the most supreme idealists to be found nowadays among philosophers and
scholars. Have we, perchance, found in them the sought-for _opponents_
of the ascetic ideal, its _anti-idealists_? In fact, they _believe_
themselves to be such, these "unbelievers" (for they are all of them
that): it seems that this idea is their last remnant of faith, the idea
of being opponents of this ideal, so earnest are they on this subject,
so passionate in word and gesture;--but does it follow that what
they believe must necessarily be _true_? We "knowers" have grown by
degrees suspicious of all kinds of believers, our suspicion has step by
step habituated us to draw just the opposite conclusions to what people
have drawn before; that is to say, wherever the strength of a belief
is particularly prominent to draw the conclusion of the difficulty of
proving what is believed, the conclusion of its actual _improbability_.
We do not again deny that "faith produces salvation": _for that very
reason_ we do deny that faith _proves_ anything,--a strong faith, which
produces happiness, causes suspicion of the object of that faith, it
does not establish its "truth," it does establish a certain probability
of--_illusion_. What is now the position in these cases? These
solitaries and deniers of to-day; these fanatics in one thing, in their
claim to intellectual cleanness; these hard, stern, continent, heroic
spirits, who constitute the glory of our time; all these pale atheists,
anti-Christians, immoralists, Nihilists; these sceptics, "ephectics,"
and "hectics" of the intellect (in a certain sense they are the
latter, both collectively and individually); these supreme idealists
of knowledge, in whom alone nowadays the intellectual conscience
dwells and is alive--in point of fact they believe themselves as far
away as possible from the ascetic ideal, do these "free, very free
spirits": and yet, if I may reveal what they themselves cannot see--for
they stand too near themselves: this ideal is simply _their_ ideal,
they represent it nowadays and perhaps no one else, they themselves
are its most spiritualised product, its most advanced picket of
skirmishers and scouts, its most insidious delicate and elusive form
of seduction.--If I am in any way a reader of riddles, then I will
be one with this sentence: for some time past there have been no
free spirits; _for they still believe in truth_. When the Christian
Crusaders in the East came into collision with that invincible order
of assassins, that order of free spirits _par excellence_, whose
lowest grade lives in a state of discipline such as no order of monks
has ever attained, then in some way or other they managed to get an
inkling of that symbol and tally-word, that was reserved for the
highest grade alone as their _secretum_, "Nothing is true, everything
is allowed,"--in sooth, that was _freedom_ of thought, thereby was
_taking leave_ of the very belief in truth. Has indeed any European,
any Christian freethinker, ever yet wandered into this proposition
and its labyrinthine consequences? Does he know _from experience_ the
Minotauros of this den.--I doubt it--nay, I know otherwise. Nothing
is more really alien to these "mono-fanatics," these _so-called_
"free spirits," than freedom and unfettering in that sense; in no
respect are they more closely tied, the absolute fanaticism of their
belief in truth is unparalleled. I know all this perhaps too much from
experience at close quarters--that dignified philosophic abstinence
to which a belief like that binds its adherents, that stoicism of
the intellect, which eventually vetoes negation as rigidly as it does
affirmation, that wish for standing still in front of the actual,
the _factum brutum_, that fatalism in "_petits faits_" (ce petit
faitalism, as I call it), in which French Science now attempts a kind
of moral superiority over German, this renunciation of interpretation
generally (that is, of forcing, doctoring, abridging, omitting,
suppressing, inventing, falsifying, and all the other _essential_
attributes of interpretation)--all this, considered broadly, expresses
the asceticism of virtue, quite as efficiently as does any repudiation
of the senses (it is at bottom only a _modus_ of that repudiation.)
