Twilight of Idols and Anti-Christ

by Friedrich Nietzsche

  3

  From scenting out ‘beautiful souls’,* ‘golden means’ and other perfections in the Greeks, from admiring in them such things as their repose in grandeur, their ideal disposition, their sublime simplicity – from this ‘sublime simplicity’, a niaiserie allemande† when all is said and done, I was preserved by the psychologist in me. I saw their strongest instinct, the will to power, I saw them trembling at the intractable force of this drive – I saw all their institutions evolve out of protective measures designed for mutual security against the explosive material within them. The tremendous internal tension then discharged itself in fearful and ruthless external hostility: the city states tore one another to pieces so that the citizens of each of them might find peace within himself. One needed to be strong: danger was close at hand – it lurked everywhere. The splendid supple physique, the reckless realism and immoralism which pertains to the Hellene was a necessity, not a ‘natural quality’. It was produced, it was not there from the beginning. And one employed festivals and arts for no other purpose than to feel oneself dominant, to show oneself dominant: they are means for making oneself feared…. To judge the Greeks by their philosophers, in the German manner, perchance to employ the philistinism of the Socratic schools as a clue to what is fundamentally Hellenic!… 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…

  4

  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. Whoever has investigated the Greeks, such as that profoundest student of their culture now living, Jacob Burckhardt of Basel, realizes at once the value of this line of approach: Burckhardt inserted a special section on the said phenomenon into his Culture of the Greeks. For the opposite of this, one should take a look at the almost laughable poverty of instinct displayed by German philologists whenever they approach the Dionysian. The celebrated Lobeck especially, who crept into this world of mysterious states with the honest self-confidence of a dried-up bookworm and by being nauseously frivolous and childish persuaded himself he was being scientific – Lobeck intimated, with a great display of erudition, that these curiosities were of no consequence. To be sure, the priests might have communicated a number of valuable pieces of information to the participants in such orgies – that wine arouses desire, for example, that man can live on fruit if need be, that plants bloom in spring and wither in autumn. As regards that strange wealth of rites, symbols and myths of orgiastic origin with which the antique world was quite literally overrun, Lobeck finds in them an occasion for becoming a trifle more ingenious. ‘When the Greeks had nothing else to do,’ he says (Aglao-phamus I, 672), ‘they used to laugh, jump, race about, or, since man sometimes feels a desire for this, they used to sit down and weep and wail. Others later came along and sought some reason for this striking behaviour; and thus those countless myths and legends arose to explain these practices. On the other hand, one believed that the droll activities which now took place on festival days necessarily pertained to festival celebration and retained them as an indispensable part of divine worship.’ – This is contemptible chatter and no one is likely to take a Lobeck seriously for a moment. We are affected quite differently when we probe the concept ‘Greek’ which Winckelmann and Goethe constructed for themselves and find it incompatible with that element out of which Dionysian art evolved – the orgy. I have, in fact, no doubt that Goethe would have utterly excluded anything of this kind from the possibilities of the Greek soul. Consequently Goethe did not understand the Greeks. 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…. 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…

  5

  The psychology of the orgy as an overflowing feeling of life and energy within which even pain acts as a stimulus provided me with the key to the concept of the tragic feeling, which was misunderstood as much by Aristotle as it especially was by our pessimists. Tragedy is so far from providing evidence for pessimism among the Hellenes in Schopenhauer’s sense that it has to be considered the decisive repudiation of that idea and the counter-verdict to it. Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems, the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types – that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I recognized as the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not so as to get rid of pity and terror, not so as to purify oneself of a dangerous emotion through its vehement discharge – it was thus Aristotle understood it – : but, beyond pity and terror, to realize in oneself the eternal joy of becoming – that joy which also encompasses joy in destruction…. And with that I again return to the place from which I set out – Birth of Tragedy was my first revaluation of all values: with that I again plant myself in the soil out of which I draw all that I will and can – I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysos – I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence…*

  The Hammer Speaks

  ‘Why so hard?’ the charcoal once said to the diamond; ‘for are we not close relations?’

  Why so soft? O my brothers, thus I ask you: for are you not – my brothers?

  Why so soft, unresisting and yielding? Why is there so much denial and abnegation in your hearts? So little fate in your glances?

