company – by teasing, for example.
330
Thanks. – A refined soul is distressed to know that someone owes it thanks; a crude soul is distressed that it owes thanks.
331
Indication of alienation. – The clearest sign that two people hold alienated views is that each says ironic things to the other, but neither of the two feels the other’s irony.
332
Arrogance of the meritorious. – Arrogance on the part of the meritorious is even more offensive to us than the arrogance of those without merit: for merit itself is offensive.
333
The danger in our own voice. – Sometimes in the course of conversation the sound of our own voice disconcerts us and misleads us into making assertions which in no way correspond to our opinions.
334
In conversation. – In conversation, it is largely a matter of habit whether one decides mainly for or against the other person: both make sense.
335
Fear of one’s neighbor. – We fear the hostile mood of our neighbor because we are afraid that this mood will help him discover our secrets.
336
To distinguish by censure. – Very respected people confer even their censure in such a way as to distinguish us by it. It is supposed to make us aware how earnestly they are concerned with us. We quite misunderstand them if we take their censure as a matter of fact and defend ourselves against it; we annoy them by doing so and alienate them.
337
Vexation at the goodwill of others. – We are wrong about the degree to which we believe ourselves hated or feared; for we ourselves know well the degree of our divergence from a person, a direction, or a party, but those others know us only very superficially, and therefore also hate us only superficially. Often we encounter goodwill which we cannot explain; but if we understand it, it offends us, for it shows that one doesn’t take us seriously or importantly enough.
338
Clashing vanities. – Two* *people with equally great vanity retain a bad impression of one another after they meet, because each one was so busy with the impression he wanted to elicit in the other that the other made no impression on him; finally both notice that their efforts have failed and blame the other for it.
339
Bad manners as a good sign. – The superior spirit takes pleasure in ambitious youths’ tactless, arrogant, even hostile behavior toward him; it is the bad behavior of fiery horses who still have carried no rider, and yet will in a short time be so proud to carry him.
340
When it is advisable to be wrong. – It is good to accept accusations without refuting them, even when they do us wrong, if the accuser would see an even greater wrong on our part were we to contradict him, or indeed refute him. In this way, of course, one can always be in the wrong, and always gain one’s point, and, finally, with the best conscience in the world, become the most intolerable tyrant and pest; and what is true of the individual can also occur in whole classes of society.
341
Too little honored. – Very conceited people to whom one has given fewer signs of regard than they expected will try to mislead themselves and others about this for a long time; they become casuistic psychologists in order to prove that they were indeed honored sufficiently; if they do not achieve their goal, if the veil of deception is torn away, they indulge in a rage all the greater.
342
Primeval states echoed in speech. – In the way men make assertions in present-day society, one often hears an echo of the times when they were better skilled in arms than in anything else; sometimes they handle assertions as poised archers their weapons; sometimes one thinks he hears the whir and clatter of blades; and with some men an assertion thunders down like a heavy cudgel.
Women, on the other hand, speak like creatures who sat for thousands of years at the loom, or did sewing, or were childish with children.
343
The narrator. – It is easy to tell whether a narrator is narrating because the subject matter interests him or because he wants to evoke interest through his narrative. If the latter is the case, he will exaggerate, use superlatives, etc. Then he usually narrates the worse, because he is not thinking so much about the story as about himself.
344
Reading aloud. – Whoever reads dramatic poetry aloud makes discoveries about his own character. He finds his voice more natural for certain moods and scenes than for others – for everything pathetic or for the farcical, for example; whereas in his usual life, he may not have had the opportunity to indicate pathos or farce.
345
*A comedy scene which occurs in *life. – Someone thinks of a clever opinion about a matter in order to expound it in company. Now, in a comedy we would hear and see how he sets all sails to get to the point, and tries to steer the company to where he can make his remark; how he continually pushes the conversation toward one destination, sometimes losing his direction, finding it again, finally reaching the moment; his breath almost fails him – then someone from the company takes his words out of his mouth. What will he do? Oppose his own opinion?
346
Unintentionally impolite. – If we unintentionally treat another impolitely, do not greet him, for example, because we do not recognize him, this riles us, even though we cannot reproach our own good intentions; the bad opinion that we engendered in the other fellow irks us, or we fear the consequences of ill feeling, or we are pained at having hurt the other fellow – thus vanity, fear, or pity can be aroused, and perhaps all three together.
347
Traitor’s tour de force. – To express to your fellow conspirator the hurtful suspicion that he might be betraying you, and this at the very moment when you are yourself engaged in betraying him, is a tour de force of malice, because it makes the other person aware of himself and forces him to behave very unsuspiciously and openly for a time, giving you, the true traitor, a free hand.
348
To offend and be offended. – It is much more agreeable to offend and later ask forgiveness than to be offended and grant forgiveness. The one who does the former demonstrates his power and then his goodness. The other, if he does not want to be thought inhuman, *must *forgive; because of this coercion, pleasure in the other’s humiliation is slight.
349
In a dispute. – When someone contradicts an opinion and develops his own at the same time, his incessant consideration of the other opinion usually causes the natural presentation of his own to go awry: it appears more intentional, cutting, perhaps a bit exaggerated.
350
Trick. – A man who wishes to demand something difficult from another man must not conceive of the matter as a problem, but rather simply lay out his plan, as if it were the only possibility; when an objection or contradiction glimmers in the eye of his opponent, he must know how to break off the conversation quickly, leaving him no time.
351
Pangs of conscience after parties. – Why do we feel pangs of conscience after ordinary parties? Because we have taken important matters lightly; because we have discussed people with less than complete loyalty, or because we were silent when we should have spoken; because we did not on occasion jump up and run away; in short, because we behaved at the party as if we belonged to it.
352
One is judged wrongly. – He who listens to how he is judged will always be annoyed. For we are sometimes judged wrongly even by those who are closest to us ( “who know us best”). Even good friends release their annoyance in an envious word; and would they be our friends if they knew us completely? – The judgment of disinterested people hurts a great deal, because it sounds so uninhibited, almost objective. But if we notice that an enemy knows one of our secret characteristics as well as we know ourselves – how great our annoyance is then!
353
Tyranny of the portrait. – Artists and statesmen, who quickly put together the whole picture of a person or event from individual characteristics, are usually unjust, in that they demand afterwards that the event or person really must be the way they painted it; they virtually demand that a person be as gifted, cunning, or unjust as he is in their imagination.
354
The relative as best friend. – The Greeks, who knew so well what a friend is (they alone of all peoples have a deep, many-sided, philosophical discussion of friendship; so that they are the first, and thus far are the last, to consider the friend as a problem worthy of solution), these same Greeks called *relatives *by a term that is the superlative of the word “friend.” I find this inexplicable.
355
Unrecognized honesty. – If someone quotes himself in conversation (“I used to say " “I always say “), this gives the impression of arrogance, whereas it more often stems from precisely the opposite source, or at least from an honesty that does not wish to embellish or adorn the moment with ideas that belong to a previous moment.
356
The parasite. – It shows a complete lack of noble character when someone prefers to live in dependence, at the expense of others, in order not to work at any cost, and usually with a secret bitterness towards those on whom he is dependent. – This kind of character is much more common in women than in men, and also much more forgivable (for historical reasons).
357
On the altar of reconciliation. – There are circumstances when one obtains an object from a person only by offending him and antagonizing him; this feeling of having an enemy torments the man so that he gladly seizes the first sign of a milder mood to bring about reconciliation, and on the altar of this reconciliation sacrifices the object which was earlier of such great importance to him that he did not want to give it up at any price.
358
Demanding pity as a sign of arrogance. – There are people, who, when they become angry and offend others, demand first that nothing be held against them, and second, that they be pitied because they are prey to such violent attacks. Human arrogance can go that far.
359
Bait. – “Every man has his price” – that is not true. But every one has a bait into which he must bite. Thus, to win certain people to a matter, one need only paint it as human, noble, charitable, self-sacrificing – and what matter could not be painted thus? It is the sweet candy of *their *souls: others have another.
360
Behavior when praised. – When good friends praise a talented man’s nature, he often appears pleased about it out of politeness and good will, but in truth it is a matter of indifference to him. His real nature is quite sluggish about it, and cannot be dragged one step out of the sun or shade in which it lies; but men want to give joy by praising, and we would sadden them if we did not take pleasure in their praise.
361
The experience of Socrates. – When one has become a master in some field one has usually, for that very reason, remained a complete amateur in most other things; but one judges just the other way around, as Socrates had already found out. This is what makes association with masters disagreeable.
362
Means of bestialization. – In the struggle with stupidity the fairest and gentlest people finally become brutal. Perhaps that is the right way for them to defend themselves; for by rights the argument against a stupid brow is a clenched fist. But because, as we said, they have a fair and gentle disposition, this means of selfdefense makes their own suffering greater than the suffering they inflict.
363
Curiosity. – If there were no curiosity, nothing much would be done for the good of one’s neighbor. But, using the name of Duty or Pity, Curiosity sneaks into the house of the unfortunate and needy. – Perhaps even in the much-celebrated matter of motherly love, there is a good bit of curiosity.
364
Miscalculating in society. – One person wants to be interesting by virtue of his judgments, another by his likes and dislikes, a third by his acquaintances, a fourth by his isolation – and all of them are miscalculating. For the person for whom they are putting on the spectacle thinks that he himself is the only spectacle that counts.
365
Duel. – It can be said in favor of all duels and affairs of honor, thatif a man is so sensitive as not to want to live if so-and-so said or thought this-and-that about him, then he has a right to let the matter be settled by the death of one man or the other. We cannot argue about his being so sensitive; in that regard we are the heirs of the past, its greatness as well as its excesses, without which there can never be any greatness. Now, if a canon of honor exists that allows blood to take the place of death, so that the heart is relieved after a duel according to the rules, then this is a great blessing, because otherwise many human lives would be in danger. – Such an institution, by the way, educates men to be cautious in their remarks, and makes associating with them possible.
366
Nobility and gratitude. – A noble soul will be happy to feel itself bound in gratitude and will not try anxiously to avoid the occasions when it may be so bound; it will likewise be at ease later in expressing gratitude; while cruder souls resist being bound in any way, or are later excessive and much too eager in expressing their gratitude. This last, by the way, also occurs in people of low origin or oppressed station: they think a favor shown to *them *is a miracle of mercy.
367
The hours of eloquence. – In order to speak well, one person needs someone who is definitely and admittedly superior to him; another person can speak completely freely and turn a phrase with eloquence only in front of someone whom he surpasses; the reason is the same in both cases: each of them speaks well only when he speaks sans gêne, the one because he does not feel the stimulus of rivalry or competition vis a vis the superior man, the other for the same reason vis à vis the lesser man. – Now, there is quite another category of men who speak well only when they speak in competition, intending to win. Which of the two categories is the more ambitious: the one that speaks well when ambition is aroused, or the one that, out of precisely the same motives, speaks badly or not at all?
368
The talent for friendship. – Among men who have a particular gift for friendship, two types stand out. The one man is in a continual state of ascent, and finds an exactly appropriate friend for each phase of his development. The series of friends that he acquires in this way is only rarely interconnected, and sometimes discordant and contradictory, quite in accordance with the fact that the later phases in his development invalidate or compromise the earlier phases. Such a man may jokingly be called a ladder. – The other type is represented by the man who exercises his powers of attraction on very different characters and talents, thereby winning a whole circle of friends; and these come into friendly contact with one another through him, despite all their diversity. Such a man can be called a circle; for in him, that intimate connection of so many different temperaments and natures must somehow be prefigured. – In many people, incidentally, the gift of having good friends is much greater than the gift of being a good friend.
369
Tactics in conversation. – After a conversation with someone, one is best disposed towards his partner in conversation if he had the opportunity to display to him his own wit and amiability in its full splendor. Clever men who want to gain someone’s favor use this during a conversation, giving the other person the best opportunities for a good joke and the like. One could imagine an amusing conversation between two very clever people, both of whom want to gain the other’s favor and therefore toss the good conversational opportunities back and forth, neither one accepting them – so that the conversation as a whole would proceed without wit or amiability because each one was offering the other the opportunity to demonstrate wit and amiability.
370
Releasing ill humor. – The man who fails at something prefers to attribute the failure to the bad will of another rather than to chance. His injured sensibility is relieved by imagining a person, not a thing, as the reason for his failure. For one can avenge oneself on people, but one must choke down the injuries of coincidence. Therefore, when a prince fails at something, his court habitually points out to him a single person as the alleged cause, and sacrifices this person in the interest of all the courtiers; for the prince’s ill humor would otherwise be released on them all, since he can, of course, take no vengeance on Dame Fortune herself.
371
Assuming the colors of the environment. – Why are likes and dislikes so contagious that one can scarcely live in proximity to a person of strong sensibilities without being filled like a vessel with his pros and cons? First, it is very hard to withhold judgment entirely, and sometimes it is virtually intolerable for our vanity. It can look like poverty of thought and feeling, fearfulness, unmanliness; and so we are persuaded at least to take a side, perhaps against the direction of our environment if our pride likes this posture better. Usually, however – this is the second point – we are not even aware of the transition from indifference to liking or disliking, but gradually grow used to the sentiments of our environment; and because sympathetic agreement and mutual understanding are so pleasant, we soon wear all its insignias and party colors.
372
Irony. – Irony is appropriate only as a pedagogical tool, used by a teacher interacting with pupils of whatever sort; its purpose is humiliation, shame, but the salubrious kind that awakens good intentions and bids us offer, as to a doctor, honor and gratitude to the one who treated us so. The ironic man pretends to be ignorant, and, in fact, does it so well that the pupils conversing with him are fooled and become bold in their conviction about their better knowledge, exposing themselves in all kinds of ways; they lose caution and reveal themselves as they are – until the rays of the torch that they held up to their teacher’s face are suddenly reflected back on them, humiliating them. – Where there is no relation as between teacher and pupil, irony is impolite, a base emotion. All ironic writers are counting on that silly category of men who want to feel, along with the author, superior to all other men, and regard the author as the spokesman for their arrogance. – Incidentally, the habit of irony, like that of sarcasm, ruins the character; eventually it lends the quality of a gloating superiority; finally, one is like a snapping dog, who, besides biting, has also learned to laugh.
373
Arrogance. – Man should beware of nothing so much as the growth of that weed called arrogance, which ruins every one of our good harvests; For there is arrogance in warmheartedness, in marks of respect, in well-meaning intimacy, in caresses, in friendly advice, in confession of errors, in the pity for others – and all these fine things awaken revulsion when that weed grows among them. The arrogant man, that is, the one who wants to be more important than he is *or is thought to be, *always miscalculates. To be sure, he enjoys his momentary success, to the extent that the witnesses of his arrogance usually render to him, out of fear or convenience, that amount of honor which he demands. But they take a nasty vengeance for it, by subtracting just the amount of excess honor he demands from the value they used to attach to him. People make one pay for nothing so dearly as for humiliation. An arrogant man can make his real, great achievement so suspect and petty in the eyes of others that they tread upon it with dust-covered feet. – One should not even allow himself a proud bearing, unless he can be quite sure that he will not be misunderstood and considered arrogant – with friends or wives, for example. For in associating with men, there is no greater foolishness than to bring on oneself a reputation for arrogance; it is even worse than not having learned to lie politely.
374
Dialogue. – A dialogue is the perfect conversation because everything that the one person says acquires its particular color, sound, its accompanying gesture *in strict consideration of the other person *to whom he is speaking; it is like letter-writing, where one and the same man shows ten ways of expressing his inner thoughts, depending on whether he is writing to this person or to that. In a dialogue, there is only one single refraction of thought: this is produced by the partner in conversation, the mirror in which we want to see our thoughts reflected as beautifully as possible. But how is it with two, or three, or more partners? There the conversation necessarily loses something of its individualizing refinement; the various considerations clash, cancel each other out; the phrase that pleases the one, does not accord with the character of the other. Therefore, a man interacting with several people is forced to fall back upon himself, to present the facts as they are, but rob the subject matter of that scintillating air of humanity that makes a conversation one of the most agreeable things in the world. Just listen to the tone in which men interacting with whole groups of men tend to speak; it is as if the ground bass of all speech were: “That is who I am; that is what I say; now you think what you will about it!” For this reason, clever women whom a man has met in society are generally remembered as strange, awkward, unappealing: it is speaking to and in front of many people that robs them of all intelligent amiability and turns a harshlight only on their conscious dependence on themselves, their tactics, and their intention to triumph publicly; while the same women in a dialogue become females again and rediscover their mind’s gracefulness.
375
Posthumous fame. – It makes sense to hope for recognition in a distant future only if one assumes that mankind will remain essentially unchanged and that all greatness must be perceived as great, not for one time only, but for all times. However, this is a mistake; in all its perceptions and judgments of what is beautiful and good, mankind changes very greatly; it is fantasy to believe of ourselves that we have a mile’s head start and that all mankind is following our path. Besides, a scholar who goes unrecognized may certainly count on the fact that other men will also make the same discovery he did, and that in the best case a historian will later acknowledge that he already knew this or the other thing but was not capable of winning belief for his theory. Posterity always interprets lack of recognition as a lack of strength. – In short, one should not speak so quickly in favor of arrogant isolation. Incidentally, there are exceptions; but usually it is our errors, weaknesses, or follies that keep our great qualities from being recognized.
376
About friends. – Just think to yourself some time how different are the feelings, how divided the opinions, even among the closest acquaintances; how even the same opinions have quite a different place or intensity in the heads of your friends than in your own; how many hundreds of times there is occasion for misunderstanding or hostile flight. After all that, you will say to yourself: “How unsure is the ground on which all our bonds and friendships rest; how near we are to cold downpours or ill weather; how lonely is every man!” If someone understands this, and also that all his fellow men’s opinions, their kind and intensity, are as inevitable and irresponsible as their actions; if he learns to perceive that there is this inner inevitability of opinions, due to the indissoluble interweaving of character, occupation, talent, and environment then he will perhaps be rid of the bitterness and sharpness of that feeling with which the wise man called out: “Friends, there are no friends!” Rather, he will admit to himself that there are, indeed, friends, but they were brought to you by error and deception about yourself; and they must have learned to be silent in order to remain your friend; for almost always, such human relationships rest on the fact that a certain few things are never said, indeed that they are never touched upon; and once these pebbles are set rolling, the friendship follows after, and falls apart. Are there men who cannot be fatally wounded, were they to learn what their most intimate friends really know about them? – By knowing ourselves and regarding our nature itself as a changing sphere of opinions and moods, thus learning to despise it a bit, we bring ourselves into balance with others again. It is true, we have good reason to despise each of our acquaintances, even the greatest; but we have just as good reason to turn this feeling against ourselves. – And so let us bear with each other, since we do in fact bear with ourselves; and perhaps each man will some day know the more joyful hour in which he says:
“Friends, there are no friends!” the dying wise man shouted.
“Enemies, there is no enemy!” shout I, the living fool.
Seventh Division - Woman and Child
377
The perfect woman. – The perfect woman is a higher type of human than the perfect man, and also something much more rare.
The natural science of animals offers a means to demonstrate the probability of this tenet.
378
Friendship and marriage. – The best friend will probably get the best wife, because a good marriage is based on a talent for friendship.
379
Parents live on. – Unresolved dissonances in the relation of the character and disposition of the parents continue to reverberate in the nature of the child, and constitute his inner sufferings.
380
From the mother. – Everyone carries within him an image of woman that he gets from his mother; that determines whether he will honor women in general, or despise them, or be generally indifferent to them.
381
To correct nature. – If someone does not have a good father, he should acquire one.
382
Fathers and sons. – Fathers have much to do to make amends for the fact that they have sons.
383
Refined women’s error. – Refined women think that a subject does not exist at all if it is not possible to speak about it in society.
384
A male’s disease. – The surest aid in combating the male’s disease of self-contempt is to be loved by a clever woman.
385
A kind of jealousy. – Mothers are easily jealous of their sons’ friends if they are exceptionally successful. Usually a mother loves *herself *in her son more than she loves the son himself.
386
Reasonable unreason. – When his life and reason are mature, man comes to feel that his father was wrong to beget him.
387
Maternal goodness. – Some mothers need happy, respected children; some need unhappy children: otherwise they cannot demonstrate their goodness as mothers.
388
*Different *sighs. – A few men have sighed because their women were abducted; most, because no one wanted to abduct them.
389
Love-matches. – Marriages contracted from love (so-called love-matches) have error for their father and need for their mother. [See Plato: Symposium, 203b-d.]
390
Friendship with women. – Women are quite able to make friends with a man; but to preserve such a friendship – that no doubt requires the assistance of a slight physical antipathy.
391
Boredom. – Many people, especially women, do not experience boredom, because they have never learned to work properly.
392
An element of love. – In every kind of female love, something of maternal love appears also.
393
Unity of place, and drama. – If spouses did not live together, good marriages would be more frequent.
394
Usual consequences of marriage. – Every association that does not uplift, draws downwards, and vice ‘versa; therefore men generally sink somewhat when they take wives, while wives are somewhat elevated. Men who are too intellectual need marriage every bit as much as they resist it like a bitter medicine.
395
Teaching to command. – Children from humble families must be educated to command, as much as other children to obey.
396
To want to be in love. – Fiancés who have been brought together by convenience often try to *be *in love in order to overcome the reproach of cold, calculating advantage. Likewise, those who turn to Christianity for their advantage try to become truly pious, for in that way the religious pantomime is easier for them.
397
No standstill in love. – A musician who *loves *the slow tempo will take the same pieces slower and slower. Thus there is no standstill in any love.
398
Modesty. – Women’s modesty generally increases with their beauty.
399
Long-lasting marriage. – A marriage in which each wants to attain an individual goal through the other holds together well, for example, when the woman wants to be famous through the man, or the man popular through the woman.
400
Proteus nature. – For the sake of love, women wholly become what they are in the imagination of the men who love them.
401
Loving and possessing. – Women usually love an important man in such a way that they want to have him to themselves. They would gladly put him under lock and key, if their vanity, which wants him to appear important in front of others, too, did not advise against it.
402
Test of a good marriage. – A marriage proves itself a good marriage by being able to endure an occasional “exception.”
403
Means to bring everyone to everything. – One can so tire and weaken any man, by disturbances, fears, excessive work and ideas, that he no longer resists any apparently complex matter, but rather gives in to it – that is something diplomats and women know.
404
Honor and honesty. – Those girls who want to owe their whole life’s maintenance to their youthful charms alone, and whose cunning is prompted by their shrewd mothers, want the same thing as courtesans – only the girls are more clever and less honest.
405
Masks. – There are women who, however you may search them, prove to have no content but are purely masks. The man who associates with such almost spectral, necessarily unsatisfied beings is to be commiserated with, yet it is precisely they who are able to arouse the desire of the man most strongly: he seeks for her soul – and goes on seeking.
406
Marriage as a long conversation. – When entering a marriage, one should ask the question: do you think you will be able to have good conversations with this woman right into old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but most of the time in interaction is spent in conversation.
407
Girlish dreams. – Inexperienced girls flatter themselves with the notion that it is within their power to make a man happy; later they learn that it means holding a man in low esteem to assume that only a girl is needed to make him happy. The vanity of women demands that a man be more than a happy husband.
408
Faust and Gretchen dying out. – As one scholar very insightfully remarks [Paul Anton de Lagarde: On the Current State of the German Reich (1876), 44-55.], educated men in present-day Germany resemble a combination of Mephistopheles and Wagner, but certainly not Faust, whom their grandfathers (in their youth at least) felt rumbling within them. So (to continue the idea), *Gretchens *do not suit them for two reasons. And because they are no longer desired, it seems that they are dying out.
409
Girls as Gymnasium students. – For heaven’s sake, do not pass our Gymnasium education on to girls too! For it often turns witty, inquisitive, fiery youths – into copies of their teachers!
410
Without rivals. – Women easily notice whether a man’s soul is already appropriated; they want to be loved without rivals, and resent the goals of his ambition, his political duties, his science and art, if he has a passion for such things. Unless he is distinguished because of them: then they hope an amorous tie to him will also make *them *more distinguished; when that is the case, they encourage their lover.
411
The female intellect. – Women’s intellect is manifested as perfect control, presence of mind, and utilization of all advantages. They bequeath it as their fundamental character to their children, and the father furnishes the darker background of will. His influence determines the rhythm and harmony, so to speak, to which the new life is to be played out; but its melody comes from the woman. – To say it for those who know how to explain a thing: women have the intelligence, men the heart and passion. This is not contradicted by the fact that men actually get so much farther with their intelligence: they have the deeper, more powerful drives; these take their intelligence, which is in itself something passive, forward. Women are often privately amazed at the great honor men pay to their hearts. When men look especially for a profound, warmhearted being, in choosing their spouse, and women for a clever, alert, and brilliant being, one sees very clearly how a man is looking for an idealized man, and a woman for an idealized woman – that is, not for a complement, but for the perfection of their own merits.
412
A judgment of Hesiod’s confirmed. – An indication of the cleverness of women is that, almost everywhere, they have known how to have others support them, like drones in a beehive. Just consider the original meaning of this, and why men do not have women support them. It is certainly because male vanity and ambition are greater than female cleverness; for, through submission, women have known how to secure for themselves the preponderant advantage, indeed domination. Originally, clever women could use even the care of children to excuse their avoiding work as much as possible. Even now, if they are really active, as housekeepers, for example, they know how to make a disconcerting fuss about it, so that men tend to overestimate the merit of their activity tenfold.
413
The shortsighted are in love. – Sometimes it requires only a stronger pair of spectacles to cure the lover, and he who had the imagination to picture a face, a figure twenty years older would perhaps pass through life very undisturbed.
414
When women hate. – When feeling hatred, women are more dangerous than men. First and foremost because once their hostile feeling has been aroused, they are inhibited by no considerations of fairness but let their hatred swell undisturbed to the final consequences; and second, because they are practiced in finding sore spots (which every man, every party has) and stabbing there: then their rapier-sharp mind performs splendid services for them (while men, when they see wounds, become restrained, often generous and conciliatory).
415
Love. – The idolatry that women practice when it comes to love is fundamentally and originally a clever device, in that all those idealizations of love heighten their own power and portray them as ever more desirable in the eyes of men. But because they have grown accustomed over the centuries to this exaggerated estimation of love, it has happened that they have run into their own net and forgotten the reason behind it. They themselves are now more deceived than men, and suffer more, therefore, from the disappointment that almost inevitably enters the life of every woman – to the extent that she even has enough fantasy and sense to be able to be deceived and disappointed.
416
On the emancipation of women. – Can women be just at all, if they are so used to loving, to feeling immediately pro or con? For this reason they are also less often partial to causes, more often to people; but if to a cause, they immediately become partisan, thereby ruining its pure, innocent effect. Thus, there is a not insignificant danger when they are entrusted with politics or certain areas of science (history, for example). For what would be more rare than a woman who really knew what science is? The best even nourish in their hearts a secret disdain for it, as if they were somehow superior. Perhaps all this can change; for the time being it is so.
417
Inspiration in the judgments of women. – Those sudden decisions about pro and con which women tend to make, the lightning-fast illuminations of personal relationships by their eruptions of liking and disliking, in short, the proofs of female injustice have been enwreathed by loving men with a glow, as if all women had inspirations of wisdom, even without the Delphic cauldron and the laurel: long afterwards, their statements are interpreted and explained like a sibyl’s oracle. However, if one considers that something positive can be said for any person or cause, and likewise something against it, that all matters are not only two-sided, but three or four-sided, then it is almost difficult to go completely astray by such sudden decisions; indeed, one could say that the nature of things is arranged in such a way that women always win the argument.
418
Letting oneself be loved. – Because one of the two loving people is usually the lover, the other the beloved, the belief has arisen that in every love affair the amount of love is constant: the more of it one of the two grabs to himself, the less remains for the other person. Sometimes, exceptionally, it happens that vanity convinces each of the two people that *he *is the one who has to be loved, so that both want to let themselves be loved: in marriage, especially, this results in some half-droll, half-absurd scenes.
419
Contradictions in female heads. – Because women are so much more personal than objective, their range of ideas can tolerate tendencies that are logically in contradiction with one another; they tend to be enthusiastic about the representatives of these tendencies, one after the other, and accept their systems wholesale; but in such a way that a dead place arises whenever a new personality later gains the upper hand. It could happen that all of the philosophy in the head of an old woman consists of nothing but such dead places.
420
Who suffers more? – After a personal disagreement and quarrel between a woman and a man, the one party suffers most at the thought of having hurt the other; while that other party suffers most at the thought of not having hurt the first enough; for which reason it tries by tears, sobs, and contorted features, to weigh down the other person’s heart, even afterwards.
421
Opportunity for female generosity. – Once a man’s thoughts have gone beyond the demands of custom, he might consider whether nature and reason do not dictate that he marry several times in succession, so that first, aged twenty-two years, he marry an older girl who is spiritually and morally superior to him and can guide him through the dangers of his twenties (ambition, hatred, selfcontempt, passions of all kinds). This woman’s love would later be completely transformed into maternal feeling, and she would not only tolerate it, but promote it in the most salutary way, if the man in his thirties made an alliance with a quite young girl, whose education he himself would take in hand. – For one’s twenties, marriage is a necessary institution; for one’s thirties, it is useful, but not necessary; for later life, it often becomes harmful and promotes a husband’s spiritual regression.
422
Tragedy of childhood. – Not infrequently, noble-minded and ambitious men have to endure their harshest struggle in childhood, perhaps by having to assert their characters against a low-minded father, who is devoted to pretense and mendacity, or by living, like Lord Byron, in continual struggle with a childish and wrathful mother. If one has experienced such struggles, for the rest of his life he will never get over knowing who has been in reality his greatest and most dangerous enemy.
423
Parents’ foolishness. – The grossest errors in judging a person are made by his parents; this is a fact, but how is one to explain it? Do the parents have too much experience of the child, and can they no longer compose it into a unity? We notice that travelers in a strange land grasp correctly the common, distinctive traits of a people only in the first period of their stay; the more they get to know a people, the more they forget how to see what is typical and distinctive about it. As soon as they see up close, they stop being farsighted. Might parents judge their child wrongly because they have never stood far enough off from him? – A quite different explanation would be the following: men tend to stop thinking about things that are closest to them, and simply accept them. When parents are required to judge their children, it is perhaps their customary thoughtlessness that makes them judge so mistakenly.
424
From the future of marriage. – Those noble, free-minded women who set themselves the task of educating and elevating the female sex should not overlook one factor: marriage, conceived of in its higher interpretation, the spiritual friendship of two people of opposite sexes, that is, marriage as hoped for by the future, entered into for the purpose of begetting and raising a new generation. Such a marriage, which uses sensuality as if it were only a rare, occasional means for a higher end, probably requires and must be provided with a natural aid: concubinage. For if, for reasons of the man’s health, his wife is also to serve for the sole satisfaction of his sexual need, a false point of view, counter to the goals we have indicated, will be decisive in choosing a wife. Posterity becomes a coincidental objective; its successful education, highly improbable. A good wife, who should be friend, helpmate, childbearer, mother, head of the family, manager, indeed, who perhaps has to run her own business or office separate from her husband, cannot be a concubine at the same time: it would usually be asking too much of her. Thus, the opposite of what happened in Pericles’ times in Athens could occur in the future: men, whose wives were not much more than concubines then, turned to Aspasias [Aspasia: an Athenian courtesan, the mistress of Pericles] as well, because they desired the delights of a mentally and emotionally liberating sociability, which only the grace and spiritual flexibility of women can provide. All human institutions, like marriage, permit only a moderate degree of practical idealization, failing which, crude measures immediately become necessary.
425
Women’s period of storm and stress. – In the three or four civilized European countries, one can in a few centuries educate women to be anything one wants, even men – not in the sexual sense, of course, but certainly in every other sense. At some point, under such an influence, they will have taken on all male virtues and strengths, and of course they will also have to take male weaknesses and vices into the bargain. This much, as I said, one can bring about by force. But how will we endure the intermediate stage it brings with it, which itself can last a few centuries, during which female follies and injustices, their ancient birthright, still claim predominance over everything they will have learned or achieved? This will be the time when anger will constitute the real male emotion, anger over the fact that all the arts and sciences will be overrun and clogged up by shocking dilettantism; bewildering chatter will talk philosophy to death; politics will be more fantastic and partisan than ever; society will be in complete dissolution because women, the preservers of the old custom, will have become ludicrous in their own eyes, and will be intent on standing outside custom in every way. For if women had their greatest power *in *custom, where will they not have to reach to achieve a similar abundance of power again, after they have given up custom?
426
Free spirit and marriage. – Will free spirits live with women? In general, I believe that, as the true-thinking, truth-speaking men of the present, they must, like the prophetic birds of ancient times, prefer to fly alone.
427
Happiness of marriage. – Everything habitual draws an ever tighter net of spiderwebs around us; then we notice that the fibres have become traps, and that we ourselves are sitting in the middle, like a spider that got caught there and must feed on its own blood. That is why the free spirit hates all habits and rules, everything enduring and definitive; that is why, again and again, he painfully tears apart the net around him, even though he will suffer as a consequence from countless large and small wounds – for he must tear those fibres away from himself, from his body, his soul. He must learn to love where he used to hate, and vice versa. Indeed, nothing may be impossible for him, not even to sow dragons’ teeth on the same field where he previously emptied the cornucopias of his kindness. – From this one can judge whether he is cut out for the happiness of marriage.
428
Too close. – If we live in too close proximity to a person, it is as if we kept touching a good etching with our bare fingers; one day we have poor, dirty paper in our hands and nothing more. A human being’s soul is likewise worn down by continual touching; at least it finally *appears *that way to us – we never see its original design and beauty again. – One always loses by all-too-intimate association with women and friends; and sometimes one loses the pearl of his life in the process.
429
The golden cradle. – The free spirit will always breathe a sigh of relief when he has finally decided to shake off the maternal care and protection administered by the women around him. What is the harm in the colder draft of air that they had warded off so anxiously? What does one real disadvantage, loss, accident, illness, debt, or folly more or less in his life matter, compared with the bondage of the golden cradle, the peacock-tail fan, and the oppressive feeling of having to be actually grateful because he is waited upon and spoiled like an infant? That is why the milk offered him by the maternal disposition of the women around him can so easily turn to bile.
430
Voluntary sacrificial animal. – Significant women bring relief to the lives of their husbands, if the latter are famous and great, by nothing so much as by becoming a vessel, so to speak, for other people’s general ill-will and occasional bad humor. Contemporaries tend to overlook their great men’s many mistakes and follies, even gross injustices, if only they can find someone whom they may abuse and slaughter as a veritable sacrificial animal to relieve their feelings. Not infrequently a woman finds in herself the ambition to offer herself for this sacrifice, and then the man can of course be very contented – in the case that he is egoist enough to tolerate in his vicinity such a voluntary conductor of lightning, storm, and rain.
431
Pleasant adversaries. – Women’s natural inclination to a quiet, regular, happily harmonious existence and society, the oil-like and calming aspect of their influence on the sea of life, automatically works against the heroic inner urgency of the free spirit. Without noticing it, women act as if they were removing the stones from the traveling mineralogist’s path so that he will not bump his foot against them – whereas he has gone forth so that his foot shall strike against them.
432
Dissonance of two consonants. – Women want to serve, and therein lies their happiness; and the free spirit wants not to be served, and therein lies his happiness.
433
Xanthippe. – Socrates found the kind of woman he needed – but not even he would have sought her out had he known her well enough; not even the heroism of this free spirit would have gone that far. In fact, Xanthippe drove him more and more into his strange profession, by making his house and home inhospitable and unhomely; she taught him to live in the back streets, and anywhere where one could chatter and be idle, and in that way formed him into Athens’ greatest backstreet dialectician, who finally had to compare himself to a pesky horsefly, set by a god on the neck of the beautiful horse Athens to keep it from coming to rest.
434
Blind at a distance. – Just as mothers cannot really perceive or see more than the perceptible and visible pains of their children, so wives of very ambitious men cannot bring themselves to see their husbands suffering, in want, and even disdained; while perhaps all this is not only the sign that they have chosen their way of life correctly, but also the guarantee that their goals will *have *to be attained sooner or later. Women always intrigue secretly against their husband’s higher soul; they want to cheat it out of its future for the sake of a painless, comfortable present.
435
Power and freedom. – As greatly as women honor their husbands, they honor the powers and ideas recognized by society even more; for thousands of years they have been used to walking bowed over in front of all forms of rule, with their hands folded on their breast, disapproving of any revolt against public power. That is why, without even intending to, but rather as if out of instinct, they drop themselves like a drag onto the wheels of any freethinking, independent striving, and in some circumstances make their husbands most impatient, especially when the husbands convince themselves that it is love that is really spurring the wives on. To disapprove of women’s methods arid generously to honor the motives for these methods: that is man’s way, and often enough man’s despair.
436
Ceterum censeo. [It is my opinion, moreover.] – It is ludicrous when a have-not society declares the abolition of inheritance rights, and no less ludicrous when childless people work on the practical laws of a country: they do not have enough ballast in their ship to be able to sail surely into the ocean of the future. But it seems just as nonsensical if a man who has chosen as his task the acquisition of the most general knowledge and the evaluation of the whole of existence weighs himself down with personal considerations of a family, a livelihood, security, respect of his wife and child; he is spreading out over his telescope a thick veil, which scarcely any rays from the distant heavens are able to penetrate. So I, too, come to the tenet that in questions of the highest philosophical kind, all married people are suspect.
437
Finally. – There are many kinds of hemlock, and fate usually finds an opportunity to set a cup of this poison to the lips of the free spirit – to “punish” him, as everyone then says. What do the women around him do then? They will cry and lament and perhaps disturb the thinker’s twilight peace, as they did in the prison of Athens. “O Crito, have someone take these women away!” said Socrates at last. –
Eighth Division - A Glance at the State.
438
Permission to speak! – The demagogic character and the intention to appeal to the masses is at present common to all political parties: on account of this intention they are all compelled to transform their principles into great al fresco stupidities and thus to paint them on the wall. This is no longer alterable, indeed it would be pointless to raise so much as a finger against it; for in this domain there apply the words of Voltaire: quand la populace se mêle de raisonner, tout est perdu. [“When the mob joins in and adds its voice, all is lost.”] Since this has happened one has to accommodate oneself when an earthquake has displaced the former boundaries and contours of the ground and altered the value of one’s property. Moreover, if the purpose of all politics really is to make life endurable for as many as possible, then these as-many-as-possible are entitled to determine what they understand by an endurable life; if they trust to their intellect also to discover the right means of attaining this goal, what good is there in doubting it? They want for once to forge for themselves their own fortunes and misfortunes; and if this feeling of self-determination, pride in the five or six ideas their head contains and brings forth, in fact renders their life so pleasant to them they are happy to bear the calamitous consequences of their narrow-mindedness, there is little to be objected to, always presupposing that this narrow-mindedness does not go so far as to demand that everything should become politics in this sense, that everyone should live and work according to such a standard. For a few must first of all be allowed, now more than ever, to refrain from politics and to step a little aside: they too are prompted to this by pleasure in self-determination; and there may also be a degree of pride attached to staying silent when too many, or even just many, are speaking. Then these few must be forgiven if they fail to take the happiness of the many, whether by the many one understands nations or social classes, so very seriously and are now and then guilty of an ironic posture; for their seriousness is located elsewhere, their happiness is something quite different, their goal is not to be encompassed by any clumsy hand that has only five fingers. Finally, from time to time there comes to them – what it will certainly be hardest to concede to them but must be conceded to them nonetheless – a moment when they emerge from their silent solitude and again try the power of their lungs: for then they call to one another like those gone astray in a wood in order to locate and encourage one another; whereby much becomes audible, to be sure, that sounds ill to ears for which it is not intended. – Soon afterwards, though, it is again still in the wood, so still that the buzzing, humming and fluttering of the countless insects that live in, above and beneath it can again clearly be heard.
439
Culture and caste. – A higher culture can come into being only where there are two castes of society: the working caste and the idle caste, capable of true leisure; or, to express it more emphatically, the caste of forced labor and the caste of free labor. The distribution of happiness is not a crucial factor when it is a matter of engendering a higher culture, but the caste of the idle is in fact the more capable of suffering and does suffer more; its contentment in existence is slighter; its task greater. Now, if there should be an exchange between the two castes, so that duller, less spiritual individuals and families from the higher caste are demoted into the lower, and, conversely, the freer people from that caste gain admission to the higher: then a condition has been achieved beyond which only the open sea of indefinite desires is still visible. – Thus the fading voice of the old era speaks to us; but where are the ears left to hear it?
440
Of the nobility. – That in which men and women of the nobility excel others and which gives them an undoubted right to be rated higher consists in two arts ever more enhanced through inheritance: the art of commanding and the art of proud obedience. – Now wherever commanding is part of the business of the day (as in the great mercantile and industrial world) there arises something similar to those families “of the nobility,” but they lack nobility in obedience, which is in the former an inheritance from the feudal ages and will no longer grow in our present cultural climate.
441
Subordination. – The subordination that is valued so highly in military and bureaucratic states will soon become as unbelievable to us as the secret tactics of the Jesuits have already become; and when this subordination is no longer possible, it will no longer be possible to achieve a number of its most astonishing consequences, and the world will be the poorer. Subordination must vanish, for its basis is vanishing: belief in absolute authority, in ultimate truth. Even in military states, physical coercion is not sufficient to produce subordination; rather it requires an inherited adoration of princeliness, as of something suprahuman. – In freer situations, one subordinates himself only on conditions, as a consequence of a mutual contract, that is, without any prejudice to self-interest.
442
Conscript armies. – The greatest disadvantage of the conscript army, now so widely acclaimed, consists in the squandering of men of the highest civilization; they exist at all only when every circumstance is favorable – how sparingly and anxiously one should deal with them, since it requires great periods of time to create the chance conditions for the production of such delicately organized brains! But just as the Greeks wallowed in Greek blood, so Europeans are now wallowing in European blood; and, in fact, it is the men of highest culture who are always sacrificed in the relatively greatest number, the men who guarantee an abundant and good posterity; for these men stand as commanders in the front lines of a battle, and moreover, because of their greater ambition, expose themselves most to dangers. – Nowadays, when quite different and higher tasks are set than patria and honor, crude Roman patriotism is either something dishonest, or a sign of backwardness.
443
Hope and presumption. – Our social order will slowly melt away, as all earlier orders have done when the suns of new ideas shone forth with new warmth over the people. One can desire this melting only in that one has hope; and one may reasonably have hope only if one credits his own heart and head, and that of his equals, with more strength than one credits to the representatives of the existing order. Usually, therefore, this hope will be a piece of presumption and an overvaluation.
444
War. – One can say against war that it makes the victor stupid and the vanquished malicious. In favor of war, one can say that it barbarizes through both these effects and thus makes man more natural; war is the winter or hibernation time of culture, mankind emerges from it stronger for good and evil.
445
In the service of the prince. – In order to act with complete ruthlessness, a statesman will do best to carry out his work not for himself, but for his prince. The spectator’s eye will be so blinded by the glitter of this overall disinterestedness that he will not see the wiles and severities which the statesman’s work brings with it.
446
A question of power, not of justice. – For men who always consider the higher utility of a matter, socialism, assuming it is really the uprising against their oppressors of people who have been held down for thousands of years, poses no problem of justice (with the ludicrous, feeble question: “How far ought one to yield to its demands?”), but only a problem of power (“To what extent can one exploit its demands?”). So it is likewise the case of a force of nature, for example steam – which is either pressed into service by man as god of the machine or, if the machine is faulty (that is, if human calculation in its construction is faulty), blows the machine and man with it to pieces. To solve this question of power, one must know how strong socialism is, and with what modification it can still be used as a mighty lever within the existing play of political forces; in some circumstances one would even have to do everything possible to strengthen it. Whenever a great force exists – even the most dangerous – mankind has to consider how to make of it an instument for the attainment of its own objectives. – Socialism gains rights only if war appears to be imminent between the two powers, the representatives of the old and new, but then both parties prudently calculate how they may preserve themselves to best advantage, and this results in their desire for a treaty. No rights without a treaty. Until now, however, in the said domain there has been neither war nor treaties, and thus no rights, no “ought,” either.
447
Making use of petty dishonesty. – The power of the press resides in the fact that every individual who serves it feels only slightly pledged or bound to it. He usually gives his opinion, but sometimes, in order to help his party or the politics of his country, or even himself, he does not give it. Such little misdemeanors of dishonesty, or perhaps only of dishonest reticence, are not hard for the individual to bear; and yet the consequences are extraordinary, because these little misdemeanors are committed by many people simultaneously. Each of them says to himself, “For such petty services I live better and can make my livelihood; if I refuse such little acts of discretion, I shall make myself impossible.” Because it seems almost a matter of indifference morally whether one writes one line more or less, and perhaps even without a signature – anyone who has money and influence can transform any opinion into public opinion. Whoever realizes that most people are weak in small matters, and wants to attain his own purposes through them, is thus always a dangerous man.
448
Complaining too loudly. – When abuses (for example, the crimes of an administration, or bribery and favoritism in political or learned bodies) are painted in greatly exaggerated colors, it does of course have less of an effect on insightful people, but it has all the greater effect on the uninsightful (who would have remained indifferent to a careful, measured representation). But since the uninsightful are considerably in the majority, and harbor within themselves stronger willpower and a more impetuous desire for action, that exaggeration will lead to investigations, punishments, undertakings, and reorganizations. – To this extent it is useful to paint abuses in exaggerated colors.
449
The apparent weather-makers of politics. – Just as people secretly assume that a man who knows something about the weather and can predict it a day in advance actually makes the weather, so even cultivated and learned men, calling on superstitious belief, attribute all the important changes and conjunctures that occurred during the government of great statesmen to them, as their own work, when it is only too clear that they knew something about it sooner than the others and made their calculations accordingly: thus they too are taken for weather-makers – and this belief is not the least tool of their power.
450
New and old conception of government. – To distinguish between government and people, as if two distinct spheres of power, one stronger and higher, the other weaker and lower, were negotiating and coming to agreement, is a bit of inherited political sensibility that still corresponds exactly to the historical establishment of the power situation in most states. When, for example, Bismarck describes the constitutional form as a compromise between government and people, he is speaking according to a principle that has its rationality in history (which is, of course, also the source for that portion of irrationality, without which nothing human can exist). By contrast, we are now supposed to learn – in accordance with a principle that has sprung from the head alone, and is supposed to make history – that government is nothing but an organ of the people, and not a provident, venerable “above” in relation to a habitually humble “below.” Before one accepts this formulation of the concept of government, which is as yet unhistorical and arbitrary, if more logical, we might consider the consequences: for the relationship between people and government is the most pervasive ideal relationship, according to which the interactions between teacher and pupil, head of the house and servants, father and family, commander-in-chief and soldier, master and apprentice, have unconsciously been modeled. All these relationships are now being slightly transformed, under the influence of the prevailing constitutional form of government: they are becoming compromises. But how will they have to reverse and displace themselves, changing name and nature, when that latest concept of government has captured everyone’s mind! But it will probably take another century for that. In this regard, there is nothing more desirable than caution and slow evolution.
451
Justice as party call-notes. – Noble (if not particularly judicious) representatives of the ruling class can by all means vow: let us treat men as equals, concede to them equal rights. To this extent a socialist mode of thought resting on justice is possible; but, as aforesaid, only within the rules of the ruling class, which in this case practices justice with sacrifices and self-denials. To demand equality of rights, on the other hand, as the socialists of the subject caste do, is never an emanation of justice but of greed. – If one holds up bleeding chunks of meat to an animal and takes them away again until it finally roars: do you think this roaring has anything to do with justice?
452
Property and justice. – When socialists prove that the distribution of wealth in present-day society is the consequence of countless injustices and atrocities, rejecting in summa the obligation towards anything so unjustly established, they are seeing one only one aspect of the matter. The entire past of the old culture was erected on force, slavery, deception, error; but we, the heirs and inheritors of all these past things, cannot decree our own abolition, and may not wish away one particular part. The disposition to injustice lies in the souls of the non-possessors too, they are no better than the possessors and have no special moral privilege, for at some point their forefathers were possessors too. We do not need forcible redistribution of property, but rather a gradual transformation of mind; the sense of justice must become greater in everyone, and the instinct for violence weaker.
453
The steersman of the passions. – The statesman excites public passions in order to profit from the counter-passions they awaken. To take an example: any German statesman knows well that the Catholic Church will never form an alliance with Russia, indeed that it would much rather ally itself with the Turks; he likewise knows that Germany is greatly threatened by the danger of an alliance of France with Russia. Now, if he can succeed in making France the hearth and home of the Catholic Church, he will have eliminated this danger for a long time to come. Thus he has an interest in showing hatred towards the Catholics and, by hostilities of all kinds, transforming believers in the Pope’s authority into a passionate political power that is inimical to German policy and must naturally ally itself with France, as Germany’s adversary: his goal is just as necessarily the Catholicization of France, as Mirabeau’s [Honoré Gabriel de Riqueti, Count de Mirabeau (1749-91), French statesman.] was its decatholicization. – Thus, one state desires to cloud millions of minds of another state, in order to derive its benefit from this clouding. This is the same attitude that supports the neighboring states’ republican form of government – “le désorde organisé,” as Mérimée says [from Prosper Mérimée’s Lettres à une inconnue 2, 372] – for the sole reason that it assumes it will make the people weaker, more divided, and less able to wage war.
454
Those who are dangerous among the revolutionary spirits. – One can divide those who are intent on overthrowing society into the ones who want to achieve something for themselves, and the ones who want to achieve something for their children and grandchildren. The latter are the more dangerous; for they believe they are disinterested and possess the good conscience that goes with that belief. The others can be bought off: the ruling society is still rich and prudent enough for that. Danger begins when goals become impersonal; revolutionaries whose interest is impersonal may regard all defenders of the existing order as having a personal interest, and may therefore feel superior to them.
455
Political value of fatherhood. – If a man has no sons, he lacks full right to speak about the needs of a single matter of state. He has to have risked with the others what is most precious to him; only then is he bound firmly to the state. One must consider the happiness of one’s descendants, and so, above all, have descendants, in order to take a proper, natural part in all institutions and their transformation. The evolution of a higher morality depends on a man’s having sons: this makes him unegoistic, or, more exactly, it expands his egoism over time, and enables him seriously to pursue objectives that transcend his individual lifespan.
456
Pride of descent. – A man may be justly proud of an unbroken line of good ancestors down to his father – not however of the line itself, for every one has that. Descent from good ancestors constitutes the real nobility of birth; a single break in the chain, one bad ancestor, therefore, destroys the nobility of birth. Every one who talks about his nobility should be asked: “Have you no violent, avaricious, dissolute, wicked, cruel man amongst your ancestors?” If with good cognizance and conscience he can answer No, then let his friendship be sought.
457
Slaves and laborers. – The fact that we regard the gratification of vanity as of more account than all other forms of well-being (security, position, and pleasures of all sorts), is shown to a ludicrous extent by every one wishing for the abolition of slavery and utterly abhorring to put any one into this position (apart altogether from political reasons), while every one must acknowledge to himself that in all respects slaves live more securely and more happily than modern laborers, and that slave labor is very easy labor compared with that of the “laborer.” We protest in the name of the “dignity of man”; but, expressed more simply, that is just our darling vanity which feels non-equality, and inferiority in public estimation, to be the hardest lot of all. The cynic thinks differently concerning the matter, because he despises honour – and so Diogenes was for some time a slave and tutor.
458
Leading minds and their instruments. – We see that great statesmen, and in general all who have to employ many people to carry out their plans, sometimes proceed one way and sometimes another; they either choose with great skill and care the people suitable for their plans, and then leave them a comparatively large amount of liberty, because they know that the nature of the persons selected impels them precisely to the point where they themselves would have them go; or else they choose badly, in fact take whatever comes to hand, but out of every piece of clay they form something useful for their purpose. These latter minds are the more high handed; they also desire more submissive instruments; their knowledge of mankind is usually much smaller, their contempt of mankind greater than in the case of the first mentioned class, but the machines they construct generally work better than the machines from the workshops of the former.
459
Arbitrary law necessary. – Jurists dispute as to whether that law which is most thoroughly thought out, or that which is easiest to understand ought to prevail in a nation. The first type, whose supremee model is Roman law, seems incomprehensible to the layman and therefore no expression of his sense of law. Popular codes of law, like the Germanic, for example, have been crude, superstitious, illogical, and in part stupid, but they reflected quite specific inherited indigenous customs and feelings. – But when law is no longer a tradition, as in our case, it can only be commanded, imposed by constraint; none of us has a traditional sense of justice any longer; therefore we must content ourselves with arbitrary law, which express the necessity of the fact that there has to be law. Then, the most logical law is the most acceptable, because it is the most impartial, even admitting that, in the relationship of crime and punishment, the smallest unit of measure is always fixed arbitrarily.
460
The great man of the masses. – It is easy to give the recipe for what the masses call a great man. By all means, supply them with something that they find very pleasant, or, first, put the idea into their heads that this or that would be very pleasant, and then give it to them. But on no account immediately: let it rather be won with great exertion, or let it seem so. The masses must have the impression that a mighty, indeed invincible, force of will is present; at least it must seem to be present. Everyone admires a strong will, because no one has it, and everyone tells himself that, if he had it, there would be no more limits for him and his egoism. Now, if it appears that this strong will is producing something very pleasant for the masses, instead of listening to the dictates of its own desires, then everyone admires it all the more, and congratulates himself. For the rest, the great man possesses all the characteristics of the masses: thus the less they are ashamed before him, thus the more popular he is. So, let him be violent, envious, exploitative, scheming, fawning, cringing, puffed up, all according to circumstances.
461
Prince and god. – Men often deal with their princes in a similar way as with their God, since after all the prince has been to a great degree God’s representative, or at least his high priest. This almost uncanny mood of reverence and fear and shame has grown and is growing much weaker, but sometimes it flares up and attaches to powerful people generally. The cult of the genius is an echo of this reverence for gods and princes. Wherever one endeavors to exalt individual men into the suprahuman, the also appears the tendency to imagine whole classes of people as coarser and more base than they really are.
462
My utopia. – In a better ordering of society the heavy work and exigencies of life will be apportioned to him who suffers least as a consequence of them, that is to say to the most insensible, and thus step by step up to him who is most sensitive to the most highly sublimated species of suffering and who therefore suffers even when life is alleviated to the greatest degree possible.
463
A delusion in the theory of revolution. – There are political and social visionaries who hotly and eloquently demand the overthrow of all orders, in the belief that the proudest temple of fair humanity would then immediately rise up on its own. In these dangerous dreams, there is still the echo of Rousseau’s superstition, which believes in a wondrous, innate, but, as it were, buried goodness of human nature, and attributes all the blame for that repression to the institutions of culture, in society, state, and education. Unfortunately, we know from historical experience that every such overthrow once more resurrects the wildest energies, the long since buried horrors and extravagances of most distant times. An overthrow can well be a source of energy in an exhausted human race, but it can never be an organizer, architect artist, perfecter of the human character. – It is not Voltaire’s temperate nature, inclined to organizing cleansing, and restructuring, but rather Rousseau’s passionate idiocies and half-truths that have called awake the optimistic spirit of revolution, counter to which I shout: “Ecrasez l’infame!” [“Crush the infamy!” In his letter to d’Alembert on November 28, 1762, Voltaire was referring to superstition.] Because of it, the spirit of enlightenment and of progressive development has been scared off for a long time to come: let us see (each one for himself) whether it is not possible to call it back again!
464
Moderation. – Complete decisiveness in thought and inquiry – that is, free-thinking, when it has become a quality of character – makes men moderate in behavior: for it reduces covetousness, draws much of the available energy to itself in order to advance spiritual ends, and shows what is half-useful or useless and dangerous about all sudden changes.
465
Resurrection of the spirit. – A nation usually rejuvenates itself on the political sickbed and rediscovers its spirit, which it gradually lost in its seeking for and assertion of power. Culture owes this above all to the ages of political weakness.
466
New opinions in an old house. – The overturning of opinions does not immediately follow upon the overturning of institutions: the novel opinions continue, rather, to live on for a long time in the deserted and by now uncomfortable house of their predecessors, and even keep it in good condition because they have nowhere else to live.
467
Schooling. – In great cities the schooling will always be at the best mediocre, for the same reason that in great kitchens the cooking will be at best mediocre.
468
Innocent corruption. – In all institutions that are not open to the biting air of public criticism an innocent corruption flourishes like a fungus (as, for example, in learned bodies and senates).
469
Scholars as politicians. – Scholars who become politicians are usually allotted the comic role of being the good conscience of a party’s policy.
470
The wolf behind the sheep. – Almost every politician has at some time or other such need of an honest man that he breaks into a sheepstall like a ravenous wolf: not, however, so as then to eat the ram he has stolen, but so as to hide himself behind its woolly back.
471
Ages of happiness. – A happy era is completely impossible, because men want only to desire it, but not to have it, and every individual, if he has good days, learns virtually to pray for unrest and misery. The destiny of men is designed for happy moments (every life has those), but not for happy eras. Nevertheless, this idea, as a heritage of past ages, will endure in the human imagination as “the place beyond the mountains,” for since ancient times, the concept of the age of happiness has been inferred from that state when, after powerfully exerting himself in hunting or war, man surrenders to rest, stretches his limbs, and hears the wings of slumber rustle around him. It is a false conclusion when man imagines, according to that old habit of mind, that after whole periods of misery and toil, he could experience such a state of happiness in corresponding intensity and duration.
472
Religion and government. – As long as the state, or more precisely, the government knows that it is appointed as guardian for the benefit of the masses not yet of age, and for their sake considers the question whether religion is to be preserved or abolished, it will most probably always decide to preserve religion. For religion appeases an individual’s disposition in times of loss, privation, fear, or mistrust, that is, when government feels itself unable to do anything directly to alleviate the private man’s psychical sufferings: even during universal, inevitable, and initially unpreventable evils (famines, financial crises, wars), religion gives the masses a calm, patient and trusting bearing. Wherever the necessary or coincidental failings of a state government, or the dangerous consequences of dynastic interests catch the eye of a man of insight and make him recalcitrant, the uninsightful will think they are seeing the finger of God, and will submit patiently to the directives from above (in which concept, divine and human ways of government are usually merged): thus internal civil peace and continuity of development will be ensured. Religion protects and seals the power that lies in the unity of popular sentiment, in identical opinions and goals for all, discounting those rare cases when a priesthood and the state power cannot agree about the price and enter into battle. Usually, the state will know how to win the priests over, because it needs their most private, secret education of souls and knows how to appreciate servants who seem outwardly to represent a quite different interest. Without the help of priests, no power can become “legitimate” even now, as Napoleon understood. – Thus, absolute tutelary government and the careful preservation of religion necessarily go together. It is to be presumed that ruling persons and classes will be enlightened about the benefit provided them by religion, and thus feel somewhat superior to it, in that they are using it as a tool: and this is the origin of freethinking. – But what if a quite different view of the concept of government, as it is taught in democratic states, begins to prevail? If one sees in government nothing but the instrument of popular will, no Above in contrast to a Below, but solely a function of the single sovereign, the people? Then the government can only take the same position toward religion that the people hold; any spread of enlightenment will have to reverberate right into its representatives; it will not be so easy to use or exploit religious energies and comforts for state purposes (unless powerful party leaders occasionally exert an influence similar to that of enlightened despotism). But if the state may no longer draw any use from religion itself, or if the people think so variously about religious matters that the government cannot take uniform, unified measures regarding religion, then the necessary alternative will appear to be to treat religion as a private matter and consign it to the conscience and habits of each individual. At the very first, the result is that religious feeling appears to be strengthened, to the extent that hidden or repressed stirrings of it, which the state had unwittingly or deliberately stifled, now break out and exceed all limits; later, it turns out that religion is overrun with sects, and that an abundance of dragon’s teeth had been sown at the moment when religion was made a private affair. Finally, the sight of the strife, and the hostile exposure of all the weaknesses of religious confessions allow no other alternative but that every superior and more gifted man makes irreligiosity his private concern. Then this attitude also prevails in the minds of those who govern, and gives, almost against their will, an antireligious character to the measures they take. As soon as this happens, the people who are still moved by religion, and who used to adore the state as something half-divine or wholly divine, develop an attitude decidedly hostile to the state; they attack government measures, try to impede, cross, disturb as much as they can, and because their opposition is so heated, they drive the other party, the irreligious one, into an almost fanatical enthusiasm for the state; also contributing secretly to this is the fact that, since they parted from religion, the nonreligious have had a feeling of emptiness and are provisionally trying to create a substitute, a kind of fulfillment, through devotion to the state. After these transitional struggles, which may last a long time, it is finally decided whether the religious parties are still strong enough to resurrect an old state of affairs and turn the wheel back: in which case, the state inevitably falls into the hands of enlightened despotism (perhaps less enlightened and more fearful than before) – or whether the nonreligious parties prevail, undermining and finally thwarting the propagation of their opponents for a few generations, perhaps by means of schools and education. Yet their enthusiasm for the state will also diminish then. It becomes more and more clear that when religious adoration, which makes the state into a mysterium, a supraterrestrial institution, is shaken, so is the reverent and pious relationship to the state. Henceforth, individuals see only the side of it that can be helpful or harmful to them, and will press all the means in their power to acquire an influence over it. But soon this competition becomes too great, men and parties switch too quickly, throw each other too fiercely down from the mountain, after they have scarcely arrived at the top. There is no guarantee that any measure a government puts through will endure; people shy away from undertakings that would have to grow quietly over decades or centuries in order to produce ripe fruit. No longer does anyone feel an obligation toward a law, other than to bow instantaneously to the power that introduced it: at once, however, people begin to undermine it with a new power, a new majority yet to be formed. Finally – one can state it with certainty – the distrust of anything that governs, the insight into the uselessness and irritation of these short-lived struggles, must impel men to a quite novel resolve: the abolition of the concept of the state, the end of the antithesis “private and public.” Step by step, private companies will incorporate state businesses: even the most stubborn vestige of the old work of governing (for example, that activity which is supposed to protect private parties against other private parties) will ultimately be taken care of by private contractors. Neglect, decline, and death of the state, the liberation of the private person (I am careful not to say: of the individual) is the result of the democratic concept of the state; here lies its mission. When it has fulfilled its task – which like everything human bears much rationality and irrationality in its womb – when all the relapses of the old illness have been overcome, then a new leaf in the storybook of humanity will be turned in which one will read all sorts of strange histories, and perhaps some good things as well. – To recapitulate briefly what has just been said: the interests of tutelary government and the interests of religion go together hand in hand, so that if the latter begins to die out, the foundation of the state will also be shaken. The belief in a divine order of political affairs, in a mysterium in the existence of the state, has a religious origin: if religion disappears, the state will inevitably lose its old veil of Isis and no longer awaken awe. The sovereignty of the people, seen closely, serves to scare off even the last trace of magic and superstition contained in these feelings; modern democracy is the historical form of the decline of the state. – But the prospect resulting from this certain decline is not an unhappy one in every respect: of all their qualities, men’s prudence and selfishness are the best developed; when the state no longer satisfies the demands of these energies, chaos will be the last thing to occur, an invention even more expedient than the state will triumph over the state. Mankind has already seen many an organizational power die out, – for example, that of the racial clan [Geschlechtsgenossenschaft], which for thousands of years were much more powerful than the family, indeed ruled and regulated long before the family existed. We ourselves have seen the idea of family rights and power, which once ruled as far as Roman culture reached, grow ever fainter and feebler. Thus a later generation will also see the state become meaningless in various parts of the earth – an idea that many men today can hardly contemplate without fear and abhorrence. To be sure, to work on the dissemination and realization of this idea is something else again: one must have a very arrogant opinion of his own reason and only a superficial understanding of history to set one’s hand to the plough already – while there is still no one who can show us the seedcorn that is to be strewn afterwards on the ravaged earth. So let us trust to “men’s prudence and selfishness” that the state will still endure for a good while, and that the destructive efforts of overzealous and rash pretenders to knowledge [voreiliger Halbwisser] will be repulsed!
473
Socialism with regards to its means. – Socialism is the visionary younger brother of an almost decrepit despotism, whose heir it wants to be; thus its efforts are reactionary in the deepest sense. For it desires an abundance of executive power, as only despotism has ever had; indeed, it outdoes everything in the past by striving for the downright destruction of the individual, who it sees as an unauthorized luxury of nature, and who it intends to improve into a useful organ of the community. It crops up in the vicinity of all excessive displays of power because of its relation to it, like the typical old socialist Plato, at the court of the Sicilian tyrant [In 388 B.C. Plato visited the court of the Sicilian tyrant Dionysius the Elder in Syracuse, where he returned in 367 and 361 B.C., hoping to realize his political ideals there.]; it desires (and in certain circumstances, furthers) the Caesarean power state of this century, because, as we said, it would like to be its heir. But even this inheritance would not suffice for its purposes, it needs the most submissive subjugation of all citizens to the absolute state, the like of which has never existed; and since it cannot even count any longer on the old religious piety towards the state, having rather always to work automatically to eliminate piety – because it works on the elimination of all existing states – , it can only hope to exist here and there for short periods of time by means of the most extreme terrorism. Therefore, it secretly prepares for reigns of terror, and drives the word “justice” like a nail into the heads of the half-educated masses, to rob them completely of their reason (after this reason has already suffered a great deal from its half-education), and to create in them a good conscience for the evil game that they are to play. – Socialism can serve as a rather brutal and forceful way to teach the danger of all accumulations of state power, and to that extent instill one with distrust of the state itself. When its harsh voice chimes in with the battle cry [Feldgeschrei] “as much state as possible,” it will at first make the cry noisier than ever; but soon the opposite cry will be heard with strength the greater: “as little state as possible.”
474
The evolution of the spirit feared by the state. – Like every organizing political power, the Greek polis was mistrustful of the growth of culture and sought almost exclusively to paralyze and inhibit it. It wanted to admit no history, no development in this realm. The same thing was later desired by Plato too for his ideal state. This culture evolved in spite of the polis: it assisted indirectly and against its will, to be sure, because the individual’s thirst for honor was incited to the highest degree in the polis, so that, once entered upon the path of spiritual cultivation, he continued along it as far as he could go. On the other hand, one should not invoke the glorificatory speech of Pericles: for it is no more than a grand, optimistic illusion as to the supposedly necessary connection between the polis and Athenian culture; immediately before night descends on Athens (the plague and the rapture of tradition), Thucydides makes it rise resplendent once again, like a transfiguring evening glow in whose light the evil day that preceded it could be forgotten.
475
European man and the abolition of nations. – Trade and industry, the post and the book-trade, the possession in common of all higher culture, rapid changing of home and scene, the nomadic life now lived by all who do not own land – these circumstances are necessarily bringing with them a weakening and finally an abolition of nations, at least the European; so that as a consequence of continual crossing a mixed race, that of European man, must come into being out of them. This goal is at present being worked against, consciously or unconsciously, by the separation of nations through the production of national hostilities, yet this mixing will nonetheless go slowly forward in spite of that temporary countercurrent: this artificial nationalism is in any case as perilous as artificial Catholicism used to be, for it is in its essence a forcibly imposed state of siege and self-defense inflicted on the many by the few and requires cunning, force and falsehood to maintain a front of respectability. It is not the interests of the many (the peoples), as is no doubt claimed, but above all the interests of certain princely dynasties, and of certain classes of business and society, that impel to this nationalism; once one has recognized this fact, one should not be afraid to proclaim oneself simply a good European and actively to work for the amalgamation of nations. The Germans are, through their ancient and tested quality of being the interpreter and mediator between peoples, able to be of assistance. – Incidentally: the entire problem of the Jews exists only within national states, inasmuch as it is here that their energy and higher intelligence, their capital in will and spirit accumulated from generation to generation in a long school of suffering, must come to preponderate to a degree calculated to arouse envy and hatred, so that in every nation – and the more so the more nationalistic posture the nation is again adopting – there is gaining ground the literary indecency of leading the Jews to the sacrificial slaughter as scapegoats for every possible public or private misfortune. As soon as it is no longer a question of the conserving of nations but of the production of the strongest possible European mixed race, the Jew will be just as usable and desirable as an ingredient of it as any other national residue. Every nation, every man, possesses unpleasant, indeed dangerous qualities: it is cruel to demand that the Jew should constitute an exception. In him these qualities may even be dangerous and repellent to an exceptional degree; and perhaps the youthful stock-exchange Jew is the most repulsive invention of the entire human race. Nonetheless, I should like to know how much must, in a total accounting, be forgiven a people who, not without us all being to blame, have had the most grief-laden history of any people and whom we have to thank for the noblest human being (Christ), the purest sage (Spinoza), the mightiest book and the most efficacious moral code in the world. Moreover: in the darkest periods of the Middle Ages, when the cloudbanks of Asia had settled low over Europe, it was the Jewish freethinkers, scholars and physicians who, under the harshest personal constraint, held firmly to the banner of enlightenment and intellectual independence and defended Europe against Asia; it is thanks not least to their efforts that a more natural, rational and in any event unmythical elucidation of the world could at last again obtain victory and the ring of culture that now unites us with the enlightenment of Graeco-Roman antiquity remain unbroken. If Christianity has done everything to orientalize the Occident, Judaism has always played an essential part in occidentalizing it again: which in a certain sense means making of Europe’s mission and history a continuation of the Greek.
476
Apparent superiority of the Middle Ages. – The Middle Ages exhibit in the church an institution possessing a universal goal embracing all mankind, and aimed at their – supposed – highest interests: in contrast to it, the goals of states and nations exhibited by modern history, make a disheartening impression; they appear petty, mean, materialistic, spatially limited. But we should not form our judgments because of these varying impressions on our imagination; for the universal institution was reflecting artificial needs, based on fictions, which, if they were not yet present, it first had to invent (need for redemption); the new institutions help in real states of need; and the time is coming when institutions will be formed in order to serve the common, true needs of all men, and to place that fantastic archetype, the Catholic Church, into shadow and oblivion.
477
War indispensable. – It is vain reverie and beautiful-soulism to expect much more (let alone only then to expect much) of mankind when it has unlearned how to wage war. For the present we know of no other means by which that rude energy that characterizes the camp, that profound impersonal hatred, that murderous cold-bloodedness with a good conscience, that common fire in the destruction of the enemy, that proud indifference to great losses, to one’s own existence and that of one’s friends, that inarticulate, earthquake-like shuddering of the soul, could be communicated more surely or strongly than every great war communicates them: the streams and currents that here break forth, though they carry with them rocks and rubbish of every kind and ruin the pastures of tenderer cultures, will later under favorable circumstances turn the wheels in the workshops of the spirit with newfound energy. Culture can in no way do without passions, vices and acts of wickedness. – When the Romans of the imperial era had grown a little tired of war they tried to gain new energy through animal-baiting, gladiatorial combats and the persecution of Christians. Present-day Englishmen, who seem also on the whole to have renounced war, seize on a different means of again engendering their fading energies: those perilous journeys of discovery, navigations, mountain-climbings, undertaken for scientific ends as they claim, in truth so as to bring home with them superfluous energy acquired through adventures and perils of all kinds. One will be able to discover many other such surrogates for war, but they will perhaps increasingly reveal that so highly cultivated and for that reason necessarily feeble humanity as that of the present-day European requires not merely war but the greatest and most terrible wars – thus a temporary relapse into barbarism – if the means to culture are not to deprive them of their culture and of their existence itself.
478
Industriousness in south and north. – Industriousness comes about in two very different ways. Craftsmen in the South do not become industrious from an acquisitive drive, but rather from the constant needs of others. Because someone is always coming to have his horse shod, or his wagon repaired, the smith is always industrious. If no one came, he would lounge about in the marketplace. It is not so difficult to subsist in a fertile land: to do so, he would need only a very small amount of work, and certainly no industriousness; in the end, he would go begging and be content. – The industriousness of English workers, on the other hand, has acquisitiveness behind it: it is aware of itself and its objectives, and desires with possessions power, with power the greatest possible freedom and individual nobility.
479
Wealth as the origin of a nobility of birth. – Wealth necessarily produces an aristocracy of race, for it permits one to select the most beautiful women, pay the best teachers, grants a man cleanliness, time for physical exercise, and, above all, freedom from deadening physical labor. To this extent it provides all the conditions for the production over a few generations of a noble and fair demeanor, even noble and fair behavior, in men: greater freedom of feeling, the absence of miserable pettiness, of abasement before breadgivers, of penny-pinching. – It is precisely these negative qualities that are the richest gifts of happiness for a young man; a very poor man with a noble nature usually destroys himself, it takes him nowhere and gains him nothing, his race is not capable of life. – But one must also consider that the effects of wealth are almost the same if a man has three hundred talers a year, or thirty thousand to spend: there is no essential progression in favoring circumstances. But to have less, to beg as a boy, and to debase oneself, is dreadful: though it may be the right point of departure for those who want to seek their happiness in the splendor of the court, in submission to the mighty and influential, or for those who want to be heads of churches. ( – It teaches how to slink bent over into the underground passageways of favor.)
480
Envy and indolence in different directions. – The two opposing parties, the socialistic and the nationalist – or whatever they are called in Europe’s various countries – deserve one another: in both of them, envy and laziness are the moving forces. In the former camp, people want to work as little as possible with their hands, in the latter, as little as possible with their heads; in the latter they hate and envy the prominent, self-evolved individuals who are unwilling to let themselves be placed into the rank and file for the purpose of a mass action; in the former the better, outwardly more favored caste of society whose actual task, the production of the supreme goods of culture [höchsten Culturgüter], makes life inwardly all the more difficult and painful. If, to be sure, one should succeed in turning that spirit of mass action into the spirit of the higher social classes, then the socialistic throngs would be quite justified in seeking to level them with themselves outwardly, too, since they would already be level with one another in head and heart. – Live as higher men, and persist in doing the deeds of higher culture – then everything alive will grant you your rights, and the social order, whose peak you represent, will be proof against every evil eye and claw!
481
Grand politics and what they cost. – Just as the greatest cost to a people involved in war and preparation for war is not the expense of the war or the interruption to trade and commerce, nor the maintenance of standing armies – however great those expenses may be now that eight states of Europe expend between two and three milliards annually on it – but the cost involved in the removal year in, year out of an extraordinary number of its efficient and industrious men from their proper professions and occupations so that they may become soldiers: so a people which sets about practicing grand politics and ensuring to itself a decisive voice among the most powerful states does not incur the highest costs where these are usually thought to lie. It is true that from this moment on a host of the most prominent talents are continually sacrificed on the “altar of the fatherland” or of the national thirst for honor, whereas previously other spheres of activity were open to these talents now devoured by politics. But aside from these public hecatombs, and at bottom much more horrible, there occurs a spectacle played out continually in a hundred thousand simultaneous acts: every efficient, industrious, intelligent, energetic man belonging to such a people lusting after political laurels is dominated by this lust and no longer belongs wholly to his own domain, as he formerly did: questions and cares of the public weal, renewed every day, devour a daily tribute from the capital in every citizen’s head and heart: the sum total of all these sacrifices and cost in individual energy and work is so tremendous that the political emergence of a people almost necessarily draws after it a spiritual impoverishment and enfeeblement and a diminution of the capacity for undertakings demanding great concentration and application. Finally one may ask: is all this inflorescence and pomp of the whole (which is, after all, apparent only in the fear of other states for the new colossus and in the more favorable terms for trade and travel extorted form them) worth it, if all the nobler, tenderer, more spiritual plants and growths in which its soil was previously so rich have to be sacrificed to this coarse and gaudy flower of the nation?
482
And to repeat. – Public opinions – private indolence. [After the subtitle of The Fable of The Bees: or, Private Vices Public Benefits – Bernard de Mandeville (1630-1733), Brit. (Dutch-born) satirist and philosopher.]
Ninth Division - Man Alone by Himself
483
Enemies of truth. – Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
484
Topsy-turvy world. – We criticize a thinker more sharply when he proposes a tenet that is disagreeable to us; and yet it would be more reasonable to do this when we find his tenet agreeable.
485
A person of character. – It is much more common for a person to appear to have character because he always acts in accord with his temperament, rather than because he always acts in accord with his principles.
486
The one necessary thing. – A person must have one or the other. Either a cheerful disposition by nature, or a disposition made cheerful by art and knowledge.
487
Passion for things. – He who directs his passion to things (the sciences, the national good, cultural interests, the arts) takes much of the fire out of his passion for people (even when they represent those things, as statesmen, philosophers, and artier represent their creations).
488
Calm in action. – As a waterfall becomes slower and more floating as it plunges, so the great man of action will act with greater calm than could be expected from his violent desire before the deed.
489
Not too deep. – People who comprehend a matter in all its depth seldom remain true to it forever. For they have brought its depths to the light; and then there is always much to see about it that is bad.
490
Idealists’ delusion. – All idealists imagine that the causes they serve are significantly better than the other causes in the world; they do not want to believe that if their cause is to flourish at all, it needs exactly the same foul-smelling manure that all other human undertakings require.
491
Self-observation. – Man is very well defended against himself, against his own spying and sieges; usually he is able to make out no more of himself than his outer fortifications. The actual stronghold is inaccessible to him, even invisible, unless friends and enemies turn traitor and lead him there by a secret path.
492
The right profession. – Men seldom endure a profession if they do not believe or persuade themselves that it is basically more important than all others. Women do the same with their lovers.
493
Nobility of mind. – To a great degree, nobility of mind consists of good nature and lack of distrust, and thus contains precisely that which acquisitive and successful people so like to treat with superiority and scorn.
494
Destination and paths. – Many people are obstinate about the path once it is taken; few people about the destination.
495
The infuriating thing about an individual way of living. – People are always angry at anyone who chooses very individual standards for his life; because of the extraordinary treatment which that man grants to himself, they feel degraded, like ordinary beings.
496
Privilege of greatness. – It is the privilege of greatness to grant supreme pleasure through trifling gifts.
497
Unwittingly noble. – A man’s behavior is unwittingly noble if he has grown accustomed never to want anything from men, and always to give to them.
498
Condition for being a hero. – If a man wants to become a hero, the snake must first become a dragon: otherwise he is lacking his proper enemy. [Compare Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea, I, 173: “serpens, nisi serpentem comederit, non fit draco.”]
499
Friend. – Fellow rejoicing [Mitfreude], not fellow suffering [Mitleiden], makes the friend.
500
Using high and low tides. – For the purpose of knowledge, one must know how to use that inner current that draws us to a thing, and then the one that, after a time, draws us away from it.
501
Delight in oneself. – “Delight in an enterprise,” they say; but in truth it is delight in oneself, by means of an enterprise.
502
The modest one. – He who is modest with people shows his arrogance all the more with things (the city, state, society, epoch, or mankind). That is his revenge.
503
Envy and jealousy. – Envy and jealousy are the private parts of the human soul. The comparison can perhaps be pursued further.
504
The most refined hypocrite. – To speak about oneself not at all is a very refined form of hypocrisy.
505
Annoyance. – Annoyance is a physical illness that is by no means ended simply by eliminating the cause of the annoyance.
506
Representatives of truth. – The champions of truth are hardest to find, not when it is dangerous to tell it, but rather when it is boring.
507
More troublesome than enemies. – When some reason (e.g., gratitude) obliges us to maintain the appearance of unqualified congeniality with people about whose own congenial behavior we are not entirely convinced, these people torment our imagination much more than do our enemies.
508
Out in nature. – We like to be out in nature so much because it has no opinion about us.
509
Everyone superior in one thing. – In civilized circumstances, everyone feels superior to everyone else in at least one way; this is the basis of the general goodwill, inasmuch as everyone is someone who, under certain conditions, can be of help, and need therefore feel no shame in allowing himself to be helped.
510
Reasons for consolation. – When someone dies, we usually need reasons to be consoled, not so much to soften the force of our pain, as to excuse the fact that we feel consoled so easily.
511
Loyal to their convictions. – The man who has a lot to do usually keeps his general views and opinions almost unchanged; as does each person who works in the service of an idea. He will never test the idea itself any more; he no longer has time for that. Indeed, it is contrary to his interest even to think it possible to discuss it.
512
Morality and quantity. – One man’s greater morality, in contrast to another’s, often lies only in the fact that his goals are quantitatively larger. The other man is pulled down by occupying himself with small things, in a narrow sphere.
513.
Life as the product of life. – However far man may extend himself with his knowledge, however objective he may appear to himself – ultimately he reaps nothing but his own biography.
514
Iron necessity. – Over the course of history, men learn that iron necessity is neither iron nor necessary.
515
From experience. – That something is irrational is no argument against its existence, but rather a condition for it.
516
Truth. – No one dies of fatal truths nowadays: there are too many antidotes.
517
Basic insight. – There is no pre-established harmony between the furthering of truth and the good of mankind.
518
Human lot. – Whoever thinks more deeply knows that he is always wrong, whatever his acts and judgments.
519
Truth as Circe. – Error has turned animals into men; might truth be capable of turning man into an animal again?
520
Danger of our culture. – We belong to a time in which culture is in danger of being destroyed by the means of culture.
521
Greatness means: to give a direction. – No river is great and bounteous through itself alone, but rather because it takes up so many tributaries and carries them onwards: that makes it great. It is the same with all great minds. All that matters is that one man give the direction, which the many tributaries must then follow; it does not matter whether he is poorly or richly endowed in the beginning.
522
Weak conscience. – Men who talk about their importance for mankind have a weak conscience about their common bourgeois honesty in keeping contracts or promises.
523
Wanting to be loved. – The demand to be loved is the greatest kind of arrogance.
524
Contempt for people. – The least ambiguous sign of a disdain for people is this: that one tolerates everyone else only as a means to one’s own end, or not at all.
525
Disciples out of disagreement. – Whoever has brought men to a state of rage against himself has always acquired a party in his favor, too.
526
Forgetting one’s experiences. – It is easy for a man who thinks a lot, and objectively, to forget his own experiences, but not the thoughts that were evoked by them.
527
Adhering to an opinion. – One man adheres to an opinion because he prides himself on having come upon it by himself; another because he has learned it with effort, and is proud of having grasped it: thus both out of vanity.
528
Shunning the light. – The good deed shuns the light as anxiously as the evil deed: the latter fears that, if it is known, pain (as punishment) will follow; the former fears that, if it is known, joy (that pure joy in oneself, which ceases as soon as it includes the satisfaction of one’s vanity) will disappear.
529
The day’s length. – If a man has a great deal to put in them, a day will have a hundred pockets.
530
Genius of tyranny. – If the soul stirs with an ungovernable desire to assert itself tyranically, and the fire is continually maintained, then even a slight talent (in politicians, artists) gradually becomes an almost irresistible force of nature.
531
The life of the enemy. – Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy’s staying alive.
532
More important. – The unexplained, obscure matter is taken as more important than the explained, clear one.
533
Evaluating services rendered. – We evaluate services someone renders us according to the value that person places on them, not according to the value they have for us.
534
Unhappiness. – The distinction that lies in being unhappy (as if to feel happy were a sign of shallowness, lack of ambition, ordinariness) is so great that when someone says, “But how happy you must be!” we usually protest.
535
Fantasy of fear. – The fantasy of fear is that malevolent, apelike goblin which jumps onto man’s back just when he already has the most to bear.
536
Value of insipid opponents. – Sometimes we remain true to a cause only because its opponents will not stop being insipid.
537
Value of a profession. – A profession makes us thoughtless: therein lies its greatest blessing. For it is a bulwark, behind which we are allowed to withdraw when qualms and worries of a general kind attack us.
538
Talent. – The talent of some men appears slighter than it is because they have always set themselves tasks that are too great.
539
Youth. – The time of youth is disagreeable, for then it is not possible, or not reasonable, to be productive in any sense.
540
Goals too great. – Who publicly sets himself great goals, and later realizes privately that he is too weak to accomplish them, does not usually have enough strength to revoke those goals publicly, either, and then inevitably becomes a hypocrite.
541
In the stream. – Strong currents draw many stones and bushes along with them; strong minds many stupid and muddled heads.
542
Danger of intellectual liberation. – When a man tries earnestly to liberate his intellect, his passions and desires secretly hope to benefit from it also.
543
Embodiment of the spirit. – When we think much and sagaciously not only our face but our body too assumes a sagacious appearance.
544
Seeing badly and listening badly. – He who sees badly sees less and less; he who listens badly hears more than has been said.
545
Self-enjoyment in vanity. – The vain man wants not so much to predominate as to feel himself predominant; that is why he disdains no means of self-deception and self-outwitting. What he treasures is not the opinion of others but his own opinion of their opinion.
546
Vain exceptionally. – He who is usually self-sufficient is vain and receptive to fame and commendation on exceptional occasions, namely when he is physically ill. To the extent that he feels himself diminishing he has to try to recoup himself from outside through the opinion of others.
547
The “rich in spirit.” – He has no spirit who seeks spirit.
548
Hint for party chiefs. – If we can force people to declare themselves publicly for something, we have usually also brought them to the point of declaring themselves for it privately; they want to continue to be perceived as consistent.
549
Contempt. – Man is more sensitive to contempt from others than to contempt from himself.
550
Rope of gratitude. – There are slavish souls who carry their thanks for favors so far that they actually strangle themselves with the rope of gratitude.
551
Trick of the prophet. – In order to predict the behavior of ordinary men, we must assume that they always expend the least possible amount of intellect to free themselves from a disagreeable situation.
552
The only human right. – He who strays from tradition becomes a sacrifice to the extraordinary; he who remains in tradition is its slave. Destruction follows in any case.
553
Lower than the animal. – When man howls with laughter, he surpasses all animals by his coarseness.
554
Superficial knowledge. – He who speaks a bit of a foreign language has more delight in it than he who speaks it well; pleasure goes along with superficial knowledge.
555
Dangerous helpfulness. – There are people who want to make men’s lives more difficult for no other reason than afterwards to offer them their prescriptions for making life easier – their Christianity, for example.
556
Industriousness and conscientiousness. – Industriousness and conscientiousness are often antagonists, in that industriousness wants to take the fruits off the tree while still sour, but conscientiousness lets them hang too long, until they drop off the tree and come to nothing.
557
Suspicion. – People whom we cannot tolerate, we try to make suspect.
558
Lacking the circumstances. – Many men wait all their lives for the opportunity to be good in their way.
559
Want of friends. – A want of friends points to envy or arrogance. Many a man owes his friends simply to the fortunate circumstance that he has no cause for envy.
560
Danger in multiplicity. – With one talent the more, one often stands less secure than with one talent the less: as the table stands better on three legs than on four.
561
Model for others. – He who wants to set a good example must add a grain of foolishness to his virtue; then others can imitate and, at the same time, rise above the one being imitated – something which people love.
562
Being a target. – Often, other people’s vicious talk about us is not actually aimed at us, but expresses their annoyance or ill humor arising from quite different reasons.
563
Easily resigned. – A man suffers little from unfulfilled wishes if he has trained his imagination to think of the past as hateful.
564
In danger. – When we have just gotten out of the way of a vehicle, we are most in danger of being run over.
565
The role according to the voice. – He who is forced to speak more loudly than is his habit (as in front of someone hard of hearing, or before a large audience) generally exaggerates what he has to communicate. – Some people become conspirators, malicious slanderers, or schemers, merely because their voice is best suited to a whisper.
566
Love and hatred. – Love and hatred are not blind, but are blinded by the fire they themselves carry with them.
567
Made an enemy to one’s advantage. – Men who are unable to make their merit completely clear to the world seek to awaken an intense enmity towards themselves. Then they have the comfort of thinking that this stands between their merit and its recognition – and that other people assume the same thing, which is of great advantage to their own importance.
568
Confession. – We forget our guilt when we have confessed it to another, but usually the other person does not forget it.
569
Self-sufficiency. – The golden fleece of self-sufficiency protects against thrashings, but not against pin-pricks.
570
Shadow in the flame. – The flame is not so bright to itself as to those on whom it shines: so too the wise man.
571
Our own opinions. – The first opinion that occurs to us when we are suddenly asked about a matter is usually not our own, but only the customary one, appropriate to our caste, position, or parentage; our own opinions seldom swim near the surface.
572
Origin of courage. – The ordinary man is courageous and invulnerable like a hero when he does not see the danger, when he has no eyes for it. Conversely, the hero’s one vulnerable spot is on his back; that is, where he has no eyes.
573
Danger in the doctor. – A man is either born for his doctor, or else he perishes by his doctor.
574
Magical vanity. – He who has boldly prophesied the weather three times and has been successful, believes a bit, at the bottom of his heart, in his own prophetic gift. We do not dispute what is magical or irrational when it flatters our self-esteem.
575
Profession. – A profession is the backbone of life.
576
Danger of personal influence. – He who feels that he exercises a great inner influence on another must leave him quite free rein, indeed must look with favor on his occasional resistance and even bring it about: otherwise he will inevitably make himself an enemy.
577
Giving the heir his due. – Whoever has established something great with a selfless frame of mind takes care to bring up heirs. It is the sign of a tyrannical and ignoble nature to see one’s opponents in all the possible heirs of one’s work and to live in a state of self-defense against them.
578
A little knowledge. – A little knowledge is more successful than complete knowledge: it conceives things as simpler than they are, thus resulting in opinions that are more comprehensible and persuasive.
579
Not suited to be a party member. – He who thinks much is not suited to be a party member: too soon, he thinks himself through and beyond the party.
580
Bad memory. – The advantage of a bad memory is that, several times over, one enjoys the same good things for the first time.
581
Causing oneself pain. – Inconsiderate thinking is often the sign of a discordant inner state which craves numbness.
582
Martyr. – The disciple of a martyr suffers more than the martyr.
583
Residual vanity. – The vanity of some people, who should not need to be vain, is the left-over and full-grown habit stemming from that time when they still had no right to believe in themselves, and only acquired their belief from others, by begging it in small change.
584
Punctum saliens [salient point] of passion. – He who is about to fall into a state of anger or violent love reaches a point where his soul is full like a vessel; but it needs one more drop of water: the good will to passion (which is generally also called the bad will). Only this little point is necessary; then the vessel runs over.
585
Bad-tempered thought. – People are like piles of charcoal in the woods. Only when young people have stopped glowing, and carbonized, as charcoal does, do they become useful. As long as they smolder and smoke they are perhaps more interesting, but useless, and all too often troublesome. – Mankind unsparingly uses every individual as material to heat its great machines; but what good are the machines when all individuals (that is, mankind) serve only to keep them going? Machines that are their own end – is that the umana commedia?
586
The hour-hand of life. – Life consists of rare, isolated moments of the greatest significance, and of innumerably many intervals, during which at best the silhouettes of those moments hover about us. Love, springtime, every beautiful melody, mountains, the moon, the sea – all these speak completely to the heart but once, if in fact they ever do get a chance to speak completely. For many men do not have those moments at all, and are themselves intervals and intermissions in the symphony of real life.
587
To set against or set to work*?* – We often make the mistake of actively opposing a direction, or party, or epoch, because we coincidentally get to see only its superficial side, its stunted aspect, or the inescapable “faults of its virtues” – perhaps because we ourselves have participated to a large degree in them. Then we turn our back on them and seek an opposite direction; but it would be better to look for the strong, good sides, or to develop them in ourselves. To be sure, it takes a stronger gaze and a better will to further that which is evolving and imperfect, rather than to penetrate its imperfection and reject it.
588
Modesty. – True modesty (that is, the knowledge that we are not our own creations) does exist, and it well suits the great mind, because he particularly can comprehend the thought of his complete lack of responsibility (even for whatever good he creates). One does not hate the great man’s immodesty because he is feeling his strength, but rather because he wants to feel it primarily by wounding others, treating them imperiously and watching to see how much they can stand. Most often, this actually proves that he lacks a secure sense of his strength, and makes men doubt his greatness. To this extent, cleverness would strongly advise against immodesty.
589
The first thought of the day. – The best way to begin each day well is to think upon awakening whether we could not give at least one person pleasure on this day. If this practice could be accepted as a substitute for the religious habit of prayer, our fellow men would benefit by this change.
590
Arrogance as the last means of comfort. – If a man accounts for a misfortune, or his intellectual inadequacies, or his illness by seeing them as his predetermined fate, his ordeal, or mysterious punishment for something he had done earlier, he is thereby making his own nature interesting, and imagining himself superior to his fellow men. The proud sinner is a familiar figure in all religious sects.
591
Growth of happiness. – Near to the sorrow of the world, and often upon its volcanic earth, man has laid out his little gardens of happiness; whether he approaches life as one who wants only knowledge from existence, or as one who yields and resigns himself, or as one who rejoices in a difficulty overcome – everywhere he will find some happiness sprouting up next to the trouble – and the more volcanic the earth, the greater the happiness will be – but it would be ludicrous to say that with this happiness suffering is justified.
592
The street of one’s ancestors. – It is reasonable to develop further the talent that one’s father or grandfather worked hard at, and not switch to something entirely new; otherwise one is depriving himself of the chance to attain perfection in some one craft. Thus the saying: “Which street should you take? – that of your ancestors.”
593
Vanity and ambition as educators. – So long as a man has not yet become the instrument of the universal human good, ambition may torment him; but if he has achieved that goal, if of necessity he is working like a machine for the good of all, then vanity may enter; it will humanize him in small matters, make him more sociable, tolerable, considerate, once ambition has completed the rough work (of making him useful).
594
Philosophical novices. – If we have just partaken of a philosopher’s wisdom, we go through the streets feeling as if we had been transformed and had become great men; for we encounter only people who do not know this wisdom, and thus we have to deliver a new, unheard-of judgment about everything; because we have acknowledged a book of laws, we also think we now have to act like judges.
595
Pleasing by displeasing. – People who prefer to be noticed, and thereby displease, desire the same thing as those who do not want to be noticed, and want to please, only to a much greater degree and indirectly, by means of a step that seems to be distancing them from their goal. Because they want to have influence and power, they display their superiority, even if it is felt as disagreeable: for they know that the man who has finally gained power pleases in almost everything he does and says, that even when he displeases, he seems nevertheless to be pleasing. – Both the free spirit and the true believer want power, too, in order to use it to please; if they are threatened because of their doctrines with a dire fate, persecution, prison, or execution, they rejoice at the thought that this will enable their doctrines to be engraved and branded upon mankind; although it is delayed acting, they accept it as a painful but potent means to attain power after all.
596
**Casus belli and the like. – The prince who discovers a casus belli for an earlier decision to wage war against his neighbor is like a father who imposes a mother upon his child, to be henceforth accepted as such. And are not almost all publicly announced motives for our actions such imposed mothers?
597
Passions and rights. – No one speaks more passionately about his rights than the man who, at the bottom of his heart, doubts them. In drawing passion to his side, he wants to deaden reason and its doubts: he thus gains a good conscience, and, along with it, success with his fellow men.
598
The renouncing man’s trick. – He who protests against marriage, in the manner of Catholic priests, will seek to understand it in its lowest, most vulgar sense. Likewise, he who refuses the respect of his contemporaries will conceive it in a base way; he thus makes his renunciation of it and the fight against it easier for himself. Incidentally, he who denies himself much in large matters will easily indulge himself in small matters. It is conceivable that the man who is above the applause of his contemporaries is nevertheless unable to refuse himself the satisfaction of little vanities.
599
The age of arrogance. – The true period of arrogance for talented men comes between their twenty-sixth and thirtieth year; it is the time of first ripeness, with a good bit of sourness still remaining. On the basis of what one feels inside himself, one demands from other people, who see little or nothing of it, respect and humility; and because these are not at first forthcoming, one takes vengeance with a glance, an arrogant gesture, or a tone of voice. This a fine ear and eye will recognize in all the products of those years, be they poems, philosophies, or paintings and music. Older, experienced men smile about it, and remember with emotion this beautiful time of life, in which one is angry at his lot of having to be so much and seem so little. Later, one really seems to be more – but the faith in being much has been lost: unless one remain throughout his life vanity’s hopeless fool.
600
Deceptive and yet firm. – When walking around the top of an abyss, or crossing a deep stream on a plank, we need a railing, not to hold onto – for it would collapse with us at once – but rather to achieve the visual image of security, just as when we are young we need people who unconsciously offer us the service of that railing; it is true that they would not help us if we really were in great danger and wanted to lean on them, but they give us the comforting sensation of protection nearby (for example, fathers, teachers, friends, as we generally know all three).
601
Learning to love. – We must learn to love, learn to be kind, and this from earliest youth; if education or chance give us no opportunity to practice these feelings, our soul becomes dry and unsuited even to understanding the tender inventions of loving people. Likewise, hatred must be learned and nurtured, if one wishes to become a proficient hater: otherwise the germ for that, too, will gradually wither.
602
Ruins as decoration. – People who go through many spiritual changes retain some views and habits from earlier stages, which then jut out into their new thinking and acting like a bit of inexplicable antiquity and gray stonework, often ornamenting the whole region.
603
Love and respect. – Love desires; fear avoids. That is why it is impossible, at least in the same time span, to be loved and respected by the same person. For the man who respects another, acknowledges his power; that is, he fears it: his condition is one of awe. But love acknowledges no power, nothing that separates, differentiates, ranks higher or subordinates. Because the state of being loved carries with it no respect, ambitious men secretly or openly balk against it.
604
Prejudice in favor of cold people. – People who catch fire rapidly quickly become cold, and are therefore by and large unreliable. Therefore, all those who are always cold, or act that way, benefit from the prejudice that they are especially trustworthy, reliable people: they are being confused with those others who catch fire slowly and burn for a long time.
605
What is dangerous about free opinions. – The casual entertainment of free opinions is like an itch; giving in to it, one begins to rub the area; finally there is an open, aching wound; that is, the free opinion finally begins to disturb and torment us in our attitude to life, in our human relationships.
606
Desire for deep pain. – When it has gone, passion leaves behind a dark longing for itself, and in disappearing throws us one last seductive glance. There must have been a kind of pleasure in having been beaten with her whip. In contrast, the more moderate feelings appear flat; apparently we still prefer a more violent displeasure to a weak pleasure.
607
Annoyance with others and the world. – When, as happens so often, we let our annoyance out on others, while we are actually feeling it about ourselves, we are basically trying to cloud and delude our judgment; we want to motivate our annoyance a posteriori by the oversights and inadequacies of others, so we can lose sight of ourselves. – Religiously strict people, who judge themselves without mercy, are also those who have most often spoken ill of mankind in general. There has never been a saint who reserves sins to himself and virtues to others: he is as rare as the man who, following Buddha’s precept, hides his goodness from people and lets them see of himself only what is bad.
