Twilight of Idols and Anti-Christ
Page 22
ZOLA, Emile (1840–1902) ‘There is no such thing as pessimistic art…. Art affirms, Job affirms. – But Zola? But the Goncourts? – The things they exhibit are ugly: but that they exhibit them comes from pleasure in this ugliness….’ (Will to Power 821.)
CHRONOLOGY
1844
15 October. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche born in the parsonage at Röcken, near Lützen, Germany, the first of three children of Karl Ludwig, the village pastor, and Fraziska Nietzsche, daughter of the pastor of a nearby village.
1849
27 July. Nietzsche’s father dies.
1850
The Nietzsche family moves to Naumberg, in Thuringia, in April. Arthur Schopenhauer publishes Essays, Aphorisms and Maxims.
1856
Birth of Freud.
1858
The family moves to No. 18 Weingarten. Nietzsche wins a place at the prestigious Pforta grammar school.
1860
Forms a literary society, ‘Germania’, with two Naumberg friends. Jacob Burckhardt publishes The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy.
1864
Enters Bonn University as a student of theology and philology.
1865
At Easter, Nietzsche abandons the study of theology having lost his Christian belief. Leaves Bonn for Leipzig, following his former tutor of philology, Friedrich Ritschl. Begins to read Schopenhauer.
1867
First publication, ‘Zur Geschichte der Theognideischen Spruchsammlung’ (The History of the Theognidia Collection) in the Rheinische Museum für Philiogie. Begins military service.
1868
Discharged from the army. Meets Richard Wagner.
1869
Appointed to the chair of classical philology at Basle University having been recommended by Ritschl. Awarded a doctorate by Leipzig. Regular visitor at Wagners’ home in Tribschen.
1870
Delivers public lectures on ‘The Greek Music Drama’ and ‘Socrates and Tragedy’. Serves as a medical orderly with the Prussian army where he is taken ill with diphtheria.
1871
Applies unsuccessfully for the chair of philology at Basle. His health deteriorates. Takes leave to recover and works on The Birth of Tragedy.
1872
The Birth of Tragedy published (January). Public lectures ‘On the Future of our Educational Institutions’.
1873
Untimely Meditations I: David Strauss published.
1874
Untimely Meditations II: On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life and III: Schopenhauer as Educator published.
1875
Meets Peter Gast, who is to become his earliest ‘disciple’. Suffers from ill-health leading to a general collapse at Christmas.
1876
Granted a long absence from Basle due to continuing ill-health. Proposes marriage to Mathilde Trampedach but is rejected. Untimely Meditations IV: Richard Wagner in Bayreuth published. Travels to Italy.
1878
Human, All Too Human published. His friendship with the Wagners comes to an end.
1879
Assorted Opinions and Maxims published. Retires on a pension from Basle due to sickness.
1880
The Wanderer and his Shadow and Human, All Too Human II published.
1881
Dawn published.
1882
The Gay Science published. Proposes to Lou Andreas Salomé and is rejected.
1883
13 February. Wagner dies in Venice. Thus Spoke Zarathustra I and II published.
1884
Thus Spoke Zarathustra III published.
1885
Zarathustra IV privately printed.
1886
Beyond Good and Evil published.
1887
On the Genealogy of Morals published.
1888
The Wagner Case published. First review of his work as a whole published in the Bern Bund. Experiences some improvement in health but this is short-lived.
1889
Suffers mental collapse in Turin and is admitted to a psychiatric clinic at the University of Jena. Twilight of the Idols published and Nietzsche contra Wagner privately printed.
1890
Nietzsche returns to his mother’s home.
1891
Dithyrambs of Dionysus published.
1894
The Anti-Christ published. The ‘Nietzsche Archive’ founded by his sister, Elisabeth.
1895
Nietzsche contra Wagner published.
1897
20 April. Nietzsche’s mother dies; and Elisabeth moves Nietzsche to Weimar.
1900
25 August. Nietzsche dies. Freud publishes Interpretation of Dreams.
1901
Publication of The Will to Power, papers selected by Elisabeth and Peter Gast.
1908
Ecce Homo published.
* jeder ‘Fall’ ein GlÜcksfall. ‘Fall’ means case, ‘Glücksfall’ a piece of good luck. As well as being a play on words there seems to be a reference intended to Der Fall Wagner (The Wagner Case), Nietzsche’s witty attack on Wagner completed immediately before Twilight was begun and which was also announced, ironically of course, as a ‘relief’ from a sterner task.
† The spirit grows, strength is restored by wounding.
* Like The Wagner Case, presumably.
