Datasets:

Augustya07
/

friedrich_nietzsche_books_unsupervised

Dataset card Viewer Files Files and versions Community

Split (2)

train · 740 rows

Text stringlengths 2.43k 4.68k
The plastic artist, as also the epic poet, who is related to him, is sunk in the pure contemplation of pictures. The Dionysian musician is, without any picture, himself just primordial pain and the primordial re-echoing thereof. The lyric genius is conscious of a world of pictures and symbols—growing out of the state of mystical self-abnegation and oneness,—which has a colouring causality and velocity quite different from that of the world of the plastic artist and epic poet. While the latter lives in these pictures, and only in them, with joyful satisfaction, and never grows tired of contemplating them with love, even in their minutest characters, while even the picture of the angry Achilles is to him but a picture, the angry expression of which he enjoys with the dream-joy in appearance—so that, by this mirror of appearance, he is guarded against being uniﬁed and blending with his ﬁgures;— the pictures of the lyrist on the other hand are nothing but his very self and, as it were, only different projections of himself, on account of which he as the moving centre of this world is entitled to say "I": only of course this self is not the same as that of the waking, empirically real man, but the only verily existent and eternal self resting at the basis of things, by means of the images whereof the lyric genius sees through even to this basis of things. Now let us suppose that he beholds himself also among these images as non-genius, i.e., his subject, the whole throng of subjective passions and impulses of the will directed to a deﬁnite object which appears real to him; if now it seems as if the lyric genius and the allied non-genius were one, and as if the former spoke that little word "I" of his own accord, this appearance will no longer be able to lead us astray, as it certainly led those astray who designated the lyrist as the subjective poet. In truth, Archilochus, the passionately inﬂamed, loving and hating man, is but a vision of the genius, who by this time is no longer Archilochus, but a genius of the world, who expresses his primordial pain symbolically in the ﬁgure of the man Archilochus: while the subjectively willing and desiring man, Archilochus, can never at any time be a poet. It is by no means necessary, however, that the lyrist should see nothing but the phenomenon of the man Archilochus before him as a reﬂection of eternal being; and tragedy shows how far the visionary world of the lyrist may depart from this phenomenon, to which, of course, it is most intimately related. Schopenhauer, who did not shut his eyes to the difﬁculty presented by the lyrist in the philosophical contemplation of art, thought he had found a way out of it, on which, however, I cannot accompany him; while he alone, in his profound metaphysics of music, held in his hands the means whereby this difﬁculty could be deﬁnitely removed: as I believe I have removed it here in his spirit and to his honour. In contrast to our view, he describes the peculiar nature of song as follows[4] (Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, I. 295):—"It is the subject of the will, i.e., his own volition, which ﬁlls the consciousness of the singer; often as an unbound and satisﬁed desire (joy), but still more often as a restricted desire (grief), always as an emotion, a passion, or an agitated frame of mind. Besides this, however, and along with it, by the sight of surrounding nature, the singer becomes conscious of himself as the subject of pure will-less knowing, the unbroken, blissful peace of which now appears, in contrast to the stress of desire, which is always restricted and always needy. The feeling of this contrast, this alternation, is really what the song as a whole expresses and what principally constitutes the lyrical state of mind. In it pure knowing comes to us as it were to deliver us from desire and the stress thereof: we follow, but only for an instant; for desire, the remembrance of our personal ends, tears us anew from peaceful contemplation; yet ever again the next beautiful surrounding in which the pure will-less knowledge presents itself to us, allures us away from desire.
