Good and evil, these are time-old opposites. So are beautiful and ugly.
But these two opposites are seldom entirely coincident. No doubt there
are good and high-class men who are commonly judged to be fundamentally
ugly. And there are blinding beauties who are on a war-footing against
all that we call good. The good satisfies our moral judgment; the
beautiful, our judgment of taste. The one has to do with the content of
human life; the other, with the form. But, at bottom, the moral judgment
and the judgment of taste cannot remain entirely and materially
dissociated. It was a more nearly correct feeling on the part of the
Greeks when they let the beautiful and the good inter-grow. According to
the Greek, the good and the beautiful, intimately united, constitute the
ideal of virtue, however. We are reconciled after a fashion to the
ugliness of a man if we find a great and noble soul in the repellant
shell.
But if permanent beauty is to be preserved to human nature, efficient
and high endeavor, free self-concentrated formation of character is the
only means to this end. When the “outer man” mirrors goodness and beauty
of heart, firmness and bravery of will, seriousness and depth of
thought, his countenance glows under all circumstances with a radiance
of happy beauty, and it would be a barbarian and pitiable eye indeed
that could not apprehend such radiance or feel itself smitten with its
glory. For the man of fine feeling, therefore, all that is ugly affects
him morally at the same time. Indeed, the reproach of having behaved in
an ugly manner he feels as keenly, frequently more keenly in fact, than
the reproach of having behaved immorally.
In the case of _Friedrich Nietzsche_, the moral criterion of human worth
was totally transformed into an aesthetic criterion! This man who had
subdued all “morality” and left it behind him, who took his stand
“beyond good and evil,” submitted to a new evaluation, was measured
according to his greatness. Greatness was nobility, supremacy, beauty.
Smallness was vulgarity, baseness, ugliness. Not the wickedest, and not
the wretchedest, but the ugliest man—_der hässlichste Mensch_—represents
the power which the new culture has to struggle with—to overcome,
indeed—if man is to mount to a higher plane of being.
Who is this ugliest man? Of all the Zarathustrian enigmas, this is
perhaps the most enigmatic. It must have been a frightful ugliness which
haunted and harried the poet-philosopher when he narrates that, amid his
wanderings over men’s disappointing earth, he had met the ugliest man.
Many and many were the types of human beings that Zarathustra had met in
his lonely pilgrimages. Most of them he disposed of with high scorn or
honest contempt,—thus did he dispatch the good and reputable, the
custodians of the old tables of morals and order; then, the preachers of
the doctrine of equality, who swarmed around like flies in market
places, shunning all solitudes, able to exist only in masses; next the
poisonous tarantulas who, with envious revenge, devised punishments, in
cold blood dragged their victims to justice; finally, the wise and
upright, the schoolmasters, whose duress converted all depths into
shallows, managed to obliterate all men’s peculiarities, till nothing
distinctive was left.
But the ugliest man was uglier than any of these! These types did not so
infuriate Zarathustra as did the ugliest man. At all these Nietzsche
shook his head, but they did not floor him. He had been able to look
upon them, to scold them, to laugh at them. “And again did Zarathustra’s
feet run through mountains and forests.... When the path curved round a
rock, all at once the landscape changed, and Zarathustra entered into a
realm of death. Here bristled aloft black and red cliffs, without any
grass, tree, or bird’s voice. For it was a valley which all animals
avoided, even the beasts of prey, except that a species of ugly, thick,
green serpent came here to die when they became old. Therefore the
shepherds called this valley ‘Serpent-death.’” Here Zarathustra found
the ugliest man something sitting by the wayside shaped like a man, and
yet hardly like a man, something nondescript. And all at once there came
over Zarathustra a great shame, he blushed up to the roots of his white
hair, he would flee this ill-starred place—the worst that there was in
the whole world! But the Great Despiser, the Hater of all pity was
himself so unstrung and overpowered by pity that he sank down all at
once, like a giant oak that had weathered many a storm, or withstood
many a stroke of the woodman’s axe.
Who was this ugliest man? What was this ugliest thing which
Nietzsche—the great man-spy and life-appraiser—had ever discovered in a
human being? Before Nietzsche wrote, _thus spake Zarathustra_, he
expresses himself in another work as follows: “Nothing is ugly save the
degenerate man.... From the physical standpoint everything ugly weakens
and depresses man. It reminds of decay, danger, impotence; he literally
loses strength in its presence. The effect of ugliness may be gauged by
the dynamometer. Whenever man’s spirits are downcast, it is a sign that
he scents the proximity of something ‘ugly.’ His feeling of power, his
will to power, his courage and his pride—these things collapse at the
sight of what is ugly, and rise at the sight of what is beautiful....
Ugliness is understood to signify a hint or a symptom of degeneration;
that which reminds us, however, remotely of degeneracy, impels us to the
judgment ‘ugly.’ Every sign of exhaustion, of gravity, of age, of
fatigue; every kind of constraint, such as cramp, or paralysis; and
above all the smells, colors and forms associated with decomposition and
putrefaction, however much they may have been attenuated into
symbols,—all these things provoke the same reaction, which is the
judgment ‘ugly.’ A certain hatred expresses itself here: who is it that
man hates? Without a doubt it is _the decline of his type_. In this
regard his hatred springs from the deepest instinct of the race. There
is horror, caution, profundity, and far-reaching vision in this
hatred,—it is the most profound hatred that exists.”