608
Cause and effect confused. – Unconsciously we seek out the principles and dogmas that are in keeping with our temperament, so that in the end it looks as if the principles and dogmas had created our character, given it stability and certainty, while precisely the opposite has occurred. It seems that our thinking and judging are to be made the cause of our nature after the fact, but actually our nature causes us to think and judge one way or the other. – And what decides us on this almost unconscious comedy? Laziness and convenience, and not least the vain desire to be considered consistent through and through, uniform both in character and thought: for this earns us respect, brings us trust and power.
609
Age and truth. – Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity.
610
People as bad poets. – Just as bad poets, in the second half of a line, look for a thought to fit their rhyme, so people in the second half of their lives, having become more anxious, look for the actions, attitudes, relationships that suit those of their earlier life, so that everything will harmonize outwardly. But then they no longer have any powerful thought to rule their life and determine it anew; rather, in its stead, comes the intention of finding a rhyme.
611
Boredom and play. – Need forces us to do the work whose product will quiet the need; we are habituated to work by the ever-new awakening of needs. But in those intervals when our needs are quieted and seem to sleep, boredom overtakes us. What is that? It is the habit of working as such, which now asserts itself as a new, additional need; the need becomes the greater, the greater our habit of working, perhaps even the greater our suffering from our needs. To escape boredom, man works either beyond what his usual needs require, or else he invents play, that is, work that is designed to quiet no need other than that for working in general. He who is tired of play, and has no reason to work because of new needs, is sometimes overcome by the longing for a third state that relates to play as floating does to dancing, as dancing does to walking, a blissful, peaceful state of motion: it is the artist’s and philosopher’s vision of happiness.
612
Instruction from pictures. – If we consider a series of pictures of ourselves from the time of childhood to that of manhood, we are agreeably surprised to find that the man resembles the child more than the adolescent: probably corresponding to this occurrence, then, there has been a temporary alienation from our basic character, now overcome again by the man’s collected, concentrated strength. This perception agrees with the one that all those strong influences of our passions, our teachers, or political events, which pull us about in our adolescence, later seem to be reduced to a fixed measure. Certainly, they continue to live and act in us, but our basic feeling and basic thinking have the upper hand; these influences are used as sources of power, but no longer as regulators, as happens in our twenties. Thus man’s thinking and feeling appear again more in accord with that of his childhood years – and this inner fact is expressed in the external one mentioned above.
613
Voice of the years. – The tone adolescents use to speak, praise, blame, or invent displeases older people because it is too loud and yet at the same time muffled and unclear, like a tone in a vault, which gains resonance because of the emptiness. For most of what adolescents think has not flowed out of the fullness of their own nature, but rather harmonizes and echoes what is thought, spoken, praised, or blamed around them. But because the feelings (of inclination and disinclination) reverberate in them much more strongly than the reasons for these feelings, there arises, when they give voice to their feeling again, that muffled, ringing tone that indicates the absence or paucity of reasons. The tone of the more mature years is rigorous, sharply punctuated, moderately loud, but like everything clearly articulated, it carries very far. Finally, old age often brings a certain gentleness and indulgence to the sound and seems to sugar it: of course, in some cases it makes it sour, too.
614
Backward and anticipating people. – The unpleasant personality who is full of mistrust, who reacts with envy to his competitors’ and neighbors’ successes, who flares up violently at divergent opinions, is showing that he belongs to an earlier stage of culture, and is thus a relic. For the way in which he interacts with people was proper and appropriate for the conditions of an age when rule by force prevailed: he is a backward person. A second personality, who shares profusely in others’ joy, who wins friends everywhere, who is touched by everything that grows and evolves, who enjoys other people’s honors and successes, and makes no claim to the privilege of alone knowing the truth, but instead is full of modest skepticism – he is an anticipator who is reaching ahead towards a higher human culture. The unpleasant personality grows out of times when the unhewn foundation of human intercourse had still to be laid; the other lives on its highest floors, as far away as possible from the wild animal that rages and howls locked up in the cellars, beneath the foundations of culture.
615
Comfort for hypochondriacs. – When a great thinker is temporarily subjected to hypochondriacal self-torments, he may say to comfort himself: “This parasite is feeding and growing from your great strength; if that strength were less, you would have less to suffer.” The statesman may speak likewise when his jealousy and vengeful feelings, in short, the mood of a bellum omnium contra omnes, for which he as a nation’s representative must necessarily have a great gift, occasionally intrude into his personal relations and make his life difficult.
616
Alienated from the present. – There are great advantages in for once removing ourselves distinctly from our time and letting ourselves be driven from its shore back into the ocean of former world views. Looking at the coast from that perspective, we survey for the first time its entire shape, and when we near it again, we have the advantage of understanding it better on the whole than do those who have never left it.
617
Sowing and reaping on personal inadequacies. – People like Rousseau know how to use their weaknesses, deficiencies, or vices as if they were the fertilizer of their talent. When Rousseau laments the depravity and degeneration of society as the unpleasant consequence of culture, this is based on his personal experience, whose bitterness makes his general condemnation so sharp, and poisons the arrows he shoots. He is relieving himself first as an individual, and thinks that he is seeking a cure that will directly benefit society, but that will also indirectly, and by means of society, benefit him too.
618
A philosophical frame of mind. – Generally we strive to acquire one emotional stance, one viewpoint for all life situations and events – we usually call that being of a philosophical frame of mind. But rather than making oneself uniform, we may find greater value for the enrichment of knowledge by listening to the soft voice of different life situations; each brings its own views with it. Thus we acknowledge and share the life and nature of many by not treating ourselves like rigid, invariable, single individuals.
619
In the fire of contempt. – It is a new step towards independence, once a man dares to express opinions that bring disgrace on him if he entertains them; then even his friends and acquaintances begin to grow anxious. The man of talent must pass through this fire, too; afterwards he is much more his own person.
620
Sacrifice. – If there is a choice, a great sacrifice will be preferred to a small one, because we compensate ourselves for a great sacrifice with self-admiration, and this is not possible with a small one.
621
Love as a device. – Whoever wants really to get to know something new (be it a person, an event, or a book) does well to take up this new thing with all possible love, to avert his eye quickly from, even to forget, everything about it that he finds inimical, objectionable, or false. So, for example, we give the author of a book the greatest possible head start, and, as if at a race, virtually yearn with a pounding heart for him to reach his goal. By doing this, we penetrate into the heart of the new thing, into its motive center: and this is what it means to get to know it. Once we have got that far, reason then sets its limits; that overestimation, that occasional unhinging of the critical pendulum, was just a device to entice the soul of a matter out into the open.
622
To think too well or too ill of the world. – Whether we think too well or too ill of things, we will always gain the advantage of reaping a greater pleasure: if our preconceived opinion is too good we are generally investing things (experiences) with more sweetness than they actually possess. If a preconceived opinion is overly negative, it leads to a pleasant disappointment: what was pleasurable in those things in and of themselves is increased through the pleasure of our surprise. – Incidentally, a morose temperament will experience the opposite in both cases.
623
Deep men. – Those whose strength lies in the depth impressions make on them – they are generally called deep men – are relatively controlled and decisive when anything unexpected happens: for in the first moment the impression was still shallow; only later does it become deep. But long foreseen and expected things or people excite such natures most, and make them almost incapable of maintaining presence of mind when their wait is over.
624
Traffic with one’s higher self. – Everyone has his good day, when he finds his higher self; and true humanity demands that we judge someone only when he is in this condition, and not in his workdays of bondage and servitude. We should, for example, assess and honor a painter according to the highest vision he was able to see and portray. But people themselves deal very differently with this, their higher self, and often act out the role of their own self, to the extent that they later keep imitating what they were in those moments. Some regard their ideal with shy humility and would like to deny it: they fear their higher self because, when it speaks, it speaks demandingly. In addition, it has a ghostly freedom of coming or staying away as it wishes; for that reason it is often called a gift of the gods, while actually everything else is a gift of the gods (of chance): this, however, is the man himself.
625
Solitary people. – Some people are so used to solitude with themselves that they never compare themselves to others, but spin forth their monologue of a life in a calm, joyous mood, holding good conversations with themselves, even laughing. But if they are made to compare themselves with others, they tend to a brooding underestimation of their selves: so that they have to be forced to learn again from others to have a good, fair opinion of themselves. And even from this learned opinion they will always want to detract or reduce something. – Thus one must grant certain men their solitude, and not be silly enough, as often happens, to pity them for it.
626
Without melody. – There are people for whom a constant inner repose and a harmonious ordering of all their capabilities is so characteristic that any goal-directed activity goes against their grain. They are like a piece of music consisting entirely of sustained harmonious chords, with no evidence of even the beginning of a structured, moving melody. At any movement from the outside, their boat at once gains a new equilibrium on the sea of harmonic euphony. Modern people are usually extremely impatient on meeting such natures, who do not become anything though it may not be said that they are not anything. In certain moods, however, their presence evokes that rare question: why have melody at all? Why are we not satisfied when life mirrors itself peacefully in a deep lake? – The Middle Ages was richer in such natures than we are. How seldom do we now meet a person who can keep living so peacefully and cheerfully with himself even amidst the turmoil, saying to himself like Goethe: “The best is the deep quiet in which I live and grow against the world, and harvest what they cannot take from me by fire or sword.” [Goethe, Tagebuch, May 13, 1780.]
627
Life and experience. – If one notices how some individuals know how to treat their experiences – their insignificant everyday experiences – so that these become a plot of ground that bears fruit three times a year; while others – and how many there are! – are driven through the waves of the most exciting turns of fate, of the most varied currents of their time or nation, and yet always stay lightly on the surface, like cork: then one is finally tempted to divide mankind into a minority (minimality) of those people who know how to make much out of little and a majority of those who know how to make a little out of much; indeed, one meets those perverse wizards who, instead of creating the world out of nothing, create nothing out of the world.
628
Seriousness in play. – At sunset in Genoa, I heard from a tower a long chiming of bells: it kept on and on, and over the noise of the backstreets, as if insatiable for itself, it rang out into the evening sky and the sea air, so terrible and so childish at the same time, so melancholy. Then I thought of Plato’s words and felt them suddenly in my heart: Nothing human is worth taking very seriously; nonetheless [Plato: Republic, X 604c]
629
On convictions and justice. – To carry out later, in coolness and sobriety, what a man promises or decides in passion – this demand is among the heaviest burdens oppressing mankind. To have to acknowledge for all future time the consequences of anger, of raging vengeance, of enthusiastic devotion – this can incite a bitterness against these feelings all the greater because everywhere, and especially by artists, precisely these feelings are the object of idol worship. These latter cultivate the esteem for the passions, and have always done so; to be sure, they also glorify the frightful satisfactions of passion, in which one indulges, the outbursts of revenge that have death, mutilation, or voluntary banishment as a consequence, and the resignation of the broken heart. In any event, they keep alive curiosity about the passions, as if they wished to say: experience without passions is nothing at all. – Because we have vowed to be faithful, even, perhaps, to a purely imaginary being, a God, because we have surrendered our heart to a prince, a party, a woman, a priestly order, an artist, a thinker, in a state of blind madness that enveloped us in rapture and made that being appear worthy of every honor, every sacrifice – are we then inextricably bound? Were we not deceiving ourselves then? Was it not a hypothetical promise, under the admittedly silent condition that those beings to whom we dedicated ourselves really are the beings they appeared to be in our imaginations? Are we obliged to be faithful to our errors, even if we perceive that by this faithfulness we do damage to our higher self? – No, there is no law, no obligation of that kind; we must become traitors, act unfaithfully, forsake our ideals again and again. We do not pass from one period of life to another without causing these pains of betrayal, and without suffering from them in turn. Should we have to guard ourselves against the upsurging of our feeling in order to avoid these pains? Would not the world then become too bleak, too ghostly for us? Let us rather ask ourselves whether these pains at a change of conviction are necessary, or whether they do not depend on an erroneous opinion and estimation. Why do we admire the man who remains faithful to his conviction and despise the one who changes it? I fear the answer must be: because everyone assumes such a change is caused only by motives of baser advantage or personal fear. That is, we believe fundamentally that no one changes his opinions as long as they are advantageous to him, or at least as long as they do him no harm. But if that is the case, it bears bad testimony to the intellectual significance of all convictions. Let us examine how convictions come into being and observe whether they are not vastly overrated: in that way it will be revealed that the change of convictions too is in any case measured by false standards and that until now we have tended to suffer too much from such changes.
630
Conviction is the belief that in some point of knowledge one possesses absolute truth. Such a belief presumes, then, that absolute truths exist; likewise, that the perfect methods for arriving at them have been discovered; finally, that every man who has convictions makes use of these perfect methods. All three assertions prove at once that the man of convictions is not the man of scientific thinking; he stands before us still in the age of theoretical innocence, and is a child, however grown up he might be otherwise. But throughout thousands of years, people have lived in such childlike assumptions, and from out of them mankind’s mightiest sources of energy have flowed. The countless people who sacrificed themselves for their convictions thought they were doing it for absolute truth. All of them were wrong: probably no man has ever sacrificed himself for truth; at least, the dogmatic expression of his belief will have been unscientific or half-scientific. But actually one wanted to be right because one thought one had to be right. To let his belief be torn from him meant perhaps to put his eternal happiness in question. With a matter of this extreme importance, the “will” was all too audibly the intellect’s prompter. Every believer of every persuasion assumed he could not be refuted; if the counterarguments proved very strong, he could still always malign reason in general and perhaps even raise as a banner of extreme fanaticism the “credo quia absurdum est.” [“I believe it because it is absurd.”] It is not the conflict of opinions that has made history so violent, but rather the conflict of belief in opinions, that is, conflict of convictions. If only all those people who thought so highly of their conviction, who sacrificed all sorts of things to it and spared neither their honor, body nor life in its service, had devoted only half of their strength to investigating by what right they clung to this or that conviction, how they had arrived at it, then how peaceable the history of mankind would appear! How much more would be known! All the cruel scenes during the persecution of every kind of heretic would have been spared us for two reasons: first, because the inquisitors would above all have inquired within themselves, and got beyond the arrogant idea that they were defending the absolute truth; then because the heretics themselves would not have granted such poorly established tenets as those of all the sectarians and “orthodox” any further attention, once they had investigated them.
631
Stemming from the time when people were accustomed to believe that they possessed absolute truth is a deep discomfort with all skeptical and relativistic positions on any questions of knowledge; usually we prefer to surrender unconditionally to a conviction held by people of authority (fathers, friends, teachers, princes), and we have a kind of troubled conscience if we do not do so. This inclination is understandable and its consequences do not entitle us to violent reproaches against the development of human reason. But eventually the scientific spirit in man must bring forth that virtue of cautious restraint, that wise moderation that is better known in the realm of practical life than in the realm of theoretical life, and that Goethe, for example [in Torquato Tasso], portrayed in his Antonio, as an object of animosity for all Tassos, that is, for those unscientific and also passive natures. The man of conviction has in himself a right not to understand the man of cautious thinking, the theoretical Antonio; the scientific man, on the other hand, has no right to scold him for this; he makes allowances for him and knows besides that, in certain cases, the man will cling to him as Tasso finally does to Antonio.
632
If one has not passed through various convictions, but remains caught in the net of his first belief, he is in all events, because of just this unchangeability, a representative of backward cultures; in accordance with this lack of education (which always presupposes educability), he is harsh, injudicious, unteachable, without gentleness, eternally suspect, a person lacking scruples, who reaches for any means to enforce his opinion because he simply cannot understand that there have to be other opinions. In this regard, he is perhaps a source of power, and even salutary in cultures grown too free and lax, but only because he powerfully incites opposition: for in that way the new culture’s more delicate structure, which is forced to struggle with him, becomes strong itself.
633
Essentially, we are still the same people as those in the period of the Reformation: and how could it be otherwise? But we no longer allow ourselves certain means to gain victory for our opinion: this distinguishes us from that age and proves that we belong to a higher culture. These days, if a man still attacks and crushes opinions with suspicions and outbursts of rage, in the manner of men during the Reformation, he clearly betrays that he would have burnt his opponents, had he lived in other times, and that he would have taken recourse to all the means of the Inquisition, had he lived as an opponent of the Reformation. In its time, the Inquisition was reasonable, for it meant nothing other than the general martial law which had to be proclaimed over the whole domain of the church, and which, like every state of martial law, justified the use of the extremest means, namely under the assumption (which we no longer share with those people) that one possessed truth in the church and had to preserve it at any cost, with any sacrifice, for the salvation of mankind. But now we will no longer concede so easily that anyone has the truth; the rigorous methods of inquiry have spread sufficient distrust and caution, so that we experience every man who represents opinions violently in word and deed as any enemy of our present culture, or at least as a backward person. And in fact, the pathos of possessing truth counts very little today in relation to that other pathos, more gentle and silent, to be sure, for seeking the truth, a search that does not tire of learning afresh and testing anew.
634
Incidentally, the methodical search for truth itself results from those times when convictions were feuding among themselves. If the individual had not cared about his “truth,” that is, about his being right in the end, no method of inquiry would exist at all; but, given the eternal struggle of various individuals’ claims to absolute truth, man proceeded step by step, in order to find irrefutable principles by which the justice of the claims could be tested and the argument settled. At first decisions were made according to authorities, later the ways and means with which the ostensible truth had been found were mutually criticized; in between, there was a period when the consequences of the opposing tenet were drawn and perhaps experienced as harmful and saddening; this was to result in everyone’s judging that the opponent’s conviction contained an error. Finally, the thinkers’ personal struggle sharpened their methods so much that truths could really be discovered, and the aberrations of earlier methods were exposed for all to see.
635
All in all, scientific methods are at least as important as any other result of inquiry: for the scientific spirit is based on the insight into methods, and were those methods to be lost, all the results of science could not prevent a renewed triumph of superstition and nonsense. Clever people may learn the results of science as much as they like, but one still sees from their conversation, especially from their hypotheses in conversation, that they lack the scientific spirit: they do not have that instinctive mistrust of the wrong ways of thinking, a mistrust which, as a consequence of long practice, has put its roots deep into the soul of every scientific man. For them it is enough to find any one hypothesis about a matter; then they get fired up about it and think that puts an end to it. For them, to have an opinion means to get fanatical about it and cherish it in their hearts henceforth as a conviction. If a matter is unexplained, they become excited at the first notion resembling an explanation that enters their brain: this always has the worst consequences, especially in the realm of politics. – Therefore everyone should have come to know at least one science in its essentials; then he knows what method is, and how necessary is the most extreme circumspection. This advice should be given to women particularly, who are now the hopeless victims of all hypotheses, especially those which give the impression of being witty, thrilling, invigorating, or energizing. In fact, if one looks closer, one notices that the majority of all educated people still desire convictions and nothing but convictions from a thinker, and that only a slight minority want certainty. The former want to be forcibly carried away, in order to thus increase their own strength; the latter few have that matter-of-fact interest that ignores personal advantage, even the above-mentioned increase of strength. The former, vastly preponderant class is what the thinker has in view when he takes himself for a genius, and presents himself as a higher being possessing authority. To the extent that that kind of genius keeps up the heat of convictions and awakens mistrust of the cautious and modest spirit of science, he is an enemy of truth, however much he may believe he is its suitor.
636
To be sure, there is also quite another category of genius, that of justice; and I can in no way see fit to esteem that kind lower than any philosophical, political, or artistic genius. It is its way to avoid with hearty indignation everything which blinds and confuses our judgment about things; thus it is an enemy of convictions, for it wants to give each thing its due, be it living or dead, real or fictive – and to do so it must apprehend it clearly; it therefore places each thing in the best light and walks all around it with an attentive eye. Finally it will even give to its opponent, blind or shortsighted “conviction” (as men call it: – women call it “faith”), what is due to conviction – for the sake of truth.
637
Opinions grow out of passions; inertia of the spirit lets these rigidify into convictions. – However, if one feels he is of a free, restlessly alive spirit, he can prevent this rigidity through constant change; and if he is on the whole a veritable thinking snowball, then he will have no opinions at all in his head, but rather only certainties and precisely calculated probabilities. – But we who are of a mixed nature, sometimes aglow with fire and sometimes chilled by the spirit, we want to kneel down before justice, as the only goddess whom we recognize above us. Usually the fire in us makes us unjust, and in the sense of that goddess, impure; never may we grasp her hand in this condition; never will the grave smile of her pleasure lie upon us. We revere her as the veiled Isis of our lives; ashamed, we offer her our pain as a penance and a sacrifice, whenever the fire burns us and tries to consume us. It is the spirit that saves us from turning utterly to burnt-out coals; here and there it pulls us away from justice’s sacrificial altar, or wraps us in an asbestos cocoon. Redeemed from the fire, we then stride on, driven by the spirit, from opinion to opinion, through the change of sides, as noble traitors to all things that can ever be betrayed – and yet with no feeling of guilt.
638
The Wanderer. – He who has come only in part to a freedom of reason cannot feel on earth otherwise than as a wanderer – though not as a traveler towards a final goal: for this does not exist. But he does want to observe, and keep his eyes open for everything that actually occurs in the world; therefore he must not attach his heart too firmly to any individual thing; there must be something wandering within him, which takes its joy in change and transitoriness. To be sure, such a man will have bad nights, when he is tired and finds closed the gates to the city that should offer him rest; perhaps in addition, as in the Orient, the desert reaches up to the gate, beasts of prey howl now near, now far; a strong wind stirs; robbers lead off his pack-animals. Then for him the frightful night sinks over the desert like a second desert, and his heart becomes weary of wandering. If the morning sun then rises, glowing like a divinity of wrath, and the city opens up, he sees in the faces of its inhabitants perhaps more of desert, dirt, deception, uncertainty, than outside the gates – and the day is almost worse than the night. So it may happen sometimes to the wanderer; but then, as recompense, come the ecstatic mornings of other regions and days, when he shall see nearby in the dawning light the bands of muses dancing past him in the mist of the mountains, when afterwards, if he strolls quietly beneath the trees in the equanimity of his soul at morning, good and bright things will be thrown down to him, from their tops and leafy hiding-places, the gifts of all those free spirits who are at home in mountain, wood, and solitude, and who are, like him, in their now joyful, now contemplative way, wanderers and philosophers. Born out of the mysteries of the dawn, they ponder how the day can have such a pure, transparent, transfigured and cheerful face between the tenth and twelfth stroke of the clock – they seek the philosophy of the morning.
An Epode - Among Friends
1.
It’s nice, in silence together,
Even nicer, laughing together –
Underneath the silken skies
Amidst moss and books, here lie
Friends, our joyous laughter growing
With our white teeth showing.
Am I right? silent let us remain;
Am I wrong? laughter be our refrain –
Make it worse and worse, a louder wave,
Until together we reach the grave.
Yes, friends, shall we do it again? –
Amen! and auf Wiedersehn!
2.
No excuses! No forgiving!
Openhearted and cheerful living
Grant this foolish book your
Ear and heart and shelter!
Believe me, friends, my foolish strain
Has never been in vain!
What I seek, what I discover –
Has a book contained it ever?
Honor in me the guild of fools!
From this fools-book learn
How reason to its senses turned!
Yes, friends, shall we do it again? –
Amen! and auf Wiedersehn!
First Sequel:**
**Mixed Opinions and Maxims
Preface**
**To the Second Edition, 1886
1.
One should speak only when one may not remain silent; and then speak only of that which one has overcome – everything else is chatter, “literature,” lack of breeding. My writings speak only of my overcomings: “I” am in them, together with everything that was hostile to me, ego ipsissimus, indeed, even if a yet prouder expression be permitted, ego ipsissimum ["ego ipsissimus”: my very own self; “ego ipsissimum”: my innermost self]. One will surmise: I already have much – *beneath *me … But still it always required time, recovery, detachment, distance, until the desire stirred within me to exploit, reveal, expose, “exhibit” (or whatever one wants to call it) for the sake of knowledge something experienced and survived, possibly some fact or fatum of my life. To that extent all my writings, with a single, though substantial exception, are to be back-dated – they always speak of something “behind me” – some, like the first three Untimely Meditations, even back before the emergence and experience of the time of a previously published book (The Birth of Tragedy in the given case: as a subtler observer and comparer may uncover). That sudden outburst against Germanomania, complacency and beggarly speech found in the old David Strauss, the content of the first Meditation, gave vent to feelings from a long time ago when I, as a student, had sat in the midst of German culture and cultural philistinism (I make claim on the paternity of the now much used and abused expression “cultural philistine”); and what I said against the “historical disease,” I said as one who had slowly, laboriously learned to recover from it and who was not at all willing to renounce “history,” because he had once suffered from it. When I then, in the third Untimely Meditation, expressed my reverence for my first and only educator, for the *great Arthur Schopenhauer – even now I would express it much more strongly, also more personally – I was myself already in the midst of moral skepticism and dissolution, that is to say just as much in the critique as in the depths of all pessimism hitherto – and already believed “in nothing any more,” as people say, not even in Schopenhauer: just at that time I produced the unpublished essay “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.” Even my commemorative victory speech in honor of Richard Wagner, on the occasion of his victory celebration at Bayreuth in 1876 – Bayreuth signifies the greatest victory which an artist has ever achieved – a work which itself bears the strongest appearance of being “up-to-date,” was in its background an homage and a gratitude set against a piece of my past, against the fairest but also most dangerously calm seas of my voyage … and actually a liberation, a farewell. (Perhaps Richard Wagner was deceived about it? I do not think so. As long as one still loves, one certainly does not paint such pictures; one does not yet “contemplate,” one does not place oneself at a distance, as the contemplator must do. “Even contemplation involves a secret antagonism, that of the contrary view” – it is stated in Chapter 7, on page 342 of the work itself [“Richard Wagner in Bayreuth”], with a telltale and melancholy idiom, which was perhaps intended but for few ears.) The composure needed to be able to speak about the innermost solitude and self-restraint over long intervening years, *first came to me with the book *Human, All Too Human, to which this second foreword and forward ["Für- und Vorwort”] is to be dedicated, too. As a book “for free spirits,” something lies upon it from the almost cheerful and inquisitive coldness of the psychologist, who has a lot of painful things beneath him, *behind him, yet subsequently identifies and as it were jabs firmly at them with the point of a needle: is it any wonder if, with such pointed and ticklish work, a little blood occasionally flows as well, if during this the psychologist has blood on his fingers and not always only – on his fingers? …
2.
The Mixed Opinions and Maxims were published individually, just like The Wanderer and His Shadow*, first as continuations and appendices of that human-all-too-human “book for free spirits”: at the same time as a continuation and duplication of a spiritual cure, namely of the anti-romantic self-treatment, as my healthy instinct had itself discovered and prescribed for me against a temporary illness of the most dangerous form of romanticism. At this point, after six years of convalescence, may these same writings stand united, as the second volume of Human, All Too Human: perhaps they, taken together, will teach their precepts more strongly and more clearly – *precepts of health, which may be recommended to the more spiritual natures of the yet upcoming generation as disciplina voluntatis. A pessimist speaks out of them, who often enough jumped out of his skin but always knew how to jump back in again, hence a pessimist with goodwill toward pessimism – thus in any case no longer a romantic: what? should a spirit, who understands the serpent’s cleverness in changing his skin, not be allowed to give the pessimists of today a lesson, who are one and all still in danger of romanticism? And at least show them how it is – done? …
3.
At the time it was indeed high time to say farewell: soon after, I received the proof. Richard Wagner, most triumphant, but in truth a decaying and despairing romantic, suddenly sank down, helpless and broken, before the Christian cross … At the time, did no German have eyes in his head, empathy in his conscience, for this dreadful spectacle? Was I the only one whom – it pained? Enough, this unexpected event struck me like lightning and gave me clarity about the place I had left – and also that horror which everybody feels after he has unconsciously passed through a tremendous danger. As I proceeded alone, I trembled; soon after I was sick, more than sick, namely weary from the inevitable disappointment about everything that remained to inspire us modern men, about the universally wasted energy, work, hope, youth, love; weary with disgust at the femininity and ill-bred rapturousness of this romanticism, at the whole idealistic deception and pampering of the conscience that had here triumphed once again over one of the bravest; weary, finally and not least of all, from the grief aroused by an inexorable suspicion – that, after this disappointment, I was condemned to mistrust more profoundly, to despise more profoundly, to be more profoundly alone than ever before. My task – where was it? What? did it not seem as if my task had now withdrawn itself from me – as if now, for a long time, I would have no more right to it? What could I do in order to endure this greatest deprivation? – I began by forbidding myself, thoroughly and in principle, all romantic *music, this ambiguous, inflated, stifling art that deprives the spirit of its severity and cheerfulness and fosters every kind of vague longing and spongy, exploitative desire. Even today “cave musicam” [“beware music”] is still my advice to all who are man enough to insist on cleanliness in things of the spirit; such music unnerves, softens, feminizes, its “eternal womanly” draws us – *downwards! … At that time I was first and foremost suspicious and circumspect towards romantic music; and if I hoped for something at all from music anymore, it was the prospect that a musician might come – bold, subtle, malicious, southerly, superhealthy enough to confront that music and in an immortal fashion take revenge on it. –
4.
Henceforth alone and sorely mistrustful of myself, I thus, and not without a sullen wrathfulness, took sides against myself and for everything painful and difficult precisely for me: – thus I again found my way to that courageous pessimism that is the antithesis of all romantic mendacity, and also, as it seems to me today, the way to “myself,” to my task. The hidden imperious something, for which we for long have no name until at last it proves itself to be our task – this tyrant in us exacts a terrible price for every attempt that we make to escape it or give it the slip, for every premature act of self-constraint, for every reconciliation with those to whom we do not belong, for every activity, however respectable, which turns us aside from our main purpose, even indeed for every virtue that would like to protect us from the severity of our most personal responsibility. “Illness” is always the answer when we begin to doubt our right to our task – every time we begin to make things easier for ourselves. How strange and how terrible! It is our alleviations for which we have to make the severest atonement! And if we afterwards want to return to health, we have no choice – we must burden ourselves more heavily than we have ever been burdened before …
5.
– It was only then that I learned the hermitical habit of speech understood by only the most silent and suffering. I spoke without witnesses, or rather indifferent to the presence of witnesses, so as not to suffer from silence, I spoke of various things that did not concern me in a style that gave the impression that they did. It was then that I learned the art of appearing cheerful, objective, inquisitive, above all that is healthy and malicious – is this, in an invalid, as it seems to me, his “good taste”? Nevertheless, a subtler eye and empathy will not miss what perhaps constitutes the charm of this writing – the fact that here one who has suffered and abstained speaks in such a way as if he had never suffered or abstained. Here there is a determination to preserve an equilibrium and composure in the face of life and even a sense of gratitude towards it, here rules a vigorous, proud, ever vigilant, and sensitive will, which has undertaken the task of defending life against pain and striking down all those inferences that, like poisonous fungi, flourish by virtue of pain, disappointment, ill-humor, solitude and other morasses. Perhaps this gives our pessimists a signpost to their own self-examination? – for it was then that I hit upon the proposition: “a sufferer has no right to pessimism because he suffers!”, and that I engaged in a tedious, patient campaign against the unscientific basic tendency of all romantic pessimism, which seeks to magnify and interpret individual, personal experiences into universal judgments, indeed into condemnations of the world … in short, it was then that I turned my perspective around. Optimism for the sake of restoration, in order at some future time to have the right to be a pessimist – do you understand that? Just as a physician transfers his patient to totally strange surroundings, in order to displace him from his entire “hitherto,” from his cares, friends, letters, duties, stupidities and painful memories, and teaches him to stretch out hands and senses to new nourishment, a new sun, a new future, so I, as physician and patient in one, compelled myself to an utterly different and unexplored clime of the soul, and especially to a curative journey into strange parts, into strangeness itself, to an inquisitiveness for every kind of strange thing … A long process of roaming, seeking, changing followed from this, a repugnance towards all staying still, towards every blunt affirmation and denial; likewise a dietetic and discipline designed to make it as easy as possible for the spirit to run long distances, to fly to great heights, above all again and again to fly away. In fact a minimum of life, an unfettering from all coarser desires, an independence in the midst of all kinds of unfavorable outward circumstances, together with the pride in being able to live surrounded by these unfavorable circumstances: a little cynicism perhaps, a little of the “barrel” [Diogenes the Cynic (400-325 BC), reputed to have lived in a barrel.], but just as surely a great deal of capricious happiness, capricious cheerfulness, much calm, light, subtler folly, hidden enthusiasm – all this produced in the end a great spiritual strengthening, an increasing joy and abundance of health. Life itself rewards us for our tenacious will to life, for such a long war as I waged against the pessimistic weariness of life, even for every attentive glance our gratitude accords to even the smallest, most delicate, most fleeting gift that life gives us. Finally our reward is the greatest of life’s gifts, perhaps the greatest thing it is able to give of any kind – we are given our task back.
6.
Shall my experience – the history of an illness and a convalescence, for it resulted in a convalescence – have been my personal experience alone? And only my human, all-too-human? Today I would like to believe the reverse, for I am becoming more and more confident that my travel books were not penned solely for myself, as sometimes seems to be the case. – May I now, after six years of growing confidence, send them once more on a journey for an experiment? May I commend them particularly to the ears and hearts of those who are burdened with some sort of “past,” and have enough spirit left still to suffer from the spirit of their past too? But above all would I commend them to you whose burden is heaviest, you rare, most imperiled, most spiritual, most courageous ones who must be the conscience of the modern soul and as such must possess its knowledge, in whom is concentrated all that exists today of sickness, poison and danger – whose lot it is that you must be sicker than any other kind of individual because you are not “only individuals” … whose comfort it is to know the way to a new health, and alas! to go along it, a health of tomorrow and the day after, you predestined ones, you victorious ones, overcomers of your age, you healthiest ones, you strongest ones, you good Europeans!
7.
– Finally to reduce my opposition to romantic pessimism, that is to say the pessimism of the renunciators, the failed and defeated, to a formula: there is a will to the tragic and to pessimism that is as much a sign of severity and of strength of intellect (taste, feeling, conscience). With this will in one’s heart one has no fear of the fearful and questionable that characterizes all existence; one even seeks it out. Behind such a will there stands courage, pride, the longing for a great enemy. – This has been my pessimistic perspective from the beginning – a novel perspective, is it not? a perspective that even today is novel and strange? To this moment I continue to adhere to it and, if you will believe me, just as much for myself as, occasionally at least, against myself … Do you want me to prove this to you? But what else does this long preface – prove?
Sils-Maria,
Upper Engadine,
September 1886
1.
To the disappointed of philosophy. – If you have hitherto believed that life was one of the highest value and now see yourselves disappointed, do you at once have to reduce it to the lowest possible price?
6.
Against fantasists. – The fantasist denies reality to himself, the liar does so only to others.
12.
Knapsack of the metaphysicians. – Those who boast so mightily of the scientificality of their metaphysics should receive no answer; it is enough to pluck at the bundle which, with a certain degree of embarrassment, they keep concealed behind their back; if one succeeds in opening it, the products of that scientificality come to light, attended by their blushes: a dear little Lord God, a nice little immortality, perhaps a certain quantity of spiritualism, and in any event a whole tangled heap of “wretched poor sinner” and Pharisee arrogance.
23.
Incurable. – An idealist is incorrigible: if he is thrown out of his heaven he makes an ideal of his hell. Let him be disillusioned and behold! – he will embrace this disillusionment just as fervently as a little while before he embraced his hopes. Insofar as his tendency is among the great incurable tendencies of human nature he is able to give rise to tragic destinies and afterwards become the subject of tragedies: for tragedies have to do with precisely what is incurable, ineluctable, inescapable in the fate and character of man.
26.
From the thinker’s innermost experience. – Nothing is more difficult for man than to apprehend a thing impersonally: I mean to see it as a thing, not as a person: one might question, indeed, whether it is at all possible for him to suspend the clockwork of this person-constructing, person-inventing drive even for a moment. He traffics even with ideas, though they be the most abstract, as if they were individuals with whom one has to struggle, to whom one has to ally oneself, whom one has to tend, protect and nourish. We have only to spy on ourselves at that moment when we hear or discover a proposition new to us. Perhaps it displeases us because of its defiant and autocratic bearing; we unconsciously ask ourselves whether we shall not set a counter-proposition as an enemy beside it, whether we can append to it a “perhaps,” a “sometimes”; even the little word “probably” does us good, because it breaks the personally burdensome tyranny of the unconditional. If, on the other hand, this new proposition approaches in a milder shape, nice and tolerant, humble, and sinking as it were into the arms of contradiction, we try another way of testing our autocracy: what, can we not come to the assistance of this weak creature, stroke and feed it, give it strength and fullness, indeed truth and even unconditionality? Can we possibly be parental or knightly or pitying towards it? – Then again, we behold a judgment there, separated from one another, not regarding one another, making no impression one upon the other: and we are tickled by the thought of whether here a marriage might not be arranged, a conclusion drawn, in the presentiment that, if a consequence should proceed from this conclusion, the honor of it will fall not only to the two married judgments but also to those who arranged the marriage. If, however, one can get hold of that idea neither by means of defiance and ill-will nor by means of good-will (if one holds it for true – ), then one yields and pays it homage as a prince and leader, accords it a seat of honor and speaks of it with pomp and pride: for in its glitter one glitters too. Woe to him who seeks to darken it; unless it itself should one day become suspicious to us: – then, unwearying king-makers in the history of the spirit that we are, we hurl it from the throne and immediately raise its opponent in its place. Let one ponder this and then think on a little further: certainly no one will then speak of a “drive to knowledge in and for itself”! – Why then does man prefer the true to the untrue in this secret struggle with idea-persons, in this usually hidden idea-meaning, idea-state founding, idea pedagogy, idea-tending of the sic and poor? For the same reason as he practices justice in traffic with real persons: now out of habit, heredity and training, originally because the true – as also the fair and just – is more useful and more productive of honor than the untrue. For in the realm of thought, power and fame are hard to maintain if erected on the basis of errors or lies: the feeling that such a building could at some time or other fall down is humiliating to the self-conceit of its architect; he is ashamed of the fragility of his material and, because he takes himself more seriously than he does the rest of the world, wants to do nothing that is not more enduring than the rest of the world. It is as a consequence of his demand for truth that he embraces belief in personal immortality, that is to say the most arrogant and defiant idea that exists, united as it is with the hidden thought “pereat mundus, dum ego salvus sim!” [“Let the world perish so long as I am safe.”] His work has become for him his ego, he transforms himself into the intransitory, the all-defiant. It is his immeasurable pride which wants to employ only the finest, hardest stones for its work, that is to say truths or what it takes for truths. At all times arrogance has rightly been designated the “vice of the intellectual” – yet without the motive power of this vice truth and the respect accorded it would be miserably accommodated on this earth. That we are afraid of our own ideas, concepts, words, but also honor ourselves in them and involuntarily ascribe to them the capacity to instruct, despise, praise and censure us, that we thus traffic with them as with free intelligent persons, with independent powers, as equals with equals – it is in this that the strange phenomenon I have called “intellectual conscience” has its roots. – Thus here too something moral of the highest sort has blossomed out of a black root.
29.
In Gethsemane. – The most grievous thing the thinker can say to the artists is: “What, could ye not watch with me one hour?”
31.
In the desert of science. – To the man of science on his unassuming and laborious travels, which must often enough be journeys through the desert, there appear those glittering mirages called “philosophical systems”: with bewitching, deceptive power they show the solution of all enigmas and the freshest draught of the true water of life to be near at hand; his heart rejoices, and it seems to the weary traveler that his lips already touch the goal of all the perseverance and sorrows of the scientific life, so that he involuntarily presses forward. There are other natures, to be sure, which stand still, as if bewildered by the fair illusion: the desert swallows them up and they are dead to science. Other natures again, which have often before experienced this subjective solace, may well grow exceedingly ill-humored and curse the salty taste which these apparitions leave behind in the mouth and from which arises a raging thirst – without one’s having been brought so much as a single step nearer to any kind of spring.
33.
The desire to be just and the desire to be a judge. – Schopenhauer, whose great knowledgeability about the human and all-too-human, whose native sense of reality was not a little dimmed by the motley leopard-skin of his metaphysics (which one must first remove from him if one is to discover the real moralist genius beneath it) – Schopenhauer makes that striking distinction which is very much more justified than he really dared to admit to himself: “the insight into the strict necessity of human actions is the boundary line which divides philosophical heads from the others.” This mighty insight, which from time to time he publicly avowed, he nonetheless counteracted in his own mind with that prejudice which he still had in common with moral men (not with the moralists) and which, quite innocuously and credulously, he expressed as: “the ultimate and true elucidation of the inner nature of the whole of things must necessarily hang closely together with that of the ethical significance of human behavior” – which is absolutely not “necessary” but, on the contrary, has been rejected by precisely that proposition of the strict necessity of human actions, that is to say, the unconditonal unfreedom and unaccountability of the will. Philosophical heads will thus distinguish themselves from the others through their unbelief in the metaphysical significance of morality: and that may establish a gulf between them of whose depth and unbridgeability the so much lamented gulf between the “cultured” and the “uncultured,” as it now exists, gives hardly any idea. Many more backdoors, to be sure, which “philosophical heads” have, like Schopenhauer himself, left open must be recognized as useless: none leads outside, into the air of free will: every one which has hitherto been slipped through reveals behind it every time a brazen wall of fate: we are in prison, we can only dream ourselves free, not make ourselves free. That this knowledge cannot for very much longer be resisted is indicated by the despairing and incredible postures and contortions of those who assail it, who still continue to wrestle with it. – This, approximately, is how they go on: “What, is no man accountable? And is everything full of guilt and feeling of guilt? But someone or other has to be the sinner, if it is impossible and no longer permissible to accuse and to judge the individual, the poor wave in the necessary wave-play of becoming – very well: then let the wave-play itself, becoming, be the sinner: here is free will, here there can be accusing, condemning, atonement and expiation: then let God be the sinner and man his redeemer: then let world history be guilt, self-condemnation and suicide; thus will the offender become his own judge, the judge his own executioner.” – This *Christianity stood on its head – *for what else is it? – is the final lunge in the struggle of the theory of unconditional morality with that of unconditional freedom – a horrible thing if it were anything more than a logical grimace, more than an ugly gesture on the part of the defeated idea – perhaps the death-throes of the despairing and salvation-thirsty heart to which madness whispers: “Behold, thou art the lamb that beareth the sins of God.” – The error lies not only in the feeling “I am accountable,” but equally in that antithesis “I am not, but somebody has to be.” – This is, in fact, not true: teh philosopher thus has to say, as Christ did, “judge not!” and the ultimate distinction between philosophical heads and the others would be that the former desire to be just, the others to be a judge.
50.
Power without victories. – The strongest knowledge (that of the total unfreedom of the human will) is nonetheless the poorest in successes: for it always has the strongest opponent, human vanity.
58.
Dangerous books. – Somebody remarked: “I can tell by my own reaction to it that this book is harmful.” But let him only wait and perhaps one day he will admit to himself that this same book has done him a great service by bringing out the hidden sickness of his heart and making it visible. – Altered opinions do not alter a man’s character (or do so very little); but they do illuminate individual aspects of the constellation of his personality which with a different constellation of opinions had hitherto remained dark and unrecognizable.
76.
Interpreting by dreams. – That which we sometimes do not know or feel precisely while awake – whether we have a good or a bad conscience towards a particular person – the dream informs us of without any ambiguity.
85.
Making plans. – To make plans and project designs brings with it many good sensations; and whoever had the strength to be nothing but a forger of plans his whole life long would be a very happy man: but he would occasionally have to take a rest from this activity by carrying out a plan – and then comes the vexation and the sobering up.
88.
How one dies is a matter of indifference. – The whole way in which a person thinks of death during the high tide of his life and strength bears, to be sure, very eloquent witness as to that which is called his character; but the hour of death itself, his bearing on his deathbed, hardly does so at all. The exhaustion of expiring existence, especially when old people die, the irregular or insufficient nourishment of the brain during this last period, the occasional very bad attacks of pain, the new and untried nature of the whole condition and all too often the coming and going of superstitious impressions and fears, as if dying were a very important thing and bridges of the most terrible description are here being crossed – all this does not permit us to employ dying as evidence as to the living. It is, moreover, not true that the dying are in general more honest than the living: almost everyone is, rather, tempted by the solemn bearing of the bystanders, the streams of tears and feeling held back or let flow, into a now conscious, now unconscious comedy of vanity. The seriousness with which every dying person is treated has certainly been for many a poor despised devil the most exquisite pleasure of his entire life and a kind of indemnification and part-payment for many deprivations.
89.
Mores and their victim. – The origin of mores lies in two ideas: “society is worth more than the individual” and “an enduring advantage is to be preferred to ephemeral advantage” – from which it follows that the enduring advantage of society must be given precedence, unconditionally, over the advantage of the individual, especially over his momentary well-being but also over his enduring advantage and even his continued existence. Whether the individual suffers from an institution that is good for the whole, whether it causes him to atrophy or perish – mores must be preserved, sacrifices must be made. But such an attitude originates only in those who are not its victims – for they claim in their behalf that the individual may be worth more than many, also that present enjoyment, the moment in paradise, may have to be valued higher than a pallid continuation of painless or complacent states. The philosophy of the sacrificial animal, however, is always sounded too late; and so we retain mores and morality – which is no more than the feeling for the whole quintessence of mores under which one lives and has been brought up – brought up not as an individual but as a member of a whole, as a digit of a majority. – Thus it happens constantly that an individual brings to bear upon himself, by means of his morality, the tyranny of the majority.
90.
The good and the good conscience. – Do you think that every good thing has always had a good conscience? – Science, which is certainly something good, entered the world without one, and quite destitute of pathos, but did so rather in secret, by crooked and indirect paths, hooded or masked like a criminal and at least always with the feeling of dealing in contraband. The good conscience has as a preliminary stage the bad conscience – the latter is not its opposite: for everything good was once new, consequently unfamiliar, contrary to custom, immoral, and gnawed at the heart of its fortunate inventor like a worm.
95.
“Love” – The subtlest artifice which Christianity has over the other religions is a word: it spoke of love. Thus it became the lyrical religion (whereas in their two other creations the Semites have given the world heroic-epic religions). There is in the word love something so ambiguous and suggestive, something which speaks to the memory and to future hope, that even the meanest intelligence and the coldest heart still feels something of the luster of this word. The shrewdest woman and the commonest man think when they hear it of the relatively least selfish moments of their whole life, even if Eros has only paid them a passing visit; and those countless numbers who never experience love, of parents, or children, or lovers, especially however the men and women of sublimated sexuality, have made their find in Christianity.
98.
Honesty and play-acting among unbelievers. – There exists no book that expresses so candidly or contains such an abundance of that which does everybody good once in a while – the joyful enthusiasm, ready for any sacrifice, which we feel when we believe in and behold our “truth” – than does the book that speaks of Christ: a perspicacious man can learn from it all the expedients by which a book can be made into a universal book, a friend of everyone, and especially that master expedient of representing everything as having already been discovered, with nothing still on the way and as yet uncertain. All influential books try to leave behind this kind of impression: the impression that the widest spiritual and psychical horizon has here been circumscribed and that every star visible now or in the future will have to revolve around the sun that shines here. – Must it therefore not be the case that the causes that make such books as this influential will render every purely scientific book poor in influence? Is the latter not condemned to live a lowly existence among the lowly, and finally to be crucified, never to rise again? Are all honest men of science not “poor in spirit” by comparison with that which religious men proclaim of their “knowledge,” of their “holy” spirit? Can any religion demand more renunciation, draw the egoistic more inexorably out of themselves, than science does? Thus and in similar ways, and in any event with a certain amount of play-acting, may we speak if we have to defend ourselves before believers; for it is hardly possible to conduct a defense without employing some degree of play-acting. Among ourselves, however, we must speak more honestly: here we may employ a freedom which, in their own interests, everyone is not permitted even to understand. Away, therefore, with the monk’s cowl of renunciation! with the humble mien! Much more and much better: that is how our truth sounds! If science were not united with the joy of knowledge and the utility of what is known, what interest would we have in science? If a little faith, hope and charity did not lead our soul towards knowledge, what else would draw us to science? And if the ego does indeed have no place in science, the happy, inventive ego, even that honest and industrious ego already mentioned, has a very considerable place in the republic of scientific men. Respect, the pleasure of those we wish well or revere, sometimes fame and a modest personal immortality are the achievable rewards of this depersonalization, not to speak of lesser objectives and remunerations, even though it is on their account that most have sworn and continue to swear allegiance to the laws of that republic and of science in general. If we had not remained to some extent unscientific men what meaning could science possibly have for us? Taken as a whole and expressed without qualification: to a purely cognitive being knowledge would be a matter of indifference. – What distinguishes us from the pious and the believers is not the quality but the quantity of belief and piety; we are contented with less. But if the former should challenge us: then be contented and appear to be contented! – then we might easily reply: “We are, indeed, not among the least contented. You, however, if your belief makes you blessed then appear to be blessed! Your faces have always been more injurious to your belief than our objections have! If those glad tidings of your Bible were written in your faces you would not need to insist so obstinately on the authority of that book: your works, your actions ought continually to render the Bible superfluous, through you a new Bible ought to be continually in course of creation! As things are, however, all your apologies for Christianity have their roots in your lack of Christianity; with your defense plea you inscribe your own bill of indictment. But if you should wish to emerge out of this insufficiency of Christianity, then ponder the experience of two millennia: which, clothed in the modesty of a question, speaks thus: “if Christ really intended to redeem the world, must he not be said to have failed?”
122.
Good memory. – Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good.
137.
The worst readers. – The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.
138.
Marks of the good writer. – Good writers have two things in common; they prefer to be understood rather than admired; and they do not write for knowing and over-acute readers.
140.
Shutting his mouth. – When his work opens its mouth, the author has to shut his.
164.
In favor of critics. – Insects sting, not from malice, but because they want to live. It is the same with critics – they desire our blood, not our pain.
168.
Praise of aphorisms. – A good aphorism is too hard for the tooth of time and is not consumed by all millennia, although it serves every time for nourishment: this it is the great paradox of literature, the intransitory amid the changing, the food that always remains esteemed, like salt, and never loses its savor, as even that does.
185.
Genius of humanity. – If genius consists, according to Schopenhauer’s observation, in the connected and lively recollection of experience, then in the striving for knowledge of the entire historical past – whichever more mightily distinguishes the modern age from all others and has for the first time demolished the ancient walls between nature and spirit, man and animal, morality and the physical world – it may be possible to recognize a striving for the genius of mankind as a whole. History perfect and complete would be cosmic self-consciousness.
201.
Error of philosophers. – The philosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the building: posterity discovers it in the bricks with which he built and which are then often used again for better building: in the fact, that is to say, that that building can be destroyed and nonetheless possess value as material.
224.
Balm and poison. – This fact can never be sufficiently pondered: Christianity is the religion of antiquity grown old, its presupposition is degenerated ancient cultures; on these it could and can act as a balm. In ages in which eyes and ears are “filled with mud,” so that they are no longer capable of hearing the voice of reason and philosophy, or of seeing wisdom in bodily form, whether it bear the name of Epictetus or of Epicurus: in such ages the cross of martyrdom and the “trumpet of the last judgment” may perhaps still move the peoples to live a decent life. If one thinks of the Rome of Juvenal [Roman satirical poet (60 to 140 AD)], that poison-toad with the eyes of Venus, one learns what it means to confront the “world” with a Cross, one comes to respect the quiet Christian community and is grateful that it overran the Graeco-Roman world. When most people were born as though with the souls of slaves and the sensuality of old men, what a blessing it must have been to encounter beings who were more soul than body and seemed to be an actualization of the Greek condeption of the shades of Hades: modest, elusive, benevolent figures living in expectation of a “better life” and thereby become so undemanding, so silently contemptuous, so proudly patient! – This Christianity as the evening-bell of good antiquity, a bell broken and weary yet still sweet-sounding, is a balm to the ears even for him who now wanders through these centuries only as a historian: what must it have been for the men of these centuries themselves! – On the other hand, for youthful, vigorous barbarians Christianity is poison; to implant the teaching of sinfulness and damnation into the heroic, childish and animal soul of the ancient German, for example, is nothing than to poison it; a quite tremendous chemical fermentation and decomposition, a confusion of feelings and judgments, a rank exuberance of every kind of fantasy must have been the outcome, and thus in the longer run a fundamental enfeeblement of such barbarians. – One must, to be sure, ask what, without this enfeeblement, there would have been left to us of Greek culture! of the entire cultural past of the human race! – for the barbarian races untouched by Christianity were capable of doing away with ancient cultures altogether: as, for example, was demonstrated with fearful clarity by the pagan conquerors of Romanized Britain. Christianity was obliged against its will to assist in making the “world” of antiquity immoral. – Here too there still remains another counter-question and the possibility of a counter-reckoning: if it had not been enfeebled by the poison referred to, would one or other of these vigorous peoples, the German possibly, have perhaps been capable of gradually finding a higher culture for themselves, one of their own, a new one? – of which, as things are, mankind has not now the remotest conception? – Thus it is the same here as everywhere: one does not know, to speak the language of Christianity, whether God owes more gratitude to the Devil or the Devil more gratitude to God for everything having turned out as it has.
251.
In parting. – * *Not how one soul comes close to another but how it moves away shows me their kinship and how much they belong together.
313.
When asses are needed. – You will never get the crowd to cry Hosanna until you ride into town on an ass.
340.
To one who is praised. – So long as you are praised think only that you are not yet on your own path but on that of another.
362.
On spiritual order of rank. – It ranks you far beneath him that you seek to establish the exceptions while he seeks to establish the rule.
366.
“Will a self.” – * *Active, successful natures act, not according to the dictum “know thyself,” but as if there hovered before them the commandment: will a self and thou shalt become a self. – Fate seems to have left the choice still up to them; whereas the inactive and contemplative cogitate on what they have already chosen, on one occasion, when they entered into life.
378.
What is genius? – To will an exalted end and the means to it.
385.
Anti-theses. – * *The most senile thing ever thought about man is contained in the celebrated saying “the ego is always hateful”; the most childish is the even more celebrated “love thy neighbor as thyself.” – In the former, knowledge of human nature has ceased, in the latter it has not yet even begun.
408.
The journey to Hades. – * *I, too, have been in the underworld, like Odysseus, and shall be there often yet; and not only rams have I sacrificed to be able to speak with a few of the dead, but I have not spared my own blood. Four pairs it was that did not deny themselves to my sacrifice: Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. With these I must come to terms when I have long wandered alone; they may call me right and wrong; to them will I listen when in the process they call each other right and wrong. Whatsoever I say, resolve, or think up for myself and others – on these eight I fix my eyes and see their eyes fixed on me.
May the living forgive me that occasionally they appear to me as shades, so pale and somber, so restless and, alas, so lusting for life – while these men then seem so alive to me as if now, after death, they could never again grow weary of life. But eternal aliveness is what counts: what matters “eternal life” or any life!
Second Sequel:**
**The Wanderer and His Shadow
Preface
The Shadow: Since I haven’t heard your voice in so long, I would like to give you an opportunity to speak.
The Wanderer: Someone said something – where? and who? It almost seems as if I myself were speaking, though in an even weaker voice than mine.
The Shadow (after a pause): Are you not happy to have an opportunity to speak?
The Wanderer: By God and all things, in which I do not believe, my shadow speaks; I hear it, but I don’t believe it.
The Shadow: Let’s accept it and don’t continue to think about it – in one hour it will all be over.
The Wanderer: That’s what I thought, when I saw two and then five camels in a forest near Pisa.
The Shadow: It’s good, that we are both indulgent in the same way, if our reason stands still: thus we will not become annoying and press each other in conversation when something sounds incomprehensible to us. If one does not know how to answer, then it is already enough to say something – that’s the reasonable policy under which I agree to converse. With longer discussions, the wisest one becomes once the fool and three times the dullard.
The Wanderer: Your modesty is not complimentary to your confessor.
The Shadow: Am I to flatter?
The Wanderer: I thought a man’s shadow was his vanity, but his vanity would never ask: “Am I to flatter?”
The Shadow: Nor would man’s vanity, as far as I know, inquire – as I did twice already – *whether *it could speak: it always speaks.
The Wanderer: Only now do I notice how impolite I am, my beloved shadow: I have not said a word about how *pleased *I am to see you as well as hear you. You should know that I love the shadow as much as I cherish the light. For facial beauty, clarity of speech, quality and firmness of character, shadow is as necessary as light. They are not opponents: they are rather affectionate, holding hands – and if the light disappears, the shadow slips away after it.
The Shadow: And I hate the same thing you hate: the night; I love human beings, because they are devotees of light and I’m pleased when their eyes shine as they discern and discover knowledge – untiring knowers and discoverers that they are. That shadow, which all things cast, if the sunshine of perception falls upon them – that shadow am I as well.
The Wanderer: I believe I understand you, despite your somewhat shadowy expressions. But you were right: good friends give each other – here and there – a cryptic word as a sign of agreement, which should be a mystery to any third party. And we are good friends. Therefore, let’s dispense with the preliminaries! A few hundred questions press upon my soul, and the time you have to answer them is perhaps only brief. Let’s see what, in all haste and peaceableness, we can agree upon.
The Shadow: But shadows are shier than human beings: you won’t tell anyone how we have spoken together!
The Wanderer: How we have spoken together? Heaven forfend! especially from long drawn-out literary discussions. If Plato had less desire to “spin” his readers, they would find more pleasure in Plato. A really amusing discussion – when written down – is merely a painting with false perspectives: everything is too long or too short – nevertheless, perhaps you’ll allow me to indicate *what *we agreed upon?
The Shadow: I’m happy with that, since everyone will recognize therein only your opinions – nobody will think of the shadow.
The Wanderer: Perhaps you are wrong, my friend! Up to now one assumed in my opinions more of shadow than of me.
The Shadow: More shadow than light? Is it possible?
The Wanderer: Dear fool, be serious! My first question requires seriousness.
*****
1.
Of the tree of knowledge. – Probability but no truth: appearance of freedom but no freedom – it is on account of these two fruits that the tree of knowledge cannot be confused with the tree of life.
9.
Where the theory of freedom of will originated. – Over one man necessity stands in the shape of his passions, over another as the habit of hearing and obeying, over a third as a logical conscience, over a fourth as caprice and a mischievous pleasure in escapades. These four will, however, seek the *freedom *of their will precisely where each of them is most firmly fettered: it is as if the silkworm sought the freedom of its will in spinning. How does this happen? Evidently because each considers himself most free where his feeling of living is greatest; thus, as we have said, in passion, in duty, in knowledge, in mischievousness respectively. That through which the individual human being is strong, wherein he feels himself animated, he involuntarily thinks must also always be the element of his freedom: he accounts dependence and dullness, independence and the feeling of living as necessarily coupled. – Here an experience in the social-political domain has been falsely transferred to the farthest metaphysical domain: in the former the strong man is also the free man; the lively feeling of joy and sorrow, high hope, boldness in desire, powerfulness in hatred is the property of the rulers and the independent, while the subjected man, the slave, lives dull and oppressed. – The theory of freedom of will is an invention of the ruling classes.
11.
Freedom of will and isolation of facts. – Our usual imprecise mode of observation takes a group of phenomena as one and calls it a fact: between this fact and another fact it imagines in addition an empty space, it isolates every fact. In reality, however, all our doing and knowing is not a succession of facts and empty spaces but a continuous flux. Now, belief in freedom of will is incompatible precisely with the idea of a continuous, homogenous, undivided, indivisible flowing: it presupposes that every individual action is isolate and indivisible, it is an atomism in the domain of willing and knowing. – Just as we understand characters only imprecisely, so do we also facts: we speak of identical characters, identical facts: neither exists. Now, we praise and censure, however, only under this false presupposition that there are identical facts, that there exists a graduated order of classes of facts which corresponds to a graduated world-order: thus we isolate, not only the individual fact, but also again groups of supposedly identical facts (good, evil, sympathetic, envious actions, etc.) – in both cases erroneously. – The word and the concept are the most manifest ground for our belief in this isolation of groups of actions: we do not only designate things with them, we think originally that through them we grasp the true in things. Through words and concepts we are still continually misled into imagining things as simpler than they are, separate from one another, indivisible, each existing in and for itself. A philosophical mythology lies concealed in language which breaks out again every moment, however careful one may be otherwise. Belief in freedom of will – that is to say in identical facts and in isolated facts – has in language its constant evangelist and advocate.
12.
The fundamental errors. – For man to feel any sort of physical pleasure or displeasure he must be in the grip of one of these two illusions: either he believes in the identity of certain facts, certain sensations: in which case he experiences psychical pleasure or displeasure through comparing his present states with past ones and declaring them identical or not identical (as happens in all recollection); or he believes in freedom of will, for instance when he thinks “I did not have to do this,” “this could have happened differently,” and likewise gains pleasure or displeasure. Without the errors which are active in every psychical pleasure and displeasure a humanity would never have come into existence – whose fundamental feeling is and remains that man is the free being in a world of unfreedom, the eternal miracle worker whether he does good or ill, the astonishing exception, the superbeast and almost-god, the meaning of creation which cannot be thought away, the solution of the cosmic riddle, the mighty ruler over nature and the despiser of it, the creature which calls its history world history! – Vanitas vanitatum homo.
15.
Modesty of man. – How little pleasure most people need to make them find life good, how modest man is!
18.
The modern Diogenes. – Before one seeks men one must have found the lantern. Will it have to be the lantern of the cynic?
23.
Have the adherents of the theory of free will the right to punish? – People who judge and punish as a profession try to establish in each case whether an ill-doer is at all accountable for his deed, whether he was able to employ his intelligence, whether he acted for reasons and not unconsciously or under compulsion. If he is punished, he is punished for having preferred the worse reasons to the better: which he must therefore have known. Where this knowledge is lacking a man is, according to the prevailing view, unfree and not responsible: except if his lack of knowledge, his ignorantia legis [ignorance of the law] for example, is a result of an intentional neglect to learn; in which case, when he failed to learn what he should have learned he had already preferred the worse reasons to the better and must now suffer the consequences of his bad choice. If, on the other hand, he did not see the better reasons, perhaps from dull-wittedness or weakness of mind, it is not usual to punish him: he lacked, one says, the capacity to choose, he acted as an animal would. For an offense to be punishable presupposes that its perpetrator intentionally acted contrary to the better dictates of his intelligence. But how can anyone intentionally be less intelligent than he has to be? Whence comes the decision when the scales are weighted with good and bad motives? Not from error, from blindness, not from an external nor from an internal compulsion? (Consider, moreover, that every so-called “external compulsion” is nothing more than the internal compulsion of fear and pain.) Whence? one asks again and again. The intelligence is not the cause, because it could not decide against the better reasons? And here one calls “free will” to one’s aid: it is pure willfulness which is supposed to decide, as impulse is supposed to enter within which motive plays no part, in which the deed, arising out of nothing, occurs as a miracle. It is this supposed willfulness, in a case in which willfulness ought not to reign, which is punished: the rational intelligence, which knows law, prohibition and command, ought to have permitted no choice, and to have had the effect of compulsion and a higher power. Thus the offender is punished because he employs “free will,” that is to say, because he acted without a reason where he ought to have acted in accordance with reasons. Why did he do this? But it is precisely this question that can no longer even be asked: it was a deed without a “for that reason,” without motive, without origin, something purposeless and non-rational. – But such a deed too ought, in accordance with the first condition of all punishability laid down above, not to be punished! It is not as if something had not been done here, something omitted, the intelligence had not been employed: for the omission is under all circumstances unintentional! and only the intentional omission to perform what the law commands counts as punishable. The offender certainly preferred the worse reasons to the better, but without reason or intention: he certainly failed to employ his intelligence, but not for the purpose of not employing it. The presupposition that for an offense to be punishable its perpetrator must have intentionally acted contrary to his intelligence – it is precisely this presupposition which is annulled by the assumption of “free will.” You adherents of the theory of “free will” have no right to punish, your own principles deny you that right! But these are at bottom nothing but a very peculiar conceptual mythology; and the hen that hatched it sat on her egg in a place far removed from reality.
25.
A fair exchange. – An exchange is honest and just only when each of those participating demands as much as his own object seems worth to him, including the effort it cost to acquire it, its rarity, the time expended, etc., together with its sentimental value. As soon as he sets the price with reference to the need of the other he is a subtler robber and extortioner. – If money is the exchange object it must be considered that a shilling in the hand of a rich heir, a day laborer, a shopkeeper, a student are quite different things: according to whether he did almost nothing or a great deal to get it, each ought to receive little or a great deal in exchange for it: in reality it is, of course, the other way round. In the great world of money the shilling of the laziest rich man is more lucrative than that of the poor and industrious.
33.
Elements of revenge. – The word “revenge” is said so quickly it almost seems as if it could contain no more than one conceptual and perceptional root. And so one continues to strive to discover it: just as our economists have not yet wearied of scenting a similar unity in the word “value” and of searching after the original root-concept of the word. As if every word were not a pocket into which now this, now that, now several things at once have been put! Thus “revenge,” too, is now this, now that, now something more combined. Distinguish first of all that defensive return blow which one delivers even against lifeless objects (moving machinery, for example) which have hurt us: the sense of our countermove is to put a stop to the injury by bringing the machine to a halt. Occasionally, the strength of the counterblow must be so strong to succeed in this that it smashes the machine; but where that is too strong to be destructible immediately by an individual, he will nevertheless strike as hard as he can – making, as it were, a last-ditch effort. One behaves the same way against persons who harm one, as long as one feels the harm immediately: if you want to call this action an act of revenge, all right; but consider that it is only self-preservation that has here put its rational machinery into motion, and that in the last analysis one does not think at all of the harming person in such a case but only of oneself: we act that way without any wish to do harm in return, merely in order to get away with life and limb. – *Time *is needed – when instead of concentrating on oneself one begins to think about one’s opponent, asking oneself how one can hurt him the most. This happens in the second type of revenge: reflection on the other person’s vulnerability and capacity for suffering is its presupposition; one wants to hurt. Protecting oneself against further harm, on the other hand, is so little a consideration for the seeker of such vengeance that he almost regularly brings about further harm to himself and quite often anticipates this in cold blood. In the first type of revenge it was fear of a second blow that made the counterblow as strong as possible; here we find almost total indifference to what the opponent will do yet; the strength of the counterblow is determined solely by what he has done to us. But what has he done? And what use is it to us if he now suffers after we have suffered on his account? What matters is a restoration, while the act of revenge of the first type serves only self-preservation. Perhaps we have lost through our opponent possessions, rank, friends, children: such losses are not brought back by revenge; the restoration concerns solely a loss incidental to all these losses. The revenge of restoration does not protect us against further harm; it does not make good the harm suffered – except in one case. If our honor has suffered from our opponent, then revenge can restore it. But this has suffered damage in every instance in which suffering has been inflicted on us deliberately; for our opponent thus demonstrated that he did not fear us. By revenge we demonstrate that we do not fear him either: this constitutes the equalization, the restoration. (The intent of showing one’s utter lack of fear goes so far in some persons that the danger their revenge involves for them – loss of health or life or other damage – is for them an indispensable condition of all revenge. Therefore they choose the means of a duel although the courts offer them help in attaining satisfaction for the insult: but they do not accept an undangerous restoration of their honor as sufficient, because it cannot demonstrate their lack of fear.) – In the first type of revenge it is fear that strikes the counterblow; here, on the other hand, it is the absence of fear that, as I have tried to show, wants to prove itself by means of the counterblow. – Nothing therefore seems more different than the inner motivation or the two ways of action that are called by one name, “revenge.” Nevertheless it happens quite frequently that the person seeking revenge is unclear about what really induced him to act: perhaps he delivered the counterblow from fear and in order to preserve himself, but later, when he has time to think about the point of his injured honor, he convinces himself that he avenged himself for his honor’s sake – after all, this motive is nobler than the other one. Moreover, it is also important whether he believes his honor to have been injured in the eyes of others (the world) or only in the eyes of the opponent who insulted him: in the latter case he will prefer secret revenge, in the former public revenge. Depending on whether he projects himself strongly or weakly into the soul of his opponent and the spectators, his revenge will be more embittered or tamer; if he lacks this type of imagination entirely, he will not think of revenge at all, for in that case the feeling for “honor” is not present in him and hence cannot be injured. Just so, he will not think of revenge if he despises the doer and the spectators of the deed – because they, being despised, cannot accord him any honor and hence also cannot take it away. Finally, he will forgo revenge in the not unusual case in which he loves the doer: to be sure, he thus loses honor in his opponent’s eyes and perhaps thus becomes less worthy of being loved in return. But even forgoing all such counterlove is a sacrifice that love is prepared to make if only it does not have to hurt the beloved being: that would mean hurting oneself more than this sacrifice hurts. – Thus: everybody will revenge himself unless he is without honor or full of contempt or full of love for the person who has harmed and insulted him. Even when he has recourse to the courts he wants revenge as a private person – but besides, being a member of society who thinks further and considers the future, he also wants society’s revenge on one who does not honor it. Thus judicial punishment restores both private honor and the honor of society – which means, punishment is revenge. – Indubitably, it also contains that other element of revenge which we described first, insofar as society uses punishment for its self-preservation and deals a counterblow in self-defense. Punishment desires to prevent further damage; it desires to deter. Thus both of these so different elements of revenge are actually tied together in punishment, and perhaps this is the main support of that above-mentioned conceptual confusion by virtue of which the individual who revenges himself usually does not know what he really wants.
34.
The virtues that incur loss. – As members of society we believe we ought not to practice certain virtues from which as private persons we acquire the highest honor and a certain satisfaction, for example mercy and consideration for transgressors of all kinds – in general any action by which the interests of society would suffer through our virtue. No bench of judges may conscientiously practice mercy: this privilege is reserved to the king as an individual; one rejoices when he makes use of it, as proof that one would like to be merciful, even though as a society one absolutely cannot be. Society thus recognizes only those virtues that are advantageous, or at least not harmful to it (those that can be practiced without its incurring loss, for example justice). Those virtues that incur loss cannot, consequently, have come into existence within society, since even now there is opposition to them within every society, however circumscribed. They are thus virtues belonging among non-equals, devised by the superior, the individual; they are the virtues of bearing the sense: “I am sufficiently powerful to put up with a palpable loss, this is a proof of my power” – and are thus virtues related to pride.
37.
A kind of cult of the passions. – In order to raise an accusation against the whole nature of the world, you dismal philosophical blindworms speak of the terrible character of human passions. As if wherever there have been passions there had also been terribleness! As if this kind of terribleness was bound to persist in the world! – Through a neglect of the small facts, through lack of self-observation and observation of those who are to be brought up, it is you yourselves who first allowed the passions to develop into such monsters that you are overcome by fear at the word “passion”! It was up to you, and is up to us, to take from the passions their terrible character and thus prevent their becoming devastating torrents. – One should not inflate one’s oversights into eternal fatalities; let us rather work honestly together on the task of transforming the passions of mankind one and all into joys.
40.
The significance of forgetting for the moral sensation. – The same actions as within primitive society appear to have been performed first with a view to common utility have been performed by later generations for other motives: out of fear of or reverence for those who demanded and recommended them, or out of habit because one had seen them done all around one from childhood on, or from benevolence because their performance everywhere produced joy and concurring faces, or from vanity because they were commended. Such actions, whose basic motive, that of utility, has been forgotten, are then called moral actions: not because, for instance, they are performed out of those other motives, but because they are not performed from any conscious reason of utility. – Where does it come from, this hatred of utility which becomes visible here, where all praiseworthy behavior formally excludes behavior with a view to utility? – It is plain that society, the hearth of all morality and all eulogy of moral behavior, has had to struggle too long and too hard against the self-interest and self-will of the individual not at last to rate any other motive morally higher than utility. Thus it comes to appear that morality has not grown out of utility; while it is originally social utility, which had great difficulty in asserting itself against all the individual private utilities and making itself more highly respected.
48.
Prohibitions without reasons. – A prohibition, the reason for which we do not understand or admit, is almost a command not only for the stubborn but also for those who thirst for knowledge: one risks an experiment to find out why the prohibition was pronounced. Moral prohibitions, like those of the Decalogue, are suitable only for an age of subjugated reason: now, such a prohibition as “Thou shalt not kill” or “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” presented without reasons, would have a harmful rather than a useful effect.
50.
Pity and contempt. – To show pity is felt as a sign of contempt because one has clearly ceased to be an object of fear as soon as one is pitied. One has sunk below the level of equilibrium, whereas human vanity is not satisfied even with that, the sensation most desired being one of predominance and the inspiration of fear. That is why the high value pity has come to be accorded presents a problem, just as the praise now accorded selfless disinterestedness needs to be explained: originally it was despised, or feared as a deception.
52.
Content of the conscience. – The content of our conscience is everything that was during the years of our childhood regularly demanded of us without reason by people we honored or feared. It is thus the conscience that excites that feeling of compulsion (“I must do this, not do that”) which does not ask: why must I? – In every case in which a thing is done with “because” and “why” man acts without conscience; but not yet for that reason against it. – The belief in authorities is the source of the conscience: it is therefore not the voice of God in the heart of man but the voice of some men in man.
53.
Overcoming of the passions. – The man who has overcome his passions has entered into possession of the most fertile ground; like the colonist who has mastered the forests and swamps. To sow the seeds of good spiritual works in the soil of the subdued passions is then the immediate urgent task. The overcoming itself is only a means, not a goal; if it is not so viewed, all kinds of weeds and devilish nonsense will quickly spring up in this rich soil now unoccupied, and soon there will be more rank confusion than there ever was before.
55.
Linguistic danger to spiritual freedom. – Every word is a prejudice.
56.
Spirit and boredom. – The saying “The Magyar is much too lazy to feel bored” is thought-provoking. Only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom. – A theme for a great poet would be God’s boredom on the seventh day of creation.
65.
What is needed first. – A man who refuses to become master over his wrath, his choler and revengefulness, and his lusts and attempts to become master in anything else, is as stupid as a farmer who stakes out his field besides a torrential stream without protecting himself against it.
67.
Habit of seeing opposites. – The general imprecise way of observing sees everywhere in nature opposites (as, e.g., “warm and cold”) where they are, not opposites, but differences of degree. This bad habit has led us into wanting to comprehend and analyze the inner world, too, the spiritual-moral world, in terms of such opposites. An unspeakable amount of pain, arrogance, harshness, estrangement, frigidity has entered into human feelings because we think we see opposites instead of transitions.
78.
Belief in the sickness as sickness. – It was Christianity which first painted the Devil on the world’s wall; it was Christianity which first brought sin into the world. Belief in the cure which it offered has now been shaken to its deepest roots: but belief in the sickness which it taught and propagated continues to exist.
85.
The persecutor of God. – Paul thought up the idea and Calvin rethought it, that for innumerable people damnation has been decreed from eternity, and that this beautiful world plan was instituted to reveal the glory of God: heaven and hell and humanity are thus supposed to exist – to satisfy the vanity of God! What cruel and insatiable vanity must have flared in the soul of the man who thought this up first, or second. Paul has remained Saul after all – the persecutor of God.
86.
Socrates. – If all goes well, the time will come when one will take up the memorabilia of Socrates rather than the Bible as a guide to morals and reason… The pathways of the most various philosophical modes of life lead back to him… Socrates excels the founder of Christianity in being able to be serious cheerfully and in possessing that wisdom full of roguishness that constitutes the finest state of the human soul. And he also possessed the finer intellect.
87.
Learning to write well. – The age of speaking well is past, because the age of the city cultures is past. The extreme limit Aristotle allowed for the size of a city – it must be possible for the herald to make himself audible to the whole assembled community – this limit is of as little concern to us as is the city community itself: we want to make ourself understood, not merely beyond the city, but out over the nations. That is why everyone who is a good European now has to learn to write well and ever better: this is still so even if he happens to have been born in Germany, where writing badly is regarded as a national privilege. To write better, however, means at the same time also to think better; continually to invent things more worth communicating and to be able actually to communicate them; to become translatable into the language of one’s neighbor; to make ourselves accessible to the understanding of those foreigners who learn our language; to assist towards making all good things common property and freely available to the free-minded; finally, to prepare the way for that distant state of things in which the good Europeans will come into possession of their great task: the direction and supervision of the total culture of the earth. – Whoever preaches the opposite and sets no store by writing well and reading well – both virtues grow together and decline together – is in fact showing the peoples a way of becoming more and more national: he is augmenting the sickness of this century and is an enemy of all good Europeans, an enemy of all free spirits.
176.
The patient. – The pine tree seems to listen, the fir tree to wait: and both without impatience – they give no thought to the little people beneath them devoured by their impatience and their curiosity.
192.
The philosopher of sensual pleasure. – A little garden, figs, little cheeses and in addition three or four good friends – these were the sensual pleasures of Epicurus.
194.
Dreams. – On the rare occasions when our dreams succeed and achieve perfection – most dreams are bungled – they are symbolic chains of scenes and images in place of a narrative poetic language; they circumscribe our experiences or situations with such poetic boldness and decisiveness that in the morning we are always amazed at ourselves when we remember our dreams. We use up too much artistry in our dreams – and therefore often are impoverished during the day.
200.
The solitary speaks. – One receives as a reward for much ennui, despondency, boredom – such as a solitude without friends, books, duties, passions must bring with it – those quarter-hours of profoundest contemplation within oneself and nature. He who completely entrenches himself against boredom also entrenches himself against himself: he will never get to drink the strongest refreshing draught from his own innermost fountain.
203.
Too much and too little. – All men now live through too much and think through too little: they suffer at the same time from extreme hunger and from colic, and therefore become thinner and thinner, no matter how much they eat. – Whoever says now, “I have not lived through anything” – is an ass.
204.
End and goal. – Not every end is the goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; and yet: if a melody has not reached its end, it has not reached its goal. A parable.
206.
Forgetting our objectives. – During the journey we commonly forget its goal. Almost every profession is chosen and commenced as a means to an end but continued as an end in itself. Forgetting our objectives is the most frequent act of stupidity.
217.
Classical and romantic. – The classically disposed spirits no less than those romantically inclined – as these two species always exist – carry a vision of the future: but the former out of the strength of their time: the latter out of its weakness.
249.
Positive and negative. – The thinker needs nobody to refute him: for that he suffices himself.
251.
Not to assert one’s rights. – To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled – because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance.
261.
Letter. – A letter is an unannounced visit; the mailman, the mediator of impolite incursions. One ought to have one hour in every eight days for receiving letters, and then take a bath.
267.
There are no educators. – As a thinker one should speak only of self-education. The education of youth by others is either an experiment carried out on an as yet unknown and unknowable subject, or a leveling on principle with the object of making a new being, whatever it may be, conform to the customs and habits then prevailing: in both cases therefore something unworthy of the thinker, the work of those elders and teachers whom a man of rash honesty once described as nos ennemis naturels. – One day, when one has long since been educated as the world understands it, one discovers oneself: here begins the task of the thinker; now the time has come to call on him for assistance – not as an educator but as one who has educated himself and thus knows how it is done.
273.
The unwomanly. – “Stupid as a man” say the women: “cowardly as a woman” say the men. Stupidity is in woman the unwomanly.
278.
Premises of the machine age. – The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.
284.
The means to real peace. – No government admits any more that it keeps an army to satisfy occasionally the desire for conquest. Rather the army is supposed to serve for defense, and one invokes the morality that approves of self-defense. But this implies one’s own morality and the neighbor’s immorality; for the neighbor must be thought of as eager to attack and conquer if our state must think of means of self-defense. Moreover, the reasons we give for requiring an army imply that our neighbor, who denies the desire for conquest just as much as does our own state, and who, for his part, also keeps an army only for reasons of self-defense, is a hypocrite and a cunning criminal who would like nothing better than to overpower a harmless and awkward victim without any fight. Thus all states are now ranged against each other: they presuppose their neighbor’s bad disposition and their own good disposition. This presupposition, however, is inhumane, as bad as war and worse. At bottom, indeed, it is itself the challenge and the cause of wars, because, as I have said, it attributes immorality to the neighbor and thus provokes a hostile disposition and act. We must abjure the doctrine of the army as a means of self-defense just as completely as the desire for conquests. And perhaps the great day will come when people, distinguished by wars and victories and by the highest development of a military order and intelligence, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifices for these things, will exclaim of its own free will, “We break the sword,” and will smash its entire military establishment down to its lowest foundations. Rendering oneself unarmed when one had been the best-armed, out of a height of feeling – that is the means to real peace, which must always rest on a peace of mind; whereas the so-called armed peace, as it now exists in all countries, is the absence of peace of mind. One trusts neither oneself nor one’s neighbor and, half from hatred, half from fear, does not lay down arms. Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared – this must someday become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth. Our liberal representatives, as is well known, lack the time for reflecting on the nature of man: else they would know that they work in vain when they work for a “gradual decrease of the military burden.” Rather, only when this kind of need has become greatest will the kind of god be nearest who alone can help here. The tree of war-glory can only be destroyed all at once, by a stroke of lightning: but lightning, as indeed you know, comes from a cloud – and from up high.
289.
Hundred-year quarantine. – Democratic institutions are quarantine arrangements to combat that ancient pestilence, lust for tyranny: as such they are very useful and very boring.
290.
The most dangerous follower. – The most dangerous follower is he whose defection would destroy the whole party: that is to say, the best follower.
298.
From the practice of wise men. – To become wise, one must *wish *to have certain experiences and run, as it were, into their gaping jaws. This, of course, is very dangerous; many a “wise guy” has been swallowed.
302.
How one tries to improve bad arguments. – Some people throw a bit of their personality after their bad arguments, as if that might straighten their paths and turn them into right and good arguments – just as a man in a bowling alley, after he has let go of the ball, still tries to direct it with gestures.
304.
Man! – What is the vanity of the vainest man compared with the vanity which the most modest possesses when, in the midst of nature and the world, he feels himself to be “man”!
317.
Opinions and fish. – Possessing opinions is like possessing fish, assuming one has a fishpond. One has to go fishing and needs some luck – then one has one’s own fish, one’s own opinions. I am speaking of live opinions, of live fish. Others are satisfied if they own a cabinet of fossils – and in their heads, “convictions.”
323.
Remorse. – Never yield to remorse, but at once tell yourself: remorse would simply mean adding to the first act of stupidity a second. – If you have done harm, see how you can do good. – If you are punished for your actions, bear the punishment with the feeling that you are doing good – by deterring others from falling prey to the same folly. Every evildoer who is punished may feel that he is a benefactor of humanity.
324.
To become a thinker. – How can one become a thinker if he does not spend at least a third of the day without passions, people and books?
326.
Don’t touch! – There are terrible people who, instead of solving a problem, bungle it and make it more difficult for all who come after. Whoever can’t hit the nail on the head should, please, not hit it at all.
330.
Weather prophets. – Just as the clouds tell us the direction of the wind high above our heads, so the lightest and freest spirits are in their tendencies foretellers of the weather that is coming. The wind in the valley and the opinions of the marketplace of today indicate nothing of that which is coming but only of that which has been.
333.
Dying for the “truth.” – We should not let ourselves be burnt by our opinions: we are not that sure of them. But perhaps for this: that we may have and change our opinions.
348.
Measure of wisdom. – Growth in wisdom can be measured precisely by decline in bile.
350.
The golden watchword. – Many chains have been laid upon man so that he should no longer behave like an animal: and he has in truth become gentler, more spiritual, more joyful, more reflective than any animal is. Now, however, he suffers from having worn his chains for so long, from being deprived for so long of clean air and free movement: – these chains, however, I shall never cease from repeating, are those heavy and pregnant errors contained in the conceptions of morality, religion and metaphysics. Only when this sickness from one’s chains has also been overcome will the first great goal have truly been attained: the separation of man from the animals. – We stand now in the midst of our work of removing these chains, and we need to proceed with the greatest caution. Only the ennobled man may be given freedom of the spirit; to him alone does alleviation of life draw near and salve his wounds; only he may say that he lives for the sake of joy and for the sake of no further goal; and in any other mouth his motto would be perilous: Peace all around me and goodwill to all things closest to me. – With this motto for individuals he recalls an ancient great and moving saying intended for all which has remained hanging over all mankind as a sign and motto by which anyone shall perish who inscribes it on his banner too soon – by which Christianity perished. The time has, it seems, still not yet come when all men are to share the experience of those shepherds who saw the heavens brighten above them and heard the words: “On earth peace, good will toward men.” – It is still the age of the individual.
*****
[Afterword]
The Shadow: From everything that you said, nothing has pleased me more than a promise: you want again to become a good neighbor to the things closest to you. This will benefit us poor shadows as well. Because, admit it, so far you have slandered us all too often.
The Wanderer: Slander? But why haven’t you ever defended yourselves? You were near to our ear.
The Shadow: It seemed to us as if we were much too close to be allowed to speak of ourselves.
The Wanderer: Delicately! Very delicately! Oh, you shadows are “better human beings” than we are, I see.
The Shadow: And, nevertheless, you call us “obtrusive”; we understand at least one thing well: to be silent and wait – no Englishman understands it better. It is true, one very often finds us in the retinue of human beings, but nevertheless we are not servants. When human beings shun the light, we shun them: that’s the extent of our freedom.
The Wanderer: Oh, the light shuns human beings even more frequently, and then you abandon us as well.
The Shadow: I’ve often abandoned you with sorrow: it remains dark for man since I – being eager for knowledge – cannot always be around. As full payment for the complete understanding of man, I would probably be your slave.*
The Wanderer*: Do you know – do I know? – whether you would undergo a sudden change from slave to master? Or remain a slave, but also become disdainful of your master, and lead a life of degradation and disgust? Let’s be content with this freedom, such as you have it, you and me! Because the sight of one unfree turns my greatest joys into rancor; I would be adverse to the best if I *had *to share it with someone – I do not want slaves around me. Thus, I don’t even like dogs, lazy tail-wagging parasites that became “doglike” only as servants of man and who are still praised for their faithfulness to their master and follow him in this manner.
The Shadow: Like his shadow, that’s what they say. Yet today – have I already followed you too easily, and for too long?
The Wanderer: Oh, is it time to part? I had to give you the last blow – and I see that you became darker thereby.
The Shadow: I blushed, in the color that I’m able to blush. It occurred to me that I’ve often been at your heels like a dog, and that you then –
The Wanderer: And couldn’t I do in all haste something to please you? Don’t you have a desire?
The Shadow: Nothing, except perhaps the same desire that the philosophical “dog” had of the great Alexander: move a little out of the sun, it’s getting too cold for me.
The Wanderer: What am I to do?
The Shadow: Step under these spruces and look out at the mountains; the sun is sinking.
The Wanderer: – Where are you? Where are you?
________
The End|Go to top
On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense
by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Electronically Developed By MobileReference
Friedrich W. Nietzsche Biography
Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life. Rather, it is human, and only its possessor and begetter takes it so solemnly-as though the world’s axis turned within it. But if we could communicate with the gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity, that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself. There is nothing so reprehensible and unimportant in nature that it would not immediately swell up like a balloon at the slightest puff of this power of knowing. And just as every porter wants to have an admirer, so even the proudest of men, the philosopher, supposes that he sees on all sides the eyes of the universe telescopically focused upon his action and thought.
It is remarkable that this was brought about by the intellect, which was certainly allotted to these most unfortunate, delicate, and ephemeral beings merely as a device for detaining them a minute within existence. For without this addition they would have every reason to flee this existence as quickly as Lessing’s son. The pride connected with knowing and sensing lies like a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of men, thus deceiving them concerning the value of existence. For this pride contains within itself the most flattering estimation of the value of knowing. Deception is the most general effect of such pride, but even its most particular effects contain within themselves something of the same deceitful character.
As a means for the preserving of the individual, the intellect unfolds its principle powers in dissimulation, which is the means by which weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves-since they have been denied the chance to wage the battle for existence with horns or with the sharp teeth of beasts of prey, This art of dissimulation reaches its peak in man. Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself-in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity-is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them. They are deeply immersed in illusions and in dream images; their eyes merely glide over the surface of things and see “forms.” Their senses nowhere lead to truth; on the contrary, they are content to receive stimuli and, as it were, to engage in a groping game on the backs of things. Moreover, man permits himself to be deceived in his dreams every night of his life. His moral sentiment does not even make an attempt to prevent this, whereas there are supposed to be men who have stopped snoring through sheer will power. What does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case? Does nature not conceal most things from him-even concerning his own body-in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers! She threw away the key. And woe to that fatal curiosity which might one day have the power to peer out and down through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and then suspect that man is sustained in the indifference of his ignorance by that which is pitiless, greedy, insatiable, and murderous-as if hanging in dreams on the back of a tiger. Given this situation, where in the world could the drive for truth have come from?
Insofar as the individual wants to maintain himself against other individuals, he will under natural circumstances employ the intellect mainly for dissimulation. But at the same time, from boredom and necessity, man wishes to exist socially and with the herd; therefore, he needs to make peace and strives accordingly to banish from his world at least the most flagrant bellum omni contra omnes. This peace treaty brings in its wake something which appears to be the first step toward acquiring that puzzling truth drive: to wit, that which shall count as “truth” from now on is established. That is to say, a uniformly valid and binding designation is invented for things, and this legislation of language likewise establishes the first laws of truth. For the contrast between truth and lie arises here for the first time. The liar is a person who uses the valid designations, the words, in order to make something which is unreal appear to be real. He says, for example, “I am rich,” when the proper designation for his condition would be “poor.” He misuses fixed conventions by means of arbitrary substitutions or even reversals of names. If he does this in a selfish and moreover harmful manner, society will cease to trust him and will thereby exclude him. What men avoid by excluding the liar is not so much being defrauded as it is being harmed by means of fraud. Thus, even at this stage, what they hate is basically not deception itself, but rather the unpleasant, hated consequences of certain sorts of deception. It is in a similarly restricted sense that man now wants nothing but truth: he desires the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth. He is indifferent toward pure knowledge which has no consequences; toward those truths which are possibly harmful and destructive he is even hostilely inclined. And besides, what about these linguistic conventions themselves? Are they perhaps products of knowledge, that is, of the sense of truth? Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?
It is only by means of forgetfulness that man can ever reach the point of fancying himself to possess a “truth” of the grade just indicated. If he will not be satisfied with truth in the form of tautology, that is to say, if he will not be content with empty husks, then he will always exchange truths for illusions. What is a word? It is the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus. But the further inference from the nerve stimulus to a cause outside of us is already the result of a false and unjustifiable application of the principle of sufficient reason. If truth alone had been the deciding factor in the genesis of language, and if the standpoint of certainty had been decisive for designations, then how could we still dare to say “the stone is hard,” as if “hard” were something otherwise familiar to us, and not merely a totally subjective stimulation! We separate things according to gender, designating the tree as masculine and the plant as feminine. What arbitrary assignments! How far this oversteps the canons of certainty! We speak of a “snake”: this designation touches only upon its ability to twist itself and could therefore also fit a worm. What arbitrary differentiations! What one-sided preferences, first for this, then for that property of a thing! The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The “thing in itself” (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors. To begin with, a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one. One can imagine a man who is totally deaf and has never had a sensation of sound and music. Perhaps such a person will gaze with astonishment at Chladni’s sound figures; perhaps he will discover their causes in the vibrations of the string and will now swear that he must know what men mean by “sound.” It is this way with all of us concerning language; we believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things–metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities. In the same way that the sound appears as a sand figure, so the mysterious X of the thing in itself first appears as a nerve stimulus, then as an image, and finally as a sound. Thus the genesis of language does not proceed logically in any case, and all the material within and with which the man of truth, the scientist, and the philosopher later work and build, if not derived from never-never land, is a least not derived from the essence of things.
In particular, let us further consider the formation of concepts. Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases–which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept “leaf” is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exists in nature the “leaf”: the original model according to which all the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted–but by incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned out to be a correct, trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the original model. We call a person “honest,” and then we ask “why has he behaved so honestly today?” Our usual answer is, “on account of his honesty.” Honesty! This in turn means that the leaf is the cause of the leaves. We know nothing whatsoever about an essential quality called “honesty”; but we do know of countless individualized and consequently unequal actions which we equate by omitting the aspects in which they are unequal and which we now designate as “honest” actions. Finally we formulate from them a qualities occulta which has the name “honesty.” We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us. For even our contrast between individual and species is something anthropomorphic and does not originate in the essence of things; although we should not presume to claim that this contrast does not correspond o the essence of things: that would of course be a dogmatic assertion and, as such, would be just as indemonstrable as its opposite.
What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and; anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions- they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.
We still do not yet know where the drive for truth comes from. For so far we have heard only of the duty which society imposes in order to exist: to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors. Thus, to express it morally, this is the duty to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie with the herd and in a manner binding upon everyone. Now man of course forgets that this is the way things stand for him. Thus he lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously and in accordance with habits which are centuries’ old; and precisely by means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness he arrives at his sense of truth. From the sense that one is obliged to designate one thing as “red,” another as “cold,” and a third as “mute,” there arises a moral impulse in regard to truth. The venerability, reliability, and utility of truth is something which a person demonstrates for himself from the contrast with the liar, whom no one trusts and everyone excludes. As a “rational” being, he now places his behavior under the control of abstractions. He will no longer tolerate being carried away by sudden impressions, by intuitions. First he universalizes all these impressions into less colorful, cooler concepts, so that he can entrust the guidance of his life and conduct to them. Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. For something is possible in the realm of these schemata which could never be achieved with the vivid first impressions: the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries-a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world. Whereas each perceptual metaphor is individual and without equals and is therefore able to elude all classification, the great edifice of concepts displays the rigid regularity of a Roman columbarium and exhales in logic that strength and coolness which is characteristic of mathematics. Anyone who has felt this cool breath [of logic] will hardly believe that even the concept-which is as bony, foursquare, and transposable as a die-is nevertheless merely the residue of a metaphor, and that the illusion which is involved in the artistic transference of a nerve stimulus into images is, if not the mother, then the grandmother of every single concept. But in this conceptual crap game “truth” means using every die in the designated manner, counting its spots accurately, fashioning the right categories, and never violating the order of caste and class rank. Just as the Romans and Etruscans cut up the heavens with rigid mathematical lines and confined a god within each of the spaces thereby delimited, as within a templum, so every people has a similarly mathematically divided conceptual heaven above themselves and henceforth thinks that truth demands that each conceptual god be sought only within his own sphere. Here one may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water. Of course, in order to be supported by such a foundation, his construction must be like one constructed of spiders’ webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown apart by every wind. As a genius of construction man raises himself far above the bee in the following way: whereas the bee builds with wax that he gathers from nature, man builds with the far more delicate conceptual material which he first has to manufacture from himself. In this he is greatly to be admired, but not on account of his drive for truth or for pure knowledge of things. When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding “truth” within the realm of reason. If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare “look, a mammal’ I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value. That is to say, it is a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth which contains not a single point which would be “true in itself” or really and universally valid apart from man. At bottom, what the investigator of such truths is seeking is only the metamorphosis of the world into man. He strives to understand the world as something analogous to man, and at best he achieves by his struggles the feeling of assimilation. Similar to the way in which astrologers considered the stars to be in man ’s service and connected with his happiness and sorrow, such an investigator considers the entire universe in connection with man: the entire universe as the infinitely fractured echo of one original sound-man; the entire universe as the infinitely multiplied copy of one original picture-man. His method is to treat man as the measure of all things, but in doing so he again proceeds from the error of believing that he hasthese things [which he intends to measure] immediately before him as mere objects. He forgets that the original perceptual metaphors are metaphors and takes them to be the things themselves.
Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose, security, and consistency: only by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid, only in the invincible faith that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency. If but for an instant he could escape from the prison walls of this faith, his"self consciousness” would be immediately destroyed. It is even a difficult thing for him to admit to himself that the insect or the bird perceives an entirely different world from the one that man does, and that the question of which of these perceptions of the world is the more correct one is quite meaningless, for this would have to have been decided previously in accordance with the criterion of the correct perception, which means, in accordance with a criterion which is not available. But in any case it seems to me that “the correct perception”-which would mean “the adequate expression of an object in the subject”-is a contradictory impossibility. For between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression; there is, at most, an aesthetic relation: I mean, a suggestive transference, a stammering translation into a completely foreign tongue-for which I there is required, in any case, a freely inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force. “Appearance” is a word that contains many temptations, which is why I avoid it as much as possible. For it is not true that the essence of things “appears” in the empirical world. A painter without hands who wished to express in song the picture before his mind would, by means of this substitution of spheres, still reveal more about the essence of things than does the empirical world. Even the relationship of a nerve stimulus to the generated image is not a necessary one. But when the same image has been generated millions of times and has been handed down for many generations and finally appears on the same occasion every time for all mankind, then it acquires at last the same meaning for men it would have if it were the sole necessary image and if the relationship of the original nerve stimulus to the generated image were a strictly causal one. In the same manner, an eternally repeated dream would certainly be felt and judged to be reality. But the hardening and congealing of a metaphor guarantees absolutely nothing concerning its necessity and exclusive justification.
Every person who is familiar with such considerations has no doubt felt a deep mistrust of all idealism of this sort: just as often as he has quite early convinced himself of the eternal consistency, omnipresence, and fallibility of the laws of nature. He has concluded that so far as we can penetrate here-from the telescopic heights to the microscopic depths-everything is secure, complete, infinite, regular, and without any gaps. Science will be able to dig successfully in this shaft forever, and the things that are discovered will harmonize with and not contradict each other. How little does this resemble a product of the imagination, for if it were such, there should be some place where the illusion and reality can be divined. Against this, the following must be said: if each us had a different kind of sense perception-if we could only perceive things now as a bird, now as a worm, now as a plant, or if one of us saw a stimulus as red, another as blue, while a third even heard the same stimulus as a sound-then no one would speak of such a regularity of nature, rather, nature would be grasped only as a creation which is subjective in the highest degree. After all, what is a law of nature as such for us? We are not acquainted with it in itself, but only with its effects, which means in its relation to other laws of nature-which, in turn, are known to us only as sums of relations. Therefore all these relations always refer again to others and are thoroughly incomprehensible to us in their essence. All that we actually know about these laws of nature is what we ourselves bring to them-time and space, and therefore relationships of succession and number. But everything marvelous about the laws of nature, everything that quite astonishes us therein and seems to demand explanation, everything that might lead us to distrust idealism: all this is completely and solely contained within the mathematical strictness and inviolability of our representations of time and space. But we produce these representations in and from ourselves with the same necessity with which the spider spins. If we are forced to comprehend all things only under these forms, then it ceases to be amazing that in all things we actually comprehend nothing but these forms. For they must all bear within themselves the laws of number, and it is precisely number which is most astonishing in things. All that conformity to law, which impresses us so much in the movement of the stars and in chemical processes, coincides at bottom with those properties which we bring to things. Thus it is we who impress ourselves in this way. In conjunction with this, it of course follows that the artistic process of metaphor formation with which every sensation begins in us already presupposes these forms and thus occurs within them. The only way in which the possibility of subsequently constructing a new conceptual edifice from metaphors themselves can be explained is by the firm persistence of these original forms That is to say, this conceptual edifice is an imitation of temporal, spatial, and numerical relationships in the domain of metaphor.
