93. Renaissance and Reformation. What does the Renaissance prove? That the reign of the "individual" can be only a short one. The out put is too great; there is not even the possibility of husbanding or of capitalizing forces, and exhaustion sets in step by step. These are times when everything is squandered, when even the strength itself with which one collects, capitalises, and heaps riches upon riches, is squandered. Even the opponents of such movements are driven to preposterous extremes in the dissipation of their strength: and they too are very soon exhausted, used up, and completely sapped. In the Reformation we are face to face with a wild and plebeian counterpart of the Italian Renaissance, generated by similar impulses, except that the former, in the backward and still vulgar North, had to assume a religious form there the concept of a higher life had not yet been divorced from that of a religious one. Even the Reformation was a movement for individual liberty; " every one his own priest " is really no more than a formula for libertinage. As a matter of fact, the words " Evangelical freedom " would have sufficed and all instincts which had reasons for remaining concealed broke out like wild hounds, the most brutal needs suddenly acquired the courage to show themselves, everything seemed justified...men refused to specify the kind of freedom they had aimed at, they preferred to shut their eyes. But the fact that their eyes were closed and that their lips were moistened with gushing orations, did not prevent their hands from being ready to snatch at whatever there was to snatch at, that the belly became the god of the "free gospel," and that all lusts of revenge and of hatred were indulged with insatiable fury. This lasted for a while: then exhaustion super vened, just as it had done in Southern Europe; and again here, it was a low form of exhaustion, a sort of general mere in servitium...Then the disreputable century of Germany dawned.
94. Chivalry the position won by power: its gradual break-up (and partial transference to broader and more bourgeois spheres). In the case of Larochefoucauld we find a knowledge of the actual impulses of a noble temperament together with the gloomy Christian estimate of these impulses. The protraction of Christianity through the French Revolution. The seducer is Rousseau; he once again liberates woman, who thenceforward is always represented as ever more interesting suffering. Then come the slaves and Mrs. Beecher- Stowe. Then the poor and the workmen. Then the vicious and the sick all this is drawn into the foreground (even for the purpose of disposing people in favour of the genius, it has been custom ary for five hundred years to press him forward as the great sufferer!). Then comes the cursing of all voluptuousness (Beaudelaire and Schopen hauer); the most decided conviction that the lust of power is the greatest vice; absolute certainty that morality and disinterestedness are identical things; that the " happiness of all " is a goal worth 77 striving after (i.e., Christ's Kingdom of Heaven). We are on the best road to it: the Kingdom of Heaven of the poor in spirit has begun. Inter mediate stages: the bourgeois (as a result of the nouveau riche] and the workman (as a result of the machine). Greek and French culture of the time of Louis XIV. compared. A decided belief in oneself. A leisure-class which makes things hard for itself and exercises a great deal of self-control. The power of form, the will to form oneself. " Happi ness " acknowledged as a purpose. Much strength and energy behind all formality of manners. Pleasure at the sight of a life that is seemingly so easy. The Greeks seemed like children to the French.
95. The Three Centuries. Their different kinds of sensitiveness may perhaps be best expressed as follows: Aristocracy: Descartes, the reign of reason, evidence showing the sovereignty of the will. Feminism: Rousseau, the reign of feeling, evidence showing the sovereignty of the senses; all lies. Animalism: Schopenhauer, the reign of passion, evidence showing the sovereignty of animality, more honest, but gloomy. The seventeenth century is aristocratic, all for order, haughty towards everything animal, severe in regard to the heart, " austere," and even free from sentiment, " non-German," averse to all that is burlesque and natural, generalizing and maintaining an attitude of sovereignty towards the past- for it believes in itself. At bottom it partakes very much of the beast of prey, and practises asceticism in order to remain master. It is the century of strength of will, as also that of strong passion. The eighteenth century is dominated by woman, it is gushing, spiritual, and flat; but with intellect at the service of aspirations and of the heart, it is a libertine in the pleasures of intellect, undermining all authorities; emotionally intoxicated, cheerful, clear, humane, and sociable, false to itself and at bottom very rascally...The nineteenth century is more animal, more subterranean, hateful, realistic, plebeian, and on that very account " better," " more honest," more submissive to " reality " of what kind soever, and truer; but weak of will, sad, obscurely exacting and fatalistic. It has no feeling of timidity or reverence, either in the presence of " reason " or the " heart "; thoroughly convinced of the dominion of the desires (Schopenhauer said " Will," but nothing is more characteristic of his philosophy than that it entirely lacks all actual willing}. Even morality is reduced to an instinct (" Pity "). Auguste Comte is the continuation of the eighteenth century (the dominion of the heart over the head, sensuality in the theory of knowledge, altruistic exaltation). The fact that science has become as sovereign as it is today, proves how the nineteenth century has emancipated itself from the dominion of ideals. A certain absence of " needs " and wishes makes our scientific curiosity and rigor possible this is our kind of virtue. Romanticism is the counterstroke of the eighteenth century; a sort of accumulated longing for its grand style of exaltation (as a matter of fact, largely mingled with mummery and self-deception: the desire was to represent strong nature and strong passion}. The nineteenth century instinctively goes in search of theories by means of which it may feel its fatalistic submission to the empire of facts justified.