Therefore, in song and in the lyrical mood, desire (the personal interest of the ends) and the pure perception of the surrounding which presents itself, are wonderfully mingled with each other; connections between them are sought for and imagined; the subjective disposition, the af- fection of the will, imparts its own hue to the contemplated surrounding, and conversely, the surroundings communicate the reﬂex of their colour to the will. The true song is the expression of the whole of this mingled and divided state of mind." Who could fail to see in this description that lyric poetry is here characterised as an imperfectly attained art, which seldom and only as it were in leaps arrives at its goal, indeed, as a semi-art, the essence of which is said to consist in this, that desire and pure contemplation, i.e., the unæsthetic and the æsthetic condition, are wonderfully mingled with each other? We maintain rather, that this entire antithesis, according to which, as according to some standard of value, Schopenhauer, too, still classiﬁes the arts, the antithesis between the subjective and the objective, is quite out of place in æsthetics, inasmuch as the subject i.e., the desiring individual who furthers his own egoistic ends, can be conceived only as the adversary, not as the origin of art. In so far as the subject is the artist, however, he has already been released from his individual will, and has become as it were the medium, through which the one verily existent Subject celebrates his redemption in appearance. For this one thing must above all be clear to us, to our humiliation and exaltation, that the entire comedy of art is not at all performed, say, for our betterment and culture, and that we are just as little the true authors of this art-world: rather we may assume with regard to ourselves, that its true author uses us as pictures and artistic projections, and that we have our highest dignity in our signiﬁcance as works of art—for only as an æsthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justiﬁed:—while of course our consciousness of this our speciﬁc signiﬁcance hardly differs from the kind of consciousness which the soldiers painted on canvas have of the battle represented thereon. Hence all our knowledge of art is at bottom quite illusory, because, as knowing persons we are not one and identical with the Being who, as the sole author and spectator of this comedy of art, prepares a perpetual entertainment for himself. Only in so far as the genius in the act of artistic production coalesces with this primordial artist of the world, does he get a glimpse of the eternal essence of art, for in this state he is, in a marvellous manner, like the weird picture of the fairy-tale which can at will turn its eyes and behold itself; he is now at once subject and object, at once poet, actor, and spectator. [4] World as Will and Idea, I. 323, 4th ed. of Haldane and Kemp's translation. Quoted with a few changes. 6. With reference to Archilochus, it has been established by critical research that he introduced the folk-song into literature, and, on account thereof, deserved, according to the general estimate of the Greeks, his unique position alongside of Homer. But what is this popular folk-song in contrast to the wholly Apollonian epos? What else but the perpetuum vestigium of a union of the Apollonian and the Dionysian? Its enormous diffusion among all peoples, still further enhanced by ever new births, testiﬁes to the power of this artistic double impulse of nature: which leaves its vestiges in the popular song in like manner as the orgiastic movements of a people perpetuate themselves in its music. Indeed, one might also furnish historical proofs, that every period which is highly productive in popular songs has been most violently stirred by Dionysian currents, which we must always regard as the substratum and prerequisite of the popular song. First of all, however, we regard the popular song as the musical mirror of the world, as the Original melody, which now seeks for itself a parallel dream-phenomenon and expresses it in poetry. Melody is therefore primary and universal, and as such may admit of several objectivations, in several texts. Likewise, in the naïve estimation of the people, it is regarded as by far the more important and necessary. Melody generates the poem out of itself by an ever-recurring process.
The strophic form of the popular song points to the same phenomenon, which I always beheld with astonishment, till at last I found this explanation. Any one who in accordance with this theory examines a collection of popular songs, such as "Des Knaben Wunderhorn," will ﬁnd innumerable instances of the perpetually productive melody scattering picture sparks all around: which in their variegation, their abrupt change, their mad precipitance, manifest a power quite unknown to the epic appearance and its steady ﬂow. From the point of view of the epos, this unequal and irregular pictorial world of lyric poetry must be simply con- demned: and the solemn epic rhapsodists of the Apollonian festivals in the age of Terpander have certainly done so. Accordingly, we observe that in the poetising of the popular song, language is strained to its utmost to imitate music; and hence a new world of poetry begins with Archilochus, which is fundamentally opposed to the Homeric. And in saying this we have pointed out the only possible relation between poetry and music, between word and tone: the word, the picture, the concept here seeks an expression analogous to music and now experiences in itself the power of music. In this sense we may discriminate between two main currents in the history of the language of the Greek people, according as their language imitated either the world of phenomena and of pictures, or the world of music. One has only to reﬂect seriously on the linguistic difference with regard to colour, syntactical structure, and vocabulary in Homer and Pindar, in order to comprehend the signiﬁcance of this contrast; indeed, it becomes palpably clear to us that in the period between Homer and Pindar the orgiastic ﬂute tones of Olympus must have sounded forth, which, in an age as late as Aristotle's, when music was inﬁnitely more developed, transported people to drunken enthusiasm, and which, when their inﬂuence was ﬁrst felt, undoubtedly incited all the poetic means of expression of contemporaneous man to imitation. I here call attention to a familiar phenomenon of our own times, against which our æsthetics raises many objections. We again and again have occasion to observe