2
We have seen how it is originally language which works on the construction of concepts, a labor taken over in later ages by science. Just as the bee simultaneously constructs cells and fills them with honey, so science works unceasingly on this great columbarium of concepts, the graveyard of perceptions. It is always building new, higher stories and shoring up, cleaning, and renovating the old cells; above all, it takes pains to fill up this monstrously towering framework and to arrange therein the entire empirical world, which is to say, the anthropomorphic world. Whereas the man of action binds his life to reason and its concepts so that he will not be swept away and lost, the scientific investigator builds his hut right next to the tower of science so that he will be able to work on it and to find shelter for himself beneath those bulwarks which presently exist. And he requires shelter, for there are frightful powers which continuously break in upon him, powers which oppose scientific “truth” with completely different kinds of “truths” which bear on their shields the most varied sorts of emblems.
The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself. This drive is not truly vanquished and scarcely subdued by the fact that a regular and rigid new world is constructed as its prison from its own ephemeral products, the concepts. It seeks a new realm and another channel for its activity, and it finds this in myth and in art generally. This drive continually confuses the conceptual categories and cells by bringing forward new transferences, metaphors, and metonymies. It continually manifests an ardent desire to refashion the world which presents itself to waking man, so that it will be as colorful, irregular, lacking in results and coherence, charming, and eternally new as the world of dreams. Indeed, it is only by means of the rigid and regular web of concepts that the waking man clearly sees that he is awake; and it is precisely because of this that he sometimes thinks that he must be dreaming when this web of concepts is torn by art. Pascal is right in maintaining that if the same dream came to us every night we would be just as occupied with it as we are with the things that we see every day. “If a workman were sure to dream for twelve straight hours every night that he was king,” said Pascal, “I believe that he would be just as happy as a king who dreamt for twelve hours every night that he was a workman. In fact, because of the way that myth takes it for granted that miracles are always happening, the waking life of a mythically inspired people-the ancient Greeks, for instance- more closely resembles a dream than it does the waking world of a scientifically disenchanted thinker. When every tree can suddenly speak as a nymph, when a god in the shape of a bull can drag away maidens, when even the goddess Athena herself is suddenly seen in the company of Peisastratus driving through the market place of Athens with a beautiful team of horses-and this is what the honest Athenian believed- then, as in a dream, anything is possible at each moment, and all of nature swarms around man as if it were nothing but a masquerade of the gods, who were merely amusing themselves by deceiving men in all these shapes.
But man has an invincible inclination to allow himself to be deceived D and is, as it were, enchanted with happiness when the rhapsodist tells i him epic fables as if they were true, or when the actor in the theater acts more royally than any real king. So long as it is able to deceive without injuring, that master of deception, the intellect, is free; it is released from its former slavery and celebrates its Saturnalia. It is never more luxuriant, richer, prouder, more clever and more daring. With creative pleasure it throws metaphors into confusion and displaces the boundary stones of abstractions, so that, for example, it designates the stream as “the moving path which carries man where he would otherwise walk.” The intellect has now thrown the token of bondage from itself. At other times it endeavors, with gloomy officiousness, to show the way and to demonstrate the tools to a poor individual who covets existence; it is like a servant who goes in search of booty and prey for his master. But now it has become the master and it dares to wipe from its face the expression of indigence. In comparison with its previous conduct, everything that it now does bears the mark of dissimulation, just as that previous conduct did of distortion. The free intellect copies human life, but it considers this life to be something good and seems to be quite satisfied with it. That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than by concepts. There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard-of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition.
There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic. They both desire to rule over life: the former, by knowing how to meet his principle needs by means of foresight, prudence, and regularity; the latter, by disregarding these needs and, as an “overjoyed hero,” counting as real only that life which has been disguised as illusion and beauty. Whenever, as was perhaps the case in ancient Greece, the intuitive man handles his weapons more authoritatively and victoriously than his opponent, then, under favorable circumstances, a culture can take shape and art’s mastery over life can be established. All the manifestations of such a life will be accompanied by this dissimulation, this disavowal of indigence, this glitter of metaphorical intuitions, and, in general, this immediacy of deception: neither the house, nor the gait, nor the clothes, nor the clay jugs give evidence of having been invented because of a pressing need. It seems as if they were all intended to express an exalted happiness, an OIympian cloudlessness, and, as it were, a playing with seriousness. The man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune, without ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions. And while he aims for the greatest possible freedom from pain, the intuitive man, standing in the midst of a culture, already reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually inflowing illumination, cheer, and redemption-in addition to obtaining a defense against misfortune. To be sure, he suffers more intensely, when he suffers; he even suffers more frequently, since he does not understand how to learn from experience and keeps falling over and over again into the same ditch. He is then just as irrational in sorrow as he is in happiness: he cries aloud and will not be consoled. How differently the stoical man who learns from experience and governs himself by concepts is affected by the same misfortunes! This man, who at other times seeks nothing but sincerity, truth, freedom from deception, and protection against ensnaring surprise attacks, now executes a masterpiece of deception: he executes his masterpiece of deception in misfortune, as the other type of man executes his in times of happiness. He wears no quivering and changeable human face, but, as it were, a mask with dignified, symmetrical features. He does not cry; he does not even alter his voice. When a real storm cloud thunders above him, he wraps himself in his cloak, and with slow steps he walks from beneath it.
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Untimely Meditations or; Thoughts out of Season
by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Translated by Anthony M. Ludovici and Adrian Collins
Electronically Developed by MobileReference
David Strauss: The Confessor and the Writer: -1- | -2- | -3- | -4- | -5- | -6- | -7- | -8- | -9- | -10- | -11- | -12-
Richard Wagner in Bayreuth: -1- | -2- | -3- | -4- | -5- | -6- | -7- | -8- | -9- | -10- | -11-
On the Use and Abuse of History for Life: Preface | -1- | -2- | -3- | -4- | -5- | -6- | -7- | -8- | -9- | -10-
Schopenhauer As Educator: -1- | -2- | -3- | -4- | -5- | -6- | -7- | -8-
Friedrich W. Nietzsche Biography
David Strauss: the Confessor and the Writer
Translated by Anthony M. Ludovici
I.
Public opinion in Germany seems strictly to forbid any allusion to the evil and dangerous consequences of a war, more particularly when the war in question has been a victorious one. Those writers, therefore, command a more ready attention who, regarding this public opinion as final, proceed to vie with each other in their jubilant praise of the war, and of the powerful influences it has brought to bear upon morality, culture, and art. Yet it must be confessed that a great victory is a great danger. Human nature bears a triumph less easily than a defeat; indeed, it might even be urged that it is simpler to gain a victory of this sort than to turn it to such account that it may not ultimately proxe a seiious rout.
But of all evil results due to the last contest with France, the most deplorable, perhaps, is that widespread and even universal error of public opinion and of all who think publicly, that German culture was also victorious in the struggle, and that it should now, therefore, be decked with garlands, as a fit recognition of such extraordinary events and successes. This error is in the highest degree pernicious: not because it is an error,-for there are illusions which are both salutary and blessed,-but because it threatens to convert our victory into a signal defeat. A defeat? -I should say rather, into the uprooting of the “German Mind” for the benefit of the “German Empire.”
Even supposing that the fight had been between the two cultures, the standard for the value of the victor would still be a very relative one, and, in any case, would certainly not justify such exaggerated triumph or self-glorification. For, in the first place, it would be necessary to ascertain the worth of the conquered culture. This might be very little; in which case, even if the victory had involved the most glorious display of arms, it would still offer no warrant for inordinate rapture.
Even so, however, there can be no question, in our case, of the victory of German culture; and for the simple reason, that French culture remains as heretofore, and that we depend upon it as heretofore. It did not even help towards the success of our arms. Severe military discipline, natural bravery and sustaining power, the superior generalship, unity and obedience in the rank and file-in short, factors which have nothing to do with culture, were instrumental in making us conquer an opponent in whom the most essential of these factors were absent. The only wonder is, that precisely what is now called “culture” in Germany did not prove an obstacle to the military operations which seemed vitally necessary to a great victory. Perhaps, though, this was only owing to the fact that this “thing” which dubs itself “culture” saw its advantage, for once, in keeping in the background.
If however, it be permitted to grow and to spread, if it be spoilt by the flattering and nonsensical assurance that it has been victorious,-then, as I have said, it will have the power to extirpate German mind, and, when that is done, who knows whether there will still be anything to be made out of the surviving German body!
Provided it were possible to direct that calm and tenacious bravery which the German opposed to the pathetic and spontaneous fury of the Frenchman, against the inward enemy, against the highly suspicious and, at all events, unnative “cultivation” which, owing to a dangerous misunderstanding, is called “culture” in Germany, then all hope of a really genuine German “culture”-the reverse of that “cultivation”-would not be entirely lost. For the Germans have never known any lack of clear-sighted and heroic leaders, though these, often enough, probably, have lacked Germans. But whether it be possible to turn German bravery into a new direction seems to me to become ever more and more doubtful; for I realise how fully convinced every one is that such a struggle and such bravery are no longer requisite; on the contrary, that most things are regulated as satisactorily as they possibly can be-or, at all events, that everything of moment has long ago been discovered and accomplished: in a word, that the seed of culture is already sown everywhere, and is now either shooting up its fresh green blades, or, here and there, even bursting forth into luxuriant blossom. In this sphere, not only happiness but ecstasy reigns supreme. I am conscious of this ecstasy and happiness, in the ineffable, truculent assurance of German journalists and manufacturers of novels, tragedies, poems, and histories (for it must be clear that these people belong to one category), who seem to have conspired to improve the leisure and ruminative hours-that is to say, “the intellectual lapses”-of the modern man, by bewildering him with their printed paper. Since the war, all is gladness, dignity, and self-consciousness in this merry throng. After the startling successes of German culture, it regards itself, not only as approved and sanctioned, but almost as sanctified. It therefore speaks with gravity, affects to apostrophise the German People, and issues complete works, after the manner of the classics; nor does it shrink from proclaiming in those journals which are open to it some few of its adherents as new German classical writers and model authors. It might be supposed that the dangers of such an abuse of success would be recognised by the more thoughtful and enlightened among cultivated Germans; or, at least, that these would feel how painful is the comedy that is being enacted around them: for what in truth could more readily inspire pity than the sight of a cripple strutting like a cock before a mirror, and exchanging complacent glances with his reflection! But the “scholar” caste willingly allow things to remain as they are, and re too much concerned with their own affairs to busy themselves with the care of the German mind. Moreover, the units of this caste are too thoroughly convinced that their own scholarship is the ripest and most perfect fruit of the age-in fact, of all ages-to see any necessity for a care of German culture in general; since, in so far as they and the legion of their brethren are concerned, preoccupations of this order have everywhere been, so to speak, surpassed. The more conscientious observer, more particularly if he be a foreigner, cannot help noticing withal that no great disparity exists between that which the German scholar regards as his culture and that other triumphant culture of the new German classics, save in respect of the quantum of knowledge. Everywhere, where knowledge and not ability, where information and not art, hold the first rank,-everywhere, therefore, where life bears testimony to the kind of culture extant, there is now only one specific German culture-and this is the culture that is supposed to have conquered France?
The contention appears to be altogether too preposterous. It was solely to the more extensive knowledge of German officers, to the superior training of their soldiers, and to their more scientific military strategy, that all impartial Judges, and even the French nation, in the end, ascribed the victory. Hence, if it be intended to regard German erudition as a thing apart, in what sense can German culture be said to have conquered? In none whatsoever; for the moral qualities of severe discipline, of more placid obedience, have nothing in common with culture: these were characteristic of the Macedonian army, for instance, despite the fact that the Greek soldiers were infinitely more cultivated. To speak of German scholarship and culture as having conquered, therefore, can only be the outcome of a misapprehension, probably resulting from the circumstance that every precise notion of culture has now vanished from Germany.
Culture is, before all things, the unity of artistic style, in every expression of the life of a people. Abundant knowledge and learning, however, are not essential to it, nor are they a sign of its existence; and, at a pinch, they might coexist much more harmoniously with the very opposite of culture-with barbarity: that is to say, with a complete lack of style, or with a riotous jumble of all styles. But it is precisely amid this riotous jumble that the German of to-day subsists; and the serious problem to be solved is: how, with all his learning, he can possibly avoid noticing it; how, into the bargain, he can rejoice with all his heart in his present “culture”? For everything conduces to open his eyes for him-every glance he casts at his clothes, his room, his house; every walk he takes through the streets of his town; every visit he pays to his art-dealers and to his trader in the articles of fashion. In his social intercourse he ought to realise the origin of his manners and movements; in the heart of our art-institutions, the pleasures of our concerts, theatres, and museums, he ought to become apprised of the super- and juxta-position of all imaginable styles. The German heaps up around him the forms, colours, products, and curiosities of all ages and zones, and thereby succeeds in producing that garish newness, as of a country fair, which his scholars then proceed to contemplate and to define as “Modernism per se”; and there he remains, squatting peacefully, in the midst of this conflict of styles. But with this kind of culture, which is, at bottom, nothing more nor less than a phlegmatic insensibility to real culture, men cannot vanquish an enemy, least of all an enemy like the French, who, whatever their worth may be, do actually possess a genuine and productive culture, and whom, up to the present, we have systematically copied, though in the majority of cases without skill.
Even supposing we had really ceased copying them, it would still not mean that we had overcome them, but merely that we had lifted their yoke from our necks. Not before we have succeeded in forcing an original German culture upon them can there be any question of the triumph of German culture. Meanwhile, let us not forget that in all matters of form we are, and must be, just as dependent upon Paris now as we were before the war; for up to the present there has been no such thing as a original German culture.
We all ought to have become aware of this, of our own accord. Besides, one of the few who had he right to speak to Germans in terms of reproach Publicly drew attention to the fact. “We Germans are of yesterday,” Goethe once said to Eckermann. “True, for the last hundred years we have diligently cultivated ourselves, but a few centuries may yet have to run their course before our fellow-countrymen become permeated with sufficient intellectuality and higher culture to have it said of them, it is a long time since they were barbarians.”
II.
If, however, our public and private life is so manifestly devoid of all signs of a productive and characteristic culture; if, moreover, our great artists, with that earnest vehemence and honesty which is peculiar to greatness admit, and have admitted, this monstrous fact-so very humiliating to a gifted nation; how can it still be possible for contentment to reign to such an astonishing extent among German scholars? And since the last war this complacent spirit has seemed ever more and more ready to break forth into exultant cries and demonstrations of triumph. At all events, the belief seems to be rife that we are in possession of a genuine culture, and the enormous incongruity of this triumphant satisfaction in the face of the inferiority which should be patent to all, seems only to be noticed by the few and the select. For all those who think with the public mind have blindfolded their eyes and closed their ears. The incongruity is not even acknowledged to exist. How is this possible? What power is sufficiently influential to deny this existence? What species of men must have attained to supremacy in Germany that feelings which are so strong and simple should he denied or prevented from obtaining expression? This power, this species of men, I will name-they are the Philistines of Culture.
As every one knows, the word “Philistine” is borrowed from the vernacular of student-life, and, in its widest and most popular sense, it signifies the reverse of a son of the Muses, of an artist, and of the genuine man of culture. The Philistine of culture, however, the study of whose type and the hearing of whose confessions (when he makes them) have now become tiresome duties, distinguishes himself from the general notion of the order “Philistine” by means of a superstition: he fancies that he is himself a son of the Muses and a man of culture. This incomprehensible error clearly shows that he does not even know the difference between a Philistine and his opposite. We must not be surprised, therefore, if we find him, for the most part, solemnly protesting that he is no Philistine. Owing to this lack of self-knowledge, he is convinced that his “culture” is the consummate manifestation of real German culture; and, since he everywhere meets with scholars of his own type, since all public institutions, whether schools, universities, or academies, are so organised as to be in complete harmony with his education and needs, wherever he goes he bears with him the triumphant feeling that he is the worthy champion of prevailing German culture, and he frames his pretensions and claims accordingly.
If, however, real culture takes unity of style for granted (and even an inferior and degenerate culture cannot be imagined in which a certain coalescence of the profusion of forms has not taken place), it is just possible that the confusion underlying the Culture-Philistine’s error may arise from the fact that, since he comes into contact everywhere with creatures cast in the same mould as himself, he concludes that this uniformity among all “scholars” must point to a certain uniformity in German education-hence to culture. All round him, he sees only needs and views similar to his own; wherever he goes, he finds himself embraced by a ring of tacit conventions concerning almost everything, but more especially matters of religion and art. This imposing sameness, this tutti unisono which, though it responds to no word of command, is yet ever ready to burst forth, cozens him into the belief that here a culture must be established and flourishing. But Philistinism, despite its systematic organisation and power, does not constitute a culture by virtue of its system alone; it does not even constitute an inferior culture, but invariably the reverse-namely, firmly established barbarity. For the uniformity of character which is so apparent in the German scholars of to-day is only the result of a conscious or unconscious exclusion and negation of all the artistically productive forms and requirements of a genuine style. The mind of the cultured Philistine must have become sadly unhinged; for precisely what culture repudiates he regards as culture itself; and, since he proceeds logically, he succeeds in creating a connected group of these repudiations-a system of non-culture, to which one might at a pinch grant a certain “unity of style,” provided of course it were not nonsense to attribute style to barbarity. If he have to choose between a stylish act and its opposite, he will invariably adopt the latter, and, since this rule holds good throughout, every one of his acts bears the same negative stamp. Now, it is by means of this stamp that he is able to identify the character of the “German culture,” which is his own patent; and all things that do not bear it are so many enemies and obstacles drawn up against him. In the presence of these arrayed forces the Culture-Philistine either does no more than ward off the blows, or else he denies, holds his tongue, stops his ears, and refuses to face facts. He is a negative creature-even in his hatred and animosity. Nobody, however, is more disliked by him than the man who regards him as a Philistine, and tells him what he is-namely, the barrier in the way of all powerful men and creators, the labyrinth for all who doubt and go astray, the swamp for all the weak and the weary, the fetters of those who would run towards lofty goals, the poisonous mist that chokes all germinating hopes, the scorching sand to all those German thinkers who seek for, and thirst after, a new life. For the mind of Germany is seeking; and ye hate it because it is seeking, and because it will not accept your word, when ye declare that ye have found what it is seeking. How could it have been possible for a type like that of the Culture-Philistine to develop? and even granting its development, how was it able to rise to the powerful Position of supreme judge concerning all questions of German culture? How could this have been possible, seeing that a whole procession of grand and heroic figures has already filed past us, whose every movement, the expression of whose every feature, whose questioning voice and burning eye betrayed the one fact, that they were seekers, and that they sought that which the Culture-Philistine had long fancied he had found-to wit, a genuine original German culture? Is there a soil-thus they seemed to ask-a soil that is pure enough, unhandselled enough, of sufficient virgin sanctity, to allow the mind of Germany to build its house upon it? Questioning thus, they wandered through the wilderness, and the woods of wretched ages and narrow conditions, and as seekers they disappeared from our vision; one of them, at an advanced age, was even able to say, in the name of all: “For half a century my life has been hard and bitter enough; I have allowed myself no rest, but have ever striven, sought and done, to the best and to the utmost of my ability.”
What does our Culture-Philistinism say of these seekers? It regards them simply as discoverers, and seems to forget that they themselves only claimed to be seekers. We have our culture, say her sons; for have we not our “classics”? Not only is the foundation there, but the building already stands upon it-we ourselves constitute that building. And, so saying, the Philistine raises his hand to his brow.
But, in order to be able thus to misjudge, and thus to grant left-handed veneration to our classics, people must have ceased to know them. This, generally speaking, is precisely what has happened. For, otherwise, one ought to know that there is only one way of honouring them, and that is to continue seeking with the same spirit and with the same courage, and not to weary of the search. But to foist the doubtful title of “classics” upon them, and to “edify” oneself from time to time by reading their works, means to yield to those feeble and selfish emotions which all the paying public may purchase at concert-halls and theatres. Even the raising of monuments to their memory, and the christening of feasts and societies with their names-all these things are but so many ringing cash payments by means of which the Culture-Philistine discharges his indebtedness to them, so that in all other respects he may be rid of them, and, above all, not bound to follow in their wake and prosecute his search further. For henceforth inquiry is to cease: that is the Philistine watchword.
This watchword once had some meaning. In Germany, during the first decade of the nineteenth century, for instance, when the heyday and confusion of seeking, experimenting, destroying, promising, surmising, and hoping was sweeping in currents and cross-currents over the land, the thinking middle-classes were right in their concern for their own security. It was then quite right of them to dismiss from their minds with a shrug of their shoulders the omnium gatherum of fantastic and language-maiming philosophies, and of rabid special-pleading historical studies, the carnival of all gods and myths, and the poetical affectations and fooleries which a drunken spirit may be responsible for. In this respect they were quite right; for the Philistine has not even the privilege of license. With the cunning proper to base natures, however, he availed himself of the opportunity, in order to throw suspicion even upon the seeking spirit, and to invite people to join in the more comfortable pastime of finding. His eye opened to the joy of Philistinism; he saved himself from wild experimenting by clinging to the idyllic, and opposed the restless creative spirit that animates the artist, by means of a certain smug ease-the ease of self-conscious narrowness, tranquillity, and self-sufficiency. His tapering finger pointed, without any affectation of modesty, to all the hidden and intimate incidents of his life, to the many touching and ingenuous joys which sprang into existence in the wretched depths of his uncultivated existence, and which modestly blossomed forth on the bog-land of Philistinism.
There were, naturally, a few gifted narrators who, with a nice touch, drew vivid pictures of the happiness, the prosaic simplicity, the bucolic robustness, and all the well-being which floods the quarters of children, scholars, and peasants. With picture-books of this class in their hands, these smug ones now once and for all sought to escape from the yoke of these dubious classics and the command which they contained-to seek further and to find. They only started the notion of an epigone-age in order to secure peace for themselves, and to be able to reject all the efforts of disturbing innovators summarily as the work of epigones. With the view of ensuring their own tranquillity, these smug ones even appropriated history, and sought to transform all sciences that threatened to disturb their wretched ease into branches of history-more particularly philosophy and classical philology. Through historical consciousness, they saved themselves from enthusiasm; for, in opposition to Goethe, it was maintained that history would no longer kindle enthusiasm. No, in their desire to acquire an historical grasp of everything, stultification became the sole aim of these philosophical admirers of “nil admirari.” While professing to hate every form of fanaticism and intolerance, what they really hated, at bottom, was the dominating genius and the tyranny of the real claims of culture. They therefore concentrated and utilised all their forces in those quarters where a fresh and vigorous movement was to be expected, and then paralysed, stupefied, and tore it to shreds. In this way, a philosophy which veiled the Philistine confessions of its founder beneath neat twists and flourishes of language proceeded further to discover a formula for the canonisation of the commonplace. It expatiated upon the rationalism of all reality, and thus ingratiated itself with the Culture-Philistine, who also loves neat twists and flourishes, and who, above all, considers himself real, and regards his reality as the standard of reason for the world. From this time forward he began to allow every one, and even himself, to reflect, to investigate, to astheticise, and, more particularly, to make poetry, music, and even pictures-not to mention systems philosophy; provided, of course, that everything were done according to the old pattern, and that no assault were made upon the “reasonable” and the “real”-that is to say, upon the Philistine. The latter really does not at all mind giving himself up, from time to time, to the delightful and daring transgressions of art or of sceptical historical studies, and he does not underestimate the charm of such recreations and entertainments; but he strictly separates “the earnestness of life” (under which term he understands his calling, his business, and his wife and child) from such trivialities, and among the latter he includes all things which have any relation to culture. Therefore, woe to the art that takes itself seriously, that has a notion of what it may exact, and that dares to endanger his income, his business, and his habits! Upon such an art he turns his back, as though it were something dissolute; and, affecting the attitude of a. guardian of chastity, he cautions every unprotected virtue on no account to look.
Being such an adept at cautioning people, he is always grateful to any artist who heeds him and listens to caution. He then assures his protege that things are to be made more easy for him; that, as a kindred spirit, he will no longer be expected to make sublime masterpieces, but that his work must be one of two kinds-either the imitation of reality to the point of simian mimicry, in idylls or gentle and humorous satires, or the free copying of the best-known and most famous classical works, albeit with shamefast concessions to the taste of the age. For, although he may only be able to appreciate slavish copying or accurate portraiture of the present, still he knows that the latter will but glorify him, and increase the well-being of “reality”; while the former, far from doing him any harm, rather helps to establish his reputation as a classical judge of taste, and is not otherwise troublesome; for he has, once and for all, come to terms with the classics. Finally, he discovers the general and effective formula “Health” for his habits, methods of observation, judgments, and the objects of his patronage; while he dismisses the importunate disturber of the peace with the epithets “hysterical” and “morbid.” It is thus that David Strauss-a genuine example of the satisfait in regard to our scholastic institutions, and a typical Philistine-it is thus that he speaks of “the philosophy of Schopenhauer” as being “thoroughly intellectual, yet often unhealthy and unprofitable.” It is indeed a deplorable fact that intellect should show such a decided preference for the “unhealthy” and the “unprofitable”; and even the Philistine, if he be true to himself, will admit that, in regard to the philosophies which men of his stamp produce, he is conscious of a frequent lack of intellectuality, although of course they are always thoroughly healthy and profitable.
Now and again, the Philistines, provided they are by themselves, indulge in a bottle of wine, and then they grow reminiscent, and speak of the great deeds of the war, honestly and ingenuously. On such occasions it often happens that a great deal comes to light which would otherwise have been most stead-fastly concealed, and one of them may even be heard to blurt out the most precious secrets of the whole brotherhood. Indeed, a lapse of this sort occurred but a short while ago, to a well-known aesthete of the Hegelian school of reasoning. It must, however, be admitted that the provocation thereto was of an unusual character. A company of Philistines were feasting together, in celebration of the memory of a genuine anti-Philistine-one who, moreover, had been, in the strictest sense of the words, wrecked by Philistinism. This man was Holderlin, and the afore-mentioned aesthete was therefore justified, under the circumstances, in speaking of the tragic souls who had foundered on “reality”-reality being understood, here, to mean Philistine reason. But the “reality” is now different, and it might well be asked whether Holderlin would be able to find his way at all in the present great age. “I doubt,” says Dr. Vischer, “whether his delicate soul could have borne all the roughness which is inseparable from war, and whether it had survived the amount of perversity which, since the war, we now see flourishing in every quarter. Perhaps he would have succumbed to despair. His was one of the unarmed souls; he was the Werther of Greece, a hopeless lover; his life was full of softness and yearning, but there was strength and substance in his will, and in his style, greatness, riches and life; here and there it is even reminiscent of Aeschylus. His spirit, however, lacked hardness. He lacked the weapon humour; he could not grant that one may be a Philistine and still be no barbarian.” Not the sugary condolence of the post-prandial speaker, but this last sentence concerns us. Yes, it is admitted that one is a Philistine; but, a barbarian?-No, not at any price! Unfortunately, poor Holderlin could not make such flne distinctions. If one reads the reverse of civilisation, or perhaps sea-pirating, or cannibalism, into the word “barbarian,” then the distinction is justifiable enough. But what the aesthete obviously wishes to prove to us is, that we may be Philistines and at the same time men of culture. Therein lies the humour which poor Holderlin lacked and the need of which ultimately wrecked him.
On this occasion a second admission was made by the speaker: “It is not always strength of will, but weakness, which makes us superior to those tragic souls which are so passionately responsive to the attractions of beauty,” or words to this effect. And this was said in the name of the assembled “We”; that is to say, the “superiors,” the “superiors through weakness.” Let us content ourselves with these admissions. We are now in possession of information concerning two matters from one of the initiated: first, that these “We” stand beyond the passion for beauty; secondly, that their position was reached by means of weakness. In less confidential moments, however, it was just this weakness which masqueraded in the guise of a much more beautiful name: it was the famous “healthiness” of the Culture-Philistine. In view of this very recent restatement of the case, however, it would be as well not to speak of them any longer as the “healthy ones,” but as the “weakly,” or, still better, as the “feeble.” Oh, if only these feeble ones were not in power! How is it that they concern themselves at all about what we call them! They are the rulers, and he is a poor ruler who cannot endure to be called by a nickname. Yes, if one only have power, one soon learns to poke fun-even at oneself. It cannot matter so very much, therefore, even if one do give oneself away; for what could not the purple mantle of triumph conceal? The strength of the Culture-Philistine steps into the broad light of day when he acknowledges his weakness; and the more he acknowledges it-the more cynically he acknowledges it-the more completely he betrays his consciousness of his own importance and superiority. We are living in a period of cynical Philistine confessions. Just as Friedrich Vischer gave us his in a word, so has David Strauss handed us his in a book; and both that word and that book are cynical.
III.
Concerning Culture-Philistinism, David Strauss makes a double confession, by word and by deed; that is to say, by the word of the confessor, and the act of the writer. His book entitled The Old Faith and the New is, first in regard to its contents, and secondly in regard to its being a book and a literary production, an uninterrupted confession; while, in the very fact that he allows himself to write confessions at all about his faith, there already lies a confession. Presumably, every one seems to have the right to compile an autobiography after his fortieth year; for the humblest amongst us may have experienced things, and may have seen them at such close quarters, that the recording of them may prove of use and value to the thinker. But to write a confession of one’s faith cannot but be regarded as a thousand times more pretentious, since it takes for granted that the writer attaches worth, not only to the experiences and investigations of his life, but also to his beliefs. Now, what the nice thinker will require to know, above all else, is the kind of faith which happens to be compatible with natures of the Straussian order, and what it is they have “half dreamily conjured up” (p. 10) concerning matters of which those alone have the right to speak who are acquainted with them at first hand. Whoever would have desired to possess the confessions, say, of a Ranke or a Mommsen? And these men were scholars and historians of a very different stamp from David Strauss. If, however, they had ever ventured to interest us in their faith instead of in their scientific investigations, we should have felt that they were overstepping their limits in a most irritating fashion. Yet Strauss does this when he discusses his faith. Nobody wants to know anything about it, save, perhaps, a few bigoted opponents of the Straussian doctrines, who, suspecting, as they do, a substratum of satanic principles beneath these doctrines, hope that he may compromise his learned utterances by revealing the nature of those principles. These clumsy creatures may, perhaps, have found what they sought in the last book; but we, who had no occasion to suspect a satanic substratum, discovered nothing of the sort, and would have felt rather pleased than not had we been able to discern even a dash of the diabolical in any part of the volume. But surely no evil spirit could speak as Strauss speaks of his new faith. In fact, spirit in general seems to be altogether foreign to the book- more particularly the spirit of genius. Only those whom Strauss designates as his “We,” speak as he does, and then, when they expatiate upon their faith to us, they bore us even more than when they relate their dreams; be they “scholars, artists, military men, civil employes, merchants, or landed proprietors; come they in their thousands, and not the worst people in the land either!” If they do not wish to remain the peaceful ones in town or county, but threaten to wax noisy, then let not the din of their unisono deceive us concerning the poverty and vulgarity of the melody they sing. How can it dispose us more favourably towards a profession of faith to hear that it is approved by a crowd, when it is of such an order that if any individual of that crowd attempted to make it known to us, we should not only fail to hear him out, but should interrupt him with a yawn? If thou sharest such a belief, we should say unto him, in Heaven’s name, keep it to thyself! Maybe, in the past, some few harmless types looked for the thinker in David Strauss; now they have discovered the “believer” in him, and are disappointed. Had he kept silent, he would have remained, for these, at least, the philosopher; whereas, now, no one regards him as such. He no longer craved the honours of the thinker, however; all he wanted to be was a new believer, and he is proud of his new belief. In making a written declaration of it, he fancied he was writing the catechism of “modern thought,” and building the “broad highway of the world’s future.” Indeed, our Philistines have ceased to be faint-hearted and bashful, and have acquired almost cynical assurance. There was a time, long, long ago, when the Philistine was only tolerated as something that did not speak, and about which no one spoke; then a period ensued during which his roughness was smoothed, during which he was found amusing, and people talked about him. Under this treatment he gradually became a prig, rejoiced with all his heart over his rough places and his wrongheaded and candid singularities, and began to talk, on his own account, after the style of Riehl’s music for the home.
“But what do I see? Is it a shadow? Is it reality? How long and broad my poodle grows!”
For now he is already rolling like a hippopotamus along “the broad highway of the world’s future,” and his growling and barking have become transformed into the proud incantations of a religious founder. And is it your own sweet wish, Great Master, to found the religion of the future? “The times seem to us not yet ripe (p. 7). It does not occur to us to wish to destroy a church.” But why not, Great Master? One but needs the ability. Besides, to speak quite openly in the latter, you yourself are convinced that you Possess this ability. Look at the last page of your book. There you actually state, forsooth, that your new way “alone is the future highway of the world, which now only requires partial completion, and especially general use, in order also to become easy and pleasant.”
Make no further denials, then. The religious founder is unmasked, the convenient and agreeable highway leading to the Straussian Paradise is built. It is only the coach in which you wish to convey us that does not altogether satisfy you, unpretentious man that you are! You tell us in your concluding remarks: “Nor will I pretend that the coach to which my esteemed readers have been obliged to trust themselves with me fulfils every requirement,.. all through one is much jolted” (p. 438). Ah! you are casting about for a compliment, you gallant old religious founder! But let us be straightforward with you. If your reader so regulates the perusal of the 368 pages of your religious catechism as to read only one page a day-that is to say, if he take it in the smallest possible doses-then, perhaps, we should be able to believe that he might suffer some evil effect from the book-if only as the outcome of his vexation when the results he expected fail to make themselves felt. Gulped down more heartily, however, and as much as possible being taken at each draught, according to the prescription to be recommended in the case of all modern books, the drink can work no mischief; and, after taking it, the reader will not necessarily be either out of sorts or out of temper, but rather merry and well-disposed, as though nothing had happened; as though no religion had been assailed, no world’s highway been built, and no profession of faith been made. And I do indeed call this a result! The doctor, the drug, and the disease-everything forgotten! And the joyous laughter! The continual provocation to hilarity! You are to be envied, Sir; for you have founded the most attractive of all religions -one whose followers do honour to its founder by laughing at him.
IV.
The Philistine as founder of the religion of the future-that is the new belief in its most emphatic form of expression. The Philistine becomes a dreamer-that is the unheard-of occurrence which distinguishes the German nation of to-day. But for the present, in any case, let us maintain an attitude of caution towards this fantastic exaltation. For does not David Strauss himself advise us to exercise such caution, in the following profound passage, the general tone of which leads us to think of the Founder of Christianity rather than of our particular author? (p. 92): “We know there have been noble enthusiasts-enthusiasts of genius; the influence of an enthusiast can rouse, exalt, and produce prolonged historic effects; but we do not wish to choose him as the guide of our life. He will be sure to mislead us, if we do not subject his influence to the control of reason.” But we know something more: we know that there are enthusiasts who are not intellectual, who do not rouse or exalt, and who, nevertheless, not only expect to be the guides of our lives, but, as such, to exercise a very lasting historical influence into the bargain, and to rule the future;-all the more reason why we should place their influence under the control of reason. Lichtenberg even said: “There are enthusiasts quite devoid of ability, and these are really dangerous people.” In the first place, as regards the above-mentioned control of reason, we should like to have candid answers to the three following questions: First, how does the new believer picture his heaven? Secondly, how far does the courage lent him by the new faith extend? And, thirdly, how does he write his books? Strauss the Confessor must answer the first and second questions; Strauss the Writer must answer the third.
The heaven of the new believer must, perforce, be a heaven upon earth; for the Christian “prospect of an immortal life in heaven,” together with the other consolations, “must irretrievably vanish” for him who has but “one foot” on the Straussian platform. The way in which a religion represents its heaven is significant, and if it be true that Christianity knows no other heavenly occupations than singing and making music, the prospect of the Philistine, à la Strauss, is truly not a very comforting one. In the book of confessions, however, there is a page which treats of Paradise (p. 342). Happiest of Philistines, unroll this parchment scroll before anything else, and the whole of heaven will seem to clamber down to thee! “We would but indicate how we act, how we have acted these many years. Besides our profession-for we are members of the most various professions, and by no means exclusively consist of scholars or artists, but of military men and civil employees, of merchants and landed proprietors;.. and again, as I have said already, there are not a few of us, but many thousands, and not the worst people in the country;-besides our profession, then, I say, we are eagerly accessible to all the higher interests of humanity; we have taken a vivid interest, during late years, and each after his manner has participated in the great national war, and the reconstruction of the German State; and we have been profoundly exalted by the turn events have taken, as unexpected as glorious, for our much tried nation. To the end of forming just conclusions in these things, we study history, which has now been made easy, even to the unlearned, by a series of attractively and popularly written works; at the same time, we endeavour to enlarge our knowledge of the natural sciences, where also there is no lack of sources of information; and lastly, in the writings of our great poets, in the performances of our great musicians, we find a stimulus for the intellect and heart, for wit and imagination, which leaves nothing to be desired. Thus we live, and hold on our way in joy.”
“Here is our man!” cries the Philistine exultingly, who reads this: “for this is exactly how we live; it is indeed our daily life.” And how perfectly he understands the euphemism! When, for example, he refers to the historical studies by means of which we help ourselves in forming just conclusions regarding the political situation, what can he be thinking of, if it be not our newspaper-reading? When he speaks of the active part we take in the reconstruction of the German State, he surely has only our daily visits to the beer-garden in his mind; and is not a walk in the Zoological Gardens implied by ’the sources of information through which we endeavour to enlarge our knowledge of the natural sciences’? Finally, the theatres and concert-halls are referred to as places from which we take home ‘a stimulus for wit and imagination which leaves nothing to be desired.’-With what dignity and wit he describes even the most suspicious of our doings! Here indeed is our man; for his heaven is our heaven!”
Thus cries the Philistine; and if we are not quite so satisfied as he, it is merely owing to the fact that we wanted to know more. Scaliger used to say: “What does it matter to us whether Montaigne drank red or white wine?” But, in this more important case, how greatly ought we to value definite particulars of this sort! If we could but learn how many pipes the Philistine smokes daily, according to the prescriptions of the new faith, and whether it is the Spener or the National Gazette that appeals to him over his coffee! But our curiosity is not satisfied. With regard to one point only do we receive more exhaustive information, and fortunately this point relates to the heaven in heaven-the private little art-rooms which will be consecrated to the use of great poets and musicians, and to which the Philistine will go to edify himself; in which, moreover, according to his own showing, he will even get “all his stains removed and wiped away” (p. 433); so that we are led to regard these private little art-rooms as a kind of bath-rooms. “But this is only effected for some fleeting moments; it happens and counts only in the realms of phantasy; as soon as we return to rude reality, and the cramping confines of actual life, we are again on all sides assailed by the old cares,"-thus our Master sighs. Let us, however, avail ourselves of the fleeting moments during which we remain in those little rooms; there is just sufficient time to get a glimpse of the apotheosis of the Philistine- that is to say, the Philistine whose stains have been removed and wiped away, and who is now an absolutely pure sample of his type. In truth, the opportunity we have here may prove instructive: let no one who happens to have fallen a victim to the confession-book lay it aside before having read the two appendices, “Of our Great Poets” and “Of our Great Musicians.” Here the rainbow of the new brotherhood is set, and he who can find no pleasure in it “for such an one there is no help,” as Strauss says on another occasion; and, as he might well say here, “he is not yet ripe for our point of view.” For are we not in the heaven of heavens? The enthusiastic explorer undertakes to lead us about, and begs us to excuse him if, in the excess of his joy at all the beauties to be seen, he should by any chance be tempted to talk too much. “If I should, perhaps, become more garrulous than may seem warranted in this place, let the reader be indulgent to me; for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. Let him only be assured that what he is now about to read does not consist of older materials, which I take the opportunity of inserting here, but that these remarks have been written for their present place and purpose” (pp. 345-46). This confession surprises us somewhat for the moment. What can it matter to us whether or not the little chapters were freshly written? As if it were a matter of writing! Between ourselves, I should have been glad if they had been written a quarter of a century earlier; then, at least, I should have understood why the thoughts seem to be so bleached, and why they are so redolent of resuscitated antiquities. But that a thing should have been written in 1872 and already smell of decay in 1872 strikes me as suspicious. Let us imagine some one’s falling asleep while reading these chapters-what would he most probably dream about? A friend answered this question for me, because he happened to have had the experience himself. He dreamt of a wax-work show. The classical writers stood there, elegantly represented in wax and beads. Their arms and eyes moved, and a screw inside them creaked an accompaniment to their movements. He saw something gruesome among them-a misshapen figure, decked with tapes and jaundiced paper, out of whose mouth a ticket hung, on which “Lessing” was written. My friend went close up to it and learned the worst: it was the Homeric Chimera; in front it was Strauss, behind it was Gervinus, and in the middle Chimera. The tout-ensemble was Lessing. This discovery caused him to shriek with terror: he waked, and read no more. In sooth, Great Master, why have you written such fusty little chapters?
We do, indeed, learn something new from them; for instance, that Gervinus made it known to the world how and why Goethe was no dramatic genius; that, in the second part of Faust, he had only produced a world of phantoms and of symbols; that Wallenstein is a Macbeth as well as a Hamlet; that the Straussian reader extracts the short stories out of the Wanderjahre “much as naughty children pick the raisins and almonds out of a tough plum-cake”; that no complete effect can be produced on the stage without the forcible element, and that Schiller emerged from Kant as from a cold-water cure. All this is certainly new and striking; but, even so, it does not strike us with wonder, and so sure as it is new, it will never grow old, for it never was young; it was senile at birth. What extraordinary ideas seem to occur to these Blessed Ones, after the New Style, in their aesthetic heaven! And why can they not manage to forget a few of them, more particularly when they are of that unaesthetic, earthly, and ephemeral order to which the scholarly thoughts of Gervinus belong, and when they so obviously bear the stamp of puerility? But it almost seems as though the modest greatness of a Strauss and the vain insignificance of a Gervinus were only too well able to harmonise: then long live all those Blessed Ones! may we, the rejected, also live long, if this unchallenged judge of art continues any longer to teach his borrowed enthusiasm, and the gallop of that hired steed of which the honest Grillparzer speaks with such delightful clearness, until the whole of heaven rings beneath the hoof of that galumphing enthusiasm. Then, at least, things will be livelier and noisier than they are at the present moment, in which the carpet-slippered rapture of our heavenly leader and the lukewarm eloquence of his lips only succeed in the end in making us sick and tired. I should like to know how a Hallelujah sung by Strauss would sound: I believe one would have to listen very carefully, lest it should seem no more than a courteous apology or a lisped compliment. Apropos of this, I might adduce an instructive and somewhat forbidding example. Strauss strongly resented the action of one of his opponents who happened to refer to his reverence for Lessing. The unfortunate man had misunderstood;-true, Strauss did declare that one must be of a very obtuse mind not to recognise that the simple words of paragraph 86 come from the writer’s heart. Now, I do not question this warmth in the very least; on the contrary, the fact that Strauss fosters these feelings towards Lessing has always excited my suspicion; I find the same warmth for Lessing raised almost to heat in Gervinus-yea, on the whole, no great German writer is so popular among little German writers as Lessing is; but for all that, they deserve no thanks for their predilection; for what is it, in sooth, that they praise in Lessing? At one moment it is his catholicity- the fact that he was critic and poet, archaeologist and philosopher, dramatist and theologian. Anon, “it is the unity in him of the writer and the man, of the head and the heart.” The last quality, as a rule, is just as characteristic of the great writer as of the little one; as a rule, a narrow head agrees only too fatally with a narrow heart. And as to the catholicity; this is no distinction, more especially when, as in Lessing’s case, it was a dire necessity. What astonishes one in regard to Lessing-enthusiasts is rather that they have no conception of the devouring necessity which drove him on through life and to this catholicity; no feeling for the fact that such a man is too prone to consume himself rapidly, like a flame; nor any indignation at the thought that the vulgar narrowness and pusillanimity of his whole environment, especially of his learned contemporaries, so saddened, tormented, and stifled the tender and ardent creature that he was, that the very universality for which he is praised should give rise to feelings of the deepest compassion. “Have pity on the exceptional man!” Goethe cries to us; “for it was his lot to live in such a wretched age that his life was one long polemical effort.” How can ye, my worthy Philistines, think of Lessing without shame? He who was ruined precisely on account of your stupidity, while struggling with your ludicrous fetiches and idols, with the defects of your theatres, scholars, and theologists, without once daring to attempt that eternal flight for which he had been born. And what are your feelings when ye think of Winckelman, who, in order to turn his eyes from your grotesque puerilities, went begging to the Jesuits for help, and whose ignominious conversion dishonours not him, but you? Dare ye mention Schiller’s name without blushing? Look at his portrait. See the flashing eyes that glance contemptuously over your heads, the deadly red cheek-do these things mean nothing to you? In him ye had such a magnificent and divine toy that ye shattered it. Suppose, for a moment, it had been possible to deprive this harassed and hunted life of Goethe’s friendship, ye would then have been reponsible for its still earlier end. Ye have had no finger in any one of the life-works of your great geniuses, and yet ye would make a dogma to the effect that no one is to be helped in the future. But for every one of them, ye were “the resistance of the obtuse world,” which Goethe calls by its name in his epilogue to the Bell; for all of them ye were the grumbling imbeciles, or the envious bigots, or the malicious egoists: in spite of you each of them created his works, against you each directed his attacks, and thanks to you each prematurely sank, while his work was still unfinished, broken and bewildered by the stress of the battle. And now ye presume that ye are going to be permitted, tamquam re bene gesta, to praise such men! and with words which leave no one in any doubt as to whom ye have in your minds when ye utter your encomiums, which therefore “spring forth with such hearty warmth” that one must be blind not to see to whom ye are really bowing. Even Goethe in his day had to cry: “Upon my honour, we are in need of a Lessing, and woe unto all vain masters and to the whole aesthetic kingdom of heaven, when the young tiger, whose restless strength will be visible in his every distended muscle and his every glance, shall sally forth to seek his prey!”
V.
How clever it was of my friend to read no further, once he had been enlightened (thanks to that chimerical vision) concerning the Straussian Lessing and Strauss himself. We, however, read on further, and even craved admission of the Doorkeeper of the New Faith to the sanctum of music. The Master threw the door open for us, accompanied us, and began quoting certain names, until, at last, overcome with mistrust, we stood still and looked at him. Was it possible that we were the victims of the same hallucination as that to which our friend had been subjected in his dream? The musicians to whom Strauss referred seemed to us to be wrongly designated as long as he spoke about them, and we began to think that the talk must certainly be about somebody else, even admitting that it did not relate to incongruous phantoms. When, for instance, he mentioned Haydn with that same warmth which made us so suspicious when he praised Lessing, and when he posed as the epopt and priest of a mysterious Haydn cult; when, in a discussion upon quartette-music, if you please, he even likened Haydn to a “good unpretending soup” and Beethoven to “sweetmeats” (p. 432); then, to our minds, one thing, and one thing alone, became certain-namely, that his Sweetmeat-Beethoven is not our Beethoven, and his Soup-Haydn is not our Haydn. The Master was moreover of the opinion that our orchestra is too good to perform Haydn, and that only the most unpretentious amateurs can do justice to that music-a further proof that he was referring to some other artist and some other work, possibly to Riehl’s music for the home.
But whoever can this Sweetmeat-Beethoven of Strauss’s be? He is said to have composed nine symphonies, of which the Pastoral is “the least remarkable”; we are told that “each time in composing the third, he seemed impelled to exceed his bounds, and depart on an adventurous quest,” from which we might infer that we are here concerned with a sort of double monster, half horse and half cavalier. With regard to a certain Eroica, this Centaur is very hard pressed, because he did not succeed in making it clear “whether it is a question of a conflict on the open field or in the deep heart of man.” In the Pastoral there is said to be “a furiously raging storm,” for which it is “almost too insignificant” to interrupt a dance of country-folk, and which, owing to “its arbitrary connection with a trivial motive,” as Strauss so adroitly and correctly puts it, renders this symphony “the least remarkable.” A more drastic expression appears to have occurred to the Master; but he prefers to speak here, as he says, “with becoming modesty.” But no, for once our Master is wrong; in this case he is really a little too modest. Who, indeed, will enlighten us concerning this Sweetmeat-Beethoven, if not Strauss himself-the only person who seems to know anything about him? But, immediately below, a strong judgment is uttered with becoming non-modesty, and precisely in regard to the Ninth Symphony. It is said, for instance, that this symphony “is naturally the favourite of a prevalent taste, which in art, and music especially, mistakes the grotesque for the genial, and the formless for the sublime” (p. 428). It is true that a critic as severe as Gervinus was gave this work a hearty welcome, because it happened to confirm one of his doctrines; but Strauss is “far from going to these problematic productions” in search of the merits of his Beethoven. “It is a pity,” cries our Master, with a convulsive sigh, “that one is compelled, by such reservations, to mar one’s enjoyment of Beethoven, as well as the admiration gladly accorded to him.” For our Master is a favourite of the Graces, and these have informed him that they only accompanied Beethoven part of the way, and that he then lost sight of them. “This is a defect,” he cries, “but can you believe that it may also appear as an advantage?” “He who is painfully and breathlessly rolling the musical idea along will seem to be moving the weightier one, and thus appear to be the stronger” (pp. 423-24). This is a confession, and not necessarily one concerning Beethoven alone, but concerning “the classical prose-writer” himself. He, the celebrated author, is not abandoned by the Graces. From the play of airy jests-that is to say, Straussian jests- to the heights of solemn earnestness-that is to say, Straussian earnestness-they remain stolidly at his elbow. He, the classical prose-writer, slides his burden along playfully and with a light heart, whereas Beethoven rolls his painfully and breathlessly. He seems merely to dandle his load; this is indeed an advantage. But would anybody believe that it might equally be a sign of something wanting? In any case, only those could believe this who mistake the grotesque for the genial, and the formless for the sublime-is not that so, you dandling favourite of the Graces? We envy no one the edifying moments he may have, either in the stillness of his little private room or in a new heaven specially fitted out for him; but of all possible pleasures of this order, that of Strauss’s is surely one of the most wonderful, for he is even edified by a little holocaust. He calmly throws the sublimest works of the German nation into the flames, in order to cense his idols with their smoke. Suppose, for a moment, that by some accident, the Eroica, the Pastoral, and the Ninth Symphony had fallen into the hands of our priest of the Graces, and that it had been in his power to suppress such problematic productions, in order to keep the image of the Master pure, who doubts but what he would have burned them? And it is precisely in this way that the Strausses of our time demean themselves: they only wish to know so much of an artist as is compatible with the service of their rooms; they know only the extremes-censing or burning. To all this they are heartily welcome; the one surprising feature of the whole case is that public opinion, in matters artistic, should be so feeble, vacillating, and corruptible as contentedly to allow these exhibitions of indigent Philistinism to go by without raising an objection; yea, that it does not even possess sufficient sense of humour to feel tickled at the sight of an unaesthetic little master’s sitting in judgment upon Beethoven. As to Mozart, what Aristotle says of Plato ought really to be applied here: “Insignificant people ought not to be permitted even to praise him.” In this respect, however, all shame has vanished-from the public as well as from the Master’s mind: he is allowed, not merely to cross himself before the greatest and purest creations of German genius, as though he had perceived something godless and immoral in them, but people actually rejoice over his candid confessions and admission of sins-more particularly as he makes no mention of his own, but only of those which great men are said to have committed. Oh, if only our Master be in the right! his readers sometimes think, when attacked by a paroxysm of doubt; he himself, however, stands there, smiling and convinced, perorating, condemning, blessing, raising his hat to himself, and is at any minute capable of saying what the Duchesse Delaforte said to Madame de Staël, to wit: “My dear, I must confess that I find no one but myself invariably right.”
VI.
A corpse is a pleasant thought for a worm, and a worm is a dreadful thought for every living creature. Worms fancy their kingdom of heaven in a fat body; professors of philosophy seek theirs in rummaging among Schopenhauer’s entrails, and as long as rodents exist, there will exist a heaven for rodents. In this, we have the answer to our first question: How does the believer in the new faith picture his heaven? The Straussian Philistine harbours in the works of our great poets and musicians like a parasitic worm whose life is destruction, whose admiration is devouring, and whose worship is digesting.
Now, however, our second question must be answered: How far does the courage lent to its adherents by this new faith extend? Even this question would already have been answered, if courage and pretentiousness had been one; for then Strauss would not be lacking even in the just and veritable courage of a Mameluke. At all events, the “becoming modesty” of which Strauss speaks in the above-mentioned passage, where he is referring to Beethoven, can only be a stylistic and not a moral manner of speech. Strauss has his full share of the temerity to which every successful hero assumes the right: all flowers grow only for him-the conqueror; and he praises the sun because it shines in at his window just at the right time. He does not even spare the venerable old universe in his eulogies-as though it were only now and henceforward sufficiently sanctified by praise to revolve around the central monad David Strauss. The universe, he is happy to inform us, is, it is true, a machine with jagged iron wheels, stamping and hammering ponderously, but: “We do not only find the revolution of pitiless wheels in our world-machine, but also the shedding of soothing oil” (p. 435). The universe, provided it submit to Strauss’s encomiums, is not likely to overflow with gratitude towards this master of weird metaphors, who was unable to discover better similes in its praise. But what is the oil called which trickles down upon the hammers and stampers? And how would it console a workman who chanced to get one of his limbs caught in the mechanism to know that this oil was trickling over him? Passing over this simile as bad, let us turn our attention to another of Strauss’s artifices, whereby he tries to ascertain how he feels disposed towards the universe; this question of Marguerite’s, “He loves me-loves me not-loves me?” hanging on his lips the while. Now, although Strauss is not telling flower-petals or the buttons on his waistcoat, still what he does is not less harmless, despite the fact that it needs perhaps a little more courage. Strauss wishes to make certain whether his feeling for the “All” is either paralysed or withered, and he pricks himself; for he knows that one can prick a limb that is either paralysed or withered without causing any pain. As a matter of fact, he does not really prick himself, but selects another more violent method, which he describes thus: “We open Schopenhauer, who takes every occasion of slapping our idea in the face” (p. 167). Now, as an idea-even that of Strauss’s concerning the universe-has no face, if there be any face in the question at all it must be that of the idealist, and the procedure may be subdivided into the following separate actions:-Strauss, in any case, throws Schopenhauer open, whereupon the latter slaps Strauss in the face. Strauss then reacts religiously; that is to say, he again begins to belabour Schopenhauer, to abuse him, to speak of absurdities, blasphemies, dissipations, and even to allege that Schopenhauer could not have been in his right senses. Result of the dispute: “We demand the same piety for our Cosmos that the devout of old demanded for his God”; or, briefly, “He loves me.” Our favourite of the Graces makes his life a hard one, but he is as brave as a Mameluke, and fears neither the Devil nor Schopenhauer. How much “soothing oil” must he use if such incidents are of frequent occurrence!
On the other hand, we readily understand Strauss’s gratitude to this tickling, pricking, and slapping Schopenhauer; hence we are not so very much surprised when we find him expressing himself in the following kind way about him: “We need only turn over the leaves of Arthur Schopenhauer’s works (although we shall on many other accounts do well not only to glance over but to study them), etc.” (p. 166). Now, to whom does this captain of Philistines address these words? To him who has clearly never even studied Schopenhauer, the latter might well have retorted, “This is an author who does not even deserve to be scanned, much less to be studied.” Obviously, he gulped Schopenhauer down “the wrong way,” and this hoarse coughing is merely his attempt to clear his throat. But, in order to fill the measure of his ingenuous encomiums, Strauss even arrogates to himself the right of commending old Kant: he speaks of the latter’s General History of the Heavens of the Year 1755 as of “a work which has always appeared to me not less important than his later Critique of Pure Reason. If in the latter we admire the depth of insight, the breadth of observation strikes us in the former. If in the latter we can trace the old man’s anxiety to secure even a limited possession of knowledge-so it be but on a firm basis-in the former we encounter the mature man, full of the daring of the discoverer and conqueror in the realm of thought.” This judgment of Strauss’s concerning Kant did not strike me as being more modest than the one concerning Schopenhauer. In the one case, we have the little captain, who is above all anxious to express even the most insignificant opinion with certainty, and in the other we have the famous prose-writer, who, with all the courage of ignorance, exudes his eulogistic secretions over Kant. It is almost incredible that Strauss availed himself of nothing in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason while compiling his Testament of modern ideas, and that he knew only how to appeal to the coarsest realistic taste must also be numbered among the more striking characteristics of this new gospel, the which professes to be but the result of the laborious and continuous study of history and science, and therefore tacitly repudiates all connection with philosophy. For the Philistine captain and his “We,” Kantian philosophy does not exist. He does not dream of the fundamental antinomy of idealism and of the highly relative sense of all science and reason. And it is precisely reason that ought to tell him how little it is possible to know of things in themselves. It is true, however, that people of a certain age cannot possibly understand Kant, especially when, in their youth, they understood or fancied they understood that “gigantic mind,” Hegel, as Strauss did; and had moreover concerned themselves with Schleiermacher, who, according to Strauss, “was gifted with perhaps too much acumen.” It will sound odd to our author when I tell him that, even now, he stands absolutely dependent upon Hegel and Schleiermacher, and that his teaching of the Cosmos, his way of regarding things sub specie biennii, his salaams to the state of affairs now existing in Germany, and, above all, his shameless Philistine optimism, can only be explained by an appeal to certain impressions of youth, early habits, and disorders; for he who has once sickened on Hegel and Schleiermacher never completely recovers.
There is one passage in the confession-book where the incurable optimism referred to above bursts forth with the full joyousness of holiday spirits (pp. 166-67). “If the universe is a thing which had better not have existed,” says Strauss, “then surely the speculation of the philosopher, as forming part of this universe, is a speculation which had better not have speculated. The pessimist philosopher fails to perceive that he, above all, declares his own thought, which declares the world to be bad, as bad also; but if the thought which declares the world to be bad is a bad thought, then it follows naturally that the world is good. As a rule, optimism may take things too easily. Schopenhauer’s references to the colossal part which sorrow and evil play in the world are quite in their right place as a counterpoise; but every true philosophy is necessarily optimistic, as otherwise she hews down the branch on which she herself is sitting.” If this refutation of Schopenhauer is not the same as that to which Strauss refers somewhere else as “the refutation loudly and jubilantly acclaimed in higher spheres,” then I quite fail to understand the dramatic phraseology used by him elsewhere to strike an opponent. Here optimism has for once intentionally simplified her task. But the master-stroke lay in thus pretending that the refutation of Schopenhauer was not such a very difficult task after all, and in playfully wielding the burden in such a manner that the three Graces attendant on the dandling optimist might constantly be delighted by his methods. The whole purpose of the deed was to demonstrate this one truth, that it is quite unnecessary to take a pessimist seriously; the most vapid sophisms become justified, provided they show that, in regard to a philosophy as “unhealthy and unprofitable” as Schopenhauer’s, not proofs but quips and sallies alone are suitable. While perusing such passages, the reader will grasp the full meaning of Schopenhauer’s solemn utterance to the effect that, where optimism is not merely the idle prattle of those beneath whose flat brows words and only words are stored, it seemed to him not merely an absurd but a vicious attitude of mind, and one full of scornful irony towards the indescribable sufferings of humanity. When a philosopher like Strauss is able to frame it into a system, it becomes more than a vicious attitude of mind-it is then an imbecile gospel of comfort for the “I” or for the “We,” and can only provoke indignation.
Who could read the following psychological avowal, for instance, without indignation, seeing that it is obviously but an offshoot from this vicious gospel of comfort?-“Beethoven remarked that he could never have composed a text like Figaro or Don Juan. Life had not been so profuse of its snubs to him that he could treat it so gaily, or deal so lightly with the foibles of men” (p. 430). In order, however, to adduce the most striking instance of this dissolute vulgarity of sentiment, let it suffice, here, to observe that Strauss knows no other means of accounting for the terribly serious negative instinct and the movement of ascetic sanctification which characterised the first century of the Christian era, than by supposing the existence of a previous period of surfeit in the matter of all kinds of sexual indulgence, which of itself brought about a state of revulsion and disgust.
“The Persians call it bidamag buden, The Germans say Katzenjammer.”
Strauss quotes this himself, and is not ashamed. As for us, we turn aside for a moment, that we may overcome our loathing.
VII.
As a matter of fact, our Philistine captain is brave, even audacious, in words; particularly when he hopes by such bravery to delight his noble colleagues-the “We,” as he calls them. So the asceticism and self-denial of the ancient anchorite and saint was merely a form of Katzenjammer? Jesus may be described as an enthusiast who nowadays would scarcely have escaped the madhouse, and the story of the Resurrection may be termed a “world-wide deception.” For once we will allow these views to pass without raising any objection, seeing that they may help us to gauge the amount of courage which our “classical Philistine” Strauss is capable of. Let us first hear his confession: “It is certainly an unpleasant and a thankless task to tell the world those truths which it is least desirous of hearing. It prefers, in fact, to manage its affairs on a profuse scale, receiving and spending after the magnificent fashion of the great, as long as there is anything left; should any person, however, add up the various items of its liabilities, and anxiously call its attention to the sum-total, he is certain to be regarded as an importunate meddler. And yet this has always been the bent of my moral and intellectual nature.” A moral and intellectual nature of this sort might possibly be regarded as courageous; but what still remains to be proved is, whether this courage is natural and inborn, or whether it is not rather acquired and artificial. Perhaps Strauss only accustomed himself by degrees to the role of an importunate meddler, until he gradually acquired the courage of his calling. Innate cowardice, which is the Philistine’s birthright, would not be incompatible with this mode of development, and it is precisely this cowardice which is perceptible in the want of logic of those sentences of Strauss’s which it needed courage to pronounce. They sound like thunder, but they do not clear the air. No aggressive action is performed: aggressive words alone are used, and these he selects from among the most insulting he can find. He moreover exhausts all his accumulated strength and energy in coarse and noisy expression, and when once his utterances have died away he is more of a coward even than he who has always held his tongue. The very shadow of his deeds-his morality-shows us that he is a word-hero, and that he avoids everything which might induce him to transfer his energies from mere verbosity to really serious things. With admirable frankness, he announces that he is no longer a Christian, but disclaims all idea of wishing to disturb the contentment of any one: he seems to recognise a contradiction in the notion of abolishing one society by instituting another-whereas there is nothing contradictory in it at all. With a certain rude self-satisfaction, he swathes himself in the hirsute garment of our Simian genealogists, and extols Darwin as one of mankind’s greatest benefactors; but our perplexity is great when we find him constructing his ethics quite independently of the question, “What is our conception of the universe?” In this department he had an opportunity of exhibiting native pluck; for he ought to have turned his back on his “We,” and have established a moral code for life out of bellum omnium contra omnes and the privileges of the strong. But it is to be feared that such a code could only have emanated from a bold spirit like that of Hobbes’, and must have taken its root in a love of truth quite different from that which was only able to vent itself in explosive outbursts against parsons, miracles, and the “world-wide humbug” of the Resurrection. For, whereas the Philistine remained on Strauss’s side in regard to these explosive outbursts, he would have been against him had he been confronted with a genuine and seriously constructed ethical system, based upon Darwin’s teaching.
Says Strauss: “I should say that all moral action arises from the individual’s acting in consonance with the idea of kind” (p. 274). Put quite clearly and comprehensively, this means: “Live as a man, and not as an ape or a seal.” Unfortunately, this imperative is both useless and feeble; for in the class Man what a multitude of different types are included-to mention only the Patagonian and the Master, Strauss; and no one would ever dare to say with any right, “Live like a Patagonian,” and “Live like the Master Strauss”! Should any one, however, make it his rule to live like a genius-that is to say, like the ideal type of the genus Man-and should he perchance at the same time be either a Patagonian or Strauss himself, what should we then not have to suffer from the importunities of genius-mad eccentrics (concerning whose mushroom growth in Germany even Lichtenberg had already spoken), who with savage cries would compel us to listen to the confession of their most recent belief! Strauss has not yet learned that no “idea” can ever make man better or more moral, and that the preaching of a morality is as easy as the establishment of it is difficult. His business ought rather to have been, to take the phenomena of human goodness, such-for instance-as pity, love, and self-abnegation, which are already to hand, and seriously to explain them and show their relation to his Darwinian first principle. But no; he preferred to soar into the imperative, and thus escape the task of explaining. But even in his flight he was irresponsible enough to soar beyond the very first principles of which we speak.
“Ever remember,” says Strauss, “that thou art human, not merely a natural production; ever remember that all others are human also, and, with all individual differences, the same as thou, having the same needs and claims as thyself: this is the sum and the substance of morality” (p. 277). But where does this imperative hail from? How can it be intuitive in man, seeing that, according to Darwin, man is indeed a creature of nature, and that his ascent to his present stage of development has been conditioned by quite different laws-by the very fact that be was continually forgetting that others were constituted like him and shared the same rights with him; by the very fact that he regarded himself as the stronger, and thus brought about the gradual suppression of weaker types. Though Strauss is bound to admit that no two creatures have ever been quite alike, and that the ascent of man from the lowest species of animals to the exalted height of the Culture-Philistine depended upon the law of individual distinctness, he still sees no difficulty in declaring exactly the reverse in his law: “Behave thyself as though there were no such things as individual distinctions.” Where is the Strauss-Darwin morality here? Whither, above all, has the courage gone?
In the very next paragraph we find further evidence tending to show us the point at which this courage veers round to its opposite; for Strauss continues: “Ever remember that thou, and all that thou beholdest within and around thee, all that befalls thee and others, is no disjointed fragment, no wild chaos of atoms or casualties, but that, following eternal law, it springs from the one primal source of all life, all reason, and all good: this is the essence of religion” (pp. 277-78). Out of that “one primal source,” however, all ruin and irrationality, all evil flows as well, and its name, according to Strauss, is Cosmos.
Now, how can this Cosmos, with all the contradictions and the self-annihilating characteristics which Strauss gives it, be worthy of religious veneration and be addressed by the name “God,” as Strauss addresses it?-“Our God does not, indeed, take us into His arms from the outside (here one expects, as an antithesis, a somewhat miraculous process of being “taken into His arms from the inside”), but He unseals the well-springs of consolation within our own bosoms. He shows us that although Chance would be an unreasonable ruler, yet necessity, or the enchainment of causes in the world, is Reason itself.” (A misapprehension of which only the “We” can fail to perceive the folly; because they were brought up in the Hegelian worship of Reality as the Reasonable-that is to say, in the canonisation of success.) “He teaches us to perceive that to demand an exception in the accomplishment of a single natural law would be to demand the destruction of the universe” (pp. 435-36). On the contrary, Great Master: an honest natural scientist believes in the unconditional rule of natural laws in the world, without, however, taking up any position in regard to the ethical or intellectual value of these laws. Wherever neutrality is abandoned in this respect, it is owing to an anthropomorphic attitude of mind which allows reason to exceed its proper bounds. But it is just at the point where the natural scientist resigns that Strauss, to put it in his own words, “reacts religiously,” and leaves the scientific and scholarly standpoint in order to proceed along less honest lines of his own. Without any further warrant, he assumes that all that has happened possesses the highest intellectual value; that it was therefore absolutely reasonably and intentionally so arranged, and that it even contained a revelation of eternal goodness. He therefore has to appeal to a complete cosmodicy, and finds himself at a disadvantage in regard to him who is contented with a theodicy, and who, for instance, regards the whole of man’s existence as a punishment for sin or a process of purification. At this stage, and in this embarrassing position, Strauss even suggests a metaphysical hypothesis-the driest and most palsied ever conceived-and, in reality, but an unconscious parody of one of Lessing’s sayings. We read on page 255: “And that other saying of Lessing’s- ‘If God, holding truth in His right hand, and in His left only the ever-living desire for it, although on condition of perpetual error, left him the choice of the two, he would, considering that truth belongs to God alone, humbly seize His left hand, and beg its contents for Himself’- this saying of Lessing’s has always been accounted one of the most magnificent which he has left us. It has been found to contain the general expression of his restless love of inquiry and activity. The saying has always made a special impression upon me; because, behind its subjective meaning, I still seemed to hear the faint ring of an objective one of infinite import. For does it not contain the best possible answer to the rude speech of Schopenhauer, respecting the ill-advised God who had nothing better to do than to transform Himself into this miserable world? if, for example, the Creator Himself had shared Lessing’s conviction of the superiority of struggle to tranquil possession?” What!-a God who would choose perpetual error, together with a striving after truth, and who would, perhaps, fall humbly at Strauss’s feet and cry to him,“Take thou all Truth, it is thine!”? If ever a God and a man were ill-advised, they are this Straussian God, whose hobby is to err and to fail, and this Straussian man, who must atone for this erring and failing. Here, indeed, one hears “a faint ring of infinite import”; here flows Strauss’s cosmic soothing oil; here one has a notion of the rationale of all becoming and all natural laws. Really? Is not our universe rather the work of an inferior being, as Lichtenberg suggests?-of an inferior being who did not quite understand his business; therefore an experiment, an attempt, upon which work is still proceeding? Strauss himself, then, would be compelled to admit that our universe is by no means the theatre of reason, but of error, and that no conformity to law can contain anything consoling, since all laws have been promulgated by an erratic God who even finds pleasure in blundering. It really is a most amusing spectacle to watch Strauss as a metaphysical architect, building castles in the air. But for whose benefit is this entertainment given? For the smug and noble “We,” that they may not lose conceit with themselves: they may possibly have taken sudden fright, in the midst of the inflexible and pitiless wheel-works of the world-machine, and are tremulously imploring their leader to come to their aid. That is why Strauss pours forth the “soothing oil,” that is why he leads forth on a leash a God whose passion it is to err; it is for the same reason, too, that he assumes for once the utterly unsuitable rôle of a metaphysical architect. He does all this, because the noble souls already referred to are frightened, and because he is too. And it is here that we reach the limit of his courage, even in the presence of his “We.” He does not dare to be honest, and to tell them, for instance: “I have liberated you from a helping and pitiful God: the Cosmos is no more than an inflexible machine; beware of its wheels, that they do not crush you.” He dare not do this. Consequently, he must enlist the help of a witch, and he turns to metaphysics. To the Philistine, however, even Strauss’s metaphysics is preferable to Christianity’s, and the notion of an erratic God more congenial than that of one who works miracles. For the Philistine himself errs, but has never yet performed a miracle. Hence his hatred of the genius; for the latter is justly famous for the working of miracles. It is therefore highly instructive to ascertain why Strauss, in one passage alone, suddenly takes up the cudgels for genius and the aristocracy of intellect in general. Whatever does he do it for? He does it out of fear-fear of the social democrat. He refers to Bismarck and Moltke, “whose greatness is the less open to controversy as it manifests itself in the domain of tangible external facts. No help for it, therefore; even the most stiff-necked and obdurate of these fellows must condescend to look up a little, if only to get a sight, be it no farther than the knees, of those august figures” (p.327). Do you, Master Metaphysician, perhaps intend to instruct the social democrats in the art of getting kicks? The willingness to bestow them may be met with everywhere, and you are perfectly justified in promising to those who happen to be kicked a sight of those sublime beings as far as the knee. “Also in the domain of art and science,” Strauss continues, “there will never be a dearth of kings whose architectural undertakings will find employment for a multitude of carters.” Granted; but what if the carters should begin building? It does happen at times, Great Master, as you know, and then the kings must grin and bear it.
As a matter of fact, this union of impudence and weakness, of daring words and cowardly concessions, this cautious deliberation as to which sentences will or will not impress the Philistine or smooth him down the right way, this lack of character and power masquerading as character and power, this meagre wisdom in the guise of omniscience,-these are the features in this book which I detest. If I could conceive of young men having patience to read it and to value it, I should sorrowfully renounce all hope for their future. And is this confession of wretched, hopeless, and really despicable Philistinism supposed to be the expression of the thousands constituting the “We” of whom Strauss speaks, and who are to be the fathers of the coming generation? Unto him who would fain help this coming generation to acquire what the present one does not yet possess, namely, a genuine German culture, the prospect is a horrible one. To such a man, the ground seems strewn with ashes, and all stars are obscured; while every withered tree and field laid waste seems to cry to him: Barren! Forsaken! Springtime is no longer possible here! He must feel as young Goethe felt when he first peered into the melancholy atheistic twilight of the Système de la Nature; to him this book seemed so grey, so Cimmerian and deadly, that he could only endure its presence with difficulty, and shuddered at it as one shudders at a spectre.
VIII.
We ought now to be sufficiently informed concerning the heaven and the courage of our new believer to be able to turn to the last question: How does he write his books? and of what order are his religious documents?
He who can answer this question uprightly and without prejudice will be confronted by yet another serious problem, and that is: How this Straussian pocket-oracle of the German Philistine was able to pass through six editions? And he will grow more than ever suspicious when he hears that it was actually welcomed as a pocket-oracle, not only in scholastic circles, but even in German universities as well. Students are said to have greeted it as a canon for strong intellects, and, from all accounts, the professors raised no objections to this view; while here and there people have declared it to be a religions book for scholars. Strauss himself gave out that he did not intend his profession of faith to be merely a reference-book for learned and cultured people; but here let us abide by the fact that it was first and foremost a work appealing to his colleagues, and was ostensibly a mirror in which they were to see their own way of living faithfully reflected. For therein lay the feat. The Master feigned to have presented us with a new ideal conception of the universe, and now adulation is being paid him out of every mouth; because each is in a position to suppose that he too regards the universe and life in the same way. Thus Strauss has seen fulfilled in each of his readers what he only demanded of the future. In this way, the extraordinary success of his book is partly explained: “Thus we live and hold on our way in joy,” the scholar cries in his book, and delights to see others rejoicing over the announcement. If the reader happen to think differently from the Master in regard to Darwin or to capital punishment, it is of very little consequence; for he is too conscious throughout of breathing an atmosphere that is familiar to him, and of hearing but the echoes of his own voice and wants. However painfully this unanimity may strike the true friend of German culture, it is his duty to be unrelenting in his explanation of it as a phenomenon, and not to shrink from making this explanation public.
We all know the peculiar methods adopted in our own time of cultivating the sciences: we all know them, because they form a part of our lives. And, for this very reason, scarcely anybody seems to ask himself what the result of such a cultivation of the sciences will mean to culture in general, even supposing that everywhere the highest abilities and the most earnest will be available for the promotion of culture. In the heart of the average scientific type (quite irrespective of the examples thereof with which we meet to-day) there lies a pure paradox: he behaves like the veriest idler of independent means, to whom life is not a dreadful and serious business, but a sound piece of property, settled upon him for all eternity; and it seems to him justifiable to spend his whole life in answering questions which, after all is said and done, can only be of interest to that person who believes in eternal life as an absolute certainty. The heir of but a few hours, he sees himself encompassed by yawning abysses, terrible to behold; and every step he takes should recall the questions, Wherefore? Whither? and Whence? to his mind. But his soul rather warms to his work, and, be this the counting of a floweret’s petals or the breaking of stones by the roadside, he spends his whole fund of interest, pleasure, strength, and aspirations upon it. This paradox-the scientific man-has lately dashed ahead at such a frantic speed in Germany, that one would almost think the scientific world were a factory, in which every minute wasted meant a fine. To-day the man of science works as arduously as the fourth or slave caste: his study has ceased to be an occupation, it is a necessity; he looks neither to the right nor to the left, but rushes through all things-even through the serious matters which life bears in its train-with that semi-listlessness and repulsive need of rest so characteristic of the exhausted labourer. This is also his attitude towards culture. He behaves as if life to him were not only otium but sine dignitate: even in his sleep he does not throw off the yoke, but like an emancipated slave still dreams of his misery, his forced haste and his floggings. Our scholars can scarcely be distinguished-and, even then, not to their advantage-from agricultural labourers, who in order to increase a small patrimony, assiduously strive, day and night, to cultivate their fields, drive their ploughs, and urge on their oxen. Now, Pascal suggests that men only endeavour to work hard at their business and sciences with the view of escaping those questions of greatest import which every moment of loneliness or leisure presses upon them-the questions relating to the wherefore, the whence, and the whither of life. Curiously enough, our scholars never think of the most vital question of all-the wherefore of their work, their haste, and their painful ecstasies. Surely their object is not the earning of bread or the acquiring of posts of honour? No, certainly not. But ye take as much pains as the famishing and breadless; and, with that eagerness and lack of discernment which characterises the starving, ye even snatch the dishes from the sideboard of science. If, however, as scientific men, ye proceed with science as the labourers with the tasks which the exigencies of life impose upon them, what will become of a culture which must await the hour of its birth and its salvation in the very midst of all this agitated and breathless running to and fro-this sprawling scientifically?
For it no one has time-and yet for what shall science have time if not for culture? Answer us here, then, at least: whence, whither, wherefore all science, if it do not lead to culture? Belike to barbarity? And in this direction we already see the scholar caste ominously advanced, if we are to believe that such superficial books as this one of Strauss’s meet the demand of their present degree of culture. For precisely in him do we find that repulsive need of rest and that incidental semi-listless attention to, and coming to terms with, philosophy, culture, and every serious thing on earth. It will be remembered that, at the meetings held by scholars, as soon as each individual has had his say in his own particular department of knowledge, signs of fatigue, of a desire for distraction at any price, of waning memory, and of incoherent experiences of life, begin to be noticeable. While listening to Strauss discussing any worldly question, be it marriage, the war, or capital punishment, we are startled by his complete lack of anything like first-hand experience, or of any original thought on human nature. All his judgments are so redolent of books, yea even of newspapers. Literary reminiscences do duty for genuine ideas and views, and the assumption of a moderate and grandfatherly tone take the place of wisdom and mature thought. How perfectly in keeping all this is with the fulsome spirit animating the holders of the highest places in German science in large cities! How thoroughly this spirit must appeal to that other! for it is precisely in those quarters that culture is in the saddest plight; it is precisely there that its fresh growth is made impossible-so boisterous are the preparations made by science, so sheepishly are favourite subjects of knowledge allowed to oust questions of much greater import. What kind of lantern would be needed here, in order to find men capable of a complete surrender to genius, and of an intimate knowledge of its depths-men possessed of sufficient courage and strength to exorcise the demons that have forsaken our age? Viewed from the outside, such quarters certainly do appear to possess the whole pomp of culture; with their imposing apparatus they resemble great arsenals fitted with huge guns and other machinery of war; we see preparations in progress and the most strenuous activity, as though the heavens themselves were to be stormed, and truth were to be drawn out of the deepest of all wells; and yet, in war, the largest machines are the most unwieldy. Genuine culture therefore leaves such places as these religiously alone, for its best instincts warn it that in their midst it has nothing to hope for, and very much to fear. For the only kind of culture with which the inflamed eye and obtuse brain of the scholar working-classes concern themselves is of that Philistine order of which Strauss has announced the gospel. If we consider for a moment the fundamental causes underlying the sympathy which binds the learned working-classes to Culture-Philistinism, we shall discover the road leading to Strauss the Writer, who has been acknowledged classical, and thence to our last and principal theme.
To begin with, that culture has contentment written in its every feature, and will allow of no important changes being introduced into the present state of German education. It is above all convinced of the originality of all German educational institutions, more particularly the public schools and universities; it does not cease recommending these to foreigners, and never doubts that if the Germans have become the most cultivated and discriminating people on earth, it is owing to such institutions. Culture-Philistinism believes in itself, consequently it also believes in the methods and means at its disposal. Secondly, however, it leaves the highest judgment concerning all questions of taste and culture to the scholar, and even regards itself as the ever-increasing compendium of scholarly opinions regarding art, literature, and philosophy. Its first care is to urge the scholar to express his opinions; these it proceeds to mix, dilute, and systematise, and then it administers them to the German people in the form of a bottle of medicine. What conies to life outside this circle is either not heard or attended at all, or if heard, is heeded half-heartedly; until, at last, a voice (it does not matter whose, provided it belong to some one who is strictly typical of the scholar tribe) is heard to issue from the temple in which traditional infallibility of taste is said to reside; and from that time forward public opinion has one conviction more, which it echoes and re-echoes hundreds and hundreds of times. As a matter of fact, though, the aesthetic infallibility of any utterance emanating from the temple is the more doubtful, seeing that the lack of taste, thought, and artistic feeling in any scholar can be taken for granted, unless it has previously been proved that, in his particular case, the reverse is true. And only a few can prove this. For how many who have had a share in the breathless and unending scurry of modern science have preserved that quiet and courageous gaze of the struggling man of culture-if they ever possessed it-that gaze which condemns even the scurry we speak of as a barbarous state of affairs? That is why these few are forced to live in an almost perpetual contradiction. What could they do against the uniform belief of the thousands who have enlisted public opinion in their cause, and who mutually defend each other in this belief? What purpose can it serve when one individual openly declares war against Strauss, seeing that a crowd have decided in his favour, and that the masses led by this crowd have learned to ask six consecutive times for the Master’s Philistine sleeping-mixture?
If, without further ado, we here assumed that the Straussian confession-book had triumphed over public opinion and had been acclaimed and welcomed as conqueror, its author might call our attention to the fact that the multitudinous criticisms of his work in the various public organs are not of an altogether unanimous or even favourable character, and that he therefore felt it incumbent upon him to defend himself against some of the more malicious, impudent, and provoking of these newspaper pugilists by means of a postscript. How can there be a public opinion concerning my book, he cries to us, if every journalist is to regard me as an outlaw, and to mishandle me as much as he likes? This contradiction is easily explained, as soon as one considers the two aspects of the Straussian book-the theological and the literary, and it is only the latter that has anything to do with German culture. Thanks to its theological colouring, it stands beyond the pale of our German culture, and provokes the animosity of the various theological groups-yea, even of every individual German, in so far as he is a theological sectarian from birth, and only invents his own peculiar private belief in order to be able to dissent from every other form of belief. But when the question arises of talking about Strauss THE WRITER, pray listen to what the theological sectarians have to say about him. As soon as his literary side comes under notice, all theological objections immediately subside, and the dictum comes plain and clear, as if from the lips of one congregation: In spite of it all, he is still a classical writer!
Everybody-even the most bigoted, orthodox Churchman-pays the writer the most gratifying compliments, while there is always a word or two thrown in as a tribute to his almost Lessingesque language, his delicacy of touch, or the beauty and accuracy of his aesthetic views. As a book, therefore, the Straussian performance appears to meet all the demands of an ideal example of its kind. The theological opponents, despite the fact that their voices were the loudest of all, nevertheless constitute but an infinitesimal portion of the great public; and even with regard to them, Strauss still maintains that he is right when he says: “Compared with my thousands of readers, a few dozen public cavillers form but an insignificant minority, and they can hardly prove that they are their faithful interpreters. It was obviously in the nature of things that opposition should be clamorous and assent tacit.” Thus, apart from the angry bitterness which Strauss’s profession of faith may have provoked here and there, even the most fanatical of his opponents, to whom his voice seems to rise out of an abyss, like the voice of a beast, are agreed as to his merits as a writer; and that is why the treatment which Strauss has received at the hands of the literary lackeys of the theological groups proves nothing against our contention that Culture-Philistinism celebrated its triumph in this book. It must be admitted that the average educated Philistine is a degree less honest than Strauss, or is at least more reserved in his public utterances. But this fact only tends to increase his admiration for honesty in another. At home, or in the company of his equals, he may applaud with wild enthusiasm, but takes care not to put on paper how entirely Strauss’s words are in harmony with his own innermost feelings. For, as we have already maintained, our Culture-Philistine is somewhat of a coward, even in his strongest sympathies; hence Strauss, who can boast of a trifle more courage than he, becomes his leader, notwithstanding the fact that even Straussian pluck has its very definite limits. If he overstepped these limits, as Schopenhauer does in almost every sentence, he would then forfeit his position at the head of the Philistines, and everybody would flee from him as precipitately as they are now following in his wake. He who would regard this artful if not sagacious moderation and this mediocre valour as an Aristotelian virtue, would certainly be wrong; for the valour in question is not the golden mean between two faults, but between a virtue and a fault-and in this mean, between virtue and fault, all Philistine qualities are to be found.
IX.
“In spite of it all, he is still a classical writer.” Well, let us see! Perhaps we may now be allowed to discuss Strauss the stylist and master of language; but in the first place let us inquire whether, as a literary man, he is equal to the task of building his house, and whether he really understands the architecture of a book. From this inquiry we shall be able to conclude whether he is a respectable, thoughtful, and experienced author; and even should we be forced to answer “No” to these questions, he may still, as a last shift, take refuge in his fame as a classical prose-writer. This last-mentioned talent alone, it is true, would not suffice to class him with the classical authors, but at most with the classical improvisers and virtuosos of style, who, however, in regard to power of expression and the whole planning and framing of the work, reveal the awkward hand and the embarrassed eye of the bungler. We therefore put the question, whether Strauss really possesses the artistic strength necessary for the purpose of presenting us with a thing that is a whole, totum ponere?
As a rule, it ought to be possible to tell from the first rough sketch of a work whether the author conceived the thing as a whole, and whether, in view of this original conception, he has discovered the correct way of proceeding with his task and of fixing its proportions. Should this most important Part of the problem be solved, and should the framework of the building have been given its most favourable proportions, even then there remains enough to be done: how many smaller faults have to be corrected, how many gaps require filling in! Here and there a temporary partition or floor was found to answer the requirements; everywhere dust and fragments litter the ground, and no matter where we look, we see the signs of work done and work still to be done. The house, as a whole, is still uninhabitable and gloomy, its walls are bare, and the wind blows in through the open windows. Now, whether this remaining, necessary, and very irksome work has been satisfactorily accomplished by Strauss does not concern us at present; our question is, whether the building itself has been conceived as a whole, and whether its proportions are good? The reverse of this, of course, would be a compilation of fragments-a method generally adopted by scholars. They rely upon it that these fragments are related among themselves, and thus confound the logical and the artistic relation between them. Now, the relation between the four questions which provide the chapter-headings of Strauss’s book cannot be called a logical one. Are we still Christians? Have we still a religion? What is our conception of the universe? What is our rule of life? And it is by no means contended that the relation is illogical simply because the third question has nothing to do with the second, nor the fourth with the third, nor all three with the first. The natural scientist who puts the third question, for instance, shows his unsullied love of truth by the simple fact that he tacitly passes over the second. And with regard to the subject of the fourth chapter-marriage, republicanism, and capital punishment-Strauss himself seems to have been aware that they could only have been muddled and obscured by being associated with the Darwinian theory expounded in the third chapter; for he carefully avoids all reference to this theory when discussing them. But the question, “Are we still Christians?” destroys the freedom of the philosophical standpoint at one stroke, by lending it an unpleasant theological colouring. Moreover, in this matter, he quite forgot that the majority of men to-day are not Christians at all, but Buddhists. Why should one, without further ceremony, immediately think of Christianity at the sound of the words “old faith”? Is this a sign that Strauss has never ceased to be a Christian theologian, and that he has therefore never learned to be a philosopher? For we find still greater cause for surprise in the fact that he quite fails to distinguish between belief and knowledge, and continually mentions his “new belief” and the still newer science in one breath. Or is “new belief” merely an ironical concession to ordinary parlance? This almost seems to be the case; for here and there he actually allows “new belief” and “newer science” to be interchangeable terms, as for instance on page II, where he asks on which side, whether on that of the ancient orthodoxy or of modern science, “exist more of the obscurities and insufficiencies unavoidable in human speculation.”
Moreover, according to the scheme laid down in the Introduction, his desire is to disclose those proofs upon which the modern view of life is based; but he derives all these proofs from science, and in this respect assumes far more the attitude of a scientist than of a believer.
At bottom, therefore, the religion is not a new belief, but, being of a piece with modern science, it has nothing to do with religion at all. If Strauss, however, persists in his claims to be religious, the grounds for these claims must be beyond the pale of recent science. Only the smallest portion of the Straussian book-that is to say, but a few isolated pages-refer to what Strauss in all justice might call a belief, namely, that feeling for the “All” for which he demands the piety that the old believer demanded for his God. On the pages in question, however, he cannot claim to be altogether scientific; but if only he could lay claim to being a little stronger, more natural, more outspoken, more pious, we should be content. Indeed, what perhaps strikes us most forcibly about him is the multitude of artificial procedures of which he avails himself before he ultimately gets the feeling that he still possesses a belief and a religion; he reaches it by means of stings and blows, as we have already seen. How indigently and feebly this emergency-belief presents itself to us! We shiver at the sight of it.
Although Strauss, in the plan laid down in his Introduction, promises to compare the two faiths, the old and the new, and to show that the latter will answer the same purpose as the former, even he begins to feel, in the end, that he has promised too much. For the question whether the new belief answers the same purpose as the old, or is better or worse, is disposed of incidentally, so to speak, and with uncomfortable haste, in two or three pages (p. 436 et seq.-), and is actually bolstered up by the following subterfuge: “He who cannot help himself in this matter is beyond help, is not yet ripe for our standpoint” (p. 436). How differently, and with what intensity of conviction, did the ancient Stoic believe in the All and the rationality of the All! And, viewed in this light, how does Strauss’s claim to originality appear? But, as we have already observed, it would be a matter of indifference to us whether it were new, old, original, or imitated, so that it were only more powerful, more healthy, and more natural. Even Strauss himself leaves this double-distilled emergency-belief to take care of itself as often as he can do so, in order to protect himself and us from danger, and to present his recently acquired biological knowledge to his “We” with a clear conscience. The more embarrassed he may happen to be when he speaks of faith, the rounder and fuller his mouth becomes when he quotes the greatest benefactor to modern men-Darwin. Then he not only exacts belief for the new Messiah, but also for himself-the new apostle. For instance, while discussing one of the most intricate questions in natural history, he declares with true ancient pride: “I shall be told that I am here speaking of things about which I understand nothing. Very well; but others will come who will understand them, and who will also have understood me” (p. 241).
According to this, it would almost seem as though the famous “We” were not only in duty bound to believe in the “All,” but also in the naturalist Strauss; in this case we can only hope that in order to acquire the feeling for this last belief, other processes are requisite than the painful and cruel ones demanded by the first belief. Or is it perhaps sufficient in this case that the subject of belief himself be tormented and stabbed with the view of bringing the believers to that “religious reaction” which is the distinguishing sign of the “new faith.” What merit should we then discover in the piety of those whom Strauss calls “We”?
Otherwise, it is almost to be feared that modern men will pass on in pursuit of their business without troubling themselves overmuch concerning the new furniture of faith offered them by the apostle: just as they have done heretofore, without the doctrine of the rationality of the All. The whole of modern biological and historical research has nothing to do with the Straussian belief in the All, and the fact that the modern Philistine does not require the belief is proved by the description of his life given by Strauss in the chapter,“What is our Rule of Life?” He is therefore quite right in doubting whether the coach to which his esteemed readers have been obliged to trust themselves “with him, fulfils every requirement.” It certainly does not; for the modern man makes more rapid progress when he does not take his place in the Straussian coach, or rather, he got ahead much more quickly long before the Straussian coach ever existed. Now, if it be true that the famous “minority” which is “not to be overlooked,” and of which, and in whose name, Strauss speaks, “attaches great importance to consistency,” it must be just as dissatisfied with Strauss the Coachbuilder as we are with Strauss the Logician.
Let us, however, drop the question of the logician. Perhaps, from the artistic point of view, the book really is an example of a. well-conceived plan, and does, after all, answer to the requirements of the laws of beauty, despite the fact that it fails to meet with the demands of a well-conducted argument. And now, having shown that he is neither a scientist nor a strictly correct and systematic scholar, for the first time we approach the question: Is Strauss a capable writer? Perhaps the task he set himself was not so much to scare people away from the old faith as to captivate them by a picturesque and graceful description of what life would be with the new. If he regarded scholars and educated men as his most probable audience, experience ought certainly to have told him that whereas one can shoot such men down with the heavy guns of scientific proof, but cannot make them surrender, they may be got to capitulate all the more quickly before “lightly equipped” measures of seduction. “Lightly equipped,” and “intentionally so,” thus Strauss himself speaks of his own book. Nor do his public eulogisers refrain from using the same expression in reference to the work, as the following passage, quoted from one of the least remarkable among them, and in which the same expression is merely paraphrased, will go to prove:-
“The discourse flows on with delightful harmony: wherever it directs its criticism against old ideas it wields the art of demonstration, almost playfully; and it is with some spirit that it prepares the new ideas it brings so enticingly, and presents them to the simple as well as to the fastidious taste. The arrangement of such diverse and conflicting material is well thought out for every portion of it required to be touched upon, without being made too prominent; at times the transitions leading from one subject to another are artistically managed, and one hardly knows what to admire most-the skill with which unpleasant questions are shelved, or the discretion with which they are hushed up.”
The spirit of such eulogies, as the above clearly shows, is not quite so subtle in regard to judging of what an author is able to do as in regard to what he wishes. What Strauss wishes, however, is best revealed by his own emphatic and not quite harmless commendation of Voltaire’s charms, in whose service he might have learned precisely those “lightly equipped” arts of which his admirer speaks-granting, of course, that virtue may be acquired and a pedagogue can ever be a dancer.
Who could help having a suspicion or two, when reading the following passage, for instance, in which Strauss says of Voltaire, “As a philosopher [he] is certainly not original, but in the main a mere exponent of English investigations: in this respect, however, he shows himself to be completely master of his subject, which he presents with incomparable skill, in all possible lights and from all possible sides, and is able withal to meet the demands of thoroughness, without, however, being over-severe in his method”? Now, all the negative traits mentioned in this passage might be applied to Strauss. No one would contend, I suppose, that Strauss is original, or that he is over-severe in his method; but the question is whether we can regard him as “master of his subject,” and grant him “incomparable skill”? The confession to the effect that the treatise was intentionally “lightly equipped” leads us to think that it at least aimed at incomparable skill.
It was not the dream of our architect to build a temple, nor yet a house, but a sort of summer-pavilion, surrounded by everything that the art of gardening can provide. Yea, it even seems as if that mysterious feeling for the All were only calculated to produce an aesthetic effect, to be, so to speak, a view of an irrational element, such as the sea, looked at from the most charming and rational of terraces. The walk through the first chapters- that is to say, through the theological catacombs with all their gloominess and their involved and baroque embellishments-was also no more than an aesthetic expedient in order to throw into greater relief the purity, clearness, and common sense of the chapter “What is our Conception of the Universe?” For, immediately after that walk in the gloaming and that peep into the wilderness of Irrationalism, we step into a hall with a skylight to it. Soberly and limpidly it welcomes us: its mural decorations consist of astronomical charts and mathematical figures; it is filled with scientific apparatus, and its cupboards contain skeletons, stuffed apes, and anatomical specimens. But now, really rejoicing for the first time, we direct our steps into the innermost chamber of bliss belonging to our pavilion-dwellers; there we find them with their wives, children, and newspapers, occupied in the commonplace discussion of politics; we listen for a moment to their conversation on marriage, universal suffrage, capital punishment, and workmen’s strikes, and we can scarcely believe it to be possible that the rosary of public opinions can be told off so quickly. At length an attempt is made to convince us of the classical taste of the inmates. A moment’s halt in the library, and the music-room suffices to show us what we had expected all along, namely, that the best books lay on the shelves, and that the most famous musical compositions were in the music-cabinets. Some one actually played something to us, and even if it were Haydn’s music, Haydn could not be blamed because it sounded like Riehl’s music for the home. Meanwhile the host had found occasion to announce to us his complete agreement with Lessing and Goethe, although with the latter only up to the second part of Faust. At last our pavilion-owner began to praise himself, and assured us that he who could not be happy under his roof was beyond help and could not be ripe for his standpoint, whereupon he offered us his coach, but with the polite reservation that he could not assert that it would fulfil every requirement, and that, owing to the stones on his road having been newly laid down, we were not to mind if we were very much jolted. Our Epicurean garden-god then took leave of us with the incomparable skill which he praised in Voltaire.
Who could now persist in doubting the existence of this incomparable skill? The complete master of his subject is revealed; the lightly equipped artist-gardener is exposed, and still we hear the voice of the classical author saying, “As a writer I shall for once cease to be a Philistine: I will not be one; I refuse to be one! But a Voltaire-the German Voltaire-or at least the French Lessing.”
With this we have betrayed a secret. Our Master does not always know which he prefers to be-Voltaire or Lessing; but on no account will he be a Philistine. At a pinch he would not object to being both Lessing and Voltaire-that the word might be fulfilled that is written, “He had no character, but when he wished to appear as if he had, he assumed one.”
X.
If we have understood Strauss the Confessor correctly, he must be a genuine Philistine, with a narrow, parched soul and scholarly and common-place needs; albeit no one would be more indignant at the title than David Strauss the Writer. He would be quite happy to be regarded as mischievous, bold, malicious, daring; but his ideal of bliss would consist in finding himself compared with either Lessing or Voltaire-because these men were undoubtedly anything but Philistines. In striving after this state of bliss, he often seems to waver between two alternatives-either to mimic the brave and dialectical petulance of Lessing, or to affect the manner of the faun-like and free-spirited man of antiquity that Voltaire was. When taking up his pen to write, he seems to be continually posing for his portrait; and whereas at times his features are drawn to look like Lessing’s, anon they are made to assume the Voltairean mould. While reading his praise of Voltaire’s manner, we almost seem to see him abjuring the consciences of his contemporaries for not having learned long ago what the modern Voltaire had to offer them. “Even his excellences are wonderfully uniform,” he says: “simple naturalness, transparent clearness, vivacious mobility, seductive charm. Warmth and emphasis are also not wanting where they are needed, and Voltaire’s innermost nature always revolted against stiltedness and affectation; while, on the other hand, if at times wantonness or passion descend to an unpleasantly low level, the fault does not rest so much with the stylist as with the man.” According to this, Strauss seems only too well aware of the importance of simplicity in style; it is ever the sign of genius, which alone has the privilege to express itself naturally and guilelessly. When, therefore, an author selects a simple mode of expression, this is no sign whatever of vulgar ambition; for although many are aware of what such an author would fain be taken for, they are yet kind enough to take him precisely for that. The genial writer, however, not only reveals his true nature in the plain and unmistakable form of his utterance, but his super-abundant strength actually dallies with the material he treats, even when it is dangerous and difficult. Nobody treads stiffly along unknown paths, especially when these are broken throughout their course by thousands of crevices and furrows; but the genius speeds nimbly over them, and, leaping with grace and daring, scorns the wistful and timorous step of caution.