Hegel s success against sentimentality and romantic idealism was already a sign of its fatalistic trend of thought, in its belief that superior reason belongs to the triumphant side, and in its justification of the actual " state " (in the place of " humanity," etc.). Schopenhauer: we are something foolish, and at the best self- suppressive. The success of determinism, the genealogical derivation of obligations which were formerly held to be absolute, the teaching of environment and adaptation, the reduction of will to a process of reflex movement, the denial of the will as a " working cause "; finally a real process of re-christening: so little will is observed that the word itself becomes available for another purpose. Further theories: the teaching of objectivity, " will-less " contemplation, as the only road to truth, as also to beauty (also the belief in " genius," in order to have the right to be submissive); mechanism, the determinable rigidity of the mechanical process; so-called " Naturalism," the elimination of the choosing, directing, inter preting subject, on principle. Kant, with his " practical reason," with his moral fanaticism, is quite eighteenth century style; still completely outside the historical movement, without any notion whatsoever of the reality of his time, for instance, revolution; he is not affected by Greek philosophy; he is a phantasist of the notion of duty, a sensualist with a hidden leaning to dogmatic pampering. The return to Kant in our century means a return to the eighteenth century: people desire to create themselves a right to the old ideas and to the old exaltation hence a theoryofknowledge which" describes limits," that is to say, which admits of the option of fixing a Beyond to the domain of reason. Hegel's way of thinking is not so very far removed from that of Goethe: see the latter on the subject of Spinoza, for instance. The will to deify the All and Life, in order to find both peace and happiness in contemplating them: Hegel looks for reason everywhere in the presence of reason man may be submissive and resigned. In Goethe we find a kind of fatalism which is almost joyous and confiding, which neither revolts nor weakens, which strives to make a totality out of itself, in the belief that only in totality does every thing seem good and justified, and find itself resolved.
96. The period of rationalism followed by a period of sentimentality. To what extent does Schopenhauer come under "sentimentality"? (Hegel under intellectuality?)
97. The seventeenth century suffers from humanity as from a host of contradictions (" Famas de con tradictions " that we are ); it endeavours to discover man, to co-ordinate him, to excavate him: whereas the eighteenth century tries to forget what is known of man s nature, in order to adapt him to its Utopia. " Superficial, soft, humane " gushes over " humanity." The seventeenth century tries to banish all traces of the individual in order that the artist s work may resemble life as much as possible. The eighteenth century strives to create interest in the author by means of the work. The seventeenth century seeks art in art, a piece of culture; the eighteenth uses art in its propaganda for political and social reforms. " Utopia," the " ideal man," the deification of Nature, the vanity of making one s own personality the centre of interest, subordination to the propa ganda of social ideas, charlatanism all this we derive from the eighteenth century. The style of the seventeenth century: propre exact et libre. The strong individual who is self-sufficient, or who appeals ardently to God and that obtrusive- ness and indiscretion of modern authors these things are opposites. u Showing-oneself-ofif" what a contrast to the Scholars of Port- Royal! Alfieri had a sense for the grand style. The hate of the burlesque (that which lacks dignity), the lack of a sense of Nature belongs to the seventeenth century.
