however, are quite alien to the essence of the particular object. To regard a thing as beauti ful is necessarily to regard it falsely (that is why incidentally love marriages are from the social point of view the most unreasonable form of matrimony).
805. Concerning the genesis of Art. That making perfect and seeing perfect, which is peculiar to the cerebral system overladen with sexual energy (a lover alone with his sweetheart at eventide trans figures the smallest details: life is a chain of sublime things, " the misfortune of an unhappy love affair is more valuable than anything else "); on the other hand, everything perfect and beautiful operates like an unconscious recollection of that amorous condition and of the point of view peculiar to it all perfection, and the whole of the beauty of things, through contiguity, revives aphrodisiac bliss. (Physiologically it is the creative instinct of the artist and the distribution 248 of his semen in his blood.) The desire for art and beauty is an indirect longing for the ecstasy of sexual desire, which gets communicated to the brain. The world become perfect through " love." i VrX 806. Sensuality in its various disguises. ( I ) As idealism (Plato), common to youth, constructing a kind of concave-mirror in which the image of the beloved is an incrustation, an exaggeration, a transfiguration, an attribution of infinity to every thing. (2) In the religion of love, " a fine young man," " a beautiful woman," in some way divine; a bridegroom, a bride of the soul. (3) In art, as a decorating force, e.g. just as the man sees the woman and makes her a present of everything that can enhance her personal charm, so the sensuality of the artist adorns an object with everything else that he honors and esteems, and by this means perfects it (or idealises it). Woman, knowing what man feels in regard to her, tries to meet his idealising endeavours half way by decorating herself, by walking and dancing well, by expressing delicate thoughts: in addition, she may practise modesty, shyness, reserve- prompted by her instinctive feeling that the ideal ising power of man increases with all this. (In the extraordinary finesse of woman s instincts, modesty must not by any means be considered as conscious hypocrisy: she guesses that it is pre cisely artlessness and real shame which seduces man most and urges him to an exaggerated 249 esteem of her. On this account, woman is in genuous, owing to the subtlety of her instincts which reveal to her the utility of a state of innocence. A wilful closing of one s eyes to one s self...Wherever dissembling has a stronger influence by being unconscious it actually becomes unconscious.)
807. What a host of things can be accomplished by the state of intoxication which is called by the name of love, and which is something else besides love! And yet everybody has his own experience of this matter. The muscular strength of a girl suddenly increases as soon as a man comes into her presence: there are instruments with which this can be measured. In the case of a still closer relationship of the sexes, as, for instance, in dancing and in other amusements which society gatherings entail, this power increases to such an extent as to make real feats of strength possible: at last one no longer trusts either one s eyes, or one s watch! Here at all events we must reckon with the fact that dancing itself, like every form of rapid movement, involves a kind of intoxication of the whole nervous, muscular, and visceral system. We must therefore reckon in this case with the collective effects of a double intoxication. And how clever it is to be a little off your head i at times! There are some realities which we - cannot admit even to ourselves: especially when we are women and have all sorts of feminine 7 250 " pudeurs"...Those young creatures dancing over there are obviously beyond all reality: they are dancing only with a host of tangible ideals: what is more, they even see ideals sitting around them, their mothers!...An opportunity for quoting Faust. They look incomparably fairer, do ttese pretty creatures, when they have lost their head a little; and how well they know it too, they are even more delightful because they know it! Lastly, it is their finery which inspires them: their finery is their third little intoxication. They believe in their dressmaker as in their God: and who would destroy this faith in them? Blessed is this faith! And self-admiration is healthy! Self-admiration can protect one even from cold! Has a beautiful woman, who knew she was well- dressed, ever caught cold? Never yet on this earth! I even suppose a case in which she has scarcely a rag on her.
