set up here, or is one pulled down?" I am perhaps asked.... But have
ye sufficiently asked yourselves how dear a payment has the setting up
of every ideal in the world exacted? To achieve that consummation how
much truth must always be traduced and misunderstood, how many lies
must be sanctified, how much conscience has got to be disturbed, how
many pounds of "God" have got to be sacrificed every time? To enable
a sanctuary to be set up _a sanctuary has got to be destroyed_: that
is a law--show me an instance where it has not been fulfilled!...
We modern men, we inherit the immemorial tradition of vivisecting
the conscience, and practising cruelty to our animal selves. That is
the sphere of our most protracted training, perhaps of our artistic
prowess, at any rate of our dilettantism and our perverted taste. Man
has for too long regarded his natural proclivities with an "evil eye,"
so that eventually they have become in his system affiliated to a
bad conscience. A converse endeavour would be intrinsically feasible
--but who is strong enough to attempt it?--namely, to affiliate to
the "bad conscience" all those _unnatural_ proclivities, all those
transcendental aspirations, contrary to sense, instinct, nature, and
animalism--in short, all past and present ideals, which are all ideals
opposed to life, and traducing the world. To whom is one to turn
nowadays with _such_ hopes and pretensions?--It is just the _good_
men that we should thus bring about our ears; and in addition, as
stands to reason, the indolent, the hedgers, the vain, the hysterical,
the tired.... What is more offensive or more thoroughly calculated
to alienate, than giving any hint of the exalted severity with which
we treat ourselves? And again how conciliatory, how full of love
does all the world show itself towards us so soon as we do as all
the world docs, and "let ourselves go" like all the world. For such
a consummation we need spirits of _different_ calibre than seems
really feasible in this age; spirits rendered potent through wars and
victories, to whom conquest, adventure, danger, even pain, have become
a need; for such a consummation we need habituation to sharp, rare air,
to winter wanderings, to literal and metaphorical ice and mountains; we
even need a kind of sublime malice, a supreme and most self-conscious
insolence of knowledge, which is the appanage of great health; we need
(to summarise the awful truth) just this _great health_!
Is this even feasible to-day?... But some day, in a stronger age
than this rotting and introspective present, must he in sooth come
to us, even the _redeemer_ of great love and scorn, the creative
spirit, rebounding by the impetus of his own force back again away
from every transcendental plane and dimension, he whose solitude
is misunderstanded (sic) of the people, as though it were a flight
_from_ reality;--while actually it is only his diving, burrowing, and
penetrating _into_ reality, so that when he comes again to the light
he can at once bring about by these means the _redemption_ of this
reality; its redemption from the curse which the old ideal has laid
upon it. This man of the future, who in this wise will redeem us from
the old ideal, as he will from that ideal's necessary corollary of
great nausea, will to nothingness, and Nihilism; this tocsin of noon
and of the great verdict, which renders the will again free, who gives
back to the world its goal and to man his hope, this Antichrist and
Antinihilist, this conqueror of God and of Nothingness--_he must one
day come_.
25.
But what am I talking of? Enough! Enough? At this juncture I have
only one proper course, silence: otherwise tresspass on a domain open
alone to one who is younger than I, one stronger, more "_future_" than
I--open alone to _Zarathustra, Zarathustra the godless._
[1] The German is: "_Sittlichkeit der Sitte_." H. B. S.
[2] The German world "_schuld_" means both debt and guilt. Cp. the
English "owe" and "ought," by which I occasionally render the double
meaning.--H. B. S.
[3] German: "_Verbrecher_."--H.B.S.
[4] An allusion to _Der Zweck im Recht_, by the great German jurist,
Professor Ihering.
THIRD ESSAY.
WHAT IS THE MEANING OF ASCETIC IDEALS?
"Careless, mocking, forceful--so does wisdom wish us: she is a woman,
and never loves any one but a warrior." Thus Spake Zarathustra.
1.