how a symphony of Beethoven compels the individual hearers to use ﬁgurative speech, though the appearance presented by a collocation of the different pictorial world generated by a piece of music may be never so fantastically diversiﬁed and even contradictory. To practise its small wit on such compositions, and to overlook a phenomenon which is certainly worth explaining, is quite in keeping with this æsthetics. Indeed, even if the tone-poet has spoken in pictures concerning a composition, when for instance he designates a certain symphony as the "pastoral" symphony, or a passage therein as "the scene by the brook," or another as the "merry gathering of rustics," these are likewise only symbolical representations born out of music—and not perhaps the imitated objects of music—representations which can give us no information whatever concerning the Dionysian content of music, and which in fact have no distinctive value of their own alongside of other pictorical expressions. This process of a discharge of music in pictures we have now to transfer to some youthful, linguistically productive people, to get a notion as to how the strophic popular song originates, and how the entire faculty of speech is stimulated by this new principle of imitation of music. If, therefore, we may regard lyric poetry as the effulguration of music in pictures and concepts, we can now ask: "how does music appear in the mirror of symbolism and conception?" It appears as will, taking the word in the Schopenhauerian sense, i.e., as the antithesis of the æsthetic, purely contemplative, and passive frame of mind. Here, however, we must discriminate as sharply as possible between the concept of essentiality and the concept of phenominality; for music, according to its essence, cannot be will, because as such it would have to be wholly banished from the domain of art —for the will is the unæsthetic-in-itself;—yet it appears as will. For in order to express the phenomenon of music in pictures, the lyrist requires all the stirrings of passion, from the whispering of infant desire to the roaring of madness. Under the impulse to speak of music in Apollonian symbols, he conceives of all nature, and himself therein, only as the eternally willing, desiring, longing existence.
But in so far as he interprets music by means of pictures, he himself rests in the quiet calm of Apollonian contemplation, however much all around him which he beholds through the medium of music is in a state of confused and violent motion. Indeed, when he beholds himself through this same medium, his own image appears to him in a state of unsatisﬁed feeling: his own willing, longing, moaning and rejoicing are to him symbols by which he interprets music. Such is the phenomenon of the lyrist: as Apollonian genius he interprets music through the image of the will, while he himself, completely released from the avidity of the will, is the pure, undimmed eye of day. Our whole disquisition insists on this, that lyric poetry is dependent on the spirit of music just as music itself in its absolute sovereignty does not require the picture and the concept, but only endures them as accompaniments. The poems of the lyrist can express nothing which has not already been contained in the vast universality and absoluteness of the music which compelled him to use ﬁgurative speech. By no means is it possible for language adequately to render the cosmic symbolism of music, for the very reason that music stands in symbolic relation to the primordial contradiction and primordial pain in the heart of the Primordial Unity, and therefore symbolises a sphere which is above all appearance and before all phenomena. Rather should we say that all phenomena, compared with it, are but symbols: hence language, as the organ and symbol of phenomena, cannot at all disclose the innermost essence, of music; language can only be in superﬁcial contact with music when it attempts to imitate music; while the profoundest signiﬁcance of the latter cannot be brought one step nearer to us by all the eloquence of lyric poetry. 7. We shall now have to avail ourselves of all the principles of art hitherto considered, in order to ﬁnd our way through the labyrinth, as we must designate the origin of Greek tragedy. I shall not be charged with absurdity in saying that the problem of this origin has as yet not even been seriously stated, not to say solved, however often the ﬂuttering tatters of ancient tradition have been sewed together in sundry combinations and torn asunder again. This tradition tells us in the most unequivocal terms, that tragedy sprang from the tragic chorus, and was originally only chorus and nothing but chorus: and hence we feel it our duty to look into the heart of this tragic chorus as being the real proto-drama, without in the least contenting ourselves with current art-phraseology—according to which the chorus is the ideal spectator, or represents the people in contrast to the regal side of the scene. The latter explanatory notion, which sounds sublime to many a politician—that the immutable moral law was embodied by the democratic Athenians in the popular chorus, which always carries its point over the passionate excesses and extravagances of kings—may be ever so forcibly suggested by an observation of Aristotle: still it has no bearing on the original formation of tragedy, inasmuch as the entire antithesis of king and people, and, in general, the whole politico-social sphere, is excluded from the purely religious beginnings of tragedy; but, considering the well-known classical form of the chorus in Æschylus and Sophocles, we should even deem it blasphemy to speak here of the anticipation of a "constitutional representation of the people," from which blasphemy others have not shrunk, however. The ancient governments knew of no constitutional representation of the people in praxi, and it is to be hoped that they did not even so much as "anticipate" it in tragedy. Much more celebrated than this political explanation of the chorus is the notion of A. W. Schlegel, who advises us to regard the chorus, in a manner, as the essence and extract of the crowd of spectators,—as the "ideal spectator." This view when compared with the historical tradition that tragedy was originally only chorus, reveals itself in its true character, as a crude, unscientiﬁc, yet brilliant assertion, which, however, has acquired its brilliancy only through its concentrated form of expression, through the truly Germanic bias in favour of whatever is called "ideal," and through our momentary astonishment.