808. If one should require the most astonishing proof of how far the power of transfiguring, which I comes of intoxication, goes, this proof is at hand V in the phenonTeTTon of love; or what is called love in all the languages and silences of the world. Intoxication works to such a degree upon reality in this passion that in the consciousness of the lover the cause of his love is quite suppressed, and something else seems to take its place, a vibra tion and a glitter of all the charm-mirrors of Circe...In this respect to be man or an 251 animal makes no difference: and still less does spirit, goodness, or honesty. If one is astute, one is befooled astutely; if one is thick-headed, one is befooled in a thick-headed way. But love, even the love of God, saintly love, " the love that saves the soul," are at bottom all one; they are nothing but a fever which has reasons to trans figure itself a state of intoxication which does well to lie about i self...And, at any rate, when a man loves, he is a good liar about himself and to himself: he seems to himself transfigured, stronger, richer, more perfect; he is more per fect...-4rJiere acts as an organic function: we find it present in the most angelic instinct " love "; we find it as the greatest stimulus of life thus art is sublimely utilitarian, even in the fact that it lies...But we should be wrong In hall at its power to lie: it does more than merely imagine; it actually transposes values. J, And it not only transposes the feeling for values: the lover actually has a greater value; he is stronger. In animals this condition gives rise to new weapons, colors, pigments, and forms, and above all to new movements, new rhythms, new love-calls and seductions. In man it is just the same. His whole economy is richer, mightier, and more complete when he is in love than when he is not. The lover becomes a spendthrift; he is rich enough for it. He now dares; he becomes an adventurer, and even a donkey in magnanimity and innocence; his belief in God and in virtue revives, because he believes in love. Moreover, such idiots of happiness acquire wings and new 252 capacities, and even the door to art is opened to them. If we cancel the suggestion of this intestinal fever from the lyric of tones and words, what is left to poetry and music?...L art pour I art perhaps; the professional cant of frogs shivering outside in the cold, and dying of despair in their swamp...Everything else was created by love.
809. All art works like a suggestion on the muscles and the senses which were originally active in the ingenuous artistic man; its voice is only heard by artists it speaks to this kind of man, whose constitution is attuned to such subtlety in sensi tiveness. The concept " layman " is a misnomer. The deaf man is not a subdivision of the class whose ears are sound. All art works as a tonic it increases strength, it kindles desire (i.e. the feeling of strength), it excites all the more subtle recollections of intoxication; there is actually a special kind of memory which underlies such states a distant flitful world of sensations here returns to being. Ugliness is the contradiction of art. It is that which art excludes, the negation of art: wherever decline, impoverishment of life, impotence, de composition, dissolution, are felt, however remotely, the aesthetic man reacts with his No. Ugliness depresses: it is the sign of depression. It robs strength, it impoverishes, it weighs down,...Ugliness suggests repulsive things. From one s 253 states of health one can test how an indisposition may increase one s power of fancying ugly things. One s selection of things, interests, and questions becomes different. Logic provides a state which is next of kin to ugliness: heaviness, bluntness. In the presence of ugliness equilibrium is lacking in a mechanical sense: ugliness limps and stumbles the direct opposite of the godly agility of the dancer. The aesthetic state represents an overflow of means of communication as well as a condition of extreme sensibility to stimuli and signs. It is the zenith of communion and transmission between living creatures; it is the source of languages. In it, languages, whether of signs, sounds, or glances, have their birthplace. The richer phenomenon is always the beginning: our abilities are subtilised forms of richer abilities. But even today we still listen with our muscles, we even read with our muscles. Every mature art possesses a host of conventions as a basis: in so far as it is a language. Con vention is a condition of great art, not an obstacle to it...Every elevation of life likewise elevates the power of communication, as also the under standing of man. The power of living in other people s souls originally had nothing to do with morality, but with a physiological irritability of suggestion: " sympathy," or what is called "altruism," is merely a product of that psycho- motor relationship which is reckoned as spirituality (psycho-motor induction, says Charles Fere). People never communicate a thought to one 254 another: they communicate a movement, an imitative sign which is then interpreted as a thought.
810. Compared with music, communication by means of words is a shameless mode of procedure; words reduce and stultify; words make impersonal; words make common that which is uncommon.
