1. The true world-attainable for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man; he lives in it, he is it.

(The oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, and persuasive. A circumlocution for the sentence, "I, Plato, am the truth.")

2. The true world-unattainable for now, but promised for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man ("for the sinner who repents").

(Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, insidious, incomprehensible-it becomes female, it becomes Christian ...)

3. The true world-unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but the very thought of it-a consolation, an obligation, an imperative.

(At bottom, the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism. The idea has become elusive, pale, Nordic, Knigsbergian.)

4. The true world-unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being unattained, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating: how could something unknown obligate us? ...

(Gray morning. The first yawn of reason. The cockcrow of positivism.)

5. The "true" world-an idea which is no longer good for anything, not even obligating-an idea which has become useless and superfluous-consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it!

(Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato's embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits.)

6. We have abolished the true world: what world has remained? the apparent one perhaps? ... But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one!

(Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)

Morality as Anti-Nature

1

All passions have a phase when they are merely disastrous, when they drag down their victim with the weight of stupidity-and a later, very much later phase when they wed the spirit, when they "spiritualize" themselves. Formerly, in view of the element of stupidity in passion, war was declared on passion itself: its destruction was plotted,-all the old moral monsters are agreed on this: il faut tuer les passions. The most famous formula for this is to be found in the New Testament, in that Sermon on the Mount, where, incidentally, things are by no means looked at from a height. There it is said, for example, with particular reference to sexuality: "If thy eye offend thee, pluck it out." Fortunately, no Christian acts in accordance with this precept. Destroying the passions and cravings, merely as a preventive measure against their stupidity and the unpleasant consequences of this stupidity-today this itself strikes us as merely another acute form of stupidity. We no longer admire dentists who pluck out teeth so that they will not hurt any more ... To be fair, it should be admitted, however, that on the ground out of which Christianity grew, the concept of the "spiritualization of passion" could never have been formed. After all, the first church, as is well known, fought against the "intelligent" in favor of the "poor in spirit": how could one expect from it an intelligent war against passion?- The church fights passion with excision in every sense: its practice, its "cure," is castratism. It never asks: "How can one spiritualize, beautify, deify a craving?"- It has at all times laid the stress of discipline on extirpation (of sensuality, of pride, of the lust to rule, of avarice, of vengefulness).- But an attack on the roots of passion means an attack on the roots of life: the practice of the church is hostile to life ...

2

The same means in the fight against a craving-castration, extirpation-is instinctively chosen by those who are too weak-willed, too degenerate, to be able to impose moderation on themselves; by those who are so constituted that they require la Trappe, to use a figure of speech, or (without any figure of speech) some kind of definitive declaration of hostility, a cleft between themselves and the passion. Radical means are indispensable only for the degenerate; the weakness of the will-or, to speak more definitely, the inability not to respond to a stimulus-is itself merely another form of degeneration. The radical hostility, the deadly hostility against sensuality, is always a symptom to reflect on: it entitles us to suppositions concerning the total state of one who is excessive in this manner.- This hostility, this hatred, by the way, reaches its climax only when such types lack even the firmness for this radical cure, for this renunciation of their "devil." One should survey the whole history of the priests and philosophers, including the artists: the most poisonous things against the senses have been said not by the impotent, nor by ascetics, but by the impossible ascetics, by those who really were in dire need of being ascetics ...

3

The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it represents a great triumph over Christianity. Another triumph is our spiritualization of hostility. It consists in a profound appreciation of the value of having enemies: in short, it means acting and thinking in the opposite way from that which has been the rule. The church always wanted the destruction of its enemies; we, we immoralists and Antichristians, find our advantage in this, that the church exists ... In the political realm too, hostility has now become more spiritual-much more prudent, much more thoughtful, much more considerate. Almost every party understands how it is in the interest of its own self-preservation that the opposition should not lose all strength; the same is true of grand politics [der grossen Politik]. A new creation in particular-the new Reich, for example-needs enemies more than friends: in opposition alone does it feel itself necessary, in opposition alone does it become necessary ... Our attitude to the "internal enemy" is no different: here too we have spiritualized hostility; here too we have come to appreciate its value. The price of fruitfulness is to be rich in internal opposition; one remains young only as long as the soul does not stretch itself and desire peace ... Nothing has become more alien to us than that desideratum of former times, "peace of soul," the Christian desideratum; there is nothing we envy less than the moralistic cow and the fat happiness of the good conscience. One has renounced the great life when one renounces war ... In many cases, to be sure, "peace of soul" is merely a misunderstanding-something else, which lacks only a more honest name. Without further ado or prejudice, a few examples. "Peace of soul" can be, for one, the gentle radiation of a rich animality into the moral (or religious) sphere. Or the beginning of weariness, the first shadow of evening, of any kind of evening. Or a sign that the air is humid, that south winds are approaching. Or unrecognized gratitude for a good digestion (sometimes called "love of man"). Or the attainment of calm by a convalescent who feels a new relish in all things and waits ... Or the state which follows a thorough satisfaction of our dominant passion, the well-being of a rare repletion. Or the senile weakness of our will, our cravings, our vices. Or laziness, persuaded by vanity to give itself moral airs. Or the emergence of certainty, even a dreadful certainty, after long tension and torture by uncertainty. Or the expression of maturity and mastery in the midst of doing, creating, working, and willing-calm breathing, attained "freedom of the will" ... Twilight of the Idols: who knows? perhaps also only a kind of "peace of soul" ...

4

- I reduce a principle to a formula. Every naturalism in morality-that is, every healthy morality-is dominated by an instinct of life, some commandment of life is fulfilled by a determinate canon of "shalt" and "shalt not"; some inhibition and hostile element on the path of life is thus removed. Anti-natural morality-that is, almost every morality which has so far been taught, revered, and preached-turns, conversely, against the instincts of life: it is condemnation of these instincts, now secret, now outspoken and impudent. When it says, "God looks at the heart," it says No to both the lowest and the highest desires of life, and posits God as the enemy of life ... The saint in whom God delights is the ideal eunuch ... Life has come to an end where the "kingdom of God" begins ...

5

Once one has comprehended the outrage of such a revolt against life as has become almost sacrosanct in Christian morality, one has, fortunately, also comprehended something else: the futility, apparentness, absurdity, and mendaciousness of such a revolt. A condemnation of life by the living remains in the end a mere symptom of a certain kind of life: the question whether it is justified or unjustified is not even raised thereby. One would require a position outside of life, and yet have to know it as well as one, as many, as all who have lived it, in order to be permitted even to touch the problem of the value of life: reasons enough to comprehend that this problem is for us an unapproachable problem. When we speak of values, we speak with the inspiration, with the way of looking at things, which is part of life: life itself forces us to posit values; life itself values through us when we posit values ... From this it follows that even that anti-natural morality which conceives of God as the counter-concept and condemnation of life is only a value judgment of life-but of what life? of what kind of life?- I have already given the answer: of declining, weakened, weary, condemned life. Morality, as it has so far been understood-as it has in the end been formulated once more by Schopenhauer, as "negation of the will to life"-is the very instinct of dcadence, which makes an imperative of itself. It says: "Perish!"-it is a condemnation pronounced by the condemned ...