98. Against Rousseau. Alas! man is no longer sufficiently evil; Rousseau s opponents, who say that " man is a beast of prey," are unfortunately wrong. Not the corruption of man, but the softening and moralising of him is the curse. In the sphere which Rousseau attacked most violently, the relatively strongest and most successful type of man was still to be found (the type which still possessed the great passions intact: Will to Power, Will to Pleasure, the Will and Ability to Com mand). The man of the eighteenth century must be compared with the man of the Renaissance (also with the man of the seventeenth century in France) if the matter is to be understood at all: Rousseau is a symptom of self-contempt and of inflamed vanity both signs that the dominating will is lacking: he moralises and seeks the cause of his own misery after the style of a revengeful man in the ruling classes.
99. Voltaire Rousseau. A state of nature is terrible; man is a beast of prey: our civilisation is an extraordinary triumph over this beast of prey in nature this was Voltaire s conclusion. He was conscious of the mildness, the refinements, the intellectual joys of the civilized state; he despised obtuseness, even in the form of virtue, and the lack of delicacy even in ascetics and monks. The moral depravity of man seemed to pre occupy Rousseau; the words " unjust," " cruel," are the best possible for the purpose of exciting the instincts of the oppressed, who otherwise find themselves under the ban of the vetitum and of disgrace; so that their conscience is opposed to their indulging any insurrectional desires. These emancipators seek one thing above all: to give their party the great accents and attitudes of higher Nature.
100. Rousseau: the rule founded on sentiment; Nature as the source of justice; man perfects himself in proportion as he approaches Nature (according to Voltaire, in proportion as he leaves Nature behind}. The very same periods seem to the one to demonstrate the progress of humanity and, to the other, the increase of injustice and inequality. Voltaire, who still understood umanita in the sense of the Renaissance, as also virtu (as " higher culture "), fights for the cause of the " honnetes gens" " la bonne compagnie" taste, science, arts, and even for the cause of progress and civilisation. The flare-up occurred towards 1760: On the one hand the citizen of Geneva, on the other le seigneur de Ferney. It is only from that moment and henceforward that Voltaire was the man of his age, the philosopher, the representative of Toleration and of Disbelief (theretofore he had been merely un bel esprit}. His envy and hatred of Rousseau s success forced him upwards. " Pour la canaille un dieu re mune rateur el vengeur " Voltaire. The criticism of both standpoints in regard to the value of civilisation. To Voltaire nothing seems finer than the social invention: there is no higher goal than to uphold and perfect it. L honnetete consists precisely in respecting social usage; virtue in a certain obedience towards various necessary " prejudices " which favour the maintenance of society. Missionary of Culture, aristocrat, representative of the triumphant and ruling classes and their values.
But Rousseau remained a plebeian, even as hommes de lettres, this was preposterous] his shameless contempt for everything that was not himself. The morbid feature in Rousseau is the one which happens to have been most admired and imitated. (Lord Byron resembled him somewhat, he too screwed himself up to sublime attitudes and to revengeful rage a sign of vulgarity; later on, when Venice restored his equilibrium, he under stood what alleviates most and does the most good...F insouciance?) In spite of his antecedents, Rousseau is proud of himself; but he is incensed if he is reminded of his origin...In Rousseau there was undoubtedly some brain trouble; in Voltaire rare health and lightsome- ness. The revengefulness of the sick; his periods of insanity as also those of his contempt of man, and of his mistrust. Rousseau s defence of Providence (against Vol taire s Pessimism): he had need of God in order to be able to curse society and civilisation; every thing must be good per se, because God had created it; man alone has corrupted man. The " good man " as a man of Nature was pure fantasy; but with the dogma of God s authorship he became something probable and even not devoid of found ation. Romanticism & la Rousseau: passion (" the sovereign right of passion "); " naturalness "; the fascination of madness (foolishness reckoned as greatness); the senseless vanity of the weak; the revengefulness of the masses elevated to the posi tion of justice (" in politics, for one hundred years, the leader has always been this invalid " ).
