EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY & OTHER ESSAYS
By
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
TRANSLATED BY
MAXIMILIAN A. MÜGGE
AUTHOR OF "FR. NIETZSCHE, HIS LIFE AND WORK," ETC.
The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche
The First Complete and Authorised English Translation
Edited by Dr Oscar Levy
Volume Two
T.N. FOULIS
13 & 15 FREDERICK STREET
EDINBURGH: AND LONDON
1911
CONTENTS
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
1. THE GREEK STATE--Preface to an unwritten book (1871)
2. THE GREEK WOMAN--Fragment (1871)
3. ON MUSIC AND WORDS--Fragment (1871)
4. HOMER'S CONTEST--Preface to an unwritten book (1872)
5. THE RELATION OF SCHOPENHAUER'S PHILOSOPHY TO A GERMAN CULTURE
--Preface to an unwritten book (1872)
6. PHILOSOPHY DURING THE TRAGIC AGE OF THE GREEKS (1873)
7. ON TRUTH AND FALSITY IN THEIR ULTRAMORAL SENSE (1873)
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
The essays contained in this volume treat of various subjects. With
the exception of perhaps one we must consider all these papers as
fragments. Written during the early Seventies, and intended mostly as
prefaces, they are extremely interesting, since traces of Nietzsche's
later tenets--like Slave and Master morality, the Superman--can be
found everywhere. But they are also very valuable on account of the
young philosopher's daring and able handling of difficult and abstruse
subjects. "Truth and Falsity," and "The Greek Woman" are probably the
two essays which will prove most attractive to the average reader.
In the essay on THE GREEK STATE the two tenets mentioned above
are clearly discernible, though the Superman still goes by the
Schopenhauerian label "genius." Our philosopher attacks the modern
ideas of the "dignity of man" and of the "dignity of labour," because
Existence seems to be without worth and dignity. The preponderance
of such illusory ideas is due to the political power nowadays vested
in the "slaves." The Greeks saw no dignity in labour. They saw the
necessity of it, and the necessity of slavery, but felt ashamed of
both. Not even the labour of the artist did they admire, although they
praised his completed work.
If the Greeks perished through their slavery, one thing is still more
certain: we shall perish through the lack of slavery. To the essence
of Culture slavery is innate. It is part of it. A vast multitude must
labour and "slave" in order that a few may lead an existence devoted to
beauty and art.
Strife and war are necessary for the welfare of the State. War
consecrates and purines the State. The purpose of the military State
is the creating of the military genius, the ruthless conqueror, the
War-lord. There also exists a mysterious connection between the State
in general and the creating of the genius.
In THE GREEK WOMAN, Nietzsche, the man who said, "One cannot think
highly enough of women," delineates his ideal of woman. Penelope,
Antigone, Electra are his ideal types.
Plato's dictum that in the perfect State the family would cease to
exist, belongs to the most intimate things uttered about the relation
between women and the State. The Greek woman as mother had to vegetate
in obscurity, to lead a kind of Cranfordian existence for the greater
welfare of the body politic. Only in Greek antiquity did woman occupy
her proper position, and for this reason she was more honoured than she
has ever been since. Pythia was the mouthpiece, the symbol of Greek
unity.
ON MUSIC AND WORDS. Music is older, more fundamental than language.
Music is an expression of cosmic consciousness. Language is only a
gesture-symbolism.
It is true the music of every people was at first allied to lyric
poetry; "absolute music" always appeared much later. But that is due
to the double nature in the essence of language. The _tone_ of the
speaker expresses the basic pleasure- and displeasure-sensations of the
individual. These form the tonal subsoil common to all languages; they
are comprehensible everywhere. Language itself is a super-structure on
that subsoil; it is a gesture-symbolism for all the other conceptions
which man adds to that subsoil.
The endeavour to illustrate a poem by music is futile. The text of
an opera is therefore quite negligible. Modern opera in its music is
therefore often only a stimulant or a remembrancer for set, stereotyped
feelings. Great music, _i.e.,_ Dionysean music, makes us forget to
listen to the words.
HOMER'S CONTEST. The Greek genius acknowledged strife, struggle,
contest to be necessary in this life. Only through competition and
emulation will the Common-Wealth thrive. Yet there was no unbridled
ambition. Everyone's individual endeavours were subordinated to the
welfare of the community. The curse of present-day contest is that it
does not do the same.
In THE RELATION OF SCHOPENHAUER'S PHILOSOPHY TO A GERMAN CULTURE an
amusing and yet serious attack is made on the hollow would-be culture
of the German Philistines who after the Franco-Prussian war were
swollen with self-conceit, self-sufficiency, and were a great danger to
real Culture. Nietzsche points out Schopenhauer's great philosophy as
the only possible means of escaping the humdrum of Philistia with its
hypocrisy and intellectual ostrichisation.