But what forces it into that unqualified will for truth is the faith
_in the ascetic ideal itself_, even though it take the form of its
unconscious imperatives,--make no mistake about it, it is the faith,
I repeat, in a _metaphysical_ value, an _intrinsic_ value of truth,
of a character which is only warranted and guaranteed in this ideal
(it stands and falls with that ideal). Judged strictly, there does
not exist a science without its "hypotheses," the thought of such a
science is inconceivable, illogical: a philosophy, a faith, must always
exist first to enable science to gain thereby a direction, a meaning,
a limit and method, a _right_ to existence. (He who holds a contrary
opinion on the subject--he, for example, who takes it upon himself to
establish philosophy "upon a strictly scientific basis"--has first got
to "turn up-side-down" not only philosophy but also truth itself--the
gravest insult which could possibly be offered to two such respectable
females!) Yes, there is no doubt about it--and here I quote my _Joyful
Wisdom_, cp. Book V. Aph. 344: "The man who is truthful in that
daring and extreme fashion, which is the presupposition of the faith
in science, _asserts thereby a different world_ from that of life,
nature, and history; and in so far as he asserts the existence of that
different world, come, must he not similarly repudiate its counterpart,
this world, _our_ world? The belief on which our faith in science is
based has remained to this day a metaphysical belief--even we knowers
of to-day, we godless foes of metaphysics, we too take our fire from
that conflagration which was kindled by a thousand-year-old faith,
from that Christian belief, which was also Plato's belief, the belief
that God is truth, that truth is _divine_.... But what if this belief
becomes more and more incredible, what if nothing proves itself to
be divine, unless it be error, blindness, lies--what if God, Himself
proved Himself to be our _oldest lie_?"--It is necessary to stop at
this point and to consider the situation carefully. Science itself now
_needs_ a justification (which is not for a minute to say that there
is such a justification). Turn in this context to the most ancient and
the most modern philosophers: they all fail to realise the extent of
the need of a justification on the part of the Will for Truth--here
is a gap in every philosophy--what is it caused by? Because up to the
present the ascetic ideal dominated all philosophy, because Truth was
fixed as Being, as God, as the Supreme Court of Appeal, because Truth
was not allowed to be a problem. Do you understand this "allowed"?
From the minute that the belief in the God of the ascetic ideal is
repudiated, there exists _a new problem_: the problem of the value of
truth. The Will for Truth needed a critique--let us define by these
words our own task---the value of truth is tentatively _to be called
in question_.... (If this seems too laconically expressed, I recommend
the reader to peruse again that passage from the _Joyful Wisdom_ which
bears the title, "How far we also are still pious," Aph. 344, and best
of all the whole fifth book of that work, as well as the Preface to
_The Dawn of Day_.)
25.
No! You can't get round me with science, when I search for the natural
antagonists of the ascetic ideal, when I put the question: "_Where_
is the opposed will in which the _opponent ideal_ expresses itself?"
Science is not, by a long way, independent enough to fulfil this
function; in every department science needs an ideal value, a power
which creates values, and in whose _service_ it _can believe_ in itself
--science itself never creates values. Its relation to the ascetic
ideal is not in itself antagonistic; speaking roughly, it rather
represents the progressive force in the inner evolution of that ideal.
Tested more exactly, its opposition and antagonism are concerned not
with the ideal itself, but only with that ideal's outworks, its outer
garb, its masquerade, with its temporary hardening, stiffening, and
dogmatising--it makes the life in the ideal free once more, while it
repudiates its superficial elements. These two phenomena, science and
the ascetic ideal, both rest on the same basis––I have already made
this clear––the basis, I say, oft the same over-appreciation of truth
(more accurately the same belief in the _impossibility_ of valuing and
of criticising truth), and consequently they are _necessarily_ allies,
so that, in the event of their being attacked, they must always be
attacked and called into question together. A valuation of the ascetic
ideal inevitably entails a valuation of science as well; lose no time
in seeing this clearly, and be sharp to catch it! (_Art_, I am speaking
provisionally, for I will treat it on some other occasion in greater
detail,––art, I repeat, in which lying is sanctified and the _will for
deception_ has good conscience on its side, is much more fundamentally
opposed to the ascetic ideal than is science: Plato's instinct felt
this––Plato, the greatest enemy of art which Europe has produced up
to the present. Plato _versus_ Homer, that is the complete, the true
antagonism––on the one side, the whole–hearted "transcendental," the
great defamer of life; on the other, its involuntary panegyrist, the
_golden_ nature. An artistic subservience to the service of the ascetic
ideal is consequently the most absolute artistic _corruption_ that
there can be, though unfortunately it is one of the most frequent
phases, for nothing is more corruptible than an artist.) Considered
physiologically, moreover, science rests on the same, basis as
does the ascetic ideal: a certain _impoverishment of life_ is the
presupposition of the latter as of the former––add, frigidity of the
emotions, slackening of the _tempo_, the substitution of dialectic for
instinct, _seriousness_ impressed on mien and gesture (seriousness,
that most unmistakable sign of strenuous metabolism, of struggling,
toiling life). Consider the periods in a nation in which the learned
man comes into prominence; they are the periods of exhaustion, often
of sunset, of decay--the effervescing strength, the confidence in
life, the confidence in the future are no more. The preponderance of
the mandarins never signifies any good, any more than does the advent
of democracy, or arbitration instead of war, equal rights for women,
the religion of pity, and all the other symptoms of declining life.