101. Kant: makes the scepticism of Englishmen, in regard to the theory of knowledge, possible for Germans. (1) By enlisting in its cause the interest of the German s religious and moral needs: just as the new academicians used scepticism for the same reasons, as a preparation for Platonism (vide Augustine); just as Pascal even used moral scepticism in order to provoke (to justify) the need of belief; (2) By complicating and entangling it with scholastic flourishes in view of making it more acceptable to the German's scientific taste in form (for Locke and Hume, alone, were too illuminating, too clear that is to say, judged according to the German valuing instinct, " too superficial "). Kant: a poor psychologist and mediocre judge of human nature, made hopeless mistakes in regard to great historical values (the French Revolution); a moral fanatic a la Rousseau; with a subterranean current of Christian values; a thorough dogmatist, but bored to extinction by this tendency, to the extent of wishing to tyrannise over it, but quickly tired, even of skepticism; and not yet affected by any cosmopolitan thought or antique beauty...a dawdler and a go-between, not at all original (like Leibnitz, something between mechanism and spiritualism; like Goethe, something between the taste of the eighteenth century and that of the " historical sense " [which is essentially a sense of exoticism]; like German music, between French and Italian music; like Charles the Great, who mediated and built bridges between the Roman Empire and Nationalism a dawdler par excellence], 102. In what respect have the Christian centuries with their Pessimism been stronger centuries than the eighteenth and how do they correspond with the tragic age of the Greeks? The nineteenth century versus the eighteenth. How was it an heir? how was it a step backwards from the latter? (more lacking in " spirit " and in taste) how did it show an advance on the latter? (more gloomy, more realistic, stronger).
103. How can we explain the fact that we feel something in common with the Campagna romana? And the high mountain chain? Chateaubriand in a letter to M. de Fontanes in 1803 writes his first impression of the Campagna romana. The President de Brosses says of the Campagna romana: " II fallait que Romulus fut ivre quand il songea a batir une ville dans un terrain aussi laid." Even Delacroix would have nothing to do with Rome, it frightened him. He loved Venice, just as Shakespeare, Byron, and Georges Sand did. The"ophile Gautier s and Richard Wagner s dislike of Rome must not be forgotten. Lamartine has the language for Sorrento and Posilippo. Victor Hugo raves about Spain, " parce que aucune autre nation n a moins emprunte* a 1 antiquite", parce qu elle n a subi aucune influence classique."
104. The two great attempts that were made to overcome the eighteenth century: Napoleon, in that he called man, the soldier, and the great struggle for power, to life again, and conceived Europe as a political power. Goethe, in that he imagined a European culture which would consist of the whole heritage of what humanity had attained to up to his time. German culture in this century inspires mistrust the music of the period lacks that complete element which liberates and binds as well, to wit Goethe.
105. The pre-eminence of music in the romanticists of 1830 and 1840. Delacroix. Ingres a passionate musician (admired Gluck, Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart), said to his pupils in Rome: "Si je pouvais vous rendre tous musiciens, vous y gagneriez comme peintres" likewise Horace Vernet, who was particularly fond of Don Juan (as Mendelssohn assures us, 1831); Stendhal, too, who says of himself: "Combien de lieues ne ferais-je pas a pied, et a combien de jours de prison ne me soumetterais-je pas pour entendre Don Juan ou le Matrimonio segreto; et je ne sais pour quelle autre chose je ferais cet effort." He was then fifty-six years old. The borrowed forms, for instance: Brahms as a typical "Epigone," likewise Mendelssohn s cultured Protestantism (a former " soul " is turned into poetry posthumously...) the moral and poetical substitutions in Wagner, who used one art as a stop-gap to make up for what another lacked. the " historical sense," inspiration derived from poems, sagas. That characteristic transformation of which G. Flaubert is the most striking example among Frenchmen, and Richard Wagner the most striking example among Germans, shows how the romantic belief in love and the future changes into a longing for nonentity in 1830-50. " 106. How is it that German music reaches its culminating point in the age of German romanti cism? How is it that German music lacks Goethe? On the other hand, how much Schiller, or more exactly, how much " Thekla " * is there not in Beethoven! Schumann has Eichendorff, Uhland, Heine, Hoffman, Tieck, in him. Richard Wagner has Freischutz, Hoffmann, Grimm, the romantic Saga, the mystic Catholicism of instinct, symbolism, " the free-spiritedness of passion " (Rousseau s intention). The Flying Dutchman savors of France, where le ttntbreux (1830) was the type of the seducer. The cult of music, the revolutionary romanticism of form. Wagner synthesises German and French romanticism.