The essay on GREEK PHILOSOPHY DURING THE TRAGIC AGE is a performance
of great interest to the scholar. It brims with ideas. The Hegelian
School, especially Zeller, has shown what an important place is held by
the earlier thinkers in the history of Greek thought and how necessary
a knowledge of their work is for all who wish to understand Plato and
Aristotle. _Diels'_ great book: "Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker",
_Benn's, Burnet's_ and _Fairbanks'_ books we may regard as the
peristyle through which we enter the temple of Early Greek Philosophy.
Nietzsche's essay then is like a beautiful festoon swinging between the
columns erected by Diels and the others out of the marble of facts.
Beauty and the personal equation are the two "leitmotive" of
Nietzsche's history of the pre-Socratian philosophers. Especially
does he lay stress upon the personal equation, since that is the
only permanent item of interest, considering that every "System"
crumbles into nothing with the appearance of a new thinker. In this
way Nietzsche treats of _Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides,
Xenophanes, Anaxagoras._ There are also some sketches of a draft for
an intended but never accomplished continuation, in which Empedocles,
Democritus and Plato were to be dealt with.
Probably the most popular of the Essays in this book will prove to be
the one on TRUTH AND FALSITY. It is an epistemological rhapsody on the
relativity of truth, on "Appearance and Reality," on "perceptual flux"
versus--"conceptual conceit."
Man's intellect is only a means in the struggle for existence, a means
taking the place of the animal's horns and teeth. It adapts itself
especially to deception and dissimulation.
There are no absolute truths. Truth is relative and always imperfect.
Yet fictitious values fixed by convention and utility are set down as
truth. The liar does not use these standard coins of the realm. He is
hated; not out of love for truth, no, but because he is dangerous.
Our words never hit the essence, the "X" of a thing, but indicate only
external characteristics. Language is the columbarium of the ideas, the
cemetery of perceptions.
Truths are metaphors, illusions, anthropomorph isms about which one has
forgotten that they are such. There are different truths to different
beings. Like a spider man sits in the web of his truths and ideas. He
wants to be deceived. By means of error he mostly lives; truth is often
fatal. When the liar, the story-teller, the poet, the rhapsodist lie to
him without hurting him he--loves them!--
The text underlying this translation is that of Vol. I. of the
"Taschenausgabe." One or two obscure passages I hope my conjectures may
have elucidated. The dates following the titles indicate the year when
these essays were written.
In no other work have I felt so deeply the great need of the science of
Signifies with its ultimate international standardisation of terms, as
attempted by Eisler and Baldwin. I hope, however, I have succeeded in
conveying accurately the meaning of the author in spite of a certain
_looseness_ in his philosophical terminology.
The English language is somewhat at a disadvantage through its lack
of a Noun-Infinitive. I can best illustrate this by a passage from
_Parmenides_:
χρὴ τὸ λέγειν τε νοεῑν τ' ἐὸν ἔμμεναι· ἔστι γὰρ εῖναι, μηδὲν δ' οὐκ
ἔστιν· τά σ' ἐγὼ ψράζεσθαι ἄνωγα.
In his usual masterly manner _Diels_ translates these lines with: "Das
Sagen und Denken musz ein Seiendes sein. Denn das Sein existiert, das
Nichts existiert nicht; das heisz ich dich wohl zu beherzigen." On
the other hand in _Fairbanks'_ "version" we read: "It is necessary
both to say and to think that being is; for it is possible that being
is, and it is impossible that not being is; this is what I bid thee
ponder." In order to avoid a similar obscurity, throughout the paper on
"EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY" I have rendered "das Seiende" (τὸ ἐὸν) with
"Existent", "das Nicht-Seiende" with "Non-Existent"; "das Sein" (εῖναι)
with "Being" and "das Nicht-Sein" with "Not-Being."
I am directly or indirectly indebted for many suggestions to several
friends of mine, especially to two of my colleagues, J. Charlton
Hipkins, M.A., and R. Miller, B.A., for their patient revision of the
whole of the proofs.
M. A. MÜGGE.
LONDON, _July_ 1911.
THE GREEK STATE
Preface to an Unwritten Book (1871)
We moderns have an advantage over the Greeks in two ideas, which are
given as it were as a compensation to a world behaving thoroughly
slavishly and yet at the same time anxiously eschewing the word
"slave": we talk of the "dignity of man" and of the "dignity of
labour." Everybody worries in order miserably to perpetuate a miserable
existence; this awful need compels him to consuming labour; man
(or, more exactly, the human intellect) seduced by the "Will" now
occasionally marvels at labour as something dignified. However in
order that labour might have a claim on titles of honour, it would be
necessary above all, that Existence itself, to which labour after all
is only a painful means, should have more dignity and value than it
appears to have had, up to the present, to serious philosophies and
religions. What else may we find in the labour-need of all the millions
but the impulse to exist at any price, the same all-powerful impulse by
which stunted plants stretch their roots through earthless rocks!
