friends, that at first I assailed the modern world with some gross
errors and exaggerations, but at any rate with _hope_ in my heart. I
recognised—who knows from what personal experiences?—the philosophical
pessimism of the nineteenth century as the symptom of a higher power of
thought, a more daring courage and a more triumphant _plenitude_ of life
than had been characteristic of the eighteenth century, the age of Hume,
Kant, Condillac, and the sensualists: so that the tragic view of things
seemed to me the peculiar _luxury_ of our culture, its most precious,
noble, and dangerous mode of prodigality; but nevertheless, in view of
its overflowing wealth, a _justifiable_ luxury. In the same way I
interpreted for myself German music as the expression of a Dionysian
power in the German soul: I thought I heard in it the earthquake by
means of which a primeval force that had been imprisoned for ages was
finally finding vent—indifferent as to whether all that usually calls
itself culture was thereby made to totter. It is obvious that I then
misunderstood what constitutes the veritable character both of
philosophical pessimism and of German music,—namely, their
_Romanticism_. What is Romanticism? Every art and every philosophy may
be regarded as a healing and helping appliance in the service of
growing, struggling life: they always presuppose suffering and
sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: on the one hand those
that suffer from _overflowing vitality_, who need Dionysian art, and
require a tragic view and insight into life; and on the other hand those
who suffer from _reduced vitality_, who seek repose, quietness, calm
seas, and deliverance from themselves through art or knowledge, or else
intoxication, spasm, bewilderment and madness. All Romanticism in art
and knowledge responds to the twofold craving of the _latter_; to them
Schopenhauer as well as Wagner responded (and responds),—to name those
most celebrated and decided romanticists who were then _misunderstood_
by me (_not_ however to their disadvantage, as may be reasonably
conceded to me). The being richest in overflowing vitality, the
Dionysian God and man, may not only allow himself the spectacle of the
horrible and questionable, but even the fearful deed itself, and all the
luxury of destruction, disorganisation and negation. With him evil,
senselessness and ugliness seem as it were licensed, in consequence of
the overflowing plenitude of procreative, fructifying power, which can
convert every desert into a luxuriant orchard. Conversely, the greatest
sufferer, the man poorest in vitality, would have most need of mildness,
peace and kindliness in thought and action: he would need, if possible,
a God who is specially the God of the sick, a "Saviour"; similarly he
would have need of logic, the abstract intelligibility of existence—for
logic soothes and gives confidence;—in short he would need a certain
warm, fear-dispelling narrowness and imprisonment within optimistic
horizons. In this manner I gradually began to understand Epicurus, the
opposite of a Dionysian pessimist;—in a similar manner also the
"Christian," who in fact is only a type of Epicurean, and like him
essentially a romanticist:—and my vision has always become keener in
tracing that most difficult and insidious of all forms of _retrospective
inference_, which most mistakes have been made—the inference from the
work to its author, from the deed to its doer, from the ideal to him who
_needs_ it, from every mode of thinking and valuing to the imperative
_want_ behind it.—In regard to all æsthetic values I now avail myself of
this radical distinction: I ask in every single case, "Has hunger or
superfluity become creative here?" At the outset another distinction
might seem to recommend itself more—it is far more conspicuous,—namely,
to have in view whether the desire for rigidity, for perpetuation, for
_being_ is the cause of the creating, or the desire for destruction, for
change, for the new, for the future—for _becoming_. But when looked at
more carefully, both these kinds of desire prove themselves ambiguous,
and are explicable precisely according to the before-mentioned and, as
it seems to me, rightly preferred scheme. The desire for _destruction_,
change and becoming, may be the expression of overflowing power,
pregnant with futurity (my _terminus_ for this is of course the word
"Dionysian"); but it may also be the hatred of the ill-constituted,
destitute and unfortunate, which destroys, and _must_ destroy, because
the enduring, yea, all that endures, in fact all being, excites and
provokes it. To understand this emotion we have but to look closely at
our anarchists. The will to _perpetuation_ requires equally a double
interpretation. It may on the one hand proceed from gratitude and
love:—art of this origin will always be an art of apotheosis, perhaps
dithyrambic, as with Rubens, mocking divinely, as with Hafiz, or clear
and kind-hearted as with Goethe, and spreading a Homeric brightness and
glory over everything (in this case I speak of _Apollonian_ art). It may
also, however, be the tyrannical will of a sorely-suffering, struggling
or tortured being, who would like to stamp his most personal, individual
and narrow characteristics, the very idiosyncrasy of his suffering, as
an obligatory law and constraint on others; who, as it were, takes
revenge on all things, in that he imprints, enforces and brands _his_
image, the image of _his_ torture, upon them. The latter is _romantic
pessimism_ in its most extreme form, whether it be as Schopenhauerian
will-philosophy, or as Wagnerian music:—romantic pessimism, the last
_great_ event in the destiny of our civilisation. (That there _may be_
quite a different kind of pessimism, a classical pessimism—this
presentiment and vision belongs to me, as something inseparable from me,
as my _proprium_ and _ipsissimum_; only that the word "classical" is
repugnant to my ears, it has become far too worn; too indefinite and
indistinguishable. I call that pessimism of the future,—for it is
coming! I see it coming!—_Dionysian_ pessimism.)