107. From the point of view only of his value to Germany and to German culture, Richard Wagner is still a great problem, perhaps a German mis fortune: in any case, however, a fatality. But what does it matter? Is he not very much more than a German event? It also seems to me that to no country on earth is he less related than to Germany; nothing was prepared there for his advent; his whole type is simply strange amongst Germans; there he stands in their midst, wonderful, misunderstood, incomprehensible. But people carefully avoid acknowledging this: they are too kind, too square-headed too German for that. " Credo quia absurdus est ": thus did the German spirit wish it to be, in this case too hence it is content meanwhile to believe everything Richard Wagner wanted to have believed about himself. In all ages the spirit of Germany has been deficient in subtlety and divining powers concerning psychological matters. Now that it happens to be under the high pressure of patriotic nonsense and self-adoration, it is visibly growing thicker and coarser: how could it therefore be equal to the problem of Wagner!
108. The Germans are not yet anything, but they are becoming something; that is why they have not yet any culture; that is why they cannot yet have any culture! They are not yet anything: that means they are all kinds of things. They are becoming something: that means that they will one day cease from being all kinds of things. The latter is at bottom only a wish, scarcely a hope yet. Fortunately it is a wish with which one can live, a question of will, of work, of discipline, a question of training, as also of resentment, of longing, of privation, of discomfort, yea, even of bitterness, in short, we Germans will get something out of ourselves, something that has not yet been wanted of us we want something more 91 That this " German, as he is not as yet " has a right to something better than the present German " culture "; that all who wish to become something better, must wax angry when they perceive a sort of contentment, an impudent " setting-oneself-at-ease," or " a process of self- censing," in this quarter: that is my second principle, in regard to which my opinions have not yet changed.
(c) SIGNS OF INCREASING STRENGTH.
109. First Principle: everything that characterises modern men savors of decay: but side by side with the prevailing sickness there are signs of a strength and powerfulness of soul which are still untried. The same causes which tend to promote the belittling of men, also force the stronger and rarer individuals upwards to greatness. no.
110. General survey: the ambiguous character of our modern world precisely the same symptoms might at the same time be indicative of either decline or strength. And the signs of strength and of emancipation dearly bought, might in view of traditional (or hereditary] appreciations concerned with the feelings, be misunderstood as indications of weakness. In short, feeling, as a means of fixing valuations, is not on a level with the times. Generalized: Every valuation is always back ward; it is merely the expression of the conditions which favoured survival and growth in a much earlier age: it struggles against new conditions of existence out of which it did not arise, and which it therefore necessarily misunderstands: it hinders, and excites suspicion against, all that is new.
111. The problem of the nineteenth century. To discover whether its strong and weak side belong to each other. Whether they have been cut from one and the same piece. Whether the variety of its ideals and their contradictions are conditioned by a higher purpose: whether they are something higher. For it might be the prerequisite of great ness, that growth should take place amid such violent tension. Dissatisfaction, Nihilism, might be a good sign.
112. General survey. As a matter of fact, all abundant growth involves a concomitant process of crumbling to bits and decay: suffering and the symptoms of decline belong to ages of enormous progress; every fruitful and powerful movement of mankind has always brought about a concurrent Nihilistic movement Under certain circumstances, the appearance of the extremest form of Pessimism and actual Nihilism might be the sign of a process of incisive and most essential growth, and of man kind s transit into completely new conditions of existence. This is what I have understood. Nihilism.
113. A. Starting out with a thoroughly courageous appreciation of our men of today: we must not allow ourselves to be deceived by appearance: this mankind is much less effective, but it gives quite different pledges of lasting strength its tempo is slower, but the rhythm itself is richer. Healthiness is increasing, the real conditions of a healthy body are on the point of being known, and will gradually be created, " asceticism " is regarded with irony. The fear of extremes, a certain confidence in the " right way," no raving: a periodical self-habituation to narrower values (such as " mother-land," " science," etc.). This whole picture, however, would still be ambiguous: it might be a movement either of increase or decline in Life. B. The belief in " progress " in lower spheres of intelligence, appears as increasing life: but this is self-deception; in higher spheres of intelligence it is a sign of declining life. Description of the symptoms. The unity of the aspect: uncertainty in regard to the standard of valuation. Fear of a general " in vain." Nihilism.
