Fragments
The Revaluation of All Values
To stay cheerful when involved in a gloomy and exceedingly responsible business is no inconsiderable art: yet what could be more necessary than cheerfulness? Nothing succeeds in which high spirits play no part. Only excess of strength is proof of strength. — A revaluation of all values, this question-mark so black, so huge it casts a shadow over him who sets it up — such a destiny of a task compels one every instant to run out into the sunshine so as to shake off a seriousness grown all too oppressive. Every expedient for doing so is justified, every ‘occasion’ a joyful occasion. Above all, war. War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives. A maxim whose origin I withhold from learned curiosity has long been my motto: increscunt animi, virescit volnere virtus (The spirit grows, strength is restored by wounding). (Forward) [^]
How to Philosophize with a Hammer
Another form of recovery, in certain cases even more suited to me, is to sound out idols.… There are more idols in the world than there are realities: that is my ‘evil eye’ for this world, that is also my ‘evil ear’.… For once to pose questions here with a hammer and perhaps to receive for answer that famous hollow sound which speaks of inflated bowels — what a delight for one who has ears behind his ears – for an old psychologist and pied piper like me, in presence of whom precisely that which would like to stay silent has to become audible…
This book too — the title betrays it — is above all a relaxation, a sunspot, an escapade into the idle hours of a psychologist. Perhaps also a new war? And are new idols sounded out?… This little book is a grand declaration of war; and as regards the sounding-out of idols, this time they are not idols of the age but eternal idols which are here touched with the hammer as with a tuning fork — there are no more ancient idols in existence.… Also none more hollow.… That does not prevent their being the most believed in; and they are not, especially in the most eminent case, called idols… (Forward) [^]
Maxims and Arrows
Even the bravest of us rarely has the courage for what he really knows… (§ 2) [^]
From the military school of life. – What does not kill me makes me stronger. (§ 8) [^]
If we possess our why of life we can put up with almost any how. – Man does not strive after happiness; only the Englishman does that. (§ 12) [^]
In order to look for beginners one becomes a crab. The historian looks backwards; at last he also believes backwards. (§ 24) [^]
Women are considered deep – why? because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women are not even shallow. (§27) [^]
‘How much the conscience formerly had to bite on! || what good teeth it had! – And today? what’s the trouble?’ – A dentist’s question. (§29) [^]
When it is trodden on a worm will curl up.* That is prudent. It thereby reduces the chance of being trodden on again. In the language of morals: humility. — (§31) [^]
The Problem of Socrates
— Wisdom Against Life
In every age the wisest have passed the identical judgement on life: it is worthless. … Everywhere and always their mouths have uttered the same sound — a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness with life, full of opposition to life. Even Socrates said as he died: ‘To live — that means to be a long time sick: I owe a cock to the saviour Asclepius’. Even Socrates had had enough of it. — What does that prove? What does it point to? — Formerly one would have said (— oh, and did say, and loudly enough, and our pessimists most of all!): ‘Here at any rate there must be something true! The consensus sapientium is proof of truth.’ — Shall we still speak thus today? are we allowed to do so? ‘Here at any rate there must be something sick’ — this is our retort: one ought to take a closer look at them, these wisest of every age! Were they all of them perhaps no longer steady on their legs? belated? tottery? décadents? Does wisdom perhaps appear on earth as a raven which is inspired by the smell of carrion?… (The Problem of Socrates, § 1) [^]
— Socrates and Plato: Symptoms of Decay
This irreverent notion that the great sages are declining types first dawned on me in regard to just the case in which learned and unlearned prejudice is most strongly opposed to it: I recognized Socrates and Plato as symptoms of decay, as agents of the dissolution of Greece, as pseudo-Greek, as anti-Greek (Birth of Tragedy, 1872). (The Problem of Socrates, § 2)
Everything about him is exaggerated, buffo, caricature, everything is at the same time hidden, reserved, subterranean. — I seek to understand out of what idiosyncrasy that Socratic equation reason = virtue = happiness derives: that bizarrest of equations and one which has in particular all the instincts of the older Hellenes against it. (The Problem of Socrates, § 4) [^]
— Ugliness as an Objection in Itself
Socrates belonged, in his origins, to the lowest orders: Socrates was rabble. One knows, one sees for oneself, how ugly he was. But ugliness, an objection in itself, is among Greeks almost a refutation. Was Socrates a Greek at all? Ugliness is frequently enough the sign of a thwarted development, a development retarded by interbreeding. Otherwise it appears as a development in decline. Anthropologists among criminologists tell us the typical criminal is ugly: monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animo. (The Problem of Socrates, § 3) [^]
Dialectics as a Sign of Decadence
— Socrates Changed Greek Taste to Favor Dialectics
With Socrates Greek taste undergoes a change in favour of dialectics: what is really happening when that happens? It is above all the defeat of a nobler taste; with dialectics the rabble gets on top. Before Socrates, the dialectical manner was repudiated in good society: it was regarded as a form of bad manners, one was compromised by it. Young people were warned against it. And all such presentation of one’s reasons was regarded with mistrust. Honest things, like honest men, do not carry their reasons exposed in this fashion. It is indecent to display all one’s goods. What has first to have itself proved is of little value. Wherever authority is still part of accepted usage and one does not ‘give reasons’ but commands, the dialectician is a kind of buffoon: he is laughed at, he is not taken seriously. — Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously: what was really happening when that happened? (The Problem of Socrates, § 5) [^]
— Dialectics Are the Will to Power of the Weak
One chooses dialectics only when one has no other expedient. One knows that dialectics inspire mistrust, that they are not very convincing. Nothing is easier to expunge than the effect of a dialectician, as is proved by the experience of every speech-making assembly. Dialectics can be only a last-ditch weapon in the hands of those who have no other weapon left. One must have to enforce one’s rights: otherwise one makes no use of it. That is why the Jews were dialecticians; Reynard the Fox was a dialectician: what? and Socrates was a dialectician too? — (The Problem of Socrates, § 6) [^]
— Dialectics Are a Form of Revenge
