Twilight of Idols and Anti-Christ

by Nietzsche, Friedrich

  44

  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. – That they have very different ideas on this subject in France today (in Germany too, but that is of no consequence), that there the theory of milieu, a real neurotic’s theory, has become sacrosanct and almost scientific and finds credence even among physiologists – that fact has an ‘ill odour’ and gives one sadly to think. – The same ideas are believed in England too, but no one will lose any sleep over that. The Englishman has only two possible ways of coming to terms with the genius and ‘great man’: either the democratic way in the manner of Buckle or the religious way in the manner of Carlyle. – 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. –

  45

  The criminal and what is related to him. – The criminal type is the type of the strong human being under unfavourable conditions, a strong human being made sick. What he lacks is the wilderness, a certain freer and more perilous nature and form of existence in which all that is attack and defence in the instinct of the strong human being comes into its own. His virtues have been excommunicated by society; the liveliest drives within him forthwith blend with the depressive emotions, with suspicion, fear, dishonour. But this is almost the recipe for physiological degeneration. He who has to do in secret what he does best and most likes to do, with protracted tension, caution, slyness, becomes anaemic; and because he has never harvested anything from his instincts but danger, persecution, disaster, his feelings too turn against these instincts – he feels them to be a fatality. It is society, our tame, mediocre, gelded society, in which a human being raised in nature, who comes from the mountains or from adventures of the sea, necessarily degenerates into a criminal. Or almost necessarily: for there are cases in which such a human being proves stronger than society: the Corsican Napoleon is the most famous case. In regard to the problem before us the testimony of Dostoyevsky is of importance – Dostoyevsky, the only psychologist, by the way, from whom I had anything to learn: he is one of the happiest accidents of my life, even more so than my discovery of Stendhal. This profound human being, who was ten times justified in despising the superficial Germans, found the Siberian convicts in whose midst he lived for a long time, nothing but the worst criminals for whom no return to society was possible, very different from what he himself had expected – he found them to be carved out of about the best, hardest and most valuable timber growing anywhere on Russian soil. Let us generalize the case of the criminal: let us think of natures which, for whatever reason, lack public approval, which know they are not considered beneficial or useful, that Chandala feeling that one is considered not an equal but as thrust out, as unworthy, as a source of pollution. The colour of the subterranean is on the thoughts and actions of such natures; everything in them becomes paler than in those upon whose existence the light of day reposes. But virtually every form of existence which we treat with distinction today formerly lived in this semi-gravelike atmosphere: the scientific nature, the artist, the genius, the free spirit, the actor, the merchant, the great discoverer.… As long as the priest was considered the highest type every valuable kind of human being was disvalued.… The time is coming – I promise it – when he will be considered the lowest, as our Chandala, as the most mendacious, as the most indecent kind of human being.… I draw attention to the fact that even now, under the mildest rule of custom which has ever obtained on earth or at any rate in Europe, every kind of apartness, every protracted, all too protracted keeping under, every uncommon, untransparent form of existence, brings men close to that type of which the criminal is the perfection. 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. –

  46

  Here is the prospect free.* – When a philosopher keeps silent, it can be loftiness of soul; when he contradicts himself, it can be love; a politeness which tells lies is possible in men of knowledge. Not without subtlety was it said: il est indigne des grands coeurs de répandre le trouble qu’ils ressentent:† only one has to add that not to fear the unworthiest things can likewise be greatness of soul. A woman who loves sacrifices her honour; a man of knowledge who ‘loves’ sacrifices perhaps his humanity; a god who loved became a Jew…

  47

  Beauty no accident. – Even the beauty of a race or a family, the charm and benevolence of their whole demeanour, is earned by labour: like genius, it is the final result of the accumulatory labour of generations. One must have made great sacrifices to good taste, one must for its sake have done many things, left many things undone – the French seventeenth century is admirable in both – one must have possessed in it a selective principle in respect of one’s society, residence, dress, sexual gratification, one must have preferred beauty to advantage, habit, opinion, indolence. Supreme rule of conduct: even when alone one must not ‘let oneself go’. – Good things are costly beyond measure: and the law still holds that he who has them is different from him who obtains them. Everything good is inheritance: what is not inherited is imperfect, is a beginning…. In Athens at the time of Cicero, who expressed his surprise at it, the men and youths were of far superior beauty to the women: but what labour and exertion in the service of beauty the male sex of that place had for centuries demanded of themselves! – For one must not mistake the method involved here: a mere disciplining of thoughts and feelings is virtually nothing (– here lies the great mistake of German culture, which i
s totally illusory): one first has to convince the body. The strict maintenance of a significant and select demeanour, an obligation to live only among men who do not ‘let themselves go’, completely suffices for becoming significant and select: in two or three generations everything is already internalized. 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. –

  48

  Progress in my sense. – I too speak of a ‘return to nature’, although it is not really a going-back but a going-up – up into a high, free, even frightful nature and naturalness, such as plays with great tasks, is permitted to play with them…. To speak in a parable: Napoleon was a piece of ‘return to nature’ as I understand it (for example in rebus tacticis* even more, as military men know, in strategy). – But Rousseau – where did he really want to return to? Rousseau, this first modern man, idealist, and canaille in one person; who needed moral ‘dignity’ in order to endure his own aspect; sick with unbridled vanity and unbridled self-contempt. Even this abortion recumbent on the threshold of the new age wanted a ‘return to nature’ – where, to ask it again, did Rousseau want to return to? – I hate Rousseau even in the Revolution: it is the world-historical expression of this duplicity of idealist and canaille. The bloody farce enacted by this Revolution, its ‘immorality’, does not concern me much: what I hate is its Rousseauesque morality – the so-called ‘truths’ of the Revolution through which it is still an active force and persuades everything shallow and mediocre over to its side. 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…