811. It is exceptional states that determine the artist such states as are all intimately related and entwined with morbid symptoms, so that it would seem almost impossible to be an artist without being ill. The physiological conditions which in the artist become moulded into a " personality," and which, to a certain degree, may attach themselves to any man: 1 i ) Intoxication, the feeling of enhanced power; the inner compulsion to make things a mirror of one s own fulness and perfection. (2) The extreme sharpness of certain senses, so that they are capable of understanding a totally different language of signs and to create such a language (this is a condition which manifests itself in some nervous diseases); extreme susceptibility out of which great powers of communion are developed; the desire to speak on the part of everything that is capable of making -signs; a need of being rid of one s self by means of gestures 255 and attitudes; the ability of speaking about one s self in a hundred different languages in fact, a state of explosion. One must first imagine this condition as one in which there is a pressing and compulsory desire of ridding one s self of the ecstasy of a state of tension,, by all kinds of muscular work and movement; also as an involuntary co-ordination of these move ments with inner processes (images, thoughts, desires) as a kind of automatism of the whole muscular system under the compulsion of strong stimuli acting from within; the inability to resist reaction; the apparatus of resistance is also suspended. Every inner movement (feeling, thought, emotion) is accompanied by vascular changes, and consequently by changes incolor; temperature, and secretion. The suggestive power of music, its " suggestion mentale" (3) The compulsion to imitate-, extreme irritabil ity, by means of which a certain example becomes contagious a condition is guessed and represented merely by means of a few signs...A complete picture is visualised by one s inner consciousness, and its effect soon shows itself in the movement of the limbs, in a ceVtain suspension of the will (Schopenhauer!!!!). A sort of blindness and deafness towards the external world, the realm of admitted stimuli is sharply defined. This differentiates the artist from the layman (from the spectator of art): the latter reaches the height of his excitement in the mere act of appre hending: the former in giving and in such a way that the antagonism between these two gifts is not 2 5 6 only natural but even desirable. Each of these states has an opposite standpoint to demand of the artist that he should have the point of view of the spectator (of the critic) is equivalent to asking him to impoverish his creative power...In this respect the same difference holds good as that which exists between the sexes: one should not ask the artist who gives to become a woman to "receive" Our aesthetics have hitherto been women s aesthetics, inasmuch as they have only formulated the experiences of what is beautiful, from the point of view of the receivers in art. In the whole of philosophy hitherto the artist has been lacking...i.e. as we have already suggested, a necessary fault: for the artist who would begin to under stand himself would therewith begin to mistake himself he must not look backwards, he must not look at all; he must give. It is an honor for an artist to have no critical faculty; if he can criticize he is mediocre, he is modern.
812. Here I lay down a series of psychological states as signs of flourishing and complete life, which today we are in the habit of regarding as morbid. But, by this time, we have broken ourselves of the habit of speaking of healthy and morbid as opposites: the question is one of degree, what I maintain on this point is that what people call healthy nowadays represents a lower level of that which under favourable circumstances actually would be healthy that we are relatively sick...The artist belongs to a much stronger race. That V which in us would be harmful and sickly, is natural in him. But people object to this that it is pre cisely the impoverishment of the machine which renders this extraordinary power of comprehending every kind of suggestion possible: e.g. our hysteri cal females. An overflow of spunk and energy may quite as well lead to symptoms of partial constraint, sense hallucinations, peripheral sensitiveness, as a poor vitality does the stimuli are differently deter mined, the effect is the same...What is not the same is above all the ultimate result; the extreme torpidity of all morbid natlllg, after their nervous eccentricities, has nothing in common with the states of the artist, who need in no wise repent his best moments...He is rich enough for it all: he can squander without becoming poor. Just as we now feel justified in judging genius j as a form of neurosis, we may perhaps think the same of artistic suggestive power, and our artists are, as a matter of fact, only too closely related to hysterical females This, however, is only an argument against the present day, and not against artists in general. The inartistic states are: objectivity, reflection suspension of the will...(Schopenhauer s scandal- ] ous misunderstanding consisted in regarding art as a mere bridge to the denial of life)...The in artistic states are: those which impoverish, which subtract, which bleach, under which life suffers the Christian. I. R 258 813. The modern artist who, in his physiology, is next of kin to the hysteric, may also be classified as a character belonging to this state of morbid ness. The hysteric is false, he lies from the love of lying, he is admirable in all the arts of dissimulation, unless his morbid vanity hood wink him. This vanity is like a perpetual fever which is in need of stupefying drugs, and which recoils from no self-deception and no farce that promises it the most fleeting satisfaction. (The incapacity for pride and the need of continual revenge for his deep-rooted self-contempt, this is almost the definition of this man s vanity.) The absurd irritability of his system, which makes a crisis out of every one of his experiences, and sees dramatic elements in the most insignifi cant occurrences of life, deprives him of all calm reflection: he ceases from being a personality, at most he is a rendezvous of personalities of which first one and then the other asserts itself with barefaced assurance. Precisely on this account he is great as an actor: all these poor will-less people, whom doctors study so profoundly, astound one through their virtuosity in mimicking, in trans figuration, in their assumption of almost any character required.