Is Socrates’ irony an expression of revolt? of the ressentiment of the rabble? does he, as one of the oppressed, enjoy his own form of ferocity in the knife-thrust of the syllogism? does he revenge himself on the aristocrats he fascinates? — As a dialectician one is in possession of a pitiless instrument; with its aid one can play the tyrant; one compromises by conquering. The dialectician leaves it to his opponent to demonstrate he is not an idiot: he enrages, he at the same time makes helpless. The dialectician devitalizes his opponent’s intellect. — What? is dialectics only a form of revenge in the case of Socrates? (The Problem of Socrates, § 7) [^]
Reason as the Savior of Declining Greek Spirit
— Socrates Understood Old Athens Was Coming to an End
But Socrates divined even more. He saw behind his aristocratic Athenians; he grasped that his case, the idiosyncrasy of his case, was already no longer exceptional. The same kind of degeneration was everywhere silently preparing itself: the old Athens was coming to an end. — And Socrates understood that all the world had need of him. (The Problem of Socrates, § 9) [^]
— Reason as Tyrant
If one needs to make a tyrant of reason, as Socrates did, then there must exist no little danger of something else playing the tyrant. Rationality was at that time divined as a saviour; neither Socrates nor his ‘invalids’ were free to be rational or not, as they wished – it was de rigueur, it was their last expedient. The fanaticism with which the whole of Greek thought throws itself at rationality betrays a state of emergency: one was in peril, one had only one choice: either to perish or — be absurdly rational.… The moralism of the Greek philosophers from Plato downwards is pathologically conditioned: likewise their estimation of dialectics. Reason = virtue = happiness means merely: one must imitate Socrates and counter the dark desires by producing a permanent daylight— the daylight of reason. One must be prudent, clear, bright at any cost: every yielding to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downwards… (The Problem of Socrates, § 10) [^]
Philosophy’s Self-Deception
— Socrates was a misunderstanding
I have intimated the way in which Socrates exercised fascination: he seemed to be a physician, a saviour. Is it necessary to go on to point out the error which lay in his faith in ‘rationality at any cost’? — It is self-deception on the part of philosophers and moralists to imagine that by making war on décadence they therewith elude décadence themselves. This is beyond their powers: what they select as an expedient, as a deliverance, is itself only another expression of décadence — they alter its expression, they do not abolish the thing itself. Socrates was a misunderstanding: the entire morality of improvement, the Christian included, has been a misunderstanding.… The harshest daylight, rationality at any cost, life bright, cold, circumspect, conscious, without instinct, in opposition to the instincts, has itself been no more than a form of sickness, another form of sickness — and by no means a way back to ‘virtue’, to ‘health’, to happiness…. To have to combat one’s instincts — that is the formula for décadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness and instinct are one. — (The Problem of Socrates, § 11) [^]
— Socrates Wanted to Die
— Did he himself grasp that, this shrewdest of all self-deceivers? Did he at last say that to himself in the wisdom of his courage for death?… Socrates wanted to die — it was not Athens, it was he who handed himself the poison cup, who compelled Athens to hand him the poison cup.… ‘Socrates is no physician,’ he said softly to himself: ‘death alone is a physician here.… Socrates himself has only been a long time sick…' (The Problem of Socrates, § 12) [^]
‘Reason’ in Philosophy
— Logocentric Philosophies Make War Upon the Senses
Now they all believe, even to the point of despair, in that which is. But since they cannot get hold of it, they look for reasons why it is being withheld from them. ‘It must be an illusion, a deception which prevents us from perceiving that which is: where is the deceiver to be found?’ — ‘We’ve got it,’ they cry in delight, ‘it is the senses! These senses, which are so immoral as well, it is they which deceive us about the real world.' (‘Reason’ in Philosophy, § 1) [^]
— Four Theses
It will be a matter for gratitude if I now compress so fundamental and new an insight into four theses: I shall thereby make it easier to understand, I shall thereby challenge contradiction.
First proposition. The grounds upon which ‘this’ world has been designated as apparent establish rather its reality — another kind of reality is absolutely undemonstrable.
Second proposition. The characteristics which have been assigned to the ‘real being’ of things are the characteristics of non-being, of nothingness — the ‘real world’ has been constructed out of the contradiction to the actual world: an apparent world indeed, in so far as it is no more than a moral-optical illusion.
Third proposition. To talk about ‘another’ world than this is quite pointless, provided that an instinct for slandering, disparaging and accusing life is not strong within us: in the latter case we revenge ourselves on life by means of the phantasmagoria of ‘another’, a ‘better’ life.
Fourth proposition. To divide the world into a ‘real’ and an ‘apparent’ world, whether in the manner of Christianity or in the manner of Kant (which is, after all, that of a cunning Christian —) is only a suggestion of décadence — a symptom of declining life.… That the artist places a higher value on appearance than on reality constitutes no objection to this proposition. For ‘appearance’ here signifies reality once more, only selected, strengthened, corrected.… The tragic artist is not a pessimist – it is precisely he who affirms all that is questionable and terrible in existence, he is Dionysian. (‘Reason’ in Philosophy, § 6) [^]
How the ‘Real World’ At Last Became a Myth
The real world, attainable to the wise, the pious, the virtuous man — he dwells in it, he is it.
(Oldest convincing form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, convincing. Transcription of the proposition ‘I, Plato, am the truth.’)
The real world, unattainable for the moment, but promised to the wise, the pious, the virtuous man (‘to the sinner who repents’).
(Progress of the idea: it grows more refined, more enticing, more incomprehensible — it becomes a woman, it becomes Christian . . .)
The real world, unattainable, undemonstrable, cannot be promised, but even when merely thought of a consolation, a duty, an imperative.
(Fundamentally the same old sun, but shining through mist and scepticism; the idea grown sublime, pale, northerly, Königsbergian.)
The real world — unattainable? Unattained, at any rate. And if unattained also unknown. Consequently also no consolation, no redemption, no duty: how could we have a duty towards something unknown?
(The grey of dawn. First yawnings of reason. Cock-crow of positivism.)
The ‘real world’ — an idea no longer of any use, not even a duty any longer — an idea grown useless, superfluous, consequently a refuted idea: let us abolish it!
(Broad daylight; breakfast; return of cheerfulness and bons sens; Plato blushes for shame; all free spirits run riot.)