Even Strauss knows that the problems he prances over are dreadfully serious, and have ever been regarded as such by the philosophers who have grappled with them; yet he calls his book lightly equipped! But of this dreadfulness and of the usual dark nature of our meditations when considering such questions as the worth of existence and the duties of man, we entirely cease to be conscious when the genial Master plays his antics before us, “lightly equipped, and intentionally so.” Yes, even more lightly equipped than his Rousseau, of whom he tells us it was said that he stripped himself below and adorned himself on top, whereas Goethe did precisely the reverse. Perfectly guileless geniuses do not, it appears, adorn themselves at all; possibly the words “lightly equipped” may simply be a euphemism for “naked.” The few who happen to have seen the Goddess of Truth declare that she is naked, and perhaps, in the minds of those who have never seen her, but who implicitly believe those few, nakedness or light equipment is actually a proof, or at least a feature, of truth. Even this vulgar superstition turns to the advantage of the author’s ambition. Some one sees something naked, and he exclaims: “What if this were the truth!” Whereupon he grows more solemn than is his wont. By this means, however, the author scores a tremendous advantage; for he compels his reader to approach him with greater solemnity than another and perhaps more heavily equipped writer. This is unquestionably the best way to become a classical author; hence Strauss himself is able to tell us: “I even enjoy the unsought honour of being, in the opinion of many, a classical writer of prose. “He has therefore achieved his aim. Strauss the Genius goes gadding about the streets in the garb of lightly equipped goddesses as a classic, while Strauss the Philistine, to use an original expression of this genius’s, must, at all costs, be “declared to be on the decline,” or “irrevocably dismissed.”
But, alas! in spite of all declarations of decline and dismissal, the Philistine still returns, and all too frequently. Those features, contorted to resemble Lessing and Voltaire, must relax from time to time to resume their old and original shape. The mask of genius falls from them too often, and the Master’s expression is never more sour and his movements never stiffer than when he has just attempted to take the leap, or to glance with the fiery eye, of a genius. Precisely owing to the fact that he is too lightly equipped for our zone, he runs the risk of catching cold more often and more severely than another. It may seem a terrible hardship to him that every one should notice this; but if he wishes to be cured, the following diagnosis of his case ought to be publicly presented to him:- Once upon a time there lived a Strauss, a brave, severe, and stoutly equipped scholar, with whom we sympathised as wholly as with all those in Germany who seek to serve truth with earnestness and energy, and to rule within the limits of their powers. He, however, who is now publicly famous as David Strauss, is another person. The theologians may be to blame for this metamorphosis; but, at any rate, his present toying with the mask of genius inspires us with as much hatred and scorn as his former earnestness commanded respect and sympathy. When, for instance, he tells us, “it would also argue ingratitude towards my genius if I were not to rejoice that to the faculty of an incisive, analytical criticism was added the innocent pleasure in artistic production,” it may astonish him to hear that, in spite of this self-praise, there are still men who maintain exactly the reverse, and who say, not only that he has never possessed the gift of artistic production, but that the “innocent” pleasure he mentions is of all things the least innocent, seeing that it succeeded in gradually undermining and ultimately destroying a nature as strongly and deeply scholarly and critical as Strauss’s-in fact, the real Straussian Genius. In a moment of unlimited frankness, Strauss himself indeed adds: “Merck was always in my thoughts, calling out, ‘Don’t produce such child’s play again; others can do that too!’” That was the voice of the real Straussian genius, which also asked him what the worth of his newest, innocent, and lightly equipped modern Philistine’s testament was. Others can do that too! And many could do it better. And even they who could have done it best, i.e. those thinkers who are more widely endowed than Strauss, could still only have made nonsense of it.
I take it that you are now beginning to understand the value I set on Strauss the Writer. You are beginning to realise that I regard him as a mummer who would parade as an artless genius and classical writer. When Lichtenberg said, “A simple manner of writing is to be recommended, if only in view of the fact that no honest man trims and twists his expressions,” he was very far from wishing to imply that a simple style is a proof of literary integrity. I, for my part, only wish that Strauss the Writer had been more upright, for then he would have written more becomingly and have been less famous. Or, if he would be a mummer at all costs, how much more would he not have pleased me if he had been a better mummer-one more able to ape the guileless genius and classical author! For it yet remains to be said that Strauss was not only an inferior actor but a very worthless stylist as well.
XI.
Of course, the blame attaching to Strauss for being a bad writer is greatly mitigated by the fact that it is extremely difficult in Germany to become even a passable or moderately good writer, and that it is more the exception than not, to be a really good one. In this respect the natural soil is wanting, as are also artistic values and the proper method of treating and cultivating oratory. This latter accomplishment, as the various branches of it, i.e. drawing-room, ecclesiastical and Parliamentary parlance, show, has not yet reached the level of a national style; indeed, it has not yet shown even a tendency to attain to a style at all, and all forms of language in Germany do not yet seem to have passed a certain experimental stage. In view of these facts, the writer of to-day, to some extent, lacks an authoritative standard, and he is in some measure excused if, in the matter of language, he attempts to go ahead of his own accord. As to the probable result which the present dilapidated condition of the German language will bring about, Schopenhauer, perhaps, has spoken most forcibly. “If the existing state of affairs continues,” he says, “in the year 1900 German classics will cease to be understood, for the simple reason that no other language will be known, save the trumpery jargon of the noble present, the chief characteristic of which is impotence.” And, in truth, if one turn to the latest periodicals, one will find German philologists and grammarians already giving expression to the view that our classics can no longer serve us as examples of style, owing to the fact that they constantly use words, modes of speech, and syntactic arrangements which are fast dropping out of currency. Hence the need of collecting specimens of the finest prose that has been produced by our best modern writers, and of offering them as examples to be followed, after the style of Sander’s pocket dictionary of bad language. In this book, that repulsive monster of style Gutzkow appears as a classic, and, according to its injunctions, we seem to be called upon to accustom ourselves to quite a new and wondrous crowd of classical authors, among which the first, or one of the first, is David Strauss: he whom we cannot describe more aptly than we have already-that is to say, as a worthless stylist. Now, the notion which the Culture-Philistine has of a classic and standard author speaks eloquently for his pseudo-culture-he who only shows his strength by opposing a really artistic and severe style, and who, thanks to the persistence of his opposition, finally arrives at a certain uniformity of expression, which again almost appears to possess unity of genuine style. In view, therefore, of the right which is granted to every one to experiment with the language, how is it possible at all for individual authors to discover a generally agreeable tone? What is so generally interesting in them? In the first place, a negative quality-the total lack of offensiveness: but every really productive thing is offensive. The greater part of a German’s daily reading matter is undoubtedly sought either in the pages of newspapers, periodicals, or reviews. The language of these journals gradually stamps itself on his brain, by means of its steady drip, drip, drip of similar phrases and similar words. And, since he generally devotes to reading those hours of the day during which his exhausted brain is in any case not inclined to offer resistance, his ear for his native tongue so slowly but surely accustoms itself to this everyday German that it ultimately cannot endure its absence without pain. But the manufacturers of these newspapers are, by virtue of their trade, most thoroughly inured to the effluvia of this journalistic jargon; they have literally lost all taste, and their palate is rather gratified than not by the most corrupt and arbitrary innovations. Hence the tutti unisono with which, despite the general lethargy and sickliness, every fresh solecism is greeted; it is with such impudent corruptions of the language that her hirelings are avenged against her for the incredible boredom she imposes ever more and more upon them. I remember having read “an appeal to the German nation,” by Berthold Auerbach, in which every sentence was un-German, distorted and false, and which, as a whole, resembled a soulless mosaic of words cemented together with international syntax. As to the disgracefully slipshod German with which Edward Devrient solemnised the death of Mendelssohn, I do not even wish to do more than refer to it. A grammatical error-and this is the most extraordinary feature of the case-does not therefore seem an offence in any sense to our Philistine, but a most delightful restorative in the barren wilderness of everyday German. He still, however, considers all really productive things to be offensive. The wholly bombastic, distorted, and threadbare syntax of the modern standard author-yea, even his ludicrous neologisms-are not only tolerated, but placed to his credit as the spicy element in his works. But woe to the stylist with character, who seeks as earnestly and perseveringly to avoid the trite phrases of everyday parlance, as the “yester-night monster blooms of modern ink-flingers,” as Schopenhauer says! When platitudes, hackneyed, feeble, and vulgar phrases are the rule, and the bad and the corrupt become refreshing exceptions, then all that is strong, distinguished, and beautiful perforce acquires an evil odour. From which it follows that, in Germany, the well-known experience which befell the normally built traveller in the land of hunchbacks is constantly being repeated. It will be remembered that he was so shamefully insulted there, owing to his quaint figure and lack of dorsal convexity, that a priest at last had to harangue the people on his behalf as follows: “My brethren, rather pity this poor stranger, and present thank-offerings unto the gods, that ye are blessed with such attractive gibbosities.”
If any one attempted to compose a positive grammar out of the international German style of to-day, and wished to trace the unwritten and unspoken laws followed by every one, he would get the most extraordinary notions of style and rhetoric. He would meet with laws which are probably nothing more than reminiscences of bygone schooldays, vestiges of impositions for Latin prose, and results perhaps of choice readings from French novelists, over whose incredible crudeness every decently educated Frenchman would have the right to laugh. But no conscientious native of Germany seems to have given a thought to these extraordinary notions under the yoke of which almost every German lives and writes.
As an example of what I say, we may find an injunction to the effect that a metaphor or a simile must be introduced from time to time, and that it must be new; but, since to the mind of the shallow-pated writer newness and modernity are identical, he proceeds forthwith to rack his brain for metaphors in the technical vocabularies of the railway, the telegraph, the steamship, and the Stock Exchange, and is proudly convinced that such metaphors must be new because they are modern. In Strauss’s confession-book we find liberal tribute paid to modern metaphor. He treats us to a simile, covering a page and a half, drawn from modern road-improvement work; a few pages farther back he likens the world to a machine, with its wheels, stampers, hammers, and “soothing oil” (p. 432); “A repast that begins with champagne” (p. 384); “Kant is a cold-water cure” (p. 309); “The Swiss constitution is to that of England as a watermill is to a steam-engine, as a waltz-tune or a song to a fugue or symphony” (p. 301); “In every appeal, the sequence of procedure must be observed. Now the mean tribunal between the individual and humanity is the nation” (p. 165); “If we would know whether there be still any life in an organism which appears dead to us, we are wont to test it by a powerful, even painful stimulus, as for example a stab” (p. 161); “The religious domain in the human soul resembles the domain of the Red Indian in America” (p. 160); “Virtuosos in piety, in convents”(p. 107); “And place the sum-total of the foregoing in round numbers under the account” (p. 205); “Darwin’s theory resembles a railway track that is just marked out.. where the flags are fluttering joyfully in the breeze.” In this really highly modern way, Strauss has met the Philistine injunction to the effect that a new simile must be introduced from time to time.
Another rhetorical rule is also very widespread, namely, that didactic passages should be composed in long periods, and should be drawn out into lengthy abstractions, while all persuasive passages should consist of short sentences followed by striking contrasts. On page 154 in Strauss’s book we find a standard example of the didactic and scholarly style-a passage blown out after the genuine Schleiermacher manner, and made to stumble along at a true tortoise pace: “The reason why, in the earlier stages of religion, there appear many instead of this single Whereon, a plurality of gods instead of the one, is explained in this deduction of religion, from the fact that the various forces of nature, or relations of life, which inspire man with the sentiment of unqualified dependence, still act upon him in the commencement with the full force of their distinctive characteristics; that he has not as yet become conscious how, in regard to his unmitigated dependence upon them, there is no distinction between them, and that therefore the Whereon of this dependence, or the Being to which it conducts in the last instance, can only be one.”
On pages 7 and 8 we find an example of the other kind of style, that of the short sentences containing that affected liveliness which so excited certain readers that they cannot mention Strauss any more without coupling his name with Lessing’s. “I am well aware that what I propose to delineate in the following pages is known to multitudes as well as to myself, to some even much better. A few have already spoken out on the subject. Am I therefore to keep silence? I think not. For do we not all supply each other’s deficiencies? If another is better informed as regards some things, I may perhaps be so as regards others; while yet others are known and viewed by me in a different light. Out with it, then! let my colours be displayed that it may be seen whether they are genuine or not.’”
It is true that Strauss’s style generally maintains a happy medium between this sort of merry quick-march and the other funereal and indolent pace; but between two vices one does not invariably find a virtue; more often rather only weakness, helpless paralysis, and impotence. As a matter of fact, I was very disappointed when I glanced through Strauss’s book in search of fine and witty passages; for, not having found anything praiseworthy in the Confessor, I had actually set out with the express purpose of meeting here and there with at least some opportunities of praising Strauss the Writer. I sought and sought, but my purpose remained unfulfilled. Meanwhile, however, another duty seemed to press itself strongly on my mind-that of enumerating the solecisms, the strained metaphors, the obscure abbreviations, the instances of bad taste, and the distortions which I encountered; and these were of such a nature that I dare do no more than select a few examples of them from among a collection which is too bulky to be given in full. By means of these examples I may succeed in showing what it is that inspires, in the hearts of modern Germans, such faith in this great and seductive stylist Strauss: I refer to his eccentricities of expression, which, in the barren waste and dryness of his whole book, jump out at one, not perhaps as pleasant but as painfully stimulating, surprises. When perusing such passages, we are at least assured, to use a Straussian metaphor, that we are not quite dead, but still respond to the test of a stab. For the rest of the book is entirely lacking in offensiveness -that quality which alone, as we have seen, is productive, and which our classical author has himself reckoned among the positive virtues. When the educated masses meet with exaggerated dulness and dryness, when they are in the presence of really vapid commonplaces, they now seem to believe that such things are the signs of health; and in this respect the words of the author of the dialogus de oratoribus are very much to the point: “illam ipsam quam jactant sanitatem non firmitate sed jejunio consequuntur.” That is why they so unanimously hate every firmitas, because it bears testimony to a kind of health quite different from theirs; hence their one wish to throw suspicion upon all austerity and terseness, upon all fiery and energetic movement, and upon every full and delicate play of muscles. They have conspired to twist nature and the names of things completely round, and for the future to speak of health only there where we see weakness, and to speak of illness and excitability where for our part we see genuine vigour. From which it follows that David Strauss is to them a classical author.
If only this dulness were of a severely logical order! but simplicity and austerity in thought are precisely what these weaklings have lost, and in their hands even our language has become illogically tangled. As a proof of this, let any one try to translate Strauss’s style into Latin: in the case of Kant, be it remembered, this is possible, while with Schopenhauer it even becomes an agreeable exercise. The reason why this test fails with Strauss’s German is not owing to the fact that it is more Teutonic than theirs, but because his is distorted and illogical, whereas theirs is lofty and simple. Moreover, he who knows how the ancients exerted themselves in order to learn to write and speak correctly, and how the moderns omit to do so, must feel, as Schopenhauer says, a positive relief when he can turn from a German book like the one under our notice, to dive into those other works, those ancient works which seem to him still to be written in a new language. “For in these books,” says Schopenhauer, “I find a regular and fixed language which, throughout, faithfully follows the laws of grammar and orthography, so that I can give up my thoughts completely to their matter; whereas in German I am constantly being disturbed by the author’s impudence and his continual attempts to establish his own orthographical freaks and absurd ideas- the swaggering foolery of which disgusts me. It is really a painful sight to see a fine old language, possessed of classical literature, being botched by asses and ignoramuses!”
Thus Schopenhauer’s holy anger cries out to us, and you cannot say that you have not been warned. He who turns a deaf ear to such warnings, and who absolutely refuses to relinquish his faith in Strauss the classical author, can only be given this last word of advice-to imitate his hero. In any case, try it at your own risk; but you will repent it, not only in your style but in your head, that it may be fulfilled which was spoken by the Indian prophet, saying, “He who gnaweth a cow’s horn gnaweth in vain and shorteneth his life; for he grindeth away his teeth, yet his belly is empty.”
XII.
By way of concluding, we shall proceed to give our classical prose-writer the promised examples of his style which we have collected. Schopenhauer would probably have classed the whole lot as “new documents serving to swell the trumpery jargon of the present day”; for David Strauss may be comforted to hear (if what follows can be regarded as a comfort at all) that everybody now writes as he does; some, of course, worse, and that among the blind the one-eyed is king. Indeed, we allow him too much when we grant him one eye; but we do this willingly, because Strauss does not write so badly as the most infamous of all corrupters of German-the Hegelians and their crippled offspring. Strauss at least wishes to extricate himself from the mire, and he is already partly out of it; still, he is very far from being on dry land, and he still shows signs of having stammered Hegel’s prose in youth. In those days, possibly, something was sprained in him, some muscle must have been overstrained. His ear, perhaps, like that of a boy brought up amid the beating of drums, grew dull, and became incapable of detecting those artistically subtle and yet mighty laws of sound, under the guidance of which every writer is content to remain who has been strictly trained in the study of good models. But in this way, as a stylist, he has lost his most valuable possessions, and stands condemned to remain reclining, his life long, on the dangerous and barren shifting sand of newspaper style-that is, if he do not wish to fall back into the Hegelian mire. Nevertheless, he has succeeded in making himself famous for a couple of hours in our time, and perhaps in another couple of hours people will remember that he was once famous; then, however, night will come, and with her oblivion; and already at this moment, while we are entering his sins against style in the black book, the sable mantle of twilight is falling upon his fame. For he who has sinned against the German language has desecrated the mystery of all our Germanity. Throughout all the confusion and the changes of races and of customs, the German language alone, as though possessed of some supernatural charm, has saved herself; and with her own salvation she has wrought that of the spirit of Germany. She alone holds the warrant for this spirit in future ages, provided she be not destroyed at the sacrilegious hands of the modern world. “But Di meliora! Avaunt, ye pachyderms, avaunt! This is the German language, by means of which men express themselves, and in which great poets have sung and great thinkers have written. Hands off!”
To put it in plain words, what we have seen have been feet of clay, and what appeared to be of the colour of healthy flesh was only applied paint. Of course, Culture-Philistinism in Germany will be very angry when it hears its one living God referred to as a series of painted idols. He, however, who dares to overthrow its idols will not shrink, despite all indignation, from telling it to its face that it has forgotten how to distinguish between the quick and the dead, the genuine and the counterfeit, the original and the imitation, between a God and a host of idols; that it has completely lost the healthy and manly instinct for what is real and right. It alone deserves to be destroyed; and already the manifestations of its power are sinking; already are its purple honours falling from it; but when the purple falls, its royal wearer soon follows.
Here I come to the end of my confession of faith. This is the confession of an individual; and what can such an one do against a whole world, even supposing his voice were heard everywhere! In order for the last time to use a precious Straussism, his judgment only possesses “that amount of subjective truth which is compatible with a complete lack of objective demonstration”-is not that so, my dear friends? Meanwhile, be of good cheer. For the time being let the matter rest at this “amount which is compatible with a complete lack”! For the time being! That is to say, for as long as that is held to be out of season which in reality is always in season, and is now more than ever pressing; I refer to..speaking the truth.
Richard Wagner in Bayreuth
Translated by Anthony M. Ludovici
Chapter I.
FOR an event to be great, two things must be united-the lofty sentiment of those who accomplish it, and the lofty sentiment of those who witness it. No event is great in itself, even though it be the disappearance of whole constellations, the destruction of several nations, the establishment of vast empires, or the prosecution of wars at the cost of enormous forces: over things of this sort the breath of history blows as if they were flocks of wool. But it often happens, too, that a man of might strikes a blow which falls without effect upon a stubborn stone; a short, sharp report is heard, and all is over. History is able to record little or nothing of such abortive efforts. Hence the anxiety which every one must feel who, observing the approach of an event, wonders whether those about to witness it will be worthy of it. This reciprocity between an act and its reception is always taken into account when anything great or small is to be accomplished; and he who would give anything away must see to it that he find recipients who will do justice to the meaning of his gift. This is why even the work of a great man is not necessarily great when it is short, abortive, or fruitless; for at the moment when he performed it he must have failed to perceive that it was really necessary; he must have been careless in his aim, and he cannot have chosen and fixed upon the time with sufficient caution. Chance thus became his master; for there is a very intimate relation between greatness and the instinct which discerns the proper moment at which to act.
We therefore leave it to those who doubt Wagner’s power of discerning the proper time for action, to be concerned and anxious as to whether what is now taking place in Bayreuth is really opportune and necessary. To us who are more confident, it is clear that he believes as strongly in the greatness of his feat as in the greatness of feeling in those who are to witness it. Be their number great or small, therefore, all those who inspire this faith in Wagner should feel extremely honoured; for that it was not inspired by everybody, or by the whole age, or even by the whole German people, as they are now constituted, he himself told us in his dedicatory address of the 22nd of May 1872, and not one amongst us could, with any show of conviction, assure him of the contrary. “I had only you to turn to,” he said, “when I sought those who I thought would be in sympathy with my plans,- you who are the most personal friends of my own particular art, my work and activity: only you could I invite to help me in my work, that it might be presented pure and whole to those who manifest a genuine interest in my art, despite the fact that it has hitherto made its appeal to them only in a disfigured and adulterated form.”
It is certain that in Bayreuth even the spectator is a spectacle worth seeing. If the spirit of some observant sage were to return, after the absence of a century, and were to compare the most remarkable movements in the present world of culture, he would find much to interest him there. Like one swimming in a lake, who encounters a current of warm water issuing from a hot spring, in Bayreuth he would certainly feel as though he had suddenly plunged into a more temperate element, and would tell himself that this must rise out of a distant and deeper source: the surrounding mass of water, which at all events is more common in origin, does not account for it. In this way, all those who assist at the Bayreuth festival will seem like men out of season; their raison-d’etre and the forces which would seem to account for them are elsewhere, and their home is not in the present age. I realise ever more clearly that the scholar, in so far as he is entirely the man of his own day, can only be accessible to all that Wagner does and thinks by means of parody,-and since everything is parodied nowadays, he will even get the event of Bayreuth reproduced for him, through the very un-magic lanterns of our facetious art-critics. And one ought to be thankful if they stop at parody; for by means of it a spirit of aloofness and animosity finds a vent which might otherwise hit upon a less desirable mode of expression. Now, the observant sage already mentioned could not remain blind to this unusual sharpness and tension of contrasts. They who hold by gradual development as a kind of moral law must be somewhat shocked at the sight of one who, in the course of a single lifetime, succeeds in producing something absolutely new. Being dawdlers themselves, and insisting upon slowness as a principle, they are very naturally vexed by one who strides rapidly ahead, and they wonder how on earth he does it. No omens, no periods of transition, and no concessions preceded the enterprise at Bayreuth; no one except Wagner knew either the goal or the long road that was to lead to it. In the realm of art it signifies, so to speak, the first circumnavigation of the world, and by this voyage not only was there discovered an apparently new art, but Art itself. In view of this, all modern arts, as arts of luxury which have degenerated through having been insulated, have become almost worthless. And the same applies to the nebulous and inconsistent reminiscences of a genuine art, which we as modern Europeans derive from the Greeks; let them rest in peace, unless they are now able to shine of their own accord in the light of a new interpretation. The last hour has come for a good many things; this new art is a clairvoyante that sees ruin approaching-not for art alone. Her warning voice must strike the whole of our prevailing civilisation with terror the instant the laughter which its parodies have provoked subsides. Let it laugh and enjoy itself for yet a while longer!
And as for us, the disciples of this revived art, we shall have time and inclination for thoughtfulness, deep thoughtfulness. All the talk and noise about art which has been made by civilisation hitherto must seem like shameless obtrusiveness; everything makes silence a duty with us-the quinquennial silence of the Pythagoreans. Which of us has not soiled his hands and heart in the disgusting idolatry of modern culture? Which of us can exist without the waters of purification? Who does not hear the voice which cries, “Be silent and cleansed”? Be silent and cleansed! Only the merit of being included among those who give ear to this voice will grant even us the lofty look necessary to view the event at Bayreuth; and only upon this look depends the great future of the event.
When on that dismal and cloudy day in May 1872, after the foundation stone had been laid on the height of Bayreuth, amid torrents of rain, and while Wagner was driving back to the town with a small party of us, he was exceptionally silent, and there was that indescribable look in his eyes as of one who has turned his gaze deeply inwards. The day happened to be the first of his sixtieth year, and his whole past now appeared as but a long preparation for this great moment. It is almost a recognised fact that in times of exceptional danger, or at all decisive and culminating points in their lives, men see the remotest and most recent events of their career with singular vividness, and in one rapid inward glance obtain a sort of panorama of a whole span of years in which every event is faithfully depicted. What, for instance, must Alexander the Great have seen in that instant when he caused Asia and Europe to be drunk out of the same goblet? But what went through Wagner’s mind on that day-how he became what he is, and what he will be-we only can imagine who are nearest to him, and can follow him, up to a certain point, in his self-examination; but through his eyes alone is it possible for us to understand his grand work, and by the help of this understanding vouch for its fruitfulness.
Chapter II.
It were strange if what a man did best and most liked to do could not be traced in the general outline of his life, and in the case of those who are remarkably endowed there is all the more reason for supposing that their life will present not only the counterpart of their character, as in the case of every one else, but that it will present above all the counterpart of their intellect and their most individual tastes. The life of the epic poet will have a dash of the Epos in it-as from all accounts was the case with Goethe, whom the Germans very wrongly regarded only as a lyrist-and the life of the dramatist will probably be dramatic.
The dramatic element in Wagner’s development cannot be ignored, from the time when his ruling passion became self-conscious and took possession of his whole being. From that time forward there is an end to all groping, straying, and sprouting of offshoots, and over his most tortuous deviations and excursions, over the often eccentric disposition of his plans, a single law and will are seen to rule, in which we have the explanation of his actions, however strange this explanation may sometimes appear. There was, however, an ante-dramatic period in Wagner’s life-his childhood and youth- which it is impossible to approach without discovering innumerable problems. At this period there seems to be no promise yet of himself, and what one might now, in a retrospect, regard as a pledge for his future greatness, amounts to no more than a juxtaposition of traits which inspire more dismay than hope; a restless and excitable spirit, nervously eager to undertake a hundred things at the same time, passionately fond of almost morbidly exalted states of mind, and ready at any moment to veer completely round from calm and profound meditation to a state of violence and uproar. In his case there were no hereditary or family influences at work to constrain him to the sedulous study of one particular art. Painting, versifying, acting, and music were just as much within his reach as the learning and the career of a scholar; and the superficial inquirer into this stage of his life might even conclude that he was born to be a dilettante. The small world within the bounds of which he grew up was not of the kind we should choose to be the home of an artist. He ran the constant risk of becoming infected by that dangerously dissipated attitude of mind in which a person will taste of everything, as also by that condition of slackness resulting from the fragmentary knowledge of all things, which is so characteristic of University towns. His feelings were easily roused and but indifferently satisfied; wherever the boy turned he found himself surrounded by a wonderful and would-be learned activity, to which the garish theatres presented a ridiculous contrast, and the entrancing strains of music a perplexing one. Now, to the observer who sees things relatively, it must seem strange that the modern man who happens to be gifted with exceptional talent should as a child and a youth so seldom be blessed with the quality of ingenuousness and of simple individuality, that he is so little able to have these qualities at all. As a matter of fact, men of rare talent, like Goethe and Wagner, much more often attain to ingenuousness in manhood than during the more tender years of childhood and youth. And this is especially so with the artist, who, being born with a more than usual capacity for imitating, succumbs to the morbid multiformity of modern life as to a virulent disease of infancy. As a child he will more closely resemble an old man. The wonderfully accurate and original picture of youth which Wagner gives us in the Siegfried of the Nibelungen Ring could only have been conceived by a man, and by one who had discovered his youthfulness but late in life. Wagner’s maturity, like his adolesence, was also late in making its appearance, and he is thus, in this respect alone, the very reverse of the precocious type.
The appearance of his moral and intellectual strength was the prelude to the drama of his soul. And how different it then became! His nature seems to have been simplified at one terrible stroke, and divided against itself into two instincts or spheres. From its innermost depths there gushes forth a passionate will which, like a rapid mountain torrent, endeavours to make its way through all paths, ravines, and crevices, in search of light and power. Only a force completely free and pure was strong enough to guide this will to all that is good and beneficial. Had it been combined with a narrow intelligence, a will with such a tyrannical and boundless desire might have become fatal; in any case, an exit into the open had to be found for it as quickly as possible, whereby it could rush into pure air and sunshine. Lofty aspirations, which continually meet with failure, ultimately turn to evil. The inadequacy of means for obtaining success may, in certain circumstances, be the result of an inexorable fate, and not necessarily of a lack of strength; but he who under such circumstances cannot abandon his aspirations, despite the inadequacy of his means, will only become embittered, and consequently irritable and intolerant. He may possibly seek the cause of his failure in other people; he may even, in a fit of passion, hold the whole world guilty; or he may turn defiantly down secret byways and secluded lanes, or resort to violence. In this way, noble natures, on their road to the most high, may turn savage. Even among those who seek but their own personal moral purity, among monks and anchorites, men are to be found who, undermined and devoured by failure, have become barbarous and hopelessly morbid. There was a spirit full of love and calm belief, full of goodness and infinite tenderness, hostile to all violence and self-deterioration, and abhorring the sight of a soul in bondage. And it was this spirit which manifested itself to Wagner. It hovered over him as a consoling angel, it covered him with its wings, and showed him the true path. At this stage we bring the other side of Wagner’s nature into view: but how shall we describe this other side?
The characters an artist creates are not himself, but the succession of these characters, to which it is clear he is greatly attached, must at all events reveal something of his nature. Now try and recall Rienzi, the Flying Dutchman and Senta, Tannhauser and Elizabeth, Lohengrin and Elsa, Tristan and Marke, Hans Sachs, Woden and Brunhilda,-all these characters are correlated by a secret current of ennobling and broadening morality which flows through them and becomes ever purer and clearer as it progresses. And at this point we enter with respectful reserve into the presence of the most hidden development in Wagner’s own soul. In what other artist do we meet with the like of this, in the same proportion? Schiller’s characters, from the Robbers to Wallenstein and Tell, do indeed pursue an ennobling course, and likewise reveal something of their author’s development; but in Wagner the standard is higher and the distance covered is much greater. In the Nibelungen Ring, for instance, where Brunhilda is awakened by Siegfried, I perceive the most moral music I have ever heard. Here Wagner attains to such a high level of sacred feeling that our mind unconsciously wanders to the glistening ice-and snow-peaks of the Alps, to find a likeness there;- so pure, isolated, inaccessible, chaste, and bathed in love-beams does Nature here display herself, that clouds and tempests-yea, and even the sublime itself-seem to lie beneath her. Now, looking down from this height upon Tannhauser and the Flying Dutchman, we begin to perceive how the man in Wagner was evolved: how restlessly and darkly he began; how tempestuously he strove to gratify his desires, to acquire power and to taste those rapturous delights from which he often fled in disgust; how he wished to throw off a yoke, to forget, to be negative, and to renounce everything. The whole torrent plunged, now into this valley, now into that, and flooded the most secluded chinks and crannies. In the night of these semi-subterranean convulsions a star appeared and glowed high above him with melancholy vehemence; as soon as he recognised it, he named it Fidelity-unselfish fidelity. Why did this star seem to him the brightest and purest of all? What secret meaning had the word “fidelity” to his whole being? For he has graven its image and problems upon all his thoughts and compositions. His works contain almost a complete series of the rarest and most beautiful examples of fidelity: that of brother to sister, of friend to friend, of servant to master; of Elizabeth to Tannhauser, of Senta to the Dutchman, of Elsa to Lohengrin, of Isolde, Kurvenal, and Marke to Tristan, of Brunhilda to the most secret vows of Woden-and many others. It is Wagner’s most personal and most individual experience, which he reveres like a religious mystery, and which he calls Fidelity; he never wearies of breathing it into hundreds of different characters, and of endowing it with the sublimest that in him lies, so overflowing is his gratitude. It is, in short, the recognition of the fact that the two sides of his nature remained faithful to each other, that out of free and unselfish love, the creative, ingenuous, and brilliant side kept loyally abreast of the dark, the intractable, and the tyrannical side.
Chapter III.
The relation of the two constituent forces to each other, and the yielding of the one to the other, was the great requisite by which alone he could remain wholly and truly himself. At the same time, this was the only thing he could not control, and over which he could only keep a watch, while the temptations to infidelity and its threatening dangers beset him more and more. The uncertainty derived therefrom is an overflowing source of suffering for those in process of development. Each of his instincts made constant efforts to attain to unmeasured heights, and each of the capacities he possessed for enjoying life seemed to long to tear itself away from its companions in order to seek satisfaction alone; the greater their exuberance the more terrific was the tumult, and the more bitter the competition between them. In addition, accident and life fired the desire for power and splendour in him; but he was more often tormented by the cruel necessity of having to live at all, while all around him lay obstacles and snares. How is it possible for any one to remain faithful here, to be completely steadfast? This doubt often depressed him, and he expresses it, as an artist expressed his doubt, in artistic forms. Elizabeth, for instance, can only suffer, pray, and die; she saves the fickle and intemperate man by her loyalty, though not for this life. In the path of every true artist, whose lot is cast in these modern days, despair and danger are strewn. He has many means whereby he can attain to honour and might; peace and plenty persistently offer themselves to him, but only in that form recognised by the modern man, which to the straightforward artist is no better than choke-damp. In this temptation, and in the act of resisting it, lie the dangers that threaten him-dangers arising from his disgust at the means modernity offers him of acquiring pleasure and esteem, and from the indignation provoked by the selfish ease of modern society. Imagine Wagner’s filling an official position, as for instance that of bandmaster at public and court theatres, both of which positions he has held: think how he, a serious artist, must have struggled in order to enforce seriousness in those very places which, to meet the demands of modern conventions, are designed with almost systematic frivolity to appeal only to the frivolous. Think how he must have partially succeeded, though only to fail on the whole. How constantly disgust must have been at his heels despite his repeated attempts to flee it, how he failed to find the haven to which he might have repaired, and how he had ever to return to the Bohemians and outlaws of our society, as one of them. If he himself broke loose from any post or position, he rarely found a better one in its stead, while more than once distress was all that his unrest brought him. Thus Wagner changed his associates, his dwelling-place and country, and when we come to comprehend the nature of the circles into which he gravitated, we can hardly realise how he was able to tolerate them for any length of time. The greater half of his past seems to be shrouded in heavy mist; for a long time he appears to have had no general hopes, but only hopes for the morrow, and thus, although he reposed no faith in the future, he was not driven to despair. He must have felt like a nocturnal traveller, broken with fatigue, exasperated from want of sleep, and tramping wearily along beneath a heavy burden, who, far from fearing the sudden approach of death, rather longs for it as something exquisitely charming. His burden, the road and the night-all would disappear! The thought was a temptation to him. Again and again, buoyed up by his temporary hopes, he plunged anew into the turmoil of life, and left all apparatus behind him. But his method of doing this, his lack of moderation in the doing, betrayed what a feeble hold his hopes had upon him; how they were only stimulants to which he had recourse in an extremity. The conflict between his aspirations and his partial or total inability to realise them, tormented him like a thorn in the flesh. Infuriated by constant privations, his imagination lapsed into the dissipated, whenever the state of want was momentarily relieved. Life grew ever more and more complicated for him; but the means and artifices that he discovered in his art as a dramatist became evermore resourceful and daring. Albeit, these were little more than palpable dramatic makeshifts and expedients, which deceived, and were invented, only for the moment. In a flash such means occurred to his mind and were used up. Examined closely and without prepossession, Wagner’s life, to recall one of Schopenhauer’s expressions, might be said to consist largely of comedy, not to mention burlesque. And what the artist’s feelings must have been, conscious as he was, during whole periods of his life, of this undignified element in it,-he who more than any one else, perhaps, breathed freely only in sublime and more than sublime spheres,- the thinker alone can form any idea.
In the midst of this mode of life, a detailed description of which is necessary in order to inspire the amount of pity, awe, and admiration which are its due, he developed a talent for acquiring knowledge, which even in a German-a son of the nation learned above all others-was really extraordinary. And with this talent yet another danger threatened Wagner-a danger more formidable than that involved in a life which was apparently without either a stay or a rule, borne hither and thither by disturbing illusions. From a novice trying his strength, Wagner became a thorough master of music and of the theatre, as also a prolific inventor in the preliminary technical conditions for the execution of art. No one will any longer deny him the glory of having given us the supreme model for lofty artistic execution on a large scale. But he became more than this, and in order so to develop, he, no less than any one else in like circumstances, had to reach the highest degree of culture by virtue of his studies. And wonderfully he achieved this end! It is delightful to follow his progress. From all sides material seemed to come unto him and into him, and the larger and heavier the resulting structure became, the more rigid was the arch of the ruling and ordering thought supporting it. And yet access to the sciences and arts has seldom been made more difficult for any man than for Wagner; so much so that he had almost to break his own road through to them. The reviver of the simple drama, the discoverer of the position due to art in true human society, the poetic interpreter of bygone views of life, the philosopher, the historian, the aesthete and the critic, the master of languages, the mythologist and the myth poet, who was the first to include all these wonderful and beautiful products of primitive times in a single Ring, upon which he engraved the runic characters of his thoughts- what a wealth of knowledge must Wagner have accumulated and commanded, in order to have become all that! And yet this mass of material was just as powerless to impede the action of his will as a matter of detail-however attractive-was to draw his purpose from its path. For the exceptional character of such conduct to be appreciated fully, it should be compared with that of Goethe,- he who, as a student and as a sage, resembled nothing so much as a huge river-basin, which does not pour all its water into the sea, but spends as much of it on its way there, and at its various twists and turns, as it ultimately disgorges at its mouth. True, a nature like Goethe’s not only has, but also engenders, more pleasure than any other; there is more mildness and noble profligacy in it; whereas the tenor and tempo of Wagner’s power at times provoke both fear and flight. But let him fear who will, we shall only be the more courageous, in that we shall be permitted to come face to face with a hero who, in regard to modern culture, “has never learned the meaning of fear.”
But neither has he learned to look for repose in history and philosophy, nor to derive those subtle influences from their study which tend to paralyse action or to soften a man unduly. Neither the creative nor the militant artist in him was ever diverted from his purpose by learning and culture. The moment his constructive powers direct him, history becomes yielding clay in his hands. His attitude towards it then differs from that of every scholar, and more nearly resembles the relation of the ancient Greek to his myths; that is to say, his subject is something he may fashion, and about which he may write verses. He will naturally do this with love and a certain becoming reverence, but with the sovereign right of the creator notwithstanding. And precisely because history is more supple and more variable than a dream to him, he can invest the most individual case with the characteristics of a whole age, and thus attain to a vividness of narrative of which historians are quite incapable. In what work of art, of any kind, has the body and soul of the Middle Ages ever been so thoroughly depicted as in Lohengrin? And will not the Meistersingers continue to acquaint men, even in the remotest ages to come, with the nature of Germany’s soul? Will they not do more than acquaint men of it? Will they not represent its very ripest fruit-the fruit of that spirit which ever wishes to reform and not to overthrow, and which, despite the broad couch of comfort on which it lies, has not forgotten how to endure the noblest discomfort when a worthy and novel deed has to be accomplished?
And it is just to this kind of discomfort that Wagner always felt himself drawn by his study of history and philosophy: in them he not only found arms and coats of mail, but what he felt in their presence above all was the inspiring breath which is wafted from the graves of all great fighters, sufferers, and thinkers. Nothing distinguishes a man more from the general pattern of the age than the use he makes of history and philosophy. According to present views, the former seems to have been allotted the duty of giving modern man breathing-time, in the midst of his panting and strenuous scurry towards his goal, so that he may, for a space, imagine he has slipped his leash. What Montaigne was as an individual amid the turmoil of the Reformation-that is to say, a creature inwardly coming to peace with himself, serenely secluded in himself and taking breath, as his best reader, Shakespeare, understood him, -this is what history is to the modern spirit today. The fact that the Germans, for a whole century, have devoted themselves more particularly to the study of history, only tends to prove that they are the stemming, retarding, and becalming force in the activity of modern society-a circumstance which some, of course, will place to their credit. On the whole, however, it is a dangerous symptom when the mind of a nation turns with preference to the study of the past. It is a sign of flagging strength, of decline and degeneration; it denotes that its people are perilously near to falling victims to the first fever that may happen to be rife -the political fever among others. Now, in the history of modern thought, our scholars are an example of this condition of weakness as opposed to all reformative and revolutionary activity. The mission they have chosen is not of the noblest; they have rather been content to secure smug happiness for their kind, and little more. Every independent and manly step leaves them halting in the background, although it by no means outstrips history. For the latter is possessed of vastly different powers, which only natures like Wagner have any notion of; but it requires to be written in a much more earnest and severe spirit, by much more vigorous students, and with much less optimism than has been the case hitherto. In fact, it requires to be treated quite differently from the way German scholars have treated it until now. In all their works there is a continual desire to embellish, to submit and to be content, while the course of events invariably seems to have their approbation. It is rather the exception for one of them to imply that he is satisfied only because things might have turned out worse; for most of them believe, almost as a matter of course, that everything has been for the best simply because it has only happened once. Were history not always a disguised Christian theodicy, were it written with more justice and fervent feeling, it would be the very last thing on earth to be made to serve the purpose it now serves, namely, that of an opiate against everything subversive and novel. And philosophy is in the same plight: all that the majority demand of it is, that it may teach them to understand approximate facts-very approximate facts-in order that they may then become adapted to them. And even its noblest exponents press its soporific and comforting powers so strongly to the fore, that all lovers of sleep and of loafing must think that their aim and the aim of philosophy are one. For my part, the most important question philosophy has to decide seems to be, how far things have acquired an unalterable stamp and form, and, once this question has been answered, I think it the duty of philosophy unhesitatingly and courageously to proceed with the task of improving that part of the world which has been recognised as still susceptible to change. But genuine philosophers do, as a matter of fact, teach this doctrine themselves, inasmuch as they work at endeavouring to alter the very changeable views of men, and do not keep their opinions to themselves. Genuine disciples of genuine philosophies also teach this doctrine; for, like Wagner, they understand the art of deriving a more decisive and inflexible will from their master’s teaching, rather than an opiate or a sleeping draught. Wagner is most philosophical where he is most powerfully active and heroic. It was as a philosopher that he went, not only through the fire of various philosophical systems without fear, but also through the vapours of science and scholarship, while remaining ever true to his highest self. And it was this highest self which exacted from his versatile spirit works as complete as his were, which bade him suffer and learn, that he might accomplish such works.
Chapter IV.
The history of the development of culture since the time of the Greeks is short enough, when we take into consideration the actual ground it covers, and ignore the periods during which man stood still, went backwards, hesitated or strayed. The Hellenising of the world-and to make this possible, the Orientalising of Hellenism-that double mission of Alexander the Great, still remains the most important event: the old question whether a foreign civilisation may be transplanted is still the problem that the peoples of modern times are vainly endeavouring to solve. The rhythmic play of those two factors against each other is the force that has determined the course of history heretofore. Thus Christianity appears, for instance, as a product of Oriental antiquity, which was thought out and pursued to its ultimate conclusions by men, with almost intemperate thoroughness. As its influence began to decay, the power of Hellenic culture was revived, and we are now experiencing phenomena so strange that they would hang in the air as unsolved problems, if it were not possible, by spanning an enormous gulf of time, to show their relation to analogous phenomena in Hellenistic culture. Thus, between Kant and the Eleatics, Schopenhauer and Empedocles, Aeschylus and Wagner, there is so much relationship, so many things in common, that one is vividly impressed with the very relative nature of all notions of time. It would even seem as if a whole diversity of things were really all of a piece, and that time is only a cloud which makes it hard for our eyes to perceive the oneness of them. In the history of the exact sciences we are perhaps most impressed by the close bond uniting us with the days of Alexander and ancient Greece. The pendulum of history seems merely to have swung back to that point from which it started when it plunged forth into unknown and mysterious distance. The picture represented by our own times is by no means a new one: to the student of history it must always seem as though he were merely in the presence of an old familiar face, the features of which he recognises. In our time the spirit of Greek culture is scattered broadcast. While forces of all kinds are pressing one upon the other, and the fruits of modern art and science are offering themselves as a means of exchange, the pale outline of Hellenism is beginning to dawn faintly in the distance. The earth which, up to the present, has been more than adequately Orientalised, begins to yearn once more for Hellenism. He who wishes to help her in this respect will certainly need to be gifted for speedy action and to have wings on his heels, in order to synthetise the multitudinous and still undiscovered facts of science and the many conflicting divisions of talent so as to reconnoitre and rule the whole enormous field. It is now necessary that a generation of anti-Alexanders should arise, endowed with the supreme strength necessary for gathering up, binding together, and joining the individual threads of the fabric, so as to prevent their being scattered to the four winds. The object is not to cut the Gordian knot of Greek culture after the manner adopted by Alexander, and then to leave its frayed ends fluttering in all directions; it is rather to bind it after it has been loosed. That is our task to-day. In the person of Wagner I recognise one of these anti-Alexanders: he rivets and locks together all that is isolated, weak, or in any way defective; if I may be allowed to use a medical expression, he has an astringent power. And in this respect he is one of the greatest civilising forces of his age. He dominates art, religion, and folklore, yet he is the reverse of a polyhistor or of a mere collecting and classifying spirit; for he constructs with the collected material, and breathes life into it, and is a Simplifier of the Universe. We must not be led away from this idea by comparing the general mission which his genius imposed upon him with the much narrower and more immediate one which we are at present in the habit of associating with the name of Wagner. He is expected to effect a reform in the theatre world; but even supposing he should succeed in doing this, what would then have been done towards the accomplishment of that higher, more distant mission?
But even with this lesser theatrical reform, modern man would also be altered and reformed; for everything is so intimately related in this world, that he who removes even so small a thing as a rivet from the framework shatters and destroys the whole edifice. And what we here assert, with perhaps seeming exaggeration, of Wagner’s activity would hold equally good of any other genuine reform. It is quite impossible to reinstate the art of drama in its purest and highest form without effecting changes everywhere in the customs of the people, in the State, in education, and in social intercourse. When love and justice have become powerful in one department of life, namely in art, they must, in accordance with the law of their inner being, spread their influence around them, and can no more return to the stiff stillness of their former pupal condition. In order even to realise how far the attitude of the arts towards life is a sign of their decline, and how far our theatres are a disgrace to those who build and visit them, everything must be learnt over again, and that which is usual and commonplace should be regarded as something unusual and complicated. An extraordinary lack of clear judgment, a badly-concealed lust of pleasure, of entertainment at any cost, learned scruples, assumed airs of importance, and trifling with the seriousness of art on the part of those who represent it; brutality of appetite and money-grubbing on the part of promoters; the empty-mindedness and thoughtlessness of society, which only thinks of the people in so far as these serve or thwart its purpose, and which attends theatres and concerts without giving a thought to its duties,-all these things constitute the stifling and deleterious atmosphere of our modern art conditions: when, however, people like our men of culture have grown accustomed to it, they imagine that it is a condition of their healthy existence, and would immediately feel unwell if, for any reason, they were compelled to dispense with it for a while. In point of fact, there is but one speedy way of convincing oneself of the vulgarity, weirdness, and confusion of our theatrical institutions, and that is to compare them with those which once flourished in ancient Greece. If we knew nothing about the Greeks, it would perhaps be impossible to assail our present conditions at all, and objections made on the large scale conceived for the first time by Wagner would have been regarded as the dreams of people who could only be at home in outlandish places. “For men as we now find them,” people would have retorted, “art of this modern kind answers the purpose and is fitting- and men have never been different.” But they have been very different, and even now there are men who are far from satisfied with the existing state of affairs-the fact of Bayreuth alone demonstrates this point. Here you will find prepared and initiated spectators, and the emotion of men conscious of being at the very zenith of their happiness, who concentrate their whole being on that happiness in order to strengthen themselves for a higher and more far-reaching purpose. Here you will find the most noble self-abnegation on the part of the artist, and the finest of all spectacles -that of a triumphant creator of works which are in themselves an overflowing treasury of artistic triumphs. Does it not seem almost like a fairy tale, to be able to come face to face with such a personality? Must not they who take any part whatsoever, active or passive, in the proceedings at Bayreuth, already feel altered and rejuvenated, and ready to introduce reforms and to effect renovations in other spheres of life? Has not a haven been found for all wanderers on high and desert seas, and has not peace settled over the face of the waters? Must not he who leaves these spheres of ruling profundity and loneliness for the very differently ordered world with its plains and lower levels, cry continually like Isolde: “Oh, how could I bear it? How can I still bear it?” And should he be unable to endure his joy and his sorrow, or to keep them egotistically to himself, he will avail himself from that time forward of every opportunity of making them known to all. “Where are they who are suffering under the yoke of modern institutions?” he will inquire. “Where are my natural allies, with whom I may struggle against the ever waxing and ever more oppressive pretensions of modern erudition? For at present, at least, we have but one enemy-at present!-and it is that band of aesthetes, to whom the word Bayreuth means the completest rout-they have taken no share in the arrangements, they were rather indignant at the whole movement, or else availed themselves effectively of the deaf-ear policy, which has now become the trusty weapon of all very superior opposition. But this proves that their animosity and knavery were ineffectual in destroying Wagner’s spirit or in hindering the accomplishment of his plans; it proves even more, for it betrays their weakness and the fact that all those who are at present in possession of power will not be able to withstand many more attacks. The time is at hand for those who would conquer and triumph; the vastest empires lie at their mercy, a note of interrogation hangs to the name of all present possessors of power, so far as possession may be said to exist in this respect. Thus educational institutions are said to be decaying, and everywhere individuals are to be found who have secretly deserted them. If only it were possible to invite those to open rebellion and public utterances, who even now are thoroughly dissatisfied with the state of affairs in this quarter! If only it were possible to deprive them of their faint heart and lukewarmness! I am convinced that the whole spirit of modern culture would receive its deadliest blow if the tacit support which these natures give it could in any way be cancelled. Among scholars, only those would remain loyal to the old order of things who had been infected with the political mania or who were literary hacks in any form whatever. The repulsive organisation which derives its strength from the violence and injustice upon which it relies-that is to say, from the State and Society-and which sees its advantage in making the latter ever more evil and unscrupulous,-this structure which without such support would be something feeble and effete, only needs to be despised in order to perish. He who is struggling to spread justice and love among mankind must regard this organisation as the least significant of the obstacles in his way; for he will only encounter his real opponents once he has successfully stormed and conquered modern culture, which is nothing more than their outworks.
For us, Bayreuth is the consecration of the dawn of the combat. No greater injustice could be done to us than to suppose that we are concerned with art alone, as though it were merely a means of healing or stupefying us, which we make use of in order to rid our consciousness of all the misery that still remains in our midst. In the image of this tragic art work at Bayreuth, we see, rather, the struggle of individuals against everything which seems to oppose them with invincible necessity, with power, law, tradition, conduct, and the whole order of things established. Individuals cannot choose a better life than that of holding themselves ready to sacrifice themselves and to die in their fight for love and justice. The gaze which the mysterious eye of tragedy vouchsafes us neither lulls nor paralyses. Nevertheless, it demands silence of us as long as it keeps us in view; for art does not serve the purposes of war, but is merely with us to improve our hours of respite, before and during the course of the contest,-to improve those few moments when, looking back, yet dreaming of the future, we seem to understand the symbolical, and are carried away into a refreshing reverie when fatigue overtakes us. Day and battle dawn together, the sacred shadows vanish, and Art is once more far away from us; but the comfort she dispenses is with men from the earliest hour of day, and never leaves them. Wherever he turns, the individual realises only too clearly his own shortcomings, his insufficiency and his incompetence; what courage would he have left were he not previously rendered impersonal by this consecration! The greatest of all torments harassing him, the conflicting beliefs and opinions among men, the unreliability of these beliefs and opinions, and the unequal character of men’s abilities-all these things make him hanker after art. We cannot be happy so long as everything about us suffers and causes suffering; we cannot be moral so long as the course of human events is determined by violence, treachery, and injustice; we cannot even be wise, so long as the whole of mankind does not compete for wisdom, and does not lead the individual to the most sober and reasonable form of life and knowledge. How, then, would it be possible to endure this feeling of threefold insufficiency if one were not able to recognise something sublime and valuable in one’s struggles, strivings, and defeats, if one did not learn from tragedy how to delight in the rhythm of the great passions, and in their victim? Art is certainly no teacher or educator of practical conduct: the artist is never in this sense an instructor or adviser; the things after which a tragic hero strives are not necessarily worth striving after. As in a dream so in art, the valuation of things only holds good while we are under its spell. What we, for the time being, regard as so worthy of effort, and what makes us sympathise with the tragic hero when he prefers death to renouncing the object of his desire, this can seldom retain the same value and energy when transferred to everyday life: that is why art is the business of the man who is recreating himself. The strife it reveals to us is a simplification of life’s struggle; its problems are abbreviations of the infinitely complicated phenomena of man’s actions and volitions. But from this very fact-that it is the reflection, so to speak, of a simpler world, a more rapid solution of the riddle of life-art derives its greatness and indispensability. No one who suffers from life can do without this reflection, just as no one can exist without sleep. The more difficult the science of natural laws becomes, the more fervently we yearn for the image of this simplification, if only for an instant; and the greater becomes the tension between each man’s general knowledge of things and his moral and spiritual faculties. Art is with us to prevent the bow from snapping.
The individual must be consecrated to something impersonal-that is the aim of tragedy: he must forget the terrible anxiety which death and time tend to create in him; for at any moment of his life, at any fraction of time in the whole of his span of years, something sacred may cross his path which will amply compensate him for all his struggles and privations. This means having a sense for the tragic. And if all mankind must perish some day-and who could question this! -it has been given its highest aim for the future, namely, to increase and to live in such unity that it may confront its final extermination as a whole, with one spirit-with a common sense of the tragic: in this one aim all the ennobling influences of man lie locked; its complete repudiation by humanity would be the saddest blow which the soul of the philanthropist could receive. That is how I feel in the matter! There is but one hope and guarantee for the future of man, and that is that his sense for the tragic may not die out. If he ever completely lost it, an agonised cry, the like of which has never been heard, would have to be raised all over the world; for there is no more blessed joy than that which consists in knowing what we know-how tragic thought was born again on earth. For this joy is thoroughly impersonal and general: it is the wild rejoicing of humanity, anent the hidden relationship and progress of all that is human.
Chapter V.
Wagner concentrated upon life, past and present, the light of an intelligence strong enough to embrace the most distant regions in its rays. That is why he is a simplifier of the universe; for the simplification of the universe is only possible to him whose eye has been able to master the immensity and wildness of an apparent chaos, and to relate and unite those things which before had lain hopelessly asunder. Wagner did this by discovering a connection between two objects which seemed to exist apart from each other as though in separate spheres-that between music and life, and similarly between music and the drama. Not that he invented or was the first to create this relationship, for they must always have existed and have been noticeable to all; but, as is usually the case with a great problem, it is like a precious stone which thousands stumble over before one finally picks it up. Wagner asked himself the meaning of the fact that an art such as music should have become so very important a feature of the lives of modern men. It is not necessary to think meanly of life in order to suspect a riddle behind this question. On the contrary, when all the great forces of existence are duly considered, and struggling life is regarded as striving mightily after conscious freedom and independence of thought, only then does music seem to be a riddle in this world. Should one not answer: Music could not have been born in our time? What then does its presence amongst us signify? An accident? A single great artist might certainly be an accident, but the appearance of a whole group of them, such as the history of modern music has to show, a group only once before equalled on earth, that is to say in the time of the Greeks,-a circumstance of this sort leads one to think that perhaps necessity rather than accident is at the root of the whole phenomenon. The meaning of this necessity is the riddle which Wagner answers.
He was the first to recognise an evil which is as widespread as civilisation itself among men; language is everywhere diseased, and the burden of this terrible disease weighs heavily upon the whole of man’s development. Inasmuch as language has retreated ever more and more from its true province-the expression of strong feelings, which it was once able to convey in all their simplicity-and has always had to strain after the practically impossible achievement of communicating the reverse of feeling, that is to say thought, its strength has become so exhausted by this excessive extension of its duties during the comparatively short period of modern civilisation, that it is no longer able to perform even that function which alone justifies its existence, to wit, the assisting of those who suffer, in communicating with each other concerning the sorrows of existence. Man can no longer make his misery known unto others by means of language; hence he cannot really express himself any longer. And under these conditions, which are only vaguely felt at present, language has gradually become a force in itself which with spectral arms coerces and drives humanity where it least wants to go. As soon as they would fain understand one another and unite for a common cause, the craziness of general concepts, and even of the ring of modern words, lays hold of them. The result of this inability to communicate with one another is that every product of their co-operative action bears the stamp of discord, not only because it fails to meet their real needs, but because of the very emptiness of those all-powerful words and notions already mentioned. To the misery already at hand, man thus adds the curse of convention-that is to say, the agreement between words and actions without an agreement between the feelings. Just as, during the decline of every art, a point is reached when the morbid accumulation of its means and forms attains to such tyrannical proportions that it oppresses the tender souls of artists and converts these into slaves, so now, in the period of the decline of language, men have become the slaves of words. Under this yoke no one is able to show himself as he is, or to express himself artlessly, while only few are able to preserve their individuality in their fight against a culture which thinks to manifest its success, not by the fact that it approaches definite sensations and desires with the view of educating them, but by the fact that it involves the individual in the snare of “definite notions,” and teaches him to think correctly: as if there were any value in making a correctly thinking and reasoning being out of man, before one has succeeded in making him a creature that feels correctly. If now the strains of our German masters’ music burst upon a mass of mankind sick to this extent, what is really the meaning of these strains? Only correct feeling, the enemy of all convention, of all artificial estrangement and misunderstandings between man and man: this music signifies a return to nature, and at the same time a purification and remodelling of it; for the need of such a return took shape in the souls of the most loving of men, and, through their art, nature transformed into love makes its voice heard.
Let us regard this as one of Wagner’s answers to the question, What does music mean in our time? for he has a second. The relation between music and life is not merely that existing between one kind of language and another; it is, besides, the relation between the perfect world of sound and that of sight. Regarded merely as a spectacle, and compared with other and earlier manifestations of human life, the existence of modern man is characterised by indescribable indigence and exhaustion, despite the unspeakable garishness at which only the superficial observer rejoices. If one examines a little more closely the impression which this vehement and kaleidoscopic play of colours makes upon one, does not the whole seem to blaze with the shimmer and sparkle of innumerable little stones borrowed from former civilisations? Is not everything one sees merely a complex of inharmonious bombast, aped gesticulations, arrogant superficiality?-a ragged suit of motley for the naked and the shivering? A seeming dance of joy enjoined upon a sufferer? Airs of overbearing pride assumed by one who is sick to the backbone? And the whole moving with such rapidity and confusion that it is disguised and masked- sordid impotence, devouring dissension, assiduous ennui, dishonest distress! The appearance of present-day humanity is all appearance, and nothing else: in what he now represents man himself has become obscured and concealed; and the vestiges of the creative faculty in art, which still cling to such countries as France and Italy, are all concentrated upon this one task of concealing. Wherever form is still in demand in society, conversation, literary style, or the relations between governments, men have unconsciously grown to believe that it is adequately met by a kind of agreeable dissimulation, quite the reverse of genuine form conceived as a necessary relation between the proportions of a figure, having no concern whatever with the notions “agreeable” or “disagreeable,” simply because it is necessary and not optional. But even where form is not openly exacted by civilised people, there is no greater evidence of this requisite relation of proportions; a striving after the agreeable dissimulation, already referred to, is on the contrary noticeable, though it is never so successful even if it be more eager than in the first instance. How far this dissimulation is agreeable at times, and why it must please everybody to see how modern men at least endeavour to dissemble, every one is in a position to judge, according to, the extent to which he himself may happen to be modern. “Only galley slaves know each other,” says Tasso, “and if we mistake others, it is only out of courtesy, and with the hope that they, in their turn, should mistake us.”
Now, in this world of forms and intentional misunderstandings, what purpose is served by the appearance of souls overflowing with music? They pursue the course of grand and unrestrained rhythm with noble candour-with a passion more than personal; they glow with the mighty and peaceful fire of music, which wells up to the light of day from their unexhausted depths-and all this to what purpose?
By means of these souls music gives expression to the longing that it feels for the company of its natural ally, gymnastics-that is to say, its necessary form in the order of visible phenomena. In its search and craving for this ally, it becomes the arbiter of the whole visible world and the world of mere lying appearance of the present day. This is Wagner’s second answer to the question, What is the meaning of music in our times? “Help me,” he cries to all who have ears to hear, “help me to discover that culture of which my music, as the rediscovered language of correct feeling, seems to foretell the existence. Bear in mind that the soul of music now wishes to acquire a body, that, by means of you all, it would find its way to visibleness in movements, deeds, institutions, and customs!” There are some men who understand this summons, and their number will increase; they have also understood, for the first time, what it means to found the State upon music. It is something that the ancient Hellenes not only understood but actually insisted upon; and these enlightened creatures would just as soon have sentenced the modern State to death as modern men now condemn the Church. The road to such a new though not unprecedented goal would lead to this: that we should be compelled to acknowledge where the worst faults of our educational system lie, and why it has failed hitherto to elevate us out of barbarity: in reality, it lacks the stirring and creative soul of music; its requirements and arrangements are moreover the product of a period in which the music, to which We seem to attach so much importance, had not yet been born. Our education is the most antiquated factor of our present conditions, and it is so more precisely in regard to the one new educational force by which it makes men of to-day in advance of those of bygone centuries, or by which it would make them in advance of their remote ancestors, provided only they did not persist so rashly in hurrying forward in meek response to the scourge of the moment. Through not having allowed the soul of music to lodge within them, they have no notion of gymnastics in the Greek and Wagnerian sense; and that is why their creative artists are condemned to despair, as long as they wish to dispense with music as a guide in a new world of visible phenomena. Talent may develop as much as may be desired: it either comes too late or too soon, and at all events out of season; for it is in the main superfluous and abortive, just as even the most perfect and the highest products of earlier times which serve modern artists as models are superfluous and abortive, and add not a stone to the edifice already begun. If their innermost consciousness can perceive no new forms, but only the old ones belonging to the past, they may certainly achieve something for history, but not for life; for they are already dead before having expired. He, however, who feels genuine and fruitful life in him, which at present can only be described by the one term “Music,” could he allow himself to be deceived for one moment into nursing solid hopes by this something which exhausts all its energy in producing figures, forms, and styles? He stands above all such vanities, and as little expects to meet with artistic wonders outside his ideal world of sound as with great writers bred on our effete and discoloured language. Rather than lend an ear to illusive consolations, he prefers to turn his unsatisfied gaze stoically upon our modern world, and if his heart be not warm enough to feel pity, let it at least feel bitterness and hate! It were better for him to show anger and scorn than to take cover in spurious contentment or steadily to drug himself, as our “friends of art” are wont to do. But if he can do more than condemn and despise, if he is capable of loving, sympathising, and assisting in the general work of construction, he must still condemn, notwithstanding, in order to prepare the road for his willing soul. In order that music may one day exhort many men to greater piety and make them privy to her highest aims, an end must first be made to the whole of the pleasure-seeking relations which men now enjoy with such a sacred art. Behind all our artistic pastimes- theatres, museums, concerts, and the like-that aforementioned “friend of art” is to be found, and he it is who must be suppressed: the favour he now finds at the hands of the State must be changed into oppression; public opinion, which lays such particular stress upon the training of this love of art, must be routed by better judgment. Meanwhile we must reckon the declared enemy of art as our best and most useful ally; for the object of his animosity is precisely art as understood by the “friend of art,"-he knows of no other kind! Let him be allowed to call our “friend of art” to account for the nonsensical waste of money occasioned by the building of his theatres and public monuments, the engagement of his celebrated singers and actors, and the support of his utterly useless schools of art and picture-galleries-to say nothing of all the energy, time, and money which every family squanders in pretended “artistic interests.” Neither hunger nor satiety is to be noticed here, but a dead-and-alive game is played-with the semblance of each, a game invented by the idle desire to produce an effect and to deceive others. Or, worse still, art is taken more or less seriously, and then it is itself expected to provoke a kind of hunger and craving, and to fulfil its mission in this artificially induced excitement. It is as if people were afraid of sinking beneath the weight of their loathing and dulness, and invoked every conceivable evil spirit to scare them and drive them about like wild cattle. Men hanker after pain, anger, hate, the flush of passion, sudden flight, and breathless suspense, and they appeal to the artist as the conjurer of this demoniacal host. In the spiritual economy of our cultured classes art has become a spurious or ignominious and undignified need-a nonentity or a something evil. The superior and more uncommon artist must be in the throes of a bewildering nightmare in order to be blind to all this, and like a ghost, diffidently and in a quavering voice, he goes on repeating beautiful words which he declares descend to him from higher spheres, but whose sound he can hear only very indistinctly. The artist who happens to be moulded according to the modern pattern, however, regards the dreamy gropings and hesitating speech of his nobler colleague with contempt, and leads forth the whole brawling mob of assembled passions on a leash in order to let them loose upon modern men as he may think fit. For these modern creatures wish rather to be hunted down, wounded, and torn to shreds, than to live alone with themselves in solitary calm. Alone with oneself!-this thought terrifies the modern soul; it is his one anxiety, his one ghastly fear.
When I watch the throngs that move and linger about the streets of a very populous town, and notice no other expression in their faces than one of hunted stupor, I can never help commenting to myself upon the misery of their condition. For them all, art exists only that they may be still more wretched, torpid, insensible, or even more flurried and covetous. For incorrect feeling governs and drills them unremittingly, and does not even give them time to become aware of their misery. Should they wish to speak, convention whispers their cue to them, and this makes them forget what they originally intended to say; should they desire to understand one another, their comprehension is maimed as though by a spell: they declare that to be their joy which in reality is but their doom, and they proceed to collaborate in wilfully bringing about their own damnation. Thus they have become transformed into perfectly and absolutely different creatures, and reduced to the state of abject slaves of incorrect feeling.
Chapter VI.
I shall only give two instances showing how utterly the sentiment of our time has been perverted, and how completely unconscious the present age is of this perversion. Formerly financiers were looked down upon with honest scorn, even though they were recognised as needful; for it was generally admitted that every society must have its viscera. Now, however, they are the ruling power in the soul of modern humanity, for they constitute the most covetous portion thereof. In former times people were warned especially against taking the day or the moment too seriously: the nil admirari was recommended and the care of things eternal. Now there is but one kind of seriousness left in the modern mind, and it is limited to the news brought by the newspaper and the telegraph. Improve each shining hour, turn it to some account and judge it as quickly as possible!-one would think modern men had but one virtue left-presence of mind. Unfortunately, it much more closely resembles the omnipresence of disgusting and insatiable cupidity, and spying inquisitiveness become universal. For the question is whether mind is present at all to-day;-but we shall leave this problem for future judges to solve; they, at least, are bound to pass modern men through a sieve. But that this age is vulgar, even we can see now, and it is so because it reveres precisely what nobler ages contemned. If, therefore, it loots all the treasures of bygone wit and wisdom, and struts about in this richest of rich garments, it only proves its sinister consciousness of its own vulgarity in so doing; for it does not don this garb for warmth, but merely in order to mystify its surroundings. The desire to dissemble and to conceal himself seems stronger than the need of protection from the cold in modern man. Thus scholars and philosophers of the age do not have recourse to Indian and Greek wisdom in order to become wise and peaceful: the only purpose of their work seems to be to earn them a fictitious reputation for learning in their own time. The naturalists endeavour to classify the animal outbreaks of violence, ruse and revenge, in the present relations between nations and individual men, as immutable laws of nature. Historians are anxiously engaged in proving that every age has its own particular right and special conditions,- with the view of preparing the groundwork of an apology for the day that is to come, when our generation will be called to judgment. The science of government, of race, of commerce, and of jurisprudence, all have that preparatorily apologetic character now; yea, it even seems as though the small amount of intellect which still remains active to-day, and is not used up by the great mechanism of gain and power, has as its sole task the defending-and excusing of the present
Against what accusers? one asks, surprised.
Against its own bad conscience.
And at this point we plainly discern the task assigned to modern art-that of stupefying or intoxicating, of lulling to sleep or bewildering. By hook or by crook to make conscience unconscious! To assist the modern soul over the sensation of guilt, not to lead it back to innocence! And this for the space of moments only! To defend men against themselves, that their inmost heart may be silenced, that they may turn a deaf ear to its voice! The souls of those few who really feel the utter ignominy of this mission and its terrible humiliation of art, must be filled to the brim with sorrow and pity, but also with a new and overpowering yearning. He who would fain emancipate art, and reinstall its sanctity, now desecrated, must first have freed himself from all contact with modern souls; only as an innocent being himself can he hope to discover the innocence of art, for he must be ready to perform the stupendous tasks of self-purification and self-consecration. If he succeeded, if he were ever able to address men from out his enfranchised soul and by means of his emancipated art, he would then find himself exposed to the greatest of dangers and involved in the most appalling of struggles. Man would prefer to tear him and his art to pieces, rather than acknowledge that he must die of shame in presence of them. It is just possible that the emancipation of art is the only ray of hope illuminating the future, an event intended only for a few isolated souls, while the many remain satisfied to gaze into the flickering and smoking flame of their art and can endure to do so. For they do not want to be enlightened, but dazzled. They rather hate light -more particularly when it is thrown on themselves.
That is why they evade the new messenger of light; but he follows them-the love which gave him birth compels him to follow them and to reduce them to submission. “Ye must go through my mysteries,” he cries to them; “ye need to be purified and shaken by them. Dare to submit to this for your own salvation, and abandon the gloomily lighted corner of life and nature which alone seems familiar to you. I lead you into a kingdom which is also real, and when I lead you out of my cell into your daylight, ye will be able to judge which life is more real, which, in fact, is day and which night. Nature is much richer, more powerful, more blessed and more terrible below the surface; ye cannot divine this from the way in which ye live. O that ye yourselves could learn to become natural again, and then suffer yourselves to be transformed through nature, and into her, by the charm of my ardour and love!”
It is the voice of Wagner’s art which thus appeals to men. And that we, the children of a wretched age, should be the first to hear it, shows how deserving of pity this age must be: it shows, moreover, that real music is of a piece with fate and primitive law; for it is quite impossible to attribute its presence amongst us precisely at the present time to empty and meaningless chance. Had Wagner been an accident, he would certainly have been crushed by the superior strength of the other elements in the midst of which he was placed, out in the coming of Wagner there seems to have been a necessity which both justifies it and makes it glorious. Observed from its earliest beginnings, the development of his art constitutes a most magnificent spectacle, and-even though it was attended with great suffering-reason, law, and intention mark its course throughout. Under the charm of such a spectacle the observer will be led to take pleasure even in this painful development itself, and will regard it as fortunate. He will see how everything necessarily contributes to the welfare and benefit of talent and a nature foreordained, however severe the trials may be through which it may have to pass. He will realise how every danger gives it more heart, and every triumph more prudence; how it partakes of poison and sorrow and thrives upon them. The mockery and perversity of the surrounding world only goad and spur it on the more. Should it happen to go astray, it but returns from its wanderings and exile loaded with the most precious spoil; should it chance to slumber, “it does but recoup its strength.” It tempers the body itself and makes it tougher; it does not consume life, however long it lives; it rules over man like a pinioned passion, and allows him to fly just in the nick of time, when his foot has grown weary in the sand or has been lacerated by the stones on his way. It can do nought else but impart; every one must share in its work, and it is no stinted giver. When it is repulsed it is but more prodigal in its gifts; ill used by those it favours, it does but reward them with the richest treasures it possesses,-and, according to the oldest and most recent experience, its favoured ones have never been quite worthy of its gifts. That is why the nature foreordained, through which music expresses itself to this world of appearance, is one of the most mysterious things under the sun-an abyss in which strength and goodness lie united, a bridge between self and non-self. Who would undertake to name the object of its existence with any certainty?-even supposing the sort of purpose which it would be likely to have could be divined at all. But a most blessed foreboding leads one to ask whether it is possible for the grandest things to exist for the purpose of the meanest, the greatest talent for the benefit of the smallest, the loftiest virtue and holiness for the sake of the defective and faulty? Should real music make itself heard, because mankind of all creatures least deserves to hear it, though it perhaps need it most? If one ponder over the transcendental and wonderful character of this possibility, and turn from these considerations to look back on life, a light will then be seen to ascend, however dark and misty it may have seemed a moment before.
Chapter VII
It is quite impossible otherwise: the observer who is confronted with a nature such as Wagner’s must, willy-nilly, turn his eyes from time to time upon himself, upon his insignificance and frailty, and ask himself, What concern is this of thine? Why, pray, art thou there at all? Maybe he will find no answer to these questions, in which case he will remain estranged and confounded, face to face with his own personality. Let it then suffice him that he has experienced this feeling; let the fact that he has felt strange and embarrassed in the presence of his own soul be the answer to his question For it is precisely by virtue of this feeling that he shows the most powerful manifestation of life in Wagner-the very kernel of his strength-that demoniacal magnetism and gift of imparting oneself to others, which is peculiar to his nature, and by which it not only conveys itself to other beings, but also absorbs other beings into itself; thus attaining to its greatness by giving and by taking. As the observer is apparently subject to Wagner’s exuberant and prodigally generous nature, he partakes of its strength, and thereby becomes formidable through him and to him. And every one who critically examines himself knows that a certain mysterious antagonism is necessary to the process of mutual study. Should his art lead us to experience all that falls to the lot of a soul engaged upon a journey, i.e. feeling sympathy with others and sharing their fate, and seeing the world through hundreds of different eyes, we are then able, from such a distance, and under such strange influences, to contemplate him, once we have lived his life. We then feel with the utmost certainty that in Wagner the whole visible world desires to be spiritualised, absorbed, and lost in the world of sounds. In Wagner, too, the world of sounds seeks to manifest itself as a phenomenon for the sight; it seeks, as it were, to incarnate itself. His art always leads him into two distinct directions, from the world of the play of sound to the mysterious and yet related world of visible things, and vice versa. He is continually forced-and the observer with him-to re-translate the visible into spiritual and primeval life, and likewise to perceive the most hidden interstices of the soul as something concrete and to lend it a visible body. This constitutes the nature of the dithyrambic dramatist, if the meaning given to the term includes also the actor, the poet, and the musician; a conception necessarily borrowed from Æschylus and the contemporary Greek artists-the only perfect examples of the dithyrambic dramatist before Wagner. If attempts have been made to trace the most wonderful developments to inner obstacles or deficiencies, if, for instance, in Goethe’s case, poetry was merely the refuge of a foiled talent for painting; if one may speak of Schiller’s dramas as of vulgar eloquence directed into uncommon channels; if Wagner himself tries to account for the development of music among the Germans by showing that, inasmuch as they are devoid of the entrancing stimulus of a natural gift for singing, they were compelled to take up instrumental music with the same profound seriousness as that with which their reformers took up Christianity,-if, on the same principle, it were sought to associate Wagner’s development with an inner barrier of the same kind, it would then be necessary to recognise in him a primitive dramatic talent, which had to renounce all possibility of satisfying its needs by the quickest and most methods, and which found its salvation and its means of expression in drawing all arts to it for one great dramatic display. But then one would also have to assume that the most powerful musician, owing to his despair at having to appeal to people who were either only semi-musical or not musical at all, violently opened a road for himself to the other arts, in order to acquire that capacity for diversely communicating himself to others, by which he compelled them to understand him, by which he compelled the masses to understand him. However the development of the born dramatist may be pictured, in his ultimate expression he is a being free from all inner barriers and voids: the real, emancipated artist cannot help himself, he must think in the spirit of all the arts at once, as the mediator and intercessor between apparently separated spheres, the one who reinstalls the unity and wholeness of the artistic faculty, which cannot be divined or reasoned out, but can only be revealed by deeds themselves. But he in whose presence this deed is performed will be overcome by its gruesome and seductive charm: in a flash he will be confronted with a power which cancels both resistance and reason, and makes every detail of life appear irrational and incomprehensible. Carried away from himself, he seems to be suspended in a mysterious fiery element; he ceases to understand himself, the standard of everything has fallen from his hands; everything stereotyped and fixed begins to totter; every object seems to acquire a strange colour and to tell us its tale by means of new symbols;-one would need to be a Plato in order to discover, amid this confusion of delight and fear, how he accomplishes the feat, and to say to the dramatist: “Should a man come into our midst who possessed sufficient knowledge to simulate or imitate anything, we would honour him as something wonderful and holy; we would even anoint him and adorn his brow with a sacred diadem; but we would urge him to leave our circle for another, notwithstanding.” It may be that a member of the Platonic community would have been able to chasten himself to such conduct: we, however, who live in a very different community, long for, and earnestly desire, the charmer to come to us, although we may fear him already,-and we only desire his presence in order that our society and the mischievous reason and might of which it is the incarnation may be confuted. A state of human civilisation, of human society, morality, order, and general organisation which would be able to dispense with the services of an imitative artist or mimic, is not perhaps so utterly inconceivable; but this Perhaps is probably the most daring that has ever been posited, and is equivalent to the gravest expression of doubt. The only man who ought to be at liberty to speak of such a possibility is he who could beget, and have the presentiment of, the highest phase of all that is to come, and who then, like Faust, would either be obliged to turn blind, or be permitted to become so. For we have no right to this blindness; whereas Plato, after he had cast that one glance into the ideal Hellenic, had the right to be blind to all Hellenism. For this reason, we others are in much greater need of art; because it was in the presence of the realistic that our eyes began to see, and we require the complete dramatist in order that he may relieve us, if only for an hour or so, of the insufferable tension arising from our knowledge of the chasm which lies between our capabilities and the duties we have to perform. With him we ascend to the highest pinnacle of feeling, and only then do we fancy we have returned to nature’s unbounded freedom, to the actual realm of liberty. From this point of vantage we can see ourselves and our fellows emerge as something sublime from an immense mirage, and we see the deep meaning in our struggles, in our victories and defeats; we begin to find pleasure in the rhythm of passion and in its victim in the hero’s every footfall we distinguish the hollow echo of death, and in its proximity we realise the greatest charm of life: thus transformed into tragic men, we return again to life with comfort in our souls. We are conscious of a new feeling of security, as if we had found a road leading out of the greatest dangers, excesses, and ecstasies, back to the limited and the familiar: there where our relations with our fellows seem to partake of a superior benevolence, and are at all events more noble than they were. For here, everything seemingly serious and needful, which appears to lead to a definite goal, resembles only detached fragments when compared with the path we ourselves have trodden, even in our dreams,- detached fragments of that complete and grand experience whereof we cannot even think without a thrill. Yes, we shall even fall into danger and be tempted to take life too easily, simply because in art we were in such deadly earnest concerning it, as Wagner says somewhere anent certain incidents in his own life. For if we who are but the spectators and not the creators of this display of dithyrambic dramatic art, can almost imagine a dream to be more real than the actual experiences of our wakeful hours, how much more keenly must the creator realise this contrast! There he stands amid all the clamorous appeals and importunities of the day, and of the necessities of life; in the midst of Society and State-and as what does he stand there? Maybe he is the only wakeful one, the only being really and truly conscious, among a host of confused and tormented sleepers, among a multitude of deluded and suffering people. He may even feel like a victim of chronic insomnia, and fancy himself obliged to bring his clear, sleepless, and conscious life into touch with somnambulists and ghostly well-intentioned creatures. Thus everything that others regard as commonplace strikes him as weird, and he is tempted to meet the whole phenomenon with haughty mockery. But how peculiarly this feeling is crossed, when another force happens to join his quivering pride, the craving of the heights for the depths, the affectionate yearning for earth, for happiness and for fellowship-then, when he thinks of all he misses as a hermit-creator, he feels as though he ought to descend to the earth like a god, and bear all that is weak, human, and lost, “in fiery arms up to heaven,” so as to obtain love and no longer worship only, and to be able to lose himself completely in his love. But it is just this contradiction which is the miraculous fact in the soul of the dithyrambic dramatist, and if his nature can be understood at all, surely it must be here. For his creative moments in art occur when the antagonism between his feelings is at its height and when his proud astonishment and wonder at the world combine with the ardent desire to approach that same world as a lover. The glances he then bends towards the earth are always rays of sunlight which “draw up water,” form mist, and gather storm-clouds. Clear-sighted and prudent, loving and unselfish at the same time, his glance is projected downwards; and all things that are illumined by this double ray of light, nature conjures to discharge their strength, to reveal their most hidden secret, and this through bashfulness. It is more than a mere figure of speech to say that he surprised Nature with that glance, that he caught her naked; that is why she would conceal her shame by seeming precisely the reverse. What has hitherto been invisible, the inner life, seeks its salvation in the region of the visible; what has hitherto been only visible, repairs to the dark ocean of sound: thus Nature, in trying to conceal herself, unveils the character of her contradictions. In a dance, wild, rhythmic and gliding, and with ecstatic movements, the born dramatist makes known something of what is going on within him, of what is taking place in nature: the dithyrambic quality of his movements speaks just as eloquently of quivering comprehension and of powerful penetration as of the approach of love and self-renunciation. Intoxicated speech follows the course of this rhythm; melody resounds coupled with speech, and in its turn melody projects its sparks into the realm of images and ideas. A dream-apparition, like and unlike the image of Nature and her wooer, hovers forward; it condenses into more human shapes; it spreads out in response to its heroically triumphant will, and to a most delicious collapse and cessation of will:-thus tragedy is born; thus life is presented with its grandest knowledge- that of tragic thought; thus, at last, the greatest charmer and benefactor among mortals-the dithyrambic dramatist-is evolved.
Chapter VIII
Wagner’s actual life-that is to say, the gradual evolution of the dithyrambic dramatist in him- was at the same time an uninterrupted struggle with himself, a struggle which never ceased until his evolution was complete. His fight with the opposing world was grim and ghastly, only because it was this same world-this alluring enemy-which he heard speaking out of his own heart, and because he nourished a violent demon in his breast-the demon of resistance. When the ruling idea of his life gained ascendancy over his mind-the idea that drama is, of all arts, the one that can exercise the greatest amount of influence over the world-it aroused the most active emotions in his whole being. It gave him no very clear or luminous decision, at first, as to what was to be done and desired in the future; for the idea then appeared merely as a form of temptation-that is to say, as the expression of his gloomy, selfish, and insatiable will, eager for power and glory. Influence-the greatest amount of influence-how? over whom?-these were henceforward the questions and problems which did not cease to engage his head and his heart. He wished to conquer and triumph as no other artist had ever done before, and, if possible, to reach that height of tyrannical omnipotence at one stroke for which all his instincts secretly craved. With a jealous and cautious eye, he took stock of everything successful, and examined with special care all that upon which this influence might be brought to bear. With the magic sight of the dramatist, which scans souls as easily as the most familiar book, he scrutinised the nature of the spectator and the listener, and although he was often perturbed by the discoveries he made, he very quickly found means wherewith he could enthral them. These means were ever within his reach: everything that moved him deeply he desired and could also produce; at every stage in his career he understood just as much of his predecessors as he himself was able to create, and he never doubted that he would be able to do what they had done. In this respect his nature is perhaps more presumptuous even than Goethe’s, despite the fact that the latter said of himself: “I always thought I had mastered everything; and even had I been crowned king, I should have regarded the honour as thoroughly deserved.” Wagner’s ability. his taste and his aspirations-all of which have ever been as closely related as key to lock-grew and attained to freedom together; but there was a time when it was not so. What did he care about the feeble but noble and egotistically lonely feeling which that friend of art fosters, who, blessed with a literary and aesthetic education, takes his stand far from the common mob! But those violent spiritual tempests which are created by the crowd when under the influence of certain climactic passages of dramatic song, that sudden bewildering ecstasy of the emotions, thoroughly honest and selfless-they were but echoes of his own experiences and sensations, and filled him with glowing hope for the greatest possible power and effect. Thus he recognised grand opera as the means whereby he might express his ruling thoughts; towards it his passions impelled him; his eyes turned in the direction of its home. The larger portion of his life, his most daring wanderings, and his plans, studies, sojourns, and acquaintances are only to be explained by an appeal to these passions and the opposition of the outside world, which the poor, restless, passionately ingenuous German artist had to face. Another artist than he knew better how to become master of this calling, and now that it has gradually become known by means of what ingenious artifices of all kinds Meyerbeer succeeded in preparing and achieving every one of his great successes, and how scrupulously the sequence of “effects” was taken into account in the opera itself, people will begin to understand how bitterly Wagner was mortified when his eyes were opened to the tricks of the metier which were indispensable to a great public success. I doubt whether there has ever been another great artist in history who began his career with such extraordinary illusions and who so unsuspectingly and sincerely fell in with the most revolting form of artistic trickery. And yet the way in which he proceeded partook of greatness and was therefore extraordinarily fruitful. For when he perceived his error, despair made him understand the meaning of modern success, of the modern public, and the whole prevaricating spirit of modern art. And while becoming the critic of “effect,” indications of his own purification began to quiver through him. It seems as if from that time forward the spirit of music spoke to him with an unprecedented spiritual charm. As though he had just risen from a long illness and had for the first time gone into the open, he scarcely trusted his hand and his eye, and seemed to grope along his way. Thus it was an almost delightful surprise to him to find that he was still a musician and an artist, and perhaps then only for the first time.
Every subsequent stage in Wagner’s development may be distinguished thus, that the two fundamental powers of his nature drew ever more closely together: the aversion of the one to the other lessened, the higher self no longer condescended to serve its more violent and baser brother; it loved him and felt compelled to serve him. The tenderest and purest thing is ultimately-that is to say, at the highest stage of its evolution- always associated with the mightiest; the storming instincts pursue their course as before, but along different roads, in the direction of the higher self; and this in its turn descends to earth and finds its likeness in everything earthly. If it were possible, on this principle, to speak of the final aims and unravelments of that evolution, and to remain intelligible, it might also be possible to discover the graphic terms with which to describe the long interval preceding that last development; but I doubt whether the first achievement is possible at all, and do not therefore attempt the second. The limits of the interval separating the preceding and the subsequent ages will be described historically in two sentences: Wagner was the revolutionist of society; Wagner recognised the only artistic element that ever existed hitherto-the poetry of the people. The ruling idea which in a new form and mightier than it had ever been, obsessed Wagner, after he had overcome his share of despair and repentance, led him to both conclusions. Influence, the greatest possible amount of influence to be exercised by means of the stage! -but over whom? He shuddered when he thought of those whom he had, until then, sought to influence. His experience led him to realise the utterly ignoble position which art and the artist adorn; how a callous and hard-hearted community that calls itself the good, but which is really the evil, reckons art and the artist among its slavish retinue, and keeps them both in order to minister to its need of deception. Modern art is a luxury; he saw this, and understood that it must stand or fall with the luxurious society of which it forms but a part. This society had but one idea, to use its power as hard-heartedly and as craftily as possible in order to render the impotent-the people-ever more and more serviceable, base and unpopular, and to rear the modern workman out of them. It also robbed them of the greatest and purest things which their deepest needs led them to create, and through which they meekly expressed the genuine and unique art within their soul: their myths, songs, dances, and their discoveries in the department of language, in order to distil therefrom a voluptuous antidote against the fatigue and boredom of its existence- modern art. How this society came into being, how it learned to draw new strength for itself from the seemingly antagonistic spheres of power, and how, for instance, decaying Christianity allowed itself to be used, under the cover of half measures and subterfuges, as a shield against the masses and as a support of this society and its possessions, and finally how science and men of learning pliantly consented to become its drudges-all this Wagner traced through the ages, only to be convulsed with loathing at the end of his researches. Through his compassion for the people, he became a revolutionist. From that time forward he loved them and longed for them, as he longed for his art; for, alas! in them alone, in this fast disappearing, scarcely recognisable body, artificially held aloof, he now saw the only spectators and listeners worthy and fit for the power of his masterpieces, as he pictured them. Thus his thoughts concentrated themselves upon the question, How do the people come into being? How are they resuscitated?
He always found but one answer: if a large number of people were afflicted with the sorrow that afflicted him, that number would constitute the people, he said to himself. And where the same sorrow leads to the same impulses and desires, similar satisfaction would necessarily be sought, and the same pleasure found in this satisfaction. If he inquired into what it was that most consoled him and revived his spirits in his sorrow, what it was that succeeded best in counteracting his affliction, it was with joyful certainty that he discovered this force only in music and myth, the latter of which he had already recognised as the people’s creation and their language of distress. It seemed to him that the origin of music must be similar, though perhaps more mysterious. In both of these elements he steeped and healed his soul; they constituted his most urgent need:-in this way he was able to ascertain how like his sorrow was to that of the people, when they came into being, and how they must arise anew if many Wagners are going to appear. What part did myth and music play in modern society, wherever they had not been actually sacrificed to it? They shared very much the same fate, a fact which only tends to prove their close relationship: myth had been sadly debased and usurped by idle tales and stories; completely divested of its earnest and sacred virility, it was transformed into the plaything and pleasing bauble of children and women of the afflicted people. Music had kept itself alive among the poor, the simple, and the isolated; the German musician had not succeeded in adapting himself to the luxurious traffic of the arts; he himself had become a fairy tale full Of monsters and mysteries, full of the most touching omens and auguries-a helpless questioner, something bewitched and in need of rescue. Here the artist distinctly heard the command that concerned him alone-to recast myth and make it virile, to break the spell lying over music and to make music speak: he felt his strength for drama liberated at one stroke, and the foundation of his sway established over the hitherto undiscovered province lying between myth and music. His new masterpiece, which included all the most powerful, effective, and entrancing forces that he knew, he now laid before men with this great and painfully cutting question: “Where are ye all who suffer and think as I do? Where is that number of souls that I wish to see become a people, that ye may share the same joys and comforts with me? In your joy ye will reveal your misery to me.” These were his questions in Tannhauser and Lohengrin, in these operas he looked about him for his equals -the anchorite yearned for the number.
But what were his feelings withal? Nobody answered him. Nobody had understood his question. Not that everybody remained silent: on the contrary, answers were given to thousands of questions which he had never put; people gossipped about the new masterpieces as though they had only been composed for the express purpose of supplying subjects for conversation. The whole mania of aesthetic scribbling and small talk overtook the Germans like a pestilence, and with that lack of modesty which characterises both German scholars and German journalists, people began measuring, and generally meddling with, these masterpieces, as well as with the person of the artist. Wagner tried to help the comprehension of his question by writing about it; but this only led to fresh confusion and more uproar, -for a musician who writes and thinks was, at that time, a thing unknown. The cry arose: “He is a theorist who wishes to remould art with his far-fetched notions-stone him!” Wagner was stunned: his question was not understood, his need not felt; his masterpieces seemed a message addressed only to the deaf and blind; his people- an hallucination. He staggered and vacillated. The feasibility of a complete upheaval of all things then suggested itself to him, and he no longer shrank from the thought: possibly, beyond this revolution and dissolution, there might be a chance of a new hope; on the other hand, there might not. But, in any case, would not complete annihilation be better than the wretched existing state of affairs? Not very long afterwards, he was a political exile in dire distress.
And then only, with this terrible change in his environment and in his soul, there begins that period of the great man’s life over which as a golden reflection there is stretched the splendour of highest mastery. Now at last the genius of dithyrambic drama doffs its last disguise. He is isolated; the age seems empty to him; he ceases to hope; and his all-embracing glance descend once more into the deep, and finds the bottom, there he sees suffering in the nature of things, and henceforward, having become more impersonal, he accepts his portion of sorrow more calmly. The desire for great power which was but the inheritance of earlier conditions is now directed wholly into the channel of creative art; through his art he now speaks only to himself, and no longer to a public or to a people, and strives to lend this intimate conversation all the distinction and other qualities in keeping with such a mighty dialogue. During the preceding period things had been different with his art; then he had concerned himself, too, albeit with refinement and subtlety, with immediate effects: that artistic production was also meant as a question, and it ought to have called forth an immediate reply. And how often did Wagner not try to make his meaning clearer to those he questioned! In view of their inexperience in having questions put to them, he tried to meet them half way and to conform with older artistic notions and means of expression. When he feared that arguments couched in his own terms would only meet with failure, he had tried to persuade and to put his question in a language half strange to himself though familiar to his listeners. Now there was nothing to induce him to continue this indulgence: all he desired now was to come to terms with himself, to think of the nature of the world in dramatic actions, and to philosophise in music; what desires he still possessed turned in the direction of the latest philosophical views. He who is worthy of knowing what took place in him at that time or what questions were thrashed out in the darkest holy of holies in his soul-and not many are worthy of knowing all this-must hear, observe, and experience Tristan and Isolde, the real opus metaphysicum of all art, a work upon which rests the broken look of a dying man with his insatiable and sweet craving for the secrets of night and death, far away from life which throws a horribly spectral morning light, sharply, upon all that is evil, delusive, and sundering: moreover, a drama austere in the severity of its form, overpowering in its simple grandeur, and in harmony with the secret of which it treats-lying dead in the midst of life, being one in two. And yet there is something still more wonderful than this work, and that is the artist himself, the man who, shortly after he had accomplished it, was able to create a picture of life so full of clashing colours as the Meistersingers of Nurnberg, and who in both of these compositions seems merely to have refreshed and equipped himself for the task of completing at his ease that gigantic edifice in four parts which he had long ago planned and begun-the ultimate result of all his meditations and poetical flights for over twenty years, his Bayreuth masterpiece, the Ring of the Nibelung! He who marvels at the rapid succession of the two operas, Tristan and the Meistersingers, has failed to understand one important side of the life and nature of all great Germans: he does not know the peculiar soil out of which that essentially German gaiety, which characterised Luther, Beethoven, and Wagner, can grow, the gaiety which other nations quite fail to understand and which even seems to be missing in the Germans of to-day-that clear golden and thoroughly fermented mixture of simplicity, deeply discriminating love, observation, and roguishness which Wagner has dispensed, as the most precious of drinks, to all those who have suffered deeply through life, but who nevertheless return to it with the smile of convalescents. And, as he also turned upon the world the eyes of one reconciled, he was more filled with rage and disgust than with sorrow, and more prone to renounce the love of power than to shrink in awe from it. As he thus silently furthered his greatest work and gradually laid score upon score, something happened which caused him to stop and listen: friends were coming, a kind of subterranean movement of many souls approached with a message for him-it was still far from being the people that constituted this movement and which wished to bear him news, but it may have been the nucleus and first living source of a really human community which would reach perfection in some age still remote. For the present they only brought him the warrant that his great work could be entrusted to the care and charge of faithful men, men who would watch and be worthy to watch over this most magnificent of all legacies to posterity. In the love of friends his outlook began to glow with brighter colours; his noblest care-the care that his work should be accomplished and should find a refuge before the evening of his life-was not his only preoccupation. something occurred which he could only understand as a symbol: it was as much as a new comfort and a new token of happiness to him. A great German war caused him to open his eyes, and he observed that those very Germans whom he considered so thoroughly degenerate and so inferior to the high standard of real Teutonism, of which he had formed an ideal both from self-knowledge and the conscientious study of other great Germans in history; he observed that those very Germans were, in the midst of terrible circumstances, exhibiting two virtues of the highest order-simple bravery and prudence; and with his heart bounding with delight he conceived the hope that he might not be the last German, and that some day a greater power would perhaps stand by his works than that devoted yet meagre one consisting of his little band of friends-a power able to guard it during that long period preceding its future glory, as the masterpiece of this future. Perhaps it was not possible to steel this belief permanently against doubt, more particularly when it sought to rise to hopes of immediate results: suffice it that he derived a tremendous spur from his environment, which constantly reminded him of a lofty duty ever to be fulfilled.