814. Artists are not men of great passion, despite all their assertions to the contrary both to themselves and to others. And for the following two reasons: 259 they lack all shyness towards themselves (they watch themselves live, they spy upon themselves, they are much too inquisitive), and they also lack shyness in the presence of passion (as artists they exploit it). Secondly, however, that vampire, their talent, generally forbids them such an ex penditure of energy as passion demands. A man who has a talent is sacrificed to that talent; he lives under the vampirism of his talent. A man does not get rid of his passion by re producing it, but rather he is rid of it if he is able to reproduce it. (Goethe teaches the reverse, but it seems as though he deliberately misunderstood himself here from a sense of delicacy.)
815. Concerning a reasonable mode of life. -.Relative chastity, a fundamental and shrewd caution in regard to erotica, even in thought, may be a reason able mode of life even in richly equipped and perfect natures. But this principle applies more particularly to artists; it belongs to the best wisdom of their lives. Wholly trustworthy voices have already been raised in favour of this view, e.g. Stendhal, Th. Gautier, and Flaubert. The artist is perhaps in his way necessarily a sensual man, generally susceptible, accessible to everything, and capable of responding to the remotest stimulus or suggestion of a stimulus. Nevertheless, as a rule he is in the power of his work, of his will to mastership, really a sober and often even a chaste man. His dominating instinct will have him so: it does not allow him to spend himself haphazardly. It is one and the same form of strength which is spent in artistic conception and in the sexual act: there is only one form of strength. The artist who yields in this respect, and who spends himself, is betrayed: by so doing he reveals his lack of instinct, his lack of will in general. It may be a sign of decadence, in any case it re duces the value of his art to an incalculable degree.
816. Compared with the artist, the scientific man, regarded as a phenomenon, is indeed a sign of a certain storing-up and levelling-down of life (but also of an increase of strength, severity, hardness, and will-power). To what extent can falsity and indifference towards truth and utility be a sign of youth, of childishness, in the artist?...Their habitual manner, their unreasonableness, their ignorance of themselves, their indifference to " eternal values their seriousness in play, their lack of dignity; clowns and gods in one; the saint and the rabble...Imitation as an imperi ous instinct. t)o not artists of ascending life and artists of degeneration belong to all phases?...Yes!
817. Would any link be missing in the whole chain of science and art, if woman, if woman s work, were excluded from it? Let us acknowledge the exception it proves the rule that woman is capable of perfection in everything which does not constitute a work: in letters, in memoirs, in the most intricate handiwork in short, in everything which is not a craft; and just precisely because in the things mentioned woman perfects herself, be cause in them she obeys the only artistic impulse in her nature, which is to captivate...But what has woman to do with the passionate indiffer ence of the genuine artist who sees more importance in a breath, in a sound, in the merest trifle, than in himself? who with all his five fingers gropes for his most secret and hidden treasures? who attri butes no value to anything unless it knows how to take shape (unless it surrenders itself, unless it visualises itself in some way). Art as it is practiced by artists do you not understand what it is? is it not an outrage on all our pudeurs?...Only in this century has woman dared to try her hand at literature ( " Vers la canaille plumiere fariv- assiere" to speak with old Mirabeau): woman now writes, she now paints, she is losing her instincts. And to what purpose, if one may put such a question?
818. A man is an artist to the extent to which he regards everything that inartistic people call " form " as the actual substance, as the " prin cipal " thing. With such ideas a man certainly belongs to a world upside down: for hencefor ward substance seems to him something merely formal, his own life included.