We have abolished the real world: what world is left? the apparent world perhaps? . . . But no! with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world!
(Mid-day; moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; zenith of mankind; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA) [^]
Higher Politics Demands a New Party
The newspaper reader says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished – it is no longer secure in its instincts. Every error, of whatever kind, is a consequence of degeneration of instinct, disgregation of will: one has thereby virtually defined the bad. Everything good is instinct – and consequently easy, necessary, free. Effort is an objection, the god is typically distinguished from the hero (in my language: light feet are the first attribute of divinity). (The Four Great Errors, § 5) [^]
The ‘Improvers’ of Mankind
A first example, merely as an introduction. In all ages one has wanted to ‘improve’ men: this above all is what morality has meant. But one word can conceal the most divergent tendencies. Both the taming of the beast man and the breeding of a certain species of man has been called ‘improvement’: only these zoological termini express realities – realities, to be sure, of which the typical ‘improver’, the priest, knows nothing – wants to know nothing.… To call the taming of an animal its ‘improvement’ is in our ears almost a joke.
Whoever knows what goes on in menageries is doubtful whether the beasts in them are ‘improved’. They are weakened, they are made less harmful, they become sickly beasts through the depressive emotion of fear, through pain, through injuries, through hunger. – It is no different with the tamed human being whom the priest has ‘improved’. In the early Middle Ages, when the Church was in fact above all a menagerie, one everywhere hunted down the fairest specimens of the ‘blond beast’* – one ‘improved’, for example, the noble Teutons. But what did such a Teuton afterwards look like when he had been ‘improved’ and led into a monastery? Like a caricature of a human being, like an abortion: he had become a ‘sinner’, he was in a cage, one had imprisoned him behind nothing but sheer terrifying concepts.…
There he lay now, sick, miserable, filled with ill-will towards himself; full of hatred for the impulses towards life, full of suspicion of all that was still strong and happy. In short, a ‘Christian’.… In physiological terms: in the struggle with the beast, making it sick can be the only means of making it weak. This the Church understood: it corrupted the human being, it weakened him – but it claimed to have ‘improved’ him… (The ‘Improvers’ of Mankind, § 2) [^]
—Chandala Revenge
These regulations are instructive enough: in them we find for once Aryan humanity, quite pure, quite primordial – we learn that the concept ‘pure blood’ is the opposite of a harmless concept. It becomes clear, on the other hand, in which people the hatred, the Chandala hatred for this ‘humanity’ has been immortalized, where it has become religion, where it has become genius.… From this point of view, the Gospels are documents of the first rank; the Book of Enoch even more so. – Christianity, growing from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as a product of this soil,* represents the reaction against that morality of breeding, of race, of privilege – it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence: Christianity the revaluation of all Aryan values, the victory of Chandala values, the evangel preached to the poor and lowly, the collective rebellion of everything downtrodden, wretched, illconstituted, under-privileged against the ‘race’ – undying Chandala revenge as the religion of love… (The ‘Improvers’ of Mankind, § 4) [^]
— Against the ‘Improvers of Mankind’
The morality of breeding and the morality of taming are, in the means they employ to attain their ends, entirely worthy of one another: we may set down as our chief proposition that to make morality one must have the unconditional will to the contrary. This is the great, the uncanny problem which I have pursued furthest: the psychology of the ‘improvers’ of mankind. A small and really rather modest fact, that of so-called pia fraus, gave me my first access to this problem: pia fraus, the heritage of all philosophers and priests who have ‘improved’ mankind. Neither Manu nor Plato, neither Confucius nor the Jewish and Christian teachers, ever doubted their right to tell lies. Nor did they doubt their possession of other rights.… Expressed in a formula one might say: every means hitherto employed with the intention of making mankind moral has been thoroughly immoral. – (The ‘Improvers’ of Mankind, §, 5) [^]
What the Germans Lack
—Power makes a people stupid
You will see I want to be just to the Germans: I would not like to be untrue to myself in this – so I must also tell them what I object to. Coming to power is a costly business: power makes stupid.… The Germans – once they were called the nation of thinkers: do they still think at all? Nowadays the Germans are bored with intellect, the Germans mistrust intellect, politics devours all seriousness for really intellectual things – Deutschland, Deutschland über alies was, I fear, the end of German philosophy.… ‘Are there any German philosophers? are there any German poets? are there any good German books?’ – people ask me abroad. I blush; but with the courage which is mine even in desperate cases I answer: ‘Yes, Bismarck!’ – Dare I go so far as to confess which books are read nowadays?… Confounded instinct of mediocrity! – (What the Geramans Lack, § 1) [^]
—Three great European narcotics: alcohol, Christianity, and music
Who has not pondered sadly over what the German spirit could be! But this nation has deliberately made itself stupid, for practically a thousand years: nowhere else are the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, so viciously abused. Lately even a third has been added, one which is capable by itself of completely obstructing all delicate and audacious flexibility of spirit: music, our constipated, constipating German music. – How much dreary heaviness, lameness, dampness, sloppiness, how much beer there is in the German intellect! How can it possibly happen that young men who dedicate their existence to the most spiritual goals lack all sense of the first instinct of spirituality, the spirit’s instinct for self-preservation – and drink beer?… The alcoholism of scholarly youth perhaps does not constitute a question mark in regard to their erudition – one can be even a great scholar without possessing any spirit at all – but from any other point of view it remains a problem. (What the Geramans Lack, § 2) [^]
Culture and the State Are Antagonists