114. As a matter of fact, we are no longer so urgently in need of an antidote against the first Nihilism: Life is no longer so uncertain, accidental, and senseless in modern Europe. All such tremendous exaggeration of the value of men, of the value of evil, etc., are not so necessary now; we can endure a considerable diminution of this value, we may grant a great deal of nonsense and accident: the power man has acquired now allows of a lowering of the means of discipline, of which the strongest was the moral interpretation of the universe. The hypothesis " God " is much too extreme.
115. If anything shows that our humanisation is a genuine sign of progress, it is the fact that we no longer require excessive contraries, that we no longer require contraries at all...We may love the senses; for we have spiritualised them in every way and made them artistic; We have a right to all things which hitherto have been most calumniated.
116. The reversal of the order of rank. Those pious counterfeiters thepriests arebecomingChandala in our midst: they occupy the position of the charlatan, of the quack, of the counterfeiter, of the sorcerer: we regard them as corrupters of the will, as the great slanderers and vindictive enemies of Life, and as the rebels among the bungled and the botched. We have made our middle class out of our servant-caste the Sudra that is to say, our people or the body which wields the political power. On the other hand, the Chandala of former times is paramount: the blasphemers, the im- moralists, the independents of all kinds, the artists, the Jews, the minstrels and, at bottom, all dis reputable classes are in the van. We have elevated ourselves to honorable thoughts, even more, we determine what honor is on earth, "nobility."...All of us today are advocates of life. We Immoralists are today the strongest power: the other great powers are in need of us...we re-create the world in our own image. We have transferred the label " Chandala " to the priests, the backworldsmen, and to the deformed Christian society which has become associated with these people, together with creatures of like origin, the pessimists, Nihilists, romanticists of pity, criminals, and men of vicious habits the whole sphere in which the idea of "God" is that of Saviour...We are proud of being no longer obliged to be liars, slanderers, and detractors of Life...
117. The advance of the nineteenth century upon the eighteenth (at bottom we good Europeans are carrying on a war against the eighteenth century): 1 i ) " The return to Nature " is getting to be understood, ever more definitely, in a way which is quite the reverse of that in which Rousseau used the phrase away from idylls and operas! (2) Ever more decided, more anti-idealistic, more objective, more fearless, more industrious, more temperate, more suspicious of sudden changes. anti-revolutionary; (3) The question of bodily health is being pressed ever more decidedly in front of the health of " the soul ": the latter is regarded as a condition brought about by the former, and bodily health is believed to be, at least, the prerequisite to spiritual health.
118. If anything at all has been achieved, it is a more innocent attitude towards the senses, a happier, more favourable demeanour in regard to sensuality, resembling rather the position taken up by Goethe; a prouder feeling has also been developed in knowledge, and the "reine Thor" * meets with little faith.
119. We " objective people? It is not "pity" that opens up the way for us to all that is most remote and most strange in life and culture; but our Nihilism. 97 accessibility and ingenuousness, which precisely does not " pity," but rather takes pleasure in hun dreds of things which formerly caused pain (which in former days either outraged or moved us, or in the presence of which we were either hostile or indifferent). Pain in all its various phases is now interesting to us: on that account we are certainly not the more pitiful, even though the sight of pain may shake us to our foundations and move us to tears: and we are absolutely not inclined to be more helpful in view thereof. In this deliberate desire to look on at all pain and error, we have grown stronger and more powerful than in the eighteenth century; it is a proof of our increase of strength (we have drawn closer to the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries). But it is a profound mistake to regard our " romanticism " as a proof of our " beautified souls." We want stronger sensations than all coarser ages and classes have wanted. (This fact must not be con founded with the needs of neurotics and decadents; in their case, of course, there is a craving for pepper even for cruelty.) We are all seeking conditions which are eman cipated from the bourgeois, and to a greater degree from the priestly, notion of morality (every book which savors at all of priestdom and theology gives us the impression of pitiful niaiserie and