Out of this awful struggle for existence only individuals can emerge,
and they are at once occupied with the noble phantoms of artistic
culture, lest they should arrive at practical pessimism, which Nature
abhors as her exact opposite. In the modern world, which, compared
with the Greek, usually produces only abnormalities and centaurs, in
which the individual, like that fabulous creature in the beginning of
the Horatian Art of Poetry, is jumbled together out of pieces, here in
the modern world in one and the same man the greed of the struggle for
existence and the need for art show themselves at the same time: out of
this unnatural amalgamation has originated the dilemma, to excuse and
to consecrate that first greed before this need for art. Therefore; we
believe in the "Dignity of man" and the "Dignity of labour."
The Greeks did not require such conceptual hallucinations, for among
them the idea that labour is a disgrace is expressed with startling
frankness; and another piece of wisdom, more hidden and less
articulate, but everywhere alive, added that the human thing also was
an ignominious and piteous nothing and the "dream of a shadow." Labour
is a disgrace, because existence has no value in itself; but even
though this very existence in the alluring embellishment of artistic
illusions shines forth and really seems to have a value in itself, then
that proposition is still valid that labour is a disgrace--a disgrace
indeed by the fact that it is impossible for man, fighting for the
continuance of bare existence, to become an _artist._ In modern times
it is not the art-needing man but the slave who determines the general
conceptions, the slave who according to his nature must give deceptive
names to all conditions in order to be able to live. Such phantoms as
the dignity of man, the dignity of labour, are the needy products of
slavedom hiding itself from itself. Woful time, in which the slave
requires such conceptions, in which he is incited to think about and
beyond himself! Cursed seducers, who have destroyed the slave's state
of innocence by the fruit of the tree of knowledge! Now the slave must
vainly scrape through from one day to another with transparent lies
recognisable to every one of deeper insight, such as the alleged "equal
rights of all" or the so-called "fundamental rights of man," of man as
such, or the "dignity of labour." Indeed he is not to understand at
what stage and at what height dignity can first be mentioned--namely,
at the point, where the individual goes wholly beyond himself and no
longer has to work and to produce in order to preserve his individual
existence.
And even on this height of "labour" the Greek at times is overcome by
a feeling, that looks like shame. In one place Plutarch with earlier
Greek instinct says that no nobly born youth on beholding the Zeus in
Pisa would have the desire to become himself a Phidias, or on seeing
the Hera in Argos, to become himself a Polyklet; and just as little
would he wish to be Anacreon, Philetas or Archilochus, however much he
might revel in their poetry. To the Greek the work of the artist falls
just as much under the undignified conception of labour as any ignoble
craft. But if the compelling force of the artistic impulse operates in
him, then he _must_ produce and submit himself to that need of labour.
And as a father admires the beauty and the gift of his child but thinks
of the act of procreation with shamefaced dislike, so it was with the
Greek. The joyful astonishment at the beautiful has not blinded him
as to its origin which appeared to him, like all "Becoming" in nature,
to be a powerful necessity, a forcing of itself into existence. That
feeling by which the process of procreation is considered as something
shamefacedly to be hidden, although by it man serves a higher purpose
than his individual preservation, the same feeling veiled also the
origin of the great works of art, in spite of the fact that through
them a higher form of existence is inaugurated, just as through
that other act comes a new generation. The feeling of _shame_ seems
therefore to occur where man is merely a tool of manifestations of will
infinitely greater than he is permitted to consider himself in the
isolated shape of the individual.
Now we have the general idea to which are to be subordinated the
feelings which the Greek had with regard to labour and slavery. Both
were considered by them as a necessary disgrace, of which one feels
_ashamed,_ as a disgrace and as a necessity at the same time. In this
feeling of shame is hidden the unconscious discernment that the real
aim _needs_ those conditional factors, but that in that _need_ lies the
fearful and beast-of-prey-like quality of the Sphinx Nature, who in
the glorification of the artistically free culture-life so beautifully
stretches forth her virgin-body. Culture, which is chiefly a real need
for art, rests upon a terrible basis: the latter however makes itself
known in the twilight sensation of shame. In order that there may be a
broad, deep, and fruitful soil for the development of art, the enormous
majority must, in the service of a minority, be slavishly subjected
to life's struggle, to a _greater_ degree than their own wants
necessitate. At their cost, through the surplus of their labour, that
privileged class is to be relieved from the struggle for existence, in
order to create and to satisfy a new world of want.
Accordingly we must accept this cruel sounding truth, that _slavery
is of the essence of Culture;_ a truth of course, which leaves no
doubt as to the absolute value of Existence. _This truth_ is the
vulture, that gnaws at the liver of the Promethean promoter of Culture.