If one makes a reckoning, it is obvious not only that German culture is declining, the sufficient reason for it is obvious too. After all, no one can spend more than he has – that is true of individuals, it is also true of nations. If one spends oneself on power, grand politics, economic affairs, world commerce, parliamentary institutions, military interests – if one expends in this direction the quantum of reason, seriousness, will, self-overcoming that one is, then there will be a shortage in the other direction. Culture and the state – one should not deceive oneself over this – are antagonists: the ‘cultural state’ is merely a modern idea. The one lives off the other, the one thrives at the expense of the other. All great cultural epochs are epochs of political decline: that which is great in the cultural sense has been unpolitical, even anti-political. (What the Geramans Lack, § 4) [^]
All Modern Education Points to Mediocrity
— Educators, the First Prerequisite of Education, are Lacking
There is a need for educators who are themselves educated; superior, noble spirits, who prove themselves every moment by what they say and by what they do not say: cultures grown ripe and sweet — and not the learned boors which grammar school and university offer youth today as ‘higher nurses’. Educators, the first prerequisite of education, are lacking (except for the exceptions of exceptions): hence the decline of German culture. (What the Geramans Lack, § 5) [^]
— Higher Education, By Virtue of Its Nature, Is Reserved to the Few
All higher education belongs to the exceptions alone: one must be privileged to have a right to so high a privilege. Great and fine things can never be common property: pulchrum est paucorum hominum. – What is the cause of the decline of German culture? That ‘higher education’ is no longer a privilege – the democratism of ‘culture’ made ‘universal’ and common.… Not to overlook the fact that military privileges absolutely compel too great attendance at higher schools, which means their ruin. – No one is any longer free in present-day Germany to give his children a noble education: our ‘higher’ schools are one and all adjusted – as regards their teachers, their curricula and their instructional aims – to the most dubious mediocrity. And there reigns everywhere an indecent haste, as if something has been neglected if the young man of twenty-three is not yet ‘finished and ready’, does not yet know the answer to the ‘chief question’: which calling? –
A higher kind of human being, excuse me for saying, doesn’t think much of ‘callings’, the reason being he knows himself called.… He takes his time, he has plenty of time, he gives no thought whatsoever to being ‘finished and ready’ – at the age of thirty one is, as regards high culture, a beginner, a child. – Our overcrowded grammar schools, our overloaded, stupified grammar-school teachers, are a scandal: one may perhaps have motives for defending this state of things, as the professors of Heidelberg recently did – there are no grounds for doing so. (What the Geramans Lack, § 6) [^]
Modern "Objectivity" is the Ignoble Bad Taste Par Excellence
All unspirituality, all vulgarity, is due to the incapacity to resist a stimulus – one has to react, one obeys every impulse. In many instances, such a compulsion is already morbidity, decline, a symptom of exhaustion – almost everything which unphilosophical crudity designates by the name ‘vice’ is merely this physiological incapacity not to react – A practical application of having learned to see: one will have become slow, mistrustful, resistant as a learner in general. In an attitude of hostile calm one will allow the strange, the novel of every kind to approach one first – one will draw one’s hand back from it. To stand with all doors open, to prostrate oneself submissively before every petty fact, to be ever itching to mingle with, plunge into other people and other things, in short our celebrated modern ‘objectivity’, is bad taste, is ignoble par excellence. (What the Geramans Lack, § 6) [^]
Skirmishes In a War With the Age
Nothing is More Harmful to Freedom than Liberal Institutions
Liberal-Democratic Man Cannot Carry the West Into the Future
The Labor Question, Marx's Premise, Is Stupidity Par Excellence
The Architect’s Grand Style
The architect represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollonian condition: here it is the mighty act of will, the will which moves mountains, the intoxication of the strong will, which demands artistic expression.
The most powerful men have always inspired the architects; the architect has always been influenced by power. Pride, victory over weight and gravity, the will to power, seek to render themselves visible in a building; architecture is a kind of rhetoric of power, now persuasive, even cajoling in form, now bluntly imperious.
The highest feeling of power and security finds expression in that which possesses grand style.
Power which no longer requires proving; which disdains to please; which is slow to answer; which is conscious of no witness around it; which lives oblivious of the existence of any opposition; which reposes in itself, fatalistic, a law among laws: that is what speaks of itself in the form of grand style. — (Skirmishes In a War With the Age, § 11) [^]
Noble v Ignoble Liberality
To put up with men, to keep open house in one’s heart — this is liberal, but no more than liberal. One knows hearts which are capable of noble hospitality, which have curtained windows and closed shutters: they keep their best rooms empty. Why do they so? — Because they await guests with whom one does not have to ‘put up’… (Skirmishes In a War With the Age, § 25) [^]
The Christian and Anarchist — Both are Decadents
Christian and anarchist. — When the anarchist, as the mouthpiece of declining strata of society, demands with righteous indignation ‘his rights’, ‘justice’, ‘equal rights’, he is only acting under the influence of his want of culture, which prevents his understanding why he is really suffering — in what respect he is impoverished, in life.…
A cause-creating drive is powerful within him: someone must be to blame for his feeling vile.…
His ‘righteous indignation’ itself already does him good; every poor devil finds pleasure in scolding — it gives him a little of the intoxication of power. Even complaining and wailing can give life a charm for the sake of which one endures it: there is a small dose of revenge in every complaint, one reproaches those who are different for one’s feeling vile, sometimes even with one’s being vile, as if they had perpetrated an injustice or possessed an impermissible privilege. ‘If I am canaille, you ought to be so too’: on the basis of this logic one makes revolutions.