819. A sense for, and a delight in, nuances (which is characteristic of modernity), in that which is not general, runs counter to the instinct which finds its joy and its strength in grasping what is typical: like Greek taste in its best period. In this there is an overcoming of the plenitude of life; restraint dominates, the peace of the strong soul which is slow to move and which feels a certain repug nance towards excessive activity is defeated. The general rule, the law, is honored and made prominent: conversely, the exception is laid aside, and shades are suppressed. All that which is firm, mighty, solid, life resting on a broad and powerful basis, concealing its strength this " pleases ": i.e. it corresponds with what we think of ourselves.
820. In the main I am much more in favour of artists than any philosopher that has appeared hitherto: artists, at least, did not lose sight of the great course which life pursues; they loved the things " of this world," they loved their senses. v To strive after " spirituality," in cases where this is not pure hypocrisy or self-deception, seems to me to be either a misunderstanding, a disease, or a cure. I wish myself, and all those who live with out the troubles of a puritanical conscience, and who are able to live in this way, an ever greater spiritualisation and multiplication of the senses. Indeed, we would fain be grateful to the senses for X x 263 their subtlety, power, and plenitude, and on that account offer them the best we have in the way of spirit. What do we care about priestly and meta physical anathemas upon the senses? We no longer require to treat them in this way: it is a sign of well-constitutedness when a man like Goethe clings with ever greater joy and heartiness to the " things of this world " in this way he holds firmly to the grand concept of mankind, which is that man becomes the glorifying power j of existence when he learns to glorify himself.
821. Pessimism in art? The artist gradually learns to like for their own sake, those means which bring about the condition of aesthetic elation; extreme delicacy and glory of color, definite delineation, quality of tone; distinctness where in normal conditions distinctness is absent. All distinct things, all nuances, in so far as they recall extreme degrees of power which give rise to intoxication, kindle this feeling of intoxication by association; the effect of works of art is the excitation of the state which creates art, of aesthetic intoxication. The essential feature in art is its power of perfecting existence, its production of perfection and plenitude; art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence...What does a pessimistic art signify? Is it not a contradictio? Yes. Schopenhauer is in error when he makes certain works of art serve the L purpose of pessimism. Tragedy does not teach " resignation."...To represent terrible and questionable things is, in itself, the sign of an instinct of power and magnificence in the artist; 1 he doesn t fear them...There is no such thing j as a pessimistic art...Art affirms. Job j frirms. But Zola? and the Goncourts? the things they show us are ugly; their reason, however, for showing them to us is their love of ugliness...I don t care what you say! You simply deceive yourselves if you think otherwise. What a relief Dostoievsky is!
822. If I have sufficiently initiated my readers into the doctrine that even " goodness," in the whole comedy of existence, represents a form of exhaus tion, they will now credit Christianity with con sistency for having conceived the good to be the ugly. In this respect Christianity was right. It is absolutely unworthy of a philosopher to say that " the good and the beautiful are one "; if he should add " and also the true," he deserves to; be thrashed. Truth is ugly. Art is with us in order that we may not perish through truth.
823. Moralising tendencies may be combated with art. Art is freedom from moral bigotry and philosophy a la Little Jack Homer: or it may be the mockery of these things. The flight to Nature, where beauty and terribleness are coupled. The concept of the great man. Fragile, useless souls-de-luxe, which are dis concerted by a mere breath of wind, " beautiful souls." Ancient ideals, in their inexorablehardnessand brutality, ought to be awakened, as the mightiest of monsters that they are. We should feel a boisterous delight in the psychological perception of how all moralised artists become worms and actors without know ing it. The falsity of art, its immorality, must be brought into the light of day. The " fundamental idealising powers " (sensuality, intoxication, excessive animality) should be brought to light.