Nowhere has Nietzsche told us of the zenith, who his superman is. But he
here tells us of the nadir, who the ugliest man is—and the superman is
the exact and august opposite. Thus we could ourselves construct his
superman.
But the ugliest man—we recognize this strange figure of the Zarathustra
poesy in the sharp cry of distress which all representatives of
degenerate (_de-genera_) humanity groan out where the yearning toward a
higher humanity overpowers them. The ugliest man then appears accoutered
with a crown with which he has crowned his own head, and with two purple
girdles which encircle him. In a later profound observation, Nietzsche
informs us that the ugliest man is called _der historische Sinn_, the
historical mind, or sense, which needs decoration, accoutrement, like
all ugly things that would make themselves tolerable, at least for
surface people. The degenerate man,—this is the ugly man, and the
saddest degeneration is _the surrender of life to the past_—for the past
is the big grave which swallows up all that lives. Whoever makes the
past the goal of his longing walks among corpses which make him shiver.
He becomes himself a corpse, whose society is freezing for living men.
And because this man, assimilated to the past, living in the past, is
nothing himself, he needs all kinds of fiddle-faddle to give himself the
semblance of being something. He needs pomp which makes a world-stirring
phenomenon out of a coronation; he scrambles and scratches after titles
and orders—which long ago Frederick the Great, the philosopher-king on
the Prussian throne, called the insignia of fools; he has himself
accredited by father and grandfather, so that their merit may adorn the
shield of son and grandson; in a word, he reverses the counsel of an
apostle: “Forgetting the things that are behind,” for he forgets the
things that are before and reaches back for the things that are behind.
And because there is for this backward-bent man an inconvenient monitor
and witness of all life—because there is God, the omnipresent God, who
ever sees all, even sees man through and through, this ugliest man
became the murderer of God, he took revenge on the living God for being
witness of the hiddenest life of man! “I know thee well,” said
Zarathustra, with a brazen voice, “_thou art the murderer of God_!...
Thou couldst not _endure_ him who beheld thee through and through, thou
ugliest man. Thou tookest revenge on this witness!”
We have here, I think, with all that is enigmatic and obscure, a
sharply-outlined picture of the ugliest man. Earlier Nietzsche wrote a
book on the blessing and the bane of history for life. In that book he
accorded right to historical culture and to man’s knowledge of the past
_only in so far_ as the life of the man of the present and of the future
would be advanced thereby. But the historians in the schools, in chair
and pulpit, did not so think. They acknowledged life only when it was
dead! A zealous teacher of history was a meandering mummy from out the
past, who had no blood more in his veins, no flesh more on his bones.
Therefore was he so ugly. Therefore did he create such a frosty
temperature round about him. Under the pressure of these historical
forces, all life became a _cultus_ of the past. The older a thing was,
the better it was. It was the long past, the outlived, that was noble.
The more remote that past, the prouder men were of it, and the brighter
shone its glory-beaming star to the eyes of men.
From this malady of the ugliest man, from this _de-genera-tion_, we are
by no means free. Instead of ascent to a higher _genus_ than present
man, to superman, there is descent to a lower _genus_. This antiquarian,
hoary spirit pervades our whole social life, this _re-spect_ for what
has become old and rotten, for what can show no other merit than that it
once—was! It is a sign of our own decay, this living on the dead, this
ability only to resuscitate and copy past centuries—past poetry, past
art, past philosophy, past morality, past religion!—this knowing in
consequence no life of our very own. We build “whitewashed sepulchers”
in our lives, because we have no courage of heart to create anything
that belongs to life. At all events, that the putridity and the dead
bones may be concealed, we use whitewash, much whitewash! We use
decorations, brilliant, finely-painted decorations so that men may not
observe that life has become a theatrical play, making an impression
indeed under clever management, but inspiring no living human heart. All
the splendor of this pomp, which we of today employ on the stage of
life, cannot conceal the chilly vacuity of this whole business; and the
man who peers behind the curtains and sees how people look shorn of
their decorations, without powder and paint, without the artificial
cunning luminosity of the day’s puffery, has Zarathustra’s feeling in
the valley forsaken to the old green thick snake on its way to
die,—Zarathustra’s feeling when he met the ugliest man, where much
heaviness settled on his mind, because he did not think that anything so
ugly and horrible could exist among men.
Yes, there are traces and traits of this ugliest man among us. If we but
imagine all that is decoration, flummery, stripped off from us, think
how much degenerate life would be disclosed! How much love for the dead
_that no longer lives_, how much bitter strife and war over _reliques_,
over some sacred cloak, or sacred bone, of which history narrates,
telling us that they once belonged to life. How much slavish obedience
to thoughts that once were; to institutions that once served the living.