— Complaining is never of any use: it comes from weakness. Whether one attributes one’s feeling vile to others or to oneself — the Socialist does the former, the Christian for example the latter — makes no essential difference. What is common to both, and unworthy in both, is that someone has to be to blame for the fact that one suffers — in short, that the sufferer prescribes for himself the honey of revenge as a medicine for his suffering. The objectives of this thirst for revenge as a thirst for pleasure vary according to circumstances: the sufferer finds occasions everywhere for cooling his petty revengefulness — if he is a Christian, to say it again, he finds them in himself.…
The Christian and the anarchist — both are décadents. — And when the Christian condemns, calumniates and befouls the ‘world’, he does so from the same instinct from which the Socialist worker condemns, calumniates and befouls society: even the ‘Last Judgement’ is still the sweet consolation of revenge — the revolution, such as the Socialist worker too anticipates, only conceived of as somewhat more distant.… Even the ‘Beyond’ — why a Beyond if not as a means of befouling the Here-and-Now?… (Skirmishes In a War With the Age, § 34) [^]
Man Is Finished When He Becomes Altruistic
A criticism of décadence morality. — An ‘altruistic’ morality, a morality under which egoism languishes – is under all circumstances a bad sign. This applies to individuals, it applies especially to peoples. The best are lacking when egoism begins to be lacking. To choose what is harmful to oneself, to be attracted by ‘disinterested’ motives, almost constitutes the formula for décadence. ‘Not to seek one’s own advantage’ — that is merely a moral fig leaf for a quite different, namely physiological fact: ‘I no longer know how to find my advantage’.… Disgregation of the instincts! – Man is finished when he becomes altruistic. —
Instead of saying simply ‘I am no longer worth anything’, the moral lie in the mouth of the décadent says: ‘Nothing is worth anything — life is not worth anything’.…
Such a judgement represents, after all, a grave danger, it is contagious — on the utterly morbid soil of society it soon grows up luxuriously, now in the form of religion (Christianity), now in that of philosophy (Schopen-hauerism). In some circumstances the vapours of such a poison-tree jungle sprung up out of putrefaction can poison life for years ahead, for thousands of years ahead… (Skirmishes In a War With the Age, § 35) [^]
New Physicians
— Physicians Against Mere-Life Philosophies
A moral code for physicians. — The invalid is a parasite on society. In a certain state it is indecent to go on living. To vegetate on in cowardly dependence on physicians and medicaments after the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost ought to entail the profound contempt of society. Physicians, in their turn, ought to be the communicators of this contempt — not prescriptions, but every day a fresh dose of disgust with their patients.… (Skirmishes In a War With the Age, § 36) [^]
— The Physician’s Responsibility
To create a new responsibility, that of the physician, in all cases in which the highest interest of life, of ascending life, demands the most ruthless suppression and sequestration of degenerating life — for example in determining the right to reproduce, the right to be born, the right to live.…
To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one’s own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there, likewise an actual evaluation of what has been desired and what achieved in life, an adding-up of life — all of this in contrast to the pitiable and horrible comedy Christianity has made of the hour of death.
One should never forget of Christianity that it has abused the weakness of the dying to commit conscience-rape and even the mode of death to formulate value judgements on men and the past! — Here, every cowardice of prejudice notwithstanding, it is above all a question of establishing the correct, that is physiological evaluation of so-called natural death: which is, after all, also only an ‘unnatural’ death, an act of suicide. One perishes by no one but oneself. Only ‘natural’ death is death for the most contemptible reasons, an unfree death, a death at the wrong time, a coward’s death.
From love of life one ought to desire to die differently from this: freely, consciously, not accidentally, not suddenly overtaken. (Skirmishes In a War With the Age, § 36) [^]
Against Decadent Pessimists and the Blackpill
Finally, a piece of advice for messieurs the pessimists and other décadents. We have no power to prevent ourselves being born: but we can rectify this error — for it is sometimes an error. When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.… Society — what am I saying! life itself derives more advantage from that than from any sort of ‘life’ spent in renunciation, green-sickness and other virtues — one has freed others from having to endure one’s sight, one has removed an objection from life.… Pessimism, pur, vert proves itself only by the self-negation of messieurs the pessimists: one must take their logic a step further, and not deny life merely in ‘will and idea’, as Schopenhauer did – one must first of all deny Schopenhauer.… Pessimism, by the by, however contagious it may be, nevertheless does not add to the morbidity of an age or a race in general: it is the expression of this morbidity. One succumbs to it as one succumbs to cholera: one’s constitution must already be sufficiently morbid. Pessimism does not of itself make a single additional décadent, I recall that statistics show that the years in which cholera rages do not differ from other years in the total number of deaths. (Skirmishes In a War With the Age, § 36) [^]
Modern Progress: Weaker not Better
I permit myself to raise the question whether we have really grown more moral. That all the world believes so is already an objection to it.… We modern men, very delicate, very vulnerable and paying and receiving consideration in a hundred ways, imagine in fact that this sensitive humanity which we represent, this achieved unanimity in forbearance, in readiness to help, in mutual trust, is a positive advance, that with this we have gone far beyond the men of the Renaissance. But every age thinks in this way, has to think in this way. What is certain is that we would not dare to place ourselves in Renaissance circumstances, or even imagine ourselves in them: our nerves could not endure that reality, not to speak of our muscles. This incapacity, however, demonstrates, not an advance, but only a different, a more belated constitution, a weaker, more delicate, more vulnerable one, out of which is necessarily engendered a morality which is full of consideration. (Skirmishes In a War With the Age, § 37) [^]
Modern "Virtue" is Ancient "Old-Woman Morality"
If we think away our delicacy and belatedness, our physiological aging, then our morality of ‘humanization’ too loses its value at once – no morality has any value in itself – : we would even despise it. On the other hand, let us be in no doubt that we modern men, with our thick padding of humanity which dislikes to give the slightest offense, would provide the contemporaries of Cesare Borgia with a side-splitting comedy. We are, in fact, involuntarily funny beyond all measure, we with our modern ‘virtues’.…
The decay of our hostile and mistrust-arousing instincts – and that is what constitutes our ‘advance’ – represents only one of the effects attending our general decay of vitality: it costs a hundred times more effort, more foresight, to preserve so dependent, so late an existence as we are. Here everyone helps everyone else, here everyone is to a certain degree an invalid and everyone a nurse. This is then called ‘virtue’ – : among men who knew a different kind of life, a fuller, more prodigal, more overflowing life, it would be called something else: ‘cowardice’, perhaps, ‘pitiableness’, ‘old woman’s morality’.… (Skirmishes In a War With the Age, § 37) [^]
Stern Customs: Sign of Life; Soft Customs: Sign of Decay