6

Let us finally consider how naive it is altogether to say: "Man ought to be such and such!" Reality shows us an enchanting wealth of types, the abundance of a lavish play and change of forms-and some wretched loafer of a moralist comments: "No! Man ought to be different" ... He even knows what man should be like, this wretched bigot and prig: he paints himself on the wall and comments, "Ecce homo!" ... But even when the moralist addresses himself only to the single human being and says to him, "You ought to be such and such!" he does not cease to make himself ridiculous. The single human being is a piece of fatum from the front and from the rear, one law more, one necessity more for all that is yet to come and to be. To say to him, "Change yourself!" is to demand that everything be changed, even retroactively ... And indeed there have been consistent moralists who wanted man to be different, that is, virtuous-they wanted him remade in their own image, as a prig: to that end, they negated the world! No small madness! No modest kind of immodesty! ... Morality, insofar as it condemns for its own sake, and not out of regard for the concerns, considerations, and contrivances of life, is a specific error with which one ought to have no pity-an idiosyncrasy of degenerates which has caused immeasurable harm!- We others, we immoralists, have, conversely, made room in our hearts for every kind of understanding, comprehending, and approving. We do not easily negate; we make it a point of honor to be affirmers. More and more, our eyes have opened to that economy which needs and knows how to utilize everything that the holy witlessness of the priest, the diseased reason in the priest, rejects-that economy in the law of life which finds an advantage even in the disgusting species of the prigs, the priests, the virtuous. What advantage?- But we ourselves, we immoralists, are the answer ...

The Four Great Errors

1

The error of confusing cause and effect.- There is no more dangerous error than that of mistaking the effect for the cause: I call it the real corruption of reason. Yet this error belongs among the most ancient and recent habits of mankind: it is even hallowed among us and goes by the name of "religion" or "morality." Every single sentence which religion and morality formulate contains it; priests and legislators of moral codes are the originators of this corruption of reason.- I give an example. Everybody knows the book of the famous Cornaro in which he recommends his slender diet as a recipe for a long and happy life-a virtuous one too. Few books have been read so much; even now thousands of copies are sold in England every year. I do not doubt that scarcely any book (except the Bible, as is meet) has done as much harm, has shortened as many lives, as this well-intentioned curiosum. The reason: the mistaking of the effect for the cause. The worthy Italian thought his diet was the cause of his long life, whereas the precondition for a long life, the extraordinary slowness of his metabolism, the consumption of so little, was the cause of his slender diet. He was not free to eat little or much; his frugality was not a matter of "free will": he became sick when he ate more. But whoever is no carp not only does well to eat properly, but needs to. A scholar in our time, with his rapid consumption of nervous energy, would simply destroy himself with Cornaro's diet. Crede experto. - [Believe him who has tried.]

2

The most general formula on which every religion and morality is founded is: "Do this and that, refrain from this and that-then you will be happy! Otherwise ..." Every morality, every religion, is this imperative; I call it the great original sin of reason, the immortal unreason. In my mouth, this formula is changed into its opposite-first example of my "revaluation of all values": a well-turned-out human being, a "happy one," must perform certain actions and shrinks instinctively from other actions; he carries the order, which he represents physiologically, into his relations with other human beings and things. In a formula: his virtue is the effect of his happiness ... A long life, many descendants-these are not the wages of virtue: rather virtue itself is that slowing down of the metabolism which leads, among other things, also to a long life, many descendants-in short, to Cornarism.- The church and morality say: "A generation, a people, are destroyed by license and luxury." My recovered reason says: when a people approaches destruction, when it degenerates physiologically, then license and luxury follow from this (namely, the craving for ever stronger and more frequent stimulation, as every exhausted nature knows it). This young man turns pale early and wilts; his friends say: that is due to this or that disease. I say: that he became diseased, that he did not resist the disease, was already the effect of an impoverished life or hereditary exhaustion. The newspaper reader says: this party destroys itself by making such a mistake. My higher politics says: a party which makes such mistakes has reached its end-it has lost its sureness of instinct. Every mistake in every sense is the effect of the degeneration of instinct, of the disintegration of the will: one could almost define what is bad in this way. All that is good is instinct-and hence easy, necessary, free. Laboriousness is an objection, the god is typically different from the hero (in my language: light feet are the first attribute of divinity).

3

The error of a false causality.- People have believed at all times that they knew what a cause is; but whence did we take our knowledge-or more precisely, our faith-that we had such knowledge? From the realm of the famous "inner facts," of which not a single one has so far proved to be factual. We believed ourselves to be causal in the act of willing: we thought that here at least we caught causality in the act. Nor did one doubt that all the antecedents of an act, its causes, were to be sought in consciousness and would be found there once sought-as "motives": else one would not have been free and responsible for it. Finally, who would have denied that a thought is caused? that the ego causes the thought? ... Of these three "inward facts" which seem to guarantee causality, the first and most persuasive is that of the will as cause. The conception of a consciousness ("spirit") as a cause, and later also that of the ego as cause (the "subject"), are only afterbirths: first the causality of the will was firmly accepted as given, as empirical ... Meanwhile we have thought better of it. Today we no longer believe a word of all this. The "inner world" is full of phantoms and will-o'-the-wisps: the will is one of them. The will no longer moves anything, hence does not explain anything either-it merely accompanies events; it can also be absent. The so-called motive: another error. Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness, something alongside the deed that is more likely to cover up the antecedents of the deeds than to represent them. And as for the ego! That has become a fable, a fiction, a play on words: it has altogether ceased to think, feel, or will! ... What follows from this? There are no mental causes at all! The whole of the allegedly empirical evidence for that has gone to the devil! That is what follows!- And what a fine abuse we had perpetrated with this "empirical evidence"; we created the world on this basis as a world of causes, a world of will, a world of spirits. The most ancient and enduring psychology was at work here and did not do anything else: all that happened was considered a doing, all doing the effect of a will; the world became to it a multiplicity of doers; a doer (a "subject") was slipped under all that happened. It was out of himself that man projected his three "inner facts"-that in which he believed most firmly: the will, the spirit, the ego. He even took the concept of being from the concept of the ego; he posited "things" as being, in his image, in accordance with his concept of the ego as a cause. Is it any wonder that later he always found in things only that which he had put into them?- The thing itself, to say it once more, the concept of thing is a mere reflex of the faith in the ego as cause ... And even your atom, my dear mechanists and physicists-how much error, how much rudimentary psychology is still residual in your atom!- Not to mention the "thing-in-itself," the horrendum pudendum of the metaphysicians! The error of the spirit as cause mistaken for reality! And made the very measure of reality! And called God! -

4

The error of imaginary causes.- To begin with dreams: subsequently, a cause is slipped under a particular sensation, for example, one following a far-off cannon shot (often a whole little novel, in which the dreamer turns up as the protagonist). The sensation endures meanwhile in a kind of resonance: it waits, as it were, until the causal instinct [Ursachentrieb] permits it to step into the foreground-now no longer as a chance occurrence, but as "meaning." The cannon shot appears in a causal mode, in an apparent reversal of time. What is really later, the motivation, is experienced first-often with a hundred details which pass like lightning and the shot follows ... What has happened? The representations which were produced by a certain state have been misunderstood as its causes.- In fact, we do the same thing when awake. Most of our general feelings-every kind of inhibition, pressure, tension, and explosion in the play and counterplay of our organs, and particularly the state of the nervus sympaticus-excite our causal instinct: we want to have a reason for feeling this way or that-for feeling bad or for feeling good. We are never satisfied merely to state the fact that we feel this way or that: we admit this fact only-become conscious of it only-when we have furnished some kind of motivation.- Memory, which swings into action in such cases, unknown to us, brings up earlier states of the same kind, together with the causal interpretations associated with them-not their real causes. The faith, to be sure, that such representations, such accompanying conscious processes are the causes is also brought forth by memory. Thus originates a habitual acceptance of a particular causal interpretation, which, as a matter of fact, inhibits any investigation into the real cause and even precludes it.