(Science handled as a problem! what is the meaning of science?--upon
this point the Preface to the _Birth of Tragedy_.) No! this "modern
science"--mark you this well--is at times the _best_ ally for the
ascetic ideal, and for the very reason that it is the ally which is
most unconscious, most automatic, most secret, and most subterranean!
They have been playing into each other's hands up to the present, have
these "poor in spirit" and the scientific opponents of that ideal (take
care, by the bye, not to think that these opponents are the antithesis
of this ideal, that they are the _rich_ in spirit--that they are _not_;
I have called them the _hectic_ in spirit). As for these celebrated
victories of science; there is no doubt that they are _victories_--but
victories over what? There was not for a single minute any victory
among their list over the ascetic ideal, rather was it made stronger,
that is to say, more elusive, more abstract, more insidious, from
the fact that a wall, an outwork, that had got built on to the main
fortress and disfigured its appearance, should from time to time be
ruthlessly destroyed and broken down by science. Does any one seriously
suggest that the downfall of the theological astronomy signified the
downfall of that ideal?--Has, perchance, man grown _less in need_ of a
transcendental solution of his riddle of existence, because since that
time this existence has become more random, casual, and superfluous in
the _visible_ order of the universe? Has there not been since the time
of Copernicus an unbroken progress in the self-belittling of man and
his _will_ for belittling himself? Alas, his belief in his dignity, his
uniquenesses irreplaceableness in the scheme of existence, is gone--he
has become animal, literal, unqualified, and unmitigated animal, he
who in his earlier belief was almost God ("child of God," "demi-God").
Since Copernicus man seems to have fallen on to a steep plane--he rolls
faster and faster away from the centre--whither? into nothingness?
into the "thrilling sensation of his own nothingness"--Well! this
would be the straight way--to the old ideal?--All science (and by no
means only astronomy, with regard to the humiliating and deteriorating
effect of which Kant has made a remarkable confession, "it annihilates
my own importance"), all science, natural as much as _unnatural_--by
unnatural I mean the self-critique of reason--nowadays sets out to
talk man out of his present opinion of himself, as though that opinion
had been nothing but a bizarre piece of conceit; you might go so far
as to say that science finds its peculiar pride, its peculiar bitter
form of stoical ataraxia, in preserving man's _contempt of himself_,
that state which it took so much trouble to bring about, as man's final
and most serious claim to self-appreciation (rightly so, in point
of fact, for he who despises is always "one who has not forgotten
how to appreciate"). But does all this involve any real effort to
_counteract_ the ascetic ideal? Is it really seriously suggested that
Kant's _victory_ over the theological dogmatism about "God," "Soul,"
"Freedom," "Immortality," has damaged that ideal in any way (as the
theologians have imagined to be the case for a long time past)?––
And in this connection it does not concern us for a single minute,
if Kant himself intended any such consummation. It is certain that
from the time of Kant every type of transcendentalist is playing a
winning game––they are emancipated from the theologians; what luck!––he
has revealed to them that secret art, by which they can now pursue
their "heart's desire" on their own responsibility, and with all the
respectability of science. Similarly, who can grumble at the agnostics,
reverers, as they are, of the unknown and the absolute mystery, if they
now worship _their very query_ as God? (Xaver Doudan talks somewhere
of the _ravages_ which _l'habitude d'admirer l'inintelligible au lieu
de rester tout simplement dans l'inconnu_ has produced––the ancients,
he thinks, must have been exempt from those ravages.) Supposing that
everything, "known" to man, fails to satisfy his desires, and on the
contrary contradicts and horrifies them, what a divine way out of all
this to be able to look for the responsibility, not in the "desiring"
but in "knowing"!––"There is no knowledge. _Consequently_––there is
a God"; what a novel _elegantia syllogism_i! what a triumph for the
ascetic ideal!
26.