Our softening of customs — this is my thesis, my innovation if you like — is a consequence of decline; stern and frightful customs can, conversely, be a consequence of a superabundance of life. For in the latter case much may be risked, much demanded and much squandered. What was formerly a spice of life would be poison to us.… We are likewise too old, too belated, to be capable of indifference — also a form of strength: our morality of pity, against which I was the first to warn, that which one might call l’impressionisme morale, is one more expression of the physiological over excitability pertaining to everything décadent. That movement which with Schopenhauer’s morality of pity attempted to present itself as scientific — a very unsuccessful attempt! — is the actual décadence movement in morality; as such it is profoundly related to Christian morality. Strong ages, noble cultures, see in pity, in ‘love of one’s neighbour’, in a lack of self and self-reliance, something contemptible. (Skirmishes In a War With the Age, § 37) [^]
The Pathos of Distance Characterizes Every Great Age
Ages are to be assessed according to their positive forces — and by this assessment the age of the Renaissance, so prodigal and so fateful, appears as the last great age, and we, we moderns with our anxious care for ourselves and love of our neighbour, with our virtues of work, of unpretentiousness, of fair play, of scientificality — acquisitive, economical, machine-minded — appear as a weak age.… Our virtues are conditioned, are demanded by our weakness.…
‘Equality’, a certain actual rendering similar of which the theory of ‘equal rights’ is only the expression, belongs essentially to decline: the chasm between man and man, class and class, the multiplicity of types, the will to be oneself, to stand out — that which I call pathos of distance — characterizes every strong age. The tension, the range between the extremes is today growing less and less — the extremes themselves are finally obliterated to the point of similarity.…
All our political theories and state constitutions, the ‘German Reich ‘certainly not excluded, are consequences, necessary effects of decline; the unconscious influence of décadence has gained ascendancy even over the ideals of certain of the sciences. My objection to the whole of sociology in England and France is that it knows from experience only the decaying forms of society and takes its own decaying instincts with perfect innocence as the norm of sociological value judgement. Declining life, the diminution of all organizing power, that is to say the power of separating, of opening up chasms, of ranking above and below, formulates itself in the sociology of today as the ideal.… Our Socialists are décadents, but Mr Herbert Spencer is also a décadent — he sees in the victory of altruism something desirable!… (Skirmishes In a War With the Age, § 37) [^]
Nothing is More Harmful to Freedom than Liberal Institutions
My conception of freedom. – The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it – what it costs us. I give an example. Liberal institutions immediately cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: subsequently there is nothing more thoroughly harmful to freedom than liberal institutions. One knows, indeed, what they bring about: they undermine the will to power, they are the levelling of mountain and valley exalted to a moral principle, they make small, cowardly and smug – it is the herd animal which triumphs with them every time. Liberalism: in plain words, reduction to the herd animal.… (Skirmishes In a War With the Age, § 38) [^]
War Awakens Illiberal Instincts
As long as they are still being fought for, these same institutions produce quite different effects; they then in fact promote freedom mightily. Viewed more closely, it is war which produces these effects, war for liberal institutions which as war permits the illiberal instincts to endure. And war is a training in freedom. For what is freedom? That one has the will to self-responsibility. That one preserves the distance which divides us. That one has become more indifferent to hardship, toil, privation, even to life. That one is ready to sacrifice men to one’s cause, oneself not excepted. Freedom means that the manly instincts that delight in war and victory have gained mastery over the other instincts — for example, over the instinct for ‘happiness’. The man who has become free — and how much more the mind that has become free — spurns the contemptible sort of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats. The free man is a warrior. (Skirmishes In a War With the Age, § 38) [^]
Danger, Not Liberal Institutions, Enables Greatness
How is freedom measured, in individuals as in nations? By the resistance which has to be overcome, by the effort it costs to stay aloft. One would have to seek the highest type of free man where the greatest resistance is constantly being overcome: five steps from tyranny, near the threshold of the danger of servitude. This is true psychologically when one understands by ‘tyrants’ pitiless and dreadful instincts, to combat which demands the maximum of authority and discipline towards oneself – finest type Julius Caesar –; it is also true politically: one has only to look at history. The nations which were worth something, which became worth something, never became so under liberal institutions: it was great danger which made of them something deserving reverence, danger which first teaches us to know our resources, our virtues, our shield and spear, our spirit – which compels us to be strong.… (Skirmishes In a War With the Age, § 38) [^]
One Must Need Strength, Otherwise One Will Never Have It
First principle: one must need strength, otherwise one will never have it. — Those great forcing-houses for strong human beings, for the strongest kind there has ever been, the aristocratic communities of the pattern of Rome and Venice, understood freedom in precisely the sense which I understand the word ‘freedom’: as something one has and does not have, something one wants, something one conquers… (Skirmishes In a War With the Age, § 38) [^]
Criticism of Modernity
Criticism of modernity. — Our institutions are no longer fit for anything: everyone is unanimous about that. But the fault lies not in them but in us. Having lost all the instincts out of which institutions grow, we are losing the institutions themselves, because we are no longer fit for them. Democracy has always been the declining form of the power to organize. (Skirmishes In a War With the Age, § 39) [^]
Liberal-Democratic Man Cannot Carry the West Into the Future
For institutions to exist there must exist the kind of will, instinct, imperative which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to centuries-long responsibility, to solidarity between succeeding generations backwards and forwards in infinitum. If this will is present, there is established something such as the Imperium Romanum: or such as Russia, the only power today which has durability in it, which can wait, which can still promise something – Russia, the antithesis of that pitiable European petty-state politics and nervousness which with the foundation of the German Reich has entered a critical phase.…
The entire West has lost those instincts out of which institutions grow, out of which the future grows: perhaps nothing goes so much against the grain of its ‘modern spirit’ as this. One lives for today, one lives very fast – one lives very irresponsibly: it is precisely this which one calls ‘freedom’. That which makes institutions institutions is despised, hated, rejected: whenever the word ‘authority’ is so much as heard one believes oneself in danger of a new slavery. The décadence in the valuating instinct of our politicians, our political parties, goes so deep that they instinctively prefer that which leads to dissolution, that which hastens the end. (Skirmishes In a War With the Age, § 39) [^]
Modern Man Cannot Maintain Institutions: Marriage
Witness modern marriage. It is obvious that all sense has gone out of modern marriage: which is, however, no objection to marriage but to modernity. The rationale of marriage lay in the legal sole responsibility of the man: marriage thereby had a centre of gravity, whereas now it limps with both legs. The rationale of marriage lay in its indissolubility in principle: it thereby acquired an accent which could make itself heard against the accidents of feeling, passion and the moment. It lay likewise in the responsibility of the families for the selection of mates. With the increasing indulgence of love matches one has simply eliminated the foundation of marriage, that alone which makes it an institution.