5

The psychological explanation of this.- To derive something unknown from something familiar relieves, comforts, and satisfies, besides giving a feeling of power. With the unknown, one is confronted with danger, discomfort, and care,-the first instinct is to abolish [wegzuschaffen] these painful states. First principle: any explanation is better than none. Since at bottom it is merely a matter of wishing to be rid of oppressive representations, one is not too particular about the means of getting rid of them: the first representation that explains the unknown as familiar feels so good that one "considers it true." The proof of pleasure ("of strength") as a criterion of truth.- The causal instinct is thus conditional upon, and excited by, the feeling of fear. The "why?" shall, if at all possible, not give the cause for its own sake so much as for a kind of cause-a cause that is comforting, liberating, and relieving. That it is something already familiar, experienced, and inscribed in the memory, which is posited as a cause, that is the first consequence of this need. That which is new and strange and has not been experienced before, is excluded as a cause.- Thus one searches not only for some kind of explanation to serve as a cause, but for a selected and preferred kind of explanation-that which has most quickly and most frequently abolished the feeling of the strange, new, and hitherto unexperienced: the most habitual explanations.- Consequence: one kind of positing of causes predominates more and more, is concentrated into a system and finally emerges as dominant, that is, as simply precluding other causes and explanations.- The banker immediately thinks of "business," the Christian of "sin," and the girl of her love.

6

The whole realm of morality and religion belongs under this concept of imaginary causes.- The "explanation" of disagreeable general feelings. They are produced by beings that are hostile to us (evil spirits: the most famous case-the misunderstanding of the hysterical as witches). They are produced by acts which cannot be approved (the feeling of "sin," of "sinfulness," is slipped under a physiological discomfort-one always finds reasons for being dissatisfied with oneself). They are produced as punishments, as payment for something we should not have done, for what we should not have been (impudently generalized by Schopenhauer into a principle in which morality appears as what it really is, as the very poisoner and slanderer of life: "Every great pain, whether physical or spiritual, declares what we deserve; for it could not come to us if we did not deserve it." World as Will and Representation, 2, 666). They are produced as effects of ill-considered actions that turn out badly (-here the affects, the senses, are posited as causes, as "guilty"; physiological calamities are interpreted with the help of other calamities as "deserved").- The "explanation" of agreeable general feelings. They are produced by trust in God. They are produced by the consciousness of good deeds (the so-called "good conscience," a physiological state which at times looks so much like good digestion that it is hard to tell them apart). They are produced by the successful termination of some enterprise (-a naive fallacy: the successful termination of some enterprise does not by any means give a hypochondriac or a Pascal agreeable general feelings). They are produced by faith, charity, and hope-the Christian virtues.- In truth, all these supposed explanations are resultant states and, as it were, translations of pleasurable or unpleasurable feelings into a false dialect: one is in a state of hope because the basic physiological feeling is once again strong and rich; one trusts in God because the feeling of fullness and strength gives a sense of rest.- Morality and religion belong altogether to the psychology of error: in every single case, cause and effect are confused; or truth is confused with the effects of believing something to be true; or a state of consciousness is confused with its causes.

7

The error of free will.- Today we no longer have any pity for the concept of "free will": we know only too well what it is-the foulest of all theologians' artifices aimed at making mankind "responsible" in their sense, that is, dependent upon them ... Here I simply supply the psychology of all making-responsible.- Wherever responsibilities are sought, it is usually the instinct of wanting to judge and punish which is at work. Becoming has been deprived of its innocence when any being-such-and-such is traced back to will, to purposes, to acts of responsibility: the doctrine of the will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is, because one wanted to impute guilt. The entire old psychology, the psychology of will, was conditioned by the fact that its originators, the priests at the head of ancient communities, wanted to create for themselves the right to punish-or wanted to create this right for God ... Men were considered "free" so that they might be judged and punished-so that they might become guilty: consequently, every act had to be considered as willed, and the origin of every act had to be considered as lying within the consciousness (-and thus the most fundamental counterfeit in psychologicis was made the principle of psychology itself ...). Today, as we have entered into the reverse movement and we immoralists are trying with all our strength to take the concept of guilt and the concept of punishment out of the world again, and to cleanse psychology, history, nature, and social institutions and sanctions of them, there is in our eyes no more radical opposition than that of the theologians, who continue with the concept of a "moral world-order" to infect the innocence of becoming by means of "punishment" and "guilt." Christianity is a metaphysics of the hangman ...

8

What alone can be our doctrine?- That no one gives man his qualities-neither God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors, nor he himself (-the nonsense of the last idea was taught as "intelligible freedom" by Kant-perhaps by Plato already). No one is responsible for man's being there at all, for his being such-and-such, or for his being in these circumstances or in this environment. The fatality of his essence is not to be disentangled from the fatality of all that has been and will be. Man is not the effect of some special purpose, of a will, an end; nor is he the object of an attempt to attain an "ideal of humanity" or an "ideal of happiness" or an "ideal of morality"-it is absurd to wish to devolve one's essence on some end or other. We have invented the concept of "end": in reality there is no end ...One is necessary, one is a piece of fatefulness, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole; there is nothing which could judge, measure, compare, or sentence our being, for that would mean judging, measuring, comparing, or sentencing the whole ... But there is nothing besides the whole!- That nobody is held responsible any longer, that the mode of being may not be traced back to a causa prima, that the world does not form a unity either as a sensorium or as "spirit"-that alone is the great liberation; with this alone is the innocence of becoming restored ... The concept of "God" was until now the greatest objection to existence ... We deny God, we deny the responsibility in God: only thereby do we redeem the world. -

The "Improvers" of Mankind

1

My demand upon the philosopher is known, that he take his stand beyond good and evil and leave the illusion of moral judgment beneath himself. This demand follows from an insight which I was the first to formulate: that there are altogether no moral facts. Moral judgments agree with religious ones in believing in realities which are no realities. Morality is merely an interpretation of certain phenomena-more precisely, a misinterpretation. Moral judgments, like religious ones, belong to a stage of ignorance at which the very concept of the real, and the distinction between what is real and imaginary, are still lacking: thus "truth," at this stage, designates all sorts of things which we today call "imaginings." Moral judgments are therefore never to be taken literally: so understood, they always contain mere absurdity. Semeiotically, however, they remain invaluable: they reveal, at least for those who know, the most valuable realities of cultures and inwardnesses which did not know enough to "understand" themselves. Morality is mere sign language, mere symptomatology: one must know what it is all about to be able to profit from it.

2

A first example, quite provisional. At all times they have wanted to "improve" men: this above all was called morality. Under the same word, however, the most divergent tendencies are concealed. Both the taming of the beast man [der Bestie Mensch], and the breeding of a particular kind of man have been called "improvement": such zoological terms are required to express the realities-realities, to be sure, of which the typical "improver," the priest, neither knows nor wants to know ... To call the taming of an animal its "improvement" sounds almost like a joke to our ears. Whoever knows what goes on in menageries doubts that the beasts are "improved" there. They are weakened, they are made less harmful, and through the depressive effect of fear, through pain, through wounds, and through hunger, they become sickly beasts.- It is no different with the tamed man whom the priest has "improved." In the early Middle Ages, when the church was indeed, above all, a menagerie, the most beautiful specimens of the "blond beast" were hunted down everywhere; and the noble Teutons, for example, were "improved." But how did such an "improved" Teuton who had been seduced into a monastery look afterward? Like a caricature of man, like a miscarriage: he had become a "sinner," he was stuck in a cage, imprisoned among all sorts of terrible concepts ... And there he lay, sick, miserable, malevolent against himself; full of hatred against the springs of life, full of suspicion against all that was still strong and happy. In short, a "Christian" ... Physiologically speaking: in the struggle with beasts, to make them sick may be the only means for making them weak. This the church understood: it ruined man, it weakened him-but it claimed to have "improved" him ...