824. Modern counterfeit practices in the arts: regarded as necessary that is to say, as fully in keeping with the needs most proper to the modern soul. The gaps in the gifts, and still more in the education, antecedents, and schooling of modern artists, are now filled up in this way: First: A less artistic public is sought which is capable of unlimited love (and is capable of falling on its knees before a personality). The superstition of our century, the belief in " genius," assists this process. Secondly; Artists harangue the dark instincts of the dissatisfied, the ambitious, and the self-deceivers of a democratic age: the importance of poses. Thirdly: The procedures of one art are trans ferred to the realm of another; the object of art is confounded with that of science, with that of the Church, or with that of the interests of the race (nationalism), or with that of philosophy a man rings all bells at once, and awakens the vague suspicion that he is a god. Fourthly: Artists flatter women, sufferers, and indignant folk. Narcotics and opiates are made to- preponderate in art. The fancy of cultured people, and of the readers of poetry and ancient history, is tickled.
825. We must distinguish between the " public " and the " select "; to satisfy the public a man must be a charlatan today, to satisfy the select he will be a virtuoso and nothing else. The geniuses peculiar to our century overcame this distinction, they, were great for both; the great charlatanry of Victor Hugo and Richard Wagner was coupled with such genuine virtuosity that it even satisfied I the most refined artistic connoisseurs. This is! why greatness is lacking: these geniuses had a double outlook; first, they catered for the coarsest needs, and then for the most refined.
826. False "accentuation": (i) In romanticism; this unremitting " exp-ressivo " is not a sign of strength, but of a feeling of deficiency; (2) Picturesque music, the so-called dramatic 267 kind, is above all easier (as is also the brutal scandalmongering and the juxtaposition of facts and traits in realistic novels); (3) "Passion" as amatter of nerves and exhausted souls; likewise the delight in high mountains, deserts, storms, orgies, and disgusting details, in bulkiness and massiveness (historians, forinstance); as amatter of fact, there is actually a cult of exaggerated feel ings (how is it that in stronger ages art desired just the opposite a restraint of passion?); (4) The preference for exciting materials (Erotica or Socialistic* or Pathologicd): all these things are the signs of the style of public that is being catered for today that is to say, for overworked, absentminded, or enfeebled people. Such people must be tyrannised over in order to be affected.
827. Modern art is the art of tyrannising. A coarse and salient definiteness in delineation; the motive simplified into a formula; formulae tyrannise. Wild arabesques within the lines; overwhelming masses, before which the senses are confused; brutality in coloration, in subject-matter, in the desires. Examples: Zola, Wagner, and, in a more spiritualised degree, Taine. Hence logic, massiveness, and brutality.
828. In regard to the painter: Tous ces modernes sont des poetes qui ont voulu etre peintres. Lun a chercJit des drames dans l histoire t I autre des scenes de moeurs, celui ci traduit des religions, celui la une philosophie. One imitates Raphael, another the early Italian masters. The landscapists employ trees and clouds in order to make odes and elegies. Not one is simply a painter; they are ajl archaeologists, psychologists, and impresarios of one or another kind of event or theory. They enjoy our erudition and our philosophy. Like us, they are full, and too full, of general ideas. They like a form, not because it is what it is, but because of what it expresses. They are the scions of a learned, tormented, and reflecting generation, a thousand miles away from the Old Masters who never read, and only concerned themselves with feasting their eyes.
829. At bottom, even Wagner s music, in so far as it stands for the whole of French romanticism, is literature: the charm of exoticism (strange times, customs, passions), exercised upon sensitive cosy- corner people. The delight of entering into ex tremely distant and prehistoric lands to which books lead one, and by which means the whole horizon is painted with new colors and new possibilities...Dreams of still more distant and unexploited worlds; disdain of the boulevards...For Nationalism, let us not deceive ourselves, is also only a form of exoticism...Romantic musicians merely relate what exotic books have made of them: people would fain experience exotic sensations and passions according to Florentine and Venetian taste; finally they are satisfied to look for them in an image...The essential factor is the kind of novel desire, the desire to imitate, the desire to live as people have lived once before in the past, and the disguise and dissimulation of the soul...Romantic art is only an emergency exit from defective " reality." The attempt to perform new things: revolution, Napoleon. Napoleon represents the passion of new spiritual possibilities, of an extension of the I soul s domain. The greater the debility of the will, the greater the extravagances in the desire to feel, to repre sent, and to dream new things. The result of j the excesses which have been indulged in: an insatiable thirst for unrestrained feelings...Foreign literatures