His work would not have been complete had he handed it to the world only in the form of silent manuscript. He must make known to the world what it could not guess in regard to his productions, what was his alone to reveal-the new style for the execution and presentation of his works, so that he might set that example which nobody else could set, and thus establish a tradition of style, not on paper, not by means of signs, but through impressions made upon the very souls of men. This duty had become all the more pressing with him, seeing that precisely in regard to the style of their execution his other works had meanwhile succumbed to the most insufferable and absurd of fates: they were famous and admired, yet no one manifested the slightest sign of indignation when they were mishandled. For, strange to say, whereas he renounced ever more and more the hope of success among his contemporaries, owing to his all too thorough knowledge of them, and disclaimed all desire for power, both “success” and “power” came to him, or at least everybody told him so. It was in vain that he made repeated attempts to expose, with the utmost clearness, how worthless and humiliating such successes were to him: people were so unused to seeing an artist able to differentiate at all between the effects of his works that even his most solemn protests were never entirely trusted. Once he had perceived the relationship existing between our system of theatres and their success, and the men of his time, his soul ceased to be attracted by the stage at all. He had no further concern with aesthetic ecstasies and the exultation of excited crowds, and he must even have felt angry to see his art being gulped down indiscriminately by the yawning abyss of boredom and the insatiable love of distraction. How flat and pointless every effect proved under these circumstances- more especially as it was much more a case of having to minister to one quite insatiable than of cloying the hunger of a starving man- Wagner began to perceive from the following repeated experience: everybody, even the performers and promoters, regarded his art as nothing more nor less than any other kind of stage-music, and quite in keeping with the repulsive style of traditional opera; thanks to the efforts of cultivated conductors, his works were even cut and hacked about, until, after they had been bereft of all their spirit, they were held to be nearer the professional singer’s plane. But when people tried to follow Wagner’s instructions to the letter, they proceeded so clumsily and timidly that they were not incapable of representing the midnight riot in the second act of the Meistersingers by a group of ballet-dancers. They seemed to do all this, however, in perfectly good faith-without the smallest evil intention. Wagner’s devoted efforts to show, by means of his own example, the correct and complete way of performing his works, and his attempts at training individual singers in the new style, were foiled time after time, owing only to the thoughtlessness and iron tradition that ruled all around him. Moreover, he was always induced to concern himself with that class of theatricals which he most thoroughly loathed. Had not even Goethe, m his time, once grown tired of attending the rehearsals of his Iphigenia? “I suffer unspeakably,” he explained, “when I have to tumble about with these spectres, which never seem to act as they should.” Meanwhile Wagner’s “success” in the kind of drama which he most disliked steadily increased; so much so, indeed, that the largest theatres began to subsist almost entirely upon the receipts which Wagner’s art, in the guise of operas, brought into them. This growing passion on the part of the theatre-going public bewildered even some of Wagner’s friends; but this man who had endured so much, had still to endure the bitterest pain of all-he had to see his friends intoxicated with his “successes” and “triumphs” everywhere where his highest ideal was openly belied and shattered. It seemed almost as though a people otherwise earnest and reflecting had decided to maintain an attitude of systematic levity only towards its most serious artist, and to make him the privileged recipient of all the vulgarity, thoughtlessness, clumsiness, and malice of which the German nature is capable. When, therefore, during the German War, a current of greater magnanimity and freedom seemed to run through every one, Wagner remembered the duty to which he had pledged himself, namely, to rescue his greatest work from those successes and affronts which were so largely due to misunderstandings, and to present it in his most personal rhythm as an example for all times. Thus he conceived the idea of Bayreuth. In the wake of that current of better feeling already referred to, he expected to notice an enhanced sense of duty even among those with whom he wished to entrust his most precious possession. Out of this two-fold duty, that event took shape which, like a glow of strange sunlight, will illumine the few years that lie behind and before us, and was designed to bless that distant and problematic future which to our time and to the men of our time can be little more than a riddle or a horror, but which to the few who are allowed to assist in its realisation is a foretaste of coming joy, a foretaste of love in a higher sphere, through which they know themselves to be blessed, blessing and fruitful, far beyond their span of years; and which to Wagner himself is but a cloud of distress, care, meditation, and grief, a fresh passionate outbreak of antagonistic elements, but all bathed in the starlight of selfless fidelity, and changed by this light into indescribable joy.
It scarcely need be said that it is the breath of tragedy that fills the lungs of the world. And every one whose innermost soul has a presentiment of this, every one unto whom the yoke of tragic deception concerning the aim of life, the distortion and shattering of intentions, renunciation and purification through love, are not unknown things, must be conscious of a vague reminiscence of Wagner’s own heroic life, in the masterpieces with which the great man now presents us. We shall feel as though Siegfried from some place far away were relating his deeds to us: the most blissful of touching recollections are always draped in the deep mourning of waning summer, when all nature lies still in the sable twilight.
Chapter IX.
All those to whom the thought of Wagner’s development as a man may have caused pain will find it both restful and healing to reflect upon what he was as an artist, and to observe how his ability and daring attained to such a high degree of independence. If art mean only the faculty of communicating to others what one has oneself experienced, and if every work of art confutes itself which does not succeed in making itself understood, then Wagner’s greatness as an artist would certainly lie in the almost demoniacal power of his nature to communicate with others, to express itself in all languages at once, and to make known its most intimate and personal experience with the greatest amount of distinctness possible. His appearance in the history of art resembles nothing so much as a volcanic eruption of the united artistic faculties of Nature herself, after mankind had grown to regard the practice of a special art as a necessary rule. It is therefore a somewhat moot point whether he ought to be classified as a poet, a painter, or a musician, even using each these words in its widest sense, or whether a new word ought not to be invented in order to describe him.
Wagner’s poetic ability is shown by his thinking in visible and actual facts, and not in ideas; that is to say, he thinks mythically, as the people have always done. No particular thought lies at the bottom of a myth, as the children of an artificial culture would have us believe; but it is in itself a thought: it conveys an idea of the world, but through the medium of a chain of events, actions, and pains. The Ring of the Nihelung is a huge system of thought without the usual abstractness of the latter. It were perhaps possible for a philosopher to present us with its exact equivalent in pure thought, and to purge it of all pictures drawn from life, and of all living actions, in which case we should be in possession of the same thing portrayed in two completely different forms-the one for the people, and the other for the very reverse of the people; that is to say, men of theory. But Wagner makes no appeal to this last class, for the man of theory can know as little of poetry or myth as the deaf man can know of music; both of them being conscious only of movements which seem meaningless to them. It is impossible to appreciate either one of these completely different forms from the standpoint of the other: as long as the poet’s spell is upon one, one thinks with him just as though one were merely a feeling, seeing, and hearing creature; the conclusions thus reached are merely the result of the association of the phenomena one sees, and are therefore not logical but actual causalities.
If, therefore, the heroes and gods of mythical dramas, as understood by Wagner, were to express themselves plainly in words, there would be a danger (inasmuch as the language of words might tend to awaken the theoretical side in us) of our finding ourselves transported from the world of myth to the world of ideas, and the result would be not only that we should fail to understand with greater ease, but that we should probably not understand at all. Wagner thus forced language back to a more primeval stage in its development a stage at which it was almost free of the abstract element, and was still poetry, imagery, and feeling; the fearlessness with which Wagner undertook this formidable mission shows how imperatively he was led by the spirit of poetry, as one who must follow whithersoever his phantom leader may direct him. Every word in these dramas ought to allow of being sung, and gods and heroes should make them their own-that was the task which Wagner set his literary faculty. Any other person in like circumstances would have given up all hope; for our language seems almost too old and decrepit to allow of one’s exacting what Wagner exacted from it; and yet, when he smote the rock, he brought forth an abundant flow. Precisely owing to the fact that he loved his language and exacted a great deal from it, Wagner suffered more than any other German through its decay and enfeeblement, from its manifold losses and mutilations of form, from its unwieldy particles and clumsy construction, and from its unmusical auxiliary verbs. All these are things which have entered the language through sin and depravity. On the other hand, he was exceedingly proud to record the number of primitive and vigorous factors still extant in the current speech; and in the tonic strength of its roots he recognised quite a wonderful affinity and relation to real music, a quality which distinguished it from the highly evolved and artificially rhetorical Latin languages. Wagner’s poetry is eloquent of his affection for the German language, and there is a heartiness and candour in his treatment of it which are scarcely to be met with in any other German writer, save perhaps Goethe. Forcibleness of diction, daring brevity, power and variety in rhythm, a remarkable wealth of strong and striking words, simplicity in construction, an almost unique inventive faculty in regard to fluctuations of feeling and presentiment, and therewithal a perfectly pure and overflowing stream of colloquialisms-these are the qualities that have to be enumerated, and even then the greatest and most wonderful of all is omitted. Whoever reads two such poems as Tristan and the Meistersingers consecutively will be just as astonished and doubtful in regard to the language as to the music; for he will wonder how it could have been possible for a creative spirit to dominate so perfectly two worlds as different in form, colour, and arrangement, as in soul. This is the most wonderful achievement of Wagner’s talent; for the ability to give every work its own linguistic stamp and to find a fresh body and a new sound for every thought is a task which only the great master can successfully accomplish. Where this rarest of all powers manifests itself, adverse criticism can be but petty and fruitless which confines itself to attacks upon certain excesses and eccentricities in the treatment, or upon the more frequent obscurities of expression and ambiguity of thought. Moreover, what seemed to electrify and scandalise those who were most bitter in their criticism was not so much the language as the spirit of the Wagnerian operas-that is to say, his whole manner of feeling and suffering. It were well to wait until these very critics have acquired another spirit themselves; they will then also speak a different tongue, and, by that time, it seems to me things will go better with the German language than they do at present.
In the first place, however, no one who studies Wagner the poet and word-painter should forget that none of his dramas were meant to be read, and that it would therefore be unjust to judge them from the same standpoint as the spoken drama. The latter plays upon the feelings by means of words and ideas, and in this respect it is under the dominion of the laws of rhetoric. But in real life passion is seldom eloquent: in spoken drama it perforce must be, in order to be able to express itself at all. When, however, the language of a people is already in a state of decay and deterioration, the word-dramatist is tempted to impart an undue proportion of new colour and form both to his medium and to his thoughts; he would elevate the language in order to make it a vehicle capable of conveying lofty feelings, and by so doing he runs the risk of becoming abstruse. By means of sublime phrases and conceits he likewise tries to invest passion with some nobility, and thereby runs yet another risk, that of appearing false and artificial. For in real life passions do not speak in sentences, and the poetical element often draws suspicion upon their genuineness when it departs too palpably from reality. Now Wagner, who was the first to detect the essential feeling in spoken drama, presents every dramatic action threefold: in a word, in a gesture, and in a sound. For, as a matter of fact, music succeeds in conveying the deepest emotions of the dramatic performers direct to the spectators, and while these see the evidence of the actors’ states of soul in their bearing and movements, a third though more feeble confirmation of these states, translated into conscious will, quickly follows in the form of the spoken word. All these effects fulfil their purpose simultaneously, without disturbing one another in the least, and urge the spectator to a completely new understanding and sympathy, just as if his senses had suddenly grown more spiritual and his spirit more sensual, and as if everything which seeks an outlet in him, and which makes him thirst for knowledge, were free and joyful in exultant perception. Because every essential factor in a Wagnerian drama is conveyed to the spectator with the utmost clearness, illumined and permeated throughout by music as by an internal flame, their author can dispense with the expedients usually employed by the writer of the spoken play in order to lend light and warmth to the action. The whole of the dramatist’s stock in trade could be more simple, and the architect’s sense of rhythm could once more dare to manifest itself in the general proportions of the edifice; for there was no more need of “the deliberate confusion and involved variety of styles, whereby the ordinary playwright strove in the interests of his work to produce that feeling of wonder and thrilling suspense which he ultimately enhanced to one of delighted amazement. The impression of ideal distance and height was no more to be induced by means of tricks and artifices. Language withdrew itself from the length and breadth of rhetoric into the strong confines of the speech of the feelings, and although the actor spoke much less about all he did and felt in the performance, his innermost sentiments, which the ordinary playwright had hitherto ignored for fear of being undramatic, was now able to drive the spectators to passionate sympathy, while the accompanying language of gestures could be restricted to the most delicate modulations. Now, when passions are rendered in song, they require rather more time than when conveyed by speech; music prolongs, so to speak, the duration of the feeling, from which it follows, as a rule, that the actor who is also a singer must overcome the extremely unplastic animation from which spoken drama suffers. He feels himself incited all the more to a certain nobility of bearing, because music envelopes his feelings in a purer atmosphere, and thus brings them closer to beauty.
The extraordinary tasks which Wagner set his actors and singers will provoke rivalry between them for ages to come, in the personification of each of his heroes with the greatest possible amount of clearness, perfection, and fidelity, according to that perfect incorporation already typified by the music of drama. Following this leader, the eye of the plastic artist will ultimately behold the marvels of another visible world, which, previous to him, was seen for the first time only by the creator of such works as the Ring of the Nibelung -that creator of highest rank, who, like Æschylus, points the way to a coming art. Must not jealousy awaken the greatest talent, if the plastic artist ever compares the effect of his productions with that of Wagnerian music, in which there is so much pure and sunny happiness that he who hears it feels as though all previous music had been but an alien, faltering, and constrained language; as though in the past it had been but a thing to sport with in the presence of those who were not deserving of serious treatment, or a thing with which to train and instruct those who were not even deserving of play? In the case of this earlier kind of music, the joy we always experience while listening to Wagner’s compositions is ours only for a short space of time, and it would then seem as though it were overtaken by certain rare moments of forgetfulness, during which it appears to be communing with its inner self and directing its eyes upwards, like Raphael’s Cecilia, away from the listeners and from all those who demand distraction, happiness, or instruction from it.
In general it may be said of Wagner the Musician, that he endowed everything in nature which hitherto had had no wish to speak with the power of speech: he refuses to admit that anything must be dumb, and, resorting to the dawn, the forest, the mist, the cliffs, the hills, the thrill of night and the moonlight, he observes a desire common to them all-they too wish to sing their own melody. If the philosopher says it is will that struggles for existence in animate and inanimate nature, the musician adds: And this will wherever it manifests itself, yearns for a melodious existence.
Before Wagner’s time, music for the most part moved in narrow limits: it concerned itself with the permanent states of man, or with what the Greeks call ethos. And only with Beethoven did it begin to find the language of pathos, of passionate will, and of the dramatic occurrences in the souls of men. Formerly, what people desired was to interpret a mood, a stolid, merry, reverential, or penitential state of mind, by means of music; the object was, by means of a certain striking uniformity of treatment and the prolonged duration of this uniformity, to compel the listener to grasp the meaning of the music and to impose its mood upon him. To all such interpretations of mood or atmosphere, distinct and particular forms of treatment were necessary: others were established by convention. The question of length was left to the discretion of the musician, whose aim was not only to put the listener into a certain mood, but also to avoid rendering that mood monotonous by unduly protracting it. A further stage was reached when the interpretations of contrasted moods were made to follow one upon the other, and the charm of light and shade was discovered; and yet another step was made when the same piece of music was allowed to contain a contrast of the ethos-for instance, the contest between a male and a female theme. All these, however, are crude and primitive stages in the development of music. The fear of passion suggested the first rule, and the fear of monotony the second; all depth of feeling and any excess thereof were regarded as “unethical.” Once, however, the art of the ethos had repeatedly been made to ring all the changes on the moods and situations which convention had decreed as suitable, despite the most astounding resourcefulness on the part of its masters, its powers were exhausted. Beethoven was the first to make music speak a new language-till then forbidden-the language of passion; but as his art was based upon the laws and conventions of the ETHOS, and had to attempt to justify itself in regard to them, his artistic development was beset with peculiar difficulties and obscurities. An inner dramatic factor-and every passion pursues a dramatic course-struggled to obtain a new form, but the traditional scheme of “mood music” stood in its way, and protested-almost after the manner in which morality opposes innovations and immorality. It almost seemed, therefore, as if Beethoven had set himself the contradictory task of expressing pathos in the terms of the ethos. This view does not, however, apply to Beethoven’s latest and greatest works; for he really did succeed in discovering a novel method of expressing the grand and vaulting arch of passion. He merely selected certain portions of its curve; imparted these with the utmost clearness to his listeners, and then left it to them to divine its whole span. Viewed superficially, the new form seemed rather like an aggregation of several musical compositions, of which every one appeared to represent a sustained situation, but was in reality but a momentary stage in the dramatic course of a passion. The listener might think that he was hearing the old “mood” music over again, except that he failed to grasp the relation of the various parts to one another, and these no longer conformed with the canon of the law. Even among minor musicians, there flourished a certain contempt for the rule which enjoined harmony in the general construction of a composition and the sequence of the parts in their works still remained arbitrary. Then, owing to a misunderstanding, the discovery of the majestic treatment of passion led back to the use of the single movement with an optional setting, and the tension between the parts thus ceased completely. That is why the symphony, as Beethoven understood it, is such a wonderfully obscure production, more especially when, here and there, it makes faltering attempts at rendering Beethoven’s pathos. The means ill befit the intention, and the intention is, on the whole, not sufficiently clear to the listener, because it was never really clear, even in the mind of the composer. But the very injunction that something definite must be imparted, and that this must be done as distinctly as possible, becomes ever more and more essential, the higher, more difficult, and more exacting the class of work happens to be.
That is why all Wagner’s efforts were concentrated upon the one object of discovering those means which best served the purpose of distinctness, and to this end it was above all necessary for him to emancipate himself from all the prejudices and claims of the old “mood” music, and to give his compositions-the musical interpretations of feelings and passion-a perfectly unequivocal mode of expression. If we now turn to what he has achieved, we see that his services to music are practically equal in rank to those which that sculptor-inventor rendered to sculpture who introduced “sculpture in the round.” All previous music seems stiff and uncertain when compared with Wagner’s, just as though it were ashamed and did not wish to be inspected from all sides. With the most consummate skill and precision, Wagner avails himself of every degree and colour in the realm of feeling; without the slightest hesitation or fear of its escaping him, he seizes upon the most delicate, rarest, and mildest emotion, and holds it fast, as though it had hardened at his touch, despite the fact that it may seem like the frailest butterfly to every one else. His music is never vague or dreamy; everything that is allowed to speak through it, whether it be of man or of nature, has a strictly individual passion; storm and fire acquire the ruling power of a personal will in his hands. Over all the clamouring characters and the clash of their passions, over the whole torrent of contrasts, an almighty and symphonic understanding hovers with perfect serenity, and continually produces concord out of war. Taken as a whole, Wagner’s music is a reflex of the world as it was understood by the great Ephesian poet-that is to say, a harmony resulting from strife, as the union of justice and enmity. I admire the ability which could describe the grand line of universal passion out of a confusion of passions which all seem to be striking out in different directions: the fact that this was a possible achievement I find demonstrated in every individual act of a Wagnerian drama, which describes the individual history of various characters side by side with a general history of the whole company. Even at the very beginning we know we are watching a host of cross currents dominated by one great violent stream; and though at first this stream moves unsteadily over hidden reefs, and the torrent seems to be torn asunder as if it were travelling towards different points, gradually we perceive the central and general movement growing stronger and more rapid, the convulsive fury of the contending waters is converted into one broad, steady, and terrible flow in the direction of an unknown goal; and suddenly, at the end, the whole flood in all its breadth plunges into the depths, rejoicing demoniacally over the abyss and all its uproar. Wagner is never more himself than when he is overwhelmed with difficulties and can exercise power on a large scale with all the joy of a lawgiver. To bring restless and contending masses into simple rhythmic movement, and to exercise one will over a bewildering host of claims and desires-these are the tasks for which he feels he was born, and in the performance of which he finds freedom. And he never loses his breath withal, nor does he ever reach his goal panting. He strove just as persistently to impose the severest laws upon himself as to lighten the burden of others in this respect. Life and art weigh heavily upon him when he cannot play wit their most difficult questions. If one considers the relation between the melody of song and that of speech, one will perceive how he sought to adopt as his natural model the pitch, strength, and tempo of the passionate man’s voice in order to transform it into art; and if one further considers the task of introducing this singing passion into the general symphonic order of music, one gets some idea of the stupendous difficulties he had to overcome. In this behalf, his inventiveness in small things as in great, his omniscience and industry are such, that at the sight of one of Wagner’s scores one is almost led to believe that no real work or effort had ever existed before his time. It seems almost as if he too could have said, in regard to the hardships of art, that the real virtue of the dramatist lies in self-renunciation. But he would probably have added, There is but one kind of hardship- that of the artist who is not yet free: virtue and goodness are trivial accomplishments.
Viewing him generally as an artist, and calling to mind a more famous type, we see that Wagner is not at all unlike Demosthenes: in him also we have the terrible earnestness of purpose and that strong prehensile mind which always obtains a complete grasp of a thing; in him, too, we have the hand’s quick clutch and the grip as of iron. Like Demosthenes, he conceals his art or compels one to forget it by the peremptory way he calls attention to the subject he treats; and yet, like his great predecessor, he is the last and greatest of a whole line of artist-minds, and therefore has more to conceal than his forerunners: his art acts like nature, like nature recovered and restored. Unlike all previous musicians, there is nothing bombastic about him; for the former did not mind playing at times with their art, and making an exhibition of their virtuosity. One associates Wagner’s art neither with interest nor with diversion, nor with Wagner himself and art in general. All one is conscious of is of the great necessity of it all. No one will ever be able to appreciate what severity evenness of will, and self-control the artist required during his development, in order, at his zenith, to be able to do the necessary thing joyfully and freely. Let it suffice if we can appreciate how, in some respects, his music, with a certain cruelty towards itself, determines to subserve the course of the drama, which is as unrelenting as fate, whereas in reality his art was ever thirsting for a free ramble in the open and over the wilderness.
Chapter X.
An artist who has this empire over himself subjugates all other artists, even though he may not particularly desire to do so. For him alone there lies no danger or stemming-force in those he has subjugated-his friends and his adherents; whereas the weaker natures who learn to rely on their friends pay for this reliance by forfeiting their independence. It is very wonderful to observe how carefully, throughout his life, Wagner avoided anything in the nature of heading a party, notwithstanding the fact that at the close of every phase in his career a circle of adherents formed, presumably with the view of holding him fast to his latest development. He always succeeded, however, in wringing himself free from them, and never allowed himself to be bound; for not only was the ground he covered too vast for one alone to keep abreast of him with any ease, but his way was so exceptionally steep that the most devoted would have lost his breath. At almost every stage in Wagner’s progress his friends would have liked to preach to him, and his enemies would fain have done so too-but for other reasons. Had the purity of his artist’s nature been one degree less decided than it was, he would have attained much earlier than he actually did to the leading position in the artistic and musical world of his time. True, he has reached this now, but in a much higher sense, seeing that every performance to be witnessed in any department of art makes its obeisance, so to speak, before the judgment-stool of his genius and of his artistic temperament. He has overcome the most refractory of his contemporaries; there is not one gifted musician among them but in his innermost heart would willingly listen to him, and find Wagner’s compositions more worth listening to than his own and all other musical productions taken together. Many who wish, by hook or by crook, to make their mark, even wrestle with Wagner’s secret charm, and unconsciously throw in their lot with the older masters, preferring to ascribe their “independence” to Schubert or Handel rather than to Wagner. But in vain! Thanks to their very efforts in contending against the dictates of their own consciences, they become ever meaner and smaller artists; they ruin their own natures by forcing themselves to tolerate undesirable allies and friends. And in spite of all these sacrifices, they still find perhaps in their dreams, that their ear turns attentively to Wagner. These adversaries are to be pitied: they imagine they lose a great deal when they lose themselves, but here they are mistaken.
Albeit it is obviously all one to Wagner whether musicians compose in his style, or whether they compose at all, he even does his utmost to dissipate the belief that a school of composers should now necessarily follow in his wake; though, in so far as he exercises a direct influence upon musicians, he does indeed try to instruct them concerning the art of grand execution. In his opinion, the evolution of art seems to have reached that stage when the honest endeavour to become an able and masterly exponent or interpreter is ever so much more worth talking about than the longing to be a creator at all costs. For, at the present stage of art, universal creating has this fatal result, that inasmuch as it encourages a much larger output, it tends to exhaust the means and artifices of genius by everyday use, and thus to reduce the real grandeur of its effect. Even that which is good in art is superfluous and detrimental when it proceeds from the imitation of what is best. Wagnerian ends and means are of one piece: to perceive this, all that is required is honesty in art matters, and it would be dishonest to adopt his means in order to apply them to other and less significant ends.
If, therefore, Wagner declines to live on amid a multitude of creative musicians, he is only the more desirous of imposing upon all men of talent the new duty of joining him in seeking the law of style for dramatic performances. He deeply feels the need of establishing a traditional style for his art, by means of which his work may continue to live from one age to another in a pure form, until it reaches that future which its creator ordained for it.
Wagner is impelled by an undaunted longing to make known everything relating to that foundation of a style, mentioned above, and, accordingly, everything relating to the continuance of his art. To make his work-as Schopenhauer would say-a sacred depository and the real fruit of his life, as well as the inheritance of mankind, and to store it for the benefit of a posterity better able to appreciate it,-these were the supreme objects of his life, and for these he bore that crown of thorns which, one day, will shoot forth leaves of bay. Like the insect which, in its last form, concentrates all its energies upon the one object of finding a safe depository for its eggs and of ensuring the future welfare of its posthumous brood,-then only to die content, so Wagner strove with equal determination to find a place of security for his works.
This subject, which took precedence of all others with him, constantly incited him to new discoveries; and these he sought ever more and more at the spring of his demoniacal gift of communicability, the more distinctly he saw himself in conflict with an age that was both perverse and unwilling to lend him its ear. Gradually however, even this same age began to mark his indefatigable efforts, to respond to his subtle advances, and to turn its ear to him. Whenever a small or a great opportunity arose, however far away, which suggested to Wagner a means wherewith to explain his thoughts, he availed himself of it: he thought his thoughts anew into every fresh set of circumstances, and would make them speak out of the most paltry bodily form. Whenever a soul only half capable of comprehending him opened itself to him, he never failed to implant his seed in it. He saw hope in things which caused the average dispassionate observer merely to shrug his shoulders; and he erred again and again, only so as to be able to carry his point against that same observer. Just as the sage, in reality, mixes with living men only for the purpose of increasing his store of knowledge, so the artist would almost seem to be unable to associate with his contemporaries at all, unless they be such as can help him towards making his work eternal. He cannot be loved otherwise than with the love of this eternity, and thus he is conscious only of one kind of hatred directed at him, the hatred which would demolish the bridges bearing his art into the future. The pupils Wagner educated for his own purpose, the individual musicians and actors whom he advised and whose ear he corrected and improved, the small and large orchestras he led, the towns which witnessed him earnestly fulfilling the duties of his calling, the princes and ladies who half boastfully and half lovingly participated in the framing of his plans, the various European countries to which he temporarily belonged as the judge and evil conscience of their arts,-everything gradually became the echo of his thought and of his indefatigable efforts to attain to fruitfulness in the future. Although this echo often sounded so discordant as to confuse him, still the tremendous power of his voice repeatedly crying out into the world must in the end call forth reverberations, and it will soon be impossible to be deaf to him or to misunderstand him. It is this reflected sound which even now causes the art-institutions of modern men to shake: every time the breath of his spirit blew into these coverts, all that was overripe or withered fell to the ground; but the general increase of scepticism in all directions speaks more eloquently than all this trembling. Nobody any longer dares to predict where Wagner’s influence may not unexpectedly break out. He is quite unable to divorce the salvation of art from any other salvation or damnation: wherever modern life conceals a danger, he, with the discriminating eye of mistrust, perceives a danger threatening art. In his imagination he pulls the edifice of modern civilisation to pieces, and allows nothing rotten, no unsound timber-work to escape: if in the process he should happen to encounter weather-tight walls or anything like solid foundations, he immediately casts about for means wherewith he can convert them into bulwarks and shelters for his art. He lives like a fugitive, whose will is not to preserve his own life, but to keep a secret- like an unhappy woman who does not wish to save her own soul, but that of the child lying in her lap: in short, he lives like Sieglinde, “for the sake of love.”
For life must indeed be full of pain and shame to one who can find neither rest nor shelter in this world, and who must nevertheless appeal to it, exact things from it, contemn it, and still be unable to dispense with the thing contemned, -this really constitutes the wretchedness of the artist of the future, who, unlike the philosopher, cannot prosecute his work alone in the seclusion of a study, but who requires human souls as messengers to this future, public institutions as a guarantee of it, and, as it were, bridges between now and hereafter. His art may not, like the philosopher’s, be put aboard the boat of written documents: art needs capable men, not letters and notes, to transmit it. Over whole periods in Wagner’s life rings a murmur of distress-his distress at not being able to meet with these capable interpreters before whom he longed to execute examples of his work, instead of being confined to written symbols; before whom he yearned to practise his art, instead of showing a pallid reflection of it to those who read books, and who, generally speaking, therefore are not artists.
In Wagner the man of letters we see the struggle of a brave fighter, whose right hand has, as it were, been lopped off, and who has continued the contest with his left. In his writings he is always the sufferer, because a temporary and insuperable destiny deprives him of his own and the correct way of conveying his thoughts-that is to say, in the form of apocalyptic and triumphant examples. His writings contain nothing canonical or severe: the canons are to be found in his works as a whole. Their literary side represents his attempts to understand the instinct which urged him to create his works and to get a glimpse of himself through them. If he succeeded in transforming his instincts into terms of knowledge, it was always with the hope that the reverse process might take place in the souls of his readers-it was with this intention that he wrote. Should it ultimately be proved that, in so doing, Wagner attempted the impossible, he would still only share the lot of all those who have meditated deeply on art; and even so he would be ahead of most of them in this, namely, that the strongest instinct for all arts harboured in him. I know of no written aesthetics that give more light than those of Wagner; all that can possibly be learnt concerning the origin of a work of art is to be found in them. He is one of the very great, who appeared amongst us a witness, and who is continually improving his testimony and making it ever clearer and freer; even when he stumbles as a scientist, sparks rise from the ground. Such tracts as “Beethoven,” “Concerning the Art of Conducting,” “Concerning Actors and Singers,” “State and Religion,” silence all contradiction, and, like sacred reliquaries, impose upon all who approach them a calm, earnest, and reverential regard. Others, more particularly the earlier ones, including “Opera and Drama,” excite and agitate one; their rhythm is so uneven that, as prose they are bewildering. Their dialectics is constantly interrupted, and their course is more retarded than accelerated by outbursts of feeling; a certain reluctance on the part of the writer seems to hang over them like a pall, just as though the artist were somewhat ashamed of speculative discussions. What the reader who is only imperfectly initiated will probably find most oppressive is the general tone of authoritative dignity which is peculiar to Wagner, and which is very difficult to describe: it always strikes me as though Wagner were continually addressing enemies; for the style of all these tracts more resembles that of the spoken than of the written language, hence they will seem much more intelligible if heard read aloud, in the presence of his enemies, with whom he cannot be on familiar terms, and towards whom he must therefore show some reserve and aloofness, The entrancing passion of his feelings, however, constantly pierces this intentional disguise, and then the stilted and heavy periods, swollen with accessary words, vanish, and his pen dashes off sentences, and even whole pages, which belong to the best in German prose. But even admitting that while he wrote such passages he was addressing friends, and that the shadow of his enemies had been removed for a while, all the friends and enemies that Wagner, as a man of letters, has, possess one factor in common, which differentiates them fundamentally from the “people” for whom he worked as an artist. Owing to the refining and fruitless nature of their education, they are quite devoid of the essential traits of the national character, and he who would appeal to them must speak in a way which is not of the people-that is to say, after the manner of our best prose-writers and Wagner himself; though that he did violence to himself in writing thus is evident. But the strength of that almost maternal instinct of prudence in him, which is ready to make any sacrifice, rather tends to reinstall him among the scholars and men of learning, to whom as a creator he always longed to bid farewell. He submits to the language of culture and all the laws governing its use, though he was the first to recognise its profound insufficiency as a means of communication.
For if there is anything that distinguishes his art from every other art of modern times, it is that it no longer speaks the language of any particular caste, and refuses to admit the distinctions “literate” and “illiterate.” It thus stands as a contrast to every culture of the Renaissance, which to this day still bathes us modern men in its light and shade. Inasmuch as Wagner’s art bears us, from time to time, beyond itself, we are enabled to get a general view of its uniform character: we see Goethe and Leopardi as the last great stragglers of the Italian philologist-poets, Faust as the incarnation of a most unpopular problem, in the form of a man of theory thirsting for life; even Goethe’s song is an imitation of the song of the people rather than a standard set before them to which they are expected to attain, and the poet knew very well how truly he spoke when he seriously assured his adherents: “My compositions cannot become popular; he who hopes and strives to make them so is mistaken.”
That an art could arise which would be so clear and warm as to flood the base and the poor in spirit with its light, as well as to melt the haughtiness of the learned-such a phenomenon had to be experienced though it could not be guessed. But even in the mind of him who experiences it to-day it must upset all preconceived notions concerning education and culture; to such an one the veil will seem to have been rent in twain that conceals a future in which no highest good or highest joys exist that are not the common property of all. The odium attaching to the word “common” will then be abolished.
If presentiment venture thus into the remote future, the discerning eye of all will recognise the dreadful social insanity of our present age, and will no longer blind itself to the dangers besetting an art which seems to have roots only in the remote and distant future, and which allows its burgeoning branches to spread before our gaze when it has not yet revealed the ground from which it draws its sap. How can we protect this homeless art through the ages until that remote future is reached? How can we so dam the flood of a revolution seemingly inevitable everywhere, that the blessed prospect and guarantee of a better future-of a freer human life-shall not also be washed away with all that is destined to perish and deserves to perish?
He who asks himself this question shares Wagner’s care: he will feel himself impelled with Wagner to seek those established powers that have the goodwill to protect the noblest passions of man during the period of earthquakes and upheavals. In this sense alone Wagner questions the learned through his writings, whether they intend storing his legacy to them-the precious Ring of his art-among their other treasures. And even the wonderful confidence which he reposes in the German mind and the aims of German politics seems to me to arise from the fact that he grants the people of the Reformation that strength, mildness, and bravery which is necessary in order to divert “the torrent of revolution into the tranquil river-bed of a calmly flowing stream of humanity”: and I could almost believe that this and only this is what he meant to express by means of the symbol of his Imperial march.
As a rule, though, the generous impulses of the creative artist and the extent of his philanthropy are too great for his gaze to be confined within the limits of a single nation. His thoughts, like those of every good and great German, are more than German, and the language of his art does not appeal to particular races but to mankind in general.
But to the men of the future.
This is the belief that is proper to him; this is his torment and his distinction. No artist, of what past soever, has yet received such a remarkable portion of genius; no one, save him, has ever been obliged to mix this bitterest of ingredients with the drink of nectar to which enthusiasm helped him. It is not as one might expect, the misunderstood and mishandled artist, the fugitive of his age, who adopted this faith in self-defence: success or failure at the hands of his contemporaries was unable either to create or to destroy it Whether it glorified or reviled him, he did not belong to this generation: that was the conclusion to which his instincts led him. And the possibility of any generation’s ever belonging to him is something which he who disbelieves in Wagner can never be made to admit. But even this unbeliever may at least ask, what kind of generation it will be in which Wagner will recognise his “people,” and in which he will see the type of all those who suffer a common distress, and who wish to escape from it by means of an art common to them all. Schiller was certainly more hopeful and sanguine; he did not ask what a future must be like if the instinct of the artist that predicts it prove true; his command to every artist was rather- Soar aloft in daring flight
Out of sight of thine own years!
In thy mirror, gleaming bright,
Glimpse of distant dawn appears.
Chapter XI.
May blessed reason preserve us from ever thinking that mankind will at any time discover a final and ideal order of things, and that happiness will then and ever after beam down upon us uniformly, like the rays of the sun in the tropics. Wagner has nothing to do with such a hope; he is no Utopian. If he was unable to dispense with the belief in a future, it only meant that he observed certain properties in modern men which he did not hold to be essential to their nature, and which did not seem to him to form any necessary part of their constitution; in fact, which were changeable and transient; and that precisely owing to these properties art would find no home among them, and he himself had to be the precursor and prophet of another epoch. No golden age, no cloudless sky will fall to the portion of those future generations, which his instinct led him to expect, and whose approximate characteristics may be gleaned from the cryptic characters of his art, in so far as it is possible to draw conclusions concerning the nature of any pain from the kind of relief it seeks. Nor will superhuman goodness and justice stretch like an everlasting rainbow over this future land. Belike this coming generation will, on the whole, seem more evil than the present one-for in good as in evil it will be more straightforward. It is even possible, if its soul were ever able to speak out in full and unembarrassed tones, that it might convulse and terrify us, as though the voice of some hitherto concealed and evil spirit had suddenly cried out in our midst. Or how do the following propositions strike our ears?-That passion is better than stocism or hypocrisy; that straightforwardness, even in evil, is better than losing oneself in trying to observe traditional morality; that the free man is just as able to be good as evil, but that the unemancipated man is a disgrace to nature, and has no share in heavenly or earthly bliss; finally, that all who wish to be free must become so through themselves, and that freedom falls to nobody’s lot as a gift from Heaven. However harsh and strange these propositions may sound, they are nevertheless reverberations from that future world, which is verily in need of art, and which expects genuine pleasure from its presence; they are the language of nature-reinstated even in mankind; they stand for what I have already termed correct feeling as opposed to the incorrect feeling that reigns to-day.
But real relief or salvation exists only for nature not for that which is contrary to nature or which arises out of incorrect feeling. When all that is unnatural becomes self-conscious, it desires but one thing-nonentity; the natural thing, on the other hand, yearns to be transfigured through love: the former would fain not be, the latter would fain be otherwise. Let him who has understood this recall, in the stillness of his soul, the simple themes of Wagner’s art, in order to be able to ask himself whether it were nature or nature’s opposite which sought by means of them to achieve the aims just described.
The desperate vagabond finds deliverance from his distress in the compassionate love of a woman who would rather die than be unfaithful to him: the theme of the Flying Dutchman. The sweet-heart, renouncing all personal happiness, owing to a divine transformation of Love into Charity, becomes a saint, and saves the soul of her loved one: the theme of Tannhauser. The sublimest and highest thing descends a suppliant among men, and will not be questioned whence it came; when, however, the fatal question is put, it sorrowfully returns to its higher life: the theme of Lohengrin. The loving soul of a wife, and the people besides, joyfully welcome the new benevolent genius, although the retainers of tradition and custom reject and revile him: the theme of the Meistersingers. Of two lovers, that do not know they are loved, who believe rather that they are deeply wounded and contemned, each demands of the other that he or she should drink a cup of deadly poison, to all intents and purposes as an expiation of the insult; in reality, however, as the result of an impulse which neither of them understands: through death they wish to escape all possibility of separation or deceit. The supposed approach of death loosens their fettered souls and allows them a short moment of thrilling happiness, just as though they had actually escaped from the present, from illusions and from life: the theme of Tristan and Isolde.
In the Ring of the Nibelung the tragic hero is a god whose heart yearns for power, and who, since he travels along all roads in search of it, finally binds himself to too many undertakings, loses his freedom, and is ultimately cursed by the curse inseparable from power. He becomes aware of his loss of freedom owing to the fact that he no longer has the means to take possession of the golden Ring-that symbol of all earthly power, and also of the greatest dangers to himself as long as it lies in the hands of his enemies. The fear of the end and the twilight of all gods overcomes him, as also the despair at being able only to await the end without opposing it. He is in need of the free and fearless man who, without his advice or assistance-even in a struggle against gods-can accomplish single-handed what is denied to the powers of a god. He fails to see him, and just as a new hope finds shape within him, he must obey the conditions to which he is bound: with his own hand he must murder the thing he most loves, and purest pity must be punished by his sorrow. Then he begins to loathe power, which bears evil and bondage in its lap; his will is broken, and he himself begins to hanker for the end that threatens him from afar off. At this juncture something happens which had long been the subject of his most ardent desire: the free and fearless man appears, he rises in opposition to everything accepted and established, his parents atone for having been united by a tie which was antagonistic to the order of nature and usage; they perish, but Siegfried survives. And at the sight of his magnificent development and bloom, the loathing leaves otan’s soul, and he follows the hero’s history with the eye of fatherly love and anxiety. How he forges his sword, kills the dragon, gets possession of the ring, escapes the craftiest ruse, awakens Brunhilda; how the curse abiding in the ring gradually overtakes him; how, faithful in faithfulness, he wounds the thing he most loves, out of love; becomes enveloped in the shadow and cloud of guilt, and, rising out of it more brilliantly than the sun, ultimately goes down, firing the whole heavens with his burning glow and purging the world of the curse,-all this is seen by the god whose sovereign spear was broken in the contest with the freest man, and who lost his power through him, rejoicing greatly over his own defeat: full of sympathy for the triumph and pain of his victor, his eye burning with aching joy looks back upon the last events; he has become free through love, free from himself.
And now ask yourselves, ye generation of to-day, Was all this composed for you? Have ye the courage to point up to the stars of the whole of this heavenly dome of beauty and goodness and to say, This is our life, that Wagner has transferred to a place beneath the stars?
Where are the men among you who are able to interpret the divine image of Wotan in the light of their own lives, and who can become ever greater while, like him, ye retreat? Who among you would renounce power, knowing and having learned that power is evil? Where are they who like Brunhilda abandon their knowledge to love, and finally rob their lives of the highest wisdom, “afflicted love, deepest sorrow, opened my eyes”? and where are the free and fearless, developing and blossoming in innocent egoism? and where are the Siegfrieds, among you?
He who questions thus and does so in vain, will find himself compelled to look around him for signs of the future; and should his eye, on reaching an unknown distance, espy just that “people” which his own generation can read out of the signs contained in Wagnerian art, he will then also understand what Wagner will mean to this people-something that he cannot be to all of us, namely, not the prophet of the future, as perhaps he would fain appear to us, but the interpreter and clarifier of the past.
On the Use and Abuse of History for Life
Translated by Adrian Collins
Preface
“I HATE everything that merely instructs me without increasing or directly quickening my activity.” These words of Goethe, like a sincere ceterum censeo may well stand at the head of my thoughts on the worth and the worthlessness of history. I will show in them why instruction that does not “quicken,” knowledge that slackens the rein of activity, why in fact history, in Goethe’s phrase, must be seriously “hated,” as a costly and superfluous luxury of the understanding: for we are still in want of the necessaries of life, and the superfluous is an enemy to the necessary. We do need history, but quite differently from the jaded idlers in the garden of knowledge, however grandly they may look down on our rude and unpicturesque requirements. In other words, we need it for life and action, not as a convenient way to avoid life and action, or to excuse a selfish life and a cowardly or base action. We would serve history only so far as it serves life; but to value its study beyond a certain point mutilates and degrades life: and this is a fact that certain marked symptoms of our time make it as necessary as it may be painful to bring to the test of experience.
I have tried to describe a feeling that has often troubled me: I revenge myself on it by giving it publicity. This may lead some one to explain to me that he has also had the feeling, but that I do not feel it purely and elementally enough, and cannot express it with the ripe certainty of experience. A few may say so; but most people will tell me that it is a perverted, unnatural, horrible, and altogether unlawful feeling to have, and that I show myself unworthy of the great historical movement which is especially strong among the German people for the last two generations.
I am at all costs going to venture on a description of my feelings; which will be decidedly in the interests of propriety, as I shall give plenty of opportunity for paying compliments to such a “movement.” And I gain an advantage for myself that is more valuable to me than propriety-the attainment of a correct point of view, through my critics, with regard to our age.
These thoughts are “out of season,” because I am trying to represent something of which the age is rightly proud-its historical culture-as a fault and a defect in our time, believing as I do that we are all suffering from a malignant historical fever and should at least recognise the fact. But even if it be a virtue, Goethe may be right in asserting that we cannot help developing our faults at the same time as our virtues; and an excess of virtue can obviously bring a nation to ruin, as well as an excess of vice. In any case I may be allowed my say. But I will first relieve my mind by the confession that the experiences which produced those disturbing feelings were mostly drawn from myself, -and from other sources only for the sake of comparison; and that I have only reached such “unseasonable” experience, so far as I am the nursling of older ages like the Greek, and less a child of this age. I must admit so much in virtue of my profession as a classical scholar: for I do not know what meaning classical scholarship may have for our time except in its being “unseasonable,” that is, contrary to our time, and yet with an influence on it for the benefit, it may be hoped, of a future time.
1
CONSIDER the herds that are feeding yonder: they know not the meaning of yesterday or to-day; they graze and ruminate, move or rest, from morning to night, from day to day, taken up with their little loves and hates, at the mercy of the moment, feeling neither melancholy nor satiety. Man cannot see them without regret, for even in the pride of his humanity he looks enviously on the beast’s happiness. He wishes simply to live without satiety or pain, like the beast; yet it is all in vain, for he will not change places with it. He may ask the beast-“Why do you look at me and not speak to me of your happiness?” The beast wants to answer-“Because I always forget what I wished to say”: but he forgets this answer too, and is silent; and the man is left to wonder.
He wonders also about himself, that he cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he run, that chain runs with him. It is matter for wonder: the moment, that is here and gone, that was nothing before and nothing after, returns like a spectre to trouble the quiet of a later moment. A leaf is continually dropping out of the volume of time and fluttering away and suddenly it flutters back into the man’s lap. Then he says, “I remember..,” and envies the beast, that forgets at once, and sees every moment really die, sink into night and mist, extinguished for ever. The beast lives unhistorically; for it “goes into” the present, like a number, without leaving any curious remainder. It cannot dissimulate, it conceals nothing; at every moment it seems what it actually is, and thus can be nothing that is not honest. But man is always resisting the great and continually increasing weight of the past; it presses him down, and bows his shoulders; he travels with a dark invisible burden that he can plausibly disown, and is only too glad to disown in converse with his fellows-in order to excite their envy. And so it hurts him, like the thought of a lost Paradise, to see a herd grazing, or, nearer still, a child, that has nothing yet of the past to disown, and plays in a happy blindness between the walls of the past and the future. And yet its play must be disturbed, and only too soon will it be summoned from its little kingdom of oblivion. Then it learns to understand the words “once upon a time,” the “open sesame” that lets in battle, suffering and weariness on mankind, and reminds them what their existence really is, an imperfect tense that never becomes a present. And when death brings at last the desired forgetfulness, it abolishes life and being together, and sets the seal on the knowledge that “being” is merely a continual “has been,” a thing that lives by denying and destroying and contradicting itself.
If happiness and the chase for new happiness keep alive in any sense the will to live, no philosophy has perhaps more truth than the cynic’s: for the beast’s happiness, like that of the perfect cynic, is the visible proof of the truth of cynicism. The smallest pleasure, if it be only continuous and make one happy, is incomparably a greater happiness than the more intense pleasure that comes as an episode, a wild freak, a mad interval between ennui, desire, and privation. But in the smallest and greatest happiness there is always one thing that makes it happiness: the power of forgetting, or, in more learned phrase, the capacity of feeling “unhistorically” throughout its duration. One who cannot leave himself behind on the threshold of the moment and forget the past, who cannot stand on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without fear or giddiness, will never know what happiness is; and, worse still, will never do anything to make others happy. The extreme case would be the man without any power to forget, who is condemned to see “becoming” everywhere. Such a man believes no more in himself or his own existence, he sees everything fly past in an eternal succession, and loses himself in the stream of becoming. At last, like the logical disciple of Heraclitus, he will hardly dare to raise his finger. Forgetfulness is a property of all action; just as not only light but darkness is bound up with the life of every organism. One who wished to feel everything historically, would be like a man forcing himself to refrain from sleep, or a beast who had to live by chewing a continual cud. Thus even a happy life is possible without remembrance, as the beast shows: but life in any true sense is absolutely impossible without forgetfulness. Or, to put my conclusion better, there is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of “historical sense,” that injures and finally destroys the living thing, be it a man or a people or a system of culture.
To fix this degree and the limits to the memory of the past, if it is not to become the graved igger of the present, we must see clearly how great is the " plastic power " of a man or a community or a culture; I mean the power of specifically growing out of one’s self, of making the past and the strange one body with the near and the present, of healing wounds, replacing what is lost, repairing broken moulds. There are men who have this power so slightly that a single sharp experience, a single pain, often a little injustice, will lacerate their souls like the scratch of a poisoned knife. There are others, who are so little injured by the worst misfortunes, and even by their own spiteful actions, as to feel tolerably comfortable, with a fairly quiet conscience, in the midst of them,-or at any rate shortly afterwards. The deeper the roots of a man’s inner nature, the better will he take the past into himself; and the greatest and most powerful nature would be known by the absence of limits for the historical sense to overgrow and work harm. It would assimilate and digest the past, however foreign, and turn it to sap. Such a nature can forget what it cannot subdue; there is no break in the horizon, and nothing to remind it that there are still men, passions, theories and aims on the other side. This is a universal law; a living thing can only be healthy, strong and productive within a certain horizon: if it be incapable of drawing one round itself, or too selfish to lose its own view in another’s, it will come to an untimely end. Cheerfulness, a good conscience, belief in the future, the joyful deed, all depend, in the individual as well as the nation, on there being a line that divides the visible and clear from the vague and shadowy: we must know the right time to forget as well as the right time to remember; and instinctively see when it is necessary to feel historically, and when unhistorically. This is the point that the reader is asked to consider; that the unhistorical and the historical are equally necessary to the health of an individual, a community, and a system of culture.
Every one has noticed that a man’s historical knowledge and range of feeling may be very limited, his horizon as narrow as that of an Alpine valley, his judgments incorrect and his experience falsely supposed original, and yet in spite of all the incorrectness and falsity he may stand forth in unconquerable health and vigour, to the joy of all who see him; whereas another man with far more judgment and learning will fail in comparison, because the lines of his horizon are continually changing and shifting, and he cannot shake himself free from the delicate network of his truth and righteousness for a downright act of will or desire. We saw that the beast, absolutely " unhistorical,” with the narrowest of horizons, has yet a certain happiness, and lives at least without hypocrisy or ennui; and so we may hold the capacity of feeling (to a certain extent) unhistorically, to be the more important and elemental, as providing the foundation of every sound and real growth, everything that is truly great and human. The unhistorical is like the surrounding atmosphere that can alone create life, and in whose annihilation life itself disappears. It is true that man can only become man by first suppressing this unhistorical element in his thoughts, comparisons, distinctions, and conclusions, letting a clear sudden light break through these misty clouds by his power of turning the past to the uses of the present. But an excess of history makes him flag again, while without the veil of the unhistorical he would never have the courage to begin. What deeds could man ever have done if he had not been enveloped in the dust-cloud of the unhistorical? Or, to leave metaphors and take a concrete example, imagine a man swayed and driven by a strong passion, whether for a woman or a theory. His world is quite altered. He is blind to everything behind him, new sounds are muffled and meaningless; though his perceptions were never so intimately felt in all their colour, light and music, and he seems to grasp them with his five senses together. All his judgments of value are changed for the worse; there is much he can no longer value, as he can scarcely feel it: he wonders that he has so long been the sport of strange words and opinions, that his recollections have run round in one unwearying circle and are yet too weak and weary to make a single step away from it. His whole case is most indefensible; it is narrow, ungrateful to the past, blind to danger, deaf to warnings, a small living eddy in a dead sea of night and forgetfulness. And yet this condition, unhistorical and antihistorical throughout, is the cradle not only of unjust action, but of every just and justifiable action in the world. No artist will paint his picture, no general win his victory, no nation gain its freedom, without having striven and yearned for it under those very “unhistorical” conditions. If the man of action, in Goethe’s phrase, is without conscience, he is also without knowledge: he forgets most things in order to do one, he is unjust to what is behind him, and only recognises one law, the law of that which is to be. So he loves his work infinitely more, than it deserves to be loved; and the best works are produced in such an ecstasy of love that they must always be unworthy of it, however great their worth otherwise.
Should any one be able to dissolve the unhistorical atmosphere in which every great event happens, and breathe afterwards, he might be capable of rising to the “super-historical” standpoint of consciousness, that Niebuhr has described as the possible result of historical research. “History,” he says, “is useful for one purpose, if studied in detail: that men may know, as the greatest and best spirits of our generation do not know, the accidental nature of the forms in which they see and insist on others seeing,-insist, I say, because their consciousness of them is exceptionally intense. Any one who has not grasped this idea in its different applications will fall under the spell of a more powerful spirit who reads a deeper emotion into the given form.” Such a standpoint might be called “super-historical,” as one who took it could feel no impulse from history to any further life or work, for he would have recognised the blindness and injustice in the soul of the doer as a condition of every deed: he would be cured henceforth of taking history too seriously, and have learnt to answer the question how and why life should be lived, for all men and all circumstances, Greeks or Turks, the first century or the nineteenth. Whoever asks his friends whether they would live the last ten or twenty years over again, will easily see which of them is born for the “super-historical standpoint”: they will all answer no, but will give different reasons for their answer. Some will say they have the consolation that the next twenty will be better: they are the men referred to satirically by David Hume: “And from the dregs of life hope to receive,
What the first sprightly running could not give.”
We will call them the “historical men.” Their vision of the past turns them towards the future, encourages them to persevere with life, and kindles the hope that justice will yet come and happiness is behind the mountain they are climbing. They believe that the meaning of existence will become ever clearer in the course of its evolution, they only look backward at the process to understand the present and stimulate their longing for the future. They do not know how unhistorical their thoughts and actions are in spite of all their history, and how their preoccupation with it is for the sake of life rather than mere science.
But that question to which we have heard the first answer, is capable of another; also a “no,” but on different grounds. It is the “no” of the “super-historical” man who sees no salvation in evolution, for whom the world is complete and fulfils its aim in every single moment. How could the next ten years teach what the past ten were not able to teach?
Whether the aim of the teaching be happiness or resignation, virtue or penance, these super-historical men are not agreed; but as against all merely historical ways of viewing the past, they are unanimous in the theory that the past and the present are one and the same, typically alike in all their diversity, and forming together a picture of eternally present imperishable types of unchangeable value and significance. Just as the hundreds of different languages correspond to the same constant and elemental needs of mankind, and one who understood the needs could learn nothing new from the languages; so the “super-historical” philosopher sees all the history of nations and individuals from within. He has a divine insight into the original meaning of the hieroglyphs, and comes even to be weary of the letters that are continually unrolled before him. How should the endless rush of events not bring satiety, surfeit, loathing? So the boldest of us is ready perhaps at last to say from his heart with Giacomo Leopardi: “Nothing lives that were worth thy pains, and the earth deserves not a sigh. Our being is pain and weariness, and the world is mud-nothing else. Be calm.”
But we will leave the super-historical men to their loathings and their wisdom: we wish rather to-day to be joyful in our unwisdom and have a pleasant life as active men who go forward, and respect the course of the world. The value we put on the historical may be merely a Western prejudice: let us at least go forward within this prejudice and not stand still. If we could only learn better to study history as a means to life! We would gladly grant the super-historical people their superior wisdom, so long as we are sure of having more life than they: for in that case our unwisdom would have a greater future before it than their wisdom. To make my opposition between life and wisdom clear, I will take the usual road of the short summary.
A historical phenomenon, completely understood and reduced to an item of knowledge, is, in relation to the man who knows it, dead: for he has found out its madness, its injustice, its blind passion, and especially the earthly and darkened horizon that was the source of its power for history. This power has now become, for him who has recognised it, powerless; not yet, perhaps, for him who is alive.
History regarded as pure knowledge and allowed to sway the intellect would mean for men the final balancing of the ledger of life. Historical study is only fruitful for the future if it follow a powerful life-giving influence, for example, a new system of culture; only, therefore, if it be guided and dominated by a higher force, and do not itself guide and dominate.
History, so far as it serves life, serves an unhistorical power, and thus will never become a pure science like mathematics. The question how far life needs such a service is one of the most serious questions affecting the well-being of a man, a people and a culture. For by excess of history life becomes maimed and degenerate, and is followed by the degeneration of history as well.
2
The fact that life does need the service of history must be as clearly grasped as that an excess of history hurts it; this will be proved later. History is necessary to the living man in three ways: in relation to his action and struggle, his conservatism and reverence, his suffering and his desire for deliverance. These three relations answer to the three kinds of history so far as they can be distinguished -the monumental, the antiquarian, and the critical.
History is necessary above all to the man of action and power who fights a great fight and needs examples, teachers and comforters; he cannot find them among his contemporaries. It was necessary in this sense to Schiller; for our time is so evil, Goethe says, that the poet meets no nature that will profit him, among living men. Polybius is thinking of the active man when he calls political history the true preparation for governing a state; it is the great teacher, that shows us how to bear steadfastly the reverses of fortune, by reminding us of what others have suffered. Whoever has learned to recognise this meaning in history must hate to see curious tourists and laborious beetle-hunters climbing up the great pyramids of antiquity. He does not wish to meet the idler who is rushing through the picture-galleries of the past for a new distraction or sensation, where he himself is looking for example and encouragement. To avoid being troubled by the weak and hopeless idlers, and those whose apparent activity is merely neurotic, he looks behind him and stays his course towards the goal in order to breathe. His goal is happiness, not perhaps his own, but often the nation’s, or humanity’s at large: he avoids quietism, and uses history as a weapon against it. For the most part he has no hope of reward except fame, which means the expectation of a niche in the temple of history, where he in his turn may be the consoler and counsellor of posterity. For his orders are that what has once been able to extend the conception “man” and give it a fairer content, must ever exist for the same office. The great moments in the individual battle form a chain, a high road for humanity through the ages, and the highest points of those vanished moments are yet great and living for men; and this is the fundamental idea of the belief in humanity, that finds a voice in the demand for a " monumental " history.
But the fiercest battle is fought round the demand for greatness to be eternal. Every other living thing cries no. “Away with the monuments,” is the watchword. Dull custom fills all the chambers of the world with its meanness, and rises in thick vapour round anything that is great, barring its way to immortality, blinding and stifling it. And the way passes through mortal brains! Through the brains of sick and short-lived beasts that ever rise to the surface to breathe, and painfully keep off annihilation for a little space. For they wish but one thing: to live at any cost. Who would ever dream of any “monumental history” among them, the hard torch-race that alone gives life to greatness? And yet there are always men awakening, who are strengthened and made happy by gazing on past greatness, as though man’s life were a lordly thing, and the fairest fruit of this bitter tree were the knowledge that there was once a man who walked sternly and proudly through this world, another who had pity and loving-kindness, another who lived in contemplation, but all leaving one truth behind them, that his life is the fairest who thinks least about life. The common man snatches greedily at this little span, with tragic earnestness, but they, on their way to monumental history and immortality, knew how to greet it with Olympic laughter, or at least with a lofty scorn; and they went down to their graves in irony-for what had they to bury? Only what they had always treated as dross, refuse, and vanity, and which now falls into its true home of oblivion, after being so long the sport of their contempt. One thing will live, the sign-manual of their inmost being, the rare flash of light, the deed, the creation; because posterity cannot do without it. In this spiritualised form fame is something more than the sweetest morsel for our egoism, in Schopenhauer’s phrase: it is the belief in the oneness and continuity of the great in every age, and a protest against the change and decay of generations.
What is the use to the modern man of this “monumental " contemplation of the past, this preoccupation with the rare and classic? It is the knowledge that the great thing existed and was therefore possible, and so may be possible again. He is heartened on his way; for his doubt in weaker moments, whether his desire be not for the impossible, is struck aside. Suppose one believe that no more than a hundred men, brought up in the new spirit, efficient and productive, were needed to give the deathblow to the present fashion of education in Germany; he will gather strength from the remembrance that the culture of the Renaissance was raised on the shoulders of such another band of a hundred men.
And yet if we really wish to learn something from an example, how vague and elusive do we find the comparison! If it is to give us strength, many of the differences must be neglected, the individuality of the past forced into a general formula and all the sharp angles broken off for the sake of correspondence. Ultimately, of course, what was once possible can only become possible a second time on the Pythagorean theory, that when the heavenly bodies are in the same position again, the events on earth are reproduced to the smallest detail; so when the stars have a certain relation, a Stoic and an Epicurean will form a conspiracy to murder Caesar, and a different conjunction will show another Columbus discovering America. Only if the earth always began its drama again after the fifth act, and it were certain that the same interaction of motives, the same deus ex machina the same catastrophe would occur at particular intervals, could the man of action venture to look for the whole archetypic truth in monumental history, to see each fact fully set out in its uniqueness: it would not probably be before the astronomers became astrologers again. Till then monumental history will never be able to have complete truth; it will always bring together things that are incompatible and generalise them into compatibility, will always weaken the differences of motive and occasion. Its object is to depict effects at the expense of the causes-“monumentally,” that is, as examples for imitation: it turns aside, as far as it may, from reasons, and might be called with far less exaggeration a collection of “effects in themselves,” than of events that will have an effect on all ages. The events of war or religion cherished in our popular celebrations are such “effects in themselves”; it is these that will not let ambition sleep, and lie like amulets on the bolder hearts-not the real historical nexus of cause and effect, which, rightly understood, would only prove that nothing quite similar could ever be cast again from the dice-boxes of fate and the future.
As long as the soul of history is found in the great impulse that it gives to a powerful spirit, as long as the past is principally used as a model for imitation, it is always in danger of being a little altered and touched up, and brought nearer to fiction. Sometimes there is no possible distinction between a “monumental” past and a mythical romance, as the same motives for action can be gathered from the one world as the other. If this monumental method of surveying the past dominate the others,-the antiquarian and the critical,-the past itself suffers wrong. Whole tracts of it are forgotten and despised; they flow away like a dark unbroken river, with only a few gaily coloured islands of fact rising above it. There is something beyond nature in the rare figures that become visible, like the golden hips that his disciples attributed to Pythagoras. Monumental history lives by false analogy; it entices the brave to rashness, and the enthusiastic to fanaticism by its tempting comparisons. Imagine this history in the hands -and the head-of a gifted egoist or an inspired scoundrel; kingdoms will be overthrown, princes murdered, war and revolution let loose, and the number of “effects in themselves”-in other words, effects without sufficient cause-increased. So much for the harm done by monumental history to the powerful men of action, be they good or bad; but what if the weak and the inactive take it as their servant-or their master!
Consider the simplest and commonest example, the inartistic or half artistic natures whom a monumental history provides with sword and buckler. They will use the weapons against their hereditary enemies, the great artistic spirits, who alone can learn from that history the one real lesson, how to live, and embody what they have learnt in noble action. Their way is obstructed, their free air darkened by the idolatrous-and conscientious-dance round the half understood monument of a great past. “See, that is the true and real art,” we seem to hear: “of what use are these aspiring little people of to-day?” The dancing crowd has apparently the monopoly of “good taste”: for the creator is always at a disadvantage compared with the mere looker-on, who never put a hand to the work; just as the arm-chair politician has ever had more wisdom and foresight than the actual statesman. But if the custom of democratic suffrage and numerical majorities be transferred to the realm of art, and the artist put on his defence before the court of aesthetic dilettanti, you may take your oath on his condemnation; although, or rather because, his judges had proclaimed solemnly the canon of “monumental art,” the art that has “had an effect on all ages,” according to the official definition. In their eyes no need nor inclination nor historical authority is in favour of the art which is not yet “monumental” because it is contemporary. Their instinct tells them that art can be slain by art: the monumental will never be reproduced, and the weight of its authority is invoked from the past to make it sure. They are connoisseurs of art, primarily because they wish to kill art; they pretend to be physicians, when their real idea is to dabble in poisons. They develop their tastes to a point of perversion, that they may be able to show a reason for continually rejecting all the nourishing artistic fare that is offered them. For they do not want greatness, to arise: their method is to say, “See, the great thing is already here!” In reality they care as little about the great thing that is already here, as that which is about to arise: their lives are evidence of that. Monumental history is the cloak under which their hatred of present power and greatness masquerades as an extreme admiration of the past: the real meaning of this way of viewing history is disguised as its opposite; whether they wish it or no, they are acting as though their motto were, “let the dead bury the-living.”
Each of “the three kinds of history will only flourish in one ground and climate: otherwise it grows to a noxious weed. If the man who will produce something great, have need of the past, he makes himself its master by means of monumental history: the man who can rest content with the traditional and venerable, uses the past as an “antiquarian historian”: and only he whose heart is oppressed by an instant need, and who will cast the burden off at any price, feels the want of “critical history,” the history that judges and condemns. There is much harm wrought by wrong and thoughtless planting: the critic without the need, the antiquary without piety, the knower of the great deed who cannot be the doer of it, are plants that have grown to weeds, they are torn from their native soil and therefore degenerate.
3
Secondly, history is necessary to the man of conservative and reverent nature, who looks back to the origins of his existence with love and trust; through it, he gives thanks for life. He is careful to preserve what survives from ancient days, and will reproduce the conditions of his own upbringing for those who come after him; thus he does life a service. The possession of his ancestors’ furniture changes its meaning in his soul: for his soul is rather possessed by it. All that is small and limited, mouldy and obsolete, gains a worth and inviolability of its own from the conservative and reverent soul of the antiquary migrating into it, and building a secret nest there. The history of his town becomes the history of himself; he looks on the walls, the turreted gate, the town council, the fair, as an illustrated diary of his youth, and sees himself in it all-his strength, industry, desire, reason, faults and follies. “Here one could live,” he says, “as one can live here now-and will go on living; for we are tough folk, and will not be uprooted in the night.” And so, with his “we,” he surveys the marvellous individual life of the past and identifies himself with the spirit of the house, the family and the city. He greets the soul of his people from afar as his own, across the dim and troubled centuries: his gifts and his virtues lie in such power of feeling and divination, his scent of a half-vanished trail, his instinctive correctness in reading the scribbled past, and understanding at once its palimpsests-nay, its polypsests. Goethe stood with such thoughts before the monument of Erwin von Steinbach: the storm of his feeling rent the historical cloud-veil that hung between them, and he saw the German work for the first time “coming from the stern, rough, German soul.” This was the road that the Italians of the Renaissance travelled, the spirit that reawakened the ancient Italic genius in their poets to “a wondrous echo of the immemorial lyre,” as Jacob Burckhardt says. But the greatest value of this antiquarian spirit of reverence lies in the simple emotions of pleasure and content that it lends to the drab, rough, even painful circumstances of a nation’s or individual’s life: Niebuhr confesses that he could live happily on a moor among free peasants with a history, and would never feel the want of art. How could history serve life better than by anchoring the less gifted races and peoples to the homes and customs of their ancestors, and keeping them from ranging far afield in search of better, to find only struggle and competition? The influence that ties men down to the same companions and circumstances, to the daily round of toil, to their bare mountain-side,-seems to be selfish and unreasonable: but it is a healthy unreason and of profit to the community; as every one knows who has clearly realised the terrible consequences of mere desire for migration and adventure,-perhaps in whole peoples,-or who watches the destiny of a nation that has lost confidence in its earlier days, and is given up to a restless cosmopolitanism and an unceasing desire for novelty. The feeling of the tree that clings to its roots, the happiness of knowing one’s growth to be not merely arbitrary and fortuitous, but the inheritance, the fruit and blossom of a past, that does not merely justify but crown the present-this is what we nowadays prefer to call the real historical sense.
These are not the conditions most favourable to reducing the past to pure science: and we see here too, as we saw in the case of monumental history, that the past itself suffers when history serves life and is directed by its end. To vary the metaphor, the tree feels its roots better than it can see them: the greatness of the feeling is measured by the greatness and strength of the visible branches. The tree may be wrong here; how far more wrong will it be in regard to the whole forest, which it only knows and feels so far as it is hindered or helped by it, and not otherwise! The antiquarian sense of a man, a city or a nation has always a very limited field. Many things are not noticed at all; the others are seen in isolation, as through a microscope. There is no measure: equal importance is given to everything, and therefore too much to anything. For the things of the past are never viewed in their true perspective or receive their just value; but value and perspective change with the individual or the nation that is looking back on its past.
There is always the danger here, that everything ancient will be regarded as equally venerable, and, everything without this respect for antiquity, like a new spirit, rejected as an enemy. The Greeks themselves admitted the archaic style of plastic art by the side of the freer and greater style; and later, did not merely tolerate the pointed nose and the cold mouth, but made them even a canon of taste. If the judgment of a people harden in this way, and history’s service to the past life be to undermine a further and higher life; if the historical sense no longer preserve life, but mummify it: then the tree dies, unnaturally, from the top downwards, and at last the roots themselves wither. Antiquarian history degenerates from the moment tha,t it no longer gives a soul and inspiration to the fresh life of the present. The spring of piety is dried up, but the learned habit persists without it and revolves complaisantly round its own centre. The horrid spectacle is seen of the mad collector raking over all the dust-heaps of the past. He breathes a mouldy air; the antiquarian habit may degrade a considerable talent, a real spiritual need in him, to a mere insatiable curiosity for everything old: he often sinks so low as to be satisfied with any food, and greedily devour all the scraps that fall from the bibliographical table.
Even if this degeneration do not take place, and the foundation be not withered on which antiquarian history can alone take root with profit to life: yet there are dangers enough, if it become too powerful and invade the territories of the other methods. It only understands how to preserve life, not to create it; and thus always undervalues the present growth, having, unlike monumental history, no certain instinct for it. Thus it hinders the mighty impulse to a new deed and paralyses the doer, who must always, as doer, be grazing some piety or other. The fact that has grown old carries with it a demand for its own immortality. For when one considers the life-history of such an ancient fact, the amount of reverence paid to it for generations-whether it be a custom, a religious creed, or a political principle,-it seems presumptuous, even impious, to replace it by a new fact, and the ancient congregation of pieties by a new piety.
Here we see clearly how necessary a third way of looking at the past is to man, beside the other two. This is the “critical” way; which is also in the service of life. Man must have the strength to break up the past; and apply it too, in order to live. He must bring the past to the bar of judgment, interrogate it remorselessly, and finally condemn It. Every past is worth condemning: this is the rule in mortal affairs, which always contain a large measure of human power and human weakness. It is not justice that sits in judgment here; nor mercy that proclaims the verdict; but only life, the dim, driving force that insatiably desires-itself. Its sentence is always unmerciful, always unjust, as it never flows from a pure fountain of knowledge: though it would generally turn out the same, if Justice herself delivered it. “For everything that is born is worthy of being destroyed: better were it then that nothing should be born.” It requires great strength to be able to live and forget how far life and injustice are one. Luther himself once said that the world only arose by an oversight of God; if he had ever dreamed of heavy ordnance, he would never have created it. The same life that needs forgetfulness, needs sometimes its destruction; for should the injustice of something ever become obvious-a monopoly, a caste, a dynasty for example-the thing deserves to fall. Its past is critically examined, the knife put to its roots, and all the “pieties” are grimly trodden under foot. The process is always dangerous, even for life; and the men or the times that serve life in this way, by judging and annihilating the past, are always dangerous to themselves and others. For as we are merely the resultant of previous generations, we are also the resiftfanT of their errors, passions, and crimes: it is impossible to shake off this chain. Though we condemn the errors and think we have escaped them, we cannot escape the fact that we spring from them. At best, it comes to a conflict between our innate, inherited nature and our knowledge, between a stern, new discipline and an ancient tradition; and we plant a new way of life, a new instinct, a second nature, that withers the first. It is an attempt to gain a past a posteriori from which we might spring, as against that from which we do spring; always a dangerous attempt, as it is difficult to find a limit to the denial of the past, and the second natures are generally weaker than the first. We stop too often at knowing the good without doing it, because we also know the better but cannot do it. Here and there the victory is won, which gives a strange consolation to the fighters, to those who use critical history for the sake of life. The consolation is the knowledge that this “first nature” was once a second, and that every conquering “second nature” becomes a first.
4
This is how history can serve life. Every man and nation needs a certain knowledge of the past, whether it be through monumental, antiquarian, or critical history, according to his objects, powers, and necessities. The need is not that of the mere thinkers who only look on at life, or the few who desire knowledge and can only be satisfied with knowledge; but it has always a reference to the end of life, and is under its absolute rule and direction. This is the natural relation of an age, a culture and a people to history; hunger is its source, necessity its norm, the inner plastic power assigns its limits. The knowledge of the past is only desired for the service of the future and the present, not to weaken the present or undermine a living future. All this is as simple as truth itself, and quite convincing to any one who is not in the toils of “historical deduction.”
And now to take a quick glance at our time! We fly back in astonishment. The clearness, naturalness, and purity of the connection between life and history has vanished; and in what a maze of exaggeration and contradiction do we now see the problem! Is the guilt ours who see it, or have life and history really altered their conjunction and an inauspicious star risen between them? Others may prove we have seen falsely; I am merely saying what we believe we see. There is such a star, a bright and lordly star, and the conjunction is really altered-by science, and the demand for history to be a science. Life is no more dominant, and knowledge of the past no longer its thrall: boundary marks are overthrown and everything bursts its limits. The perspective of events is blurred, and the blur extends through their whole immeasurable course. No generation has seen such a panoramic comedy as is shown by the “science of universal evolution,” history; that shows it with the dangerous audacity of its motto-"Fiat veritas, pereat vita.”
Let me give a picture of the spiritual events in the soul of the modern man. Historical knowledge streams on him from sources that are inexhaustible, strange incoherencies come together, memory opens all its gates and yet is never open wide enough, nature busies herself to receive all the foreign guests, to honour them and put them in their places. But they are at war with each other: violent measures seem necessary, in order to escape destruction one’s self. It becomes second nature to grow gradually accustomed to this irregular and stormy home-life, though this second nature is unquestionably weaker, more restless, more radically unsound than the first. The modern man carries inside him an enormous heap of indigestible knowledge-stones that occasionally rattle together in his body, as the fairy-tale has it. And the rattle reveals the the most striking characteristic of these modern men, the opposition of something inside them to which nothing external corresponds; and the reverse. The ancient nations knew nothing of this. Knowledge, taken in excess without hunger, even contrary to desire, has no more the effect of transforming the external life; and remains hidden in a chaotic inner world that the modern man has a curious pride in calling his “real personality.” He has the substance, he says, and only wants the form; but this is quite an unreal opposition in a living thing. Our modern culture is for that reason not a living one, because it cannot be understood without that opposition. In other words, it is not a real culture but a kind of knowledge about culture, a complex of various thoughts and feelings about it, from which no decision as to its direction can come. Its real motive force that issues in visible action is often no more than a mere convention, a wretched imitation, or even a shameless caricature. The man probably feels like the snake that has swallowed a rabbit whole and lies still in the sun, avoiding all movement not absolutely necessary. The “inner life” is now the only thing that matters to education, and all who see it hope that the education may not fail by being too indigestible. Imagine a Greek meeting it; he would observe that for modern men “education” and “historical education” seem to mean the same thing, with the difference that the one phrase is longer. And if he spoke of his own theory, that a man can be very well educated without any history at all, people would shake their heads and think they had not heard aright. The Greeks, the famous people of a past still near to us, had the “unhistorical sense” strongly developed in the period of their greatest power. If a typical child of his age were transported to that world by some enchantment, he would probably find the Greeks very “uneducated.” And that discovery would betray the closely guarded secret of modern culture to the laughter of the world. For we moderns have nothing of our own. We only become worth notice by filling ourselves to overflowing with foreign customs, arts, philosophies, religions and sciences: we are wandering encyclopaedias, as an ancient Greek who had strayed into our time would probably call us. But the only value of an encyclopaedia lies in the inside, in the contents, not in what is written outside, in the binding or the wrapper. And so the whole of modern culture is essentially internal; the bookbinder prints something like this on the cover: “Manual of internal culture for external barbarians.” The opposition of inner and outer makes the outer side still more barbarous, as it would naturally be, when the outward growth of a rude people merely developed its primitive inner needs. For what means has nature of repressing too great a luxuriance from without? Only one,-to be affected by it as little as possible, to set it aside and stamp it out at the first opportunity. And so we have the custom of no longer taking real things seriously, we get the feeble personality on which the real and the permanent make so little impression. Men become at last more careless and accommodating in external matters, and the considerable cleft between substance and form is widened; until they have no longer any feeling for barbarism, if only their memories be kept continually titillated, and there flow a constant stream of new things to be known, that can be neatly packed up in the cupboards of their memory. The culture of a people as against this barbarism, can be, I think, described with justice as the “unity of artistic style in every outward expression of the people’s life.” This must not be misunderstood, as though it were merely a question of the opposition between barbarism and “fine style.” The people that can be called cultured, must be in a real sense a living unity, and not be miserably cleft asunder into form and substance. If one wish to promote a people’s culture, let him try to promote this higher unity first, and work for the destruction of the modern educative system for the sake of a true education. Let him dare to consider how the health of a people that has been destroyed by history may be restored, and how it may recover its instincts with its honour.
I am only speaking, directly, about the Germans of the present day, who have had to suffer more than other people from the feebleness of personality and the opposition of substance and form. “Form” generally implies for us some convention, disguise or hypocrisy, and if not hated, is at any rate not loved. We have an extraordinary fear of both the word convention and the thing. This fear drove the German from the French school; for he wished to become more natural, and therefore more German. But he seems to have come to a false conclusion with his “therefore.” First he ran away from his school of convention, and went by any road he liked: he has come ultimately to imitate voluntarily in a slovenly fashion, what he imitated painfully and often successfully before. So now the lazy fellow lives under French conventions that are actually incorrect: his manner of walking shows it, his conversation and dress, his general way of life. In the belief that he was returning to Nature, he merely followed caprice and comfort, with the smallest possible amount of self-control. Go through any German town; you will see conventions that are nothing but the negative aspect of the national characteristics of foreign states. Everything is colourless, worn out, shoddy and ill-copied. Every one acts at his own sweet will-which is not a strong or serious will-on laws dictated by the universal rush and the general desire for comfort. A dress that made no head ache in its inventing and wasted no time in the making, borrowed from foreign models and imperfectly copied, is regarded as an important contribution to German fashion. The sense of form is ironically disclaimed by the people-for they have the “sense of substance”: they are famous for their cult of “inwardness.”
But there is also a famous danger in their “inwardness”: the internal substance cannot be seen from the outside, and so may one day take the opportunity of vanishing, and no one notice its absence, any more than its presence before. One may think the German people to be very far from this danger: yet the foreigner will have some warrant for his reproach that our inward life is too weak and ill-organised to provide a form and external expression for itself. It may in rare cases show itself finely receptive, earnest and powerful, richer perhaps than the inward life of other peoples: but, taken as a whole, it remains weak, as all its fine threads are not tied together in one strong knot. The visible action is not the self-manifestation of the inward life, but only a weak and crude attempt of a single thread to make a show of representing the whole. And thus the German is not to be judged on any one action, for the individual may be as completely obscure after it as before. He must obviously be measured by his thoughts and feelings, which are now expressed in his books; if only the books did not, more than ever, raise the doubt whether the famous inward life is still really sitting in its inaccessible shrine. It might one day vanish and leave behind it only the external life,-with its vulgar pride and vain servility,-to mark the German. Fearful thought!-as fearful as if the inward life still sat there, painted and rouged and disguised, become a play-actress or something worse; as his theatrical experience seems to have taught the quiet observer Grillparzer, standing aside as he did from the main press. “We feel by theory,” he says. “We hardly know any more how our contemporaries give expression to their feelings: we make them use gestures that are impossible nowadays. Shakespeare has spoilt us moderns.”
This is a single example, its general application perhaps too hastily assumed. But how terrible it would be were that generalisation justified before our eyes! There would be then a note of despair in the phrase, “We Germans feel by theory, we are all spoilt by history;"-a phrase that would cut at the roots of any hope for a future national culture. For every hope of that kind grows from the belief in the genuineness and immediacy of German feeling, from the belief in an untarnished inward life. Where is our hope or belief, when its spring is muddied, and the inward quality has learned gestures and dances and the use of cosmetics, has learned to express itself “with due reflection in abstract terms,” and gradually to lose itself? And how should a great productive spirit exist among a nation that is not sure of its inward unity and is divided into educated men whose inner life has been drawn from the true path of education, and uneducated men whose inner life cannot be approached at all? How should it exist, I say, when the people has lost its own unity of feeling, and knows that the feeling of the part calling itself the educated part and claiming the right of controlling the artistic spirit of the nation, is false and hypocritical? Here and there the judgment and taste of individuals may be higher and finer than the rest, but that is no compensation: it tortures a man to have to speak only to one section and be no longer in sympathy with his people. He would rather bury his treasure now, in disgust at the vulgar patronage of a class, though his heart be filled with tenderness for all. The instinct of the people can no longer meet him half-way; it is useless for them to stretch their arms out to him in yearning. What remains but to turn his quickened hatred against the ban, strike at the barrier raised by the so-called culture, and condemn as judge what blasted and degraded him as a living man and a source of life? He takes a profound insight into fate in exchange for the godlike desire of creation and help, and ends his days as a lonely philosopher, with the wisdom of disillusion. It is the painfullest comedy: he who sees it will feel a sacred obligation on him, and say to himself,-“Help must come: the higher unity in the nature and soul of a people must be brought back, the cleft between inner and outer must again disappear under the hammer of necessity.” But to what means can he look? What remains to him now but his knowledge? He hopes to plant the feeling of a need, by speaking from the breadth of that knowledge, giving it freely with both hands. From the strong need the strong action may one day arise. And to leave no doubt of the instance I am taking of the need and the knowledge, my testimony shall stand, that it is German unity in, its highest sense which is the goal of our endeavour, far more than political union: it is the unity of the German spirit and life after the annihilation of the antagonism between form and substance, inward life and convention.
5
An excess of history seems to be an enemy to the life of a time, and dangerous in five ways. Firstly, the contrast of inner and outer is emphasised and personality weakened. Secondly, the time comes to imagine that it possesses the rarest of virtues, justice, to a higher degree than any other time. Thirdly, the instincts of a nation are thwarted, the maturity of the individual arrested no less than that of the whole. Fourthly, we get the belief in the old age of mankind, the belief, at all times harmful, that we are late survivals, mere Epigoni. Lastly, an age reaches a dangerous condition of irony"with regard to itself, and the still more dangerous state of cynicism, when a cunning egoistic theory of action is matured that maims and at last destroys the vital strength.
To return to the first point: the modern man suffers from a weakened personality. The Roman of the Empire ceased to be a Roman through the contemplation of the world that lay at his feet; he lost himself in the crowd of foreigners that streamed into Rome, and degenerated amid the cosmopolitan carnival of arts, worships and moralities. It is the same with the modern man, who is continually having a world-panorama unrolled before his eyes by his historical artists. He is turned into a restless, dilettante spectator, and arrives at a condition when even great wars and revolutions cannot affect him beyond the moment. The war is hardly at an end and it is already converted into thousands of copies of printed matter, and will be soon served up as the latest means of tickling the jaded palates of the historical gourmets. It seems impossible for a strong full chord to be prolonged, however powerfully the strings are swept: it dies away again the next moment in the soft and strength-less echo of history. In ethical language, one never succeeds in staying on a height; your deeds are sudden crashes, and not a long roll of thunder. One may bring the greatest and most marvellous thing to perfection; it must yet go down to Orcus unhonoured and unsung. For art flies away when you are roofing your deeds with the historical awning. The man who wishes to understand everything in a moment, when he ought to grasp the unintelligible as the sublime by a long struggle, can be called intelligent only in the sense of Schiller’s epigram on the “reason of reasonable men.” There is something the child sees that he does not see; something the child hears that he does not hear; and this something is the most important thing of all. Because he does not understand it, his understanding is more childish than the child’s and more simple than simplicity itself; in spite of the many clever wrinkles on his parchment face, and the masterly play of his fingers in unravelling the knots. He has lost or destroyed his instinct; he can no longer trust the “divine animal” and let the reins hang loose, when his understanding fails him and his way lies through the desert. His individuality is shaken, and left without any sure belief in itself; it sinks into its own inner being, which only means here the disordered chaos of what it has learned, which will never express itself externally, being mere dogma that cannot turn to life. Looking further, we see how the banishment of instinct by history has turned men to shades and abstractions: no one ventures to show a personality, but masks himself as a man of culture, a savant, poet or politician.
If one take hold of these masks, believing he has to do with a serious thing and not a mere puppet-show-for they all have an appearance of seriousness-he will find nothing but rags and coloured streamers in his hands. He must deceive himself no more, but cry aloud, “Off with your jackets, or be what you seem!” A man of the royal stock of seriousness must no longer be a Don Quixote, for he has better things to do than to tilt at such pretended realities. But he must always keep a sharp look about him, call his “Halt! who goes there?” to all the shrouded figures, and tear the masks from their faces. And see the result! One might have thought that history encouraged men above all to be honest, even if it were only to be honest fools: this used to be its effect, but is so no longer. Historical education and the uniform frock-coat of the citizen are both dominant at the same time. While there has never been such a full-throated chatter about “free personality,” personalities can be seen no more (to say nothing of free ones); but merely men in uniform, with their coats anxiously pulled over their ears. Individuality has withdrawn itself to its recesses; it is seen no more from the outside, which makes one doubt if it be possible to have causes without effects. Or will a race of eunuchs prove to be necessary to guard the historical harem of the world? We can understand the reason for their aloofness very well. Does it not seem as if their task were to watch over history to see that nothing comes out except other histories, but no deed that might be historical; to prevent personalities becoming “free,” that is, sincere towards themselves and others, both in word and deed? Only through this sincerity will the inner need and misery of the modern man be brought to the light, and art and religion come as true helpers in the place of that sad hypocrisy of convention and masquerade, to plant a common culture which will answer to real necessities, and not teach, as the present “liberal education” teaches, to tell lies about these needs, and thus become a walking lie one’s self.
In such an age, that suffers from its “liberal education,” how unnatural, artificial and unworthy will be the conditions under which the sincerest of all sciences, the holy naked goddess Philosophy, must exist! She remains in such a world of compulsion and outward conformity, the subject of the deep monologue of the lonely wanderer or the chance prey of any hunter, the dark secret of the chamber or the daily talk of the old men and children at the university. No one dare fulfil the law of philosophy in himself; no one lives philosophically, with that single-hearted virile faith that forced one of the olden time to bear himself as a Stoic, wherever he was and whatever he did, if he had once sworn allegiance to the Stoa. All modern philosophising is political or official, bound down to be a mere phantasmagoria of learning by our modern governments, churches, universities, moralities and cowardices: it lives by sighing “if only..” and by knowing that “it happened once upon a time..” Philosophy has no place in historical education, if it will be more than the knowledge that lives indoors, and can have no expression in action. Were the modern man once courageous and determined, and not merely such an indoor being even in his hatreds, he would banish philosophy. At present he is satisfied with modestly covering her nakedness. Yes, men think, write, print, speak and teach philosophically: so much is permitted them. It is only otherwise in action, in “life.” Only one thing is permitted there, and everything else quite impossible: such are the orders of historical education. “Are these human beings,” one might ask, “or only machines for thinking, writing and speaking?”
Goethe says of Shakespeare: “No one has more despised correctness of costume than he: he knows too well the inner costume that all men wear alike. You hear that he describes Romans wonderfully; I do not think so: they are flesh-and-blood Englishmen; but at any rate they are men from top to toe, and the Roman toga sits well on them.” Would it be possible, I wonder, to represent our present literary and national heroes, officials and politicians as Romans? I am sure it would not, as they are no men, but incarnate compendia, abstractions made concrete. If they have a character of their own, it is so deeply sunk that it can never rise to the light of day: if they are men, they are only men to a physiologist. To all others they are something else, not men, not “beasts or gods,” but historical pictures of the march of civilisation, and nothing but pictures and civilisation, form without any ascertainable substance, bad form unfortunately, and uniform at that. And in this way my thesis is to be understood and considered: “only strong personalities can endure history, the weak are extinguished by it.” History unsettles the feelings when they are not powerful enough to measure the past by themselves. The man who dare no longer trust himself, but asks history against his will for advice “how he ought to feel now,” is insensibly turned by his timidity into a play-actor, and plays a part, or generally many parts, very badly therefore and superficially. Gradually all connection ceases between the man and his historical subjects. We see noisy little fellows measuring themselves with the Romans as though they were like them: they burrow in the remains of the Greek poets, as if these were corpora for their dissection-and as vilia as their own well-educated corpora might be. Suppose a man is working at Democritus. The question is always on my tongue, why precisely Democritus? Why not Heraclitus, or Philo, or Bacon, or Descartes? And then, why a philosopher? Why not a poet or orator? And why especially a Greek? Why not an Englishman or a Turk? Is not the past large enough to let you find some place where you may disport yourself without becoming ridiculous? But, as I said, they are a race of eunuchs: and to the eunuch one woman is the same as another, merely a woman, “woman in herself,” the Ever-unapproachable. And it is indifferent what they study, if history itself always remain beautifully “objective” to them, as men, in fact, who could never make history themselves. And since the Eternal Feminine could never “draw you upward, you draw it down to you, and being neuter yourselves, regard history as neuter also. But in order that no one may take my comparison of history and the Eternal Feminine too seriously, I will say at once that I hold it, on the contrary, to be the Eternal Masculine: I only add that for those who are “historically trained” throughout, it must be quite indifferent which it is; for they are themselves neither man nor woman, nor even hermaphrodite, but mere neuters, or, in more philosophic language, the Eternal Objective,
If the personality be once be emptied of its subjectivity, and come to what men call an “objective” condition, nothing can have any more effect on it. Something good and true may be done, in action, poetry or music: but the hollow culture of the day will look beyond the work and ask the history of the author. If the author have already created something, our historian will set out clearly the past and the probable future course of his development, he will put him with others and compare them, and separate by analysis the choice of his material and his treatment; he will wisely sum the author up and give him general advice for his future path. The most astonishing works may be created; the swarm of historical neuters will always be in their place, ready to consider the author through their long telescopes. The echo is heard at once: but always in the form of “criticism,” though the critic never dreamed of the work’s possibility a moment before. It never comes to have an influence, but only a criticism: and the criticism itself has no influence, but only breeds another criticism. And so we come to consider the fact of many critics as a mark of influence, that of few or none as a mark of failure. Actually everything remains in the old condition, even in the presence of such “influence”: men talk a little while of a new thing, and then of some other new thing, and in the meantime they do what they have always done. The historical training of our critics prevents their having an influence in the true sense, an influence on life and action. They put their blotting paper on the blackest writing, and their thick brushes over the gracefullest designs; these they call “corrections”;-and that is all. Their critical pens never cease to fly, for they have lost power over them; they are driven by their pens instead of driving them. The weakness of modern personality comes out well in the measureless overflow of criticism, in the want of self-mastery, and in what the Romans called: impotentia]].
6
But leaving these weaklings, let us turn rather to a point of strength for which the modern man is famous. Let us ask the painful question whether he has the right in virtue of his historical “objectivity” to call himself strong and just in a higher degree than the man of another age. Is it true that this objectivity has its source in a heightened sense of the need for justice? Or, being really an effect of quite other causes, does it only have the appearance of coming from justice, and really lead to an unhealthy prejudice in favour of the modern man? Socrates thought it near madness to imagine one possessed a virtue without really possessing it. Such imagination has certainly more danger in it than the contrary madness of a positive vice. For of this there is still a cure; but the other makes a man or a time daily worse, and therefore more unjust.
No one has a higher claim to our reverence than the man with the feeling and the strength for justice. For the highest and rarest virtues unite and are lost in it, as an unfathomable sea absorbs the streams that flow from every side. The hand of the just man, who is called to sit in judgment, trembles no more when it holds the scales: he piles the weights inexorably against his own side, his eyes are not dimmed as the balance rises and falls, and his voice is neither hard nor broken when he pronounces the sentence. Were he a cold demon of knowledge, he would cast round him the icy atmosphere of an awful, superhuman majesty, that we should fear, not reverence. But he is a man, and has tried to rise from a careless doubt to a strong certainty, from a gentle tolerance to the imperative “thou must”; from the rare virtue of magnanimity to the rarest, of justice. He has come to be like that demon without being more than a poor mortal at the outset; above all, he has to atone to himself for his humanity and tragically shatter his own nature on the rock of an impossible virtue.-All this places him on a lonely height as the most reverend example of the human race. For truth is his aim, not in the form of cold ineffectual knowledge, but the truth of the judge who punishes according to law; not as the selfish possession of an individual, but the sacred authority that removes the boundary stones from all selfish possessions; truth, in a word, as the tribunal of the world, and not as the chance prey of a single hunter. The search for truth is often thoughtlessly praised: but it only has anything great in it if the seeker have the sincere unconditional will for justice. Its roots are in justice alone: but a whole crowd of different motives may combine in the search for it, that have nothing to do with truth at all; curiosity, for example, or dread of ennui, envy, vanity, or amusement. Thus the world seems to be full of men who “serve truth”: and yet the virtue of justice is seldom present, more seldom known, and almost always mortally hated. On the other hand a throng of sham virtues has entered in at all times with pomp and honour.
Few in truth serve truth, as only few have the pure will for justice; and very few even of these have the strength to be just. The will alone is not enough: the impulse to justice without the power of judgment has been the cause of the greatest suffering to men. And thus the common good could, require nothing better than for the seed of this power to be strewn as widely as possible, that the fanatic may be distinguished from the true judge, and the blind desire from the conscious power. But there are no means of planting a power of judgment: and so when one speaks to men of truth and justice, they will be ever troubled by the doubt whether it be the fanatic or the judge who is speaking to them. And they must be pardoned for always treating the “servants of truth” with special kindness, who possess neither the will nor the power to judge and have set before them the task of finding “pure knowledge without reference to consequences,” knowledge, in plain terms, that comes to nothing. There are very many truths which are unimportant; problems that require no struggle to solve, to say nothing of sacrifice. And in this safe realm of indifference a man may very successfully become a “cold demon of knowledge.” And yet-if we find whole regiments of learned inquirers being turned to such demons in some age specially favourable to them, it is always unfortunately possible that the age is lacking in a great and strong sense of justice, the noblest spring of the so-called impulse to truth.
Consider the historical virtuoso of the present time: is he the justest man of his age? True, he has developed in himself such a delicacy and sensitiveness that “nothing human is alien to him.” Times and persons most widely separated come together in the concords of his lyre. He has become a passive instrument, whose tones find an echo in similar instruments: until the whole atmosphere of a time is filled with such echoes, all buzzing in one soft chord. Yet I think one only hears the overtones of the original historical note: its rough powerful quality can be no longer guessed from these thin and shrill vibrations. The original note sang of action, need, and terror; the overtone lulls us into a soft dilettante sleep. It is as though the heroic symphony had been arranged for two flutes for the use of dreaming opium-smokers. We can now judge how these virtuosi stand towards the claim of the modern man to a higher and purer conception of justice. This virtue has never a pleasing quality; it never charms; it is harsh and strident. Generosity stands very low on the ladder of the virtues in comparison; and generosity is the mark of a few rare historians! Most of them only get as far as tolerance, in other words they leave what cannot be explained away, they correct it and touch it up condescendingly, on the tacit assumption that the novice will count it as justice if the past be narrated without harshness or open expressions of hatred. But only superior strength can really judge; weakness must tolerate, if it do not pretend to be strength and turn justice to a play- actress. There is still a dreadful class of historians remaining-clever, stern and honest, but narrow-minded: who have the “good will” to be just with a pathetic belief in their actual judgments, which are all false; for the same reason, almost, as the verdicts of the usual juries are false. How difficult it is to find a real historical talent, if we exclude all the disguised egoists, and the partisans who pretend to take up an impartial attitude for the sake of their own unholy game! And we also exclude the thoughtless folk who write history in the naive faith that justice resides in the popular view of their time, and that to write in the spirit of the time is to be just; a faith that is found in all religions, and which, in religion, serves very well. The measurement of the opinions and deeds of the past by the universal opinions of the present is called “objectivity” by these simple people: they find the canon of all truth here: their work is to adapt the past to the present triviality. And they call all historical writing “subjective” that does not regard these popular opinions as canonical.
Might not an illusion lurk in the highest interpretation of the word objectivity? We understand by it a certain standpoint in the historian, who sees the procession of motive and consequence too clearly for it to have an effect on his own personality. We think of the aesthetic phenomenon of the detachment from all personal concern with which the painter sees the picture and forgets himself, in a stormy landscape, amid thunder and lightning, or on a rough sea: and we require the same artistic vision and absorption in his object from the historian. But it is only a superstition to say that the picture given to such a man by the object really shows the truth of things. Unless it be that objects are expected in such moments to paint or photograph themselves by their own activity on a purely passive medium!
But this would be a myth, and a bad one at that. One forgets that this moment is actually the powerful and spontaneous moment of creation in the artist, of “composition” in its highest form, of which the result will be an artistically, but not an historically, true picture. To think objectively, in this sense, of history is the work of the dramatist: to think one thing with another, and weave the elements into a single whole; with the presumption that the unity of plan must be put into the objects if it be not already there. So man veils and subdues the past, and expresses his impulse to art-but not his impulse to truth or justice. Objectivity and justice have nothing to do with each other. There could be a kind of historical writing that had no drop of common fact in it and yet could claim to be called in the highest degree objective. Grillparzer goes so far as to say that “history is nothing but the manner in which the spirit of man apprehends facts that are obscure to him, links things together whose connection heaven only knows, replaces the unintelligible by something intelligible, puts his own ideas of causation into the external world, which can perhaps be explained only from within: and assumes the existence of chance, where thousands of small causes may be really at work. Each man has his own individual needs, and so millions of tendencies are running together, straight or crooked, parallel or across, forward or backward, helping or hindering each other. They have all the appearance of chance, and make it impossible, quite apart from all natural influences, to establish any universal lines on which past events must have run.” But as a result of this so-called “objective” way of looking at things, such a “must” ought to be made clear. It is a presumption that takes a curious form if adopted by the historian as a dogma. Schiller is quite clear about its truly subjective nature when he says of the historian, “one event after the other begins to draw away from blind chance and lawless freedom, and take its place as the member of an harmonious whole-which is of course only apparent in its presentation. But what is one to think of the innocent statement, wavering between tautology and nonsense, of a famous historical virtuoso? “It seems that all human actions and impulses are subordinate to the process of the material world, that works unnoticed, powerfully and irresistibly.” In such a sentence one no longer finds obscure wisdom in the form of obvious folly; as in the saying of Goethe’s gardener, “Nature may be forced but not compelled,” or in the notice on the side-show at a fair, in Swift: “The largest elephant in the world, except himself, to be seen here.” For what opposition is there between human action and the process of the world? It seems to me that such historians cease to be instructive as soon as they begin to generalise; their weakness is shown by their obscurity. In other sciences the generalisations are the most important things, as they contain the laws. But if such generalisations as these are to stand as laws, the historian’s labour is lost; for the residue of truth, after the obscure and insoluble part is removed, is nothing but the commonest knowledge. The smallest range of experience will teach it. But to worry whole peoples for the purpose, and spend many hard years of work on it, is like crowding one scientific experiment on another long after the law can be deduced from the results already obtained: and this absurd excess of experiment has been the bane of all natural science since Zollner. If the value of a drama lay merely in its final scene, the drama itself would be a very long, crooked and laborious road to the goal: and I hope history will not find its whole significance in general propositions, and regard them as its blossom and fruit. On the contrary, its real value lies in inventing ingenious variations on a probably commonplace theme, in raising the popular melody to a universal symbol and showing what a world of depth, power and beauty exists in it.
But this requires above all a great artistic faculty, a creative vision from a height, the loving study of the data of experience, the free elaborating of a given type,-objectivity in fact, though this time as a positive quality. Objectivity is so often merely a phrase. Instead of the quiet gaze of the artist that is lit by an inward flame, we have an affectation of tranquillity; just as a cold detachment may mask a lack of moral feeling. In some cases a triviality of thought, the everyday wisdom that is too dull not to seem calm and disinterested, comes to represent the artistic condition in which the subjective side has quite sunk out of sight. Everything is favoured that does not rouse emotion, and the driest phrase is the correct one. They go so far as to accept a man who is not affected at all by some particular moment in the past as the right man to describe it. This is the usual relation of the Greeks and the classical scholars. They have nothing to do with each other-and this is called “objectivity”! The intentional air of detachment that is assumed for effect, the sober art of the superficial motive-hunter is most exasperating when the highest and rarest things are in question; and it is the vanity of the historian that drives him to this attitude of indifference. He goes to justify the axiom that a man’s vanity corresponds to his lack of wit. No, be honest at any rate! Do not pretend to the artist’s strength, that is the real objectivity; do not try to be just, if you are not born to that dread vocation. As if it were the task of every time to be just to everything before it! Ages and generations have never the right to be the judges of all previous ages and generations: only to the rarest men in them can that difficult mission fall. Who compels you to judge? If it is your wish-you must prove first that you are capable of justice. As judges, you must stand higher than that which is to be judged: as it is, you have only come later. The guests that come last to the table should rightly take the last places: and will you take the first? Then do some great and mighty deed: the place may be prepared for you then, even though you do come last.