  And if you will not be fates, if you will not be inexorable: how can you – conquer with me?

  And if your hardness will not flash and cut and cut to pieces: how can you one day – create with me?

  For all creators are hard. And it must seem bliss to you to press your hand upon millennia as upon wax,

  bliss to write upon the will of millennia as upon metal – harder than metal, nobler than metal. Only the noblest is perfectly hard.

  This new law-table do I put over you, O my brothers: Become hard!*

  THE ANTI-CHRIST

  Foreword

  This book belongs to the very few. Perhaps none of them is even living yet. Possibly they are the readers who understand my Zarathustra: how could I confound myself with those for whom there are ears listening today? – Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously.

  The conditions under which one un
derstands me and then necessarily understands – I know them all too well. One must be honest in intellectual matters to the point of harshness to so much as endure my seriousness, my passion. One must be accustomed to living on mountains – to seeing the wretched ephemeral chatter of politics and national egoism beneath one. One must have become indifferent, one must never ask whether truth is useful or a fatality…. Strength which prefers questions for which no one today is sufficiently daring; courage for the forbidden; predestination for the labyrinth. An experience out of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for the most distant things. A new conscience for truths which have hitherto remained dumb. And the will to economy in the grand style: to keeping one’s energy, one’s enthusiasm in bounds…. Reverence for oneself; love for oneself; unconditional freedom with respect to oneself…

  Very well! These alone are my readers, my rightful readers, my predestined readers: what do the rest matter? – The rest are merely mankind. – One must be superior to mankind in force, in loftiness of soul – in contempt…

  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

  1

  – Let us look one another in the face. We are Hyperboreans* – we know well enough how much out of the way we live. ‘Neither by land nor by sea shalt thou find the road to the Hyperboreans’: Pindar already knew that of us. Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death – our life, our happiness…. We have discovered happiness, we know the road, we have found the exit out of whole millennia of labyrinth. Who else has found it? – Modern man perhaps? – ‘I know not which way to turn; I am everything that knows not which way to turn’ – sighs modern man…. It was from this modernity that we were ill – from lazy peace, from cowardly compromise, from the whole virtuous uncleanliness of modern Yes and No. This tolerance and largeur of heart which ‘forgives’ everything because it ‘Understands’ everything is sirocco to us. Better to live among ice than among modern virtues and other south winds!… We were brave enough, we spared neither ourselves nor others: but for long we did not know where to apply our courage. We became gloomy, we were called fatalists. Our fatality – was the plenitude, the tension, the blocking-up of our forces. We thirsted for lightning and action, of all things we kept ourselves furthest from the happiness of the weaklings, from ‘resignation’…. There was a thunderstorm in our air, the nature which we are grew dark – for we had no road. Formula of our happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal…

  2

  What is good? – All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.

  What is bad? – All that proceeds from weakness.

  What is happiness? – The feeling that power increases – that a resistance is overcome.

  Not contentment, but more power; not peace at all, but war; not virtue, but proficiency (virtue in the Renaissance style, virtù, virtue free of moralic acid).

  The weak and ill-constituted shall perish: first principle of our philanthropy. And one shall help them to do so.

  What is more harmful than any vice? – Active sympathy for the ill-constituted and weak – Christianity…

  3

  The problem I raise here is not what ought to succeed mankind in the sequence of species (– the human being is a conclusion –): but what type of human being one ought to breed, ought to will, as more valuable, more worthy of life, more certain of the future.

  This more valuable type has existed often enough already: but as a lucky accident, as an exception, never as willed. He has rather been the most feared, he has hitherto been virtually the thing to be feared – and out of fear the reverse type has been willed, bred, achieved: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick animal man – the Christian…

  4

  Mankind does not represent a development of the better or the stronger or the higher in the way that is believed today. ‘Progress’ is merely a modern idea, that is to say a false idea. The European of today is of far less value than the European of the Renaissance; onward development is not by any means, by any necessity the same thing as elevation, advance, strengthening.

  In another sense there are cases of individual success constantly appearing in the most various parts of the earth and from the most various cultures in which a higher type does manifest itself: something which in relation to collective mankind is a sort of superman. Such chance occurrences of great success have always been possible and perhaps always will be possible. And even entire races, tribes, nations can under certain circumstances represent such a lucky hit.