One never establishes an institution on the basis of an idiosyncrasy, one does not, as aforesaid, establish marriage on the basis of ‘love’ — one establishes it on the basis of the sexual drive, the drive to own property (wife and child considered as property), the drive to dominate which continually organizes the smallest type of domain, the family, which needs children and heirs so as to retain, in a physiological sense as well, an achieved measure of power, influence, wealth, so as to prepare for protracted tasks, for a solidarity of instinct between the centuries. Marriage as an institution already includes in itself the affirmation of the largest, the most enduring form of organization: if society as a whole cannot stand security for itself to the most distant generations, then marriage has really no meaning. — Modern marriage has lost its meaning — consequently it is being abolished (Skirmishes In a War With the Age, § 39) [^]
The Labor Question, Marx's Premise, Is Stupidity Par Excellence
The labour question. — The stupidity, fundamentally the instinct degeneration which is the cause of every stupidity today, lies in the existence of a labour question at all. About certain things one does not ask questions: first imperative of instinct. —
I simply cannot see what one wishes to do with the European worker now one has made a question of him. He finds himself far too well placed not to go on asking for more, or to ask more and more impudently. After all, he has the great majority on his side. There is absolutely no hope left that a modest and self-sufficient kind of human being, a type of Chinaman, should here form itself into a class: and this would have been sensible, this was actually a necessity. What has one done? – Everything designed to nip in the bud even the prerequisites for it – through the most irresponsible thoughtlessness one has totally destroyed the instincts by virtue of which the worker becomes possible as a class, possible for himself. The worker has been made liable for military service, he has been allowed to form unions and to vote: no wonder the worker already feels his existence to be a state of distress (expressed in moral terms as a state of injustice). But what does one want? — to ask it again. If one wills an end, one must also will the means to it: if one wants slaves, one is a fool if one educates them to be masters. (Skirmishes In a War With the Age, § 40) [^]
In the Ear of the Conservatives
In the ear of the Conservatives. — What was formerly not known, what is known today or could be known – a reversion, a turning back in any sense and to any degree, is quite impossible. We physiologists at least know that. But all priests and moralists have believed it was possible – they have wanted to take mankind back, force it back, to an earlier standard of virtue. Morality has always been a bed of Procrustes. Even politicians have in this matter imitated the preachers of virtue: even today there are parties whose goal is a dream of the crabwise retrogression of all things. But no one is free to be a crab. There is nothing for it: one has to go forward, which is to say step by step further into décadence (– this is my definition of modern ‘progress’…). One can retard this development and, through retardation, dam and gather up degeneration itself and make it more vehement and sudden: more one cannot do. — (Skirmishes In a War With the Age, § 43) [^]
Napoleon — Explosive Material
My conception of the genius. — Great men, like great epochs, are explosive material in whom tremendous energy has been accumulated; their prerequisite has always been, historically and physiologically, that a protracted assembling, accumulating, economizing and preserving has preceded them — that there has been no explosion for a long time. If the tension in the mass has grown too great the merest accidental stimulus suffices to call the ‘genius’, the ‘deed’, the great destiny, into the world. Of what account then are circumstances, the epoch, the Zeitgeist, public opinion! —
Take the case of Napoleon. The France of the Revolution, and even more pre-Revolution France, would have brought forth the type antithetical to Napoleon: it did bring it forth, moreover. And because Napoleon was different, the heir of a stronger, longer, older civilization than that which was going up in dust and smoke in France, he became master here, he alone was master here. Great human beings are necessary, the epoch in which they appear is accidental; that they almost always become master of their epoch is only because they are stronger, because they are older, because a longer assembling of force has preceded them. The relationship between a genius and his epoch is the same as that between strong and weak, and as that between old and young: the epoch is always relatively much younger, less substantial, more immature, less sure of itself, more childish. (Skirmishes In a War With the Age, § 44) [^]
The Great Human Being Is A Terminus
The danger which lies in great human beings and great epochs is extraordinary; sterility, exhaustion of every kind follow in their footsteps. The great human being is a terminus; the great epoch, the Renaissance for example, is a terminus. The genius — in his works, in his deeds — is necessarily a prodigal: his greatness lies in the fact that he expends himself.… The instinct of self-preservation is as it were suspended; the overwhelming pressure of the energies which emanate from him forbids him any such care and prudence. One calls this ‘sacrifice’; one praises his ‘heroism’ therein, his indifference to his own interests, his devotion to an idea, a great cause, a fatherland: all misunderstandings.… He flows out, he overflows, he uses himself up, he does not spare himself – with inevitability, fatefully, involuntarily, as a river’s bursting its banks is involuntary. But because one owes a great deal to such explosive beings one has bestowed a great deal upon them in return, for example a species of higher morality.… For that is the nature of human gratitude: it misunderstands its benefactors. – (Skirmishes In a War With the Age, § 44) [^]
Catiline — The Antecedent Form of Every Caesar
All innovators of the spirit bear for a time the pallid, fatalistic sign of the Chandala on their brow: not because they are felt to be so, but because they themselves feel the terrible chasm which divides them from all that is traditional and held in honour. Almost every genius knows as one of the phases of his development the ‘Catilinarian existence’, a feeling of hatred, revengefulness and revolt against everything which already is, which is no longer becoming.… Catiline — the antecedent form of every Caesar. — (Skirmishes In a War With the Age, § 45) [^]
The Greeks Remain the Supreme Cultural Event in History
Beauty no accident. — The beauty of a race or a family, their grace and graciousness in all gestures, is won by work: like genius, it is the end result of the accumulated work of generations. One must have made great sacrifices to good taste, one must have done much and omitted much, for its sake — seventeenth-century France is admirable in both respects — and good taste must have furnished a principle for selecting company, place, dress, sexual satisfaction; one must have preferred beauty to advantage, habit, opinion, and inertia. Supreme rule of conduct: before oneself too, one must not "let oneself go." The good things are immeasurably costly; and the law always holds that those who have them are different from those who acquire them. All that is good is inherited: whatever is not inherited is imperfect, is a mere beginning.