3

Let us consider the other case of so-called morality, the case of breeding, a particular race and kind. The most magnificent example of this is furnished by Indian morality, sanctioned as religion in the form of "the law of Manu." Here the task set is to breed no less than four races at once: one priestly, one warlike, one for trade and agriculture, and finally a race of servants, the Sudras. Obviously, we are here no longer among animal tamers: a kind of man that is a hundred times milder and more reasonable is the condition for even conceiving such a plan of breeding. One heaves a sigh of relief at leaving the Christian atmosphere of disease and dungeons for this healthier, higher, and wider world. How wretched is the "New Testament" compared to Manu, how foul it smells!- Yet this organization too found it necessary to be terrible-this time not in the struggle with beasts, but with their counter-concept, the unbred man, the mishmash man, the chandala. And again it had no other means for keeping him from being dangerous, for making him weak, than to make him sick-it was the fight with the "great number." Perhaps there is nothing that contradicts our feeling more than these protective measures of Indian morality. The third edict, for example (Avadana-Sastra I), "on impure vegetables," ordains that the only nourishment permitted to the chandala shall be garlic and onions, seeing that the holy scripture prohibits giving them grain or fruit with grains, or water or fire. The same edict orders that the water they need may not be taken from rivers or wells, nor from ponds, but only from the approaches to swamps and from holes made by the footsteps of animals. They are also prohibited from washing their laundry and from washing themselves, since the water they are conceded as an act of grace may be used only to quench thirst. Finally, a prohibition that Sudra women may not assist chandala women in childbirth, and a prohibition that the latter may not assist each other in this condition ... - The success of such sanitary police measures was inevitable: murderous epidemics, ghastly venereal diseases, and thereupon again "the law of the knife," ordaining circumcision for male children and the removal of the internal labia for female children.- Manu himself says: "The chandalas are the fruit of adultery, incest, and crime (-these, the necessary consequences of the concept of breeding). For clothing they shall have only rags from corpses; for dishes, broken pots; for adornment, old iron; for divine services, only evil spirits; they shall wander without rest from place to place. They are prohibited from writing from left to right, and from using the right hand in writing: the use of the right hand and of from-left-to-right is reserved for the virtuous, for the people of race." -

4

These regulations are instructive enough: here we encounter for once Aryan humanity, quite pure, quite primordial [ursprnglich]-we learn that the concept of "pure blood" is the opposite of a harmless concept. On the other hand, it becomes clear in which people the hatred, the chandala hatred, against this "humaneness" has eternalized itself, where it has become religion, where it has become genius ... Seen in this perspective, the Gospels represent a document of prime importance [ersten Ranges]; even more, the Book of Enoch.- Christianity, sprung from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as a growth on this soil, represents the counter-movement to any morality of breeding, of race, privilege:-it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence. Christianity, the revaluation of all Aryan values, the victory of chandala values, the gospel preached to the poor and base, the general revolt of all the downtrodden, the wretched, the failures, the less favored [Schlechtweggekommenen], against "race": the undying chandala hatred as the religion of love ...

5

The morality of breeding, and the morality of taming, are, in the means they use, entirely worthy of each other: we may proclaim it as the supreme principle that, to make morality, one must have the unconditional will to its opposite. This is the great, the uncanny problem which I have been pursuing the longest: the psychology of the "improvers" of mankind. A small and at bottom modest fact, that of the so-called pia fraus [holy lie], offered me the first approach to this problem: the pia fraus, the heirloom of all philosophers and priests who "improved" mankind. Neither Manu nor Plato nor Confucius nor the Jewish and Christian teachers have ever doubted their right to lie. They have not doubted that they had very different rights too ... Expressed in a formula, one might say: all the means by which one has so far attempted to make mankind moral were through and through immoral. -

What the Germans Lack

1

Among Germans today it is not enough to have spirit: one must arrogate it, one must have the arrogance to have spirit ...

Perhaps I know the Germans, perhaps I may even tell them some truths. The new Germany represents a large quantum of fitness, both inherited and acquired by training, so that for a time it may expend its accumulated store of strength, even squander it. It is not a high culture that has thus become the master, and even less a delicate taste, a noble "beauty" of the instincts; but more virile virtues than any other country in Europe can show. Much cheerfulness [guther Muth] and self-respect, much assurance in social relations and in the reciprocality of duties, much industriousness, much perseverance-and an inherited moderation which needs the spur rather than the brake. I add that here one still obeys without feeling that obedience humiliates ... And nobody despises his opponent ...

One will notice that I wish to be just to the Germans: I do not want to break faith with myself here,-I must therefore also state my objections to them. One pays heavily for coming to power: power makes stupid ... The Germans-once they were called the people of thinkers: do they think at all today? The Germans are now bored with the spirit, the Germans now mistrust the spirit; politics swallows up all serious concern for really spiritual matters-"Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles," I fear that was the end of German philosophy ... "Are there any German philosophers? Are there German poets? Are there good German books?" they ask me abroad. I blush, but with the courage which I maintain even in desperate situations I reply: "Well, Bismarck!"- Would it be permissible for me to confess what books are read today? ... Accursed instinct of mediocrity! -

2

- What the German spirit might be-who has not had his melancholy ideas about that! But this people has deliberately made itself stupid, for nearly a millennium: nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, been abused more dissolutely. Recently even a third has been added, one that alone would be suffficient to dispatch all fine and bold flexibility of the spirit-music, our constipated, constipating German music.- How much disgruntled heaviness, lameness, dampness, dressing gown-how much beer there is in the German intelligence! How is it at all possible that young men who dedicate their lives to the most spiritual goals do not feel the first instinct of spirituality, the spirit's instinct of self-preservation-and drink beer? ... The alcoholism of young scholars is perhaps no question mark concerning their scholarliness-without spirit one can still be a great scholar-but in every other respect it remains a problem.- Where would one not find the gentle degeneration which beer produces in the spirit! Once, in a case that has almost become famous, I put my finger on such a degeneration-the degeneration of our number-one German free spirit, the clever David Strauss, into the author of a beer-bench gospel and "new faith" ... It was not for nothing that he had made his vow to the "fair brunette" [dark beer] in verse-loyalty unto death ...

3

- I was speaking of the German spirit: it is becoming cruder, it is becoming shallower. Is that enough? At bottom, it is something quite different that alarms me: how German seriousness, German depth, German passion in spiritual matters are declining more and more. The verve [Pathos] has changed, not just the intellectuality.- Here and there I come into contact with German universities: what an atmosphere prevails among their scholars, what desolate spirituality-and how contented and lukewarm it has become! It would be a profound misunderstanding if one wanted to adduce German science against me-it would also be proof that one has not read a word I have written. For seventeen years I have never tired of calling attention to the despiritualizing influence of our current science-industry. The hard helotism to which the tremendous range of the sciences condemns every scholar [Einzelnen: i.e, individual] today is a main reason why those with a fuller, richer, profounder disposition no longer find a congenial education and congenial educators. There is nothing of which our culture suffers more than of the superabundance of pretentious jobbers [anmaasslicher Eckensteher] and fragments of humanity; our universities are, against their will, the real hothouses for this kind of withering of the instincts of the spirit. And the whole of Europe already has some idea of this-grand politics [die grosse Politik] deceives nobody ... Germany is considered more and more as Europe's flatland.- I am still looking for a German with whom I might be able to be serious in my own way-and how much more for one with whom I might be cheerful! Twilight of the Idols: ah, who today would comprehend from what seriousness a hermit seeks recreation here! Our cheerfulness is what is most incomprehensible about us ...