† See the Translator’s Note, page 26.
* Suche Nullen! ‘Nullen’ means nobodies, ciphers, as well as noughts – ‘Seek nobodies!’ The aphorism is a pun: ‘if you want to multiply yourself by 100 [have followers] get noughts [nobodies] behind you!’
† Zeitgemässe. Nietzsche’s conception of himself as Unzeitgemäss (untimely, inopportune, independent of the age) is reflected in the chapter tide ‘Expeditions of an Untimely Man’ (Streifzüge eines Unzeitgemässen), which itself refers back to Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (Untimely Meditations), the collective title of four essays published 1873 – 6 and intended for others left incomplete.
‡ bread and Circe, in place of panem et circenses = bread and circuses.
* Refers to a popular adage deriving from Johann Gottfried Seume’s poem Die Gesänge.
† Geist. All the meanings contained in this word cannot be conveyed in a single English word: what is meant is spirit, mind, intellect, intelligence. I have translated it as ‘spirit’, ‘spiritual’ when the most inclusive sense seems indicated, as ‘intellect’, ‘intellectual’ when this seems more appropriate.
‡ i.e. since the establishment of the Reich.
§ contradiction in terms.
|| Gewissensbisse (conscience-bites) is the ordinary term for pangs of conscience.
* Der getretene Wurm krümmt sich plays upon the German equivalent of ‘Even a worm will turn’.
† Refers to the traditional misreading of a line in Ernst Moritz Arndt’s patriotic song Des deutscben Vaterland: ‘So with die deutsche Zunge klingt, Und Gott in Himmel Lieder singt’. ‘Gott’ is dative: Wherever the German tongue resounds And sings songs to God in Heaven - but is humorously understood as nominative: And God in Heaven sings songs.
‡ One can think and write only when sitting down.
§ das Sitzfleisch: etymologically ‘the posterior’ (sitting-flesh). ‘Assiduity’, from sedere = to sit, is cognate. Hence the contrast with ‘walking’ ideas.
* According to Plato (Phaedo), Socrates’ last words were: ‘Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?’ One gave a cock to Asclepius on recovering from an illness: Socrates seems to be saying that life is, or his life has been an illness.
† Specifically the followers of Schopenhauer, among whom Nietzsche himself was numbered in his young days.
‡ Unanimity of the wise.
* Nietzsche’s first published book.
† a monster in face, a monster in soul.
* from the viewpoint of eternity.
* The school of Parmenides of Elea
(fifth century BC), who denied the logical possibility of change and motion and argued that the only logical possibility was unchanging being.
* the cause of itself.
† the most real being.
* The context makes it clear that this Kantian-sounding term is not being employed in the sense of Kant’s twelve a priori ‘categories’, but simply to mean the faculty of reasoning.
* the truth = Wahrheit, corresponding to wahre Welt = real world.
† i.e. Kantian, from the northerly German city in which Kant was born and in which he lived and died.
‡ Here meaning empiricism, philosophy founded on observation and experiment.
* Zarathustra begins.
* The passions must be killed.
* The abbey at Soligny from which the Trappist order – characterized by the severity of its discipline – takes its name.
* Behold the man!
* In Kant’s philosophy the causes of sensations are called ‘things in themselves’. The thing in itself is unknowable: the sensations we actually experience are produced by the operation of our subjective mental apparatus.
† ugly shameful part.
* first cause.
* Nietzsche introduced this term in Towards a Genealogy of Morals I 11: it means man considered as an animal, and the first use of the term is immediately followed by a reference to ‘the Roman, Arab, Teutonic, Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings’ and to the Athenians of the age of Pericles as examples of men ‘the animal’ in whom ‘has to get out again, has to go back to the wilderness.’
* The ‘untouchables’ excluded from the caste system.
* This is one of the major themes of The Anti-Christ.
† pious fraud.
* beer.
* A philosophical term meaning an explanation of something adequate to explaining it fully. Schopenhauer’s doctoral thesis was On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and Nietzsche sometimes (as here) uses the term in a humorously inappropriate context.
* beauty is for the few.
* in natural dirtiness.
† Der Trompeter von Säckingen (1853) by Joseph Viktor von Scheffel once enjoyed huge popularity in Germany; Viktor Nessler’s opera based on it (1844) was also a popular success.
‡ oder die Schule der Geläufigkeit – nach Weibern. The joke is untranslatable: or the school of Geläufigkeit – after women. ‘Geläufigkeit’ means facility, skill (referring to Lizst’s virtuosity as a pianist), but its root is ‘laufen’ = to run; and ‘läufisch’ means, among other things, lecherous.
