Twilight of Idols and Anti-Christ (Penguin Classics)

by Friedrich Nietzsche

  18.He who does not know how to put his will into things at least puts a meaning into them: that is, he believes there is a will in them already (principle of ‘belief’).

  19.What? you have chosen virtue and the heaving bosom, yet at the same time look with envy on the advantages enjoyed by those who live for the day? – But with virtue one renounces ‘advantage’… (laid at the door of an anti-Semite).

  20. The complete woman perpetrates literature in the same way as she perpetrates a little sin: as an experiment, in passing, looking around to see if someone notices and so that someone may notice…

  21. To get into only those situations in which illusory virtues are of no use, but in which, like the tightrope-walker on his rope, one either falls or stands – or gets off…

  22. ‘Bad men have no songs’.* – How is it the Russians have songs?

  23. ‘German spirit’:† for eighteen years‡ a contradictio in adjecto.§

  24. In order to look for beginners one becomes a crab. The historian looks backwards; at last he also believes backwards.

  25. Contentment protects one even from catching a cold. Has a woman who knew she was well dressed ever caught a cold? – I am assuming she was hardly dressed at all.

  26. I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.

  27. Women are considered deep – why? because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women are not even shallow.

  28. If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her; and if she does not possess them she runs away herself.

  29. ‘How much the conscience formerly had to bite on! || what good teeth it had! – And today? what’s the trouble?’ – A dentist’s question.

  30. One seldom commits only one rash act. In the first rash act one always does too much. For just that reason one usually commits a second – and then one does too little…

  31. 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. –

  32. Hatred of lies and dissembling may arise out of a sensitive notion of honour; the same hatred may arise out of cowardice, in as much as lying is forbidden by divine command. Too cowardly to tell lies…

  33. How little is needed for happiness! The note of a bagpipe. – Without music life would be a mistake. The German even thinks of God as singing songs.†

  34. On ne peut penser et écrire qu’assis ‡ (G. Flaubert). – Now I have you, nihilist! Assiduity§ is the sin against the holy spirit. Only ideas won by walking have any value.

  35. There are times when we are like horses, we psychologists, and grow restive: we see our own shadow moving up and down before us. The psychologist has to look away from himself in order to see at all.

  36. Whether we immoralists do virtue any harm? – As little as anarchists do princes. Only since they have been shot at do they again sit firmly on their thrones. Moral: one must shoot at morals.

  37. You run on ahead? – Do you do so as a herdsman? or as an exception? A third possibility would be as a deserter.… First question of conscience.

  38. Are you genuine? or only an actor? A representative? or that itself which is represented? – Finally you are no more than an imitation of an actor.… Second question of conscience.

  39. The disappointed man speaks. – I sought great human beings, I never found anything but the apes of their ideal.

  40. Are you one who looks on? or who sets to work? – or who looks away, turns aside.… Third question of conscience.

  41. Do you want to accompany? or go on ahead? or go off alone?… One must know what one wants and that one wants. – Fourth question of conscience.

  42. For me they were steps, I have climbed up upon them – therefore I had to pass over them. But they thought I wanted to settle down on them…

  43. What does it matter that I am proved right! I am too much in the right. – And he who laughs best today will also laugh last.

  44. Formula of my happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal…

  The Problem of Socrates

  1

  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?…

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  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).*. That consensus sapientium – I saw more and more clearly – proves least of all that they were right about what they were in accord over: it proves rather that they themselves, these wisest men, were in some way in physiological accord since they stood – had to stand – in the same negative relation to life. Judgements, value judgements concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms – in themselves such judgements are stupidities. One must reach out and try to grasp this astonishing finesse, that the value of life cannot be estimated. Not by a living man, because he is a party to the dispute, indeed its object, and not the judge of it; not by a dead one, for another reason. – For a philosopher to see a problem in the value of life thus even constitutes an objection to him, a question-mark as to his wisdom, a piece of unwisdom. – What? and all these great wise men – they have not only been décadents, they have not even been wise? – But I shall get back to the problem of Socrates.