4

One makes an estimate: it shows that it is not only obvious that German culture is declining but that there is sufficient reason for that. In the end, no one can spend more than he has-that is true of an individual, it is true of a people. If one spends oneself for power, for grand politics [grosse Politik], for economics, world trade, parliamentarianism, and military interests-if one spends in this direction the quantum of understanding, seriousness, will, and self- overcoming which one is, then it will be lacking for the other direction. Culture and the state-one should not deceive oneself about this-are antagonists: "Cultur-Staat" is merely a modern idea. One lives off the other, one thrives at the expense of the other. All great ages of culture are ages of political decline: what is great culturally has always been unpolitical, even anti-political.- Goethe's heart opened at the phenomenon of Napoleon-it closed at the "Wars of Liberation" ... At the same moment when Germany comes up as a great power, France gains a new importance as a cultural power. Even today much new seriousness, much new passion of the spirit, have migrated to Paris; the question of pessimism, for example, the question of Wagner, and almost all psychological and artistic questions are there weighed incomparably more delicately and thoroughly than in Germany-the Germans are altogether incapable of this kind of seriousness.- In the history of European culture the rise of the "Reich" means one thing above all: a displacement of the center of gravity. It is already known everywhere: in what matters most-and that always remains culture-the Germans are no longer worthy of consideration. One asks: Can you point to even a single spirit who counts from a European point of view? as your Goethe, your Hegel, your Heinrich Heine, your Schopenhauer counted?- That there is no longer a single German philosopher, about that there is no end of astonishment. -

5

The entire system of higher education in Germany has lost what matters most: the end as well as the means to the end. That education, that Bildung, is itself an end-and not "the Reich"-and that educators are needed to that end, and not secondary-school teachers and university scholars-that has been forgotten ... Educators are needed who have themselves been educated, superior, noble spirits, proved at every moment, proved by words and silence, representing culture which has grown ripe and sweet-not the learned louts whom secondary schools and universities today offer our youth as "higher wet nurses." Educators are lacking, not counting the most exceptional of exceptions, the first condition of education: hence the decline of German culture.- One of this rarest of exceptions is my venerable friend, Jacob Burckhardt in Basel: it is primarily to him that Basel owes its preeminence in humaneness.- What the "higher schools" in Germany really achieve is a brutal training, designed to prepare huge numbers of young men, with as little loss of time as possible, to become usable, abusable, in government service. "Higher education" and huge numbers-that is a contradiction to start with. All higher education belongs only to the exception: one must be privileged to have a right to so high a privilege. All great, all beautiful things can never be common property: pulchrum est paucorum hominum ["Beauty is for the few." Horace: Satires, I, 9, 44.].- What contributes to the decline of German culture? That "higher education" is no longer a privilege-the democratism of "Bildung," which has become "common"-too common [der Demokratismus der "allgemein," der gemein geworden "Bildung"] ... Let it not be forgotten that military privileges really compel an all-too-great attendance in the higher schools, and thus their downfall.- In present-day Germany no one is any longer free to give his children a noble education: our "higher schools" are all set up for the most ambiguous mediocrity, with their teachers, curricula, and teaching aims. And everywhere an indecent haste prevails, as if something would be lost if the young man of twenty-three were not yet "finished," or if he did not yet know the answer to the "main question": which calling?- A higher kind of human being, if I may say so, does not like "callings," precisely because he knows himself to be called ... He has time, he takes time, he does not even think of "finishing": at thirty one is, in the sense of high culture, a beginner, a child.- Our overcrowded secondary schools, our overworked, stupefied [stupid gemachten] secondary-school teachers, are a scandal: for one to defend such conditions, as the professors at Heidelberg did recently, there may perhaps be causes-reasons there are none.

6

- I put forward at once-lest I break with my style, which is affirmative [ja-sagend] and deals with contradiction and criticism only as a means, only involuntarily-the three tasks for which educators are required. One must learn to see, one must learn to think, one must learn to speak and write: the goal in all three is a noble culture.- Learning to see-accustoming the eye to calmness, to patience, to letting things come up to it; postponing judgment, learning to go around and grasp each individual case from all sides. That is the first preliminary schooling for spirituality: not to react at once to a stimulus, but to gain control of all the inhibiting, excluding instincts. Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what, unphilosophically speaking, is called a strong will: the essential feature is precisely not to "will"-to be able to suspend decision. All unspirituality, all commonness, depend on the inability to resist a stimulus: one must react, one follows every impulse. In many cases, such a compulsion is already pathology [Krankhaftigkeit], decline, a symptom of exhaustion-almost everything that unphilosophical crudity designates with the word "vice" is merely this physiological inability not to react.- A practical application of having learned to see: as a learner, one will have become altogether slow, mistrustful, recalcitrant. One will let strange, new things of every kind come up to oneself, inspecting them with hostile calm and withdrawing one's hand. To have all doors standing open, to lie servilely [unterthnige] on one's stomach before every little fact, always to be prepared for the leap of putting oneself into the place of, or of plunging into, others and other things-in short, the famous modern "objectivity"-is bad taste, is ignoble par excellence. -

7

Learning to think: in our schools one no longer has any idea of this. Even in the universities, even among the real scholars of philosophy, logic as a theory, as a practice, as a craft, is beginning to die out. One need only read German books: there is no longer the remotest recollection that thinking requires a technique, a teaching curriculum, a will to mastery-that thinking wants to be learned like dancing, as a kind of dancing ... Who among Germans still knows from experience the delicate shudder which light feet in spiritual matters send into every muscle!- The stiff clumsiness of the spiritual gesture, the bungling hand at grasping-that is German to such a degree that abroad one mistakes it for the German character as such. The German has no fingers for nuances ... That the Germans have been able to stand their philosophers at all, especially that most deformed concept-cripple of all time, the great Kant, provides not a bad notion of German grace.- For one cannot subtract dancing in every form from a noble education-to be able to dance with one's feet, with concepts, with words: need I still add that one must be able to dance with the pen too-that one must learn to write?- But at this point I should become completely enigmatic for German readers ...