§ milk in abundance.
* scandal.
† The headquarters in Paris of Jansenism, the doctrine that the human will is constitutionally incapable of goodness, and that salvation is therefore by free and undeserved grace. Sainte-Beuve wrote a celebrated history (1840–59) of the intellectual movement which grew up around Port-Royal.
* The Imitation of Christ, a famous work attributed to the German mystic Thomas à Kempis (1379–1471).
† das Ewig-Weibliche, Goethe’s coinage in the last lines of Faust (‘The eternal-feminine draws us aloft’), is often the object of Nietzsche’s mockery, apparently because he cannot see any meaning in it.
* petty facts.
* In The Birth of Tragedy.
* I am my own successor.
†… that worthy gentleman who, returning from an amorous rendezvous as if things had gone well, said gratefully: ‘Though the power be lacking, the lust is praiseworthy.’ ‘Voluptas’ replaces the usual ‘voluntas’ = will.
* Refers to the last lines of Luther’s hymn ‘Ein’ feste Burg’– where, however, what is to be let depart is the things of this world and the Reich means the kingdom of Heaven.
* Schön and hässlich is the German translation of Macbeth’s witches’ ‘fair and foul’.
† Fragmentary sketches by Nietzsche published after his death, i.e. long after this reference to them.
* intellectual love of God.
† Art for art’s sake.
* The opening line of Tamino’s aria in Mozart’s The Magic Flute.
† children or books.
‡ I shall look at myself, I shall read myself, I shall delight myself and I shall say: Can I really have had so much wit?
* ochsen: to work hard, slave – also to cram, study hard.
† In Goethe’s Faust, Part I, Scene 3.
‡ The seat of the Wagner Festival.
§ Parsifal, eponymous hero of Wagner’s last opera, is described as a pure, i.e. chaste, fool (reine Tor) whose naïvety is proof against temptation of every kind. Nietzsche considered the plot of Parsifal preposterous and persistently uses the phrase ‘reine Torheit’ (pure folly) in the sense of complete folly.
* shameful part.
* pure, raw.
* Sehr verbunden! – a play on the name of the ‘Bund’.
* Alludes to Max von Schenkendorf’s poem ‘Freiheit, die ich meine’ (Freedom as I mean it).
* Quotation from the closing scene of Faust, Part Two.
† It is unworthy of great spirits to spread abroad the agitation they feel.
* in respect of tactics.
* Refers to Goethe’s Venetian Epigrams, in which the Cross is one of four things Goethe says he cannot endure.
† i.e. the Revaluation of all Values.
* more enduring than brass.
* Menippus (third century BC), of the Cynic school of philosophy, produced a number of satires no longer extant.
* From the title of Book VII of Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship: ‘Confessions of a Beautiful Soul’.
† German foolishness.
* For Nietzsche’s theory that all events recur eternally and its emotional significance in providing the most extreme formula of life-affirmation, see Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part III (‘Of the Vision and the Riddle’, ‘The Convalescent’ and ‘The Seven Seals’) and Part IV (‘The Intoxicated Song’).
*From Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part III, ‘Of Old and New Law-Tables’, with minor variants.
* In Greek mythology a race dwelling beyond the north wind (Boreas) in a country of warmth and plenty.
* original sin.
† A famous theological college in Swabia.
* ‘Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a general natural law’ is one of the definitions of the ‘categorical imperative’ in Kant’s Metaphysic of Morals.
* The highest or priestly caste in the Hindu system,
† ‘Charity’ is in the Lutheran Bible rendered by the word ‘love’ (‘Liebe’).
* condition.
* characteristic.
* ‘That is as fitting as a fist in the eye’ is a German idiom meaning a complete unlikeness between two things – ‘alike as chalk and cheese’.
† Amphitryon’s wife Alcmene refused to sleep with him until he had revenged the death of her brothers; while Amphitryon was away engaged on this task his still virgin bride was seduced by Zeus and subsequently gave birth to Heracles.
* Matthew vi, 28–30.
* God, as Paul created him, is a denial of God.
† ‘The Law’ in Paul’s usage of the word.
* From a famous line in Schiller’s Maid of Orleans:‘Against stupidity the gods themselves fight in vain.’
* To the greater honour of God.
* undecisiveness.
* ‘Fingerfertigkeit’ plays upon ‘finger of God’.
* Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part III, ‘Of the Priests’.
* I Corinthians vii, 2 and 9.
* A phrase from Goethe’s Elective Affinities.
* ‘The eternal Jew’ is also the German form of the Wandering Jew.