  3

  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.† But the criminal is a décadent. Was Socrates a typical criminal? – At least that famous physiognomist’s opinion which Socrates’ friends found so objectionable would not contradict this idea. A foreigner passing through Athens who knew how to read faces told Socrates to his face that he was a monstrum – that he contained within him every kind of foul vice and lust. And Socrates answered merely: ‘You know me, sir!’ –

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  It is not only the admitted dissoluteness and anarchy of his instincts which indicate décadence in Socrates: the superfetation of the logical and that barbed malice which distinguishes him also point in that direction. And let us not forget those auditory hallucinations which, as ‘Socrates’ demon’, have been interpreted in a religious sense. 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.

  5

  With Socr
ates 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?

  6

  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? –

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  – 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?

  8

  I have intimated the way in which Socrates could repel: it is therefore all the more necessary to explain the fact that he exercised fascination. – That he discovered a new kind of agon, that he was the first fencing-master in it for the aristocratic circles of Athens, is one reason. He fascinated because he touched on the agonal instinct of the Hellenes – he introduced a variation into the wrestling-matches among the youths and young men. Socrates was also a great erotic.

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  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 – his expedient, his cure, his personal art of self-preservation.… Everywhere the instincts were in anarchy; everywhere people were but five steps from excess: the monstrum in animo was the universal danger. ‘The instincts want to play the tyrant; we must devise a counter-tyrant who is stronger’.… When that physiognomist had revealed to Socrates what he was, a cave of every evil lust, the great ironist uttered a phrase that provides the key to him. ‘That is true,’ he said, ‘but I have become master of them all.’ How did Socrates become master of himself? – His case was after all only the extreme case, only the most obvious instance of what had at that time begun to be the universal exigency: that no one was any longer master of himself, that the instincts were becoming mutually antagonistic. He exercised fascination as this extreme case – his fear-inspiring ugliness expressed it for every eye to see: he fascinated even more, it goes without saying, as the answer, as the solution, as the apparent cure for this case. –

  10

  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…

  11

  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. –

  12

  – 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…’

  ‘Reason’ in Philosophy

  1

  You ask me about the idiosyncrasies of philosophers?… There is their lack of historical sense, their hatred of even the idea of becoming, their Egyptianism. They think they are doing a thing honour when they dehistoricize it, sub specie aeterni* – when they make a mummy of it. All that philosophers have handled for millennia has been conceptual mummies; nothing actual has escaped from their hands alive. They kill, they stuff, when they worship, these conceptual idolaters – they become a mortal danger to everything when they worship. Death, change, age, as well as procreation and growth, are for them objections – refutations even. What is, does not become; what becomes, is not.… 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. Moral: escape from sense-deception, from becoming, from history, from falsehood – history is nothing but belief in the senses, belief in falsehood. Moral: denial of all that believes in the senses, of all the rest of mankind: all of that is mere “people”. Be a philosopher, be a mummy, represent monotono-theism by a gravedigger-mimicry! – And away, above all, with the body, that pitiable idée fixe of the senses! infected with every error of logic there is, refuted, impossible even, notwithstanding it is impudent enough to behave as if it actually existed!’…

  2

  I set apart with high reverence the name of Heraclitus. When the rest of the philosopher crowd rejected the evidence of the senses because these showed plurality and change, he rejected their evidence because they showed things as if they possessed duration and unity. Heraclitus too was unjust to the senses, which lie neither in the way the Eleatics* b
elieve nor as he believed – they do not lie at all. It is what we make of their evidence that first introduces a lie into it, for example the lie of unity, the lie of materiality, of substance, of duration.… ‘Reason’ is the cause of our falsification of the evidence of the senses. In so far as the senses show becoming, passing away, change, they do not lie.… But Heraclitus will always be right in this, that being is an empty fiction. The ‘apparent’ world is the only one: the ‘real’ world has only been lyingly added…

  3

  – And what subtle instruments for observation we possess in our senses! This nose, for example, of which no philosopher has hitherto spoken with respect and gratitude, is none the less the most delicate tool we have at our command: it can detect minimal differences in movement which even the spectroscope cannot detect. We possess scientific knowledge today to precisely the extent that we have decided to accept the evidence of the senses – to the extent that we have learned to sharpen and arm them and to think them through to their conclusions. The rest is abortion and not-yet-science: which is to say metaphysics, theology, psychology, epistemology. Or science of formulae, sign-systems: such as logic and that applied logic, mathematics. In these reality does not appear at all, not even as a problem; just as little as does the question what value a system of conventional signs such as constitutes logic can possibly possess.

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