Or, perchance, does the whole of modern history show in its demeanour
greater confidence in life, greater confidence in its ideals? Its
loftiest pretension is now to be a _mirror_; it repudiates all
teleology; it will have no more "proving"; it disdains to play the
judge, and thereby shows its good taste––it asserts as little as it
denies, it fixes, it "describes." All this is to a high degree ascetic,
but at the same time it is to a much greater degree _nihilistic_; make
no mistake about this! You see in the historian a gloomy, hard, but
determined gaze,––an eye that _looks out_ as an isolated North Pole
explorer looks out (perhaps so as not to look within, so as not to look
back?)––there is snow––here is life silenced, the last crows which
caw here are called "whither?" "Vanity," "Nada"––here nothing more
flourishes and grows, at the most the metapolitics of St. Petersburg
and the "pity" of Tolstoi. But as for that other school of historians,
a perhaps still more "modern" school, a voluptuous and lascivious
school which ogles life and the ascetic ideal with equal fervour,
which uses the word "artist" as a glove, and has nowadays established
a "corner" for itself, in all the praise given to contemplation; oh,
what a thirst do these sweet intellectuals excite even for ascetics
and winter landscapes! Nay! The devil take these "contemplative" folk!
How much liefer would I wander with those historical Nihilists through
the gloomiest, grey, cold mist!––nay, I shall not mind listening
(supposing I have to choose) to one who is completely unhistorical
and anti-historical (a man, like Dühring for instance, over whose
periods a hitherto shy and unavowed species of "beautiful souls" has
grown intoxicated in contemporary Germany, _the species anarchistica_
within the educated proletariate). The "contemplative" are a hundred
times worse––I never knew anything which produced such intense
nausea as one of those "objective" _chairs_,[6] one of those scented
mannikins-about-town of history, a thing half-priest, half-satyr (Renan
_parfum_), which betrays by the high, shrill falsetto of his applause
what he lacks and where he lacks it, who betrays where in this case
the Fates have plied their ghastly shears, alas! in too surgeon-like
a fashion! This is distasteful to me, and irritates my patience; let
him keep patient at such sights who has nothing to lose thereby,––such
a sight enrages me, such spectators embitter me against the "play,"
even more than does the play itself (history itself, you understand);
Anacreontic moods imperceptibly come over me. This Nature, who gave
to the steer its horn, to the lion its χάσμ ὀδοντων, for what purpose
did Nature give me my foot?––To kick, by St. Anacreon, and not merely
to run away! To trample on all the worm-eaten "chairs," the cowardly
contemplators, the lascivious eunuchs of history, the flirters with
ascetic ideals, the righteous hypocrites of impotence! All reverence
on my part to the ascetic ideal, _in so far as it is honourable_! So
long as it believes in itself and plays no pranks on us! But I like
not all these coquettish bugs who have an insatiate ambition to smell
of the infinite, until eventually the infinite smells of bugs; I like
not the whited sepulchres with their stagey reproduction of life;
I like not the tired and the used up who wrap themselves in wisdom
and look "objective"; I like not the agitators dressed up as heroes,
who hide their dummy-heads behind the stalking-horse of an ideal; I
like not the ambitious artists who would fain play the ascetic and
the priest, and are at bottom nothing but tragic clowns; I like not,
again, these newest speculators in idealism, the Anti-Semites, who
nowadays roll their eyes in the patent Christian-Aryan-man-of-honour
fashion, and by an abuse of moralist attitudes and agitation dodges, so
cheap as to exhaust any patience, strive to excite all the blockhead
elements in the populace (the invariable success of _every_ kind of
intellectual charlatanism in present-day Germany hangs together with
the almost indisputable and already quite palpable desolation of the
German mind, whose cause I look for in a too exclusive diet, of papers,
politics, beer, and Wagnerian music, not forgetting the condition
precedent of this diet, the national exclusiveness and vanity, the
strong but narrow principle, "Germany, Germany above everything,"[7]
and finally the _paralysis agitans_ of "modern ideas"). Europe
nowadays is, above all, wealthy and ingenious in means of excitement;
it apparently has no more crying necessity than _stimulantia_ and
alcohol. Hence the enormous counterfeiting of ideals, those most fiery
spirits of the mind; hence too the repulsive, evil-smelling, perjured,
pseudo–alcoholic air everywhere. I should like to know how many cargoes
of imitation idealism, of hero-costumes and high falutin' clap-trap,
how many casks of sweetened pity liqueur (Firm: _la religion de la
souffrance_), how many crutches of righteous indignation for the help
of these flat-footed intellects, how many _comedians_ of the Christian
moral ideal would need to-day to be exported from Europe, to enable
its air to smell pure again. It is obvious that, in regard to this
over-production, a new _trade_ possibility lies open; it is obvious
that there is a new business to be done in little ideal idols and
obedient "idealists"--don't pass over this tip! Who has sufficient
courage? We have in _our hands_ the possibility of idealising the whole
earth. But what am I talking about courage? we only need one thing
here--a hand, a free, a very free hand.