What is the meaning of ascetic ideals? In artists, nothing, or too
much; in philosophers and scholars, a kind of "flair" and instinct for
the conditions most favourable to advanced intellectualism; in women,
at best an _additional_ seductive fascination, a little _morbidezza_
on a fine piece of flesh, the angelhood of a fat, pretty animal; in
physiological failures and whiners (in the _majority_ of mortals),
an attempt to pose as "too good" for this world, a holy form of
debauchery, their chief weapon in the battle with lingering pain and
ennui; in priests, the actual priestly faith, their best engine of
power, and also the supreme authority for power; in saints, finally
a pretext for hibernation, their _novissima gloriæ cupido_, their
peace in nothingness ("God"), their form of madness.
But in the very fact that the ascetic ideal has meant so much to
man, lies expressed the fundamental feature of man's will, his
_horror vacui: he needs a goal_--and he will sooner will nothingness
than not will at all.--Am I not understood?--Have I not been
understood?--"Certainly not, sir?"--Well, let us begin at the beginning.
2.
What is the meaning of ascetic ideals? Or, to take an individual
case in regard to which I have often been consulted, what is the
meaning, for example, of an artist like Richard Wagner paying homage
to chastity in his old age? He had always done so, of course, in a
certain sense, but it was not till quite the end, that he did so in
an ascetic sense. What is the meaning of this "change of attitude,"
this radical revolution in his attitude--for that was what it was?
Wagner veered thereby straight round into his own opposite. What is
the meaning of an artist veering round into his own opposite? At
this point (granted that we do not mind stopping a little over this
question), we immediately call to mind the best, strongest, gayest,
and boldest period, that there perhaps ever was in Wagner's life: that
was the period, when he was genuinely and deeply occupied with the
idea of "Luther's Wedding." Who knows what chance is responsible for
our now having the _Meistersingers_ instead of this wedding music?
And how much in the latter is perhaps just an echo of the former? But
there is no doubt but that the theme would have dealt with the praise
of chastity. And certainly it would also have dealt with the praise
of sensuality, and even so, it would seem quite in order, and even
so, it would have been equally Wagnerian. For there is no necessary
antithesis between chastity and sensuality: every good marriage, every
authentic heart-felt love transcends this antithesis. Wagner would, it
seems to me, have done well to have brought this _pleasing_ reality
home once again to his Germans, by means of a bold and graceful "Luther
Comedy," for there were and are among the Germans many revilers of
sensuality; and perhaps Luther's greatest merit lies just in the fact
of his having had the courage of his _sensuality_ (it used to be
called, prettily enough, "evangelistic freedom "). But even in those
cases where that antithesis between chastity and sensuality does exist,
there has fortunately been for some time no necessity for it to be in
any way a tragic antithesis. This should, at any rate, be the case with
all beings who are sound in mind and body, who are far from reckoning
their delicate balance between "animal" and "angel," as being on the
face of it one of the principles opposed to existence--the most subtle
and brilliant spirits, such as Goethe, such as Hafiz,> have even seen
in this a _further_ charm of life. Such "conflicts" actually allure
one to life. On the other hand, it is only too clear that when once
these ruined swine are reduced to worshipping chastity--and there
are such swine--they only see and worship in it the antithesis to
themselves, the antithesis to ruined swine. Oh what a tragic grunting
and eagerness! You can just think of it--they worship that painful
and superfluous contrast, which Richard Wagner in his latter days
undoubtedly wished to set to music, and to place on the stage! "_For
what purpose, forsooth?_" as we may reasonably ask. What did the swine
matter to him; what do they matter to us?
3.