The misery of toiling men must still increase in order to make the
production of the world of art possible to a small number of Olympian
men. Here is to be found the source of that secret wrath nourished
by Communists and Socialists of all times, and also by their feebler
descendants, the white race of the "Liberals," not only against
the arts, but also against classical antiquity. If Culture really
rested upon the will of a people, if here inexorable powers did not
rule, powers which are law and barrier to the individual, then the
contempt for Culture, the glorification of a "poorness in spirit," the
iconoclastic annihilation of artistic claims would be _more than_ an
insurrection of the suppressed masses against drone-like individuals;
it would be the cry of compassion tearing down the walls of Culture;
the desire for justice, for the equalization of suffering, would
swamp all other ideas. In fact here and there sometimes an exuberant
degree of compassion has for a short time opened all the flood gates
of Culture-life; a rainbow of compassionate love and of peace appeared
with the first radiant rise of Christianity and under it was born
Christianity's most beautiful fruit, the gospel according to St John.
But there are also instances to show that powerful religions for long
periods petrify a given degree of Culture, and cut off with inexorable
sickle everything that still grows on strongly and luxuriantly. For it
is not to be forgotten that the same cruelty, which we found in the
essence of every Culture, lies also in the essence of every powerful
religion and in general in the essence of _power,_ which is always
evil; so that we shall understand it just as well, when a Culture is
shattering, with a cry for liberty or at least justice, a too highly
piled bulwark of religious claims. That which in this "sorry scheme" of
things will live (_i.e.,_ must live), is at the bottom of its nature a
reflex of the primal-pain and primal-contradiction, and must therefore
strike our eyes--"an organ fashioned for this world and earth"--as
an insatiable greed for existence and an eternal self-contradiction,
within the form of time, therefore as Becoming. Every moment devours
the preceding one, every birth is the death of innumerable beings;
begetting, living, murdering, all is one. Therefore we may compare
this grand Culture with a blood-stained victor, who in his triumphal
procession carries the defeated along as slaves chained to his chariot,
slaves whom a beneficent power has so blinded that, almost crushed by
the wheels of the chariot, they nevertheless still exclaim: "Dignity of
labour!" "Dignity of Man!" The voluptuous Cleopatra-Culture throws ever
again the most priceless pearls, the tears of compassion for the misery
of slaves, into her golden goblet. Out of the emasculation of modern
man has been born the enormous social distress of the present time,
not out of the true and deep commiseration for that misery; and if it
should be true that the Greeks perished through their slavedom then
another fact is much more certain, that we shall perish through the
_lack_ of slavery. Slavedom did not appear in any way objectionable,
much less abominable, either to early Christianity or to the Germanic
race. What an uplifting effect on us has the contemplation of the
mediæval bondman, with his legal and moral relations,--relations that
were inwardly strong and tender,--towards the man of higher rank, with
the profound fencing-in of his narrow existence--how uplifting!--and
how reproachful!
He who cannot reflect upon the position of affairs in Society without
melancholy, who has learnt to conceive of it as the continual painful
birth of those privileged Culture-men, in whose service everything
else must be devoured--he will no longer be deceived by that false
glamour, which the moderns have spread over the origin and meaning
of the State. For what can the State mean to us, if not the means by
which that social-process described just now is to be fused and to
be guaranteed in its unimpeded continuance? Be the sociable instinct
in individual man as strong as it may, it is only the iron clamp of
the State that constrains the large masses upon one another in such a
fashion that a chemical decomposition of Society, with its pyramid-like
super-structure, is _bound_ to take place. Whence however originates
this sudden power of the State, whose aim lies much beyond the insight
and beyond the egoism of the individual? How did the slave, the blind
mole of Culture, _originate_? The Greeks in their instinct relating
to the law of nations have betrayed it to us, in an instinct, which
even in the ripest fulness of their civilisation and humanity never
ceased to utter as out of a brazen mouth such words as: "to the victor
belongs the vanquished, with wife and child, life and property. Power
gives the first _right_ and there is no right, which at bottom is not
presumption, usurpation, violence."
Here again we see with what pitiless inflexibility Nature, in order
to arrive at Society, forges for herself the cruel tool of the
State--namely, that _conqueror_ with the iron hand, who is nothing else
than the objectivation of the instinct indicated. By the indefinable
greatness and power of such conquerors the spectator feels, that they
are only the means of an intention manifesting itself through them
and yet hiding itself from them. The weaker forces attach themselves
to them with such mysterious speed, and transform themselves so
wonderfully, in the sudden swelling of that violent avalanche, under
the charm of that creative kernel, into an affinity hitherto not
existing, that it seems as if a magic will were emanating from them.