You can only explain the past by what is highest in the present. Only by straining the noblest qualities you have to their highest power will you find out what is greatest in the past, most worth knowing and preserving. Like by like! otherwise you will draw the past to your own level. Do not Believe any history that does not spring from the mind of a rare spirit. You will know the quality of the spirit, by its being forced to say something universal, or to repeat something that is known already; the fine historian must have the power of coining the known into a thing never heard before and proclaiming the universal so simply and profoundly that the simple is lost in the profound, and the profound in the simple. No one can be a great historian and artist, and a shallowpate at the same time. But one must not despise the workers who sift and cast together the material because they can never become great historians. They must, still less, be confounded with them, for they are the necessary bricklayers and apprentices in the service of the master: just as the French used to speak, more naively than a German would, of the “historiens de M. Thiers.” These workmen should gradually become extremely learned, but never, for that reason, turn to be masters. Great learning and great shallowness go together very well under one hat.
Thus, history is to be written by the man of experience and character. He who has not lived through something greater and nobler than others, will riot be able to explain anything great and noble in the past. The language of the past is always oracular: you will only understand if as builders of the future who know the present. We can only explain the extraordinarily wide influence of Delphi by the fact that the Delphic priests had an exact knowledge of the past: and, similarly, only he who is building up the future has a right to judge the past. If you set a great aim before your eyes, you control at the same time the itch for analysis that makes the present into a desert for you, and all rest, all peaceful growth and ripening, impossible. Hedge yourselves with a great, all-embracing hope, and strive on. Make of yourselves a mirror where the future may see itself, and forget the superstition that you are Epigoni. You have enough to ponder and find out, in pondering the life of the future: but do not ask history to show you the means and the instrument to it. If you live yourselves back into the history of great men you will find inn it the high command to come to maturity and leave that blighting system of cultivation offered by your time: which sees its own profit in not allowing you to become ripe, that it may use and dominate you while you are yet unripe. And if you want biographies, do not look for those with the legend “Mr. So-and-so and his times,” but for one whose title-page might be inscribed “a fighter against his time.” Feast your souls on Plutarch, and dare to believe in yourselves when you believe in his heroes. A hundred such men-educated against the fashion of to-day, made familiar with the heroic, and come to maturity-are enough to give an eternal quietus to the noisy sham education of this time.
7
The unrestrained historical sense, pushed to its logical extreme, uproots the future, because it destroys illusions and robs existing things of the only atmosphere in which they can live. Historical justice, even if practised conscientiously, with a pure heart, is therefore a dreadful virtue, because it always undermines and ruins the living thing: its judgment always means annihilation. If there be no constructive impulse behind the historical one, if the clearance of rubbish be not merely to leave the ground free for the hopeful living future to build its house, if justice alone be supreme, the creative instinct is sapped and discouraged. A religion, for example, that has to be turned into a matter of historical knowledge by the power of pure justice, and to be scientifically studied throughout, is destroyed at the end of it all. For the historical audit brings so much to light which is false and absurd, violent and inhuman, that the condition of pious illusion falls to pieces. And a thing can only live through a pious illusion. For man is creative only through love and in the shadow of love’s illusions, only through the unconditional belief in perfection and righteousness. Everything that forces a man to be no longer unconditioned in his love, cuts at the root of his strength: he must wither, and be dishonoured. Art has the opposite effect to history: and only perhaps if history suffer transformation into a pure work of art, can it preserve instincts or arouse them. Such history would be quite against the analytical and inartistic tendencies of our time, and even be considered false. But the history that merely destroys without any impulse to construct, will in the long-run make its instruments tired of life; for such men destroy illusions, and “he who destroys illusions in himself and others is punished by the ultimate tyrant, Nature.” For a time a man can take up history like any other study, and it will be perfectly harmless. Recent theology seems to have entered quite innocently into partnership with history, and scarcely sees even now that it has unwittingly bound itself to the Voltairean écrasez! No one need expect from that any new and powerful constructive impulse: they might as well have let the so-called Protestant Union serve as the cradle of a new religion, and the jurist Holtzendorf, the editor of the far more dubiously named Protestant Bible, be its John the Baptist. This state of innocence may be continued for some time by the Hegelian philosophy,-still seething in some of the older heads,-by which men can distinguish the “idea of Christianity” from its various imperfect “manifestations”; and persuade themselves that it is the “self-movement of the Idea” that is ever particularising itself in purer and purer forms, and at last becomes the purest, most transparent, in fact scarcely visible form in the brain of the present theologus liberalis vulgaris. But to listen to this, pure Christianity speaking its mind about the earlier impure Christianity, the uninitiated hearer would often get the impression that the talk was not of Christianity at all but of..-what are we to think? if we find Christianity described by the “greatest theologian of the century” as the religion that claims to “find itself in all real religions and some other barely possible religions,” and if the “true church” is to be a thing “which may become a liquid mass with no fixed outline, with no fixed place for its different parts, but everything to be peacefully welded together”-what, I ask again, are we to think?
Christianity has been denaturalised by historical treatment-which in its most complete form means “just” treatment until it has been resolved into pure knowledge and destroyed in the process. This can be studied in everything that has life. For it ceases to have life if it be perfectly dissected, and lives in pain and anguish as soon as the historical dissection begins. There are some who believe in the saving power of German music to revolutionise the German nature. They angrily exclaim against the special injustice done to our culture, when such men as Mozart and Beethoven are beginning to be spattered with the learned mud of the biographers and forced to answer a thousand searching questions on the rack of historical criticism. Is it not premature death, or at least mutilation, for anything whose living influence is not yet exhausted, when men turn their curious eyes to the little minutiae of life and art, and look for problems of knowledge where one ought to learn to live, and forget problems? Set a couple of these modern biographers to consider the origins of Christianity or the Lutheran reformation: their sober, practical investigations would be quite sufficient to make all spiritual “action at a distance” impossible: just as the smallest animal can prevent the growth of the mightiest oak by simply eating up the acorn. All living things need an atmosphere, a mysterious mist, around them. If that veil be taken away and a religion, an art, or a genius condemned to revolve like a star without an atmosphere, we must not be surprised if it becomes hard and unfruitful, and soon withers. It is so with all great things “that never prosper without some illusion,” as Hans Sachs says in the Meistersinger.
Every people, every man even, who would become ripe, needs such a veil of illusion, such a protecting cloud. But now men hate to become ripe, for they honour history above life. They cry in triumph that “science is now beginning to rule life.” Possibly it might; but a life thus ruled Is not of much value. It is not such true life, and promises much less for the future than the life that used to be guided not by science, but by instincts and powerful illusions. But this is not to be the age of ripe, alert and harmonious personalities, but of work that may be of most use to the commonwealth. Men are to be fashioned to the needs of the time, that they may soon take their place in the machine. They must work in the factory of the “common good” before they are ripe, or rather to prevent them becoming ripe; for this would be a luxury that would draw away a deal of power from the “labour market.” Some birds are blinded that they may sing better; I do not think men sing to-day better than their grandfathers, though I am sure they are blinded early. But light, too clear, too sudden and dazzling, is the infamous means used to blind them. The young man is kicked through all the centuries: boys who know nothing of war, diplomacy, or commerce are considered fit to be introduced to political history. We moderns also run through art galleries and hear concerts in the same way as the young man runs through history. We can feel that one thing, sounds differently from another, and pronounce on the different “effects.” And the power of gradually losing all feelings of strangeness or astonishment, and finally being pleased at anything, is called the historical sense, or historical culture. The crowd of influences streaming on the young soul is so great, the clods of barbarism and violence flung at him so strange and overwhelming, that an assumed stupidity is his only refuge. Where there is a subtler and stronger self -consciousness we find another emotion too-disgust. The young man has become homeless: he doubts all ideas, all moralities. He knows “it was different in every age, and what you are does not matter.” In a heavy apathy he lets opinion on opinion pass by him, and understands the meaning of Holderlin’s words when he read the work of Diogenes Laertius on the lives and doctrines of the Greek philosophers: “I have seen here too what has often occurred to me, that the change and waste in men’s thoughts and systems is far more tragic than the fates that overtake what men are accustomed to call the only realities.” No, such study of history bewilders and overwhelms, It is not necessary for youth, as the ancients show, but even in the highest degree dangerous, as the moderns show. Consider the historical student, the heir of ennui, that appears even in his boyhood. He has the “methods” for original work, the “correct ideas” and the airs of the master at his fingers’ ends. A little isolated period of the past is marked out for sacrifice. He cleverly applies his method, and produces something, or rather, in prouder phrase, “creates” something. He becomes a “servant of truth” and a ruler in the great domain of history. If he was what they call ripe as a boy, he is now over-ripe. You only need shake him and wisdom will rattle down into your lap; but the wisdom is rotten, and every apple has its worm. Believe me, if men work in the factory of science and have to make themselves useful before they are really ripe, science is ruined as much as the slaves who have been employed too soon. I am sorry to use the common jargon about slave-owners and taskmasters in respect of such conditions, that might be thought free from any economic taint: but the words “factory, labour-market, auction-sale, practical use,” and all the auxiliaries of egoism, come involuntarily to the lips in describing the younger generation of savants. Successful mediocrity tends to become still more mediocre, science still more " useful.” Our modern savants are only wise on one subject, in all the rest they are, to say the least, different from those of the old stamp. In spite of that they demand honour and profit for themselves, as if the state and public opinion were bound to take the new coinage for the same value as the old. The carters have made a trade-compact among themselves, and settled that genius is superfluous, for every carrier is being re-stamped as one. And probably a later age will see that their edifices are only carted together and not built. To those who have ever on their lips the modern cry of battle and sacrifice-“Division of labour! fall into line!” we may say roundly: “If you try to further the progress of science as quickly as possible, you will end by destroying it as quickly as possible; just as the hen is worn out which you force to lay too many eggs.” The progress of science has been amazingly rapid in the last decade; but consider the savants, those exhausted hens. They are certainly not “harmonious” natures: they can merely cackle more than before, because they lay eggs oftener: but the eggs are always smaller, though their books are bigger. The natural result of it all is the favourite “popularising” of science (or rather its feminising and infantising), the villainous habit of cutting the cloth of science to fit the figure of the “general public.” Goethe saw the abuse in this, and demanded that science should only influence the outer world by way of a nobler ideal of action. The older generation of savants had good reason for thinking this abuse an oppressive burden: the modern savants have an equally good reason for welcoming it, because, leaving their little corner of knowledge out of account, they are part of the “general public” themselves, and its needs are theirs. They only require to take themselves less seriously to be able to open their little kingdom successfully to popular curiosity. This easy-going behaviour is called “the modest condescension of the savant to the people”; whereas in reality he has only “descended” to himself, so far as he is not a savant but a plebeian. Rise to the conception of a people, you learned men; you can never have one noble or high enough. If you thought much of the people, you would have compassion towards them, and shrink from offering your historical aquafortis as a refreshing drink. But you really think very little of them, for you dare not take any reasonable pains for their future; and you act like practical pessimists, men who feel the coming catastrophe and become indifferent and careless of their own and others’ existence. “If only the earth last for us: and if it do not last, it is no matter.” Thus they come to live an ironical existence.
8
It may seem a paradox, though it is none, that I should attribute a kind of “ironical self-consciousness” to an age that is generally so honestly, and clamorously, vain of its historical training; and should see a suspicion hovering near it that there is really nothing to be proud of, and a fear lest the time for rejoicing at historical knowledge may soon have gone by. Goethe has shown a similar riddle in man’s nature, in his remarkable study of Newton: he finds a “troubled feeling of his own error” at the base-or rather on the height-of his being, just as if he was conscious at times of having a deeper insight into things, that vanished the moment after. This gave him a certain ironical view of his own nature. And one finds that the greater and more developed “historical men” are conscious of all the superstition and absurdity in the belief that a people’s education need be so extremely historical as it is; the mightiest nations, mightiest in action and influence, have lived otherwise, and their youth has been trained otherwise. The knowledge gives a sceptical turn to their minds. “The absurdity and superstition,” these sceptics say, “suit men like ourselves, who come as the latest withered shoots of a gladder and mightier stock, and fulfil Hesiod’s prophecy, that men will one day be born gray-headed, and that Zeus will destroy that generation as soon as the sign be visible.” Historical culture is really a kind of inherited grayness, and those who have borne its mark from childhood must believe instinctively in the old age of mankind. To old age belongs the old man’s business of looking back and casting up his accounts, of seeking consolation in the memories of the past,-in historical culture. But the human race is tough and persistent, and will not admit that the lapse of a thousand years, or a hundred thousand, entitles any one to sum up its progress from the past to the future; that is, it will not be observed as a whole at all by that infinitesimal atom, the individual man. What is there in a couple of thousand years-the period of thirty-four consecutive human lives of sixty years each to make us speak of youth at the beginning, and “the old age of mankind” at the end of them? Does not this paralysing belief in a fast-fading humanity cover the misunderstanding of a theological idea, inherited from the Middle Ages, that the end of the world is approaching and we are waiting anxiously for the judgment? Does not the increasing demand for historical judgment give us that idea in a new dress? as if our time were the latest possible time, and commanded to hold that universal judgment of the past, which the Christian never expected from a man, but from “the Son of Man.” The memento mori, spoken to humanity as well as the individual, was a sting that never ceased to pain, the crown of mediaeval knowledge and consciousness.
The opposite message of a later time, memento vivere, is spoken rather timidly, without the full power of the lungs; and there is something almost dishonest about it. For mankind still keeps to its memento mori, and shows it by the universal need for history; science may flap its wings as it will, it has never been able to gain the free air. A deep feeling of hopelessness has remained, and taken the historical colouring that has now darkened and depressed all higher education. A religion that, of all the hours of man’s life, thinks the last the most important, that has prophesied the end of earthly life and condemned all creatures to live in the fifth act of a tragedy, may call forth the subtlest and noblest powers of man, but it is an enemy to all new planting, to all bold attempts or free aspirations. It opposes all flight into the unknown, because it has no life or hope there itself. It only lets the new bud press forth on sufferance, to blight it in its own good time: “it might lead life astray and give it a false value.” What the Florentines did under the influence of Savonarola’s exhortations, when they made the famous holocaust of pictures, manuscripts, masks and mirrors, Christianity would like to do with every culture that allured to further effort and bore that memento vivere on its standard. And if it cannot take the direct way-the way of main force-it gains its end all the same by allying itself with historical culture, though generally without its connivance; and speaking through its mouth, turns away every fresh birth with a shrug of its shoulders, and makes us feel all the more that we are late-comers and Epigoni, that we are, in a word, born with gray hair. The deep and serious contemplation of the unworthiness of all past action, of the world ripe for judgment, has been whittled down to the sceptical consciousness that it is anyhow a good thing to know all that has happened, as it is too late to do anything better. The historical sense makes its servants passive and retrospective. Only in moments of forgetfulness, when that sense is dormant, does the man who is sick of the historical fever ever act; though he only analyses his deed again after it is over (which prevents it from having any further consequences), and finally puts it on the dissecting table for the purposes of history. In this sense we are still living in the Middle Ages, and history is still a disguised theology; just as the reverence with which the unlearned layman looks on the learned class is inherited through the clergy. What men gave formerly to the Church they give now, though in smaller measure, to science. But the fact of giving at all is the work of the Church, not of the modern spirit, which among its other good qualities has something of the miser in it, and is a bad hand at the excellent virtue of liberality.
These words may not be very acceptable, any more than my derivation of the excess of history from the mediaeval memento mori and the hopelessness that Christianity bears in its heart towards all future ages of earthly existence. But you should always try to replace my hesitating explanations by a better one. For the origin of historical culture, and of its absolutely radical antagonism to the spirit of a new time and a “modern consciousness” must itself be known by a historical process. History must solve the problem of history, science must turn its sting against itself. This threefold “must” is the imperative of the “new spirit,” if it is really to contain something new, powerful, vital and original. Or is it true that we Germans-to leave the Romance nations out of account must always be mere “followers” in all the higher reaches of culture, because that is all we can be? The words of Wilhelm Wackernagel are well worth pondering: “We Germans are a nation of ‘followers’ and with all our higher science and even our faith, are merely the successors of the ancient world. Even those who are opposed to it are continually breathing the immortal spirit of classical culture with that of Christianity: and if any one could separate these two elements from the living air surrounding the soul of man, there would not be much remaining for a spiritual life to exist on.” Even if we would rest content with our vocation to follow antiquity, even if we decided to take it in an earnest and strenuous spirit and to show our high prerogative in our earnestness,-we should yet be compelled to ask whether it were our eternal destiny to be pupils of a fading antiquity. We might be allowed at some time to put our aim higher and further above us. And after congratulating ourselves on having brought that secondary spirit of Alexandrian culture in us to such marvellous productiveness-through our “universal history”-we might go on to place before us, as our noblest prize, the still higher task of striving beyond and above this Alexandrian world; and bravely find our prototypes in the ancient Greek world, where all was great, natural and human. But it is just there that we find the reality of a true unhistorical culture-and in spite of that, or perhaps because of it, an unspeakably rich and vital culture. Were we Germans nothing but followers, we could not be anything greater or prouder than the lineal inheritors and followers of such a culture.
This however must be added. The thought of being Epigoni, that is often a torture, can yet create a spring of hope for the future, to the individual as well as the people: so far, that is, as we can regard ourselves as the heirs and followers of the marvellous classical power, and see therein both our honour and our spur. But not as the late and bitter fruit of a powerful stock, giving that stock a further spell of cold life, as antiquaries and gravediggers. Such late-comers live truly an ironical existence. Annihilation follows their halting walk on tiptoe through life. They shudder before it in the midst of their rejoicing over the past. They are living memories, and their own memories have no meaning; for there are none to inherit them. And thus they are wrapped in the melancholy thought that their life is an injustice, which no future life can set right again.
Suppose that these antiquaries, these late arrivals, were to change their painful ironic modesty for a certain shamelessness. Suppose we heard them saying, aloud, “The race is at its zenith, for it has manifested itself consciously for the first time.” We should have a comedy, in which the dark meaning of a certain very celebrated philosophy would unroll itself for the benefit of German culture. I believe there has been no dangerous turning-point in the progress of German culture in this century that has not been made more dangerous by the enormous and still living influence of this Hegelian philosophy. The belief that one is a late-comer in the world is, anyhow, harmful and degrading: but it must appear frightful and devastating when it raises our late-comer to godhead, by a neat turn of the wheel, as the true meaning and object of all past creation, and his conscious misery is set up as the perfection of the world’s history. Such a point of view has accustomed the Germans to talk of a “world-process,” and justify their own time as its necessary result. And it has put history in the place of the other spiritual powers, art and religion, as the one sovereign; inasmuch as it is the “Idea realising itself,” the “Dialectic of the spirit of the nations,” and the “tribunal of the world.”
History understood in this Hegelian way has been contemptuously called God’s sojourn upon earth,-though the God was first created by the history. He, at any rate, became transparent and intelligible inside Hegelian skulls, and has risen through all the dialectically possible steps in his being up to the manifestation of the Self: so that for Hegel the highest and final stage of the world-process came together in his own Berlin existence. He ought to have said that everything after him was merely to be regarded as the musical coda of the great historical rondo,-or rather, as simply superfluous. He has not said it; and thus he has implanted in a generation leavened throughout by him the worship of the “power of history,” that practically turns every moment into a sheer gaping at success, into an idolatry of the actual: for which we have now discovered the characteristic phrase “to adapt ourselves to circumstances.” But the man who has once learnt to crook the knee and bow the head before the power of history, nods “yes” at last, like a Chinese doll, to every power, whether it be a government or a public opinion or a numerical majority; and his limbs move correctly as the power pulls the string. If each success have come by a “rational necessity” and every event show the victory of logic or the “Idea”, then-down on your knees quickly, and let every step in the ladder of success have its reverence! There are no more living mythologies, you say”? Religions are at their last gasp? Look at the religion of the power of history, and the priests of the mythology of Ideas, with their scarred knees! Do not all the virtues follow in the train of the new faith? And shall we not call it unselfishness, when the historical man lets himself be turned into an “objective” mirror of all that is? Is it not magnanimity to renounce all power in heaven and earth in order to adore the mere fact of power? Is it not justice, always to hold the balance of forces in your hands and observe which is the stronger and heavier? And what a school of politeness is such a contemplation of the past! To take everything objectively, to be angry at nothing, to love nothing, to understand everything-makes one gentle and pliable. Even if a man brought up in this school will show himself openly offended, one is just as pleased, knowing it is only meant in the artistic sense of ira et studium though it is really sine ira et studio.
What old-fashioned thoughts I have on such a combination of virtue and mythology! But they must out, however one may laugh at them. I would even say that history always teaches-“it was once,” and morality-“it ought not to be, or have been.” So history becomes a compendium of actual immorality. But how wrong would one be to regard history as the judge of this actual immorality! Morality is offended by the fact that a Raphael had to die at thirty-six; such a being ought not to die. If you came to the help of history, as the apologists of the actual, you would say: “he had spoken everything that was in him to speak, a longer life would only have enabled him to create a similar beauty, and not a new beauty,” and so on. Thus you become an advocatus diaboli by setting up the success, the fact, as your idol: whereas the fact is always dull, at all times more like a calf than a god. Your apologies for history are helped by ignorance: for it is only because you do not know what a natura naturans like Raphael is, that you are not on fire when you think it existed once and can never exist again. Some one has lately tried to tell us that Goethe had out-lived himself with his eighty-two years: and yet I would gladly take two of Goethe’s “outlived” years in exchange for whole cartloads of fresh modern lifetimes, to have another set of such conversations as those with Eckermann, and be preserved from all the “modern” talk of these esquires of the moment. How few living men have a right to live, as against those mighty dead! That the many live and those few live no longer, is simply a brutal truth, that is, a piece of unalterable folly, a blank wall of “it was once so” against the moral judgment “it ought not to have been.” Yes, against the moral judgment! For you may speak of what virtue you will, of justice, courage, magnanimity, of wisdom and human compassion,-you will find the virtuous man will always rise against the blind force of facts, the tyranny of the actual, and submit himself to laws that are not the fickle laws of history. He ever swims against the waves of history, either by fighting his passions, as the nearest brute facts of his existence, or by training himself to honesty amid the glittering nets spun round him by falsehood. Were history nothing more than the “all-embracing system of passion and error”, man would have to read it as Goethe wished Werther to be read;-just as if it called to him, “Be a man and follow me not!” But fortunately history also keeps alive for us the memory of the great “fighters against history,” that is, against the blind power of the actual; it puts itself in the pillory just by glorifying the true historical nature in men who troubled themselves very little about the “thus it is,” in order that they might follow a “thus it must be” with greater joy and greater pride. Not to drag their generation to the grave, but to found a new one-that is the motive that ever drives them onward; and even if they are born late, there is a way of living by which they can forget it-and future generations will know them only as the first-comers.
9
Is perhaps our time such a “first-comer”? Its historical sense is so strong, and has such universal and boundless expression, that future times will commend it, if only for this, as a first-comer-if there be any future time, in the sense of future culture. But here comes a grave doubt. Close to the modern man’s pride there stands his irony about himself, his consciousness that he must live in a historical, or twilit, atmosphere, the fear that he can retain none of his youthful hopes and powers. Here and there one goes further into cynicism, and justifies the course of history, nay, the whole evolution of the world, as simply leading up to the modern man, according to the cynical canon:-“what you see now had to come, man had to be thus and not otherwise, no one can stand against this necessity.” He who cannot rest in, a state of irony flies for refuge to the cynicism. The last decade makes him a present of one of its most beautiful inventions, a full and well-rounded phrase for this cynicism: he calls his way of living thoughtlessly and after the fashion of his time, “the full surrender of his personality to the world-process.” The personality and the world-process! The world- process and the personality of the earthworm! If only one did not eternally hear the word “world, world, world,” that hyperbole of all hyperboles; when we should only speak, in a decent manner, of “man, man, man”! Heirs of the Greeks and Romans, of Christianity? All that seems nothing to the cynics. But “heirs of the world-process”; the final target of the world-process; the meaning and solution of all riddles of the universe, the ripest fruit on the tree of knowledge!-that is what I call a right noble thought: by this token are the firstlings of every time to be known, although they may have arrived last. The historical imagination has never flown so far, even in a dream; for now the history of man is merely the continuation of that of animals and plants: the universal historian finds traces of himself even in the utter depths of the sea, in the living slime. He stands astounded in face of the enormous way that man has run, and his gaze quivers before the mightier wonder, the modern man who can see all this way! He stands proudly on the pyramid of the world-process: and while he lays the final stone of his knowledge, he seems to cry aloud to listening Nature: “We are at the top, we are the top, we are the completion of Nature!”
O thou too proud European of the nineteenth century, art thou not mad? Thy knowledge does not complete Nature, it only kills thine own nature! Measure the height of what thou knowest by the depths of thy power to do. Thou climbest the sunbeams of knowledge up towards heaven-but also down to Chaos. Thy manner of going is fatal to thee; the ground slips from under thy feet into the unknown; thy life has no other stay, but only spider’s webs that every new stroke of thy knowledge tears asunder.-But not another serious word about this, for there is a lighter side to it all. The moralist, the artist, the saint and the statesman, may well be troubled, when they see that all foundations are breaking up in mad unconscious ruin, and resolving themselves into the ever flowing stream of becoming; that all creation is being tirelessly spun into webs of history by the modern man, the great spider in the mesh of the world-net. We ourselves may be glad for once in a way that we see it all in the shining magic mirror of a philosophical parodist, in whose brain the time has come to an ironical consciousness of itself, to a point even of wickedness, in Goethe’s phrase. Hegel once said, “when the spirit makes a fresh start, we philosophers are at hand.” Our time did make a fresh start-into irony, and lo! Edward von Hartmann was at hand, with his famous Philosophy of the Unconscious-or, more plainly, his philosophy of unconscious irony. We have seldom read a more jovial production, a greater philosophical joke than Hartmann’s book. Any one whom it does not fully enlighten about “becoming,” who is not swept and garnished throughout by it, is ready to become a monument of the past himself. The beginning and end of the world-process, from the first throb of consciousness to its final leap into nothingness, with the task of our generation settled for it;-all drawn from that clever fount of inspiration, the Unconscious, and glittering in Apocalyptic light, imitating an honest seriousness to the life, as if it were a serious philosophy and not a huge joke,-such a system shows its creator to be one of the first philosophical parodists of all time. Let us then sacrifice on his altar, and offer the inventor of a true universal medicine a lock of hair, in Schleiermacher’s phrase. For what medicine would be more salutary to combat the excess of historical culture than Hartmann’s parody of the world’s history?
If we wished to express in the fewest words what Hartmann really has to tell us from his mephitic tripod of unconscious irony, it would be something like this: our time could only remain as it is, if men should become thoroughly sick of this existence. And I fervently believe he is right. The frightful petrifaction of the time, the restless rattle of the ghostly bones, held naively up to us by David Strauss as the most beautiful fact of all-is justified by Hartmann not only from the past, ex causis efficientibus, but also from the future, ex causa finali. The rogue let light stream over our time from the last day, and saw that it was very good,-for him, that is, who wishes to feel the indigestibility of life at its full strength, and for whom the last day cannot come quickly enough. True, Hartmann calls the old age of life that mankind is approaching the “old age of man”: but that is the blessed state, according to him, where there is only a successful mediocrity; where art is the “evening’s amusement of the Berlin financier,” and “the time has no more need for geniuses, either because it would be casting pearls before swine, or because the time has advanced beyond the stage where the geniuses are found, to one more important,” to that stage of social evolution, in fact, in which every worker “leads a comfortable existence, with hours of work that leave him sufficient leisure to cultivate his intellect.” Rogue of rogues, you say well what is the aspiration of present-day mankind: but you know too what a spectre of disgust will arise at the end of this old age of mankind, as the result of the intellectual culture of stolid mediocrity. It is very pitiful to see, but it will be still more pitiful yet. “Antichrist is visibly extending his arms: “yet it must be so, for after all we are on the right road-of disgust at all existence. “Forward then, boldly, with the world-process, as workers in the vineyard of the Lord, for it is the process alone that can lead to redemption!”
The vineyard of the Lord! The process! To redemption! Who does not see and hear in this how historical culture, that only knows the word “becoming,” parodies itself on purpose and says the most irresponsible things about itself through its grotesque mask? For what does the rogue mean by this cry to the workers in the vineyard? By what “work” are they to strive boldly forward? Or, to ask another question:-what further has the historically educated fanatic of the world-process to do, swimming and drowning as he is in the sea of becoming, that he may at last gather in that vintage of disgust, the precious grape of the vineyard? He has nothing to do but to live on as he has lived, love what he has loved, hate what he has hated, and read the newspapers he has always read. The only sin is for him to live otherwise than he has lived. We are told how he has lived, with monumental clearness, by that famous page with its large typed sentences, on which the whole rabble of our modern cultured folk have thrown themselves in blind ecstasy, because they believe they read their own justification there, haloed with an Apocalyptic light. For the unconscious parodist has demanded of every one of them, “the full surrender of his personality to the world-process, for the sake of his end, the redemption of the world”: or still more clearly,-“the assertion of the will to live is proclaimed to be the first step on the right road: for it is only in the full surrender to life and its sorrow, and not in the cowardice of personal renunciation and retreat, that anything can be done for the world-process.. The striving for the denial of the individual will is as foolish as it is useless, more foolish even than suicide.. The thoughtful reader will understand without further explanation how a practical philosophy can be erected on these principles, and that such a philosophy cannot endure any disunion, but only the fullest reconciliation with life.”
The thoughtful reader will understand! Then one really could misunderstand Hartmann! And what a splendid joke it is, that he should be misunderstood! Why should the Germans of to-day be particularly subtle? A valiant Englishman looks in vain for “delicacy of perception” and dares to say that “in the German mind there does seem to be something splay, something blunt-edged, un-handy and infelicitous.” Could the great German parodist contradict this? According to him, we are approaching “that ideal condition in which the human race makes its history with full consciousness”: but we are obviously far from the perhaps more ideal condition, in which mankind can read Hartmann’s book with full consciousness. If we once reach it, the word “world-process” will never pass any man’s lips again without a smile. For he will remember the time when people listened to the mock gospel of Hartmann, sucked it in, attacked it, reverenced it, extended it and canonised it with all the honesty of that “German mind,” with “the uncanny seriousness of an owl,” as Goethe has it. But the world must go forward, the ideal condition cannot be won by dreaming, it must be fought and wrestled for, and the way to redemption lies only through joyousness, the way to redemption from that dull, owlish seriousness. The time will come when we shall wisely keep away from all constructions of the world-process, or even of the history of man; a time when we shall no more look at masses but at individuals, who form a sort of bridge over the wan stream of becoming. They may not perhaps continue a process, but they live out of time, as contemporaries: and thanks to history that permits such a company, they live as the Republic of geniuses of which Schopenhauer speaks. One giant calls to the other across the waste spaces of time, and the high spirit-talk goes on, undisturbed by the wanton noisy dwarfs who creep among them. The task of history is to be the mediator between these, and even to give the motive and power to produce the great man. The aim of mankind can lie ultimately only in its highest examples.
Our low comedian has his word on this too with his wonderful dialectic, which is just as genuine as its admirers are admirable. “The idea of evolution cannot stand with our giving the world-process an endless duration in the past, for thus every conceivable evolution must have taken place, which is not the case (O rogue!); and so we cannot allow the process an endless duration in the future. Both would raise the conception of evolution to a mere ideal (And again rogue!), and would make the world-process like the sieve of the Danaides. The complete victory of the logical over the illogical (O thou complete rogue!) must coincide with the last day, the end in time of the world-process.” No, thou clear, scornful spirit, so long as the illogical rules as it does to-day,-so long, for example, as the world-process can be spoken of as thou speakest of it, amid such deep-throated assent,-the last day is yet far off. For it is still too joyful on this earth, many an illusion still blooms here-like the illusion of thy contemporaries about thee. We are not yet ripe to be hurled into thy nothingness: for we believe that we shall have a still more splendid time, when men once begin to understand thee, thou misunderstood, unconscious one! But if, in spite of that, disgust shall come throned in power, as thou hast prophesied to thy readers if thy portrayal of the present and the future shall prove to be right,-and no one has despised them with such loathing as thou,-I am ready then to cry with the majority in the form prescribed by thee, that next Saturday evening, punctually at twelve o’clock, thy world shall fall to pieces. And our decree shall conclude thus-from tomorrow time shall not exist, and the Times shall no more be published. Perhaps it will be in vain, and our decree of no avail: at any rate we have still time for a fine experiment. Take a balance and put Hartmann’s “Unconscious” in one of the scales, and his “World-process” in the other. There are some who believe they weigh equally; for in each scale there is an evil word-and a good joke.
When they are once understood, no one will take Hartmann’s words on the world-process as anything but a joke. It is, as a fact, high time to move forward with the whole battalion of satire and malice against the excesses of the “historical sense,” the wanton love of the world-process at the expense of life and existence, the blind confusion of all perspective. And it will be to the credit of the philosopher of the Unconscious that he has been the first to see the humour of the world-process, and to succeed in making others see it still more strongly by the extraordinary seriousness of his presentation. The existence of the “world” and “humanity” need not trouble us for some time, except to provide us with a good joke: for the presumption of the small earthworm is the most uproariously comic thing on the face of the earth. Ask thyself to what end thou art here, as an individual; and if no one can tell thee, try then to justify the meaning of thy existence a posteriori, by putting before thyself a high and noble end. Perish on that rock! I know no better aim for life than to be broken on something great and impossible, anima magnæ prodigus. But if we have the doctrines of the finality of “becoming,” of the flux of all ideas, types, and species, of the lack of all radical difference between man and beast (a true but fatal idea as I think),-if we have these thrust on the people in the usual mad way for another generation, no one need be surprised if that people drown on its little miserable shoals of egoism, and petrify in its self-seeking. At first it will fall asunder and cease to be a people. In its place perhaps individualist systems, secret societies for the extermination of non-members, and similar utilitarian creations, will appear on the theater of the future. Are we to continue to work for these creations and write history from the standpoint of the masses; to look for laws in it, to be deduced from the needs of the masses, the laws of motion of the lowest loam and clay strata of society? The masses seem to be worth notice in three aspects only: first as the copies of great men, printed on bad paper from worn-out plates, next as a contrast to the great men, and lastly as their tools: for the rest, let the devil and statistics fly away with them! How could statistics prove that there are laws in history? Laws? Yes, they may prove how common and abominably uniform the masses are: and should we call the effects of leaden folly, imitation, love and hunger-laws? We may admit it: but we are sure of this too-that so far as there are laws in history, the laws are of no value and the history of no value either. And least valuable of all is that kind of history which takes the great popular movements as the most important events of the past, and regards the great men only as their clearest expression, the visible bubbles on the stream. Thus the masses have to produce the great man, chaos to bring forth order; and finally all the hymns are naturally sung to the teeming chaos. Everything is called “great” that has moved the masses for some long time, and becomes, as they say, a “historical power.” But is not this really an intentional confusion of quantity and quality? When the brutish mob have found some idea, a religious idea for example, which satisfies them, when they have defended it through thick and thin for centuries; then, and then only, will they discover its inventor to have been a great man. The highest and noblest does not affect the masses at all. The historical consequences of Christianity, its “historical power,” toughness and persistence prove nothing, fortunately, as to its founder’s greatness. They would have been a witness against him. For between him and the historical success of Christianity lies a dark heavy weight of passion and error, lust of power and honour, and the crushing force of the Roman Empire. From this, Christianity had its earthly taste, and its earthly foundations too, that made its continuance in this world possible. Greatness should not depend on success. Demosthenes is great without it. The purest and noblest adherents of Christianity have always doubted and hindered, rather than helped, its effect in the world, its so-called “historical power”; for they were accustomed to stand outside the “world,” and cared little for the “process of the Christian Idea.” Hence they have generally remained unknown to history, and their very names are lost. In Christian terms, the devil is the prince of the world, and the lord of progress and consequence: he is the power behind all “historical power,” and so will it remain, however ill it may sound today in ears that are accustomed to canonise such power and consequence. The world has become skilled at giving new names to things and even baptizing the devil. It is truly an hour of great danger. Men seem to be near the discovery that the egoism of individuals, groups or masses has been at all times the lever of the “historical movements”: and yet they are in no way disturbed by the discovery, but proclaim that “egoism shall be our god.” With this new faith in their hearts, they begin quite intentionally to build future history on egoism: though it must be a clever egoism, one that allows of some limitation, that it may stand firmer; one that studies history for the purpose of recognising the foolish kind of egoism. Their study has taught them that the state has a special mission in all future egoistic systems: it will be the patron of all the clever egoisms, to protect them with all the power of its military and police against the dangerous outbreaks of the other kind. There is the same idea in introducing history-natural as well as human history-among the labouring classes, whose folly makes them dangerous. For men know well that a grain of historical culture is able to break down the rough, blind instincts and desires, or to turn them to the service of a clever egoism. In fact they are beginning to think, with Edward von Hartmann, of “fixing themselves with an eye to the future in their earthly home, and making themselves comfortable there.” Hartmann calls this life the “manhood of humanity” with an ironical reference to what is now called “manhood”;-as if only our sober models of selfishness were embraced by it; just as he prophesies an age of graybeards following on this stage,-obviously another ironical glance at our ancient time-servers. For he speaks of the ripe discretion with which “they view all the stormy passions of their past life and understand the vanity of the ends they seem to have striven for.” No, a manhood of crafty and historically cultured egoism corresponds to an old age that hangs to life with no dignity but a horrible tenacity, where the “last scene of all
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
Whether the dangers of our life and culture come from these dreary, toothless old men, or from the so-called “men” of Hartmann, we have the right to defend our youth with tooth and claw against both of them, and never tire of saving the future from these false prophets. But in this battle we shall discover an unpleasant truth-that men intentionally help, and encourage, and use, the worst aberrations of the historical sense from which the present time suffers.
They use it, however, against youth, in order to transform it into that ripe “egoism of manhood” they so long for: they use it to overcome the natural reluctance of the young by its magical splendour, which unmans while it enlightens them. Yes, we know only too well the kind of ascendency history can gain; how it can uproot the strongest instincts of youth, passion, courage, unselfishness and love; can cool its feeling for justice, can crush or repress its desire for a slow ripening by the contrary desire to be soon productive, ready and useful; and cast a sick doubt over all honesty and downrightness of feeling. It can even cozen youth of its fairest privilege, the power of planting a great thought with the fullest confidence, and letting it grow of itself to a still greater thought. An excess of history can do all that, as we have seen, by no longer allowing a man to feel and act unhistorically: for history is continually shifting his horizon and removing the atmosphere surrounding him. From an infinite horizon he withdraws into himself, back into the small egoistic circle, where he must become dry and withered: he may possibly attain to cleverness, but never to wisdom. He lets himself be talked over, is always calculating and parleying with facts. He is never enthusiastic, but blinks his eyes, and understands how to look for his own profit or his party’s in the profit or loss of somebody else. He unlearns all his useless modesty, and turns little by little into the “man” or the “graybeard” of Hartmann. And that is what they want him to be: that is the meaning of the present cynical demand for the “full surrender of the personality to the world-process”-for the sake of his end, the redemption of the world, as the rogue E. von Hartmann tells us. Though redemption can scarcely be the conscious aim of these people: the world were better redeemed by being redeemed from these “men” and “graybeards.” For then would come the reign of youth.
10
And in this kingdom of youth I can cry Land! Land! Enough, and more than enough, of the wild voyage over dark strange seas, of eternal search and eternal disappointment! The coast is at last in sight. Whatever it be, we must land there, and the worst haven is better than tossing again in the hopeless waves of an infinite scepticism. Let us hold fast by the land: we shall find the good harbours later and make the voyage easier for those who come after us.
The voyage was dangerous and exciting. How far are we even now from that quiet state of contemplation with which we first saw our ship launched! In tracking out the dangers of history, we have found ourselves especially exposed to them. We carry on us the marks of that sorrow which an excess of history brings in its train to the men of the modern time. And this present treatise, as I will not attempt to deny, shows the modern note of a weak personality in the intemperateness of its criticism, the unripeness of its humanity, in the too frequent transitions from irony to cynicism, from arrogance to scepticism. And yet I trust in the inspiring power that directs my vessel instead of genius; I trust in youth, that has brought me on the right road in forcing from me a protest against the modern historical education, and a demand that the man must learn to live, above all, and only use history in the service of the life that he has learned to live. He must be young to understand this protest; and considering the premature grayness of our present youth, he can scarcely be young enough if he would understand its reason as well. An example will help me. In Germany, not more than a century ago, a natural instinct for what is called “poetry” was awakened in some young men. Are we to think that the generations who had lived before that time had not spoken of the art, however really strange and unnatural it may have been to them? We know the contrary; that they had thought, written, and quarrelled about it with all their might in “words, words, words.” Giving life to such words did not prove the death of the word-makers; in a certain sense they are living still. For if, as Gibbon says, nothing but time-though a long time-is needed for a world to perish, so nothing but time-though still more time-is needed for a false idea to be destroyed in Germany, the “Land of Little-by-little.” In any event, there are perhaps a hundred men more now than there were a century ago who know what poetry is: perhaps in another century there will be a hundred more who have learned in the meantime what culture is, and that the Germans have had as yet no culture, however proudly they may talk about it. The general satisfaction of the Germans at their culture will seem as foolish and incredible to such men as the once lauded classicism of Gottsched, or the reputation of Ramler as the German Pindar, seemed to us. They will perhaps think this “culture” to be merely a kind of knowledge about culture, and a false and superficial knowledge at that. False and superficial, because the Germans endured the contradiction between life and knowledge, and did not see what was characteristic in the culture of really educated peoples, that it can only rise and bloom from life. But by the Germans it is worn like a paper flower, or spread over like the icing on a cake; and so must remain a useless lie for ever.
The education of youth in Germany starts from this false and unfruitful idea of culture. Its aim, when faced squarely, is not to form the liberally educated man, but the professor, the man of science, who wants to be able to make use of his science as soon as possible, and stands on one side in order to see life clearly. The result, even from a ruthlessly practical point of view, is the historically and aesthetically trained Philistine, the babbler of old saws and new wisdom on Church, State and Art, the sensorium that receives a thousand impressions, the insatiable belly that yet knows not what true hunger and thirst is. An education with such an aim and result is against nature. But only he who is not quite drowned in it can feel that; only youth can feel it, because it still has the instinct of nature, that is the first to be broken by that education. But he who will break through that education in his turn, must come to the help of youth when called upon; must let the clear light of understanding shine on its unconscious striving, and bring it to a full, vocal consciousness, How is he to attain such a strange end?
Principally by destroying the superstition that this kind of education is necessary. People think nothing but this troublesome reality of ours is possible. Look through the literature of higher education in school and college for the last ten years, and you will be astonished-and pained-to find how much alike all the proposals of reform have been; in spite of all the hesitations and violent controversies surrounding them. You will see how blindly they have all adopted the old idea of the “educated man” (in our sense) being the necessary and reasonable basis of the system. The monotonous canon runs thus: the young man must begin with a knowledge of culture, not even with a knowledge of life, still less with life and the living of it. This knowledge of culture is forced into the young mind in the form of historical knowledge; which means that his head is filled with an enormous mass of ideas, taken second-hand from past times and peoples, not from immediate contact with life. He desires to experience something for himself, and feel a close-knit, living system of experiences growing within himself. But his desire is drowned and dizzied in the sea of shams, as if it were possible to sum up in a few years the highest and notablest experiences of ancient times, and the greatest times too. It is the same mad method that carries our young artists off to picture-galleries, instead of the studio of a master, and above all the one studio of the only master, Nature. As if one could discover by a hasty rush through history the ideas and technique of past times, and their individual outlook on life! For life itself is a kind of handicraft that must be learned thoroughly and industriously, and diligently practised, if we are not to have mere botchers and babblers as the issue of it all!
Plato thought it necessary for the first generation of his new society (in the perfect state) to be brought up with the help of a “mighty lie.” The children were to be taught to believe that they had all lain dreaming for a long time under the earth, where they had been moulded and formed by the master-hand of Nature. It was impossible to go against the past, and work against the work of gods! And so it had to be an unbreakable law of nature, that he who is born to be a philosopher has gold in his body, the fighter has only silver, and the workman iron and bronze. As it is not possible to blend these metals, according to Plato, so there could never be any confusion between the classes: the belief in the æterna veritas of this arrangement was the basis of the new education and the new state. So the modern German believes also in the æterna veritas of his education, of his kind of culture: and yet this belief will fail-as the Platonic state would have failed-if the mighty German lie be ever opposed by the truth, that the German has no culture because he cannot build one on the basis of his education. He wishes for the flower without the root or the stalk; and so he wishes in vain. That is the simple truth, a rude and unpleasant truth, but yet a mighty one.
But our first generation must be brought up in this “mighty truth,” and must suffer from it too; for it must educate itself through it, even against its own nature, to attain a new nature and manner of life, which shall yet proceed from the old. So it might say to itself, in the old Spanish phrase, “Defienda me Dios de my,” God keep me from myself, from the character, that is, which has been put into me. It must taste that truth drop by drop, like a bitter, powerful medicine. And every man in this generation must subdue himself to pass the judgment on his own nature, which he might pass more easily on his whole time:-“We are without instruction, nay, we are too corrupt to live, to see and hear truly and simply, to understand what is near and natural to us. We have not yet laid even the foundations of culture, for we are not ourselves convinced that we have a sincere life in us.” We crumble and fall asunder, our whole being is divided, half mechanically, into an inner and outer side; we are sown with ideas as with dragon’s teeth, and bring forth a new dragon -brood of them; we suffer from the malady of words, and have no trust in any feeling that is not stamped with its special word. And being such a dead fabric of words and ideas, that yet has an uncanny movement in it, I have still perhaps the right to say cogito ergo sum, though not vivo ergo cogito. I am permitted the empty esse, not the full green vivere. A primary feeling tells me that I am a thinking being but not a living one, that I am no “animal,” but at most a “cogital.” “Give me life, and I will soon make you a culture out of it”-will be the cry of every man in this new generation, and they will all know each other by this cry. But who will give them this life?
No god and no man will give it-only their own youth. Set this free, and you will set life free as well. For it only lay concealed, in a prison; it is not yet withered or dead-ask your own selves!
But it is sick, this life that is set free, and must be healed. It suffers from many diseases, and not only from the memory of its chains. It suffers from the malady which I have spoken of, the malady of history. Excess of history has attacked the plastic power of life, that no more understands how to use the past as a means of strength and nourishment. It is a fearful disease, and yet, if youth had not a natural gift for clear vision, no one would see that it is a disease, and that a paradise of health has been lost. But the same youth, with that same natural instinct of health, has guessed how the paradise can be regained. It knows the magic herbs and simples for the malady of history, and the excess of it. And what are they called?
It is no marvel that they bear the names of poisons: the antidotes to history are the “unhistorical " and the “super-historical.” With these names we return to the beginning of our inquiry and draw near to its final close.
By the word “unhistorical” I mean the power, the art of forgetting, and of drawing a limited horizon round one’s self. I call the power “super-historical” which turns the eyes from the process of becoming to that which gives existence an eternal and stable character, to art and religion. Science-for it is science that makes us speak of “poisons”-sees in these powers contrary powers: for it considers only that view of things to be true and right, and therefore scientific, which regards something as finished and historical, not as continuing and eternal. Thus it lives in a deep antagonism towards the powers that make for eternity-art and religion,-for it hates the forgetfulness that is the death of knowledge, and tries to remove all limitation of horizon and cast men into an infinite boundless sea, whose waves are bright with the clear knowledge-of becoming!
If they could only live therein! Just as towns are shaken by an avalanche and become desolate, and man builds his house there in fear and for a season only; so life is broken in sunder and becomes weak and spiritless, if the avalanche of ideas started by science take from man the foundation of his rest and security, the belief in what is stable and eternal. Must life dominate knowledge, or knowledge life? Which of the two is the higher, and decisive power? There is no room for doubt: life is the higher, and the dominating power, for the knowledge that annihilated life would be itself annihilated too. Knowledge presupposes life, and has the same interest in maintaining it that every creature has in its own preservation. Science needs very careful watching: there is a hygiene of life near the volumes of science, and one of its sentences runs thus:-The unhistorical and the super-historical are the natural antidotes against the overpowering of life by history; they are the cures for the historical disease. We who are sick of the disease may suffer a little from the antidote. But this is no proof that the treatment we have chosen is wrong.
And here I see the mission of the youth that forms the first generation of fighters and dragon- slayers: it will bring a more beautiful and blessed humanity and culture, but will have itself no more than a glimpse of the promised land of happiness and wondrous beauty. This youth will suffer both from the malady and its antidotes: and yet it believes in strength and health and boasts a nature closer to the great Nature than its forebears, the cultured men and graybeards of the present. But its mission is to shake to their foundations the present conceptions of “health” and “culture,” and erect hatred and scorn in the place of this rococo mass of ideas. And the clearest sign of its own strength and health is just the fact that it can use no idea, no party-cry from the present-day mint of words and ideas to symbolise its own existence: but only claims conviction from the power in it that acts and fights, breaks up and destroys; and from an ever heightened feeling of life when the hour strikes. You may deny this youth any culture-but how would youth count that a reproach? You may speak of its rawness and intemperateness-but it is not yet old and wise enough to be acquiescent. It need not pretend to a ready-made culture at all; but enjoys all the rights and the consolations-of youth, especially the right of brave unthinking honesty and the consolation of an inspiring hope.
I know that such hopeful beings understand all these truisms from within, and can translate them into a doctrine for their own use, through their personal experience. To the others there will appear, in the meantime, nothing but a row of covered dishes, that may perhaps seem empty: until they see one day with astonished eyes that the dishes are full, and that all ideas and impulses and passions are massed together in these truisms that cannot lie covered for long. I leave those doubting ones to time, that brings all things to light; and turn at last to that great company of hope, to tell them the way and the course of their salvation, their rescue from the disease of history, and their own history as well, in a parable; whereby they may again become healthy enough to study history anew, and under the guidance of life make use of the past in that threefold way-monumental, antiquarian, or critical. At first they will be more ignorant than the “educated men” of the present: for they will have unlearnt much and have lost any desire even to discover what those educated men especially wish to know: in fact, their chief mark from the educated point of view will be just their want of science; their indifference and inaccessibility to all the good and famous things. But at the end of the cure, they are men again and have ceased to be mere shadows of humanity. That is something; there is yet hope, and do not ye who hope laugh in your hearts?
How can we reach that end? you will ask. The Delphian god cries his oracle to you at the beginning of your wanderings, “Know thyself.” It is a hard saying: for that god “tells nothing and conceals nothing but merely points the way,” as Heraclitus said. But whither does he point?
In certain epochs the Greeks were in a similar danger of being overwhelmed by what was past and foreign, and perishing on the rock of “history.” They never lived proud and untouched. Their “culture” was for a long time a chaos of foreign forms and ideas,-Semitic, Babylonian, Lydian and Egyptian,-and their religion a battle of all the gods of the East; just as German culture and religion is at present a death-struggle of all foreign nations and bygone times. And yet, Hellenic culture was no mere mechanical unity, thanks to that Delphic oracle. The Greeks gradually learned to organise the chaos, by taking Apollo’s advice and thinking back to themselves, to their own true necessities, and letting all the sham necessities go. Thus they again came into possession of themselves, and did not remain long the Epigoni of the whole East, burdened with their inheritance. After that hard fight, they increased and enriched the treasure they had inherited by their obedience to the oracle, and they became the ancestors and models for all the cultured nations of the future.
This is a parable for each one of us: he must organise the chaos in himself by “thinking himself back” to his true needs. He will want all his honesty, all the sturdiness and sincerity in his character to help him to revolt against second- hand thought, second-hand learning, second-hand action. And he will begin then to understand that culture can be something more than a “decoration of life”-a concealment and disfiguring of it, in other words; for all adornment hides what is adorned. And thus the Greek idea, as against the Roman, will be discovered to him, the idea of culture as a new and finer nature, without distinction of inner and outer, without convention or disguise, as a unity of thought and will, life and appearance. He will learn too, from his own experience, that it was by a greater force of moral character that the Greeks were victorious, and that everything which makes for sincerity is a further step towards true culture, however this sincerity may harm the ideals of education that are reverenced at the time, or even have power to shatter a whole system of merely decorative culture.
Schopenhauer as Educator
Translated by Adrian Collins
1
WHEN the traveller, who had seen many countries and nations and continents, was asked what common attribute he had found everywhere existing among men, he answered, “They have a tendency to sloth.” Many may think that the fuller truth would have been, “They are all timid.” They hide themselves behind “manners” and “opinions.” At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvellously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time. He knows this, but hides it like an evil conscience;-and why? From fear of his neighbour, who looks for the latest conventionalities in him, and is wrapped up in them himself. But what is it that forces the man to fear his neighbour, to think and act with his herd, and not seek his own joy? Shyness perhaps, in a few rare cases, but in the majority it is idleness, the “taking things easily,” in a word the “tendency to sloth,” of which the traveller spoke. He was right; men are more slothful than timid, and their greatest fear is of the burdens that an uncompromising honesty and nakedness of speech and action would lay on them. It is only the artists who hate this lazy wandering in borrowed manners and ill-fitting opinions, and discover the secret of the evil conscience, the truth that each human being is a unique marvel. They show us, how in every little movement of his muscles the man is an individual self, and further-as an analytical deduction from his individuality-a beautiful and interesting object, a new and incredible phenomenon (as is every work of nature), that can never become tedious. If the great thinker despise mankind, it is for their laziness; they seem mere indifferent bits of pottery, not worth any commerce or improvement. The man who will not belong to the general mass, has only to stop “taking himself easily”; to follow his conscience, which cries out to him, “Be thyself! all that thou doest and thinkest and desirest, is not thyself!”
Every youthful soul hears this cry day and night, and quivers to hear it: for she divines the sum of happiness that has been from eternity destined for her, if she think of her true deliverance; and towards this happiness she can in no wise be helped, so long as she lies in the chains of Opinion and of Fear. And how comfortless and unmeaning may life become without this deliverance! There is no more desolate or Ishmaelitish creature in nature than the man who has broken away from his true genius, and does nothing but peer aimlessly about him. There is no reason to attack such a man at all, for he is a mere husk without a kernel, a painted cloth, tattered and sagging, a scarecrow ghost, that can rouse no fear, and certainly no pity. And though one be right in saying of a sluggard that he is “killing time” yet in respect of an age that rests its salvation on public opinion,-that is, on private laziness,-one must be quite determined that such a time shall be “killed,” once and for all: I mean that it shall be blotted from life’s true History of Liberty. Later generations will be greatly disgusted, when they come to treat the movements of a period in which no living men ruled, but shadow-men on the screen of public opinion; and to some far posterity our age may well be the darkest chapter of history, the most unknown because the least human. I have walked through the new streets of our cities, and thought how of all the dreadful houses that these gentlemen with their public opinion have built for themselves, not a stone will remain in a hundred years, and that the opinions of these busy masons may well have fallen with them. But how full of hope should they all be who feel that they are no citizens of this age! If they were, they would have to help on the work of “killing their time,” and of perishing with it,-when they wish rather to quicken the time to life, and in that life themselves to live.
But even if the future leave us nothing to hope for, the wonderful fact of our existing at this present moment of time gives us the greatest encouragement to live after our own rule and measure; so inexplicable is it, that we should be living just to-day, though there have been an infinity of time wherein we might have arisen; that we own nothing but a span’s length of it, this “to-day” and must show in it wherefore and whereunto we have arisen. We have to answer for our existence to ourselves; and will therefore be our own true pilots, and not admit that our being resembles a blind fortuity. One must take a rather impudent and reckless way with the riddle; especially as the key is apt to be lost, however things turn out. Why cling to your bit of earth, or your little business, or listen to what your neighbour says? It is so provincial to bind oneself to views which are no longer binding a couple of hundred miles away. East and West are signs that somebody chalks up in front of us to fool such cowards as we are. “I will make the attempt to gain freedom,” says the youthful soul; and will be hindered, just because two nations happen to hate each other and go to war, or because there is a sea between two parts of the earth, or a religion is taught in the vicinity, which did not exist two thousand years ago. “And this is not-thyself,” the soul says. “No one can build thee the bridge, over which thou must cross the river of life, save thyself alone. There are paths and bridges and demi-gods without number, that will gladly carry thee over, but only at the price of thine own self: thy self wouldst thou have to give in pawn, and then lose it. There is in the world one road whereon none may go, except thou: ask not whither it lead, but go forward. Who was it that spake that true word-‘A man has never risen higher than when he knoweth not whither his road may yet lead him’?”
But how can we “find ourselves” again, and how can man “know himself”? He is a thing obscure and veiled: if the hare have seven skins, man can cast from him seventy times seven, and yet will not be able to say “Here art thou in very truth; this is outer shell no more.” Also this digging into one’s self, this straight, violent descent into the pit of one’s being, is a troublesome and dangerous business to start. A man may easily take such hurt, that no physician can heal him. And again, what were the use, since everything bears witness to our essence,-our friendships and enmities, our looks and greetings, our memories and forgetfulnesses, our books and our writing! This is the most effective way: to let the youthful soul look back on life with the question, “What hast thou up to now truly loved, what has drawn thy soul upward, mastered it and blessed it too?” Set up these things that thou hast honoured before thee, and, maybe, they will show thee, in their being and their order, a law which is the fundamental law of thine own self. Compare these objects, consider how one completes and broadens and transcends and explains another, how they form a ladder on which thou hast all the time been climbing to thy self: for thy true being lies not deeply hidden in thee, but an infinite height above thee, or at least above that which thou dost commonly take to be thyself. The true educators and moulders reveal to thee the real groundwork and import of thy being, something that in itself cannot be moulded or educated, but is anyhow difficult of approach, bound and crippled: thy educators can be nothing but thy deliverers. And that is the secret of all culture: it does not give artificial limbs, wax noses, or spectacles for the eyes-a thing that could buy such gifts is but the base coin of education. But it is rather a liberation, a removal of all the weeds and rubbish and vermin that attack the delicate shoots, the streaming forth of light and warmth, the tender dropping of the night rain; it is the following and the adoring of Nature when she is pitifully-minded as a mother;-her completion, when it bends before her fierce and ruthless blasts and turns them to good, and draws a veil over all expression of her tragic unreason-for she is a step-mother too, sometimes.
There are other means of “finding ourselves,” of coming to ourselves out of the confusion wherein we all wander as in a dreary cloud; but I know none better than to think on our educators. So I will to-day take as my theme the hard teacher Arthur Schopenhauer, and speak of others later.
2
In order to describe properly what an event my first look into Schopenhauer’s writings was for me, I must dwell for a minute on an idea, that recurred more constantly in my youth, and touched me more nearly, than any other. I wandered then as I pleased in a world of wishes, and thought that destiny would relieve me of the dreadful and wearisome duty of educating myself: some philosopher would come at the right moment to do it for me,-some true philosopher, who could be obeyed without further question, as he would be trusted more than one’s self. Then I said within me: “What would be the principles, on which he might teach thee? “And I pondered in my mind what he would say to the two maxims of education that hold the field in our time. The first demands that the teacher should find out at once the strong point in his pupil, and then direct all his skill and will, all the moisture and all the sunshine, to bring the fruit of that single virtue to maturity. The second requires him to raise to a higher power all the qualities that already exist, cherish them and bring them into a harmonious relation. But, we may ask, should one who has a decided talent for working in gold be made for that reason to learn music? And can we admit that Benvenuto Cellini’s father was right in continually forcing him back to the “dear little horn”-the “cursed piping,” as his son called it? We cannot think so in the case of such a strong and clearly marked talent as his, and it may well be that this maxim of harmonious development applies only to weaker natures, in which there is a whole swarm of desires and inclinations, though they may not amount to very much, singly or together. On the other hand, where do we find such a blending of harmonious voices-nay, the soul of harmony itself-as we see in natures like Cellini’s, where everything-knowledge, desire, love and hate-tends towards a single point, the root of all, and a harmonious system, the resultant of the various forces, is built up through the irresistible domination of this vital centre? And so perhaps the two maxims are not contrary at all: the one merely saying that man must have a centre, the other, a circumference as well. The philosophic teacher of my dream would not only discover the central force, but would know how to prevent its being destructive of the other powers: his task, I thought, would be the welding of the whole man into a solar system with life and movement, and the discovery of its paraphysical laws.
In the meantime I could not find my philosopher, however I tried; I saw how badly we moderns compare with the Greeks and Romans, even in the serious study of educational problems. You can go through all Germany, and especially all the universities, with this need in your heart, and will not find what you seek; many humbler wishes than that are still unfulfilled there. For example, if a German seriously wish to make himself an orator, or to enter a “school for authors,” he will find neither master nor school: no one yet seems to have thought that speaking and writing are arts which cannot be learnt without the most careful method and untiring application. But, to their shame, nothing shows more clearly the insolent self-satisfaction of our people than the lack of demand for educators; it comes partly from meanness, partly from want of thought. Anything will do as a so-called “family tutor,” even among our most eminent and cultured people: and what a menagerie of crazy heads and mouldy devices mostly go to make up the belauded Gymnasium! And consider what we are satisfied with in our finishing schools,-our universities. Look at our professors and their institutions! And compare the difficulty of the task of educating a man to be a man! Above all, the wonderful way in which the German savants fall to their dish of knowledge, shows that they are thinking more of Science than mankind; and they are trained to lead a forlorn hope in her service, in order to encourage ever new generations to the same sacrifice. If their traffic with knowledge be not limited and controlled by any more general principles of education, but allowed to run on indefinitely,-“the more the better,"-it is as harmful to learning as the economic theory of laisser faire to common morality. No one recognises now that the education of the professors is an exceedingly difficult problem, if their humanity is not to be sacrificed or shrivelled up:-this difficulty can be actually seen in countless examples of natures warped and twisted by their reckless and premature devotion to science. There is a still more important testimony to the complete absence of higher education, pointing to a greater and more universal danger. It is clear at once why an orator or writer cannot now be educated,-because there are no teachers; and why a savant must be a distorted and perverted thing,-because he will have been trained by the inhuman abstraction, science. This being so, let a man ask himself: “Where are now the types of moral excellence and fame for all our generation-learned and unlearned, high and low-the visible abstract of constructive ethics for this age? Where has vanished all the reflection on moral questions that has occupied every great developed society at all epochs?” There is no fame for that now, and there are none to reflect: we are really drawing on the inherited moral capital which our predecessors accumulated for us, and which we do not know how to increase, but only to squander. Such things are either not mentioned in our society, or, if at all, with a naive want of personal experience that makes one disgusted. It comes to this, that our schools and professors simply turn aside from any moral instruction or content themselves with formulae; virtue is a word and nothing more, on both sides, an old-fashioned word that they laugh at-and it is worse when they do not laugh, for then they are hypocrites.
An explanation of this faint-heartedness and ebbing of all moral strength would be difficult and complex: but whoever is considering the influence of Christianity in its hour of victory on the morality of the mediaeval world, must not forget that it reacts also in its defeat, which is apparently its position to-day. By its lofty ideal, Christianity has outbidden the ancient Systems of Ethics and their invariable naturalism, with which men came to feel a dull disgust: and afterwards when they did reach the knowledge of what was better and higher, they found they had no longer the power, for all their desire, to return to its embodiment in the antique virtues. And so the life of the modern man is passed in see-sawing between Christianity and Paganism, between a furtive or hypocritical approach to Christian morality, and an equally shy and spiritless dallying with the antique: and he does not thrive under it His inherited fear of naturalism, and its more recent attraction for him, his desire to come to rest somewhere, while in the impotence of his intellect he swings backwards and forwards between the “good” and the “better” course-all this argues an instability in the modern mind that condemns it to be without joy or fruit. Never were moral teachers more necessary and never were they more unlikely to be found: physicians are most in danger themselves in times when they are most needed and many men are sick. For where are our modern physicians who are strong and sure-footed enough to hold up another or lead him by the hand? There lies a certain heavy gloom on the best men of our time, an eternal loathing for the battle that is fought in their hearts between honesty and lies, a wavering of trust in themselves, which makes them quite incapable of showing to others the way they must go.
So I was right in speaking of my “wandering in a world of wishes” when I dreamt of finding a true philosopher who could lift me from the slough of insufficiency, and teach me again simply and honestly-to be in my thoughts and life, in the deepest sense of the word, “out of season”; simply and honestly for men have now become such complicated machines that they must be dishonest, if they speak at all, or wish to act on their words.
With such needs and desires within me did I come to know Schopenhauer.
I belong to those readers of Schopenhauer who know perfectly well, after they have turned the first page, that they will read all the others, and listen to every word that he has spoken. My trust in him sprang to life at once, and has been the same for nine years. I understood him as though he had written for me (this is the most intelligible, though a rather foolish and conceited way of expressing it). Hence I never found a paradox in him, though occasionally some small errors: for paradoxes are only assertions that carry no conviction, because the author has made them himself without any conviction, wishing to appear brilliant, or to mislead, or, above all, to pose. Schopenhauer never poses: he writes for himself, and no one likes to be deceived-least of all a philosopher who has set this up as his law: “deceive nobody, not even thyself,” neither with the “white lies” of all social intercourse, which writers almost unconsciously imitate, still less with the more conscious deceits of the platform, and the artificial methods of rhetoric. Schopenhauer’s speeches are to himself alone; or if you like to imagine an auditor, let it be a son whom the father is instructing. It is a rough, honest, good-humoured talk to one who “hears and loves.” Such writers are rare. His strength and sanity surround us at the first sound of his voice: it is like entering the heights of the forest, where we breathe deep and are well again. We feel a bracing air everywhere, a certain candour and naturalness of his own, that belongs to men who are at home with themselves, and masters of a very rich home indeed: he is quite different from the writers who are surprised at themselves if they have said something intelligent, and whose pronouncements for that reason have something nervous and unnatural about them. We are just as little reminded in Schopenhauer of the professor with his stiff joints worse for want of exercise, his narrow chest and scraggy figure, his slinking or strutting gait. And again his rough and rather grim soul leads us not so much to miss as to despise the suppleness and courtly grace of the excellent Frenchmen; and no one will find in him the gilded imitations of pseudo-gallicism that our German writers prize so highly. His style in places reminds me a little of Goethe, but is not otherwise on any German model. For he knows how to be profound with simplicity, striking without rhetoric, and severely logical without pedantry: and of what German could he have learnt that? He also keeps free from the hair-splitting, jerky and (with all respect) rather un-German manner of Lessing: no small merit in him, for Lessing is the most tempting of all models for prose style. The highest praise I can give his manner of presentation is to apply his own phrase to himself:-“A philosopher must be very honest to avail himself of no aid from poetry or rhetoric.” That honesty is something, and even a virtue, is one of those private opinions which are forbidden in this age of public opinion; and so I shall not be praising Schopenhauer, but only giving him a distinguishing mark, when I repeat that he is honest, even as a writer: so few of them are that we are apt to mistrust every one who writes at all. I only know a single author that I can rank with Schopenhauer, or even above him, in the matter of honesty; and that is Montaigne. The joy of living on this earth is increased by the existence of such a man. The effect on myself, at any rate, since my first acquaintance with that strong and masterful spirit, has been, that I can say of him as he of Plutarch-“As soon as I open him, I seem to grow a pair of wings.” If I had the task of making myself at home on the earth, I would choose him as my companion.
Schopenhauer has a second characteristic in common with Montaigne, besides honesty; a joy that really makes others joyful. “Aliis laetus, sibi sapiens.” There are two very different kinds of joyfulness. The true thinker always communicates joy and life, whether he is showing his serious or comic side, his human insight or his godlike forbearance: without surly looks or trembling hands or watery eyes, but simply and truly, with fearlessness and strength, a little cavalierly perhaps, and sternly, but always as a conqueror: and it is this that brings the deepest and intensest joy, to see the conquering god with all the monsters that he has fought. But the joyfulness one finds here and there in the mediocre writers and limited thinkers makes some of us miserable; I felt this, for example, with the “joyfulness” of David Strauss. We are generally ashamed of such a quality in our contemporaries, because they show the nakedness of our time, and of the men in it, to posterity. Such fils de joie do not see the sufferings and the monsters, that they pretend, as philosophers, to see and fight; and so their joy deceives us, and we hate it; it tempts to the false belief that they have gained some victory. At bottom there is only joy where there is victory: and this applies to true philosophy as much as to any work of art. The contents may be forbidding and serious, as the problem of existence always is; the work will only prove tiresome and oppressive, if the slipshod thinker and the dilettante have spread the mist of their insufficiency over it: while nothing happier or better can come to man’s lot than to be near one of those conquering spirits whose profound thought has made them love what is most vital, and whose wisdom has found its goal in beauty. They really speak: they are no stammerers or babblers; they live and move, and have no part in the danse macabre of the rest of humanity. And so in their company one feels a natural man again, and could cry out with Goethe-“What a wondrous and priceless thing is a living creature! How fitted to his surroundings, how true, and real!”
I have been describing nothing but the first, almost physiological, impression made upon me by Schopenhauer, the magical emanation of inner force from one plant of Nature to another, that follows the slightest contact. Analysing it, I find that this influence of Schopenhauer has three elements, his honesty, his joy, and his consistency. He is honest, as speaking and writing for himself alone; joyful, because his thought has conquered the greatest difficulties; consistent, because he cannot help being so. His strength rises like a flame in the calm air, straight up, without a tremor or deviation. He finds his way, without our noticing that he has been seeking it: so surely and cleverly and inevitably does he run his course, as if by some law of gravitation. If any one have felt what it means to find, in our present world of Centaurs and Chimaeras, a single-hearted and unaffected child of nature who moves unconstrained on his own road, he will understand my joy and surprise in discovering Schopenhauer: I knew in him the educator and philosopher I had so long desired. Only, however, in his writings: which was a great loss. All the more did I exert myself to see behind the book the living man whose testament it was, and who promised his inheritance to such as could, and would, be more than his readers-his pupils and his sons.
3
I get profit from a philosopher, just so far as he can be an example to me. There is no doubt that a man can draw whole nations after him by his example; as is shown by Indian history, which is practically the history of Indian philosophy. But this example must exist in his outward life, not merely in his books; it must follow the way of the Grecian philosophers, whose doctrine was in their dress and bearing and general manner of life rather than in their speech or writing. We have nothing yet of this “breathing testimony” in German philosophical life; the spirit has, apparently, long completed its emancipation, while the flesh has hardly begun; yet it is foolish to think that the spirit can be really free and independent when this victory over limitation-which is ultimately a formative limiting of one’s self-is not embodied anew in every look and movement. Kant held to his university, submitted to its regulations, and belonged, as his colleagues and students thought, to a definite religious faith: and naturally his example has produced, above all, University professors of philosophy. Schopenhauer makes small account of the learned tribe, keeps himself exclusive, and cultivates an independence from state and society as his ideal, to escape the chains of circumstance here: that is his value to us. Many steps in the enfranchisement of the philosopher are unknown in Germany; they cannot always remain so. Our artists live more bravely and honourably than our philosophers; and Richard Wagner, the best example of all, shows how genius need not fear a fight to the death with the established forms and ordinances, if we wish to bring the higher truth and order, that lives in him, to the light. The “truth,” however, of which we hear so much from our professors, seems to be a far more modest being, and no kind of disturbance is to be feared from her; she is an easy-going and pleasant creature, who is continually assuring the powers that be that no one need fear any trouble from her quarter: for man is only “pure reason.” And therefore I will say, that philosophy in Germany has more and more to learn not to be “pure reason”: and it may well take as its model “Schopenhauer the man.”
It is no less than a marvel that he should have come to be this human kind of example: for he was beset, within and without, by the most frightful dangers, that would have crushed and broken a weaker nature. I think there was a strong likelihood of Schopenhauer the man going under, and leaving at best a residue of “pure reason”: and only “at best”-it was more probable that neither man nor reason would survive.
A modern Englishman sketches the most usual danger to extraordinary men who live in a society that worships the ordinary, in this manner:-“Such uncommon characters are first cowed, then become sick and melancholy, and then die. A Shelley could never have lived in England: a race of Shelleys would have been impossible.” Our Hölderlins and Kleists were undone by their unconventionality, and were not strong enough for the climate of the so-called German culture; and only iron natures like Beethoven, Goethe, Schopenhauer and Wagner could hold out against it. Even in them the effect of this weary toiling and moiling is seen in many lines and wrinkles; their breathing is harder and their voice is forced. The old diplomatist who had only just seen and spoken to Goethe, said to a friend-“Voilà un homme qui a eu de grands chagrins!” which Goethe translated to mean “That is a man who has taken great pains in his life.” And he adds, “If the trace of the sorrow and activity we have gone through cannot be wiped from our features, it is no wonder that all that survives of us and our struggles should bear the same impress.” And this is the Goethe to whom our cultured Philistines point as the happiest of Germans, that they may prove their thesis, that it must be possible to be happy among them-with the unexpressed corollary that no one can be pardoned for feeling unhappy and lonely among them. Hence they push their doctrine, in practice, to its merciless conclusion, that there is always a secret guilt in isolation. Poor Schopenhauer had this secret guilt too in his heart, the guilt of cherishing his philosophy more than his fellow-men; and he was so unhappy as to have learnt from Goethe that he must defend his philosophy at all costs from the neglect of his contemporaries, to save its very existence: for there is a kind of Grand Inquisitor’s Censure in which the Germans, according to Goethe, are great adepts: it is called-inviolable silence. This much at least was accomplished by it; the greater part of the first edition of Schopenhauer’s masterpiece had to be turned into waste paper. The imminent risk that his great work would be undone, merely by neglect, bred in him a state of unrest-perilous and uncontrollable;-for no single adherent of any note presented himself. It is tragic to watch his search for any evidence of recognition: and his piercing cry of triumph at last, that he would now really be read (legor et legar), touches us with a thrill of pain. All the traits in which we do not see the great philosopher show us the suffering man, anxious for his noblest possessions; he was tortured by the fear of losing his little property, and perhaps of no longer being able to maintain in its purity his truly antique attitude towards philosophy. He often chose falsely in his desire to find real trust and compassion in men, only to return with a heavy heart to his faithful dog again. He was absolutely alone, with no single friend of his own kind to comfort him; and between one and none there lies an infinity-as ever between something and nothing. No one who has true friends knows what real loneliness means, though he may have the whole world in antagonism round him. Ah, I see well ye do not know what isolation is! Whenever there are great societies with governments and religions and public opinions where there is a tyranny, in short, there will the lonely philosopher be hated: for philosophy offers an asylum to mankind where no tyranny can penetrate, the inner sanctuary, the centre of the heart’s labyrinth: and the tyrants are galled at it. Here do the lonely men lie hid: but here too lurks their greatest danger. These men who have saved their inner freedom, must also live and be seen in the outer world: they stand in countless human relations by their birth, position, education and country, their own circumstances and the importunity of others: and so they are presumed to hold an immense number of opinions, simply because these happen to prevail: every look that is not a denial counts as an assent, every motion of the hand that does not destroy is regarded as an aid. These free and lonely men know that they perpetually seem other than they are. While they wish for nothing but truth and honesty, they are in a net of misunderstanding; and that ardent desire cannot prevent a mist of false opinions, of adaptations and wrong conclusions, of partial misapprehension and intentional reticence, from gathering round their actions, And there settles a cloud of melancholy on their brows: for such natures hate the necessity of pretence worse than death: and the continual bitterness gives them a threatening and volcanic character. They take revenge from time to time for their forced concealment and self-restraint: they issue from their dens with lowering looks: their words and deeds are explosive, and may lead to their own destruction. Schopenhauer lived amid dangers of this sort. Such lonely men need love, and friends, to whom they can be as open and sincere as to themselves, and in whose presence the deadening silence and hypocrisy may cease. Take their friends away, and there is left an increasing peril; Heinrich von Kleist was broken by the lack of love, and the most terrible weapon against unusual men is to drive them into themselves; and then their issuing forth again is a volcanic eruption. Yet there are always some demi-gods who can bear life under these fearful conditions and can be their conquerors: and if you would hear their lonely chant, listen to the music of Beethoven.
So the first danger in whose shadow Schopenhauer lived was-isolation. The second is called-doubting of the truth. To this every thinker is liable who sets out from the philosophy of Kant, provided he be strong and sincere in his sorrows and his desires, and not a mere tinkling thought-box or calculating machine. We all know the shameful state of things implied by this last reservation, and I believe it is only a very few men that Kant has so vitally affected as to change the current of their blood. To judge from what one reads, there must have been a revolution in every domain of thought since the work of this unobtrusive professor: I cannot believe it myself. For I see men, though darkly, as themselves needing to be revolutionised, before any “domains of thought” can be so. In fact, we find the first mark of any influence Kant may have had on the popular mind, in a corrosive scepticism and relativity. But it is only in noble and active spirits who could never rest in doubt that the shattering despair of truth itself could take the place of doubt. This was, for example, the effect of the Kantian philosophy on Heinrich von Kleist. “It was only a short time ago,” he writes in his poignant way, “that I became acquainted with the Kantian philosophy; and I will tell you my thought, though I cannot fear that it will rack you to your inmost soul, as it did me.-We cannot decide, whether what we call truth is really truth, or whether it only seems so to us. If the latter, the truth that we amass here does not exist after death, and all our struggle to gain a possession that may follow us even to the grave is in vain. If the blade of this thought do not cut your heart, yet laugh not at another who feels himself wounded by it in his Holy of Holies. My one highest aim has vanished, and I have no more.” Yes, when will men feel again deeply as Kleist did, and learn to measure a philosophy by what it means to the “Holy of Holies”? And yet we must make this estimate of what Schopenhauer can mean to us, after Kant, as the first pioneer to bring us from the heights of sceptical disillusionment or “critical” renunciation, to the greater height of tragic contemplation, the nocturnal heaven with its endless crown of stars. His greatness is that he can stand opposite the picture of life, and interpret it to us as a whole: while all the clever people cannot escape the error of thinking one comes nearer to the interpretation by a laborious analysis of the colours and material of the picture; with the confession, probably, that the texture of the canvas is very complicated, and the chemical composition of the colours undiscoverable. Schopenhauer knew that one must guess the painter in order to understand the picture. But now the whole learned fraternity is engaged on understanding the colours and canvas, and not the picture: and only he who has kept the universal panorama of life and being firmly before his eyes, will use the individual sciences without harm to himself; for, without this general view as a norm, they are threads that lead nowhere and only confuse still more the maze of our existence. Here we see, as I said, the greatness of Schopenhauer, that he follows up every idea, as Hamlet follows the Ghost, without allowing himself to turn aside for a learned digression, or be drawn away by the scholastic abstractions of a rabid dialectic. The study of the minute philosophers is only interesting for the recognition that they have reached those stages in the great edifice of philosophy where learned disquisitions for and against, where hair-splitting objections and counter-objections are the rule: and for that reason they evade the demand of every great philosophy to speak sub specie aeternitatis-“this is the picture of the whole of life: learn thence the meaning of thine own life.” And the converse: “read thine own life, and understand thence the hieroglyphs of the universal life.” In this way must Schopenhauer’s philosophy always be interpreted; as an individualist philosophy, starting from the single man, in his own nature, to gain an insight into his personal miseries, and needs, and limitations, and find out the remedies that will console them: namely, the sacrifice of the ego, and its submission to the nobler ends, especially those of justice and mercy. He teaches us to distinguish between the true and the apparent furtherance of man’s happiness: how neither the attainment of riches, nor honour, nor learning, can raise the individual from his deep despair at his unworthiness; and how the quest for these good things can only have meaning through a universal end that transcends and explains them;-the gaining of power to aid our physical nature by them and, as far as may be, correct its folly and awkwardness. For one’s self only, in the first instance: and finally, through one’s self, for all. It is a task that leads to scepticism: for there is so much to be made better yet, in one and all!
Applying this to Schopenhauer himself, we come to the third and most intimate danger in which he lived, and which lay deep in the marrow of his being. Every one is apt to discover a limitation in himself, in his gifts of intellect as well as his moral will, that fills him with yearning and melancholy; and as he strives after holiness through a consciousness of sin, so, as an intellectual being, he has a deep longing after the “genius” in himself. This is the root of all true culture; and if we say this means the aspiration of man to be “born again” as saint and genius, I know that one need not be a Buddhist to understand the myth. We feel a strong loathing when we find talent without such aspiration, in the circle of the learned, or among the so-called educated; for we see that such men, with all their cleverness, are no aid but a hindrance to the beginnings of culture and the blossoming of genius, the aim of all culture. There is a rigidity in them, parallel to the cold arrogance of conventional virtue, which also remains at the opposite pole to true holiness. Schopenhauer’s nature contained an extraordinarily dangerous dualism. Few thinkers have felt as he did the complete and unmistakable certainty of genius within them; and his genius made him the highest of all promises,-that there could be no deeper furrow than that which he was ploughing in the ground of the modern world. He knew one half of his being to be fulfilled according to its strength, with no other need; and he followed with greatness and dignity his vocation of consolidating his victory. In the other half there was a gnawing aspiration, which we can understand, when we hear that he turned away with a sad look from the picture of Rancé, the founder of the Trappists, with the words: “That is a matter of grace.” For genius evermore yearns after holiness as it sees further and more clearly from its watch-tower than other men, deep into the reconciliation of Thought and Being, the kingdom of peace and the denial of the will, and up to that other shore, of which the Indians speak. The wonder is, that Schopenhauer’s nature should have been so inconceivably stable and unshakable that it could neither be destroyed nor petrified by this yearning. Every one will understand this after the measure of his own character and greatness: none of us will understand it in the fulness of its meaning.
The more one considers these three dangers, the more extraordinary will appear his vigour in opposing them and his safety after the battle. True, he gained many scars and open wounds: and a cast of mind that may seem somewhat too bitter and pugnacious. But his single ideal transcends the highest humanity in him. Schopenhauer stands as a pattern to men, in spite of all those scars and scratches. We may even say, that what was imperfect and “all too human” in him, brings us nearer to him as a man, for we see a sufferer and a kinsman to suffering, not merely a dweller on the unattainable heights of genius.
These three constitutional dangers that threatened Schopenhauer, threaten us all. Each one of us bears a creative solitude within himself, and his consciousness of it forms an exotic aura of strangeness round him. Most men cannot endure it, because they are slothful, as I said, and because their solitude hangs round them a chain of troubles and burdens. No doubt, for the man with this heavy chain, life loses almost everything that one desires from it in youth-joy, safety, honour: his fellow-men pay him his due of-isolation! The wilderness and the cave are about him, wherever he may live. He must look to it that he be not enslaved and oppressed, and become melancholy thereby. And let him surround himself with the pictures of good and brave fighters such as Schopenhauer.
The second danger, too, is not rare. Here and there we find one dowered by nature with a keen vision; his thoughts dance gladly in the witches’ Sabbath of dialectic; and if he uncautiously give his talent the rein, it is easy to lose all humanity and live a ghostly life in the realm of “pure reason”: or through the constant search for the “pros and cons” of things, he may go astray from the truth and live without courage or confidence, in doubt, denial and discontent, and the slender hope that waits on disillusion: “No dog could live long thus!”
The third danger is a moral or intellectual hardening: man breaks the bond that united him to his ideal: he ceases to be fruitful and reproduce himself in this or that province, and becomes an enemy or a parasite of culture. The solitude of his being has become an indivisible, unrelated atom, an icy stone. And one can perish of this solitude as well as of the fear of it, of one’s self as well as one’s self-sacrifice, of both aspiration and petrifaction: and to live is ever to be in danger.
Beside these dangers to which Schopenhauer would have been constitutionally liable, in whatever century he had lived, there were also some produced by his own time; and it is essential to distinguish between these two kinds, in order to grasp the typical and formative elements in his nature. The philosopher casts his eye over existence, and wishes to give it a new standard value; for it has been the peculiar task of all great thinkers to be law-givers for the weight and stamp in the mint of reality. And his task will be hindered if the men he sees near him be a weakly and worm-eaten growth. To be correct in his calculation of existence, the unworthiness of the present time must be a very small item in the addition. The study of ancient or foreign history is valuable, if at all, for a correct judgment on the whole destiny of man; which must be drawn not only from an average estimate but from a comparison of the highest destinies that can befall individuals or nations. The present is too much with us; it directs the vision even against the philosopher’s will: and it will inevitably be reckoned too high in the final sum. And so he must put a low figure on his own time as against others, and suppress the present in his picture of life, as well as in himself; must put it into the background or paint it over; a difficult, and almost impossible task. The judgment of the ancient Greek philosophers on the value of existence means so much more than our own, because they had the full bloom of life itself before them, and their vision was untroubled by any felt dualism between their wish for freedom and beauty on the grand scale, and their search after truth, with its single question “What is the real worth of life? “Empedocles lived when Greek culture was full to overflowing with the joy of life, and all ages may take profit from his words; especially as no other great philosopher of that great time ventured to contradict them. Empedocles is only the clearest voice among them-they all say the same thing, if a man will but open his ears. A modern thinker is always in the throes of an unfulfilled desire; he is looking for life,-warm, red life,-that he may pass judgment on it: at any rate he will think it necessary to be a living man himself, before he can believe in his power of judging. And this is the title of the modern philosophers to sit among the great aiders of Life (or rather of the will to live), and the reason why they can look from their own out-wearied time and aspire to a truer culture, and a clearer explanation. Their yearning is, however, their danger; the reformer in them struggles with the critical philosopher. And whichever way the victory incline, it also implies a defeat. How was Schopenhauer to escape this danger?
We like to consider the great man as the noble child of his age, who feels its defects more strongly and intimately than the smaller men: and therefore the struggle of the great man against his age is apparently nothing but a mad fight to the death with himself. Only apparently, however: he only fights the elements in his time that hinder his own greatness, in other words his own freedom and sincerity. And so, at bottom, he is only an enemy to that element which is not truly himself, the irreconcilable antagonism of the temporal and eternal in him. The supposed “child of his age” proves to be but a step-child. From boyhood Schopenhauer strove with his time, a false and unworthy mother to him, and as soon as he had banished her, he could bring back his being to its native health and purity. For this very reason we can use his writings as mirrors of his time; it is no fault of the mirror if everything contemporary appear in it stricken by a ravaging disease, pale and thin, with tired looks and hollow eyes,-the step-child’s sorrow made visible. The yearning for natural strength, for a healthy and simple humanity, was a yearning for himself: and as soon as he had conquered his time within him, he was face to face with his own genius. The secret of nature’s being and his own lay open, the step-mother’s plot to conceal his genius from him was foiled. And now he could turn a fearless eye towards the question, “What is the real worth of life?” without having any more to weigh a bloodless and chaotic age of doubt and hypocrisy. He knew that there was something higher and purer to be won on this earth than the life of his time, and a man does bitter wrong to existence who only knows it and criticises it in this hateful form. Genius, itself the highest product of life, is now summoned to justify life, if it can: the noble creative soul must answer the question:-“Dost thou in thy heart say ‘Yea!’ unto this existence? Is it enough for thee? Wilt thou be its advocate and its redeemer? One true ‘Yea’ from thy lips, and the sorely accused life shall go free.” How shall he answer? In the words of Empedocles.
4
The last hint may well remain obscure for a time: I have something more easy to explain, namely how Schopenhauer can help us to educate ourselves in opposition to our age, since we have the advantage of really knowing our age, through him;-if it be an advantage! It may be no longer possible in a couple, of hundred years. I sometimes amuse myself with the idea that men may soon grow tired of books and their authors, and the savant of to-morrow come to leave directions in his will that his body be burned in the midst of his books, including of course his own writings. And in the gradual clearing of the forests, might not our libraries be very reasonably used for straw and brushwood? Most books are born from the smoke and vapour of the brain: and to vapour and smoke may they well return. For having no fire within themselves, they shall be visited with fire. And possibly to a later century our own may count as the “Dark age,” because our productions heated the furnace hotter and more continuously than ever before. We are anyhow happy that we can learn to know our time; and if there be any sense in busying ourselves with our time at all, we may as well do it as thoroughly as we can, so that no one may have any doubt about it. The possibility of this we owe to Schopenhauer.
Our happiness would of course be infinitely greater, if our inquiry showed that nothing so hopeful and splendid as our present epoch had ever existed. There are simple people in some corner of the earth to-day-perhaps in Germany-who are disposed to believe in all seriousness that the world was put right two years ago, and that all stern and gloomy views of life are now contradicted by “facts.” The foundation of the New German Empire is, to them, the decisive blow that annihilates all the “pessimistic” philosophers,-no doubt of it. To judge the philosopher’s significance in our time, as an educator, we must oppose a widespread view like this, especially common in our universities. We must say, it is a shameful thing that such abominable flattery of the Time-Fetish should be uttered by a herd of so-called reflective and honourable men; it is a proof that we no longer see how far the seriousness of philosophy is removed from that of a newspaper. Such men have lost the last remnant of feeling, not only for philosophy, but also for religion, and have put in its place a spirit not so much of optimism as of journalism, the evil spirit that broods over the day-and the daily paper. Every philosophy that believes the problem of existence to be shelved, or even solved, by a political event, is a sham philosophy. There have been innumerable states founded since the beginning of the world; that is an old story. How should a political innovation manage once and for all to make a contented race of the dwellers on this earth? If any one believe in his heart that this is possible, he should report himself to our authorities: he really deserves to be Professor of Philosophy in a German university, like Harms in Berlin, Jürgen Meyer in Bonn, and Carriere in Munich.
We are feeling the consequences of the doctrine, preached lately from all the housetops, that the state is the highest end of man and there is no higher duty than to serve it: I regard this not a relapse into paganism, but into stupidity. A man who thinks state-service to be his highest duty, very possibly knows no higher one; yet there are both men and duties in a region beyond,-and one of these duties, that seems to me at least of higher value than state-service, is to destroy stupidity in all its forms-and this particular stupidity among them. And I have to do with a class of men whose teleological conceptions extend further than the well-being of a state, I mean with philosophers-and only with them in their relation to the world of culture, which is again almost independent of the “good of the state.” Of the many links that make up the twisted chain of humanity, some are of gold and others of pewter.
How does the philosopher of our time regard culture? Quite differently, I assure you, from the professors who are so content with their new state. He seems to see the symptoms of an absolute uprooting of culture in the increasing rush and hurry of life, and the decay of all reflection and simplicity. The waters of religion are ebbing, and leaving swamps or stagnant pools: the nations are drawing away in enmity again, and long to tear each other in pieces. The sciences, blindly driving along, on a laisser faire system, without a common standard, are splitting up, and losing hold of every firm principle. The educated classes are being swept along in the contemptible struggle for wealth. Never was the world more worldly, never poorer in goodness and love. Men of learning are no longer beacons or sanctuaries in the midst of this turmoil of worldliness; they themselves are daily becoming more restless, thoughtless, loveless. Everything bows before the coming barbarism, art and science included. The educated men have degenerated into the greatest foes of education, for they will deny the universal sickness and hinder the physician. They become peevish, these poor nerveless creatures, if one speak of their weakness and combat the shameful spirit of lies in them. They would gladly make one believe that they have outstripped all the centuries, and they walk with a pretence of happiness which has something pathetic about it, because their happiness is so inconceivable. One would not even ask them, as Tannhäuser did Biterolf, “What hast thou, poor wretch, enjoyed!” For, alas! we know far better ourselves, in another way. There is a wintry sky over us, and we dwell on a high mountain, in danger and in need. Short-lived is all our joy, and the sun’s rays strike palely on our white mountains. Music is heard; an old man grinds an organ, and the dancers whirl round, and the heart of the wanderer is shaken within him to see it: everything is so disordered, so drab, so hopeless. Even now there is a sound of joy, of clear thoughtless joy! but soon the mist of evening closes round, the note dies away, and the wanderer’s footsteps are heard on the gravel; as far as his eye can reach there is nothing but the grim and desolate face of nature.
It may be one-sided, to insist only on the blurred lines and the dull colours in the picture of modern life: yet the other side is no more encouraging, it is only more disturbing. There is certainly strength there, enormous strength; but it is wild, primitive and merciless. One looks on with a chill expectancy, as though into the caldron of a witch’s kitchen; every moment there may arise sparks and vapour, to herald some fearful apparition. For a century we have been ready for a world-shaking convulsion; and though we have lately been trying to set the conservative strength of the so-called national state against the great modern tendency to volcanic destructiveness, it will only be, for a long time yet, an aggravation of the universal unrest that hangs over us. We need not be deceived by individuals behaving as if they knew nothing of all this anxiety: their own restlessness shows how well they know it. They think more exclusively of themselves than men ever thought before; they plant and build for their little day, and the chase for happiness is never greater than when the quarry must be caught to-day or to-morrow: the next day perhaps there is no more hunting. We live in the Atomic Age, or rather in the Atomic Chaos. The opposing forces were practically held together in mediaeval times by the Church, and in some measure assimilated by the strong pressure which she exerted. When the common tie broke and the pressure relaxed, they rose once more against each other. The Reformation taught that many things were “adiaphora”-departments that needed no guidance from religion: this was the price paid for its own existence. Christianity paid a similar one to guard itself against the far more religious antiquity: and laid the seeds of discord at once. Everything nowadays is directed by the fools and the knaves, the selfishness of the money-makers and the brute forces of militarism. The state in their hands makes a good show of reorganising everything, and of becoming the bond that unites the warring elements; in other words, it wishes for the same idolatry from mankind as they showed to the Church.
And we shall yet feel the consequences. We are even now on the ice-floes in the stream of the Middle Ages: they are thawing fast, and their movement is ominous: the banks are flooded, and giving way. The revolution, the atomistic revolution, is inevitable: but what are those smallest indivisible elements of human society?
There is surely far more danger to mankind in transitional periods like these than in the actual time of revolution and chaos; they are tortured by waiting, and snatch greedily at every moment; and this breeds all kinds of cowardice and selfishness in them: whereas the true feeling of a great and universal need ever inspires men, and makes them better. In the midst of such dangers, who will provide the guardians and champions for Humanity, for the holy and inviolate treasure that has been laid up in the temples, little by little, by countless generations? Who will set up again the Image of Man, when men in their selfishness and terror see nothing but the trail of the serpent or the cur in them, and have fallen from their high estate to that of the brute or the automaton?
There are three Images of Man fashioned by our modern time, which for a long while yet will urge mortal men to transfigure their own lives; they are the men of Rousseau, Goethe, and Schopenhauer. The first has the greatest fire, and is most calculated to impress the people: the second is only for the few, for those contemplative natures “in the grand style” who are misunderstood by the crowd. The third demands the highest activity in those who will follow it: only such men will look on that image without harm, for it breaks the spirit of that merely contemplative man, and the rabble shudder at it. From the first has come forth a strength that led and still leads to fearful revolution: for in all socialistic upheavals it is ever Rousseau’s man who is the Typhoeus under the Etna. Oppressed and half crushed to death by the pride of caste and the pitilessness of wealth, spoilt by priests and bad education, a laughing-stock even to himself, man cries in his need on “holy mother Nature,” and feels suddenly that she is as far from him as any god of the Epicureans. His prayers do not reach her; so deeply sunk is he in the Chaos of the unnatural. He contemptuously throws aside all the finery that seemed his truest humanity a little while ago-all his arts and sciences, all the refinements of his life,-he beats with his fists against the walls, in whose shadow he has degenerated, and goes forth to seek the light and the sun, the forest and the crag. And crying out, “Nature alone is good, the natural man alone is human,” he despises himself and aspires beyond himself: a state wherein the soul is ready for a fearful resolve, but calls the noble and the rare as well from their utter depths.