371.
_We Unintelligible Ones._—Have we ever complained among ourselves of
being misunderstood, misjudged, and confounded with others; of being
calumniated, misheard, and not heard? That is just our lot—alas, for a
long time yet! say, to be modest, until 1901—, it is also our
distinction; we should not have sufficient respect for ourselves if we
wished it otherwise. People confound us with others—the reason of it is
that we ourselves grow, we change continually, we cast off old bark, we
still slough every spring, we always become younger, higher, stronger,
as men of the future, we thrust our roots always more powerfully into
the deep—into evil—, while at the same time we embrace the heavens ever
more lovingly, more extensively, and suck in their light ever more
eagerly with all our branches and leaves. We grow like trees—that is
difficult to understand, like all life!—not in one place, but
everywhere, not in one direction only, but upwards and outwards, as well
as inwards and downwards. At the same time our force shoots forth in
stem, branches, and roots; we are really no longer free to do anything
separately, or to _be_ anything separately.... Such is our lot, as we
have said: we grow in _height_; and even should it be our calamity—for
we dwell ever closer to the lightning!—well, we honour it none the less
on that account; it is that which we do not wish to share with others,
which we do not wish to bestow upon others, the fate of all elevation,
_our_ fate....
372.
_Why we are not Idealists._—Formerly philosophers were afraid of the
senses: have we, perhaps, been far too forgetful of this fear? We are at
present all of us sensualists, we representatives of the present and of
the future in philosophy,—_not_ according to theory, however, but in
_praxis_, in practice.... Those former philosophers, on the contrary,
thought that the senses lured them out of _their_ world, the cold realm
of "ideas," to a dangerous southern island, where they were afraid that
their philosopher-virtues would melt away like snow in the sun. "Wax in
the ears," was then almost a condition of philosophising; a genuine
philosopher no longer listened to life, in so far as life is music, he
_denied_ the music of life—it is an old philosophical superstition that
all music is Sirens' music.—Now we should be inclined at the present day
to judge precisely in the opposite manner (which in itself might be just
as false), and to regard _ideas_, with their cold, anæmic appearance,
and not even in spite of this appearance, as worse seducers than the
senses. They have always lived on the "blood" of the philosopher, they
always consumed his senses, and indeed, if you will believe me, his
"heart" as well. Those old philosophers were heartless: philosophising
was always a species of vampirism. At the sight of such figures even as
Spinoza, do you not feel a profoundly enigmatical and disquieting sort
of impression? Do you not see the drama which is here performed, the
constantly _increasing pallor_—, the spiritualisation always more
ideally displayed? Do you not imagine some long-concealed blood-sucker
in the background, which makes its beginning with the senses, and in the
end retains or leaves behind nothing but bones and their rattling?—I
mean categories, formulæ, and _words_ (for you will pardon me in saying
that what _remains_ of Spinoza, _amor intellectualis dei_, is rattling
and nothing more! What is _amor_, what is _deus_, when they have lost
every drop of blood?...) _In summa_: all philosophical idealism has
hitherto been something like a disease, where it has not been, as in the
case of Plato, the prudence of superabundant and dangerous
healthfulness, the fear of _overpowerful_ senses, and the wisdom of a
wise Socratic.—Perhaps, is it the case that we moderns are merely not
sufficiently sound _to require_ Plato's idealism? And we do not fear the
senses because——.
373.