Now when we see how little the vanquished trouble themselves after a
short time about the horrible origin of the State, so that history
informs us of no class of events worse than the origins of those
sudden, violent, bloody and, at least in _one_ point, inexplicable
usurpations: when hearts involuntarily go out towards the magic of
the growing State with the presentiment of an invisible deep purpose,
where the calculating intellect is enabled to see an addition of forces
only; when now the State is even contemplated with fervour as the
goal and ultimate aim of the sacrifices and duties of the individual:
then out of all that speaks the enormous necessity of the State,
without which Nature might not succeed in coming, through Society,
to her deliverance in semblance, in the mirror of the genius. What
discernments does the instinctive pleasure in the State not overcome!
One would indeed feel inclined to think that a man who looks into the
origin of the State will henceforth seek his salvation at an awful
distance from it; and where can one not see the monuments of its
origin--devastated lands, destroyed cities, brutalised men, devouring
hatred of nations! The State, of ignominiously low birth, for the
majority of men a continually flowing source of hardship, at frequently
recurring periods the consuming torch of mankind--and yet a word, at
which we forget ourselves, a battle cry, which has filled men with
enthusiasm for innumerable really heroic deeds, perhaps the highest and
most venerable object for the blind and egoistic multitude which only
in the tremendous moments of State-life has the strange expression of
greatness on its face!
We have, however, to consider the Greeks, with regard to the unique
sun-height of their art, as the "political men in themselves," and
certainly history knows of no second instance of such an awful
unchaining of the political passion, such an unconditional immolation
of all other interests in the service of this State-instinct; at the
best one might distinguish the men of the Renascence in Italy with a
similar title for like reasons and by way of comparison. So overloaded
is that passion among the Greeks that it begins ever anew to rage
against itself and to strike its teeth into its own flesh. This bloody
jealousy of city against city, of party against party, this murderous
greed of those little wars, the tiger-like triumph over the corpse
of the slain enemy, in short, the incessant renewal of those Trojan
scenes of struggle and horror, in the spectacle of which, as a genuine
Hellene, Homer stands before us absorbed with _delight_--whither does
this naïve barbarism of the Greek State point? What is its excuse
before the tribunal of eternal justice? Proud and calm, the State steps
before this tribunal and by the hand it leads the flower of blossoming
womanhood: Greek society. For this Helena the State waged those
wars--and what grey-bearded judge could here condemn?--
Under this mysterious connection, which we here divine between State
and art, political greed and artistic creation, battlefield and work
of art, we understand by the State, as already remarked, only the
cramp-iron, which compels the Social process; whereas without the
State, in the natural _bellum omnium contra omnes_ Society cannot
strike root at all on a larger scale and beyond the reach of the
family. Now, after States have been established almost everywhere, that
bent of the _bellum omnium contra omnes_ concentrates itself from time
to time into a terrible gathering of war-clouds and discharges itself
as it were in rare but so much the more violent shocks and lightning
flashes. But in consequence of the effect of that _bellum,_--an effect
which is turned inwards and compressed,--Society is given time during
the intervals to germinate and burst into leaf, in order, as soon as
warmer days come, to let the shining blossoms of genius sprout forth.
In face of the political world of the Hellenes, I will not hide those
phenomena of the present in which I believe I discern dangerous
atrophies of the political sphere equally critical for art and society.
If there should exist men, who as it were through birth are placed
outside the national-and State-instincts, who consequently have to
esteem the State only in so far as they conceive that it coincides
with their own interest, then such men will necessarily imagine as the
ultimate political aim the most undisturbed collateral existence of
great political communities possible, which _they_ might be permitted
to pursue their own purposes without restriction. With this idea in
their heads they will promote _that_ policy which will offer the
greatest security to these purposes; whereas it is unthinkable, that
they, against their intentions, guided perhaps by an unconscious
instinct, should sacrifice themselves for the State-tendency,
unthinkable because they lack that very instinct. All other citizens
of the State are in the dark about what Nature intends with her
State-instinct within them, and they follow blindly; only those who
stand outside this instinct know what _they_ want from the State and
what the State is to grant them. Therefore it is almost unavoidable
that such men should gain great influence in the State because they
are allowed to consider it as a _means,_ whereas all the others under
the sway of those unconscious purposes of the State are themselves
only means for the fulfilment of the State-purpose. In order now to
attain, through the medium of the State, the highest furtherance
of their selfish aims, it is above all necessary, that the State be
wholly freed from those awfully incalculable war-convulsions so that
it may be used rationally; and thereby they strive with all their
might for a condition of things in which war is an impossibility. For
that purpose the thing to do is first to curtail and to enfeeble the
political separatisms and factions and through the establishment of
large _equipoised_ State-bodies and the mutual safeguarding of them
to make the successful result of an aggressive war and consequently
war itself the greatest improbability; as on the other hand they will
endeavour to wrest the question of war and peace from the decision of
individual lords, in order to be able rather to appeal to the egoism
of the masses or their representatives; for which purpose they again
need slowly to dissolve the monarchic instincts of the nations. This
purpose they attain best through the most general promulgation of
the liberal optimistic view of the world, which has its roots in the
doctrines of French Rationalism and the French Revolution, _i.e.,_ in