To be sure, men call this _piety_, and have thus designed a beautiful
robe behind which they hide their moribund lives. For the sake of this
piety, they exact consideration for all ancient dust which burden the
homes and hearts of men, they arm themselves against him who, with
mighty hand, would undertake a huge house-cleaning of life and for life.
Piety,—it is this that they call admiration and veneration of every idol
which for long has been played out, but still counts us of today among
its devotees. Men must even deal God a mortal blow, the _Living_ God of
the living, and, with the ferocious hatred of their folly, pursue the
God who sees their innermost heart as a living witness of what they
would like to hide from themselves and all the world. “But he—_had to_
die: he looked with eyes which beheld _everything_,—he beheld men’s
depths and dregs, all his hidden ignominy and ugliness ... he crept into
my dirtiest corners. This most prying, over-intrusive, over-pitiful one
had to die. He even beheld me: on such a witness I would have revenge—or
not live myself. The God who beheld everything, _and also man_: that God
had to die! Man cannot _endure_ it that such a witness should live.”
Thus spake the ugliest man. Zarathustra started off, feeling frozen to
the very bowels.
The God who told men that altogether they served death, not life, that
they worked deterioration, not rejuvenation—had to die! Life is a
dying—and yet there shoots through the heart of man such a nameless
anxiety in the presence of this dying that he paints up and pencils all
death till it looks like life. And indeed many are deceived, many see
only men’s rouge and mark not the great lie which it hides. This is the
ugliest thing in the world, and it made the prophet of a new culture
shudder and freeze—_this_, that we live and walk among corpses which yet
look as if they were alive!
To fight and conquer this hindrance to a new culture, this is to fight
and conquer death; and since death is death only through man, through
his yearning or fear, the triumph of a new culture begins with the
triumphal song of life, which knows how to make a festival out of even
death. To be sure, Nietzsche did not set his most beautiful man over
against his most ugly, but we can yet read between the lines what he
conceived the most beautiful man to be. He is the man who has pushed far
from him the last vestige and survival of fear and slave-service. He is
the man who has learned dying as the great Consummator, victorious,
surrounded by men who hope and vow that there shall ever be festival
where a man who so dies dedicates himself to the living. Here
Zarathustra-Nietzsche intimates a kinship with that other Dying Man Who
proclaimed his life’s victorious career in His: “It is finished!” and
created on Christianity’s Good Friday a festival of death. Nietzsche
speaks of the Hebrew, too early dead, who would have confessed
Zarathustra’s doctrine, if he had attained to Zarathustra’s years. It
did not occur to Nietzsche that such a confession was not at all needed,
because the world had perceived the glad message already which would
make a festival out of death and teach men how the most beautiful
festival was consecrated. Christian art had opposed to the ugliest man
the most beautiful human picture: the head full of wounds and blood, the
King in the thorn-crown, who understood dying because he understood
living. With this victorious song of death began a new culture, a new
heroism of humanity, to which death ceased to be a pale ghost, but which
confessed even in death: “as dying, and behold, we live!” Then men
ceased to learn dying, and because they made no preaching of life out of
dying and no vow to life, death became to them a torturing anxiety and
care again; they did not dare name his name; they did not dare frankly
look him in the eye. And this cowardice and lie disfigure all their
action and passion; they would give to death at least the semblance of
life; they would believe in ghostly existence still allotted to all the
dead, rather than say to death: “Thou are a messenger of God, a
revelation, a witness of life; since thou art good, I will greet thee
and bless thee!”
So Zarathustra demanded of his disciples: “Let your dying be no
blasphemy of men and earth; my friends, your spirit and your virtue
shall still glow in your dying, like the evening red over the earth, or
else death has miserably betrayed you.”
Death our will even, our freedom—this is life’s highest meaning! Who but
Nietzsche could have thought that? Of course, this is not to throw life
away, when it has become hard and heavy to bear. Such a death would be
of all the most unfree. It would be a flight, not a deed; it would be a
lamentation and a feebleness, not a festival of the soul! But it means
that we take up death from the start into the order of our life, as the
night which, no less than the day, belongs to man’s full day. It means
that we give to life a worth which no death can destroy, which first in
death reveals its eternal power. I must die—so laments the slave, who
has lived only non-entities even in his life, and has never learned that
life is work, creation, consummation. I _will_ die—so speaks the hero,
to whom every fight brings the prize of a victory well worth death!—the
hero who hazards his life every moment for the highest human good, who
knows that he and his life have become a sacrifice from which a better,
higher, freer humanity shall gain its life and its strength.
Who is ugly? Who is beautiful? Who is ashamed of his death and falsifies
his deadness that it may look like life—who does this, bears death
within himself as a power that drags him down, disfigures him in the
fullness of that which he would be able to live. But who, in his power
to die, proves that he has learned to live, has overcome the ugliest
thing in man, cast it out; namely, the fear of death which creates all
the lies of life, and all the servility and unfreedom of men—which
creates men over whom _das Gewesen_! the dead past, possesses power, so
that they can never breathe a joyous breath, can never commit themselves
to the living and the growing. But a _beautiful_ culture will also
become a _good_ culture because one that is living is at once good and
beautiful; the eternal life of God, of whom it is said: There is none
good but God alone.