_"Science" as Prejudice._—It follows from the laws of class distinction
that the learned, in so far as they belong to the intellectual
middle-class, are debarred from getting even a sight of the really
_great_ problems and notes of interrogation. Besides, their courage, and
similarly their outlook, does not reach so far,—and above all, their
need, which makes them investigators, their innate anticipation and
desire that things should be constituted _in such and such a way_, their
fears and hopes are too soon quieted and set at rest. For example, that
which makes the pedantic Englishman, Herbert Spencer, so enthusiastic in
his way, and impels him to draw a line of hope, a horizon of
desirability, the final reconciliation of "egoism and altruism" of which
he dreams,—that almost causes nausea to people like us:—a humanity with
such Spencerian perspectives as ultimate perspectives would seem to us
deserving of contempt, of extermination! But the _fact_ that something
has to be taken by him as his highest hope, which is regarded, and may
well be regarded, by others merely as a distasteful possibility, is a
note of interrogation which Spencer could not have foreseen.... It is
just the same with the belief with which at present so many
materialistic natural-scientists are content, the belief in a world
which is supposed to have its equivalent and measure in human thinking
and human valuations, a "world of truth" at which we might be able
ultimately to arrive with the help of our insignificant, four-cornered
human reason! What? do we actually wish to have existence debased in
that fashion to a ready-reckoner exercise and calculation for
stay-at-home mathematicians? We should not, above all, seek to divest
existence of its _ambiguous_ character: _good_ taste forbids it,
gentlemen, the taste of reverence for everything that goes beyond your
horizon! That a world-interpretation is alone right by which _you_
maintain your position, by which investigation and work can go on
scientifically in _your_ sense (you really mean _mechanically_?), an
interpretation which acknowledges numbering, calculating, weighing,
seeing and handling, and nothing more—such an idea is a piece of
grossness and naïvety, provided it is not lunacy and idiocy. Would the
reverse not be quite probable, that the most superficial and external
characters of existence—its most apparent quality, its outside, its
embodiment—should let themselves be apprehended first? perhaps alone
allow themselves to be apprehended? A "scientific" interpretation of the
world as you understand it might consequently still be one of the
_stupidest_ that is to say, the most destitute of significance, of all
possible world-interpretations:—I say this in confidence to my friends
the Mechanicians, who to-day like to hobnob with philosophers, and
absolutely believe that mechanics is the teaching of the first and last
laws upon which, as upon a ground-floor, all existence must be built.
But an essentially mechanical world would be an essentially
_meaningless_ world! Supposing we valued the _worth_ of a music with
reference to how much it could be counted, calculated, or formulated—how
absurd such a "scientific" estimate of music would be! What would one
have apprehended, understood, or discerned in it! Nothing, absolutely
nothing of what is really "music" in it!...
374.
_Our new "Infinite."_—How far the perspective character of existence
extends, or whether it have any other character at all, whether an
existence without explanation, without "sense" does not just become
"nonsense," whether, on the other hand, all existence is not essentially
an _explaining_ existence—these questions, as is right and proper,
cannot be determined even by the most diligent and severely
conscientious analysis and self-examination of the intellect, because in
this analysis the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its
perspective forms, and _only_ in them. We cannot see round our corner:
it is hopeless curiosity to want to know what other modes of intellect
and perspective there _might_ be: for example, whether any kind of being
could perceive time backwards, or alternately forwards and backwards (by
which another direction of life and another conception of cause and
effect would be given). But I think that we are to-day at least far from
the ludicrous immodesty of decreeing from our nook that there _can_ only
be legitimate perspectives from that nook. The world, on the contrary,
has once more become "infinite" to us: in so far we cannot dismiss the
possibility that it _contains infinite interpretations_. Once more the
great horror seizes us—but who would desire forthwith to deify once more
_this_ monster of an unknown world in the old fashion? And perhaps
worship _the_ unknown thing as _the_ "unknown person" in future? Ah!
there are too many _ungodly_ possibilities of interpretation comprised
in this unknown, too much devilment, stupidity and folly of
interpretation.—also our own human, all too human interpretation itself,
which we know....
375.
_Why we Seem to be Epicureans._—We are cautious, we modern men, with
regard to final convictions, our distrust lies in wait for the
enchantments and tricks of conscience involved in every strong belief,
in every absolute Yea and Nay: how is this explained? Perhaps one may
see in it a good deal of the caution of the "burnt child," of the
disillusioned idealist; but one may also see in it another and better
element, the joyful curiosity of a former lingerer in the corner, who
has been brought to despair by his nook, and now luxuriates and revels
in its antithesis, in the unbounded, in the "open air in itself." Thus
there is developed an almost Epicurean inclination for knowledge, which
does not readily lose sight of the questionable character of things;
likewise also a repugnance to pompous moral phrases and attitudes, a
taste that repudiates all coarse, square contrasts, and is proudly
conscious of its habitual reserve. For _this too_ constitutes our pride,
this easy tightening of the reins in our headlong impulse after
certainty, this self-control of the rider in his most furious riding:
for now, as of old we have mad, fiery steeds under us, and if we delay,
it is certainly least of all the danger which causes us to delay....