Skirmishes of an Untimely Man

1

My impossible ones.- Seneca: or the toreador of virtue.- Rousseau: or the return to nature in impuris naturalibus [in natural filth].- Schiller: or the Moral-Trumpeter of Sckingen.- Dante: or the hyena who writes poetry in tombs.- Kant: or cant as an intelligible character.- Victor Hugo: or the pharos at the sea of nonsense.- Liszt: or the school of smoothness-with women.- George Sand: or lactea ubertas, in translation: the milk cow with "a beautiful style."- Michelet: or the enthusiasm which takes off its coat ... Carlyle: or pessimism as a poorly digested dinner.- John Stuart Mill: or insulting clarity.- Les frres de Goncourt: or the two Ajaxes in battle with Homer. Music by Offenbach.- Zola: or "the delight in stinking." -

2

Renan.- Theology: or the corruption of reason by "original sin" (Christianity). Witness Renan who, whenever he risks a Yes or No of a more general nature scores a miss with painful regularity. He wants for example, to weld together la science and la noblesse: but la science belongs with democracy; what could be plainer? With no little ambition, he wishes to represent an aristocracy of the spirit: yet at the same time he is on his knees before its very counter-doctrine, the vangile des humbles-and not only on his knees ... To what avail is all free-spiritedness, modernity, mockery, and wry-neck suppleness, if in one's guts one is still a Christian, a Catholic-in fact, a priest! Renan is most inventive, just like a Jesuit and father confessor, when it comes to seduction; his spirituality does not even lack the broad fat popish smile-like all priests, he becomes dangerous only when he loves. Nobody can equal him when it comes to adoring in a manner endangering life itself ... This spirit of Renan's, a spirit which is enervated, is one more calamity for poor, sick, will-sick France. -

3

Sainte Beuve.- Nothing of virility, full of petty wrath against all virile spirits. Wanders around, cowardly, curious, bored, eavesdropping-a female at bottom, with a female's lust for revenge and a female's sensuality. As a psychologist, a genius of mdisance [slander], inexhaustibly rich in means to that end; no one knows better how to mix praise with poison. Plebeian in the lowest instincts and related to the ressentiment of Rousseau: consequently, a romantic-for underneath all romantisme lie the grunting and greed of Rousseau's instinct for revenge. A revolutionary, but still pretty well harnessed by fear. Without freedom when confronted with anything strong (public opinion, the Academy, the court, even Port Royal). Embittered against everything great in men and things, against whatever believes in itself. Poet and half-female enough to sense the great as a power; always writhing like the famous worm because he always feels stepped upon. As a critic, without any standard, steadiness, and backbone, with the cosmopolitan libertine's tongue for a medley of things, but without the courage even to confess his libertinage. As a historian, without philosophy, without the power of the philosophical eye-hence declining the task of judging in all significant matters, hiding behind the mask of "objectivity." It is different with his attitude to all things in which a fine, well-worn taste is the highest tribunal: there he really has the courage to stand by himself and delight in himself-there he is a master.- In some respects, a preliminary version of Baudelaire. -

4

De imitatione Christi is one of those books which I cannot hold in my hand without a physiological reaction: it exudes a perfume of the Eternal-Feminine, which is strictly for Frenchmen-or Wagnerians ... This saint has a way of talking about love which arouses even Parisian women to curiosity.- I am told that that cleverest of Jesuits, A. [Auguste] Comte, who wanted to lead his Frenchmen to Rome via the detour of science, found his inspiration in this book. I believe it: "the religion of the heart" ...

5

G. Eliot.- They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. That is an English consistency; we do not wish to hold it against little moralistic females la Eliot. In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there.- We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands. Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know, what is good for him, what evil: he believes in God, who alone knows it. Christian morality is a command; its origin is transcendent; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God is the truth-it stands and falls with faith in God.- When the English actually believe that they know "intuitively" what is good and evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we merely witness the effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgment and an expression of the strength and depth of this dominion: such that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, such that the very conditional character of its right to existence is no longer felt. For the English, morality is not yet a problem ...

6

George Sand.- I read the first Lettres d'un voyageur: like everything that is descended from Rousseau, false, fabricated, bellows, exaggerated. I cannot stand this motley wallpaper style any more than the mob aspiration for generous feelings. The worst feature, to be sure, is the female's coquetry with male attributes, with the manners of naughty boys.- How cold she must have been throughout, this insufferable artist! She wound herself up like a clock-and wrote ... Cold, like Hugo, like Balzac, like all the romantics as soon as they took up poetic invention! And how self-satisfied she may have lain there all the while, this fertile writing-cow who had in her something German in the bad sense, like Rousseau himself, her master, and who in any case was possible only during the decline of French taste! But Renan reveres her ...

7

Moral for psychologists.- Not to go in for backstairs psychology [Colportage-Psychologie]! Never to observe in order to observe! That gives a false perspective [Optik], leads to squinting and something forced and exaggerated. Experience as the wish to experience does not succeed. One must not eye oneself while having an experience; else the eye becomes "an evil eye." A born psychologist guards instinctively against seeing in order to see; the same is true of the born painter. He never works "from nature"; he leaves it to his instinct, to his camera obscura, to sift through and express the "case," "nature," that which is "experienced" ... He is conscious only of what is general, of the conclusion, the result: he does not know arbitrary abstractions from an individual case.- What happens when one proceeds differently? For example, if, in the manner of the Parisian romanciers [novelists], one goes in for backstairs psychology [Colportage-Psychologie] and deals in gossip, wholesale and retail? Then one lies in wait for reality, as it were, and every evening one brings home a handful of curiosities ... But note what finally comes of all this-a heap of splotches, a mosaic at best, but in any case something added together, something restless, a mess of screaming colors. The worst in this respect is accomplished by the Goncourts: they do not put three sentences together without really hurting the eye, the psychologist's eye.- Nature, estimated artistically, is no model. It exaggerates, it distorts, it leaves gaps. Nature is chance. To study "from nature" seems to me to be a bad sign: it betrays submission, weakness, fatalism,-this lying in the dust before petit faits [little facts] is unworthy of a whole artist. To see what is-that is the mark of another kind of spirit, the anti-artistic, the factual. One must know who one is ...

8

Toward a psychology of the artist.- If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: intoxication [Rausch]. Intoxication must first have enhanced the excitability of the whole machine; else there is no art. All kinds of intoxication, however diversely conditioned, have the strength to accomplish this: above all, the intoxication of sexual excitement, this most ancient and original form of intoxication. Also the intoxication that follows all great cravings, all strong affects; the intoxication of feasts, contests, feats of daring, victory, all extreme movement; the intoxication of cruelty; the intoxication in destruction, the intoxication under certain meteorological influences, as for example the intoxication of spring; or under the influence of narcotics; and finally the intoxication of will, the intoxication of an overcharged and swollen will.- What is essential in such intoxication is the feeling of increased strength and fullness. Out of this feeling one lends to things, one forces them to accept from us, one violates them-this process is called idealizing. Let us get rid of a prejudice here: idealizing does not consist, as is commonly held, in subtracting or discounting the petty and inconsequential. What is decisive is rather a tremendous drive to bring out the main features so that the others disappear in the process.

9

In this state one enriches everything out of one's own fullness: whatever one sees, whatever one wills, is seen swelled, taut, strong, overloaded with strength. A man in this state transforms things until they mirror his power-until they are reflections of his perfection. This having to transform into perfection is-art. Even everything that he is not yet, becomes for him an occasion of joy in himself; in art man enjoys himself as perfection.- It would be permissible to imagine an opposite state, a specific anti-artistry by instinct-a mode of being which would impoverish all things, making them thin and consumptive. And, as a matter of fact, history is rich in such anti-artists, in such people who are starved by life and must of necessity grab things, eat them out, and make them more meager. This is, for example, the case of the genuine Christian-of Pascal, for example: a Christian who would at the same time be an artist simply does not occur ... One should not be childish and object by naming Raphael or some homeopathic Christian of the nineteenth century: Raphael said Yes, Raphael did Yes; consequently, Raphael was no Christian ...