Goethe’s man is no such threatening force; in a certain sense he is a corrective and a sedative to those dangerous agitations of which Rousseau’s man is a prey. Goethe himself in his youth followed the “gospel of kindly Nature” with all the ardour of his soul: his Faust was the highest and boldest picture of Rousseau’s man, so far at any rate as his hunger for life, his discontent and yearning, his intercourse with the demons of the heart could be represented. But what comes from these congregated storm-clouds? Not a single lightning flash! And here begins the new Image of man the man according to Goethe. One might have thought that Faust would have lived a continual life of suffering, as a revolutionary and a deliverer, as the negative force that proceeds from goodness, as the genius of ruin, alike religious and daemonic, in opposition to his utterly un-daemonic companion; though of course he could not be free of this companion, and had at once to use and despise his evil and destructive scepticism-which is the tragic destiny of all revolutionary deliverers. One is wrong, however, to expect anything of the sort: Goethe’s man here parts company with Rousseau’s; for he hates all violence, all sudden transition that is, all action: and the universal deliverer becomes merely the universal traveller. All the riches of life and nature, all antiquity-arts, mythologies and sciences-pass before his eager eyes, his deepest desires are aroused and satisfied, Helen herself can hold him no more and the moment must come for which his mocking companion is waiting. At a fair spot on the earth, his flight comes to an end: his pinions drop, and Mephistopheles is at his side. When the German ceases to be Faust, there is no danger greater than of becoming a Philistine and falling into the hands of the devil-heavenly powers alone can save him. Goethe’s man is, as I said, the contemplative man in the grand style, who is only kept from dying of ennui by feeding on all the great and memorable things that have ever existed, and by living from desire to desire. He is not the active man; and when he does take a place among active men, as things are, you may be sure that no good will come of it (think, for example, of the zeal with which Goethe wrote for the stage!); and further, you may be sure that “things as they are” will suffer no change. Goethe’s man is a conciliatory and conservative spirit, though in danger of degenerating into a Philistine, just as Rousseau’s man may easily become a Catiline. All his virtues would be the better by the addition of a little brute force and elemental passion. Goethe appears to have seen where the weakness and danger of his creation lay, as is clear from Jarno’s word to Wilhelm Meister: “You are bitter and ill-tempered-which is quite an excellent thing: if you could once become really angry, it would be still better.” To speak plainly, it is necessary to become really angry in order that things may be better. The picture of Schopenhauer’s man can help us here. Schopenhauer’s man voluntarily takes upon himself the pain of telling the truth: this pain serves to quench his individual will and make him ready for the complete transformation of his being, which it is the inner meaning of life to realise. This openness in him appears to other men to be an effect of malice, for they think the preservation of their shifts and pretences to be the first duty of humanity, and any one who destroys their playthings to be merely malicious. They are tempted to cry out to such a man, in [[Faust|Faust’s] words to Mephistopheles:- “So to the active and eternal
Creative force, in cold disdain
You now oppose the fist infernal”-
and he who would live according to Schopenhauer would seem to be more like a Mephistopheles than a Faust-that is, to our weak modern eyes, which always discover signs of malice in any negation. But there is a kind of denial and destruction that is the effect of that strong aspiration after holiness and deliverance, which Schopenhauer was the first philosopher to teach our profane and worldly generation. Everything that can be denied, deserves to be denied; and real sincerity means the belief in a state of things which cannot be denied, or in which there is no lie. The sincere man feels that his activity has a metaphysical meaning. It can only be explained by the laws of a different and a higher life; it is in the deepest sense an affirmation: even if everything that he does seem utterly opposed to the laws of our present life. It must lead therefore to constant suffering; but he knows, as Meister Eckhard did, that “the quickest beast that will carry you to perfection is suffering.” Every one, I should think, who has such an ideal before him, must feel a wider sympathy; and he will have a burning desire to become a “Schopenhauer man”;-pure and wonderfully patient, on his intellectual side full of a devouring fire, and far removed from the cold and contemptuous “neutrality” of the so-called scientific man; so high above any warped and morose outlook on life as to offer himself as the first victim of the truth he has won, with a deep consciousness of the sufferings that must spring from his sincerity. His courage will destroy his happiness on earth, he must be an enemy to the men he loves and the institutions in which he grew up, he must spare neither person nor thing, however it may hurt him, he will be misunderstood and thought an ally of forces that he abhors, in his search for righteousness he will seem unrighteous by human standards: but he must comfort himself with the words that his teacher Schopenhauer once used: “A happy life is impossible, the highest thing that man can aspire to is a heroic life; such as a man lives, who is always fighting against unequal odds for the good of others; and wins in the end without any thanks. After the battle is over, he stands like the Prince in the re corvo of Gozzi, with dignity and nobility in his eyes, but turned to stone. His memory remains, and will be reverenced as a hero’s; his will, that has been mortified all his life by toiling and struggling, by evil payment and ingratitude, is absorbed into Nirvana.” Such a heroic life, with its full “mortification”-corresponds very little to the paltry ideas of the people who talk most about it, and make festivals in memory of great men, in the belief that a great man is great in the sense that they are small, either through exercise of his gifts to please himself or by a blind mechanical obedience to this inner force; so that the man who does not possess the gift or feel the compulsion has the same right to be small as the other to be great. But “gift” and “compulsion” are contemptible words, mere means of escape from an inner voice, a slander on him who has listened to the voice-the great man; he least of all will allow himself to be given or compelled to anything: for he knows as well as any smaller man how easily life can be taken and how soft the bed whereon he might lie if he went the pleasant and conventional way with himself and his fellow-creatures: all the regulations of mankind are turned to the end that the intense feeling of life may be lost in continual distractions. Now why will he so strongly choose the opposite, and try to feel life, which is the same as to suffer from life? Because he sees that men will tempt him to betray himself, and that there is a kind of agreement to draw him from his den. He will prick up his ears and gather himself together, and say, “I will remain mine own.” He gradually comes to understand what a fearful decision it is. For he must go down into the depths of being, with a string of curious questions on his lips-“Why am I alive? what lesson have I to learn from life? how have I become what I am, and why do I suffer in this existence?” He is troubled, and sees that no one is troubled in the same way; but rather that the hands of his fellow-men are passionately stretched out towards the fantastic drama of the political theatre, or they themselves are treading the boards under many disguises, youths, men and graybeards, fathers, citizens, priests, merchants and officials,-busy with the comedy they are all playing, and never thinking of their own selves. To the question “To what end dost thou live?” they would all immediately answer, with pride, “To become a good citizen or professor or statesman,"-and yet they are something which can never be changed: and why are they just-this? Ah, and why nothing better? The man who only regards his life as a moment in the evolution of a race or a state or a science, and will belong merely to a history of “becoming,” has not understood the lesson of existence, and must learn it over again. This eternal “becoming something” is a lying puppet-show, in which man has forgot himself; it is the force that scatters individuality to the four winds, the eternal childish game that the big baby time is playing in front of us-and with us. The heroism of sincerity lies in ceasing to be the plaything of time. Everything in the process of “becoming” is a hollow sham, contemptible and shallow: man can only find the solution of his riddle in “being” something definite and unchangeable. He begins to test how deep both “becoming” and “being” are rooted in him-and a fearful task is before his soul; to destroy the first, and bring all the falsity of things to the light. He wishes to know everything, not to feed a delicate taste, like Goethe’s man, to take delight, from a safe place, in the multiplicity of existence: but he himself is the first sacrifice that he brings. The heroic man does not think of his happiness or misery, his virtues or his vices, or of his being the measure of things; he has no further hopes of himself and will accept the utter consequences of his hopelessness. His strength lies in his self-forgetfulness: if he have a thought for himself, it is only to measure the vast distance between himself and his aim, and to view what he has left behind him as so much dross. The old philosophers sought for happiness and truth, with all their strength: and there is an evil principle in nature that not one shall find that which he cannot help seeking. But the man who looks for a lie in everything, and becomes a willing friend to unhappiness, shall have a marvellous disillusioning: there hovers near him something unutterable, of which truth and happiness are but idolatrous images born of the night; the earth loses her dragging weight, the events and powers of earth become as a dream, and a gradual clearness widens round him like a summer evening. It is as though the beholder of these things began to wake, and it had only been the clouds of a passing dream that had been weaving about him. They will at some time disappear: and then will it be day.
5
But I have promised to speak of Schopenhauer, as far as my experience goes, as an educator and it is far from being sufficient to paint the ideal humanity which is the “Platonic idea” in Schopenhauer; especially as my representation is an imperfect one. The most difficult task remains; to say how a new circle of duties may spring from this ideal, and how one can reconcile such a transcendent aim with ordinary action; to prove, in short, that the ideal is educative. One might otherwise think it to be merely the blissful or intoxicating vision of a few rare moments, that leaves us afterwards the prey of a deeper disappointment. It is certain that the ideal begins to affect us in this way when we come suddenly to distinguish light and darkness, bliss and abhorrence; this is an experience that is as old as ideals themselves. But we ought not to stand in the doorway for long; we should soon leave the first stages, and ask the question, seriously and definitely, “Is it possible to bring that incredibly high aim so near us, that it should educate us, or ’lead us out’ as well as lead us upward?"-in order that the great words of Goethe be not fulfilled in our case-“Man is born to a state of limitation: he can understand ends that are simple, present and definite, and is accustomed to make use of means that are near to his hand; but as soon as he comes into the open, he knows neither what he wishes nor what he ought to do, and it is all one whether he be confused by the multitude of objects or set beside himself by their greatness and importance. It is always his misfortune to be led to strive after something which he cannot attain by any ordinary activity of his own.” The objection can be made with apparent reason against Schopenhauer’s man, that his greatness and dignity can only turn our heads, and put us beyond all community with the active men of the world: the common round of duties, the noiseless tenor of life has disappeared. One man may possibly get accustomed to living in a reluctant dualism, that is, in a contradiction with himself;-becoming unstable, daily weaker and less productive:-while another will renounce all action on principle, and scarcely endure to see others active. The danger is always great when a man is too heavy-laden, and cannot really accomplish any duties. Stronger natures may be broken by it; the weaker, which are the majority, sink into a speculative laziness, and at last, from their laziness, lose even the power of speculation.
With regard to such objections, I will admit that our work has hardly begun, and so far as I know, I only see one thing clearly and definitely-that it is possible for that ideal picture to provide you and me with a chain of duties that may be accomplished; and some of us already feel its pressure. In order, however, to be able to speak in plain language of the formula under which I may gather the new circle of duties, I must begin with the following considerations.
The deeper minds of all ages have had pity for animals, because they suffer from life and have not the power to turn the sting of the suffering against themselves, and understand their being metaphysically. The sight of blind suffering is the spring of the deepest emotion. And in many quarters of the earth men have supposed that the souls of the guilty have entered into beasts, and that the blind suffering which at first sight calls for such pity has a clear meaning and purpose to the divine justice,-of punishment and atonement: and a heavy punishment it is, to be condemned to live in hunger and need, in the shape of a beast, and to reach no consciousness of one’s self in this life. I can think of no harder lot than the wild beast’s; he is driven to the forest by the fierce pang of hunger, that seldom leaves him at peace; and peace is itself a torment, the surfeit after horrid food, won, maybe, by a deadly fight with other animals. To cling to life, blindly and madly, with no other aim, to be ignorant of the reason, or even the fact, of one’s punishment, nay, to thirst after it as if it were a pleasure, with all the perverted desire of a fool-this is what it means to be an animal. If universal nature leads up to man, it is to show us that he is necessary to redeem her from the curse of the beast’s life, and that in him existence can find a mirror of itself wherein life appears, no longer blind, but in its real metaphysical significance. But we should consider where the beast ends and the man begins-the man, the one concern of Nature. As long as any one desires life as a pleasure in itself, he has not raised his eyes above the horizon of the beast; he only desires more consciously what the beast seeks by a blind impulse. It is so with us all, for the greater part of our lives. We do not shake off the beast, but are beasts ourselves, suffering we know not what.
But there are moments when we do know; and then the clouds break, and we see how, with the rest of nature, we are straining towards the man, as to something that stands high above us. We look round and behind us, and fear the sudden rush of light; the beasts are transfigured, and ourselves with them. The enormous migrations of mankind in the wildernesses of the world, the cities they found and the wars they wage, their ceaseless gatherings and dispersions and fusions, the doctrines they blindly follow, their mutual frauds and deceits, the cry of distress, the shriek of victory-are all a continuation of the beast in us: as if the education of man has been intentionally set back, and his promise of self-consciousness frustrated; as if, in fact, after yearning for man so long, and at last reaching him by her labour, Nature should now recoil from him and wish to return to a state of unconscious instinct. Ah! she has need of knowledge, and shrinks before the very knowledge she needs: the flame flickers unsteadily and fears its own brightness, and takes hold of a thousand things before the one thing for which knowledge is necessary. There are moments when we all know that our most elaborate arrangements are only designed to give us refuge from our real task in life; we wish to hide our heads somewhere, as if our Argus-eyed conscience could not find us out; we are quick to send our hearts on state-service, or money-making, or social duties, or scientific work, in order to possess them no longer ourselves; we are more willing and instinctive slaves of the hard day’s work than mere living requires, because it seems to us more necessary not to be in a position to think. The hurry is universal, because every one is fleeing before himself; its concealment is just as universal, as we wish to seem contented and hide our wretchedness from the keener eyes; and so there is a common need for a new carillon of words to hang in the temple of life, and peal for its noisy festival. We all know the curious way in which unpleasant memories suddenly throng on us, and how we do our best by loud talk and violent gestures to put them out of our minds; but the gestures and the talk of our ordinary life make one think we are all in this condition, frightened of any memory or any inward gaze. What is it that is always troubling us? what is the gnat that will not let us sleep? There are spirits all about us, each moment of life has something to say to us, but we will not listen to the spirit-voices. When we are quiet and alone, we fear that something will be whispered in our ears, and so we hate the quiet, and dull our senses in society.
We understand this sometimes, as I say, and stand amazed at the whirl and the rush and the anxiety and all the dream that we call our life; we seem to fear the awakening, and our dreams too become vivid and restless, as the awakening draws near. But we feel as well that we are too weak to endure long those intimate moments, and that we are not the men to whom universal nature looks as her redeemers. It is something to be able to raise our heads but for a moment and see the stream in which we are sunk so deep. We cannot gain even this transitory moment of awakening by our own strength; we must be lifted up-and who are they that will uplift us?
The sincere men who have cast out the beast, the philosophers, artists and saints. Nature-quæ nunquam facit saltum-has made her one leap in creating them; a leap of joy, as she feels herself for the first time at her goal, where she begins to see that she must learn not to have goals above her, and that she has played the game of transition too long. The knowledge transfigures her, and there rests on her face the gentle weariness of evening that men call “beauty.” Her words after this transfiguration are as a great light shed over existence: and the highest wish that mortals can reach is to listen continually to her voice with ears that hear. If a man think of all that Schopenhauer, for example, must have heard in his life, he may well say to himself-“The deaf ears, the feeble understanding and shrunken heart, everything that I call mine, how I despise them! Not to be able to fly but only to flutter one’s wings! To look above one’s self and have no power to rise! To know the road that leads to the wide vision of the philosopher, and to reel back after a few steps! Were there but one day when the great wish might be fulfilled, how gladly would we pay for it with the rest of life! To rise as high as any thinker yet into the pure icy air of the mountain, where there are no mists and veils, and the inner constitution of things is shown in a stark and piercing clarity! Even by thinking of this the soul becomes infinitely alone; but were its wish fulfilled, did its glance once fall straight as a ray of light on the things below, were shame and anxiety and desire gone for ever-one could find no words for its state then, for the mystic and tranquil emotion with which, like the soul of Schopenhauer, it would look down on the monstrous hieroglyphics of existence and the petrified doctrines of “becoming”; not as the brooding night, but as the red and glowing day that streams over the earth. And what a destiny it is only to know enough of the fixity and happiness of the philosopher to feel the complete unfixity and unhappiness of the false philosopher, ‘who without hope lives in desire’: to know one’s self to be the fruit of a tree that is too much in the shade ever to ripen, and to see a world of sunshine in front, where one may not go!”
There were sorrow enough here, if ever, to make such a man envious and spiteful: but he will turn aside, that he may not destroy his soul by a vain aspiration; and will discover a new circle of duties.
I can now give an answer to the question whether it be possible to approach the great ideal of Schopenhauer’s man “by any ordinary activity of our own.” In the first place, the new duties are certainly not those of a hermit; they imply rather a vast community, held together not by external forms but by a fundamental idea, namely that of culture; though only so far as it can put a single task before each of us-to bring the philosopher, the artist and the saint, within and without us, to the light, and to strive thereby for the completion of Nature. For Nature needs the artist, as she needs the philosopher, for a metaphysical end, the explanation of herself, whereby she may have a clear and sharp picture of what she only saw dimly in the troubled period of transition,-and so may reach self-consciousness. Goethe, in an arrogant yet profound phrase, showed how all Nature’s attempts only have value in so far as the artist interprets her stammering words, meets her half-way, and speaks aloud what she really means. “I have often said, and will often repeat,” he exclaims in one place, “the causa finalis of natural and human activity is dramatic poetry. Otherwise the stuff is of no use at all.”
Finally, Nature needs the saint. In him the ego has melted away, and the suffering of his life is, practically, no longer felt as individual, but as the spring of the deepest sympathy and intimacy with all living creatures: he sees the wonderful transformation scene that the comedy of “becoming” never reaches, the attainment, at length, of the high state of man after which all nature is striving, that she may be delivered from herself. Without doubt, we all stand in close relation to him, as well as to the philosopher and the artist: there are moments, sparks from the clear fire of love, in whose light we understand the word “I” no longer; there is something beyond our being that comes, for those moments, to the hither side of it: and this is why we long in our hearts for a bridge from here to there. In our ordinary state we can do nothing towards the production of the new redeemer, and so we hate ourselves in this state with a hatred that is the root of the pessimism which Schopenhauer had to teach again to our age, though it is as old as the aspiration after culture.-Its root, not its flower; the foundation, not the summit; the beginning of the road, not the end: for we have to learn at some time to hate something else, more universal than our own personality with its wretched limitation, its change and its unrest-and this will be when we shall learn to love something else than we can love now. When we are ourselves received into that high order of philosophers, artists and saints, in this life or a reincarnation of it, a new object for our love and hate will also rise before us. As it is, we have our task and our circle of duties, our hates and our loves. For we know that culture requires us to make ready for the coming of the Schopenhauer man;-and this is the “use” we are to make of him;-we must know what obstacles there are and strike them from our path-in fact, wage unceasing war against everything that hindered our fulfilment, and prevented us from becoming Schopenhauer’s men ourselves.
6
It is sometimes harder to agree to a thing than to understand it; many will feel this when they consider the proposition-“Mankind must toil unceasingly to bring forth individual great men: this and nothing else is its task.” One would like to apply to society and its ends a fact that holds universally in the animal and vegetable world; where progress depends only on the higher individual types, which are rarer, yet more persistent, complex and productive. But traditional notions of what the end of society is, absolutely bar the way. We can easily understand how in the natural world, where one species passes at some point into a higher one, the aim of their evolution cannot be held to lie in the high level attained by the mass, or in the latest types developed;-but rather in what seem accidental beings produced here and there by favourable circumstances. It should be just as easy to understand that it is the duty of mankind to provide the circumstances favourable to the birth of the new redeemer, simply because men can have a consciousness of their object. But there is always something to prevent them. They find their ultimate aim in the happiness of all, or the greatest number, or in the expansion of a great commonwealth. A man will very readily decide to sacrifice his life for the state; he will be much slower to respond if an individual, and not a state, ask for the sacrifice. It seems to be out of reason that one man should exist for the sake of another: “Let it be rather for the sake of every other, or, at any rate, of as many as possible!” O upright judge! As if it were more in reason to let the majority decide a question of value and significance! For the problem is-“In what way may your life, the individual life, retain the highest value and the deepest significance? and how may it least be squandered? “Only by your living for the good of the rarest and most valuable types, not for that of the majority,-who are the most worthless types, taken as individuals. This way of thinking should be implanted and fostered in every young man’s mind: he should regard himself both as a failure of Nature’s handiwork and a testimony to her larger ideas. “She has succeeded badly,” he should say; “but I will do honour to her great idea by being a means to its better success.”
With these thoughts he will enter the circle of culture, which is the child of every man’s self-knowledge and dissatisfaction. He will approach and say aloud: “I see something above me, higher and more human than I: let all help me to reach it, as I will help all who know and suffer as I do, that the man may arise at last who feels his knowledge and love, vision and power, to be complete and boundless, who in his universality is one with nature, the critic and judge of existence.” It is difficult to give any one this courageous self-consciousness, because it is impossible to teach love; from love alone the soul gains, not only the clear vision that leads to self-contempt, but also the desire to look to a higher self which is yet hidden, and strive upward to it with all its strength. And so he who rests his hope on a future great man, receives his first “initiation into culture.” The sign of this is shame or vexation at one’s self, a hatred of one’s own narrowness, a sympathy with the genius that ever raises its head again from our misty wastes, a feeling for all that is struggling into life, the conviction that Nature must be helped in her hour of need to press forward to the man, however ill she seem to prosper, whatever success may attend her marvellous forms and projects: so that the men with whom we live are like the debris of some precious sculptures, which cry out-“Come and help us! Put us together, for we long to become complete.”
I called this inward condition the “first initiation into culture.” I have now to describe the effects of the “second initiation,” a task of greater difficulty. It is the passage from the inner life to the criticism of the outer life. The eye must be turned to find in the great world of movement the desire for culture that is known from the immediate experience of the individual; who must use his own strivings and aspirations as the alphabet to interpret those of humanity. He cannot rest here either, but must go higher. Culture demands from him not only that inner experience, not only the criticism of the outer world surrounding him, but action too to crown them all, the fight for culture against the influences and conventions and institutions where he cannot find his own aim,-the production of genius.
Any one who can reach the second step, will see how extremely rare and imperceptible the knowledge of that end is, though all men busy themselves with culture and expend vast labour in her service. He asks himself in amazement-“Is not such knowledge, after all, absolutely necessary? Can Nature be said to attain her end, if men have a false idea of the aim of their own labour?” And any one who thinks a great deal of Nature’s unconscious adaptation of means to ends, will probably answer at once: “Yes, men may think and speak what they like about their ultimate end, their blind instinct will tell them the right road.” It requires some experience of life to be able to contradict this: but let a man be convinced of the real aim of culture-the production of the true man and nothing else; let him consider that amid all the pageantry and ostentation of culture at the present time the conditions for his production are nothing but a continual “battle of the beasts”: and he will see that there is great need for a conscious will to take the place of that blind instinct. There is another reason also;-to prevent the possibility of turning this obscure impulse to quite different ends, in a direction where our highest aim can no longer be attained. For we must beware of a certain kind of misapplied and parasitical culture; the powers at present most active in its propagation have other casts of thought that prevent their relation to culture from being pure and disinterested.
The first of these is the self-interest of the business men. This needs the help of culture, and helps her in return, though at the price of prescribing her ends and limits. And their favourite sorites is: “We must have as much knowledge and education as possible; this implies as great a need as possible for it, this again as much production, this again as much material wealth and happiness as possible."-This is the seductive formula. Its preachers would define education as the insight that makes man through and through a “child of his age” in his desires and their satisfaction, and gives him command over the best means of making money. Its aim would be to make “current” men, in the same sense as one speaks of the “currency” in money; and in their view, the more “current” men there are, the happier the people. The object of modern educational systems is therefore to make each man as “current” as his nature will allow him, and to give him the opportunity for the greatest amount of success and happiness that can be got from his particular stock of knowledge. He is required to have just so much idea of his own value (through his liberal education) as to know what he can ask of life; and he is assured that a natural and necessary connection between “intelligence and property” not only exists, but is also a moral necessity. All education is detested that makes for loneliness, and has an aim above money-making, and requires a long time: men look askance on such serious education, as mere “refined egoism” or “immoral Epicureanism.” The converse of course holds, according to the ordinary morality, that education must be soon over to allow the pursuit of money to be soon begun, and should be just thorough enough to allow of much money being made. The amount of education is determined by commercial interests. In short, “man has a necessary claim to worldly happiness; only for that reason is education necessary.”
There is, secondly, the self-interest of the state, which requires the greatest possible breadth and universality of culture, and has the most effective weapons to carry out its wishes. If it be firmly enough established not only to initiate but control education and bear its whole weight, such breadth will merely profit the competition of the state with other states. A “highly civilised state “generally implies, at the present time, the task of setting free the spiritual forces of a generation just so far as they may be of use to the existing institutions,-as a mountain stream is split up by embankments and channels, and its diminished power made to drive mill-wheels, its full strength being more dangerous than useful to the mills. And thus “setting free” comes to mean rather “chaining up.” Compare, for example, what the self-interest of the state has done for Christianity. Christianity is one of the purest manifestations of the impulse towards culture and the production of the saint: but being used in countless ways to turn the mills of the state authorities, it gradually became sick at heart, hypocritical and degenerate, and in antagonism with its original aim. Its last phase, the German Reformation, would have been nothing but a sudden flickering of its dying flame, had it not taken new strength and light from the clash and conflagration of states.
In the third place, culture will be favoured by all those people who know their own character to be offensive or tiresome, and wish to draw a veil of so-called “good form” over them. Words, gestures, dress, etiquette, and such external things, are meant to produce a false impression, the inner side to be judged from the outer. I sometimes think that modern men are eternally bored with each other and look to the arts to make them interesting. They let their artists make savoury and inviting dishes of them; they steep themselves in the spices of the East and West, and have a very interesting aroma after it all. They are ready to suit all palates: and every one will be served, whether he want something with a good or bad taste, something sublime or coarse, Greek or Chinese, tragedy or gutter-drama. The most celebrated chefs among the moderns who wish to interest and be interested at any price, are the French the worst are the Germans. This is really more comforting for the latter, and we have no reason to mind the French despising us for our want of interest, elegance and politeness, and being reminded of the Indian who longs for a ring through his nose, and then proceeds to tattoo himself.
Here I must digress a little. Many things in Germany have evidently been altered since the late war with France, and new requirements for German culture brought over. The war was for many their first venture into the more elegant half of the world: and what an admirable simplicity the conqueror shows in not scorning to learn something of culture from the conquered! The applied arts especially will be reformed to emulate our more refined neighbours, the German house furnished like the French, a “sound taste” applied to the German language by means of an Academy on the French model, to shake off the doubtful influence of Goethe-this is the judgment of our new Berlin Academician, Dubois-Raymond. Our theatres have been gradually moving, in a dignified way, towards the same goal, even the elegant German savant is now discovered-and we must now expect everything that does not conform to this law of elegance, our music, tragedy and philosophy to be thrust aside as un-German. But there were no need to raise a ringer for German culture, did German culture (which the Germans have yet to find) mean nothing but the little amenities that make life more decorative-including the arts of the dancing-master and the upholsterer;-or were they merely interested in academic rules of language and a general atmosphere of politeness. The late war and the self-comparison with the French do not seem to have aroused any further desires, and I suspect that the German has a strong wish for the moment to be free of the old obligations laid on him by his wonderful gifts of seriousness and profundity. He would much rather play the buffoon and the monkey, and learn the arts that make life amusing. But the German spirit cannot be more dishonoured than by being treated as wax for any elegant mould.
And if, unfortunately, a good many Germans will allow themselves to be thus moulded, one must continually say to them, till at last they listen:-“The old German way is no longer yours: it was hard, rough, and full of resistance; but it is still the most valuable material-one which only the greatest modellers can work with, for they alone are worthy to use it, What you have in you now is a soft pulpy stuff: make what you will out of it,-elegant dolls and interesting idols-Richard Wagner’s phrase will still hold good, ‘The German is awkward and ungainly when he wishes to be polite; he is high above all others, when he begins to take fire.’” All the elegant people have reason to beware of this German fire; it may one day devour them with all their wax dolls and idols. The prevailing love of “good form” in Germany may have a deeper cause in the breathless seizing at what the moment can give, the haste that plucks the fruit too green, the race and the struggle that cut the furrows in men’s brows and stamp the same mark on all their actions. As if there were a poison in them that would not let them breathe, they rush about in disorder, anxious slaves of the “three m’s,” the moment, the mode and the mob: they see too well their want of dignity and fitness, and need a false elegance to hide their galloping consumption. The fashionable desire of “good form” is bound up with a loathing of man’s inner nature: the one is to conceal, the other to be concealed. Education means now the concealment of man’s misery and wickedness, his wild-beast quarrels, his eternal greed, his shamelessness in fruition. In pointing out the absence of a German culture, I have often had the reproach flung at me: “This absence is quite natural, for the Germans have been too poor and modest up to now. Once rich and conscious of themselves, our people will have a culture too.” Faith may often produce happiness, yet this particular faith makes me unhappy, for I feel that the culture whose future raises such hopes-the culture of riches, politeness, and elegant concealments-is the bitterest foe of that German culture in which I believe. Every one who has to live among Germans suffers from the dreadful grayness and apathy of their lives, their formlessness, torpor and clumsiness, still more their envy, secretiveness and impurity: he is troubled by their innate love of the false and the ignoble, their wretched mimicry and translation of a good foreign thing into a bad German one. But now that the feverish unrest, the quest of gain and success, the intense prizing of the moment, is added to it all, it makes one furious to think that all this sickness can never be cured, but only painted over, by such a “cult of the interesting.” And this among a people that has produced a Schopenhauer and a Wagner! and will produce others, unless we are blindly deceiving ourselves; for should not their very existence be a guarantee that such forces are even now potential in the German spirit? Or will they be exceptions, the last inheritors of the qualities that were once called German? I can see nothing to help me here, and return to my main argument again, from which my doubts and anxieties have made me digress. I have not yet enumerated all the forces that help culture without recognising its end, the production of genius. Three have been named; the self-interest of business, of the state, and of those who draw the cloak of “good form” over them. There is fourthly the self-interest of science, and the peculiar nature of her servants-the learned.
Science has the same relation to wisdom as current morality to holiness: she is cold and dry, loveless, and ignorant of any deep feeling of dissatisfaction and yearning. She injures her servants in helping herself, for she impresses her own character on them and dries up their humanity. As long as we actually mean by culture the progress of science, she will pass by the great suffering man and harden her heart, for science only sees the problems of knowledge, and suffering is something alien and unintelligible to her world-though no less a problem for that!
If one accustom himself to put down every experience in a dialectical form of question and answer, and translate it into the language of “pure reason,” he will soon wither up and rattle his bones like a skeleton. We all know it: and why is it that the young do not shudder at these skeletons of men, but give themselves blindly to science without motive or measure? It cannot be the so-called “impulse to truth”: for how could there be an impulse towards a pure, cold and objectless knowledge? The unprejudiced eye can see the real driving forces only too plainly. The vivisection of the professor has much to recommend it, as he himself is accustomed to finger and analyse all things-even the worthiest! To speak honestly, the savant is a complex of very various impulses and attractive forces he is a base metal throughout.
Take first a strong and increasing desire for intellectual adventure, the attraction of the new and rare as against the old and tedious. Add to that a certain joy in nosing the trail of dialectic, and beating the cover where the old fox, Thought, lies hid; the desire is not so much for truth as the chase of truth, and the chief pleasure is in surrounding and artistically killing it. Add thirdly a love of contradiction whereby the personality is able to assert itself against all others: the battle’s the thing, and the personal victory its aim,-truth only its pretext. The impulse to discover “particular truths” plays a great part in the professor, coming from his submission to definite ruling persons, classes, opinions, churches, governments, for he feels it a profit to himself to bring truth to their side.
The following characteristics of the savant are less common, but still found.-Firstly, downrightness and a feeling for simplicity, very valuable if more than a mere awkwardness and inability to deceive, deception requiring some mother-wit.-(Actually, we may be on our guard against too obvious cleverness and resource, and doubt the man’s sincerity.)-Otherwise this downrightness is generally of little value, and rarely of any use to knowledge, as it follows tradition and speaks the truth only in “adiaphora”; it being lazier to speak the truth here than ignore it. Everything new means something to be unlearnt, and your downright man will respect the ancient dogmas and accuse the new evangelist of failing in the sensus recti. There was a similar opposition, with probability and custom on its side, to the theory of Copernicus. The professor’s frequent hatred of philosophy is principally a hatred of the long trains of reasoning and artificiality of the proofs. Ultimately the savants of every age have a fixed limit; beyond which ingenuity is not allowed, and everything suspected as a conspirator against honesty.
Secondly, a clear vision of near objects, combined with great shortsightedness for the distant and universal. The professor’s range is generally very small, and his eye must be kept close to the object. To pass from a point already considered to another, he has to move his whole optical apparatus. He cuts a picture into small sections, like a man using an opera-glass in the theatre, and sees now a head, now a bit of the dress, but nothing as a whole. The single sections are never combined for him, he only infers their connection, and consequently has no strong general impression. He judges a literary work, for example, by certain paragraphs or sentences or errors, as he can do nothing more; he will be driven to see in an oil painting nothing but a mass of daubs.
Thirdly, a sober conventionality in his likes and dislikes. Thus he especially delights in history because he can put his own motives into the actions of the past. A mole is most comfortable in a mole-hill. He is on his guard against all ingenious and extravagant hypotheses; but digs up industriously all the commonplace motives of the past, because he feels in sympathy with them. He is generally quite incapable of understanding and valuing the rare or the uncommon, the great or the real.
Fourthly, a lack of feeling, which makes him capable of vivisection. He knows nothing of the suffering that brings knowledge, and does not fear to tread where other men shudder. He is cold and may easily appear cruel. He is thought courageous, but he is not,-any more than the mule who does not feel giddiness.
Fifthly, diffidence, or a low estimate of himself. Though he live in a miserable alley of the world, he has no sense of sacrifice or surrender; he appears often to know in his inmost heart that he is not a flying but a crawling creature. And this makes him seem even pathetic.
Sixthly, loyalty to his teachers and leaders. From his heart he wishes to help them, and knows he can do it best with the truth. He has a grateful disposition, for he has only gained admittance through them to the high hall of science; he would never have entered by his own road. Any man to-day who can throw open a new province where his lesser disciples can work to some purpose, is famous at once; so great is the crowd that presses after him. These grateful pupils are certainly a misfortune to their teacher, as they all imitate him; his faults are exaggerated in their small persons, his virtues correspondingly diminished.
Seventhly, he will follow the usual road of all the professors, where a feeling for truth springs from a lack of ideas, and the wheel once started goes on. Such natures become compilers, commentators, makers of indices and herbaria; they rummage about one special department because they have never thought there are others. Their industry has something of the monstrous stupidity of gravitation; and so they can often bring their labours to an end.
Eighthly, a dread of ennui. While the true thinker desires nothing more than leisure, the professor fears it, not knowing how it is to be used. Books are his comfort; he listens to everybody’s different thoughts and keeps himself amused all day. He especially chooses books with a personal relation to himself, that make him feel some emotion of like or dislike; books that have to do with himself or his position, his political, aesthetic, or even grammatical doctrines; if he have mastered even one branch of knowledge, the means to flap away the flies of ennui will not fail him.
Ninthly, the motive of the bread-winner, the “cry of the empty stomach,” in fact. Truth is used as a direct means of preferment, when she can be attained; or as a way to the good graces of the fountains of honour-and bread. Only, however, in the sense of the “particular truth”: there is a gulf between the profitable truths that many serve, and the unprofitable truths to which only those few people devote themselves whose motto is not ingenii largitor venter.
Tenthly, a reverence for their fellow-professors and a fear of their displeasure-a higher and rarer motive than the last, though not uncommon. All the members of the guild are jealously on guard, that the truth which means so much bread and honour and position may really be baptized in the name of its discoverer. The one pays the other reverence for the truth he has found, in order to exact the toll again if he should find one himself. The Untruth, the Error is loudly exploded, that the workers may not be too many; here and there the real truth will be exploded to let a few bold and stiff-necked errors be on show for a time; there is never a lack of “moral idiosyncrasies,"-formerly called rascalities.
Eleventhly, the “savant for vanity,” now rather rare. He will get a department for himself somehow, and investigate curiosities, especially if they demand unusual expenditure, travel, research, or communication with all parts of the world. He is quite satisfied with the honour of being regarded as a curiosity himself, and never dreams of earning a living by his erudite studies.
Twelfthly, the “savant for amusement.” He loves to look for knots in knowledge and to untie them; not too energetically however, lest he lose the spirit of the game. Thus he does not penetrate the depths, though he often observes something that the microscopic eyes of the bread-and-butter scientist never see.
If I speak, lastly, of the “impulse towards justice” as a further motive of the savant, I may be answered that this noble impulse, being metaphysical in its nature, is too indistinguishable from the rest, and really incomprehensible to mortal mind; and so I leave the thirteenth heading with the pious wish that the impulse may be less rare in the professor than it seems. For a spark in his soul from the fire of justice is sufficient to irradiate and purify it, so that he can rest no more and is driven for ever from the cold or lukewarm condition in which most of his fellows do their daily work.
All these elements, or a part of them, must be regarded as fused and pounded together, to form the Servant of Truth. For the sake of an absolutely inhuman thing-mere purposeless, and therefore motiveless, knowledge-a mass of very human little motives have been chemically combined, and as the result we have the professor,-so transfigured in the light of that pure unearthly object that the mixing and pounding which went to form him are all forgotten! It is very curious. Yet there are moments when they must be remembered,-when we have to think of the professor’s significance to culture. Any one with observation can see that he is in his essence and by his origin unproductive, and has a natural hatred of the productive; and thus there is an endless feud between the genius and the savant in idea and practice. The latter wishes to kill Nature by analysing and comprehending it, the former to increase it by a new living Nature. The happy age does not need or know the savant; the sick and sluggish time ranks him as its highest and worthiest.
Who were physician enough to know the health or sickness of our time? It is clear that the professor is valued too highly, with evil consequences for the future genius, for whom he has no compassion, merely a cold, contemptuous criticism, a shrug of the shoulders, as if at something strange and perverted for which he has neither time nor inclination. And so he too knows nothing of the aim of culture.
In fact, all these considerations go to prove that the aim of culture is most unknown precisely where the interest in it seems liveliest. The state may trumpet as it will its services to culture, it merely helps culture in order to help itself, and does not comprehend an aim that stands higher than its own well-being or even existence. The business men in their continual demand for education merely wish for-business. When the pioneers of “good form” pretend to be the real helpers of culture, imagining that all art, for example, is merely to serve their own needs, they are clearly affirming themselves in affirming culture. Of the savant enough has already been said. All four are emulously thinking how they can benefit themselves with the help of culture, but have no thoughts at all when their own interests are not engaged. And so they have done nothing to improve the conditions for the birth of genius in modern times; and the opposition to original men has grown so far that no Socrates could ever live among us, and certainly could never reach the age of seventy.
I remember saying in the third chapter that our whole modern world was not so stable that one could prophesy an eternal life to its conception of culture. It is likely that the next millennium may reach two or three new ideas that might well make the hair of our present generation stand on end. The belief in the metaphysical significance of culture would not be such a horrifying thing, but its effects on educational methods might be so.
It requires a totally new attitude of mind to be able to, look away from the present educational institutions to the strangely different ones that will be necessary for the second or third generation, At present the labours of higher education produce merely the savant or the official or the business man or the Philistine or, more commonly, a mixture of all four; and the future institutions will have a harder task;-not in itself harder, as it is really more natural, and so easier; and further, could anything be harder than to make a youth into a savant against nature, as now happens?-But the difficulty lies in unlearning what we know and setting up a new aim; it will be an endless trouble to change the fundamental idea of our present educational system, that has its roots in the Middle Ages and regards the mediaeval savant as the ideal type of culture. It is already time to put these objects before us; for some generation must begin the battle, of which a later generation will reap the victory. The solitary man who has understood the new fundamental idea of culture is at the parting of the ways; on the one he will be welcomed by his age, laurels and rewards will be his, powerful parties will uphold him, he will have as many in sympathy behind him as in front, and when the leader speaks the word of deliverance, it will echo through all the ranks. The first duty is to “fight in line,” the second to treat as foes all who will not “fall in.” On the other way he will find fewer companions; it is steeper and more tortuous. The travellers on the first road laugh at him, as his way is the more troublesome and dangerous; and they try to entice him over. If the two ways cross, he is ill-treated, cast aside or left alone. What significance has any particular form of culture for these several travellers? The enormous throng that press to their end on the first road, understand by it the laws and institutions that enable them to go forward in regular fashion and rule out all the solitary and obstinate people who look towards higher and remoter objects. To the small company on the other road it has quite a different office: they wish to guard themselves, by means of a strong organisation, from being swept away by the throng, to prevent their individual members from fainting on the way or turning in spirit from their great task. These solitary men must finish their work; that is why they should all hold together; and those who have their part in the scheme will take thought to prepare themselves with ever-increasing purity of aim for the birth of the genius, and ensure that the time be ripe for him. Many are destined to help on the labour, even among the second-rate talents, and it is only in submission to such a destiny that they can feel they are living for a duty, and have a meaning and an object in their lives. But at present these talents are being turned from the road their instinct has chosen by the seductive tones of the “fashionable culture,” that plays on their selfish side, their vanities and weaknesses; and the time-spirit ever whispers in their ears its flattering counsel:-“Follow me and go not thither! There you are only servants and tools, overshadowed by higher natures with no scope for your own, drawn by threads, hung with fetters, slaves and automatons. With me you may enjoy your true personality, and be masters, your talents may shine with their own light, and yourselves stand in the front ranks with an immense following round you; and the acclamation of public opinion will rejoice you more than a wandering breath of approval sent down from the cold ethereal heights of genius.” Even the best men are snared by such allurements, and the ultimate difference comes not so much from the rarity and power of their talent, as the influence of a certain heroic disposition at the base of them, and an inner feeling of kinship with genius. For there are men who feel it as their own misery when they see the genius in painful toil and struggle, in danger of self-destruction, or neglected by the short-sighted selfishness of the state, the superficiality of the business men, and the cold arrogance of the professors; and I hope there may be some to understand what I mean by my sketch of Schopenhauer’s destiny, and to what end Schopenhauer can really educate.
7
But setting aside all thoughts of any educational revolution in the distant future;-what provision is required now, that our future philosopher may have the best chance of opening his eyes to a life like Schopenhauer’s-hard as it is, yet still livable? What, further, must be discovered that may make his influence on his contemporaries more certain? And what obstacles must be removed before his example can have its full effect and the philosopher train another philosopher? Here we descend to be practical.
Nature always desires the greatest utility, but does not understand how to find the best and handiest means to her end; that is her great sorrow, and the cause of her melancholy. The impulse towards her own redemption shows clearly her wish to give men a significant existence by the generation of the philosopher and the artist: but how unclear and weak is the effect she generally obtains with her artists and philosophers, and how seldom is there any effect at all! She is especially perplexed in her efforts to make the philosopher useful; her methods are casual and tentative, her failures innumerable; most of her philosophers never touch the common good of mankind at all. Her actions seem those of a spendthrift; but the cause lies in no prodigal luxury, but in her inexperience. Were she human, she would probably never cease to be dissatisfied with herself and her bungling. Nature shoots the philosopher at mankind like an arrow; she. does not aim, but hopes that the arrow will stick somewhere. She makes countless mistakes, that give her pain. She is as extravagant in the sphere of culture as in her planting and sowing. She fulfils her ends in a large and clumsy fashion, using up far too much of her strength. The artist has the same relation to the connoisseurs and lovers of his art as a piece of heavy artillery to a flock of sparrows. It is a fool’s part to use a great avalanche to sweep away a little snow, to kill a man in order to strike the fly on his nose. The artist and the philosopher are witnesses against Nature’s adaptation of her means, however well they may show the wisdom of her ends. They only reach a few and should reach all-and even these few are not struck with the strength they used when they shot. It is sad to have to value art so differently as cause and effect; how huge in its inception, how faint the echo afterwards! The artist does his work as Nature bids him, for the benefit of other men no doubt of it; but he knows that none of those men will understand and love his work as he understands and loves it himself. That lonely height of love and understanding is necessary, by Nature’s clumsy law, to produce a lower type; the great and noble are used as the means to the small and ignoble. Nature is a bad manager; her expenses are far greater than her profits: for all her riches she must one day go bankrupt. She would have acted more reasonably to make the rule of her household-small expense and hundredfold profit; if there had been, for example, only a few artists with moderate powers, but an immense number of hearers to appreciate them, stronger and more powerful characters than the artists themselves; then the effect of the art-work, in comparison with the cause, might be a hundred-tongued echo. One might at least expect cause and effect to be of equal power; but Nature lags infinitely behind this consummation. An artist, and especially a philosopher, seems often to have dropped by chance into his age, as a wandering hermit or straggler cut off from the main body. Think how utterly great Schopenhauer is, and what a small and absurd effect he has had! An honest man can feel no greater shame at the present time than at the thought of the casual treatment Schopenhauer has received and the evil powers that have up to now killed his effect among men. First there was the want of readers,-to the eternal shame of our cultivated age;-then the inadequacy of his first public adherents, as soon as he had any; further, I think, the crassness of the modern man towards books, which he will no longer take seriously. As an outcome of many attempts to adapt Schopenhauer to this enervated age, the new danger has gradually arisen of regarding him as an odd kind of pungent herb, of taking him in grains, as a sort of metaphysical pepper. In this way he has gradually become famous, and I should think more have heard his name than Hegel’s; and, for all that, he is still a solitary being, who has failed of his effect.-Though the honour of causing the failure belongs least of all to the barking of his literary antagonists; first because there are few men with the patience to read them, and secondly, because any one who does, is sent immediately to Schopenhauer himself; for who will let a donkey-driver prevent him from mounting a fine horse, however much he praise his donkey?
Whoever has recognised Nature’s unreason in our time, will have to consider some means to help her; his task will be to bring the free spirits and the sufferers from this age to know Schopenhauer; and make them tributaries to the flood that is to overbear all the clumsy uses to which Nature even now is accustomed to put her philosophers. Such men will see that the identical obstacles hinder the effect of a great philosophy and the production of the great philosopher; and so will direct their aims to prepare the regeneration of Schopenhauer, which means that of the philosophical genius. The real opposition to the further spread of his doctrine in the past, and the regeneration of the philosopher in the future, is the perversity of human nature as it is; and all the great men that are to be must spend infinite pains in freeing themselves from it. The world they enter is plastered over with pretence-including not merely religious dogmas, but such juggling conceptions as “progress,” “universal education,” “nationalism,” “the modern state”; practically all our general terms have an artificial veneer over them that will bring a clearer-sighted posterity to reproach our age bitterly for its warped and stunted growth, however loudly we may boast of our “health.” The beauty of the antique vases, says Schopenhauer, lies in the simplicity with which they express their meaning and object; it is so with all the ancient implements; if Nature produced amphorae, lamps, tables, chairs, helmets, shields, breastplates and the like, they would resemble these. And, as a corollary, whoever considers how we all manage our art, politics, religion and education-to say nothing of our vases!-will find in them a barbaric exaggeration and arbitrariness of expression. Nothing is more unfavourable to the rise of genius than such monstrosities. They are unseen and undiscoverable, the leaden weights on his hand when he will set it to the plough; the weights are only shaken off with violence, and his highest work must to an extent always bear the mark of it.
In considering the conditions that, at best, keep the born philosopher from being oppressed by the perversity of the age, I am surprised to find they are partly those in which Schopenhauer himself grew up. True, there was no lack of opposing influences; the evil time drew perilously near him in the person of a vain and pretentious mother. But the proud republican character of his father rescued him from her and gave him the first quality of a philosopher-a rude and strong virility. His father was neither an official nor a savant; he travelled much abroad with his son,-a great help to one who must know men rather than books, and worship truth before the state. In time he got accustomed to national peculiarities: he made England, France and Italy equally his home, and felt no little sympathy with the Spanish character. On the whole, he did not think it an honour to be born in Germany, and I am not sure that the new political conditions would have made him change his mind. He held quite openly the opinion that the state’s one object was to give protection at home and abroad, and even protection against its “protectors,” and to attribute any other object to it was to endanger its true end. And so, to the consternation of all the so-called liberals, he left his property to the survivors of the Prussian soldiers who fell in 1848 in the fight for order. To understand the state and its duties in this single sense may seem more and more henceforth the sign of intellectual superiority; for the man with the furor philosophicus in him will no longer have time for the furor politicus and will wisely keep from reading the newspapers or serving a party; though he will not hesitate a moment to take his place in the ranks if his country be in real need. All states are badly managed, when other men than politicians busy themselves with politics; and they deserve to be ruined by their political amateurs.
Schopenhauer had another great advantage-that he had never been educated for a professor, but worked for some time (though against his will) as a merchant’s clerk, and through all his early years breathed the freer air of a great commercial house. A savant can never become a philosopher: Kant himself could not, but remained in a chrysalis stage to the end, in spite of the innate force of his genius. Any one who thinks I do Kant wrong in saying this does not know what a philosopher is-not only a great thinker, but also a real man; and how could a real man have sprung from a savant? He who lets conceptions, opinions, events, books come between himself and things, and is born for history (in the widest sense), will never see anything at once, and never be himself a thing to be “seen at once”; though both these powers should be in the philosopher, as he must take most of his doctrine from himself and be himself the copy and compendium of the whole world. If a man look at himself through a veil of other people’s opinions, no wonder he sees nothing but-those opinions. And it is thus that the professors see and live. But Schopenhauer had the rare happiness of seeing the genius not only in himself, but also outside himself-in Goethe; and this double reflection taught him everything about the aims and culture of the learned. He knew by this experience how the free strong man, to whom all artistic culture was looking, must come to be born; and could he, after this vision, have much desire to busy himself with the so-called “art,” in the learned, hypocritical manner of the moderns? He had seen something higher than that-an awful unearthly judgment-scene in which all life, even the highest and completest, was weighed and found too light; he had beheld the saint as the judge of existence. We cannot tell how early Schopenhauer reached this view of life, and came to hold it with such intensity as to make all his writings an attempt to mirror it; we know that the youth had this great vision, and can well believe it of the child. Everything that he gained later from life and books, from all the realms of knowledge, was only a means of colour and expression to him; the Kantian philosophy itself was to him an extraordinary rhetorical instrument for making the utterance of his vision, as he thought, clearer; the Buddhist and Christian mythologies occasionally served the same end. He had one task and a thousand means to execute it; one meaning, and innumerable hieroglyphs to express it.
It was one of the high conditions of his existence that he really could live for such a task-according to his motto vitam impendere vero-and none of life’s material needs could shake his resolution; and we know the splendid return he made his father for this. The contemplative man in Germany usually pursues his scientific studies to the detriment of his sincerity, as a “considerate fool,” in search of place and honour, circumspect and obsequious, and fawning on his influential superiors. Nothing offended the savants more than Schopenhauer’s unlikeness to them.
8
These are a few of the conditions under which the philosophical genius can at least come to light in our time, in spite of all thwarting influences;-a virility of character, an early knowledge of mankind, an absence of learned education and narrow patriotism, of compulsion to earn his livelihood or depend on the state,-freedom in fact, and again freedom; the same marvellous and dangerous element in which the Greek philosophers grew up. The man who will reproach him, as Niebuhr did Plato, with being a bad citizen, may do so, and be himself a good one; so he and Plato will be right together! Another may call this great freedom presumption; he is also right, as he could not himself use the freedom properly if he desired it, and would certainly presume too far with it. This freedom is really a grave burden of guilt; and can only be expiated by great actions. Every ordinary son of earth has the right of looking askance on such endowments; and may Providence keep him from being so endowed-burdened, that is, with such terrible duties! His freedom and his loneliness would be his ruin, and ennui would turn him into a fool, and a mischievous fool at that.
A father may possibly learn something from this that he may use for his son’s private education, though one must not expect fathers to have only philosophers for their sons. It is possible that they will always oppose their sons becoming philosophers, and call it mere perversity; Socrates was sacrificed to the fathers’ anger, for “corrupting the youth,’ and Plato even thought a new ideal state necessary to prevent the philosophers’ growth from being dependent on the fathers’ folly. It looks at present as though Plato had really accomplished something; for the modern state counts the encouragement of philosophy as one of its duties and tries to secure for a number of men at a time the sort of freedom that conditions the philosopher. But, historically, Plato has been very unlucky; as soon as a structure has risen corresponding actually to his proposals, it has always turned, on a closer view, into a goblin-child, a monstrous changeling; compare the ecclesiastical state of the Middle Ages with the government of the “God-born king” of which Plato dreamed! The modern state is furthest removed from the idea of the Philosopher-king (Thank Heaven for that! the Christian will say); but we must think whether it takes that very “encouragement of philosophy” in a Platonic sense, I mean as seriously and honestly as if its highest object were to produce more Platos. If the philosopher seem, as usual, an accident of his time, does the state make it its conscious business to turn the accidental into the necessary and help Nature here also?
Experience teaches us a better way-or a worse: it says that nothing so stands in the way of the birth and growth of Nature’s philosopher as the bad philosophers made “by order.” A poor obstacle, isn’t it? and the same that Schopenhauer pointed out in his famous essay on University philosophy. I return to this point, as men must be forced to take it seriously, to be driven to activity by it; and I think all writing is useless that does not contain such a stimulus to activity. And anyhow it is a good thing to apply Schopenhauer’s eternal theories once more to our own contemporaries, as some kindly soul might think that everything has changed for the better in Germany since his fierce diatribes. Unfortunately his work is incomplete on this side as well, unimportant as the side may be.
The “freedom” that the state, as I said, bestows on certain men for the sake of philosophy is, properly speaking, no freedom at all, but an office that maintains its holder. The “encouragement of philosophy” means that there are to-day a number of men whom the state enables to make their living out of philosophy; whereas the old sages of Greece were not paid by the state, but at best were presented, as Zeno was, with a golden crown and a monument in the Ceramicus. I cannot say generally whether truth is served by showing the way to live by her, since everything depends on the character of the individual who shows the way. I can imagine a degree of pride in a man saying to his fellow-men, “take care of me, as I have something better to do-namely to take care of you.” We should not be angry at such a heightened mode of expression in Plato and Schopenhauer; and so they might properly have been University philosophers,-as Plato, for example, was a court philosopher for a while without lowering the dignity of philosophy. But in Kant we have the usual submissive professor, without any nobility in his relations with the state; and thus he could not justify the University philosophy when it was once assailed. If there be natures like Schopenhauer’s and Plato’s, which can justify it, I fear they will never have the chance, as the state would never venture to give such men these positions, for the simple reason that every state fears them, and will only favour philosophers it does not fear. The state obviously has a special fear of philosophy, and will try to attract more philosophers, to create the impression that it has philosophy on its side,-because it has those men on its side who have the title without the power. But if there should come one who really proposes to cut everything to the quick, the state included, with the knife of truth, the state, that affirms its own existence above all, is justified in banishing him as an enemy, just as it bans a religion that exalts itself to be its judge. The man who consents to be a state philosopher, must also consent to be regarded as renouncing the search for truth in all its secret retreats. At any rate, so long as he enjoys his position, he must recognise something higher than truth the state. And not only the state, but everything required by it for existence-a definite form of religion, a social system, a standing army; a noli me tangere is written above all these things. Can a University philosopher ever keep clearly before him the whole round of these duties and limitations? I do not know. The man who has done so and remains a state-official, is a false friend to truth; if he has not,-I think he is no friend to truth either. But general considerations like these are always the weakest in their influence on mankind. Most people will find it enough to shrug their shoulders and say, “As if anything great and pure has ever been able to maintain itself on this earth without some concession to human vulgarity! Would you rather the state persecuted philosophers than paid them for official services? “Without answering this last question, I will merely say that these “concessions” of philosophy to the state go rather far at present. In the first place, the state chooses its own philosophical servants, as many as its institutions require; it therefore pretends to be able to distinguish the good and the bad philosophers, and even assumes there must be a sufficient supply of good ones to fill all the chairs. The state is the authority not only for their goodness but their numbers. Secondly, it confines those it has chosen to a definite place and a definite activity among particular men; they must instruct every undergraduate who wants instruction, daily, at stated hours. The question is whether a philosopher can bind himself, with a good conscience, to have something to teach every day, to any one who wishes to listen. Must he not appear to know more than he does, and speak, before an unknown audience, of things that he could mention without risk only to his most intimate friends? And above all, does he not surrender the precious freedom of following his genius when and wherever it call him, by the mere fact of being bound to think at stated times on a fixed subject? And before young men, too! Is not such thinking in its nature emasculate? And suppose he felt some day that he had no ideas just then-and yet must be in his place and appear to be thinking What then?
“But,” one will say, “he is not a thinker but mainly a depository of thought, a man of great learning in all previous philosophies. Of these he can always say something that his scholars do not know.” This is actually the third, and the most dangerous, concession made by philosophy to the state, when it is compelled to appear in the form of erudition, as the knowledge (more specifically) of the history of philosophy. The genius looks purely and lovingly on existence, like a poet, and cannot dive too deep into it;-and nothing is more abhorrent to him than to burrow among the innumerable strange and wrong-headed opinions. The learned history of the past was never a true philosopher’s business, in India or Greece; and a professor of philosophy who busies himself with such matters must be, at best, content to hear it said of him, “He is an able scholar, antiquary, philologist, historian,"-but never, “He is a philosopher.” I said, “at best”: for a scholar feels that most of the learned works written by University philosophers are badly done, without any real scientific power, and generally are dreadfully tedious. Who will blow aside, for example, the Lethean vapour with which the history of Greek philosophy has been enveloped by the dull though not very scientific works of Ritter, Brandis and Zeller? I, at any rate, would rather read Diogenes Laertius than Zeller, because at least the spirit of the old philosophers lives in Diogenes, but neither that nor any other spirit in Zeller. And, after all, what does the history of philosophy matter to our young men Are they to be discouraged by the welter of opinions from having any of their own; or taught to join the chorus that approves the vastness of our progress? Are they to learn to hate or perhaps despise philosophy? One might expect the last, knowing the torture the students endure for their philosophical examinations, in having to get into their unfortunate heads the maddest efforts of the human mind as well as the greatest and profoundest. The only method of criticising a philosophy that is possible and proves anything at all-namely to see whether one can live by it-has never been taught at the universities; only the criticism of words, and again words, is taught there. Imagine a young head, without much experience of life, being stuffed with fifty systems (in the form of words) and fifty criticisms of them, all mixed up together,-what an overgrown wilderness he will come to be, what contempt he will feel for a philosophical education! It is, of course, not an education in philosophy at all, but in the art of passing a philosophical examination: the usual result being the pious ejaculation of the wearied examinee, “Thank God I am no philosopher, but a Christian and a good citizen!”
What if this cry were the ultimate object of the state, and the “education” or leading to philosophy were merely a leading from philosophy? We may well ask.-But if so, there is one thing to fear-that the youth may some day find out to what end philosophy is thus mis-handled. “Is the highest thing of all, the production of the philosophical genius, nothing but a pretext, and the main object perhaps to hinder his production? And is Reason turned to Unreason?” Then woe to the whole machinery of political and professorial trickery!
Will it soon become notorious? I do not know; but anyhow university philosophy has fallen into a general state of doubting and despair. The cause lies partly in the feebleness of those who hold the chairs at present: and if Schopenhauer had to write his treatise on university philosophy to-day, he would find the club no longer necessary, but could conquer with a bulrush. They are the heirs and successors of those slip-shod thinkers whose crazy heads Schopenhauer struck at: their childish natures and dwarfish frames remind one of the Indian proverb: " men are born according to their deeds, deaf, dumb, misshapen.” Those fathers deserved such sons, “according to their deeds,” as the proverb says. Hence the students will, no doubt, soon get on without the philosophy taught at their university, just as those who are not university men manage to do without it already. This can be tested from one’s own experience: in my student-days, for example, I found the university philosophers very ordinary men indeed, who had collected together a few conclusions from the other sciences, and in their leisure hours read the newspapers and went to concerts; they were treated by their academic colleagues with politely veiled contempt. They had the reputation of knowing very little, but of never being at a loss for obscure expressions to conceal their ignorance. They had a preference for those obscure regions where a man could not walk long with clear vision. One said of the natural sciences, “Not one of them can fully explain to me the origin of matter; then what do I care about them all?”- Another said of history, “It tells nothing new to the man with ideas”: in fact, they always found reasons for its being more philosophical to know nothing than to learn anything. If they let themselves be drawn to learn, a secret instinct made them fly from the actual sciences and found a dim kingdom amid their gaps and uncertainties. They “led the way” in the sciences in the sense that the quarry “leads the way” for the hunters who are behind him. Recently they have amused themselves with asserting they are merely the watchers on the frontier of the sciences. The Kantian doctrine is of use to them here, and they industriously build up an empty scepticism on it, of which in a short time nobody will take any more notice. Here and there one will rise to a little metaphysic of his own, with the general accompaniment of headaches and giddiness and bleeding at the nose After the usual ill-success of their voyages into the clouds and the mist, some hard-headed young student of the real sciences will pluck them down by the skirts, and their faces will assume the expression now habitual to them, of offended dignity at being found out. They have lost their happy confidence, and not one of them will venture a step further for the sake of his philosophy. Some used to believe they could find out new religions or reinstate old ones by their systems. They have given up such pretensions now, and have become mostly mild, muddled folk, with no Lucretian boldness, but merely some spiteful complaints of the “dead weight that lies on the intellects of mankind”! No one can even learn logic from them now, and their obvious knowledge of their own powers has made them discontinue the dialectical disputations common in the old days. There is much more care and modesty, logic and inventiveness, in a word, more philosophical method in the work of the special sciences than in the so-called “philosophy,” and every one will agree with the temperate words of Bagehot on the present system builders: “Unproved abstract principles without number have been eagerly caught up by sanguine men, and then carefully spun out into books and theories, which were to explain the whole world. But the world goes clear against these abstractions, and it must do so, as they require it to go in antagonistic directions. The mass of a system attracts the young and impresses the unwary; but cultivated people are very dubious about it. They are ready to receive hints and suggestions, and the smallest real truth is ever welcome. But a large book of deductive philosophy is much to be suspected. Who is not almost sure beforehand that the premises will contain a strange mixture of truth and error, and therefore that it will not be worth while to spend life in reasoning over their consequences?” The philosophers, especially in Germany, used to sink into such a state of abstraction that they were in continual danger of running their heads against a beam; but there is a whole herd of Laputan flappers about them to give them in time a gentle stroke on their eyes or anywhere else. Sometimes the blows are too hard; and then these scorners of earth forget themselves and strike back, but the victim always escapes them. " Fool, you do not see the beam,” says the flapper; and often the philosopher does see the beam, and calms down. These flappers are the natural sciences and history; little by little they have so overawed the German dream-craft which has long taken the place of philosophy, that the dreamer would be only too glad to give up the attempt to run alone: but when they unexpectedly fall into the others’ arms, or try to put leading-strings on them that they may be led themselves, those others flap as terribly as they can, as if they would say, “This is all that is wanting,-that a philosophaster like this should lay his impure hands on us, the natural sciences and history! Away with him!” Then they start back, knowing not where to turn or to ask the way. They wanted to have a little physical knowledge at their back, possibly in the form of empirical psychology (like the Herbartians), or perhaps a little history; and then they could at least make a public show of behaving scientifically, although in their hearts they may wish all philosophy and all science at the devil.
But granted that this herd of bad philosophers is ridiculous-and who will deny it?-how far are they also harmful? They are harmful just because they make philosophy ridiculous. As long as this imitation-thinking continues to be recognised by the state, the lasting effect of a true philosophy will be destroyed, or at any rate circumscribed; nothing does this so well as the curse of ridicule that the representatives of the great cause have drawn on them, for it attacks that cause itself. And so I think it will encourage culture to deprive philosophy of its political and academic standing, and relieve state and university of the task, impossible for them, of deciding between true and false philosophy. Let the philosophers run wild, forbid them any thoughts of office or civic position, hold them out no more bribes,-nay, rather persecute them and treat them ill,-you will see a wonderful result. They will flee in terror and seek a roof where they can, these poor phantasms; one will become a parson, another a schoolmaster, another will creep into an editorship, another write school-books for young ladies’ colleges, the wisest of them will plough the fields, the vainest go to court. Everything will be left suddenly empty, the birds flown: for it is easy to get rid of bad philosophers,-one only has to cease paying them. And that is a better plan than the open patronage of any philosophy, whatever it be, for state reasons.
The state has never any concern with truth, but only with the truth useful to it, or rather, with anything that is useful to it, be it truth, half-truth, or error. A coalition between state and philosophy has only meaning when the latter can promise to be unconditionally useful to the state, to put its well-being higher than truth. It would certainly be a noble thing for the state to have truth as a paid servant; but it knows well enough that it is the essence of truth to be paid nothing and serve nothing. So the state’s servant turns out to be merely “false truth,” a masked actor who cannot perform the office required from the real truth-the affirmation of the state’s worth and sanctity. When a mediaeval prince wished to be crowned by the Pope, but could not get him to consent, he appointed an antipope to do the business for him. This may serve up to a certain point; but not when the modern state appoints an “anti-philosophy” to legitimise it; for it has true philosophy against it just as much as before, or even more so. I believe in all seriousness that it is to the state’s advantage to have nothing further to do with philosophy, to demand nothing from it, and let it go its own way as much as possible. Without this indifferent attitude, philosophy may become dangerous and oppressive, and will have to be persecuted.-The only interest the state can have in the university lies in the training of obedient and useful citizens; and it should hesitate to put this obedience and usefulness in doubt by demanding an examination in philosophy from the young men. To make a bogey of philosophy may be an excellent way to frighten the idle and incompetent from its study; but this advantage is not enough to counterbalance the danger that this kind of compulsion may arouse from the side of the more reckless and turbulent spirits. They learn to know about forbidden books, begin to criticise their teachers, and finally come to understand the object of university philosophy and its examinations; not to speak of the doubts that may be fostered in the minds of young theologians, as a consequence of which they are beginning to be extinct in Germany, like the ibexes in the Tyrol.
I know the objections that the state could bring against all this, as long as the lovely Hegel-corn was yellowing in all the fields; but now that hail has destroyed the crop and all men’s hopes of it, now that nothing has been fulfilled and all the barns are empty,-there are no more objections to be made, but rather rejections of philosophy itself. The state has now the power of rejection; in Hegel’s time it only wished to have it-and that makes a great difference. The state needs no more the sanction of philosophy, and philosophy has thus become superfluous to it. It will find advantage in ceasing to maintain its professors, or (as I think will soon happen) in merely pretending to maintain them; but it is of still greater importance that the university should see the benefit of this as well. At least I believe the real sciences must see that their interest lies in freeing themselves from all contact with sham science. And further, the reputation of the universities hangs too much in the balance for them not to welcome a severance from methods that are thought little of even in academic circles. The outer world has good reason for its wide-spread contempt of universities; they are reproached with being cowardly, the small fearing the great, and the great fearing public opinion; it is said that they do not lead the higher thought of the age but hobble slowly behind it, and cleave no longer to the fundamental ideas of the recognised sciences. Grammar, for example, is studied more diligently than ever without any one seeing the necessity of a rigorous training in speech and writing. The gates of Indian antiquity are being opened, and the scholars have no more idea of the most imperishable works of the Indians-their philosophies-than a beast has of playing the harp; though Schopenhauer thinks that the acquaintance with Indian philosophy is one of the greatest advantages possessed by our century. Classical antiquity is the favourite playground nowadays, and its effect is no longer classical and formative; as is shown by the students, who are certainly no models for imitation. Where is now the spirit of Friedrich August Wolf to be found, of whom Franz Passow could say that he seemed a loyal and humanistic spirit with force enough to set half the world aflame? Instead of that a journalistic spirit is arising in the university, often under the name of philosophy; the smooth delivery-the very cosmetics of speech-with Faust and Nathan the Wise for ever on the lips, the accent and the outlook of our worst literary magazines and, more recently, much chatter about our holy German music, and the demand for lectures on Schiller and Goethe,-all this is a sign that the university spirit is beginning to be confused with the Spirit of the Age. Thus the establishment of a higher tribunal, outside the universities, to protect and criticise them with regard to culture, would seem a most valuable thing, and as soon as philosophy can sever itself from the universities and be purified from every unworthy motive or hypocrisy, it will be able to become such a tribunal. It will do its work without state help in money or honours, free from the spirit of the age as well as from any fear of it; being in fact the judge, as Schopenhauer was, of the so-called culture surrounding it And in this way the philosopher can also be useful to the university, by refusing to be a part of it, but criticising it from afar. Distance will lend dignity.
But, after all, what does the life of a state or the progress of universities matter in comparison with the life of philosophy on earth! For, to say quite frankly what I mean, it is infinitely more important that a philosopher should arise on the earth than that a state or a university should continue. The dignity of philosophy may rise in proportion as the submission to public opinion and the danger to liberty increase; it was at its highest during the convulsions marking the fall of the Roman Republic, and in the time of the Empire, when the names of both philosophy and history became ingrata principibus nomina. Brutus shows its dignity better than Plato; his was a time when ethics cease to have commonplaces. Philosophy is not much regarded now, and we may well ask why no great soldier or statesman has taken it up; and the answer is that a thin phantom has met him, under the name of philosophy, the cautious wisdom of the learned professor; and philosophy has soon come to seem ridiculous to him. It ought to have seemed terrible; and men who are called to authority should know the heroic power that has its source there. An American may tell them what a centre of mighty forces a great thinker can prove on this earth. “Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet,” says Emerson. “Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end. There is not a piece of science, but its flank may be turned to-morrow; there is not any literary reputation, not the so-called eternal names of fame, that may not be revised and condemned.. The things which are dear to men at this hour are so on account of the ideas which have emerged on their mental horizon, and which cause the present order of things as a tree bears its apples. A new degree of culture would instantly revolutionise the entire system of human pursuits.” If such thinkers are dangerous, it is clear why our university thinkers are not dangerous; for their thoughts bloom as peacefully in the shade of tradition “as ever tree bore its apples.” They do not frighten; they carry away no gates of Gaza; and to all their little contemplations one can make the answer of Diogenes when a certain philosopher was praised: “What great result has he to show, who has so long practised philosophy and yet has hurt nobody?” Yes, the university philosophy should have on its monument, “It has hurt nobody.” But this is rather the praise one gives to an old woman than “to a goddess of truth; and it is not surprising that those who know the goddess only as an old woman are the less men for that, and are naturally neglected by the real men of power.
If this be the case in our time, the dignity of philosophy is trodden in the mire; and she seems herself to have become ridiculous or insignificant. All her true friends are bound to bear witness against this transformation, at least to show that it is merely her false servants in philosopher’s clothing who are so. Or better, they must prove by their own deed that the love of truth has itself awe and power.
Schopenhauer proved this and will continue to prove it, more and more.
________
The End|Go to top
We Philologists
by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Translated By J. M. Kennedy
Electronically Developed by MobileReference
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Friedrich W. Nietzsche Biography
I
To what a great extent men are ruled by pure hazard, and how little reason itself enters into the question, is sufficiently shown by observing how few people have any real capacity for their professions and callings, and how many square pegs there are in round holes: happy and well chosen instances are quite exceptional, like happy marriages, and even these latter are not brought about by reason. A man chooses his calling before he is fitted to exercise his faculty of choice. He does not know the number of different callings and professions that exist; he does not know himself; and then he wastes his years of activity in this calling, applies all his mind to it, and becomes experienced and practical. When, afterwards, his understanding has become fully developed, it is generally too late to start something new; for wisdom on earth has almost always had something of the weakness of old age and lack of vigour about it.
For the most part the task is to make good, and to set to rights as well as possible, that which was bungled in the beginning. Many will come to recognise that the latter part of their life shows a purpose or design which has sprung from a primary discord: it is hard to live through it. Towards the end of his life, however, the average man has become accustomed to it–then he may make a mistake in regard to the life he has lived, and praise his own stupidity: bene navigavi cum naufragium feci . he may even compose a song of thanksgiving to “Providence.”
2
On inquiring into the origin of the philologist I find:
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A young man cannot have the slightest conception of what the Greeks and Romans were.
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He does not know whether he is fitted to investigate into them;
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And, in particular, he does not know to what extent, in view of the knowledge he may actually possess, he is fitted to be a teacher. What then enables him to decide is not the knowledge of himself or his science; but
( a ) Imitation.
( b ) The convenience of carrying on the kind of work which he had begun at school.
( c ) His intention of earning a living.
In short, ninety-nine philologists out of a hundred should not be philologists at all.
3
The more strict religions require that men shall look upon their activity simply as one means of carrying out a metaphysical scheme: an unfortunate choice of calling may then be explained as a test of the individual. Religions keep their eyes fixed only upon the salvation of the individual . whether he is a slave or a free man, a merchant or a scholar, his aim in life has nothing to do with his calling, so that a wrong choice is not such a very great piece of unhappiness. Let this serve as a crumb of comfort for philologists in general; but true philologists stand in need of a better understanding: what will result from a science which is “gone in for” by ninety-nine such people? The thoroughly unfitted majority draw up the rules of the science in accordance with their own capacities and inclinations; and in this way they tyrannise over the hundredth, the only capable one among them. If they have the training of others in their hands they will train them consciously or unconsciously after their own image . what then becomes of the classicism of the Greeks and Romans?
The points to be proved are–
( a ) The disparity between philologists and the ancients.
( b ) The inability of the philologist to train his pupils, even with the help of the ancients.
( c ) The falsifying of the science by the (incapacity of the) majority, the wrong requirements held in view; the renunciation of the real aim of this science.
4
All this affects the sources of our present philology: a sceptical and melancholy attitude. But how otherwise are philologists to be produced?
The imitation of antiquity: is not this a principle which has been refuted by this time?
The flight from actuality to the ancients: does not this tend to falsify our conception of antiquity?
5
We are still behindhand in one type of contemplation: to understand how the greatest productions of the intellect have a dreadful and evil background . the sceptical type of contemplation. Greek antiquity is now investigated as the most beautiful example of life.
As man assumes a sceptical and melancholy attitude towards his life’s calling, so we must sceptically examine the highest life’s calling of a nation: in order that we may understand what life is.
6
My words of consolation apply particularly to the single tyrannised individual out of a hundred: such exceptional ones should simply treat all the unenlightened majorities as their subordinates; and they should in the same way take advantage of the prejudice, which is still widespread, in favour of classical instruction–they need many helpers. But they must have a clear perception of what their actual goal is.
7
Philology as the science of antiquity does not, of course, endure for ever; its elements are not inexhaustible. What cannot be exhausted, however, is the ever-new adaptation of one’s age to antiquity; the comparison of the two. If we make it our task to understand our own age better by means of antiquity, then our task will be an everlasting one.–This is the antinomy of philology: people have always endeavoured to understand antiquity by means of the present–and shall the present now be understood by means of antiquity? Better: people have explained antiquity to themselves out of their own experiences; and from the amount of antiquity thus acquired they have assessed the value of their experiences. Experience, therefore, is certainly an essential prerequisite for a philologist–that is, the philologist must first of all be a man; for then only can he be productive as a philologist. It follows from this that old men are well suited to be philologists if they were not such during that portion of their life which was richest in experiences.
It must be insisted, however, that it is only through a knowledge of the present that one can acquire an inclination for the study of classical antiquity. Where indeed should the impulse come from if not from this inclination? When we observe how few philologists there actually are, except those that have taken up philology as a means of livelihood, we can easily decide for ourselves what is the matter with this impulse for antiquity: it hardly exists at all, for there are no disinterested philologists.
Our task then is to secure for philology the universally educative results which it should bring about. The means: the limitation of the number of those engaged in the philological profession (doubtful whether young men should be made acquainted with philology at all). Criticism of the philologist. The value of antiquity: it sinks with you: how deeply you must have sunk, since its value is now so little!
8
It is a great advantage for the true philologist that a great deal of preliminary work has been done in his science, so that he may take possession of this inheritance if he is strong enough for it–I refer to the valuation of the entire Hellenic mode of thinking. So long as philologists worked simply at details, a misunderstanding of the Greeks was the consequence. The stages of this undervaluation are . the sophists of the second century, the philologist-poets of the Renaissance, and the philologist as the teacher of the higher classes of society (Goethe, Schiller).
Valuing is the most difficult of all.
In what respect is one most fitted for this valuing?
–Not, at all events, when one is trained for philology as one is now. It should be ascertained to what extent our present means make this last object impossible.
–Thus the philologist himself is not the aim of philology.
9
Most men show clearly enough that they do not regard themselves as individuals: their lives indicate this. The Christian command that everyone shall steadfastly keep his eyes fixed upon his salvation, and his alone, has as its counterpart the general life of mankind, where every man lives merely as a point among other points–living not only as the result of earlier generations, but living also only with an eye to the future. There are only three forms of existence in which a man remains an individual as a philosopher, as a Saviour, and as an artist. But just let us consider how a scientific man bungles his life: what has the teaching of Greek particles to do with the sense of life?–Thus we can also observe how innumerable men merely live, as it were, a preparation for a man, the philologist, for example, as a preparation for the philosopher, who in his turn knows how to utilise his ant-like work to pronounce some opinion upon the value of life. When such ant-like work is not carried out under any special direction the greater part of it is simply nonsense, and quite superfluous.
10
Besides the large number of unqualified philologists there is, on the other hand, a number of what may be called born philologists, who from some reason or other are prevented from becoming such. The greatest obstacle, however, which stands in the way of these born philologists is the bad representation of philology by the unqualified philologists.
Leopardi is the modern ideal of a philologist: The German philologists can do nothing. (As a proof of this Voss should be studied!)
11
Let it be considered how differently a science is propagated from the way in which any special talent in a family is transmitted. The bodily transmission of an individual science is something very rare. Do the sons of philologists easily become philologists? Dubito . Thus there is no such accumulation of philological capacity as there was, let us say, in Beethoven’s family of musical capacity. Most philologists begin from the beginning, and even then they learn from books, and not through travels, &c. They get some training, of course.
12
Most men are obviously in the world accidentally; no necessity of a higher kind is seen in them. They work at this and that, their talents are average. How strange! The manner in which they live shows that they think very little of themselves: they merely esteem themselves in so far as they waste their energy on trifles (whether these be mean or frivolous desires, or the trashy concerns of their everyday calling). In the so-called life’s calling, which everyone must choose, we may perceive a touching modesty on the part of mankind. They practically admit in choosing thus. “We are called upon to serve and to be of advantage to our equals–the same remark applies to our neighbour and to his neighbour, so everyone serves somebody else; no one is carrying out the duties of his calling for his own sake, but always for the sake of others and thus we are like geese which support one another by the one leaning against the other. When the aim of each one of us is centred in another, then we have all no object in existing; and this ’existing for others’ is the most comical of comedies.”
13
Vanity is the involuntary inclination to set one’s self up for an individual while not really being one; that is to say, trying to appear independent when one is dependent. The case of wisdom is the exact contrary: it appears to be dependent while in reality it is independent.
14
The Hades of Homer–From what type of existence is it really copied? I think it is the description of the philologist: it is better to be a day-labourer than to have such an anaemic recollection of the past.– [1]
15
The attitude of the philologist towards antiquity is apologetic, or else dictated by the view that what our own age values can likewise be found in antiquity. The right attitude to take up, however, is the reverse one, viz., to start with an insight into our modern topsyturviness, and to look back from antiquity to it–and many things about antiquity which have hitherto displeased us will then be seen to have been most profound necessities.
We must make it clear to ourselves that we are acting in an absurd manner when we try to defend or to beautify antiquity: who are we!
16
We are under a false impression when we say that there is always some caste which governs a nation’s culture, and that therefore savants are necessary; for savants only possess knowledge concerning culture (and even this only in exceptional cases). Among learned men themselves there might be a few, certainly not a caste, but even these would indeed be rare.
17
One very great value of antiquity consists in the fact that its writings are the only ones which modern men still read carefully.
Overstraining of the memory–very common among philologists, together with a poor development of the judgment.
18
Busying ourselves with the culture-epochs of the past: is this gratitude? We should look backwards in order to explain to ourselves the present conditions of culture: we do not become too laudatory in regard to our own circumstances, but perhaps we should do so in order that we may not be too severe on ourselves.
19
He who has no sense for the symbolical has none for antiquity: let pedantic philologists bear this in mind.
20
My aim is to bring about a state of complete enmity between our present “culture” and antiquity. Whoever wishes to serve the former must hate the latter.
21
Careful meditation upon the past leads to the impression that we are a multiplication of many pasts . so how can we be a final aim? But why not? In most instances, however, we do not wish to be this. We take up our positions again in the ranks, work in our own little corner, and hope that what we do may be of some small profit to our successors. But that is exactly the case of the cask of the Danae . and this is useless, we must again set about doing everything for ourselves, and only for ourselves–measuring science by ourselves, for example with the question . What is science to us? not . what are we to science? People really make life too easy for themselves when they look upon themselves from such a simple historical point of view, and make humble servants of themselves. “Your own salvation above everything”–that is what you should say; and there are no institutions which you should prize more highly than your own soul.–Now, however, man learns to know himself: he finds himself miserable, despises himself, and is pleased to find something worthy of respect outside himself. Therefore he gets rid of himself, so to speak, makes himself subservient to a cause, does his duty strictly, and atones for his existence. He knows that he does not work for himself alone; he wishes to help those who are daring enough to exist on account of themselves, like Socrates. The majority of men are as it were suspended in the air like toy balloons; every breath of wind moves them.–As a consequence the savant must be such out of self-knowledge, that is to say, out of contempt for himself–in other words he must recognise himself to be merely the servant of some higher being who comes after him. Otherwise he is simply a sheep.
22
It is the duty of the free man to live for his own sake, and not for others. It was on this account that the Greeks looked upon handicrafts as unseemly.
As a complete entity Greek antiquity has not yet been fully valued . I am convinced that if it had not been surrounded by its traditional glorification, the men of the present day would shrink from it horror stricken. This glorification, then, is spurious; gold-paper.
23
The false enthusiasm for antiquity in which many philologists live. When antiquity suddenly comes upon us in our youth, it appears to us to be composed of innumerable trivialities; in particular we believe ourselves to be above its ethics. And Homer and Walter Scott–who carries off the palm? Let us be honest! If this enthusiasm were really felt, people could scarcely seek their life’s calling in it. I mean that what we can obtain from the Greeks only begins to dawn upon us in later years: only after we have undergone many experiences, and thought a great deal.
24
People in general think that philology is at an end–while I believe that it has not yet begun.
The greatest events in philology are the appearance of Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Wagner; standing on their shoulders we look far into the distance. The fifth and sixth centuries have still to be discovered.
25
Where do we see the effect of antiquity? Not in language, not in the imitation of something or other, and not in perversity and waywardness, to which uses the French have turned it. Our museums are gradually becoming filled up: I always experience a sensation of disgust when I see naked statues in the Greek style in the presence of this thoughtless philistinism which would fain devour everything.
PLANS AND THOUGHTS RELATING TO A WORK ON PHILOLOGY
(1875)
26
Of all sciences philology at present is the most favoured . its progress having been furthered for centuries by the greatest number of scholars in every nation who have had charge of the noblest pupils. Philology has thus had one of the best of all opportunities to be propagated from generation to generation, and to make itself respected. How has it acquired this power?
Calculations of the different prejudices in its favour.
How then if these were to be frankly recognised as prejudices? Would not philology be superfluous if we reckoned up the interests of a position in life or the earning of a livelihood? What if the truth were told about antiquity, and its qualifications for training people to live in the present?
In order that the questions set forth above may be answered let us consider the training of the philologist, his genesis: he no longer comes into being where these interests are lacking.
If the world in general came to know what an unseasonable thing for us antiquity really is, philologists would no longer be called in as the educators of our youth.
Effect of antiquity on the non-philologist likewise nothing. If they showed themselves to be imperative and contradictory, oh, with what hatred would they be pursued! But they always humble themselves.
Philology now derives its power only from the union between the philologists who will not, or cannot, understand antiquity and public opinion, which is misled by prejudices in regard to it.
The real Greeks, and their “watering down” through the philologists.
The future commanding philologist sceptical in regard to our entire culture, and therefore also the destroyer of philology as a profession.
THE PREFERENCE FOR ANTIQUITY
27
If a man approves of the investigation of the past he will also approve and even praise the fact–and will above all easily understand it–that there are scholars who are exclusively occupied with the investigation of Greek and Roman antiquity: but that these scholars are at the same time the teachers of the children of the nobility and gentry is not equally easy of comprehension–here lies a problem.
Why philologists precisely? This is not altogether such a matter of course as the case of a professor of medicine, who is also a practical physician and surgeon. For, if the cases were identical, preoccupation with Greek and Roman antiquity would be identical with the “science of education.” In short, the relationship between theory and practice in the philologist cannot be so quickly conceived. Whence comes his pretension to be a teacher in the higher sense, not only of all scientific men, but more especially of all cultured men? This educational power must be taken by the philologist from antiquity; and in such a case people will ask with astonishment: how does it come that we attach such value to a far-off past that we can only become cultured men with the aid of its knowledge?
These questions, however, are not asked as a rule: The sway of philology over our means of instruction remains practically unquestioned; and antiquity has the importance assigned to it. To this extent the position of the philologist is more favourable than that of any other follower of science. True, he has not at his disposal that great mass of men who stand in need of him–the doctor, for example, has far more than the philologist. But he can influence picked men, or youths, to be more accurate, at a time when all their mental faculties are beginning to blossom forth–people who can afford to devote both time and money to their higher development. In all those places where European culture has found its way, people have accepted secondary schools based upon a foundation of Latin and Greek as the first and highest means of instruction. In this way philology has found its best opportunity of transmitting itself, and commanding respect: no other science has been so well favoured. As a general rule all those who have passed through such institutions have afterwards borne testimony to the excellence of their organisation and curriculum, and such people are, of course, unconscious witnesses in favour of philology. If any who have not passed through these institutions should happen to utter a word in disparagement of this education, an unanimous and yet calm repudiation of the statement at once follows, as if classical education were a kind of witchcraft, blessing its followers, and demonstrating itself to them by this blessing. There is no attempt at polemics . “We have been through it all.” “We know it has done us good.”
Now there are so many things to which men have become so accustomed that they look upon them as quite appropriate and suitable, for habit intermixes all things with sweetness; and men as a rule judge the value of a thing in accordance with their own desires. The desire for classical antiquity as it is now felt should be tested, and, as it were, taken to pieces and analysed with a view to seeing how much of this desire is due to habit, and how much to mere love of adventure–I refer to that inward and active desire, new and strange, which gives rise to a productive conviction from day to day, the desire for a higher goal, and also the means thereto . as the result of which people advance step by step from one unfamiliar thing to another, like an Alpine climber.
What is the foundation on which the high value attached to antiquity at the present time is based, to such an extent indeed that our whole modern culture is founded on it? Where must we look for the origin of this delight in antiquity, and the preference shown for it?
I think I have recognised in my examination of the question that all our philology–that is, all its present existence and power–is based on the same foundation as that on which our view of antiquity as the most important of all means of training is based. Philology as a means of instruction is the clear expression of a predominating conception regarding the value of antiquity, and the best methods of education. Two propositions are contained in this statement. In the first place all higher education must be a historical one, and secondly, Greek and Roman history differs from all others in that it is classical. Thus the scholar who knows this history becomes a teacher. We are not here going into the question as to whether higher education ought to be historical or not; but we may examine the second and ask: in how far is it classic?
On this point there are many widespread prejudices. In the first place there is the prejudice expressed in the synonymous concept, “The study of the humanities”: antiquity is classic because it is the school of the humane.
Secondly: “Antiquity is classic because it is enlightened—-”
28
It is the task of all education to change certain conscious actions and habits into more or less unconscious ones; and the history of mankind is in this sense its education. The philologist now practises unconsciously a number of such occupations and habits. It is my object to ascertain how his power, that is, his instinctive methods of work, is the result of activities which were formerly conscious, but which he has gradually come to feel as such no longer: but that consciousness consisted of prejudices . The present power of philologists is based upon these prejudices, for example the value attached to the ratio as in the cases of Bentley and Hermann. Prejudices are, as Lichtenberg says, the art impulses of men.
29
It is difficult to justify the preference for antiquity since it has arisen from prejudices:
-
From ignorance of all non-classical antiquity.
-
From a false idealisation of humanitarianism, whilst Hindoos and Chinese are at all events more humane.
-
From the pretensions of school-teachers.
-
From the traditional admiration which emanated from antiquity itself.
-
From opposition to the Christian church; or as a support for this church.
-
From the impression created by the century-long work of the philologists, and the nature of this work. It must be a gold mine, thinks the spectator.
-
The acquirement of knowledge attained as the result of the study. The preparatory school of science.
In short, partly from ignorance, wrong impressions, and misleading conclusions; and also from the interest which philologists have in raising their science to a high level in the estimation of laymen.
Also the preference for antiquity on the part of the artists, who involuntarily assume proportion and moderation to be the property of all antiquity. Purity of form. Authors likewise.
The preference for antiquity as an abbreviation of the history of the human race, as if there were an autochthonous creation here by which all becoming might be studied.
The fact actually is that the foundations of this preference are being removed one by one, and if this is not remarked by philologists themselves, it is certainly being remarked as much as it can possibly be by people outside their circle. First of all history had its effect, and then linguistics brought about the greatest diversion among philologists themselves, and even the desertion of many of them. They have still the schools in their hands: but for how long! In the form in which it has existed up to the present philology is dying out; the ground has been swept from under its feet. Whether philologists may still hope to maintain their status is doubtful; in any case they are a dying race.
30
The peculiarly significant situation of philologists: a class of people to whom we entrust our youth, and who have to investigate quite a special antiquity. The highest value is obviously attached to this antiquity. But if this antiquity has been wrongly valued, then the whole foundation upon which the high position of the philologist is based suddenly collapses. In any case this antiquity has been very differently valued, and our appreciation of the philologists has constantly been guided by it. These people have borrowed their power from the strong prejudices in favour of antiquity,–this must be made clear.
Philologists now feel that when these prejudices are at last refuted, and antiquity depicted in its true colours, the favourable prejudices towards them will diminish considerably. It is thus to the interest of their profession not to let a clear impression of antiquity come to light; in particular the impression that antiquity in its highest sense renders one “out of season?” i.e., an enemy to one’s own time.
It is also to the interest of philologists as a class not to let their calling as teachers be regarded from a higher standpoint than that to which they themselves can correspond.
31
It is to be hoped that there are a few people who look upon it as a problem why philologists should be the teachers of our noblest youths. Perhaps the case will not be always so–It would be much more natural per se if our children were instructed in the elements of geography, natural science, political economy, and sociology, if they were gradually led to a consideration of life itself, and if finally, but much later, the most noteworthy events of the past were brought to their knowledge. A knowledge of antiquity should be among the last subjects which a student would take up; and would not this position of antiquity in the curriculum of a school be more honourable for it than the present one?–Antiquity is now used merely as a propaedeutic for thinking, speaking, and writing; but there was a time when it was the essence of earthly knowledge, and people at that time wished to acquire by means of practical learning what they now seek to acquire merely by means of a detailed plan of study–a plan which, corresponding to the more advanced knowledge of the age, has entirely changed.
Thus the inner purpose of philological teaching has been entirely altered; it was at one time material teaching, a teaching that taught how to live, but now it is merely formal. [2]
32
If it were the task of the philologist to impart formal education, it would be necessary for him to teach walking, dancing, speaking, singing, acting, or arguing . and the so-called formal teachers did impart their instruction this way in the second and third centuries. But only the training of a scientific man is taken into account, which results in “formal” thinking and writing, and hardly any speaking at all.
33
If the gymnasium is to train young men for science, people now say there can be no more preliminary preparation for any particular science, so comprehensive have all the sciences become. As a consequence teachers have to train their students generally, that is to say for all the sciences–for scientificality in other words; and for that classical studies are necessary! What a wonderful jump! a most despairing justification! Whatever is, is right, [3] even when it is clearly seen that the “right” on which it has been based has turned to wrong.
34
It is accomplishments which are expected from us after a study of the ancients: formerly, for example, the ability to write and speak. But what is expected now! Thinking and deduction . but these things are not learnt from the ancients, but at best through the ancients, by means of science. Moreover, all historical deduction is very limited and unsafe, natural science should be preferred.
35
It is the same with the simplicity of antiquity as it is with the simplicity of style: it is the highest thing which we recognise and must imitate; but it is also the last. Let it be remembered that the classic prose of the Greeks is also a late result.
36
What a mockery of the study of the “humanities” lies in the fact that they were also called “belles lettres” (bellas litteras)!
37
Wolf’s [4] reasons why the Egyptians, Hebrews, Persians, and other Oriental nations were not to be set on the same plane with the Greeks and Romans: “The former have either not raised themselves, or have raised themselves only to a slight extent, above that type of culture which should be called a mere civilisation and bourgeois acquirement, as opposed to the higher and true culture of the mind.” He then explains that this culture is spiritual and literary: “In a well-organised nation this may be begun earlier than order and peacefulness in the outward life of the people (enlightenment).”
He then contrasts the inhabitants of easternmost Asia (“like such individuals, who are not wanting in clean, decent, and comfortable dwellings, clothing, and surroundings; but who never feel the necessity for a higher enlightenment”) with the Greeks (“in the case of the Greeks, even among the most educated inhabitants of Attica, the contrary often happens to an astonishing degree; and the people neglect as insignificant factors that which we, thanks to our love of order, are in the habit of looking upon as the foundations of mental culture itself”).
38
Our terminology already shows how prone we are to judge the ancients wrongly: the exaggerated sense of literature, for example, or, as Wolf, when speaking of the “inner history of ancient erudition,” calls it, “the history of learned enlightenment.”
39
According to Goethe, the ancients are “the despair of the emulator.” Voltaire said. “If the admirers of Homer were honest, they would acknowledge the boredom which their favourite often causes them.”
40
The position we have taken up towards classical antiquity is at bottom the profound cause of the sterility of modern culture; for we have taken all this modern conception of culture from the Hellenised Romans. We must distinguish within the domain of antiquity itself: when we come to appreciate its purely productive period, we condemn at the same time the entire Romano-Alexandrian culture. But at the same time also we condemn our own attitude towards antiquity, and likewise our philology.
41
There has been an age-long battle between the Germans and antiquity, i.e. , a battle against the old culture. It is certain that precisely what is best and deepest in the German resists it. The main point, however, is that such resistance is only justifiable in the case of the Romanised culture; for this culture, even at that time, was a falling-off from something more profound and noble. It is this latter that the Germans are wrong in resisting.
42
Everything classic was thoroughly cultivated by Charles the Great, whilst he combated everything heathen with the severest possible measures of coercion. Ancient mythology was developed, but German mythology was treated as a crime. The feeling underlying all this, in my opinion, was that Christianity had already overcome the old religion . people no longer feared it, but availed themselves of the culture that rested upon it. But the old German gods were feared.
A great superficiality in the conception of antiquity–little else than an appreciation of its formal accomplishments and its knowledge–must thereby have been brought about. We must find out the forces that stood in the way of increasing our insight into antiquity. First of all, the culture of antiquity is utilised as an incitement towards the acceptance of Christianity . it became, as it were, the premium for conversion, the gilt with which the poisonous pill was coated before being swallowed. Secondly, the help of ancient culture was found to be necessary as a weapon for the intellectual protection of Christianity. Even the Reformation could not dispense with classical studies for this purpose.
The Renaissance, on the other hand, now begins, with a clearer sense of classical studies, which, however, are likewise looked upon from an anti-Christian standpoint: the Renaissance shows an awakening of honesty in the south, like the Reformation in the north. They could not but clash; for a sincere leaning towards antiquity renders one unchristian.
On the whole, however, the Church succeeded in turning classical studies into a harmless direction . the philologist was invented, representing a type of learned man who was at the same time a priest or something similar. Even in the period of the Reformation people succeeded in emasculating scholarship. It is on this account that Friedrich August Wolf is noteworthy he freed his profession from the bonds of theology. This action of his, however, was not fully understood; for an aggressive, active element, such as was manifested by the poet-philologists of the Renaissance, was not developed. The freedom obtained benefited science, but not man.
43
It is true that both humanism and rationalism have brought antiquity into the field as an ally; and it is therefore quite comprehensible that the opponents of humanism should direct their attacks against antiquity also. Antiquity, however, has been misunderstood and falsified by humanism . it must rather be considered as a testimony against humanism, against the benign nature of man, &c. The opponents of humanism are wrong to combat antiquity as well; for in antiquity they have a strong ally.
44
It is so difficult to understand the ancients. We must wait patiently until the spirit moves us. The human element which antiquity shows us must not be confused with humanitarianism. This contrast must be strongly emphasised: philology suffers by endeavouring to substitute the humanitarian, young men are brought forward as students of philology in order that they may thereby become humanitarians. A good deal of history, in my opinion, is quite sufficient for that purpose. The brutal and self-conscious man will be humbled when he sees things and values changing to such an extent.
The human element among the Greeks lies within a certain naivete , through which man himself is to be seen–state, art, society, military and civil law, sexual relations, education, party. It is precisely the human element which may be seen everywhere and among all peoples, but among the Greeks it is seen in a state of nakedness and inhumanity which cannot be dispensed with for purposes of instruction. In addition to this, the Greeks have created the greatest number of individuals, and thus they give us so much insight into men,–a Greek cook is more of a cook than any other.
45
I deplore a system of education which does not enable people to understand Wagner, and as the result of which Schopenhauer sounds harsh and discordant in our ears . such a system of education has missed its aim.
46
(THE FINAL DRAFT OF THE FIRST CHAPTER.)
Il faut dire la verite et s’immoler–VOLTAIRE.
Let us suppose that there were freer and more superior spirits who were dissatisfied with the education now in vogue, and that they summoned it to their tribunal, what would the defendant say to them? In all probability something like this: “Whether you have a right to summon anyone here or not, I am at all events not the proper person to be called. It is my educators to whom you should apply. It is their duty to defend me, and I have a right to keep silent. I am merely what they have made me.”
These educators would now be hauled before the tribunal, and among them an entire profession would be observed . the philologists. This profession consists in the first place of those men who make use of their knowledge of Greek and Roman antiquity to bring up youths of thirteen to twenty years of age, and secondly of those men whose task it is to train specially-gifted pupils to act as future teachers– i.e. , as the educators of educators. Philologists of the first type are teachers at the public schools, those of the second are professors at the universities.
The first-named philologists are entrusted with the care of certain specially-chosen youths, those who, early in life, show signs of talent and a sense of what is noble, and whose parents are prepared to allow plenty of time and money for their education. If other boys, who do not fulfil these three conditions, are presented to the teachers, the teachers have the right to refuse them. Those forming the second class, the university professors, receive the young men who feel themselves fitted for the highest and most responsible of callings, that of teachers and moulders of mankind; and these professors, too, may refuse to have anything to do with young men who are not adequately equipped or gifted for the task.
If, then, the educational system of a period is condemned, a heavy censure on philologists is thereby implied: either, as the consequence of their wrong-headed view, they insist on giving bad education in the belief that it is good; or they do not wish to give this bad education, but are unable to carry the day in favour of education which they recognise to be better. In other words, their fault is either due to their lack of insight or to their lack of will. In answer to the first charge they would say that they knew no better, and in answer to the second that they could do no better. As, however, these philologists bring up their pupils chiefly with the aid of Greek and Roman antiquity, their want of insight in the first case may be attributed to the fact that they do not understand antiquity, and again to the fact that they bring forward antiquity into the present age as if it were the most important of all aids to instruction, while antiquity, generally speaking, does not assist in training, or at all events no longer does so.
On the other hand, if we reproach our professors with their lack of will, they would be quite right in attributing educational significance and power to antiquity; but they themselves could not be said to be the proper instruments by means of which antiquity could exhibit such power. In other words, the professors would not be real teachers and would be living under false colours, but how, then, could they have reached such an irregular position? Through a misunderstanding of themselves and their qualifications. In order, then, that we may ascribe to philologists their share in this bad educational system of the present time, we may sum up the different factors of their innocence and guilt in the following sentence: the philologist, if he wishes for a verdict of acquittal, must understand three things antiquity, the present time, and himself . his fault lies in the fact that he either does not understand antiquity, or the present time, or himself.
47
It is not true to say that we can attain culture through antiquity alone. We may learn something from it, certainly; but not culture as the word is now understood. Our present culture is based on an emasculated and mendacious study of antiquity. In order to understand how ineffectual this study is, just look at our philologists . they, trained upon antiquity, should be the most cultured men. Are they?
48
Origin of the philologist. When a great work of art is exhibited there is always some one who not only feels its influence but wishes to perpetuate it. The same remark applies to a great state–to everything, in short, that man produces. Philologists wish to perpetuate the influence of antiquity and they can set about it only as imitative artists. Why not as men who form their lives after antiquity?