a wholly un-Germanic, genuinely neo-Latin shallow and unmetaphysical
philosophy. I cannot help seeing in the prevailing international
movements of the present day, and the simultaneous promulgation of
universal suffrage, the effects of the _fear of war_ above everything
else, yea I behold behind these movements, those truly international
homeless money-hermits, as the really alarmed, who, with their
natural lack of the State-instinct, have learnt to abuse politics as
a means of the Exchange, and State and Society as an apparatus for
their own enrichment. Against the deviation of the State-tendency
into a money-tendency, to be feared from this side, the only remedy
is war and once again war, in the emotions of which this at least
becomes obvious, that the State is not founded upon the fear of the
war-demon, as a protective institution for egoistic individuals, but
in love to fatherland and prince, it produces an ethical impulse,
indicative of a much higher destiny. If I therefore designate as a
dangerous and characteristic sign of the present political situation
the application of revolutionary thought in the service of a selfish
State-less money-aristocracy, if at the same time I conceive of the
enormous dissemination of liberal optimism as the result of modern
financial affairs fallen into strange hands, and if I imagine all evils
of social conditions together with the necessary decay of the arts to
have either germinated from that root or grown together with it, one
will have to pardon my occasionally chanting a Pæan on war. Horribly
clangs its silvery bow; and although it comes along like the night,
war is nevertheless Apollo, the true divinity for consecrating and
purifying the State. First of all, however, as is said in the beginning
of the "Iliad," he lets fly his arrow on the mules and dogs. Then he
strikes the men themselves, and everywhere pyres break into flames.
Be it then pronounced that war is just as much a necessity for the
State as the slave is for society, and who can avoid this verdict if
he honestly asks himself about the causes of the never-equalled Greek
art-perfection?
He who contemplates war and its uniformed possibility, the _soldier's
profession,_ with respect to the hitherto described nature of the
State, must arrive at the conviction, that through war and in the
profession of arms is placed before our eyes an image, or even perhaps
the _prototype of the State._ Here we see as the most general effect of
the war-tendency an immediate decomposition and division of the chaotic
mass into _military castes,_ out of which rises, pyramid-shaped,
on an exceedingly broad base of slaves the edifice of the "martial
society." The unconscious purpose of the whole movement constrains
every individual under its yoke, and produces also in heterogeneous
natures as it were a chemical transformation of their qualities until
they are brought into affinity with that purpose. In the highest
castes one perceives already a little more of what in this internal
process is involved at the bottom, namely the creation of the _military
genius_--with whom we have become acquainted as the original founder of
states. In the case of many States, as, for example, in the Lycurgian
constitution of Sparta, one can distinctly perceive the impress of that
fundamental idea of the State, that of the creation of the military
genius. If we now imagine the military primal State in its greatest
activity, at its proper "labour," and if we fix our glance upon the
whole technique of war, we cannot avoid correcting our notions picked
up from everywhere, as to the "dignity of man" and the "dignity of
labour" by the question, whether the idea of dignity is applicable
also to that labour, which has as its purpose the destruction of the
"dignified" man, as well as to the man who is entrusted with that
"dignified labour," or whether in this warlike task of the State those
mutually contradictory ideas do not neutralise one another. I should
like to think the warlike man to be a _means_ of the military genius
and his labour again only a tool in the hands of that same genius; and
not to him, as absolute man and non-genius, but to him as a means of
the genius--whose pleasure also can be to choose his tool's destruction
as a mere pawn sacrificed on the strategist's chessboard--is due a
degree of dignity, of that dignity namely, _to have been deemed worthy
of being a means of the genius._ But what is shown here in a single
instance is valid in the most general sense; every human being, with
his total activity, only has dignity in so far as he is a tool of _the_
genius, consciously or unconsciously; from this we may immediately
deduce the ethical conclusion, that "man in himself," the absolute man
possesses neither dignity, nor rights, nor duties; only as a wholly
determined being serving unconscious purposes can man excuse his
existence.
_Plato's perfect State_ is according to these considerations certainly
something still greater than even the warm-blooded among his admirers
believe, not to mention the smiling mien of superiority with which
our "historically" educated refuse such a fruit of antiquity. The
proper aim of the State, the Olympian existence and ever-renewed
procreation and preparation of the genius,--compared with which
all other things are only tools, expedients and factors towards
realisation--is here discovered with a poetic intuition and painted
with firmness. Plato saw through the awfully devastated Herma of the
then-existing State-life and perceived even then something divine in
its interior. He _believed_ that one might be able to take out this
divine image and that the grim and barbarically distorted outside and
shell did not belong to the essence of the State: the whole fervour
and sublimity of his political passion threw itself upon this belief,
upon that desire--and in the flames of this fire he perished. That in
his perfect State he did not place at the head _the_ genius in its
general meaning, but only the genius of wisdom and of knowledge, that
he altogether excluded the inspired artist from his State, that was
a rigid consequence of the Socratian judgment on art, which Plato,
struggling against himself, had made his own. This more external,
almost incidental gap must not prevent our recognising in the total
conception of the Platonic State the wonderfully great hieroglyph of
a profound and eternally to be interpreted _esoteric doctrine of the
connection between State and Genius._ What we believed we could divine
of this cryptograph we have said in this preface.