  5

  One should not embellish or dress up Christianity: it has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man, it has excommunicated all the fundamental instincts of this type, it has distilled evil, the Evil One, out of these instincts – the strong human being as the type of reprehensibility, as the ‘outcast’. Christianity has taken the side of everything weak, base, ill-constituted, it has made an ideal out of opposition to the preservative instincts of strong life; it has depraved the reason even of the intellectually strongest natures by teaching men to feel the supreme values of intellectuality as sinful, as misleading, as temptations. The most deplorable example: the depraving of Pascal, who believed his reason had been depraved by original sin while it had only been depraved by his Christianity! –

  6

  It is a painful, a dreadful spectacle which has opened up before me: I have drawn back the curtain on the depravity of man. In my mouth this word is protected against at any rate one suspicion: that it contains a moral accusation of man. It is – I should like to underline the fact again – free of any moralic acid: and this to the extent that I find that depravity precisely where hitherto one most consciously aspired to ‘virtue’, to ‘divinity’. I understand depravity, as will already have been guessed, in the sense of décadence: my assertion is that all the values in which mankind at present summarizes its highest desideratum are décadence values.

  I call an animal, a species, an individual depraved when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers what is harmful to it. A history of the ‘higher feelings’, of the ‘ideals of mankind’ – and it is possible I shall have to narrate it – would almost also constitute an explanation of why man is so depraved. I consider life itself instinct for growth, for continuance, for accumulation of forces, for power: where the will to power is lacking there is decline. My assertion is that this will is lacking in all the supreme values of mankind – that values of decline, nihilistic values hold sway under the holiest names.

  7

  Christianity is called the religion of pity. – Pity stands in antithesis to the tonic emotions which enhance the energy of the feeling of life: it has a depressive effect. One loses force when one pities. The loss of force which life has already sustained through suffering is increased and multiplied even further by pity. Suffering itself becomes contagious through pity; sometimes it can bring about a collective loss of life and life-energy which stands in an absurd relation to the quantum of its cause (– the case of the death of the Nazarene). This is the first aspect; but there is an even more important one. If one judges pity by the value of the reactions which it usually brings about, its mortally dangerous character appears in a much clearer light. Pity on the whole thwarts the law of evolution, which is the law of selection. It preserves what is ripe for destruction; it defends life’s disinherited and condemned; through the abundance of the ill-constituted of all kinds which it retains in life it gives life itself a gloomy and questionable aspect. One has ventured to call pity a virtue (– in every noble morality it counts as weakness –); one has gone further, one has made of it the virtue, the ground and origin of all virtue – only, to be sure, from the viewpoint of a nihilistic philosophy which inscribed Denial of Life on its escutcheon – a fact always to be kept in view. Schopenhauer was within his rights in this: life is denied, made more worthy of denial by pity – pity is practical nihilism. To say it again, this depressive and contagious instinct thwarts those instincts bent on preserving
and enhancing the value of life: both as a multiplier of misery and as a conservator of everything miserable it is one of the chief instruments for the advancement of décadence – pity persuades to nothingness!… One does not say ‘nothingness’: one says ‘the Beyond’; or ‘God’; or ‘true life’; or Nirvana, redemption, blessedness…. This innocent rhetoric from the domain of religio-moral idiosyncrasy at once appears much less innocent when one grasps which tendency is here draping the mantle of sublime words about itself: the tendency hostile to life. Schopenhauer was hostile to life: therefore pity became for him a virtue…. Aristotle, as is well known, saw in pity a morbid and dangerous condition which one did well to get at from time to time with a purgative: he understood tragedy as a purgative. From the instinct for life one would indeed have to seek some means of puncturing so morbid and dangerous an accumulation of pity as that represented by the case of Schopenhauer (and unfortunately also by our entire literary and artistic décadence from St Petersburg to Paris, from Tolstoy to Wagner), so that it might burst…. Nothing in our unhealthy modernity is more unhealthy than Christian pity. To be physician here, to be inexorable here, to wield the knife here – that pertains to us, that is our kind of philanthropy, with that are we philosophers, we Hyperboreans! –