49
The decline of the poet-scholars is due in great part to their own corruption: their type is continually arising again; Goethe and Leopardi, for example, belong to it. Behind them plod the philologist-savants. This type has its origin in the sophisticism of the second century.
50
Ah, it is a sad story, the story of philology! The disgusting erudition, the lazy, inactive passivity, the timid submission.–Who was ever free?
51
When we examine the history of philology it is borne in upon us how few really talented men have taken part in it. Among the most celebrated philologists are a few who ruined their intellect by acquiring a smattering of many subjects, and among the most enlightened of them were several who could use their intellect only for childish tasks. It is a sad story . no science, I think, has ever been so poor in talented followers. Those whom we might call the intellectually crippled found a suitable hobby in all this hair-splitting.
52
The teacher of reading and writing, and the reviser, were the first types of the philologist.
53
Friedrich August Wolf reminds us how apprehensive and feeble were the first steps taken by our ancestors in moulding scholarship–how even the Latin classics, for example, had to be smuggled into the university market under all sorts of pretexts, as if they had been contraband goods. In the “Gottingen Lexicon” of 1737, J. M. Gesner tells us of the Odes of Horace: “ut imprimis, quid prodesse in severioribus studiis possint, ostendat.”
54
I was pleased to read of Bentley “non tam grande pretium emendatiunculis meis statuere soleo, ut singularem aliquam gratiam inde sperem aut exigam.”
Newton was surprised that men like Bentley and Hare should quarrel about a book of ancient comedies, since they were both theological dignitaries.
55
Horace was summoned by Bentley as before a judgment seat, the authority of which he would have been the first to repudiate. The admiration which a discriminating man acquires as a philologist is in proportion to the rarity of the discrimination to be found in philologists. Bentley’s treatment of Horace has something of the schoolmaster about it It would appear at first sight as if Horace himself were not the object of discussion, but rather the various scribes and commentators who have handed down the text: in reality, however, it is actually Horace who is being dealt with. It is my firm conviction that to have written a single line which is deemed worthy of being commented upon by scholars of a later time, far outweighs the merits of the greatest critic. There is a profound modesty about philologists. The improving of texts is an entertaining piece of work for scholars, it is a kind of riddle-solving; but it should not be looked upon as a very important task. It would be an argument against antiquity if it should speak less clearly to us because a million words stood in the way!
56
A school-teacher said to Bentley, “Sir, I will make your grandchild as great a scholar as you are yourself.” “How can you do that,” replied Bentley, “when I have forgotten more than you ever knew?”
57
Bentley’s clever daughter Joanna once lamented to her father that he had devoted his time and talents to the criticism of the works of others instead of writing something original. Bentley remained silent for some time as if he were turning the matter over in his mind. At last he said that her remark was quite right; he himself felt that he might have directed his gifts in some other channel. Earlier in life, nevertheless, he had done something for the glory of God and the improvement of his fellow-men (referring to his “Confutation of Atheism”), but afterwards the genius of the pagans had attracted him, and, despairing of attaining their level in any other way , he had mounted upon their shoulders so that he might thus be able to look over their heads.
58
Bentley, says Wolf, both as man of letters and individual, was misunderstood and persecuted during the greater part of his life, or else praised maliciously.
Markland, towards the end of his life–as was the case with so many others like him–became imbued with a repugnance for all scholarly reputation, to such an extent, indeed, that he partly tore up and partly burnt several works which he had long had in hand.
Wolf says: “The amount of intellectual food that can be got from well-digested scholarship is a very insignificant item.”
In Winckelmann’s youth there were no philological studies apart from the ordinary bread-winning branches of the science–people read and explained the ancients in order to prepare themselves for the better interpretation of the Bible and the Corpus Juris.
59
In Wolf’s estimation, a man has reached the highest point of historical research when he is able to take a wide and general view of the whole and of the profoundly conceived distinctions in the developments in art and the different styles of art. Wolf acknowledges, however, that Winckelmann was lacking in the more common talent of philological criticism, or else he could not use it properly: “A rare mixture of a cool head and a minute and restless solicitude for hundreds of things which, insignificant in themselves, were combined in his case with a fire that swallowed up those little things, and with a gift of divination which is a vexation and an annoyance to the uninitiated.”
60
Wolf draws our attention to the fact that antiquity was acquainted only with theories of oratory and poetry which facilitated production, [Greek: technai] and artes that formed real orators and poets, “while at the present day we shall soon have theories upon which it would be as impossible to build up a speech or a poem as it would be to form a thunderstorm upon a brontological treatise.”
61
Wolf’s judgment on the amateurs of philological knowledge is noteworthy: “If they found themselves provided by nature with a mind corresponding to that of the ancients, or if they were capable of adapting themselves to other points of view and other circumstances of life, then, with even a nodding acquaintance with the best writers, they certainly acquired more from those vigorous natures, those splendid examples of thinking and acting, than most of those did who during their whole life merely offered themselves to them as interpreters.”
62
Says Wolf again . “In the end, only those few ought to attain really complete knowledge who are born with artistic talent and furnished with scholarship, and who make use of the best opportunities of securing, both theoretically and practically, the necessary technical knowledge” True!
63
Instead of forming our students on the Latin models I recommend the Greek, especially Demosthenes . simplicity! This may be seen by a reference to Leopardi, who is perhaps the greatest stylist of the century.
64
“Classical education” . what do people see in it? Something that is useless beyond rendering a period of military service unnecessary and securing a degree! [5]
65
When I observe how all countries are now promoting the advancement of classical literature I say to myself, “How harmless it must be!” and then, “How useful it must be!” It brings these countries the reputation of promoting “free culture.” In order that this “freedom” may be rightly estimated, just look at the philologists!
66
Classical education! Yea, if there were only as much paganism as Goethe found and glorified in Winckelmann, even that would not be much. Now, however, that the lying Christendom of our time has taken hold of it, the thing becomes overpowering, and I cannot help expressing my disgust on the point–People firmly believe in witchcraft where this “classical education” is concerned. They, however, who possess the greatest knowledge of antiquity should likewise possess the greatest amount of culture, viz., our philologists; but what is classical about them?
67
Classical philology is the basis of the most shallow rationalism always having been dishonestly applied, it has gradually become quite ineffective. Its effect is one more illusion of the modern man. Philologists are nothing but a guild of sky-pilots who are not known as such . this is why the State takes an interest in them. The utility of classical education is completely used up, whilst, for example, the history of Christianity still shows its power.
68
Philologists, when discussing their science, never get down to the root of the subject . they never set forth philology itself as a problem. Bad conscience? or merely thoughtlessness?
69
We learn nothing from what philologists say about philology: it is all mere tittle-tattle–for example, Jahn’s [6] “The Meaning and Place of the Study of Antiquity in Germany.” There is no feeling for what should be protected and defended: thus speak people who have not even thought of the possibility that any one could attack them.
70
Philologists are people who exploit the vaguely-felt dissatisfaction of modern man, and his desire for “something better,” in order that they may earn their bread and butter.
I know them–I myself am one of them.
71
Our philologists stand in the same relation to true educators as the medicine-men of the wild Indians do to true physicians What astonishment will be felt by a later age!
72
What they lack is a real taste for the strong and powerful characteristics of the ancients. They turn into mere panegyrists, and thus become ridiculous.
73
They have forgotten how to address other men; and, as they cannot speak to the older people, they cannot do so to the young.
74
When we bring the Greeks to the knowledge of our young students, we are treating the latter as if they were well-informed and matured men. What, indeed, is there about the Greeks and their ways which is suitable for the young? In the end we shall find that we can do nothing for them beyond giving them isolated details. Are these observations for young people? What we actually do, however, is to introduce our young scholars to the collective wisdom of antiquity. Or do we not? The reading of the ancients is emphasised in this way.
My belief is that we are forced to concern ourselves with antiquity at a wrong period of our lives. At the end of the twenties its meaning begins to dawn on one.
75
There is something disrespectful about the way in which we make our young students known to the ancients: what is worse, it is unpedagogical; or what can result from a mere acquaintance with things which a youth cannot consciously esteem! Perhaps he must learn to " believe " and this is why I object to it.
76
There are matters regarding which antiquity instructs us, and about which I should hardly care to express myself publicly.
77
All the difficulties of historical study to be elucidated by great examples.
Why our young students are not suited to the Greeks.
The consequences of philology. Arrogant expectation. Culture-philistinism. Superficiality. Too high an esteem for reading and writing. Estrangement from the nation and its needs.
The philologists themselves, the historians, philosophers, and jurists all end in smoke.
Our young students should be brought into contact with real sciences.
Likewise with real art.
In consequence, when they grew older, a desire for real history would be shown.
78
Inhumanity: even in the “Antigone,” even in Goethe’s “Iphigenia.”
The want of “rationalism” in the Greeks.
Young people cannot understand the political affairs of antiquity.
The poetic element: a bad expectation.
79
Do the philologists know the present time? Their judgments on it as Periclean, their mistaken judgments when they speak of Freytag’s [7] genius as resembling that of Homer, and so on; their following in the lead of the litterateurs, their abandonment of the pagan sense, which was exactly the classical element that Goethe discovered in Winckelmann.
80
The condition of the philologists may be seen by their indifference at the appearance of Wagner. They should have learnt even more through him than through Goethe, and they did not even glance in his direction. That shows that they are not actuated by any strong need, or else they would have an instinct to tell them where their food was to be found.
81
Wagner prizes his art too highly to go and sit in a corner with it, like Schumann. He either surrenders himself to the public (“Rienzi”) or he makes the public surrender itself to him. He educates it up to his music. Minor artists, too, want their public, but they try to get it by inartistic means, such as through the Press, Hanslick, [8] &c.
82
Wagner perfected the inner fancy of man . later generations will see a renaissance in sculpture. Poetry must precede the plastic art.
83
I observe in philologists .
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Want of respect for antiquity.
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Tenderness and flowery oratory; even an apologetic tone.
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Simplicity in their historical comments.
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Self-conceit.
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Under-estimation of the talented philologists.
84
Philologists appear to me to be a secret society who wish to train our youth by means of the culture of antiquity . I could well understand this society and their views being criticised from all sides. A great deal would depend upon knowing what these philologists understood by the term “culture of antiquity”–If I saw, for example, that they were training their pupils against German philosophy and German music, I should either set about combating them or combating the culture of antiquity, perhaps the former, by showing that these philologists had not understood the culture of antiquity. Now I observe:
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A great indecision in the valuation of the culture of antiquity on the part of philologists.
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Something very non-ancient in themselves; something non-free.
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Want of clearness in regard to the particular type of ancient culture they mean.
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Want of judgment in their methods of instruction, e.g. , scholarship.
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Classical education is served out mixed up with Christianity.
85
It is now no longer a matter of surprise to me that, with such teachers, the education of our time should be worthless. I can never avoid depicting this want of education in its true colours, especially in regard to those things which ought to be learnt from antiquity if possible, for example, writing, speaking, and so on.
86
The transmission of the emotions is hereditary: let that be recollected when we observe the effect of the Greeks upon philologists.
87
Even in the best of cases, philologists seek for no more than mere “rationalism” and Alexandrian culture–not Hellenism.
88
Very little can be gained by mere diligence, if the head is dull. Philologist after philologist has swooped down on Homer in the mistaken belief that something of him can be obtained by force. Antiquity speaks to us when it feels a desire to do so, not when we do.
89
The inherited characteristic of our present-day philologists . a certain sterility of insight has resulted, for they promote the science, but not the philologist.
90
The following is one way of carrying on classical studies, and a frequent one: a man throws himself thoughtlessly, or is thrown, into some special branch or other, whence he looks to the right and left and sees a great deal that is good and new. Then, in some unguarded moment, he asks himself: “But what the devil has all this to do with me?” In the meantime he has grown old and has become accustomed to it all; and therefore he continues in his rut–just as in the case of marriage.
91
In connection with the training of the modern philologist the influence of the science of linguistics should be mentioned and judged; a philologist should rather turn aside from it . the question of the early beginnings of the Greeks and Romans should be nothing to him . how can they spoil their own subject in such a way?
92
A morbid passion often makes its appearance from time to time in connection with the oppressive uncertainty of divination, a passion for believing and feeling sure at all costs: for example, when dealing with Aristotle, or in the discovery of magic numbers, which, in Lachmann’s case, is almost an illness.
93
The consistency which is prized in a savant is pedantry if applied to the Greeks.
94
(THE GREEKS AND THE PHILOLOGISTS.)
THE GREEKS. THE PHILOLOGISTS are .
render homage to beauty, babblers and triflers, develop the body, ugly-looking creatures, speak clearly, stammerers, are religious transfigurers filthy pedants, of everyday occurrences, are listeners and observers, quibblers and scarecrows, have an aptitude for the unfitted for the symbolical, symbolical, are in full possession of ardent slaves of the State, their freedom as men, can look innocently out Christians in disguise, into the world, are the pessimists of philistines. thought.
95
Bergk’s “History of Literature”: Not a spark of Greek fire or Greek sense.
96
People really do compare our own age with that of Pericles, and congratulate themselves on the reawakening of the feeling of patriotism: I remember a parody on the funeral oration of Pericles by G. Freytag, [9] in which this prim and strait-laced “poet” depicted the happiness now experienced by sixty-year-old men.–All pure and simple caricature! So this is the result! And sorrow and irony and seclusion are all that remain for him who has seen more of antiquity than this.
97
If we change a single word of Lord Bacon’s we may say . infimarum Graecorum virtutum apud philologos laus est, mediarum admiratio, supremarum sensus nullus.
98
How can anyone glorify and venerate a whole people! It is the individuals that count, even in the case of the Greeks.
99
There is a great deal of caricature even about the Greeks . for example, the careful attention devoted by the Cynics to their own happiness.
100
The only thing that interests me is the relationship of the people considered as a whole to the training of the single individuals . and in the case of the Greeks there are some factors which are very favourable to the development of the individual. They do not, however, arise from the goodwill of the people, but from the struggle between the evil instincts.
By means of happy inventions and discoveries, we can train the individual differently and more highly than has yet been done by mere chance and accident. There are still hopes . the breeding of superior men.
101
The Greeks are interesting and quite disproportionately important because they had such a host of great individuals. How was that possible? This point must be studied.
102
The history of Greece has hitherto always been written optimistically.
103
Selected points from antiquity: the power, fire, and swing of the feeling the ancients had for music (through the first Pythian Ode), purity in their historical sense, gratitude for the blessings of culture, the fire and corn feasts.
The ennoblement of jealousy: the Greeks the most jealous nation.
Suicide, hatred of old age, of penury. Empedocles on sexual love.
104
Nimble and healthy bodies, a clear and deep sense for the observation of everyday matters, manly freedom, belief in good racial descent and good upbringing, warlike virtues, jealousy in the [Greek: aristeyein], delight in the arts, respect for leisure, a sense for free individuality, for the symbolical.
105
The spiritual culture of Greece an aberration of the amazing political impulse towards [Greek: aristeyein]. The [Greek: polis] utterly opposed to new education; culture nevertheless existed.
106
When I say that, all things considered, the Greeks were more moral than modern men what do I mean by that? From what we can perceive of the activities of their soul, it is clear that they had no shame, they had no bad conscience. They were more sincere, open-hearted, and passionate, as artists are; they exhibited a kind of child-like naivete . It thus came about that even in all their evil actions they had a dash of purity about them, something approaching the holy. A remarkable number of individualities: might there not have been a higher morality in that? When we recollect that character develops slowly, what can it be that, in the long run, breeds individuality? Perhaps vanity, emulation? Possibly. Little inclination for conventional things.
107
The Greeks as the geniuses among the nations.
Their childlike nature, credulousness.
Passionate. Quite unconsciously they lived in such a way as to procreate genius. Enemies of shyness and dulness. Pain. Injudicious actions. The nature of their intuitive insight into misery, despite their bright and genial temperament. Profoundness in their apprehension and glorifying of everyday things (fire, agriculture). Mendacious, unhistorical. The significance of the [Greek: polis] in culture instinctively recognised, favourable as a centre and periphery for great men (the facility of surveying a community, and also the possibility of addressing it as a whole). Individuality raised to the highest power through the [Greek: polis]. Envy, jealousy, as among gifted people.
108
The Greeks were lacking in sobriety and caution. Over-sensibility, abnormally active condition of the brain and the nerves; impetuosity and fervour of the will.
109
“Invariably to see the general in the particular is the distinguishing characteristic of genius,” says Schopenhauer. Think of Pindar, &c.–”[Greek: Sophrosynae],” according to Schopenhauer, has its roots in the clearness with which the Greeks saw into themselves and into the world at large, and thence became conscious of themselves.
The “wide separation of will and intellect” indicates the genius, and is seen in the Greeks.
“The melancholy associated with genius is due to the fact that the will to live, the more clearly it is illuminated by the contemplating intellect, appreciates all the more clearly the misery of its condition,” says Schopenhauer. Cf. the Greeks.
110
The moderation of the Greeks in their sensual luxury, eating, and drinking, and their pleasure therein; the Olympic plays and their worship . that shows what they were.
In the case of the genius, “the intellect will point out the faults which are seldom absent in an instrument that is put to a use for which it was not intended.”
“The will is often left in the lurch at an awkward moment: hence genius, where real life is concerned, is more or less unpractical–its behaviour often reminds us of madness.”
111
We contrast the Romans, with their matter-of-fact earnestness, with the genial Greeks! Schopenhauer: “The stern, practical, earnest mode of life which the Romans called gravitas presupposes that the intellect does not forsake the service of the will in order to roam far off among things that have no connection with the will.”
112
It would have been much better if the Greeks had been conquered by the Persians instead of by the Romans.
113
The characteristics of the gifted man who is lacking in genius are to be found in the average Hellene–all the dangerous characteristics of such a disposition and character.
114
Genius makes tributaries of all partly-talented people: hence the Persians themselves sent their ambassadors to the Greek oracles.
115
The happiest lot that can fall to the genius is to exchange doing and acting for leisure; and this was something the Greeks knew how to value. The blessings of labour! Nugari was the Roman name for all the exertions and aspirations of the Greeks.
No happy course of life is open to the genius, he stands in contradiction to his age and must perforce struggle with it. Thus the Greeks . they instinctively made the utmost exertions to secure a safe refuge for themselves (in the polis ). Finally, everything went to pieces in politics. They were compelled to take up a stand against their enemies . this became ever more and more difficult, and at last impossible.
116
Greek culture is based on the lordship of a small class over four to nine times their number of slaves. Judged by mere numbers, Greece was a country inhabited by barbarians. How can the ancients be thought to be humane? There was a great contrast between the genius and the breadwinner, the half-beast of burden. The Greeks believed in a racial distinction. Schopenhauer wonders why Nature did not take it into her head to invent two entirely separate species of men.
The Greeks bear the same relation to the barbarians “as free-moving or winged animals do to the barnacles which cling tightly to the rocks and must await what fate chooses to send them”–Schopenhauer’s simile.
117
The Greeks as the only people of genius in the history of the world. Such they are even when considered as learners; for they understand this best of all, and can do more than merely trim and adorn themselves with what they have borrowed, as did the Romans.
The constitution of the polis is a Phoenician invention, even this has been imitated by the Hellenes. For a long time they dabbled in everything, like joyful dilettanti. Aphrodite is likewise Phoenician. Neither do they disavow what has come to them through immigration and does not originally belong to their own country.
118
The happy and comfortable constitution of the politico-social position must not be sought among the Greeks . that is a goal which dazzles the eyes of our dreamers of the future! It was, on the contrary, dreadful; for this is a matter that must be judged according to the following standard: the more spirit, the more suffering (as the Greeks themselves prove). Whence it follows, the more stupidity, the more comfort. The philistine of culture is the most comfortable creature the sun has ever shone upon: and he is doubtless also in possession of the corresponding stupidity.
119
The Greek polis and the [Greek: aien aristeyein] grew up out of mutual enmity. Hellenic and philanthropic are contrary adjectives, although the ancients flattered themselves sufficiently.
Homer is, in the world of the Hellenic discord, the pan-Hellenic Greek. The [Greek: “agon”] of the Greeks is also manifested in the Symposium in the shape of witty conversation.
120
Wanton, mutual annihilation inevitable: so long as a single polis wished to exist–its envy for everything superior to itself, its cupidity, the disorder of its customs, the enslavement of the women, lack of conscience in the keeping of oaths, in murder, and in cases of violent death.
Tremendous power of self-control: for example in a man like Socrates, who was capable of everything evil.
121
Its noble sense of order and systematic arrangement had rendered the Athenian state immortal–The ten strategists in Athens! Foolish! Too big a sacrifice on the altar of jealousy.
122
The recreations of the Spartans consisted of feasting, hunting, and making war . their every-day life was too hard. On the whole, however, their state is merely a caricature of the polls, a corruption of Hellas. The breeding of the complete Spartan–but what was there great about him that his breeding should have required such a brutal state!
123
The political defeat of Greece is the greatest failure of culture; for it has given rise to the atrocious theory that culture cannot be pursued unless one is at the same time armed to the teeth. The rise of Christianity was the second greatest failure: brute force on the one hand, and a dull intellect on the other, won a complete victory over the aristocratic genius among the nations. To be a Philhellenist now means to be a foe of brute force and stupid intellects. Sparta was the ruin of Athens in so far as she compelled Athens to turn her entire attention to politics and to act as a federal combination.
124
There are domains of thought where the ratio will only give rise to disorder, and the philologist, who possesses nothing more, is lost through it and is unable to see the truth . e.g. in the consideration of Greek mythology. A merely fantastic person, of course, has no claim either . one must possess Greek imagination and also a certain amount of Greek piety. Even the poet does not require to be too consistent, and consistency is the last thing Greeks would understand.
125
Almost all the Greek divinities are accumulations of divinities . we find one layer over another, soon to be hidden and smoothed down by yet a third, and so on. It scarcely seems to me to be possible to pick these various divinities to pieces in a scientific manner, for no good method of doing so can be recommended: even the poor conclusion by analogy is in this instance a very good conclusion.
126
At what a distance must one be from the Greeks to ascribe to them such a stupidly narrow autochthony as does Ottfried Muller! [10] How Christian it is to assume, with Welcker, [11] that the Greeks were originally monotheistic! How philologists torment themselves by investigating the question whether Homer actually wrote, without being able to grasp the far higher tenet that Greek art long exhibited an inward enmity against writing, and did not wish to be read at all.
127
In the religious cultus an earlier degree of culture comes to light a remnant of former times. The ages that celebrate it are not those which invent it, the contrary is often the case. There are many contrasts to be found here. The Greek cultus takes us back to a pre-Homeric disposition and culture. It is almost the oldest that we know of the Greeks–older than their mythology, which their poets have considerably remoulded, so far as we know it–Can this cult really be called Greek? I doubt it: they are finishers, not inventors. They preserve by means of this beautiful completion and adornment.
128
It is exceedingly doubtful whether we should draw any conclusion in regard to nationality and relationship with other nations from languages. A victorious language is nothing but a frequent (and not always regular) indication of a successful campaign. Where could there have been autochthonous peoples! It shows a very hazy conception of things to talk about Greeks who never lived in Greece. That which is really Greek is much less the result of natural aptitude than of adapted institutions, and also of an acquired language.
129
To live on mountains, to travel a great deal, and to move quickly from one place to another . in these ways we can now begin to compare ourselves with the Greek gods. We know the past, too, and we almost know the future. What would a Greek say, if only he could see us!
130
The gods make men still more evil; this is the nature of man. If we do not like a man, we wish that he may become worse than he is, and then we are glad. This forms part of the obscure philosophy of hate–a philosophy which has never yet been written, because it is everywhere the pudendum that every one feels.
131
The pan-Hellenic Homer finds his delight in the frivolity of the gods; but it is astounding how he can also give them dignity again. This amazing ability to raise one’s self again, however, is Greek.
132
What, then, is the origin of the envy of the gods? people did not believe in a calm, quiet happiness, but only in an exuberant one. This must have caused some displeasure to the Greeks; for their soul was only too easily wounded: it embittered them to see a happy man. That is Greek. If a man of distinguished talent appeared, the flock of envious people must have become astonishingly large. If any one met with a misfortune, they would say of him: “Ah! no wonder! he was too frivolous and too well off.” And every one of them would have behaved exuberantly if he had possessed the requisite talent, and would willingly have played the role of the god who sent the unhappiness to men.
133
The Greek gods did not demand any complete changes of character, and were, generally speaking, by no means burdensome or importunate . it was thus possible to take them seriously and to believe in them. At the time of Homer, indeed, the nature of the Greek was formed . flippancy of images and imagination was necessary to lighten the weight of its passionate disposition and to set it free.
134
Every religion has for its highest images an analogon in the spiritual condition of those who profess it. The God of Mohammed . the solitariness of the desert, the distant roar of the lion, the vision of a formidable warrior. The God of the Christians . everything that men and women think of when they hear the word “love”. The God of the Greeks: a beautiful apparition in a dream.
135
A great deal of intelligence must have gone to the making up of a Greek polytheism . the expenditure of intelligence is much less lavish when people have only one God.
136
Greek morality is not based on religion, but on the polis .
There were only priests of the individual gods; not representatives of the whole religion . i.e. , no guild of priests. Likewise no Holy Writ.
137
The “lighthearted” gods . this is the highest adornment which has ever been bestowed upon the world–with the feeling, How difficult it is to live!
138
If the Greeks let their “reason” speak, their life seems to them bitter and terrible. They are not deceived. But they play round life with lies: Simonides advises them to treat life as they would a play; earnestness was only too well known to them in the form of pain. The misery of men is a pleasure to the gods when they hear the poets singing of it. Well did the Greeks know that only through art could even misery itself become a source of pleasure, vide tragoediam .
139
It is quite untrue to say that the Greeks only took this life into their consideration–they suffered also from thoughts of death and Hell. But no “repentance” or contrition.
140
The incarnate appearance of gods, as in Sappho’s invocation to Aphrodite, must not be taken as poetic licence . they are frequently hallucinations. We conceive of a great many things, including the will to die, too superficially as rhetorical.
141
The “martyr” is Hellenic: Prometheus, Hercules. The hero-myth became pan-Hellenic: a poet must have had a hand in that!
142
How realistic the Greeks were even in the domain of pure inventions! They poetised reality, not yearning to lift themselves out of it. The raising of the present into the colossal and eternal, e.g. , by Pindar.
143
What condition do the Greeks premise as the model of their life in Hades? Anaemic, dreamlike, weak . it is the continuous accentuation of old age, when the memory gradually becomes weaker and weaker, and the body still more so. The senility of senility . this would be our state of life in the eyes of the Hellenes.
144
The naive character of the Greeks observed by the Egyptians.
145
The truly scientific people, the literary people, were the Egyptians and not the Greeks. That which has the appearance of science among the Greeks, originated among the Egyptians and later on returned to them to mingle again with the old current. Alexandrian culture is an amalgamation of Hellenic and Egyptian . and when our world again founds its culture upon the Alexandrian culture, then…. [12]
146
The Egyptians are far more of a literary people than the Greeks. I maintain this against Wolf. The first grain in Eleusis, the first vine in Thebes, the first olive-tree and fig-tree. The Egyptians had lost a great part of their mythology.
147
The unmathematical undulation of the column in Paestum is analogous to the modification of the tempo : animation in place of a mechanical movement.
148
The desire to find something certain and fixed in aesthetic led to the worship of Aristotle: I think, however, that we may gradually come to see from his works that he understood nothing about art, and that it is merely the intellectual conversations of the Athenians, echoing in his pages, which we admire.
149
In Socrates we have as it were lying open before us a specimen of the consciousness out of which, later on, the instincts of the theoretic man originated: that one would rather die than grow old and weak in mind.
150
At the twilight of antiquity there were still wholly unchristian figures, which were more beautiful, harmonious, and pure than those of any Christians: e.g. , Proclus. His mysticism and syncretism were things that precisely Christianity cannot reproach him with. In any case, it would be my desire to live together with such people. In comparison with them Christianity looks like some crude brutalisation, organised for the benefit of the mob and the criminal classes.
Proclus, who solemnly invokes the rising moon.
151
With the advent of Christianity a religion attained the mastery which corresponded to a pre-Greek condition of mankind: belief in witchcraft in connection with all and everything, bloody sacrifices, superstitious fear of demoniacal punishments, despair in one’s self, ecstatic brooding and hallucination, man’s self become the arena of good and evil spirits and their struggles.
152
All branches of history have experimented with antiquity . critical consideration alone remains. By this term I do not mean conjectural and literary-historical criticism.
153
Antiquity has been treated by all kinds of historians and their methods. We have now had enough experience, however, to turn the history of antiquity to account without being shipwrecked on antiquity itself.
154
We can now look back over a fairly long period of human existence . what will the humanity be like which is able to look back at us from an equally long distance? which finds us lying intoxicated among the debris of old culture! which finds its only consolation in “being good” and in holding out the “helping hand,” and turns away from all other consolations!–Does beauty, too, grow out of the ancient culture? I think that our ugliness arises from our metaphysical remnants . our confused morals, the worthlessness of our marriages, and so on, are the cause. The beautiful man, the healthy, moderate, and enterprising man, moulds the objects around him into beautiful shapes after his own image.
155
Up to the present time all history has been written from the standpoint of success, and, indeed, with the assumption of a certain reason in this success. This remark applies also to Greek history: so far we do not possess any. It is the same all round, however: where are the historians who can survey things and events without being humbugged by stupid theories? I know of only one, Burckhardt. Everywhere the widest possible optimism prevails in science. The question: “What would have been the consequence if so and so had not happened?” is almost unanimously thrust aside, and yet it is the cardinal question. Thus everything becomes ironical. Let us only consider our own lives. If we examine history in accordance with a preconceived plan, let this plan be sought in the purposes of a great man, or perhaps in those of a sex, or of a party. Everything else is a chaos.–Even in natural science we find this deification of the necessary.
Germany has become the breeding-place of this historical optimism; Hegel is perhaps to blame for this. Nothing, however, is more responsible for the fatal influence of German culture. Everything that has been kept down by success gradually rears itself up: history as the scorn of the conqueror; a servile sentiment and a kneeling down before the actual fact–“a sense for the State,” they now call it, as if that had still to be propagated! He who does not understand how brutal and unintelligent history is will never understand the stimulus to make it intelligent. Just think how rare it is to find a man with as great an intelligent knowledge of his own life as Goethe had . what amount of rationality can we expect to find arising out of these other veiled and blind existences as they work chaotically with and in opposition to each other?
And it is especially naive when Hellwald, the author of a history of culture, warns us away from all “ideals,” simply because history has killed them off one after the other.
156
To bring to light without reserve the stupidity and the want of reason in human things . that is the aim of our brethren and colleagues. People will then have to distinguish what is essential in them, what is incorrigible, and what is still susceptible of further improvement. But “Providence” must be kept out of the question, for it is a conception that enables people to take things too easily. I wish to breathe the breath of this purpose into science. Let us advance our knowledge of mankind! The good and rational in man is accidental or apparent, or the contrary of something very irrational. There will come a time when training will be the only thought.
157
Surrender to necessity is exactly what I do not teach–for one must first know this necessity to be necessary. There may perhaps be many necessities; but in general this inclination is simply a bed of idleness.
158
To know history now means . to recognise how all those who believed in a Providence took things too easily. There is no such thing. If human affairs are seen to go forward in a loose and disordered way, do not think that a god has any purpose in view by letting them do so or that he is neglecting them. We can now see in a general way that the history of Christianity on earth has been one of the most dreadful chapters in history, and that a stop must be put to it. True, the influence of antiquity has been observed in Christianity even in our own time, and, as it diminishes, so will our knowledge of antiquity diminish also to an even greater extent. Now is the best time to recognise it: we are no longer prejudiced in favour of Christianity, but we still understand it, and also the antiquity that forms part of it, so far as this antiquity stands in line with Christianity.
159
Philosophic heads must occupy themselves one day with the collective account of antiquity and make up its balance-sheet. If we have this, antiquity will be overcome. All the shortcomings which now vex us have their roots in antiquity, so that we cannot continue to treat this account with the mildness which has been customary up to the present. The atrocious crime of mankind which rendered Christianity possible, as it actually became possible, is the guilt of antiquity. With Christianity antiquity will also be cleared away.–At the present time it is not so very far behind us, and it is certainly not possible to do justice to it. It has been availed of in the most dreadful fashion for purposes of repression, and has acted as a support for religious oppression by disguising itself as “culture.” It was common to hear the saying, “Antiquity has been conquered by Christianity.”
This was a historical fact, and it was thus thought that no harm could come of any dealings with antiquity. Yes, it is so plausible to say that we find Christian ethics “deeper” than Socrates! Plato was easier to compete with! We are at the present time, so to speak, merely chewing the cud of the very battle which was fought in the first centuries of the Christian era–with the exception of the fact that now, instead of the clearly perceptible antiquity which then existed, we have merely its pale ghost; and, indeed, even Christianity itself has become rather ghostlike. It is a battle fought after the decisive battle, a post-vibration. In the end, all the forces of which antiquity consisted have reappeared in Christianity in the crudest possible form: it is nothing new, only quantitatively extraordinary.
160
What severs us for ever from the culture of antiquity is the fact that its foundations have become too shaky for us. A criticism of the Greeks is at the same time a criticism of Christianity; for the bases of the spirit of belief, the religious cult, and witchcraft, are the same in both–There are many rudimentary stages still remaining, but they are by this time almost ready to collapse.
This would be a task . to characterise Greek antiquity as irretrievably lost, and with it Christianity also and the foundations upon which, up to the present time, our society and politics have been based.
161
Christianity has conquered antiquity–yes; that is easily said. In the first place, it is itself a piece of antiquity, in the second place, it has preserved antiquity, in the third place, it has never been in combat with the pure ages of antiquity. Or rather: in order that Christianity itself might remain, it had to let itself be overcome by the spirit of antiquity–for example, the idea of empire, the community, and so forth. We are suffering from the uncommon want of clearness and uncleanliness of human things; from the ingenious mendacity which Christianity has brought among men.
162
It is almost laughable to see how nearly all the sciences and arts of modern times grow from the scattered seeds which have been wafted towards us from antiquity, and how Christianity seems to us here to be merely the evil chill of a long night, a night during which one is almost inclined to believe that all is over with reason and honesty among men. The battle waged against the natural man has given rise to the unnatural man.
163
With the dissolution of Christianity a great part of antiquity has become incomprehensible to us, for instance, the entire religious basis of life. On this account an imitation of antiquity is a false tendency . the betrayers or the betrayed are the philologists who still think of such a thing. We live in a period when many different conceptions of life are to be found: hence the present age is instructive to an unusual degree; and hence also the reason why it is so ill, since it suffers from the evils of all its tendencies at once. The man of the future . the European man.
164
The German Reformation widened the gap between us and antiquity: was it necessary for it to do so? It once again introduced the old contrast of “Paganism” and “Christianity”; and it was at the same time a protest against the decorative culture of the Renaissance–it was a victory gained over the same culture as had formerly been conquered by early Christianity.
In regard to “worldly things,” Christianity preserved the grosser views of the ancients. All the nobler elements in marriage, slavery, and the State are unchristian. It required the distorting characteristics of worldliness to prove itself.
165
The connection between humanism and religious rationalism was emphasised as a Saxonian trait by Kochly: the type of this philologist is Gottfried Hermann. [13]
166
I understand religions as narcotics: but when they are given to such nations as the Germans, I think they are simply rank poison.
167
All religions are, in the end, based upon certain physical assumptions, which are already in existence and adapt the religions to their needs . for example, in Christianity, the contrast between body and soul, the unlimited importance of the earth as the “world,” the marvellous occurrences in nature. If once the opposite views gain the mastery–for instance, a strict law of nature, the helplessness and superfluousness of all gods, the strict conception of the soul as a bodily process–all is over. But all Greek culture is based upon such views.
168
When we look from the character and culture of the Catholic Middle Ages back to the Greeks, we see them resplendent indeed in the rays of higher humanity; for, if we have anything to reproach these Greeks with, we must reproach the Middle Ages with it also to a much greater extent. The worship of the ancients at the time of the Renaissance was therefore quite honest and proper. We have carried matters further in one particular point, precisely in connection with that dawning ray of light. We have outstripped the Greeks in the clarifying of the world by our studies of nature and men. Our knowledge is much greater, and our judgments are more moderate and just.
In addition to this, a more gentle spirit has become widespread, thanks to the period of illumination which has weakened mankind–but this weakness, when turned into morality, leads to good results and honours us. Man has now a great deal of freedom: it is his own fault if he does not make more use of it than he does; the fanaticism of opinions has become much milder. Finally, that we would much rather live in the present age than in any other is due to science, and certainly no other race in the history of mankind has had such a wide choice of noble enjoyments as ours–even if our race has not the palate and stomach to experience a great deal of joy. But one can live comfortably amid all this “freedom” only when one merely understands it and does not wish to participate in it–that is the modern crux. The participants appear to be less attractive than ever . how stupid they must be!
Thus the danger arises that knowledge may avenge itself on us, just as ignorance avenged itself on us during the Middle Ages. It is all over with those religions which place their trust in gods, Providences, rational orders of the universe, miracles, and sacraments, as is also the case with certain types of holy lives, such as ascetics; for we only too easily conclude that such people are the effects of sickness and an aberrant brain. There is no doubt that the contrast between a pure, incorporeal soul and a body has been almost set aside. Who now believes in the immortality of the soul! Everything connected with blessedness or damnation, which was based upon certain erroneous physiological assumptions, falls to the ground as soon as these assumptions are recognised to be errors. Our scientific assumptions admit just as much of an interpretation and utilisation in favour of a besotting philistinism–yea, in favour of bestiality–as also in favour of “blessedness” and soul-inspiration. As compared with all previous ages, we are now standing on a new foundation, so that something may still be expected from the human race.
As regards culture, we have hitherto been acquainted with only one complete form of it, i.e. , the city-culture of the Greeks, based as it was on their mythical and social foundations; and one incomplete form, the Roman, which acted as an adornment of life, derived from the Greek. Now all these bases, the mythical and the politico-social, have changed; our alleged culture has no stability, because it has been erected upon insecure conditions and opinions which are even now almost ready to collapse.–When we thoroughly grasp Greek culture, then, we see that it is all over with it. The philologist is thus a great sceptic in the present conditions of our culture and training . that is his mission. Happy is he if, like Wagner and Schopenhauer, he has a dim presentiment of those auspicious powers amid which a new culture is stirring.
169
Those who say: “But antiquity nevertheless remains as a subject of consideration for pure science, even though all its educational purposes may be disowned,” must be answered by the words, What is pure science here! Actions and characteristics must be judged; and those who judge them must stand above them: so you must first devote your attention to overcoming antiquity. If you do not do that, your science is not pure, but impure and limited . as may now be perceived.
170
To overcome Greek antiquity through our own deeds: this would be the right task. But before we can do this we must first know it!–There is a thoroughness which is merely an excuse for inaction. Let it be recollected how much Goethe knew of antiquity: certainly not so much as a philologist, and yet sufficient to contend with it in such a way as to bring about fruitful results. One should not even know more about a thing than one could create. Moreover, the only time when we can actually recognise something is when we endeavour to make it. Let people but attempt to live after the manner of antiquity, and they will at once come hundreds of miles nearer to antiquity than they can do with all their erudition.–Our philologists never show that they strive to emulate antiquity in any way, and thus their antiquity remains without any effect on the schools.
The study of the spirit of emulation (Renaissance, Goethe), and the study of despair.
The non-popular element in the new culture of the Renaissance: a frightful fact!
171
The worship of classical antiquity, as it was to be seen in Italy, may be interpreted as the only earnest, disinterested, and fecund worship which has yet fallen to the lot of antiquity. It is a splendid example of Don Quixotism; and philology at best is such Don Quixotism. Already at the time of the Alexandrian savants, as with all the sophists of the first and second centuries, the Atticists, &c., the scholars are imitating something purely and simply chimerical and pursuing a world that never existed. The same trait is seen throughout antiquity . the manner in which the Homeric heroes were copied, and all the intercourse held with the myths, show traces of it. Gradually all Greek antiquity has become an object of Don Quixotism. It is impossible to understand our modern world if we do not take into account the enormous influence of the purely fantastic. This is now confronted by the principle . there can be no imitation. Imitation, however, is merely an artistic phenomenon, i.e. , it is based on appearance . we can accept manners, thoughts, and so on through imitation; but imitation can create nothing. True, the creator can borrow from all sides and nourish himself in that way. And it is only as creators that we shall be able to take anything from the Greeks. But in what respect can philologists be said to be creators! There must be a few dirty jobs, such as knackers’ men, and also text-revisers: are the philologists to carry out tasks of this nature?
172
What, then, is antiquity now , in the face of modern art, science, and philosophy? It is no longer the treasure-chamber of all knowledge; for in natural and historical science we have advanced greatly beyond it. Oppression by the church has been stopped. A pure knowledge of antiquity is now possible, but perhaps also a more ineffective and weaker knowledge.–This is right enough, if effect is known only as effect on the masses; but for the breeding of higher minds antiquity is more powerful than ever.
Goethe as a German poet-philologist; Wagner as a still higher stage: his clear glance for the only worthy position of art. No ancient work has ever had so powerful an effect as the “Orestes” had on Wagner. The objective, emasculated philologist, who is but a philistine of culture and a worker in “pure science,” is, however, a sad spectacle.
173
Between our highest art and philosophy and that which is recognised to be truly the oldest antiquity, there is no contradiction: they support and harmonise with one another. It is in this that I place my hopes.
174
The main standpoints from which to consider the importance of antiquity:
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There is nothing about it for young people, for it exhibits man with an entire freedom from shame.
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It is not for direct imitation, but it teaches by which means art has hitherto been perfected in the highest degree.
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It is accessible only to a few, and there should be a police des moeurs, in charge of it–as there should be also in charge of bad pianists who play Beethoven.
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These few apply this antiquity to the judgment of our own time, as critics of it; and they judge antiquity by their own ideals and are thus critics of antiquity.
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The contract between the Hellenic and the Roman should be studied, and also the contrast between the early Hellenic and the late Hellenic.–Explanation of the different types of culture.
175
The advancement of science at the expense of man is one of the most pernicious things in the world. The stunted man is a retrogression in the human race: he throws a shadow over all succeeding generations The tendencies and natural purpose of the individual science become degenerate, and science itself is finally shipwrecked: it has made progress, but has either no effect at all on life or else an immoral one.
176
Men not to be used like things!
From the former very incomplete philology and knowledge of antiquity there flowed out a stream of freedom, while our own highly developed knowledge produces slaves and serves the idol of the State.
177
There will perhaps come a time when scientific work will be carried on by women, while the men will have to create, using the word in a spiritual sense: states, laws, works of art, &c.
People should study typical antiquity just as they do typical men: i.e. , imitating what they understand of it, and, when the pattern seems to lie far in the distance, considering ways and means and preliminary preparations, and devising stepping-stones.
178
The whole feature of study lies in this: that we should study only what we feel we should like to imitate; what we gladly take up and have the desire to multiply. What is really wanted is a progressive canon of the ideal model, suited to boys, youths, and men.
179
Goethe grasped antiquity in the right way . invariably with an emulative soul. But who else did so? One sees nothing of a well-thought-out pedagogics of this nature: who knows that there is a certain knowledge of antiquity which cannot be imparted to youths!
The puerile character of philology: devised by teachers for pupils.
180
The ever more and more common form of the ideal: first men, then institutions, finally tendencies, purposes, or the want of them. The highest form: the conquest of the ideal by a backward movement from tendencies to institutions, and from institutions to men.
181
I will set down in writing what I no longer believe–and also what I do believe. Man stands in the midst of the great whirlpool of forces, and imagines that this whirlpool is rational and has a rational aim in view: error! The only rationality that we know is the small reason of man: he must exert it to the utmost, and it invariably leaves him in the lurch if he tries to place himself in the hands of “Providence.”
Our only happiness lies in reason; all the remainder of the world is dreary. The highest reason, however, is seen by me in the work of the artist, and he can feel it to be such: there may be something which, when it can be consciously brought forward, may afford an even greater feeling of reason and happiness: for example, the course of the solar system, the breeding and education of a man.
Happiness lies in rapidity of feeling and thinking: everything else is slow, gradual, and stupid. The man who could feel the progress of a ray of light would be greatly enraptured, for it is very rapid.
Thinking of one’s self affords little happiness. But when we do experience happiness therein the reason is that we are not thinking of ourselves, but of our ideal. This lies far off; and only the rapid man attains it and rejoices.
An amalgamation of a great centre of men for the breeding of better men is the task of the future. The individual must become familiarised with claims that, when he says Yea to his own will, he also says Yea to the will of that centre–for example, in reference to a choice, as among women for marriage, and likewise as to the manner in which his child shall be brought up. Until now no single individuality, or only the very rarest, have been free: they were influenced by these conceptions, but likewise by the bad and contradictory organisation of the individual purposes.
182
Education is in the first place instruction in what is necessary, and then in what is changing and inconstant. The youth is introduced to nature, and the sway of laws is everywhere pointed out to him; followed by an explanation of the laws of ordinary society. Even at this early stage the question will arise: was it absolutely necessary that this should have been so? He gradually comes to need history to ascertain how these things have been brought about. He learns at the same time, however, that they may be changed into something else. What is the extent of man’s power over things? This is the question in connection with all education. To show how things may become other than what they are we may, for example, point to the Greeks. We need the Romans to show how things became what they were.
183
If, then, the Romans had spurned the Greek culture, they would perhaps have gone to pieces completely. When could this culture have once again arisen? Christianity and Romans and barbarians: this would have been an onslaught: it would have entirely wiped out culture. We see the danger amid which genius lives. Cicero was one of the greatest benefactors of humanity, even in his own time.
There is no “Providence” for genius; it is only for the ordinary run of people and their wants that such a thing exists: they find their satisfaction, and later on their justification.
184
Thesis: the death of ancient culture inevitable. Greek culture must be distinguished as the archetype; and it must be shown how all culture rests upon shaky conceptions.
The dangerous meaning of art: as the protectress and galvanisation of dead and dying conceptions; history, in so far as it wishes to restore to us feelings which we have overcome. To feel “historically” or “just” towards what is already past, is only possible when we have risen above it. But the danger in the adoption of the feelings necessary for this is very great . let the dead bury their dead, so that we ourselves may not come under the influence of the smell of the corpses.
THE DEATH OF THE OLD CULTURE.
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The signification of the studies of antiquity hitherto pursued: obscure; mendacious.
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As soon as they recognise the goal they condemn themselves to death . for their goal is to describe ancient culture itself as one to be demolished.
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The collection of all the conceptions out of which Hellenic culture has grown up. Criticism of religion, art, society, state, morals.
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Christianity is likewise denied.
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Art and history–dangerous.
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The replacing of the study of antiquity which has become superfluous for the training of our youth.
Thus the task of the science of history is completed and it itself has become superfluous, if the entire inward continuous circle of past efforts has been condemned. Its place must be taken by the science of the future .
185
“Signs” and “miracles” are not believed; only a “Providence” stands in need of such things. There is no help to be found either in prayer or asceticism or in “vision.” If all these things constitute religion, then there is no more religion for me.
My religion, if I can still apply this name to something, lies in the work of breeding genius . from such training everything is to be hoped. All consolation comes from art. Education is love for the offspring; an excess of love over and beyond our self-love. Religion is “love beyond ourselves.” The work of art is the model of such a love beyond ourselves, and a perfect model at that.
186
The stupidity of the will is Schopenhauer’s greatest thought, if thoughts be judged from the standpoint of power. We can see in Hartmann how he juggled away this thought. Nobody will ever call something stupid–God.
187
This, then, is the new feature of all the future progress of the world . men must never again be ruled over by religious conceptions. Will they be any worse ? It is not my experience that they behave well and morally under the yoke of religion; I am not on the side of Demopheles [14] The fear of a beyond, and then again the fear of divine punishments will hardly have made men better.
188
Where something great makes its appearance and lasts for a relatively long time, we may premise a careful breeding, as in the case of the Greeks. How did so many men become free among them? Educate educators! But the first educators must educate themselves! And it is for these that I write.
189
The denial of life is no longer an easy matter: a man may become a hermit or a monk–and what is thereby denied! This conception has now become deeper . it is above all a discerning denial, a denial based upon the will to be just; not an indiscriminate and wholesale denial.
190
The seer must be affectionate, otherwise men will have no confidence in him . Cassandra.
191
The man who to-day wishes to be good and saintly has a more difficult task than formerly . in order to be “good,” he must not be so unjust to knowledge as earlier saints were. He would have to be a knowledge-saint: a man who would link love with knowledge, and who would have nothing to do with gods or demigods or “Providence,” as the Indian saints likewise had nothing to do with them. He should also be healthy, and should keep himself so, otherwise he would necessarily become distrustful of himself. And perhaps he would not bear the slightest resemblance to the ascetic saint, but would be much more like a man of the world.
192
The better the state is organised, the duller will humanity be.
To make the individual uncomfortable is my task!
The great pleasure experienced by the man who liberates himself by fighting.
Spiritual heights have had their age in history; inherited energy belongs to them. In the ideal state all would be over with them.
193
The highest judgment on life only arising from the highest energy of life. The mind must be removed as far as possible from exhaustion.
In the centre of the world-history judgment will be the most accurate; for it was there that the greatest geniuses existed.
The breeding of the genius as the only man who can truly value and deny life.
Save your genius! shall be shouted unto the people: set him free! Do all you can to unshackle him.
The feeble and poor in spirit must not be allowed to judge life.
194
I dream of a combination of men who shall make no concessions, who shall show no consideration, and who shall be willing to be called “destroyers”: they apply the standard of their criticism to everything and sacrifice themselves to truth. The bad and the false shall be brought to light! We will not build prematurely: we do not know, indeed, whether we shall ever be able to build, or if it would not be better not to build at all. There are lazy pessimists and resigned ones in this world–and it is to their number that we refuse to belong!
FOOTNOTES:
[1] No doubt a reminiscence of the “Odyssey,” Bk. ix–TR.
[2] Formal education is that which tends to develop the critical and logical faculties, as opposed to material education, which is intended to deal with the acquisition of knowledge and its valuation, e.g. , history, mathematics, &c. “Material” education, of course, has nothing to do with materialism–TR.
[3] The reference is not to Pope, but to Hegel.–TR.
[4] Friedrich August Wolf (1759-1824), the well-known classical scholar, now chiefly remembered by his “Prolegomena ad Homerum.”–TR.
[5] Students who pass certain examinations need only serve one year in the German Army instead of the usual two or three–TR.
[6] Otto Jahn (1813-69), who is probably best remembered in philological circles by his edition of Juvenal.–TR.
[7] Gustav Freytag at one time a famous German novelist–TR.
[8] A well-known anti-Wagnerian musical critic of Vienna.–TR.
[9] See note on p 149.–TR.
[10] Karl Ottfried Muller (1797-1840), classical archaeologist, who devoted special attention to Greece–TR.
[11] Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker (1784-1868), noted for his ultra-profound comments on Greek poetry–TR.
[12] “We shall once again be shipwrecked.” The omission is in the original–TR.
[13] Johann Gottfried Jakob Hermann (1772-1848), noted for his works on metre and Greek grammar.–TR.
[14] A type in Schopenhauer’s Essay “On Religion.” See “Parerga and Paralipomena”–TR.
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Friedrich Nietzsche
Summary | Biography | Philosophy | Works | Nietzsche’s reading | Nietzsche’s influence and reception
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Summary
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 - August 25, 1900) was a nineteenth-century German philosopher and philologist. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy, and science, using a distinctive German language style and displaying a fondness for aphorism. Nietzsche’s influence remains substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism and postmodernism. His style, and radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth, raise considerable problems of interpretation, generating an extensive secondary literature in both continental and analytic philosophy. Nonetheless, his key ideas include interpreting tragedy as an affirmation of life, an eternal recurrence that has become subject to numerous interpretations, a rejection of Platonism, and a repudiation of (especially 19th-century) Christianity.
Nietzsche began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. At the age of 24 he became the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, the youngest ever holder of this position, but resigned in 1879 due to health problems, which would plague him for most of his life. In 1889 he exhibited symptoms of a serious mental illness, living out his remaining years in the care of his mother and sister until his death in 1900.
Biography
Youth (1844-1869)
Born on 15 October 1844, Nietzsche grew up in the small town of Röcken, near Leipzig, in the Prussian Province of Saxony. His name comes from King Frederick William IV of Prussia, who turned 49 on the day of Nietzsche’s birth. (Nietzsche later dropped his given middle name, “Wilhelm”.) Nietzsche’s parents, Carl Ludwig (1813-1849), a Lutheran pastor and former teacher, and Franziska Oehler (1826-1897), married in 1843. His sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, was born in 1846, followed by a brother, Ludwig Joseph, in 1848. Nietzsche’s father died from a brain ailment in 1849; his younger brother died in 1850. Some have suggested that his later brain disease may have been a genetic atavism inherited from his father. The family then moved to Naumburg, where they lived with Nietzsche’s paternal grandmother and his father’s two unmarried sisters. After the death of Nietzsche’s grandmother in 1856, the family moved into their own house.
Friedrich Nietzsche, 1861.
Nietzsche attended a boys’ school and later a private school, where he became friends with Gustav Krug and Wilhelm Pinder, both of whom came from respected families. In 1854 he began to attend the Domgymnasium in Naumburg, but after he showed particular talents in music and language, the internationally-recognized Schulpforta admitted him as a pupil, and there he continued his studies from 1858 to 1864. Here he became friends with Paul Deussen and Carl von Gersdorff. He also found time to work on poems and musical compositions. At Schulpforta, Nietzsche received an important introduction to literature, particularly that of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and for the first time experienced a distance from his family life in a small-town Christian environment.
After graduation in 1864, Nietzsche commenced studies in theology and classical philology at the University of Bonn. For a short time, he and Deussen became members of the Burschenschaft Frankonia. After one semester (and to the anger of his mother) he stopped his theological studies and lost his faith. This may have happened in part due to his reading about this time of David Strauss’ Life of Jesus, which had a profound effect on the young Nietzsche, though in an essay entitled Fate and History written in 1862, Nietzsche had already argued that historical research had discredited the central teachings of Christianity. Nietzsche then concentrated on studying philology under Professor Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl, whom he followed to the University of Leipzig the next year. There, he became close friends with fellow-student Erwin Rohde. Nietzsche’s first philological publications appeared soon after.
In 1865, Nietzsche thoroughly studied the works of Arthur Schopenhauer and he read Friedrich Albert Lange’s History of Materialism in 1866. His encounter with Schopenhauer’s ideas had an influence on him until the end of his sentient life. Lange’s descriptions of Kant’s anti-materialistic philosophy, the rise of European Materialism, Europe’s increased concern with science, Darwin’s theory, and the general rebellion against tradition and authority were of great interest to Nietzsche. He was encouraged to expand his horizons beyond philology and to continue his study of philosophy. In 1867, Nietzsche signed up for one year of voluntary service with the Prussian artillery division in Naumburg. However, a bad riding accident in March 1868 left him unfit for service. Consequently Nietzsche turned his attention to his studies again, completing them and first meeting with Richard Wagner later that year.
Professor at Basel (1869-1879)
Mid October, 1871. Left to right: Erwin Rohde, Carl von Gersdorff and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Due in part to Ritschl’s support, Nietzsche received a generous offer to become professor of classical philology at the University of Basel before having completed his doctorate or certificate for teaching. This opportunity was presented at the exact time that Nietzsche was losing all interest in philology and becoming extremely interested in philosophy. On moving to Basel, Nietzsche renounced his Prussian citizenship: for the rest of his life he remained officially stateless.
Nevertheless, he served on the Prussian side during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871 as a medical orderly. In his short time in the military he experienced much, and witnessed the traumatic effects of battle. He also contracted diphtheria and dysentery. Walter Kaufmann speculates that he might also have contracted syphilis along with his other infections at this time and some biographers speculate that syphilis caused his eventual madness, though there is some dispute on this matter. On returning to Basel in 1870, Nietzsche observed the establishment of the German Empire and the following era of Otto von Bismarck as an outsider and with a degree of skepticism regarding its genuineness. At the University, he delivered his inaugural lecture, “Homer and Classical Philology”. Nietzsche also met Franz Overbeck, a professor of theology, who remained his friend throughout his life. Afrikan Spir, a little-known Russian philosopher and author of Thought and Reality (1873), and his colleague the historian Jacob Burckhardt, whose lectures Nietzsche frequently attended, began to exercise significant influence on Nietzsche during this time.
Nietzsche had already met Richard Wagner in Leipzig in 1868, and (some time later) Wagner’s wife Cosima. Nietzsche admired both greatly, and during his time at Basel frequently visited Wagner’s house in Tribschen in the Canton of Lucerne. The Wagners brought Nietzsche into their most intimate circle, and enjoyed the attention he gave to the beginning of the Bayreuth Festival Theatre. In 1870, he gave Cosima Wagner the manuscript of ‘The Genesis of the Tragic Idea’ as a birthday gift. In 1872, Nietzsche published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. However, his colleagues in the field of classical philology, including Ritschl, expressed little enthusiasm for the work, in which Nietzsche forewent a precise philological method to employ a style of philosophical speculation. In a polemic, Philology of the Future, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff dampened the book’s reception and increased its notoriety. In response, Rohde (by now a professor in Kiel) and Wagner came to Nietzsche’s defense. Nietzsche remarked freely about the isolation he felt within the philological community and attempted to attain a position in philosophy at Basel, though unsuccessfully.
Friedrich Nietzsche in Basel, ca. 1875.
Between 1873 and 1876, Nietzsche published separately four long essays: David Strauss: the Confessor and the Writer, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Schopenhauer as Educator, and Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. (These four later appeared in a collected edition under the title, Untimely Meditations.) The four essays shared the orientation of a cultural critique, challenging the developing German culture along lines suggested by Schopenhauer and Wagner. Starting in 1873, Nietzsche also accumulated the notes later posthumously published as Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. During this time, in the circle of the Wagners, Nietzsche met Malwida von Meysenbug and Hans von Bülow, and also began a friendship with Paul Rée, who in 1876 influenced him in dismissing the pessimism in his early writings. However, his disappointment with the Bayreuth Festival of 1876, where the banality of the shows and the baseness of the public repelled him, caused him in the end to distance himself from Wagner.
With the publication of Human, All Too Human in 1878, a book of aphorisms on subjects ranging from metaphysics to morality and from religion to the sexes, Nietzsche’s reaction against the pessimistic philosophy of Wagner and Schopenhauer became evident. Nietzsche’s friendship with Deussen and Rohde cooled as well. Nietzsche in this time attempted to find a wife - to no avail. In 1879, after a significant decline in health, Nietzsche had to resign his position at Basel. (Since his childhood, various disruptive illnesses had plagued him - moments of shortsightedness practically to the degree of blindness, migraine headaches, and violent stomach attacks. The 1868 riding accident and diseases in 1870 may have aggravated these persistent conditions, which continued to affect him through his years at Basel, forcing him to take longer and longer holidays until regular work became impractical.)
Independent philosopher (1879-1888)
Because his illness drove him to find more compatible climates, Nietzsche traveled frequently, and lived until 1889 as an independent author in different cities. He spent many summers in Sils Maria, near St. Moritz in Switzerland, and many winters in the Italian cities of Genoa, Rapallo, and Turin, and in the French city of Nice. In 1881, when France occupied Tunisia, he planned to travel to Tunis in order to gain a view of Europe from the outside, but later abandoned that idea (probably for health reasons).
Nietzsche occasionally returned to Naumburg to visit his family, and, especially during this time, he and his sister had repeated periods of conflict and reconciliation. He lived on his pension from Basel, but also received aid from friends. A past student of his, Peter Gast (born Heinrich Köselitz), became a sort of private secretary to Nietzsche. To the end of his life, Gast and Overbeck remained consistently faithful friends. Malwida von Meysenbug remained like a motherly patron even outside the Wagner circle. Soon Nietzsche made contact with the music-critic Carl Fuchs. Nietzsche stood at the beginning of his most productive period. Beginning with Human, All Too Human in 1878, Nietzsche would publish one book (or major section of a book) each year until 1888, his last year of writing, during which he completed five.
Lou Salomé, Paul Rée and Nietzsche, 1882.
In 1882 Nietzsche published the first part of The Gay Science. That year he also met Lou Andreas Salomé through Malwida von Meysenbug and Paul Rée. Nietzsche and Salomé spent the summer together in Tautenburg in Thuringia, often with Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth as chaperone. However, Nietzsche regarded Salomé less as an equal partner than as a gifted student. Nietzsche fell in love with Salomé and pursued her with the help of their mutual friend Rée. Salomé reports that he asked her to marry him and that she refused, though the reliability of her reports of events has come into question. Nietzsche’s relationship with Rée and Salomé broke up in the winter of 1882/1883, partially due to intrigues conducted by Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth. In the face of renewed fits of illness, in near isolation after a falling-out with his mother and sister regarding Salomé, and plagued by suicidal thoughts, Nietzsche fled to Rapallo, where he wrote the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in only ten days.
After severing his philosophical ties with Schopenhauer and his social ties with Wagner, Nietzsche had few remaining friends. Now, with the new style of Zarathustra, his work became even more alienating and the market received it only to the degree required by politeness. Nietzsche recognized this and maintained his solitude, even though he often complained about it. His books remained largely unsold. In 1885, he printed only 40 copies of the fourth part of Zarathustra, and distributed only a fraction of these among close friends, including Helene von Druskowitz.
In 1886 Nietzsche broke with his editor, Ernst Schmeitzner, disgusted over his anti-Semitic opinions. Nietzsche saw his writings as “completely buried and unexhumeable in this anti-Semitic dump” of Schmeitzner - associating the editor with a movement that should be “utterly rejected with cold contempt by every sensible mind”. He then printed Beyond Good and Evil at his own expense, and issued in 1886-87 second editions of his earlier works (The Birth of Tragedy, Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and The Gay Science), accompanied by new prefaces in which he re-read his earlier works. Hereafter, he saw his work as completed for the time and hoped that soon a readership would develop. In fact, interest in Nietzsche’s thought did increase at this time, even if rather slowly and hardly perceived by him. During these years Nietzsche met Meta von Salis, Carl Spitteler, and also Gottfried Keller. In 1886, his sister Elisabeth married the anti-Semite Bernhard Förster and traveled to Paraguay to found Nueva Germania, a “Germanic” colony - a plan to which Nietzsche responded with laughter. Through correspondence, Nietzsche’s relationship with Elisabeth continued on the path of conflict and reconciliation, but they would meet again only after his collapse. He continued to have frequent and painful attacks of illness, which made prolonged work impossible. In 1887, Nietzsche wrote the polemic On the Genealogy of Morality.
During this year Nietzsche encountered Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s work, which according to some, he quickly appropriated. He also exchanged letters with Hippolyte Taine, and then also with Georg Brandes. Brandes, who had started to teach the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard in the 1870s, wrote to Nietzsche asking him to read Kierkegaard, to which Nietzsche replied that he would come to Copenhagen and read Kierkegaard with him. However, before fulfilling this undertaking, he slipped too far into sickness and madness. In the beginning of 1888, in Copenhagen, Brandes delivered one of the first lectures on Nietzsche’s philosophy.
Although Nietzsche had in 1886 announced (at the end of Beyond Good and Evil) a new work with the title The Will to Power. Essay of a transvaluation of all values, he eventually abandoned this project and used its draft materials to compose Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist (both written in 1888).
His health seemed to improve, and he spent the summer in high spirits. In the fall of 1888 his writings and letters began to reveal a higher estimation of his own status and “fate.” He overestimated the increasing response to his writings, especially to the recent polemic, The Case of Wagner. On his 44th birthday, after completing Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, he decided to write the autobiography Ecce Homo, which presents itself to his readers in order that they “[h]ear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else.” (Preface, section 1, translated by Walter Kaufmann) In December, Nietzsche began a correspondence with August Strindberg, and thought that, short of an international breakthrough, he would attempt to buy back his older writings from the publisher and have them translated into other European languages. Moreover, he planned the publication of the compilation Nietzsche Contra Wagner and of the poems Dionysian Dithyrambs.
Mental breakdown and death (1889-1900)
A photo by Hans Olde from the photographic series “The Ill Nietzsche”, summer of 1899.
On January 3, 1889, Nietzsche exhibited signs of what was perceived as a serious mental illness. Two policemen approached him after he caused a public disturbance in the streets of Turin. What actually happened remains unknown, but the often-repeated tale states that Nietzsche witnessed the whipping of a horse at the other end of the Piazza Carlo Alberto, ran to the horse, threw his arms up around the horse’s neck to protect it, and collapsed to the ground. The first dream-sequence from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Part 1, Chapter 5) has just such a scene in which Raskolnikov witnesses the whipping of a horse around the eyes. Incidentally, Nietzsche called Dostoevsky “the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn.”
In the following few days, Nietzsche sent short writings - known as the “Wahnbriefe” (“Madness Letters”) - to a number of friends (including Cosima Wagner and Jacob Burckhardt). To his former colleague Burckhardt, Nietzsche wrote: “I have had Caiaphas put in fetters. Also, last year I was crucified by the German doctors in a very drawn-out manner. Wilhelm, Bismarck, and all anti-Semites abolished.” Additionally, he commanded the German emperor to go to Rome in order to be shot and summoned the European powers to take military action against Germany.
On January 6, 1889, Burckhardt showed the letter he had received from Nietzsche to Overbeck. The following day, Overbeck received a similarly revealing letter, and decided that Nietzsche’s friends had to bring him back to Basel. Overbeck traveled to Turin and brought Nietzsche to a psychiatric clinic in Basel. By that time, Nietzsche appeared fully in the grip of insanity, and his mother Franziska decided to transfer him to a clinic in Jena under the direction of Otto Binswanger. From November 1889 to February 1890, Julius Langbehn attempted to cure Nietzsche, claiming that the doctors’ methods were ineffective to cure Nietzsche’s condition. Langbehn assumed progressively greater control of Nietzsche until his secrecy discredited him. In March 1890 Franziska removed Nietzsche from the clinic, and in May 1890 brought him to her home in Naumburg. During this process, Overbeck and Gast contemplated what to do with Nietzsche’s unpublished works. In January 1889 they proceeded with the planned release of Twilight of the Idols, by that time already printed and bound. In February, they ordered a 50-copy private edition of Nietzsche contra Wagner, but the publisher C. G. Naumann secretly printed 100. Overbeck and Gast decided to withhold publishing The Antichrist and Ecce Homo due to their more radical content. Nietzsche’s reception and recognition enjoyed their first surge.
Peter Gast would “correct” Nietzsche’s writings even after the philosopher’s breakdown and so without his approval - something heavily criticized by contemporary Nietzsche scholarship.
In 1893 Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth returned from Nueva Germania (Paraguay) following the suicide of her husband. She read and studied Nietzsche’s works, and piece by piece took control of them and of their publication. Overbeck eventually suffered dismissal, and Gast finally co-operated. After the death of Franziska in 1897, Nietzsche lived in Weimar, where Elisabeth cared for him and allowed people, including Rudolf Steiner, to visit her uncommunicative brother.
Commentators have frequently diagnosed a syphilitic infection as the cause of the illness. While most commentators regard Nietzsche’s breakdown as unrelated to his philosophy, some, including Georges Bataille and René Girard, argue that his breakdown may have been caused by a psychological maladjustment brought on by his philosophy. At least one study suggested that it was brain cancer, rather than syphilis, that led to his breakdown and killed him ; others have suggested that Nietzsche’s “madness” was frontotemporal dementia.
In 1898 and 1899, Nietzsche suffered from at least two strokes which partially paralysed him and left him unable to speak or walk. After contracting pneumonia in mid-August 1900, he had another stroke during the night of August 24 / August 25, and then died about noon on August 25. Elisabeth had him buried beside his father at the church in Röcken. His friend, Gast, gave his funeral oration, proclaiming: “Holy be your name to all future generations!” Nietzsche had written in Ecce Homo (then unpublished) of his fear that one day his name would be regarded as “holy”.
Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche compiled The Will to Power, from notes he had written, and published it posthumously. Since his sister arranged the book, the general consensus holds that it does not reflect Nietzsche’s intent. Indeed, Mazzino Montinari, the editor of Nietzsche’s Nachlass, called it a forgery in The ‘Will to Power’ does not exist. Among other forgeries and suppressions of passages, Elisabeth removed aphorism 35 of The Antichrist, where Nietzsche rewrote a passage of the Bible (see The Will to Power and Nietzsche’s criticisms of anti-Semitism and nationalism).
Note on citizenship, nationality and ethnicity
Nietzsche had Saxon ancestry, Prussian birth, a Polish self-image, Swiss residence, official statelessness and an international intellectual outlook/influence: he never held citizenship of the German Empire founded in 1871. At the time of his appointment to Basel, Nietzsche applied for the annullment of his Prussian citizenship The official response came in a document dated 17 April 1869. Janz comments:
Von diesem Tage an war Nietzsche also staatsrechtlich kein Preusse und kein Deutscher mehr, sondern.. staatenlos, oder, wie der Terminus damals in der Schweiz lautete, heimatlos, was auf Nietzsche besonders zutrifft, und er blieb es.. Er wurde und blieb Europäer.
[Translation:] So from this day onwards Nietzsche, in terms of international law, was no longer a Prussian and no longer a German, but.. stateless, or in the terminology used in Switzerland at that time, “homeland-less”, which was particularly appropriate for Nietzsche; and he remained so.. He became and remained a European [italics in original].
Philosophy
Friedrich Nietzsche, 1882
Nietzsche’s works did not reach a wide readership during his active writing career. However, in 1888, Georg Brandes (an influential Scandinavian critic) aroused considerable excitement about Nietzsche through a series of lectures. Then in 1894, Lou Andreas-Salomé published her book, Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken [Friedrich Nietzsche in His Works]. Andreas-Salomé had known Nietzsche intimately in the early 1880s, and she returned to the subject of Nietzsche, years later, in her work Lebensrückblick - Grundriß einiger Lebenserinnerungen [Looking Back: Memoirs] (written in 1932), which covered her intellectual relationships with Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud. Nietzsche himself had acquired the publication-rights for his earlier works in 1886 and began a process of editing and re-formulation that placed the body of his work in a more coherent perspective.
In the years after his death in 1900, Nietzsche’s works became widely read, partly thanks to translations into other languages, including English. In the United States, extensive translations of Nietzsche’s works appeared, translated by Walter Kaufmann, who also wrote influential interpretations of Nietzsche’s philosophy (such as Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950), which he revised and enlarged in numerous later editions). Many other major 20th-century philosophers wrote commentaries on Nietzsche’s philosophy, including Martin Heidegger, who produced a four-volume study, and even more (particularly in the tradition of continental philosophy) cited him as a profound influence on their own philosophy including Jean Paul Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, and many others.
Nietzsche’s works remain controversial, and no real consensus exists on their meaning. The interpretation of his works seems shakier than the interpretative literature on most other major philosophers. One can readily identify some key concepts, but the meaning of each, let alone the relative significance of each, remains contested.
Part of the difficulty in interpreting Nietzsche arises from the uniquely provocative style of his philosophical writing. Nietzsche called himself a philosopher of the hammer, and he frequently delivered trenchant critiques of Christianity and of great philosophers like Plato and Kant in the most offensive and blasphemous terms possible given the context of 19th-century Europe. His arguments often employed ad-hominem attacks and emotional appeals, and, particularly in his aphoristic works, he often jumps from one grand assertion to another (leaping from mountain-top to mountain-top, as he describes it), with little sustained logical support or elucidation of the connection between his ideas. However, these assertions represent not merely fragmented thoughts, but rather a part of Nietzsche’s overarching goal, for as Nietzsche had stated “A man without a plan, is not a man.” All these aspects of Nietzsche’s style run counter to traditional values in philosophical writing, and they alienated Nietzsche from the academic establishment both in his time and, to a lesser extent, today (when some analytic philosophers still tend to dismiss Nietzsche as inconsistent and speculative, practising something other than “real” philosophy).
A few of the themes that Nietzsche scholars have devoted the most attention to include Nietzsche’s views on morality, his view that “God is dead” (and along with it any sort of God’s-eye view on the world thus leading to perspectivism), his notions of the will to power and Übermensch, and his suggestion of eternal return.
Morality
It is in Daybreak that Nietzsche begins his “Campaign against Morality”. He calls himself an immoralist and harshly criticizes the prominent moral schemes of his day: Christianity, Kantianism, and Utilitarianism. However, Nietzsche did not want to destroy morality, but rather to initiate a re-evaluation of the values of the Judeo-Christian world. He indicates his desire to bring about a new, more naturalistic source of value in the vital impulses of life itself (readers have also often seen this as a desire to return to the values of Homeric Greece).
In both these projects, Nietzsche’s genealogical account of the development of master-slave morality occupies a central place. Nietzsche presents master-morality as the original system of morality - perhaps best associated with Homeric Greece. Here, value arises as a contrast between good and bad: wealth, strength, health, and power (the sort of traits found in an Homeric hero) count as good; whereas badness becomes associated with the poor, weak, sick, and pathetic (the sort of traits conventionally found amongst ancient Greek slaves).
Slave-morality, in contrast, can only come about as a reaction to master-morality. Nietzsche associates slave-morality with the Jewish and Christian traditions. Here, value emerges from the contrast between good and evil: good associated with charity, piety, restraint, meekness, and subservience; evil seen in the cruel, selfish, wealthy, indulgent, and aggressive. Nietzsche sees slave-morality as an ingenious ploy among the slaves and the weak (such as the Jewish slaves in Egypt or the Christians dominated by Rome) to overturn the values of their masters and to gain value for themselves: explaining their situation, and at the same time fixing themselves in a slave-like life.
Whatever its cleverness, Nietzsche sees slave-morality as a sickness which has overtaken Europe - a derivative and resentful sort of value, which can only work by condemning others as evil. In Nietzsche’s eyes, Christianity exists in a hypocritical state where people preach love and kindness but find their real enjoyment in condemning others for enjoying the impulses they themselves are not allowed to act on. Nietzsche calls for the strong in the world to break their self-imposed chains and assert their own power, health, and vitality on the world.
The death of God, nihilism, and perspectivism
The statement “God is dead,” occurring in several of Nietzsche’s works, has probably become the single most-quoted line in all of Nietzsche’s texts. Many people take the quotation as a reflection of Nietzsche’s concerns about the development of Western society in the modern age. In Nietzsche’s view, recent developments in modern science and the increasing secularization of European society had effectively “killed” the Christian God, who had served as the basis for meaning and value in the West for the previous thousand years.
Nietzsche claimed the “death of God” would eventually lead to the loss of any universal perspective on things, and along with it any coherent sense of objective truth. Instead we would retain only our own multiple, diverse, and fluid perspectives. This view has acquired the name “perspectivism”.
Alternatively, the death of God may lead beyond bare perspectivism (to which some appeal in support of tolerant relativism) to outright nihilism, the belief that nothing is of any importance and that life lacks purpose. As Heidegger put the problem, “If God as the suprasensory ground and goal of all reality is dead, if the suprasensory world of the Ideas has suffered the loss of its obligatory and above it its vitalizing and upbuilding power, then nothing more remains to which man can cling and by which he can orient himself.” This was a crisis unrecognized by the secular-minded people of Nietzsche’s day, and it was to both clarify and to overcome it that Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra and introduced the concept of a value-creating Übermensch. According to Lampert, “the death of God must be followed by a long twilight of piety and nihilism (II. 19; III. 8). [..] Zarathustra’s gift of the superman is given to a mankind not aware of the problem to which the superman is the solution.”
The Will to Power
Probably the most important aspect of Nietzsche’s picture of human psychology arises in the “will to power”, which Nietzsche at points claims as the motivation that underlies all human behavior.
Some commentators understand Nietzsche’s notion of the “will to power” as a response to Schopenhauer’s “will to live”. Writing a generation before Nietzsche, Schopenhauer had regarded the entire universe and everything in it as driven by a primordial will to live - resulting in all creatures’ desire to avoid death and to procreate. Nietzsche, however, challenges Schopenhauer’s account and suggests that people and animals really want power; living in itself appears only as a subsidiary aim - something necessary to promote one’s power. In defense of his view, Nietzsche appeals to many instances in which people and animals willingly risk their lives in order to promote their power, most notably in instances like competitive fighting and warfare. Once again, Nietzsche seems to take part of his inspiration from the ancient Homeric Greek texts he knew well: Greek heroes and aristocrats or “masters” did not desire mere living - often dying quite young and risking their lives in battle - but wanted power, glory, and greatness.
In addition to Schopenhauer’s psychological views, Nietzsche contrasts his notion of the will to power with many of the other most popular psychological views of his day: utilitarianism, which claims all people want fundamentally to be happy (Nietzsche responds that only the Englishman wants that), and Platonism, which claims that people ultimately want to achieve unity with the good or, in Christian neo-Platonism, with God. In each case, Nietzsche argues that the “will to power” provides a more useful and general explanation of human behavior.
Übermensch
Nietzsche also introduced as an important concept the Übermensch (variously translated as superman, superhuman, or overman). Nietzsche contrasts the Übermensch with the Last Man, who appears as an exaggerated version of the degraded “goal” that unified the liberal democratic, bourgeois, socialist, and communist social and political programs. Interestingly, the plural Übermenschen never appears in Nietzsche’s writings, which sharply contrasts with Nazi interpretations of his corpus. Michael Tanner suggests Übermensch means the man who lives above and beyond pleasure and suffering, treating both circumstances equally “because joy and suffering are.. inseparable.”
The principle of Eternal Return
Another of Nietzsche’s ideas has become frequently cited: his notion of “eternal recurrence” or eternal return. Scholars disagree about the proper interpretation of this idea. In one view, Nietzsche proposes a thought-experiment to determine who actually leads their life in a strong and vital way: we need to imagine that this life which we lead does not simply end at our deaths, but will repeat over and over again for all eternity, each moment recurring in exactly the same way, without end. Those who recoil from this idea with horror have not yet learned to love and value life in the way that Nietzsche would admire; those who would embrace the idea cheerfully, ipso facto, lead the right sort of life.
However, based on some of the unpublished notes, many scholars think Nietzsche meant the suggestion as something more than a thought-experiment, and that he might have taken it quite seriously as a factual premise. This would, of course, only redouble the importance of living life in such a way that one could wish its eternal repetition.
Another interpretation, favored by many later Existential and Post-modern thinkers, argues that Nietzsche did not intend his readers to take eternal recurrence as a factual premise of physical reality but rather as a perpetually recurring condition of human existence. One faces, in every moment, infinite possibilities or modes of interpretation. A person may will a certain mode of being, but in each moment that will is exhausted and must be re-willed in the next. This would imply an eternal recurrence of the same state without necessitating a physical repetition of material beings in identical configurations.
Works
The Birth of Tragedy
Nietzsche published his first book in 1872 as The Birth of Tragedy, Out of the Spirit of Music (Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik) and reissued it in 1886 as The Birth of Tragedy, Or: Hellenism and Pessimism (Die Geburt der Tragödie, Oder: Griechentum und Pessimismus). The later edition contained a prefatory essay, An Attempt at Self-Criticism, wherein Nietzsche commented on this very early work.
In contrast to the typical Enlightenment view of ancient Greek culture as noble, simple, elegant and grandiose, Nietzsche characterizes it as a conflict between two distinct tendencies: the Apollonian and Dionysian. The Apollonian in culture he sees as the principium individuationis (principle of individuation) with its refinement, sobriety and emphasis on superficial appearance, whereby man separates himself from the undifferentiated immediacy of nature. Nietzsche claims sculpture as the art-form that captures this impulse most fully: sculpture has clear and definite boundaries and seeks to represent reality, in its perfectly stable form. The Dionysian impulse, by contrast, features immersion in the wholeness of nature, intoxication, non-rationality, and inhumanity; rather than the detached, rational representation of the Apollonian that invites similarly detached observation, the Dionysian impulse involves a frenzied participation in life itself. Nietzsche sees the Dionysian impulse as best realized in music, which tends not to have clear boundaries, is unstable and non-representational, and, in Nietzsche’s view, invites participation among its listeners through dance. Nietzsche argues that the Apollonian has dominated Western thought since Socrates, but he sees German Romanticism (especially Richard Wagner) as a possible re-introduction of the Dionysian, which might offer the salvation of European culture.
Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff criticised The Birth of Tragedy heavily. By 1886, Nietzsche himself had reservations about the work, referring to it as “an impossible book.. badly written, ponderous, embarrassing, image-mad and image-confused, sentimental, saccharine to the point of effeminacy, uneven in tempo, [and] without the will to logical cleanliness.”
“On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”
Nietzsche wrote his unpublished “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” in 1873; and so it sits comfortably with The Birth of Tragedy as an important expression of his youthful romanticism, a romanticism that he would reject but which would also condition his views on “truth” and prepare him for so many of his mature projects: “the problem of science itself, science considered for the first time as problematic, as questionable.. to look at science in the perspective of the artist, but at art in that of life.”
As this work represents one of his first engagements with epistemology and the philosophy of language, Nietzsche often rewrites Kant’s description of perception and experience to emphasize the aesthetic over the conceptual: nodding at the categories of understanding, in particular time and space, Nietzsche notes that “the artistic process of metaphor formation with which every sensation begins in us already presupposes these forms and thus occurs within them”.
Nietzsche expresses a nuanced but immature argument, and does not seem so much interested in refuting Kant - or even seriously arguing with Kant - on Kant’s own terms. As he later admitted, his early writings struggled to use Kantian, or even Hegelian, modes of expression in a spirit quite against Kant and Hegel: “I tried laboriously to express by means of Schopenhauerian and Kantian formulas strange and new variations which were basically at odds with Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s spirit and taste!”
Untimely Meditations
Started in 1873 and completed in 1876, this work comprises a collection of four (out of a projected 13) essays concerning the contemporary condition of European, especially German, culture. A fifth essay, published posthumously, had the title “We Philologists”, and gave as a “Task for philology: disappearance”.
- David Strauss: the Confessor and the Writer, 1873 (David Strauss: der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller) attacks David Strauss’s The Old and the New Faith: A Confession (1871), which Nietzsche holds up as an example of the German thought of the time. He paints Strauss’s “New Faith” - scientifically-determined universal mechanism based on the progression of history - as a vulgar reading of history in the service of a degenerate culture, polemically attacking not only the book but also Strauss as a Philistine of pseudo-culture.
- On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, 1874 (Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben) offers-instead of the prevailing view of “knowledge as an end in itself”-an alternative way of reading history, one where living life becomes the primary concern; along with a description of how this might improve the health of a society. It also introduced an attack against the basic precepts of classic humanism. In this essay, Nietzsche attacks both the historicism of man (the idea that man is created through history) and the idea that one can possibly have an objective concept of man, since a major aspect of man resides in his subjectivity. Nietzsche expands the idea that the essence of man dwells not inside of him, but rather above him, in the following essay, “Schopenhauer als Erzieher” (“Schopenhauer as Educator”). Glenn Most argues for the possible translation of the essay as “The Use and Abuse of History Departments for Life”, as Nietzsche used the term Historie and not Geschichte. Furthermore, he alleges that this title may have its origins via Jacob Burckhardt, who would have referred to Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise, De commodis litterarum atque incommodis (1428 - “On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Literary Studies”). Glenn Most argues that the untimelessness of Nietzsche here resides in calling to a return, beyond historicism, to Humboldt’s humanism, and, maybe even beyond, to the first humanism of the Renaissance.
- Schopenhauer as Educator, 1874 (Schopenhauer als Erzieher) describes how the philosophic genius of Schopenhauer might bring on a resurgence of German culture. Nietzsche gives special attention to Schopenhauer’s individualism, honesty and steadfastness as well as his cheerfulness, despite Schopenhauer’s noted pessimism.
- Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, 1876 investigates Richard Wagner’s psychology - less flatteringly than Nietzsche’s friendship with his subject might suggest. Nietzsche considered not publishing it because of this, and eventually settled on drafts that criticized the musician less than they might have done. Nonetheless this essay foreshadows the imminent split between the two.
Human, All Too Human
Nietzsche supplemented the original edition of this work, first published in 1878, with a second part in 1879: Mixed Opinions and Maxims (Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche), and a third part in 1880: The Wanderer and his Shadow (Der Wanderer und sein Schatten). The three parts appeared together in 1886 as Human, All Too Human, A Book for Free Spirits (Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Ein Buch für freie Geister). This book represents the beginning of Nietzsche’s “middle period”, with a break from German Romanticism and from Wagner and with a definite positivist slant. Note the style: reluctant to construct a systemic philosophy, Nietzsche composed these works as a series of several hundred aphorisms, ranging in length from a single line to a few pages. This book comprises more a collection of debunkings of unwarranted assumptions than an interpretation, though it offers some elements of Nietzsche’s thought in his arguments: he uses his perspectivism and the idea of the will to power as explanatory devices, though the latter remains less developed than in his later thought.
Daybreak
In Daybreak: Reflections on Moral Prejudices (Morgenröte. Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurteile, 1881), Nietzsche de-emphasizes the role of hedonism as a motivator and accentuates the role of a “feeling of power”. His relativism, both moral and cultural, and his critique of Christianity also reaches greater maturity. In Daybreak Nietzsche devoted a lengthy passage to his criticism of Christian biblical exegesis, including its arbitrary interpretation of objects and images in the Old Testament as prefigurements of Christ’s crucifixion. The clear, calm and intimate style of this aphoristic book seems to invite a particular experience, rather than showing concern with persuading his readers to accept any point of view. He would develop many of the ideas advanced here more fully in later books.
The Gay Science
The Gay (Merry) Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882), the largest and most comprehensive of Nietzsche’s middle-period books, continues the aphoristic style and contains more poetry than any other of his works (except possibly, “Human, All too Human, A Book for the Free Spirit,” a book on “coming to grips with chaos and emptiness”). It has central themes of a joyful affirmation of life and of an immersion in a light-hearted scholarship that takes aesthetic pleasure in life (the title refers to the Provençal phrase for the craft of poetry). As an example, Nietzsche offers the doctrine of eternal recurrence, which ranks one’s life as the sole consideration when evaluating how one should act. This contrasts with the Christian view of an afterlife which emphasizes later reward at the cost of one’s immediate happiness. The Gay Science has however perhaps become best known for the statement “God is dead”, which forms part of Nietzsche’s naturalistic and aesthetic alternative to traditional religion.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
A break with his middle-period works, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, A Book for All and None (Also Sprach Zarathustra, Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen, 1883-1885) became Nietzsche’s best-known book and the one he considered the most important. Noteworthy for its format, it comprises a philosophical work of fiction whose style often lightheartedly imitates that of the New Testament and of the Platonic dialogues, at times resembling pre-Socratic works in tone and in its use of natural phenomena as rhetorical and explanatory devices. It also features frequent references to the Western literary and philosophical traditions, implicitly offering an interpretation of these traditions and of their problems. Nietzsche achieves all of this through the character of Zarathustra (referring to the traditional prophet of Zoroastrianism), who makes speeches on philosophic topics as he moves along a loose plotline marking his development and the reception of his ideas. One can view this characteristic (following the genre of the bildungsroman) as an inline commentary on Zarathustra’s (and Nietzsche’s) philosophy. All this, along with the book’s ambiguity and paradoxical nature, has helped its eventual enthusiastic reception by the reading public, but has frustrated academic attempts at analysis (as Nietzsche may have intended). Thus Spoke Zarathustra remained unpopular as a topic for scholars (especially those in the Anglo-American analytic tradition) until the second half of the twentieth century brought widespread interest in Nietzsche and his unconventional style that does not distinguish between philosophy and literature. It offers formulations of eternal recurrence, and Nietzsche for the first time speaks of the Übermensch: themes that would dominate his books from this point onwards.
Beyond Good and Evil
Of the four “late-period” writings of Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft, 1886) most closely resembles the aphoristic style of his middle period. In it he exposes the deficiencies of those usually called “philosophers” and identifies the qualities of the “new philosophers”: imagination, self-assertion, danger, originality, and the “creation of values”. He then contests some of the key presuppositions of the old philosophic tradition like “self-consciousness,” “knowledge,” “truth,” and “free will”, explaining them as inventions of the moral consciousness. In their place, he offers the will to power as an explanation of all behavior; this ties into his “perspective of life”, which he regards as “beyond good and evil”, denying a universal morality for all human beings. Religion and the master and slave moralities feature prominently as Nietzsche re-evaluates deeply-held humanistic beliefs, portraying even domination, appropriation and injury to the weak as not universally objectionable.
On the Genealogy of Morality
The three “treatises” that make up On the Genealogy of Morality (Zur Genealogie der Moral, 1887) represent the last of Nietzsche’s works before his flurry of activity in 1888. Each treatise deals with the evolution of moral concepts and institutions, showing that the origins of contemporary morality reside in non-moral relationships in which power struggles and cruelty play an important part. The work appears more unproblematically philosophical in style and tone than many of Nietzsche’s works. For this reason this book has become a popular topic for scholarly analysis.
In the First Treatise Nietzsche traces Christian morality back to what he calls the “slave revolt in morality”, which he attributes to the ressentiment experienced by the weak members of society vis-à-vis their strong, aristocratic masters. The morality of the nobles operates with the value-distinction “good/bad”; they view themselves as evidently good and their inferiors as beneath contempt. The slaves find their subjection to the strong intolerable and thus set up an “imaginary revenge” by labelling the strong as evil and themselves as good, thereby instituting the morality of Christianity, which says that the meek shall inherit the earth.
In the Second Treatise Nietzsche sketches a pre-moral society (what he calls a “morality of custom”) in which the right to inflict harm on others emerges from man’s capacity, as an animal capable of memory, to make promises. The infliction of harm on the transgressor can compensate for the breaking of promises. In this way, according to Nietzsche, the institution of punishment comes about, free from any moral purpose or justification. “Bad conscience”, too, originates in a pre-moral situation. Here man turns his violent animal nature on himself once he loses the freedom to roam and to pillage.
In the Third Treatise Nietzsche considers the many ways in which the “ascetic ideal” (the paradigm of Christian morality) has manifested itself, ever taking on new forms and perpetuating itself by “underground” means. Nietzsche suggests that the “will to power” drives the need to hold on to the ascetic ideal in one form or another, as a surrogate for taking revenge on a hostile world.
The Case of Wagner
In his first book of a highly productive year, The Case of Wagner, A Musician’s Problem (Der Fall Wagner, Ein Musikanten-Problem, May - August 1888), Nietzsche launches into a devastating and unbridled attack upon the figure of Richard Wagner. While he recognizes Wagner’s music as an immense cultural achievement, he also characterizes it as the product of decadence and nihilism and thereby of sickness. The book shows Nietzsche as a capable music-critic, and provides the setting for some of his further reflections on the nature of art and on its relationship to the future health of humanity.
Twilight of the Idols
The title of this highly polemical book, Twilight of the Idols, or How One Philosophizes with a Hammer (Götzen-Dämmerung, oder Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert, August-September 1888), word-plays upon Wagner’s opera, The Twilight of the Gods (Götterdämmerung). In this short work, written in the flurry of his last productive year, Nietzsche re-iterates and elaborates some of the criticisms of major philosophic figures (Socrates, Plato, Kant and the Christian tradition). He establishes early on in the section The Problem of Socrates that nobody can estimate the value of life and that any judgment concerning it only reveals the judging person’s life-denying or life-affirming tendencies. He attempts to portray philosophers from Socrates onwards as (in his own term) “decadents” who employ dialectics as a tool for self-preservation while the authority of tradition breaks down. He also criticizes the German culture of his day as unsophisticated, and shoots some disapproving arrows at key French, British, and Italian cultural figures. In contrast to all these alleged representatives of cultural decadence, Nietzsche applauds Caesar, Napoleon, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Thucydides and the Sophists as healthier and stronger types. The book states the transvaluation of all values as Nietzsche’s final and most important project, and gives a view of antiquity wherein the Romans for once take precedence over the ancient Greeks.
The Anti-christ
In one of his best-known and most contentious works, The Anti-christ, Curse on Christianity (Der Antichrist. Fluch auf das Christentum, September 1888), Nietzsche launches into a polemic, hyperbolic attack on the morals of Christianity - the view of Nietzsche as an enthusiastic attacker of Christianity largely arises from this book. Therein he elaborates on his criticisms of Christianity expressed in his earlier works, but now using a sarcastic tone, expressing a disgust over the way the slave-morality corrupted noble values in ancient Rome. He frames certain elements of the religion - the Gospels, Paul, the martyrs, priests and the crusades - as creations of ressentiment for the upholding of the unhealthy at the cost of stronger sentiments. Even in this extreme denunciation Nietzsche does not begrudge some respect to the figure of Jesus and to some Christian elements, but this book abandons the relatively even-handed (if inflammatory) analysis of his earlier criticisms for outright polemic - Nietzsche proposes an “Anti-Christian” morality for the future: the transvaluation of all values.
Ecce Homo
Though Ecce Homo, How One Becomes What One Is (Ecce Homo, Wie man wird, was man ist, October to November 1888) appears as a curiously-styled autobiography (with sections entitled “Why I Am So Clever”, “Why I Am So Wise”, “Why I Write Such Good Books”) it offers much more of a history of Nietzsche’s ideas than of the man himself, highlighting Nietzsche’s project of genealogical analysis as well as de-emphasizing the splits between philosophy and literature, personality and philosophy, and body and mind. The author does this by tying certain qualities of his thought with idiosyncrasies of his physical person, as well as extremely candid remarks occasionally made throughout his half-joking self-adulation (a mockery of Socratic humility). After this self-description, wherein Nietzsche proclaims the goodness of everything that has happened to him (including his father’s early death and his near-blindness - an example of amor fati) - he offers brief insights into all of his works, concluding with the section “Why I Am A Destiny”, calmly laying out the principles he places at the center of his project: eternal recurrence and the transvaluation of all values.
Nietzsche contra Wagner
A selection of passages concerning Wagner and art in general which Nietzsche extracted from his works from the period 1878 to 1887 appears in Nietzsche Contra Wagner, Out of the Files of a Psychologist (Nietzsche contra Wagner, Aktenstücke eines Psychologen, December 1888). The passages serve as a background for the comparison Nietzsche would make between his own aesthetics and those of Wagner and his description of how Wagner became corrupted through Christianity, Aryanism, and anti-semitism.
The unpublished notebooks
Nietzsche’s Nachlass contains an immense amount of material and discusses at great length the issues around which Nietzsche’s philosophy revolves. Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who acted as executrix of his literary estate, arranged these pieces for publication as The Will to Power.
Later investigation would reveal that Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche had included material extremely selectively and that she gave these excerpts an order different to that of the author, leading to the current opinion of her manuscript as a revisionist corruption bringing her brother’s text in line with her own beliefs, which he vehemently opposed. On the strength of this manuscript, Elisabeth later fostered sympathy for her brother’s works among the Nazis, and her revisionism forms the cornerstone of the defense of Nietzsche against the charges of fascism and antisemitism.
In the 1960s Mazzino Montinari and Giorgio Colli published the first, integral notebooks, with the fragments arranged in a chronological order (whereas Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and Peter Gast had arranged them thematically, added titles, cut parts, included copied fragments of other authors (such as Charles Féré) without quotation marks, as if Nietzsche himself had written them, etc.). This reference edition has subsequently appeared in translation in various languages. Martin Heidegger expressed in his courses on Nietzsche the opinion that this unpublished work of Nietzsche is fundamental to the understanding of Nietzsche’s thought.
Nietzsche’s reading
The Nietzsche Archiv in Weimar, Germany, which holds many of Nietzsche’s papers.
As a philologist, Nietzsche had a thorough knowledge of Greek philosophy. He read Kant, Mill and Schopenhauer, who became his main opponents in his philosophy, and later Spinoza, whom he saw as his “precursor” on some counts but as a personification of the “ascetic ideal” on others. Nietzsche expressed admiration for 17th-century French moralists such as La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère and Vauvenargues, as well as for Pascal and Stendhal.
The organicism of Paul Bourget influenced Nietzsche, as did that of Rudolf Virchow and Alfred Espinas.Nietzsche early learned of Darwinism through Friedrich Lange. Nietzsche notably also read some of the posthumous works of Charles Baudelaire, Tolstoy’s My Religion, Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus and Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. Comments in several passages suggests that Nietzsche responded strongly and favorably to the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Nietzsche admired and shared ideas with the work of Niccolò Machiavelli, seeing in the Florentine a taste for morality-free action, as well as an incipient critique of conventional Christian mores. They also had similar conceptions of power and the aesthetic in political life.
Nietzsche’s influence and reception**
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Philosophers and popular culture have responded to Nietzsche’s work in complex and sometimes controversial ways. Many Germans eventually discovered his appeals for greater individualism and personality development in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but responded to those appeals divergently. He had some following among left-wing Germans in the 1890s; in 1894-95, German conservatives wanted to ban his work as subversive.
By the First World War, however, he had acquired a reputation as an inspiration for right-wing German militarism. German soldiers even received copies of Thus Spoke Zarathustra as gifts during World War I. The Dreyfus Affair provides another example of his reception: the French anti-semitic Right labelled the Jewish and Leftist intellectuals who defended Alfred Dreyfus as “Nietzscheans”.
Nietzsche’s books were read by major political dictators of the Twentieth Century, including Stalin, Hitler,, and Mussolini.. The Nazis made use of Nietzsche’s philosophy, but did so selectively; this association with National Socialism caused Nietzsche’s reputation to suffer following the Second World War.
Nevertheless, Nietzschean ideas exercised a major influence on several prominent European philosophers, including Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre. In the Anglo-American tradition, the scholarship of Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale rehabilitated Nietzsche as a philosopher, and analytic philosophers such as Alexander Nehamas and Brian Leiter continue to study him today. A vocal minority of recent Nietzschean interpreters (Bruce Detwiler, Fredrick Appel, Domenico Losurdo, Abir Taha) have contested what they consider the popular but erroneous egalitarian misrepresentation of Nietzsche’s “aristocratic radicalism”.
In popular culture, fictional characters sometimes appear ignorant and pretentious when they cite Nietzsche but mispronounce his name, for example as “Nitsh” (Anthony Jr in The Sopranos) or as “Kneeshaw” (Dakin in The History Boys, the film (2006), Faber & Faber Inc., p. 50 and The History Boys, a play by Alan Bennett (2004), Faber & Faber Inc., p. 47.)
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