THE GREEK WOMAN
(Fragment, 1871)
Just as Plato from disguises and obscurities brought to light the
innermost purpose of the State, so also he conceived the chief cause
of the position of the _Hellenic Woman_ with regard to the State; in
both cases he saw in what existed around him the image of the ideas
manifested to him, and of these ideas of course the actual was only a
hazy picture and phantasmagoria. He who according to the usual custom
considers the position of the Hellenic Woman to be altogether unworthy
and repugnant to humanity, must also turn with this reproach against
the Platonic conception of this position; for, as it were, the existing
forms were only precisely set forth in this latter conception. Here
therefore our question repeats itself: should not the nature and the
position of the Hellenic Woman have a _necessary_ relation to the goals
of the Hellenic Will?
Of course there is one side of the Platonic conception of woman, which
stands in abrupt contrast with Hellenic custom: Plato gives to woman a
full share in the rights, knowledge and duties of man, and considers
woman only as the weaker sex, in that she will not achieve remarkable
success in all things, without however disputing this sex's title to
all those things. We must not attach more value to; this strange notion
than to the expulsion of the artist out of the ideal State; these are
side-lines daringly mis-drawn, aberrations as it were of the hand
otherwise so sure and of the so calmly contemplating eye which at times
under the influence of the deceased master becomes dim and dejected; in
this mood he exaggerates the master's paradoxes and in the abundance of
his love gives himself satisfaction by very eccentrically intensifying
the latter's doctrines even to foolhardiness.
The most significant word however that Plato as a Greek could say on
the relation of woman to the State, was that so objectionable demand,
that in the perfect State, the _Family was to cease._ At present let us
take no account of his abolishing even marriage, in order to carry out
this demand fully, and of his substituting solemn nuptials arranged by
order of the State, between the bravest men and the noblest women, for
the attainment of beautiful offspring. In that principal proposition
however he has indicated most distinctly--indeed too distinctly,
offensively distinctly--an important preparatory step of the Hellenic
Will towards the procreation of the genius. But in the customs of the
Hellenic people the claim of the family on man and child was extremely
limited: the man lived in the State, the child grew up for the State
and was guided by the hand of the State. The Greek Will took care that
the need of culture could not be satisfied in the seclusion of a small
circle. From the State the individual has to receive everything in
order to return everything to the State. Woman accordingly means to the
State, what _sleep_ does to man. In her nature lies the healing power,
which replaces that which has been used up, the beneficial rest in
which everything immoderate confines itself, the eternal Same, by which
the excessive and the surplus regulate themselves. In her the future
generation dreams. Woman is more closely related to Nature than man and
in all her essentials she remains ever herself. Culture is with her
always something external, a something which does not touch the kernel
that is eternally faithful to Nature, therefore the culture of woman
might well appear to the Athenian as something indifferent, yea--if one
only wanted to conjure it up in one's mind, as something ridiculous.
He who at once feels himself compelled from that to infer the position
of women among the Greeks as unworthy and all too cruel, should not
indeed take as his criterion the "culture" of modern woman and her
claims, against which it is sufficient just to point out the Olympian
women together with Penelope, Antigone, Elektra. Of course it is true
that these are ideal figures, but who would be able to create such
ideals out of the present world?--Further indeed is to be considered
_what sons_ these women have borne, and what women they must have been
to have given birth to such sons! The Hellenic woman as _mother_ had
to live in obscurity, because the political instinct together with
its highest aim demanded it. She had to vegetate like a plant, in
the narrow circle, as a symbol of the Epicurean wisdom λάθε βυώσας.
Again, in more recent times, with the complete disintegration of the
principle of the State, she had to step in as helper; the family as a
makeshift for the State is her work; and in this sense the _artistic
aim_ of the State had to abase itself to the level of a _domestic_ art.