At this point it is impossible to beg the further question of what he
really had to do with that manly (ah, so unmanly) country bumpkin,
that poor devil and natural, Parsifal, whom he eventually made a
Catholic by such fraudulent devices. What? Was this Parsifal really
meant _seriously_? One might be tempted to suppose the contrary, even
to wish it--that the Wagnerian Parsifal was meant joyously, like a
concluding play of a trilogy or satyric drama, in which Wagner the
tragedian wished to take farewell of us, of himself, above all of
tragedy, and to do so in a manner that should be quite fitting and
worthy, that is, with an excess of the most extreme and flippant parody
of the tragic itself, of the ghastly earthly seriousness and earthly
woe of old--a parody of that _most crude phase_ in the unnaturalness
of the ascetic ideal, that had at length been overcome. That, as I
have said, would have been quite worthy of a great tragedian; who like
every artist first attains the supreme pinnacle of his greatness when
he can look _down_ into himself and his art, when he can _laugh_ at
himself. Is Wagner's Parsifal his secret laugh of superiority over
himself, the triumph of that supreme artistic freedom and artistic
transcendency which he has at length attained. We might, I repeat,
wish it were so, for what can Parsifal, _taken seriously_, amount to?
Is it really necessary to see in it (according to an expression once
used against me) the product of an insane hate of knowledge, mind,
and flesh? A curse on flesh and spirit in one breath of hate? An
apostasy and reversion to the morbid Christian and obscurantist ideals?
And finally a self-negation and self-elimination on the part of an
artist, who till then had devoted all the strength of his will to the
contrary, namely, the _highest_ artistic expression of soul and body.
And not only of his art; of his life as well. Just remember with what
enthusiasm Wagner followed in the footsteps of Feuerbach. Feuerbach's
motto of "healthy sensuality" rang in the ears of Wagner during the
thirties and forties of the century, as it did in the ears of many
Germans (they dubbed themselves "_Young_ Germans"), like the word of
redemption. Did he eventually _change his mind_ on the subject? For it
seems at any rate that he eventually wished to _change his teaching_
on that subject ... and not only is that the case with the Parsifal
trumpets on the stage: in the melancholy, cramped, and embarrassed
lucubrations of his later years, there are a hundred places in which
there are manifestations of a secret wish and will, a despondent,
uncertain, unavowed will to preach actual retrogression, conversion,
Christianity, mediævalism, and to say to his disciples, "All is vanity!
Seek salvation elsewhere!" Even the "blood of the Redeemer" is once
invoked.
4.
Let me speak out my mind in a case like this, which has many painful
elements--and it is a typical case: it is certainly best to separate
an artist from his work so completely that he cannot be taken as
seriously as his work. He is after all merely the presupposition of
his work, the womb, the soil, in certain cases the dung and manure,
on which and out of which it grows--and consequently, in most cases,
something that must be forgotten if the work itself is to be enjoyed.
The insight into the _origin_ of a work is a matter for psychologists
and vivisectors, but never either in the present or the future for the
æsthetes, the artists. The author and creator of Parsifal was as little
spared the necessity of sinking and living himself into the terrible
depths and foundations of mediæval soul-contrasts, the necessity of a
malignant abstraction from all intellectual elevation, severity, and
discipline, the necessity of a kind of mental perversity (if the reader
will pardon me such a word), as little as a pregnant woman is spared
the horrors and marvels of pregnancy, which, as I have said, must
be forgotten if the child is to be enjoyed. We must guard ourselves
against the confusion, into which an artist himself would fall only
too easily (to employ the English terminology) out of psychological
"contiguity"; as though the artist himself actually were the object
which he is able to represent, imagine, and express. In point of fact,
the position is that even if he conceived he were such an object, he
would certainly not represent, conceive, express it. Homer would not
have created an Achilles, nor Goethe a Faust, if Homer had been an
Achilles or if Goethe had been a Faust. A complete and perfect artist
is to all eternity separated from the "real," from the actual; on the
other hand, it will be appreciated that he can at times get tired to
the point of despair of this eternal "unreality" and falseness of his
innermost being--and that he then sometimes attempts to trespass on
to the most forbidden ground, on reality, and attempts to have real
_existence_. With what success? The success will be guessed--it is the
_typical velleity_ of the artist; the same velleity to which Wagner
fell a victim in his old age, and for which he had to pay so dearly and
so fatally (he lost thereby his most valuable friends). But after all,
quite apart from this velleity, who would not wish emphatically for
Wagner's own sake that he had taken farewell of us and of his art in a
_different_ manner, not with a _Parsifal_, but in more victorious, more
self-confident, more Wagnerian style--a style less misleading, a style
less ambiguous with regard to his whole meaning, less Schopenhauerian,
less Nihilistic?...