  49

  Goethe – not a German event but a European one: a grand attempt to overcome the eighteenth century through a return to nature, through a going-up to the naturalness of the Renaissance, a kind of self-overcoming on the part of that century. – He bore within him its strongest instincts: sentimentality, nature-idolatry, the anti-historical, the idealistic, the unreal and revolutionary (– the last is only a form of the unreal). He called to his aid history, the natural sciences, antiquity, likewise Spinoza, above all practical activity; he surrounded himself with nothing but closed horizons; he did not sever himself from life, he placed himself within it; nothing could discourage him and he took as much as possible upon himself, above himself, within himself. What he aspired to was totality; he strove against the separation of reason, sensuality, feeling, will (– preached in the most horrible scholasticism by Kant, the antipodes of Goethe); he disciplined himself to a whole, he created himself…. Goethe was, in an epoch disposed to the unreal, a convinced realist: he affirmed everything which was related to him in this respect – he had no greater experience than that ens realissimum called Napoleon. Goethe conceived of a strong, highly cultured human being, skilled in all physical accomplishments, who, keeping himself in check and having reverence for himself, dares to allow himself the whole compass and wealth of naturalness, who is strong enough for this freedom; a man of tolerance, not out of weakness, but out of strength, because he knows how to employ to his advantage what would destroy an average nature; a man to whom nothing is forbidden, except it be weakness, whether that weakness be called vice or virtue…. A spirit thus emancipated stands in the midst of the universe with a joyful and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only what is separate and individual may be rejected, that in the totality everything is redeemed and affirmed – he no longer denies…. But such a faith is the highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name Dionysos. –

  50

  One could say that in a certain sense the nineteenth century has also striven for what Goethe as a person strove for: universality in the understanding and affirmation, amenability to experience of whatever kind, reckless realism, reverence for everything factual. How does it happen that the total result is not a Goethe but a chaos, a nihilistic sigh, a not knowing which way to turn, an instinct of weariness which in praxi continually tries to reach back to the eighteenth century? (– for example as romanticism of feeling, as altruism and hyper-sentimentality, as feminism in taste, as Socialism in politics). Is the nineteenth century, especially in its closing decades, not merely a strengthened, brutalized eighteenth century, that is to say a century of décadence? So that Goethe would have been, not merely for Germany but for all Europe, merely an episode, a beautiful ‘in vain’? – But one misunderstands great human beings if one views them from the paltry perspective of public utility. That one does not know how to make any use of it perhaps even pertains to greatness…

  51

  Goethe is the last German before whom I feel reverence: he would have felt three things which I feel – we are also in agreement over the ‘Cross’.* I am often asked why it is I write in German: nowhere am I worse read than in the Fatherland. But who knows, after all, whether I even wish to be read today? – To create things upon which time tries its teeth in vain; in form and in substance to strive after a little immortality – I have never been modest enough to demand less of myself. The aphorism, the apophthegm, in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of ‘eternity’; 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.† –

  What I Owe to the Ancients

  1

  In conclusion, a word on that world into which I have sought to find a way, into which I have perhaps found a new way – the ancient world. My taste, which may be called the opposite of a tolerant taste, is even here far from uttering a wholesale Yes: in general it dislikes saying Yes, it would rather say No, most of all it prefers to say nothing at all…. This applies to entire cultures, it applies to books – it also applies to towns and countrysides. It is really only quite a small number of books of antiquity which count for anything in my life; the most famous are not among them. My sense of style, of the epigram as style, was awoken almost instantaneously on coming into contact with Sallust. I have not forgotten the astonishment of my honoured teacher Corssen when he had to give top marks to his worst Latin scholar – I had done all in a single blow. Compact, severe, with as much substance as possible, a cold malice towards ‘fine words’, also towards ‘fine feelings’ – in that I knew myself. One will recognize in my writings, even in my Zarathustra, a very serious ambition for Roman style, for the ‘aera perennius’* in style. – I had the same experience on first coming into contact with Horace. From that day to this no poet has given me the same artistic delight as I derived from the very first from an Horatian ode. In certain languages what is achieved here is not even desirable. This mosaic of words in which every word, as sound, as locus, as concept, pours forth its power to left and right and over the whole, this minimum in the range and number of signs which achieves a maximum of energy of these signs – all this is Roman and, if one will believe me, noble par excellence. All other poetry becomes by comparison somewhat too popular – a mere emotional garrulousness…

  2

  I received absolutely no such strong
impressions from the Greeks; and, not to mince words, they cannot be to us what the Romans are. One does not learn from the Greeks – their manner is too strange, it is also too fluid to produce an imperative, a ‘classical’ effect. Who would ever have learned to write from a Greek! Who would ever have learned it without the Romans!… Let no one offer me Plato as an objection. In respect to Plato I am a thorough sceptic and have always been unable to join in the admiration of Plato the artist which is traditional among scholars. After all, I have here the most refined judges of taste of antiquity themselves on my side. It seems to me that Plato mixes together all forms of style; he is therewith in the matter of style a first décadent: he has on his conscience something similar to the Cynics who devised the Satura Menippea.* For the Platonic dialogue, that frightfully self-satisfied and childish kind of dialectics, to operate as a stimulus one must never have read any good French writers – Fontenelle, for example. 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. It has cost us dear that this Athenian went to school with the Egyptians (– or with the Jews in Egypt?…). In the great fatality of Christianity, Plato is that ambiguity and fascination called the ‘ideal’ which made it possible for the nobler natures of antiquity to misunderstand themselves and to step on to the bridge which led to the ‘Cross’…. And how much there still is of Plato in the concept ‘Church’, in the structure, system, practice of the Church! – 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…