376.
_Our Slow Periods._—It is thus that artists feel, and all men of
"works," the maternal species of men: they always believe at every
chapter of their life—a work always makes a chapter—that they have
already reached the goal itself; they would always patiently accept
death with the feeling: "we are ripe for it." This is not the expression
of exhaustion,—but rather that of a certain autumnal sunniness and
mildness, which the work itself, the maturing of the work, always leaves
behind in its originator. Then the _tempo_ of life slows down—turns
thick and flows with honey—into long pauses, into the belief in _the_
long pause....
377.
_We Homeless Ones._—Among the Europeans of to-day there are not lacking
those who may call themselves homeless ones in a way which is at once a
distinction and an honour; it is by them that my secret wisdom and _gaya
scienza_ is expressly to be laid to heart. For their lot is hard, their
hope uncertain; it is a clever feat to devise consolation for them. But
what good does it do! We children of the future, how _could_ we be at
home in the present? We are unfavourable to all ideals which could make
us feel at home in this frail, broken-down, transition period; and as
regards the "realities" thereof, we do not believe in their _endurance_.
The ice which still carries us has become very thin: the thawing wind
blows; we ourselves, the homeless ones, are an influence that breaks the
ice, and the other all too thin "realities."... We "preserve" nothing,
nor would we return to any past age; we are not at all "liberal," we do
not labour for "progress," we do not need first to stop our ears to the
song of the market-place and the sirens of the future—their song of
"equal rights," "free society," "no longer either lords or slaves," does
not allure us! We do not by any means think it desirable that the
kingdom of righteousness and peace should be established on earth
(because under any circumstances it would be the kingdom of the
profoundest mediocrity and Chinaism); we rejoice in all men, who, like
ourselves, love danger, war and adventure, who do not make compromises,
nor let themselves be captured, conciliated and stunted; we count
ourselves among the conquerors; we ponder over the need of a new order
of things, even of a new slavery—for every strengthening and elevation
of the type "man" also involves a new form of slavery. Is it not obvious
that with all this we must feel ill at ease in an age which claims the
honour of being the most humane, gentle and just that the sun has ever
seen? What a pity that at the mere mention of these fine words, the
thoughts at the back of our minds are all the more unpleasant, that we
see therein only the expression—or the masquerade—of profound weakening,
exhaustion, age, and declining power! What can it matter to us with what
kind of tinsel an invalid decks out his weakness? He may parade it as
his _virtue_; there is no doubt whatever that weakness makes people
gentle, alas, so gentle, so just, so inoffensive, so "humane"!—The
"religion of pity," to which people would like to persuade us—yes, we
know sufficiently well the hysterical little men and women who need this
religion at present as a cloak and adornment! We are no humanitarians;
we should not dare to speak of our "love of mankind"; for that, a person
of our stamp is not enough of an actor! Or not sufficiently
Saint-Simonist, not sufficiently French. A person must have been
affected with a _Gallic_ excess of erotic susceptibility and amorous
impatience even to approach mankind honourably with his lewdness....
Mankind! Was there ever a more hideous old woman among all old women
(unless perhaps it were "the Truth": a question for philosophers)? No,
we do not love Mankind! On the other hand, however, we are not nearly
"German" enough (in the sense in which the word "German" is current at
present) to advocate nationalism and race-hatred, or take delight in the
national heart-itch and blood-poisoning, on account of which the nations
of Europe are at present bounded off and secluded from one another as if
by quarantines. We are too unprejudiced for that, too perverse, too
fastidious; also too well-informed, and too much "travelled." We prefer
much rather to live on mountains, apart and "out of season," in past or
coming centuries, in order merely to spare ourselves the silent rage to
which we know we should be condemned as witnesses of a system of
politics which makes the German nation barren by making it vain, and
which is a _petty_ system besides:—will it not be necessary for this
system to plant itself between two mortal hatreds, lest its own creation
should immediately collapse? Will it not _be obliged_ to desire the
perpetuation of the petty-state system of Europe?... We homeless ones
are too diverse and mixed in race and descent as "modern men," and are
consequently little tempted to participate in the falsified racial
self-admiration and lewdness which at present display themselves in
Germany, as signs of German sentiment, and which strike one as doubly
false and unbecoming in the people with the "historical sense." We are,
in a word—and it shall be our word of honour!—_good Europeans_, the
heirs of Europe, the rich, over-wealthy heirs, also the too deeply
pledged heirs of millenniums of European thought. As such, we have also
outgrown Christianity, and are disinclined to it—and just because we
have grown _out of_ it, because our forefathers were Christians
uncompromising in their Christian integrity, who willingly sacrificed
possessions and positions, blood and country, for the sake of their
belief. We—do the same. For what, then? For our unbelief? For all sorts
of unbelief? Nay, you know better than that, my friends! The hidden
_Yea_ in you is stronger than all the Nays and Perhapses, of which you
and your age are sick; and when you are obliged to put out to sea, you
emigrants, it is—once more a _faith_ which urges you thereto!...