5.
What, then, is the meaning of ascetic ideals? In the case of an artist
we are getting to understand their meaning: _Nothing at all_ ... or so
much that it is as good as nothing at all. Indeed, what is the use of
them? Our artists have for a long time past not taken up a sufficiently
independent attitude, either in the world or against it, to warrant
their valuations and the changes in these valuations exciting interest.
At all times they have played the valet of some morality, philosophy,
or religion, quite apart from the fact that unfortunately they
have often enough been the inordinately supple courtiers of their
clients and patrons, and the inquisitive toadies of the powers that
are existing, or even of the new powers to come. To put it at the
lowest, they always need a rampart, a support, an already constituted
authority: artists never stand by themselves, standing alone is opposed
to their deepest instincts. So, for example, did _Richard Wagner_
take, "when the time had come," the philosopher Schopenhauer for his
covering man in front, for his rampart. Who would consider it even
thinkable, that he would have had the _courage_ for an ascetic ideal,
without the support afforded him by the philosophy of Schopenhauer,
without the authority of Schopenhauer, which _dominated_ Europe in the
seventies? (This is without consideration of the question whether an
artist without the milk[1] of an orthodoxy would have been possible at
all.) This brings us to the more serious question: What is the meaning
of a real _philosopher_ paying homage to the ascetic ideal, a really
self-dependent intellect like Schopenhauer, a man and knight with a
glance of bronze, who has the courage to be himself, who knows how to
stand alone without first waiting for men who cover him in front, and
the nods of his superiors? Let us now consider at once the remarkable
attitude of Schopenhauer towards _art_, an attitude which has even a
fascination for certain types. For that is obviously the reason why
Richard Wagner _all at once_ went over to Schopenhauer (persuaded
thereto, as one knows, by a poet, Herwegh), went over so completely
that there ensued the cleavage of a complete theoretic contradiction
between his earlier and his later æsthetic faiths--the earlier, for
example, being expressed in _Opera and Drama_, the later in the
writings which he published from 1870 onwards. In particular, Wagner
from that time onwards (and this is the volte-face which alienates us
the most) had no scruples about changing his judgment concerning the
value and position of music itself. What did he care if up to that time
he had made of music a means, a medium, a "woman," that in order to
thrive needed an end, a man--that is, the drama? He suddenly realised
that _more_ could be effected by the novelty of the Schopenhauerian
theory in _majorem musicæ gloriam_--that is to say, by means of the
_sovereignty_ of music, as Schopenhauer understood it; music abstracted
from and opposed to all the other arts, music as the independent
art-in-itself, _not_ like the other arts, affording reflections of the
phenomenal world, but rather the language of the will itself, speaking
straight out of the "abyss" as its most personal, original, and direct
manifestation. This extraordinary rise in the value of music (a rise
which seemed to grow out of the Schopenhauerian philosophy) was at
once accompanied by an unprecedented rise in the estimation in which
the musician himself was held: he became now an oracle, a priest, nay,
more than a priest, a kind of mouthpiece for the "intrinsic essence
of things," a telephone from the other world--from henceforward
he talked not only music, did this ventriloquist of God, he talked
metaphysic; what wonder that one day he eventually talked _ascetic
ideals_.
6.
Schopenhauer has made use of the Kantian treatment of the æsthetic
problem--though he certainly did not regard it with the Kantian eyes.
Kant thought that he showed honour to art when he favoured and placed
in the foreground those of the predicates of the beautiful, which
constitute the honour of knowledge: impersonality and universality.