10

What is the meaning of the conceptual opposites which I have introduced into aesthetics, Apollinian and Dionysian, both conceived as kinds of intoxication?- The Apollinian intoxication excites the eye above all, so that it gains the power of vision. The painter, the sculptor, the epic poet are visionaries par excellence. In the Dionysian state, on the other hand, the whole affective system is excited and enhanced: so that it discharges all its means of expression at once and drives forth simultaneously the power of representation, imitation, transfiguration, transformation, and every kind of mimicking and acting. The essential feature here remains the ease of metamorphosis, the inability not to react (-similar to certain hysterical types who also, upon any suggestion, enter into any role). It is impossible for the Dionysian type not to understand any suggestion; he does not overlook any sign of an affect; he possesses the instinct of understanding and guessing in the highest degree, just as he commands the art of communication in the highest degree. He enters into any skin, into any affect: he constantly transforms himself.- Music, as we understand it today, is also a total excitement and a total discharge of the affects, but even so only the remnant of a much fuller world of expression of the affects, a mere residue of the Dionysian histrionicism. To make music possible as a separate art, a number of senses, especially the muscle sense, have been immobilized (at least relatively, for to a certain degree all rhythm still appeals to our muscles); so that man no longer bodily imitates and represents everything he feels. Nevertheless, that is really the normal Dionysian state, at least the original state. Music is the specialization of this state attained slowly at the expense of those faculties which are most closely related to it.

11

The actor, the mime, the dancer, the musician, and the lyric poet are basically related in their instincts and, at bottom, one-but gradually they have become specialized and separated from each other, even to the point of mutual opposition. The lyric poet remained united with the musician for the longest time; the actor, with the dancer.- The architect represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollinian state: here it is the great act of will, the will that moves mountains, the intoxication of the great will which aspires to art. The most powerful human beings have always inspired architects; the architect has always been under the spell of power [Suggestion der Macht]. His buildings are supposed to render pride visible, and the victory over gravity, the will to power. Architecture is a kind of eloquence of power in forms-now persuading, even flattering, now only commanding. The highest feeling of power and sureness finds expression in a grand style. The power which no longer needs any proof, which spurns pleasing, which does not answer lightly, which feels no witness near, which lives oblivious of all opposition to it, which reposes within itself, fatalistically, a law among laws-that speaks of itself as a grand style. -

12

I have been reading the life of Thomas Carlyle, this unconscious and involuntary farce, this heroic-moralistic interpretation of dyspeptic states.- Carlyle: a man of strong words and attitudes, a rhetor from need, constantly lured by the craving for a strong faith and the feeling of his incapacity for it (-in this respect, a typical romantic!). The craving for a strong faith is no proof of a strong faith, but quite the contrary. If one has it, then one can afford the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is sure enough, firm enough, has ties enough for that. Carlyle drugs something in himself with the fortissimo of his veneration of men of strong faith and with his rage against the less simple-minded: he requires noise. A constant passionate dishonesty against himself-that is his proprium; in this respect he is and remains interesting.- Of course, in England he is admired precisely for his honesty ... Well, that is English; and in view of the fact that the English are the people of consummate cant, it is even as it should be, and not only comprehensible. At bottom, Carlyle is an English atheist who makes it a point of honor not to be one.

13

Emerson.- Much more enlightened, more roving, more manifold, subtler than Carlyle; above all, happier ... One who instinctively nourishes himself only on ambrosia, leaving behind what is indigestible in things. Compared with Carlyle, a man of taste.- Carlyle, who loved him very much, nevertheless said of him: "He does not give us enough to chew on"-which may be correct, but is no reflection on Emerson.- Emerson has that gracious and clever cheerfulness which discourages all seriousness; he simply does not know how old he is already and how young he is still going to be; he could say of himself, quoting Lope de Vega, "Yo me sucedo a mi mismo" [I am my own heir]. His spirit always finds reasons for being satisfied and even grateful; and at times he touches on the cheerful transcendency of the worthy gentleman who returned from an amorous rendezvous, tamquiam re bene gesta [as if he had accomplished his mission]. "Ut desint vires," he said gratefully, "tamen est laudanda voluptas" [Though the power is lacking, the lust is nevertheless praiseworthy]. -

14

Anti-Darwin.- As for the famous "struggle for existence," so far it seems to me to be asserted rather than proved. It occurs, but as an exception; the total aspect of life is not the extremity, not starvation, but rather riches, profusion, even absurd squandering-and where there is struggle, it is a struggle for power ... One should not mistake Malthus for nature.- Assuming, however, that there is such a struggle for existence-and, indeed, it occurs-its result is unfortunately the opposite of what Darwin's school desires, and of what one might perhaps desire with them: namely, in favor of the strong, the privileged, the fortunate exceptions. The species do not grow in perfection: the weak prevail over the strong again and again, for they are the great majority-and they are also more intelligent ... Darwin forgot the spirit (-that is English!); the weak have more spirit ... One must need spirit to acquire spirit,-one loses it when one no longer needs it. Whoever has strength dispenses with the spirit (-"Let it go!" they think in Germany today-"the Reich must still remain to us" ...). It will be noted that by "spirit" I mean care, patience, cunning, simulation [Vorstellung], great self-control, and everything that is mimicry (the latter includes a great deal of so-called virtue).

15

Casuistry of Psychologists.- This man knows human nature [Das ist ein Menschenkenner]: why does he really study people? He wants to seize little advantages over them, or big ones too-he is a politician! ... That one over there also knows human nature, and you say that he seeks no profit for himself, that he is thoroughly "impersonal." Look more closely! Perhaps he even wants a worse advantage to feel superior to other human beings, to be able to look down on them, and no longer to mistake himself for one of them. This "impersonal" type is a despiser of human beings, while the first type is the more humane species, appearances notwithstanding. At least he places himself on the same plane, he places himself among them ...

16

The psychological tact of the Germans seems very questionable to me, in view of quite a number of cases which modesty prevents me from enumerating. In one case I shall not lack a great occasion to substantiate my thesis: I bear the Germans a grudge for having made such a mistake about Kant and his "backdoor philosophy," as I call it-for that was not the type of intellectual integrity.- The other thing I do not like to hear is a notorious "and": the Germans say "Goethe and Schiller"-I am afraid they say "Schiller and Goethe" ... Don't they know this Schiller yet?- And there are even worse "ands"; with my own ears I have heard, if only among university professors, "Schopenhauer and Hartmann" ...

17

The most spiritual human beings, if we assume that they are the most courageous, also experience by far the most painful tragedies: but just for that reason they honor life because it pits its greatest opposition against them.

18

On the "intellectual conscience."- Nothing seems rarer to me today than genuine hypocrisy. I greatly suspect that the soft air of our culture is insalubrious for this plant. Hypocrisy belongs in the ages of strong faith when, even though constrained to display another faith, one did not abandon one's own faith. Today one does abandon it; or, even more commonly, one adds a second faith-and in either case one remains honest. Without a doubt, a very much greater number of convictions is possible today than formerly: possible means permissible, which means harmless. This begets tolerance toward oneself.- Tolerance toward oneself permits several convictions and they get along with each other: they are careful, like all the rest of the world, not to compromise themselves. How does one compromise oneself today? If one is consistent. If one proceeds in a straight line. If one is not ambiguous enough to permit five conflicting interpretations ["Wenn man weniger als fnfdeutig ist": i.e., if one has less than five interpretations; "fnfdeutig" a play on "zweideutig," meaning "ambiguous."]. If one is genuine ... I fear greatly that modern man is simply too comfortable for some vices, so that they virtually die out. All evil that is a function of a strong will-and perhaps there is no evil without strength of will-degenerates into virtue in our tepid air ... The few hypocrites whom I have met imitated hypocrisy: like almost every tenth person today, they were actors. -