Thereby it has been brought about, that the passion of love, as the
one realm wholly accessible to women, regulates our art to the very
core. Similarly, home-education considers itself so to speak as the
only natural one and suffers State-education only as a questionable
infringement upon the right of home-education: all this is right as
far as the modern State only is concerned.--With that the nature of
woman withal remains unaltered, but her _power_ is, according to the
position which the State takes up with regard to women, a different
one. Women have indeed really the power to make good to a certain
extent the deficiencies of the State--ever faithful to their nature,
which I have compared to sleep. In Greek antiquity they held that
position, which the most supreme will of the State assigned to them:
for that reason they have been glorified as never since. The goddesses
of Greek mythology are their images: the Pythia and the Sibyl, as well
as the Socratic Diotima are the priestesses out of whom divine wisdom
speaks. Now one understands why the proud resignation of the Spartan
woman at the news of her son's death in battle can be no fable. Woman
in relation to the State felt herself in her proper position, therefore
she had more _dignity_ than woman has ever had since. Plato who through
abolishing family and marriage still intensifies the position of woman,
feels now so much _reverence_ towards them, that oddly enough he is
misled by a subsequent statement of their equality with man, to abolish
again the order of rank which is their due: the highest triumph of the
woman of antiquity, to have seduced even the wisest!
As long as the State is still in an embryonic condition woman as
_mother_ preponderates and determines the grade and the manifestations
of Culture: in the same way as woman is destined to complement the
disorganised State. What Tacitus says of German women: _inesse
quin etiam sanctum aliquid et providum putant, nec aut consilia
earum aspernantur aut responsa neglegunt,_ applies on the whole to
all nations not yet arrived at the real State. In such stages one
feels only the more strongly that which at all times becomes again
manifest, that the instincts of woman as the bulwark of the future
generation are invincible and that in her care for the preservation
of the species Nature speaks out of these instincts very distinctly.
How far this divining power reaches is determined, it seems, by the
greater or lesser consolidation of the State: in disorderly and more
arbitrary conditions, where the whim or the passion of the individual
man carries along with itself whole tribes, then woman suddenly comes
forward as the warning prophetess. But in Greece too there was a never
slumbering care that the terribly overcharged political instinct might
splinter into dust and atoms the little political organisms before
they attained their goals in any way. Here the Hellenic Will created
for itself ever new implements by means of which it spoke, adjusting,
moderating, warning: above all it is in the _Pythia,_ that the power
of woman to compensate the State manifested itself so clearly, as it
has never done since. That a people split up thus into small tribes
and municipalities, was yet at bottom _whole_ and was performing the
task of its nature within its faction, was assured by that wonderful
phenomenon the Pythia and the Delphian oracle: for always, as long as
Hellenism created its great works of art, it spoke out of _one_ mouth
and as _one_ Pythia. We cannot hold back the portentous discernment
that to the Will individuation means much suffering, and that in order
to reach those _individuals_ It _needs_ an enormous step-ladder of
individuals. It is true our brains reel with the consideration whether
the Will in order to arrive at _Art,_ has perhaps effused Itself out
into these worlds, stars, bodies, and atoms: at least it ought to
become clear to us then, that Art is not necessary for the individuals,
but for the Will itself: a sublime outlook at which we shall be
permitted to glance once more from another position.
ON MUSIC AND WORDS
(Fragment, 1871)
What we here have asserted of the relationship between language and
music must be valid too, for equal reasons concerning the relationship
of _Mime_ to _Music._ The Mime too, as the intensified symbolism of
man's gestures, is, measured by the eternal significance of music,
only a simile, which brings into expression the innermost secret
of music but very superficially, namely on the substratum of the
passionately moved human body. But if we include language also in the
category of bodily symbolism, and compare the _drama,_ according to
the canon advanced, with music, then I venture to think, a proposition
of Schopenhauer will come into the clearest light, to which reference
must be made again later on. "It might be admissible, although a purely
musical mind does not demand it, to join and adapt words or even a
clearly represented action to the pure language of tones, although the
latter, being self-sufficient, needs no help; so that our perceiving
and reflecting intellect, which does not like to be quite idle, may
meanwhile have light and analogous occupation also. By this concession
to the intellect man's attention adheres even more closely to music,
by this at the same time, too, is placed underneath that which the
tones indicate in their general metaphorless language of the heart,
a visible picture, as it were a schema, as an example illustrating a
general idea ... indeed such things will even heighten the effect
of music." (Schopenhauer, Parerga, II., "On the Metaphysics of the
Beautiful and Æsthetics," § 224.) If we disregard the naturalistic
external motivation according to which our perceiving and reflecting
intellect does not like to be quite idle when listening to music, and
attention led by the hand of an obvious action follows better--then
the drama in relation to music has been characterised by Schopenhauer
for the best reasons as a schema, as an example illustrating a general
idea: and when he adds "indeed such things will even heighten the
effect of music" then the enormous universality and originality of
vocal music, of the connection of tone with metaphor and idea guarantee
the correctness of this utterance. The music of every people begins in
closest connection with lyricism and long before absolute music can be
thought of, the music of a people in that connection passes through
the most important stages of development. If we understand this primal
lyricism of a people, as indeed we must, to be an imitation of the
artistic typifying Nature, then as the original prototype of that union
of music and lyricism must be regarded: _the duality in the essence
of language,_ already typified by Nature. Now, after discussing the
relation of music to metaphor we will fathom deeper this essence of
language.