This is not the place to discuss whether this was not a complete
mistake; all that I wish to emphasise is that Kant, just like other
philosophers, instead of envisaging the æsthetic problem from the
standpoint of the experiences of the artist (the creator), has only
considered art and beauty from the standpoint of the spectator, and
has thereby imperceptibly imported the spectator himself into the idea
of the "beautiful"! But if only the philosophers of the beautiful had
sufficient knowledge of this "spectator"!--Knowledge of him as a great
fact of personality, as a great experience, as a wealth of strong and
most individual events, desires, surprises, and raptures in the sphere
of beauty! But, as I feared, the contrary was always the case. And so
we get from our philosophers, from the very beginning, definitions
on which the lack of a subtler personal experience squats like a fat
worm of crass error, as it does on Kant's famous definition of the
beautiful. "That is beautiful," says Kant, "which pleases without
interesting." Without interesting! Compare this definition with this
other one, made by a real "spectator" and "artist"--by Stendhal, who
once called the beautiful _une promesse de bonheur_. Here, at any rate,
the one point which Kant makes prominent in the æsthetic position is
repudiated and eliminated--_le désintéressement_. Who is right, Kant
or Stendhal? When, forsooth, our æsthetes never get tired of throwing
into the scales in Kant's favour the fact that under the magic of
beauty men can look at even naked female statues "without interest,"
we can certainly laugh a little at their expense:--in regard to this
ticklish point the experiences of _artists_ are more "interesting,"
and at any rate Pygmalion was not necessarily an "unæsthetic man." Let
us think all the better of the innocence of our æsthetes, reflected
as it is in such arguments; let us, for instance, count to Kant's
honour the country-parson naïveté of his doctrine concerning the
peculiar character of the sense of touch! And here we come back to
Schopenhauer, who stood in much closer neighbourhood to the arts
than did Kant, and yet never escaped outside the pale of the Kantian
definition; how was that? The circumstance is marvellous enough: he
interprets the expression, "without interest," in the most personal
fashion, out of an experience which must in his case have been part and
parcel of his regular routine. On few subjects does Schopenhauer speak
with such certainty as on the working of æsthetic contemplation: he
says of it that it simply counteracts sexual interest, like lupulin
and camphor; he never gets tired of glorifying this escape from
the "Life-will" as the great advantage and utility of the æsthetic
state. In fact, one is tempted to ask if his fundamental conception
of Will and Idea, the thought that there can only exist freedom from
the "will" by means of "idea," did not originate in a generalisation
from this sexual experience. (In all questions concerning the
Schopenhauerian philosophy, one should, by the bye, never lose sight of
the consideration that it is the conception of a youth of twenty-six,
so that it participates not only in what is peculiar to Schopenhauer's
life, but in what is peculiar to that special period of his life.)
Let us listen, for instance, to one of the most expressive among the
countless passages which he has written in honour of the æsthetic
state (_World as Will and Idea_, i. 231); let us listen to the tone,
the suffering, the happiness, the gratitude, with which such words
are uttered: "This is the painless state which Epicurus praised as
the highest good and as the state of the gods; we are during that
moment freed from the vile pressure of the will, we celebrate the
Sabbath of the will's hard labour, the wheel of Ixion stands still."
What vehemence of language! What images of anguish and protracted
revulsion! How almost pathological is that temporal antithesis between
"that moment" and everything else, the "wheel of Ixion," "the hard
labour of the will," "the vile pressure of the will." But granted
that Schopenhauer was a hundred times right for himself personally,
how does that help our insight into the nature of the beautiful?
Schopenhauer has described one effect of the beautiful,--the calming
of the will,--but is this effect really normal? As has been mentioned,
Stendhal, an equally sensual but more happily constituted nature than
Schopenhauer, gives prominence to another effect of the "beautiful."
"The beautiful promises happiness." To him it is just the excitement
of the "will"(the "interest") by the beauty that seems the essential
fact. And does not Schopenhauer ultimately lay himself open to the
objection, that he is quite wrong in regarding himself as a Kantian on
this point, that he has absolutely failed to understand in a Kantian
sense the Kantian definition of the beautiful--;that the beautiful
pleased him as well by means of an interest, by means, in fact, of the
strongest and most personal interest of all, that: of the victim of
torture who escapes from his torture?--And to come back again to our
first question, "What is the meaning of a philosopher paying homage to
ascetic ideals?" We get now, at any rate, a first hint; he wishes to
escape _from a torture_.
7.