27.
Enough! enough! let us leave these curiosities and complexities of
the modern spirit, which excite as much laughter as disgust. Our
problem can certainly do without them, the problem of _meaning_ of
the ascetic ideal--what has it got to do with yesterday or to-day?
those things shall be handled by me more thoroughly and severely in
another connection (under the title "A Contribution to the History of
European Nihilism," I refer for this to a work which I am preparing:
_The Will to Power, an Attempt at a Transvaluation of All Values_).
The only reason why I come to allude to it here is this: the ascetic
ideal has at times, even in the most intellectual sphere, only one
real kind of enemies and _damagers_: these are the comedians of this
ideal--for they awake mistrust. Everywhere otherwise, where the mind
is at work seriously, powerfully, and without counterfeiting, it
dispenses altogether now with an ideal (the popular expression for this
abstinence is "Atheism")--_with the exception of the will for truth_.
But this will, this _remnant_ of an ideal, is, if you will believe me,
that ideal itself in its severest and cleverest formulation, esoteric
through and through, stripped of all outworks, and consequently not so
much its remnant as its _kernel_. Unqualified honest atheism (and its
air only do we breathe, we, the most intellectual men of this age) is
_not_ opposed to that ideal, to the extent that it appears to be; it is
rather one of the final phases of its evolution, one of its syllogisms
and pieces of inherent logic--it is the awe-inspiring catastrophe of
a two-thousand-year training in truth, which finally forbids itself
_the lie of the belief in God_. (The same course of development in
India--quite independently, and consequently of some demonstrative
value--the same ideal driving to the same conclusion the decisive point
reached five hundred years before the European era, or more precisely
at the time of Buddha--it started in the Sankhyam philosophy, and then
this was popularised through Buddha, and made into a religion.)
_What_, I put the question with all strictness, has really _triumphed_
over the Christian God? The answer stands in my _Joyful Wisdom_, Aph.
357: "the Christian morality itself, the idea of truth, taken as it was
with increasing seriousness, the confessor-subtlety of the Christian
conscience translated and sublimated into the scientific conscience
into intellectual cleanness at any price. Regarding Nature as though
it were a proof of the goodness and guardianship of God; interpreting
history in honour of a divine reason, as a constant proof of a moral
order of the world and a moral teleology; explaining our own personal
experiences, as pious men have for long enough explained them, as
though every arrangement, every nod, every single thing were invented
and sent out of love for the salvation of the soul; all this is now
done away with, all this has the conscience _against_ it, and is
regarded by every subtler conscience as disreputable, dishonourable,
as lying, feminism, weakness, cowardice--by means of this severity,
if by means of anything at all, are we, in sooth, _good Europeans_
and heirs of Europe's longest and bravest self-mastery.". .. All
great things go to ruin by reason of themselves, by reason of an act
of self-dissolution: so wills the law of life, the law of necessary
"self-mastery" even in the essence of life--ever is the law-giver
finally exposed to the cry, "_patere legem quam ipse tulisti_"; in
thus wise did Christianity _go to ruin as a dogma_, through its own
morality; in thus wise must Christianity go again to ruin to-day as
a morality--we are standing on the threshold of this event. After
Christian truthfulness has drawn one conclusion after the other, it
finally draws its _strongest conclusion_, its conclusion against
itself; this, however, happens, when it puts the question, "_what is
the meaning of every will for truth?_" And here again do I touch on my
problem, on our problem, my unknown friends (for as yet _I know_ of no
friends): what sense has our whole being, if it does not mean that in
our own selves that will for truth has come to its own consciousness
_as a problem_?---By reason of this attainment of self-consciousness
on the part of the will for truth, morality from henceforward--there
is no doubt about it--goes _to pieces_: this is that great hundred-act
play that is reserved for the next two centuries of Europe, the most
terrible, the most mysterious, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all
plays.
28.