my 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,_ in 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,--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 a 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
now 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 especially 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 has become very thin: the thawing wind blows; we ourselves,
the homeless ones, are an agency that breaks the ice, and the other
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 bottom of our hearts 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 for
"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, but too
deeply obligated 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, or
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 does _want_ to get outside, or
aloft, is perhaps a sort of madness, a peculiar, 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.