In Athens, in the time of Cicero (who expresses his surprise about this), the men and youths were far superior in beauty to the women. But what work and exertion in the service of beauty had the male sex there imposed on itself for centuries! For one should make no mistake about the method in this case: a breeding of feelings and thoughts alone is almost nothing (this is the great misunderstanding underlying German education, which is wholly illusory), one must first persuade the body. Strict perseverance in significant and exquisite gestures together with the obligation to live only with people who do not "let themselves go" — that is quite enough for one to become significant and exquisite, and in two or three generations all this becomes inward.
It is decisive for the fortune of nations and of mankind that one should inaugurate culture in the right place — not in the ‘soul’ (as has been the fateful superstition of priests and quasi-priests): the right place is the body, demeanour, diet, physiology: the rest follows…. This is why the Greeks remain the supreme cultural event of history — they knew, they did what needed to be done; Christianity, which despised the body, has up till now been mankind’s greatest misfortune. — (Skirmishes In a War With the Age, § 47) [^]
Poison — The Doctrine of Equality
The doctrine of equality!… But there exists no more poisonous poison: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, while it is the termination of justice…. ‘Equality for equals, inequality for unequals’ — that would be the true voice of justice: and, what follows from it, ‘Never make equal what is unequal’. — That such dreadful and bloody happenings have surrounded this doctrine of equality has given this ‘modern idea’ par excellence a kind of glory and lurid glow, so that the Revolution as a spectacle has seduced even the noblest spirits. That is, however, no reason for esteeming it any more highly. — I see only one who experienced it as it has to be experienced — with disgust — Goethe. (Skirmishes In a War With the Age, § 47) [^]
Nietzsche's Ambition
My ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book – what everyone else does not say in a book…. I have given mankind the profoundest book it possesses, my Zarathustra: I shall shortly give it the most independent. (Skirmishes In a War With the Age, § 51) [^]
What I Owe to the Ancients
Plato: Boring, Morally Infected, Anti-Greek, Proto-Christian
Plato is boring. — Ultimately my mistrust of Plato extends to the very bottom of him: I find him deviated so far from all the fundamental instincts of the Hellenes, so morally infected, so much an antecedent Christian — he already has the concept ‘good’ as the supreme concept — that I should prefer to describe the entire phenomenon ‘Plato’ by the harsh term ‘higher swindle’ or, if you prefer, ‘idealism’, than by any other. (What I Owe to the Ancients, § 2) [^]
Cure to Decadent Socratism: Thucydides & Machiavelli
My recreation, my preference, my cure from all Platonism has always been Thucydides. Thucydides, and perhaps the Principe of Machiavelli, are related to me closely by their unconditional will not to deceive themselves and not to see reason in reality — not in ‘reason’, still less in ‘morality’….
For the deplorable embellishment of the Greeks with the colours of the ideal which the ‘classically educated’ youth carries away with him into life as the reward of his grammar-school drilling there is no more radical cure than Thucydides. One must turn him over line by line and read his hidden thoughts as clearly as his words: there are few thinkers so rich in hidden thoughts. Sophist culture, by which I mean realist culture, attains in him its perfect expression – this invaluable movement in the midst of the morality-and-ideal swindle of the Socratic schools which was then breaking out everywhere. Greek philosophy as the décadence of the Greek instinct; Thucydides as the grand summation, the last manifestation of that strong, stern, hard matter-of-factness instinctive to the older Hellenes. Courage in face of reality ultimately distinguishes such natures as Thucydides and Plato: Plato is a coward in face of reality — consequently he flees into the ideal; Thucydides has himself under control — consequently he retains control over things… (What I Owe to the Ancients, § 2) [^]
The Greek Philosophers Were the Decadents of Hellenism
But the philosophers are the décadents of Hellenism, the counter-movement against the old, the noble taste (— against the agonal instinct, against the polis, against the value of the race, against the authority of tradition). The Socratic virtues were preached because the Greeks had lost them: excitable, timid, fickle, comedians every one, they had more than enough reason to let morality be preached to them. Not that it would have done any good: but big words and fine attitudes are so suited to décadents… (What I Owe to the Ancients, § 3) [^]
Dionysus
— Dionysos as a Means to Understand the Older, Pre-Socratic Greek Instinct
I was the first to take seriously that wonderful phenomenon which bears the name Dionysos as a means to understanding the older Hellenic instinct, an instinct still exuberant and even overflowing: it is explicable only as an excess of energy. (What I Owe to the Ancients, § 4) [^]
— The Psychology of the Dionysian condition
For it is only in the Dionysian mysteries, in the psychology of the Dionysian condition, that the fundamental fact of the Hellenic instinct expresses itself – its ‘will to life’. What did the Hellene guarantee to himself with these mysteries? Eternal life, the eternal recurrence of life; the future promised and consecrated in the past; the triumphant Yes to life beyond death and change; true life as collective continuation of life through procreation, through the mysteries of sexuality. It was for this reason that the sexual symbol was to the Greeks the symbol venerable as such, the intrinsic profound meaning of all antique piety. Every individual detail in the act of procreation, pregnancy, birth, awoke the most exalted and solemn feelings. In the teachings of the mysteries, pain is sanctified: the ‘pains of childbirth’ sanctify pain in general – all becoming and growing, all that guarantees the future, postulates pain….
For the eternal joy in creating to exist, for the will to life eternally to affirm itself, the ‘torment of childbirth’ must also exist eternally…. (What I Owe to the Ancients, § 4) [^]
— Dionysus: No Greater Symbol Expressing the Greeks
All this is contained in the word Dionysos: I know of no more exalted symbolism than this Greek symbolism, the symbolism of the Dionysian. The profoundest instinct of life, the instinct for the future of life, for the eternity of life, is in this word experienced religiously – the actual road to life, procreation, as the sacred road.… It was only Christianity, with ressentiment against life in its foundations, which made of sexuality something impure: it threw filth on the beginning, on the prerequisite of our life… (What I Owe to the Ancients, § 4) [^]
Culture begin with a realistic and joyful and holy embrace of life and its struggles and creative energies in one’s body and in one’s family and in one’s brotherhood bound by honor and duty to each other. Through the brotherhood, a space is claimed and secured in which their particular life might flow and reproduce itself and increase in strength, beauty, and fecundity.