378.
"_And once more Grow Clear._"—We, the generous and rich in spirit, who
stand at the sides of the streets like open fountains and would hinder
no one from drinking from us: we do not know, alas! how to defend
ourselves when we should like to do so; we have no means of preventing
ourselves being made _turbid_ and dark,—we have no means of preventing
the age in which we live casting its "up-to-date rubbish" into us, nor
of hindering filthy birds throwing their excrement, the boys their
trash, and fatigued resting travellers their misery, great and small,
into us. But we do as we have always done: we take whatever is cast into
us down into our depths—for we are deep, we do not forget—_and once more
grow clear_....
379.
_The Fool's Interruption._—It is not a misanthrope who has written this
book: the hatred of men costs too dear to-day. To hate as they formerly
hated _man_, in the fashion of Timon, completely, without qualification,
with all the heart, from the pure _love_ of hatred—for that purpose one
would have to renounce contempt:—and how much refined pleasure, how much
patience, how much benevolence even, do we owe to contempt! Moreover we
are thereby the "elect of God": refined contempt is our taste and
privilege, our art, our virtue perhaps, we, the most modern amongst the
moderns!... Hatred, on the contrary, makes equal, it puts men face to
face, in hatred there is honour; finally, in hatred there is _fear_,
quite a large amount of fear. We fearless ones, however, we, the most
intellectual men of the period, know our advantage well enough to live
without fear as the most intellectual persons of this age. People will
not easily behead us, shut us up, or banish us; they will not even ban
or burn our books. The age loves intellect, it loves us, and needs us,
even when we have to give it to understand that we are artists in
despising; that all intercourse with men is something of a horror to us;
that with all our gentleness, patience, humanity and courteousness, we
cannot persuade our nose to abandon its prejudice against the proximity
of man; that we love nature the more, the less humanly things are done
by her, and that we love art _when_ it is the flight of the artist from
man, or the raillery of the artist at man, or the raillery of the artist
at himself....
380.
_"The Wanderer" Speaks._—In order for once to get a glimpse of our
European morality from a distance, in order to compare it with other
earlier or future moralities, one must do as the traveller who wants to
know the height of the towers of a city: for that purpose he _leaves_
the city. "Thoughts concerning moral prejudices," if they are not to be
prejudices concerning prejudices, presuppose a position _outside of_
morality, some sort of world beyond good and evil, to which one must
ascend, climb, or fly—and in the given case at any rate, a position
beyond _our_ good and evil, an emancipation from all "Europe,"
understood as a sum of inviolable valuations which have become part and
parcel of our flesh and blood. That one _wants_ in fact to get outside,
or aloft, is perhaps a sort of madness, a peculiarly unreasonable "thou
must"—for even we thinkers have our idiosyncrasies of "unfree will"—:
the question is whether one _can_ really get there. That may depend on
manifold conditions: in the main it is a question of how light or how
heavy we are, the problem of our "specific gravity." One must be _very
light_ in order to impel one's will to knowledge to such a distance, and
as it were beyond one's age, in order to create eyes for oneself for the
survey of millenniums, and a pure heaven in these eyes besides! One must
have freed oneself from many things by which we Europeans of to-day are
oppressed, hindered, held down, and made heavy. The man of such a
"Beyond," who wants to get even in sight of the highest standards of
worth of his age, must first of all "surmount" this age in himself—it is
the test of his power—and consequently not only his age, but also his
past aversion and opposition _to_ his age, his suffering _caused by_ his
age, his unseasonableness, his Romanticism....
381.