19

Beautiful and ugly ["Schn und hsslich"="Fair and foul"].- Nothing is more conditional-or, let us say, narrower-than our feeling for beauty. Whoever would think of it apart from man's joy in man would immediately lose any foothold. "Beautiful in itself" is a mere phrase, not even a concept. In the beautiful, man posits himself as the measure of perfection; in special cases he worships himself in it. A species cannot do otherwise but thus affirm itself alone [allein Ja sagen]. Its lowest instinct, that of self-preservation and self-expansion, still radiates in such sublimities. Man believes the world itself to be overloaded with beauty-and he forgets himself as the cause of this. He alone has presented the world with beauty-alas! only with a very human, all-too-human beauty ... At bottom, man mirrors himself in things; he considers everything beautiful that reflects his own image: the judgment "beautiful" is the vanity of his species ... For a little suspicion may whisper this question into the skeptic's ear: Is the world really beautified by the fact that man thinks it beautiful? He has humanized it: that is all. But nothing, absolutely nothing, guarantees that man should be the model of beauty. Who knows what he looks like in the eyes of a higher judge of beauty? Daring perhaps? Perhaps even amusing? Perhaps a little arbitrary? ... "Oh Dionysus, divine one, why do you pull me by my ears?" Ariadne once asked her philosophic lover during one of those famous dialogues on Naxos. "I find a kind of humor in your ears, Ariadne: why are they not even longer?"

20

Nothing is beautiful, only man [Nichts ist schn, nur der Mensch ist schn]: all aesthetics rests upon this navet, which is its first truth. Let us immediately add the second: nothing is ugly except the degenerating [entarten] man-and with this the realm of aesthetic judgment is circumscribed. Physiologically considered, everything ugly weakens and saddens man. It reminds him of decay, danger, powerlessness; it actually deprives him of strength. One can measure the effect of the ugly with a dynamometer. Wherever man is depressed at all, he senses the proximity of something "ugly." His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride-all fall with the ugly and rise with the beautiful ... In both cases we draw a conclusion: the premises for it are piled up in the greatest abundance in instinct. The ugly is understood as a suggestion and symptom of degeneration: whatever reminds us in the least of degeneration causes in us the judgment of "ugly." Every indication of exhaustion, of heaviness, of age, of weariness; every kind of lack of freedom, such as cramps, such as paralysis; and above all, the smell, the color, the form of dissolution, of decomposition-even in the ultimate attenuation into a symbol-all evoke the same reaction, the value judgment, "ugly." A hatred is aroused-but whom does man hate then? But there is no doubt: the decline of his type. Here he hates out of the deepest instinct of the species; in this hatred there is a shudder, caution, depth, farsightedness-it is the deepest hatred there is. It is because of this that art is deep ...

21

Schopenhauer.- Schopenhauer, the last German worthy of consideration (-who represents a European event like Goethe, like Hegel, like Heinrich Heine, and not merely a local event, a "national" one), is for a psychologist a first- rate case: namely, as a maliciously ingenious attempt to adduce in favor of a nihilistic total depreciation of life precisely the counter-instances, the great self-affirmations of the "will to life," life's forms of exuberance. He has interpreted art, heroism, genius, beauty, great sympathy, knowledge, the will to truth, and tragedy, in turn, as consequences of "negation" or of the "will's" need to negate-the greatest psychological counterfeit in all history, not counting Christianity. On closer inspection, he is at this point merely the heir of the Christian interpretation: only he knew how to approve that which Christianity had repudiated, the great cultural facts of humanity-albeit in a Christian, that is, nihilistic, manner (-namely, as ways of "redemption," as anticipations of "redemption," as stimuli of the need for "redemption" ...).

22

I take a single case. Schopenhauer speaks of beauty with a melancholy fervor-why, in the last resort? Because he sees in it a bridge on which one will go farther, or develop a thirst to go farther ... It is for him a momentary redemption from the "will"-it lures on to redemption forever ... Particularly, he praises beauty as the redeemer from "the focal point of the will," from sexuality-in beauty he sees the negation of the drive toward procreation ... Queer saint! Someone contradicts you; I fear it is nature. To what end is there beauty at all in tone, color, fragrance, or rhythmic movement in nature? What is it that beauty evokes?- Fortunately, a philosopher contradicts him too. No lesser authority than that of the divine Plato [Symposium, 206 b-d] (-so Schopenhauer himself calls him) maintains a different proposition: that all beauty incites procreation,-that just this is the proprium of its effect, from the most sensual up to the most spiritual ...

23

Plato goes further. He says with an innocence possible only for a Greek, not a "Christian," that there would be no Platonic philosophy at all if there were not such beautiful youths in Athens: it is only their sight that transposes the philosopher's soul into an erotic trance, leaving it no peace until it lowers the seed of all exalted things into such beautiful soil. Another queer saint!-one does not trust one's ears, even if one should trust Plato. At least one guesses that they philosophized differently in Athens, especially in public. Nothing is less Greek than the conceptual web-spinning of a hermit-amor intellectualis dei [intellectual love of God] after the fashion of Spinoza. Philosophy after the fashion of Plato might rather be defined as an erotic contest, as a further development and turning inward of the ancient agonistic gymnastics and of its presuppositions ... What ultimately grew out of this philosophic eroticism of Plato? A new art form of the Greek agon: dialectics.- Finally, I recall-against Schopenhauer and in honor of Plato-that the whole higher culture and literature of classical France too grew on the soil of sexual interest. Everywhere in it one may look for the galantarie [French for "gallantry," or "love-affair"], the senses, the sexual contest, "the woman"-one will never look in vain ...

24

L'art pour l'art.- The fight against purpose in art is always a fight against the moralizing tendency in art, against its subordination to morality. L'art pour l'art means: "The devil take morality!"- But even this hostility still betrays the overpowering force of the prejudice. When the purpose of moral preaching and of improving man has been excluded from art, it still does not follow by any means that art is altogether purposeless, aimless, senseless-in short, l'art pour l'art, a worm chewing its own tail. "Rather no purpose at all than a moral purpose!"-that is the talk of mere passion. A psychologist, on the other hand, asks: what does all art do? does it not praise? glorify? choose? prefer? With all this it strengthens or weakens certain valuations ... Is this merely a "moreover"? an accident? something in which the artist's instinct had no share? Or is it not the very presupposition of the artist's ability...? Does his basic instinct aim at art, or rather at the sense of art, at life? at a desirability of life?- Art is the great stimulant to life: how could one understand it as purposeless, as aimless, as l'art pour l'art?- One question remains: art also makes apparent much that is ugly, hard, and questionable in life,-does it not thereby spoil life for us?- And indeed there have been philosophers who attributed this sense to it: "liberation from the will" was what Schopenhauer taught as the overall end of art; and with admiration he found the great utility of tragedy in its "evoking resignation."- But this-as I have already suggested-is the pessimist's perspective and "evil eye": one must appeal to the artists themselves. What does the tragic artist communicate of himself? Is it not precisely the state without fear in the face of the fearful and questionable that he is showing?- This state itself is a great desideratum [Wnschbarkeit]; whoever knows it, honors it with the greatest honors. He communicates it, he must communicate it, provided he is an artist, a genius of communication. Courage and freedom of feeling before a powerful enemy, before a sublime calamity, before a problem that arouses dread-this triumphant state is what the tragic artist chooses, what he glorifies. Before tragedy, what is warlike in our soul celebrates its Saturnalia; whoever is used to suffering, whoever seeks out suffering, the heroic man praises his own being through tragedy-to him alone the tragedian presents this drink of sweetest cruelty. -