For we are indeed astonished the moment we compare our well-known theatrical public with this chorus, and ask ourselves if it could ever be possible to idealise something analogous to the Greek chorus out of such a public. We tacitly deny this, and now wonder as much at the boldness of Schlegel's assertion as at the totally different nature of the Greek public. For hitherto we always believed that the true spectator, be he who he may, had always to remain conscious of having before him a work of art, and not an empiric reality: whereas the tragic chorus of the Greeks is compelled to recognise real beings in the ﬁgures of the stage. The chorus of the Oceanides really believes that it sees before it the Titan Prometheus, and considers itself as real as the god of the scene. And are we to own that he is the highest and purest type of spectator, who, like the Oceanides, regards Prometheus as real and present in body? And is it characteristic of the ideal spectator that he should run on the stage and free the god from his torments? We had believed in an æsthetic public, and considered the individual spectator the better qualiﬁed the more he was capable of viewing a work of art as art, that is, æsthetically; but now the Schlegelian expression has intimated to us, that the perfect ideal spectator does not at all suffer the world of the scenes to act æsthetically on him, but corporeo-empirically. Oh, these Greeks! we have sighed; they will upset our æsthetics! But once accustomed to it, we have reiterated the saying of Schlegel, as often as the subject of the chorus has been broached. But the tradition which is so explicit here speaks against Schlegel: the chorus as such, without the stage,—the primitive form of tragedy,—and the chorus of ideal spectators do not harmonise. What kind of art would that be which was extracted from the concept of the spectator, and whereof we are to regard the "spectator as such" as the true form? The spectator without the play is something absurd. We fear that the birth of tragedy can be explained neither by the high esteem for the moral intelligence of the multitude nor by the concept of the spectator without the play; and we regard the problem as too deep to be even so much as touched by such superﬁcial modes of contemplation. An inﬁnitely more valuable insight into the signiﬁcation of the chorus had already been displayed by Schiller in the celebrated Preface to his Bride of Messina, where he regarded the chorus as a living wall which tragedy draws round herself to guard her from contact with the world of reality, and to preserve her ideal domain and poetical freedom. It is with this, his chief weapon, that Schiller combats the ordinary conception of the natural, the illusion ordinarily required in dramatic poetry. He contends that while indeed the day on the stage is merely artiﬁcial, the architecture only symbolical, and the metrical dialogue purely ideal in character, nevertheless an erroneous view still prevails in the main: that it is not enough to tolerate merely as a poetical license that which is in reality the essence of all poetry. The introduction of the chorus is, he says, the decisive step by which war is declared openly and honestly against all naturalism in art.—It is, methinks, for disparaging this mode of contemplation that our would-be superior age has coined the disdainful catchword "pseudo-idealism." I fear, however, that we on the other hand with our present worship of the natural and the real have landed at the nadir of all idealism, namely in the region of cabinets of wax-ﬁgures. An art indeed exists also here, as in certain novels much in vogue at present: but let no one pester us with the claim that by this art the Schiller-Goethian "Pseudo-idealism" has been vanquished. It is indeed an "ideal" domain, as Schiller rightly perceived, upon— which the Greek satyric chorus, the chorus of primitive tragedy, was wont to walk, a domain raised far above the actual path of mortals. The Greek framed for this chorus the suspended scaffolding of a ﬁctitious natural state and placed thereon ﬁctitious natural beings. It is on this foundation that tragedy grew up, and so it could of course dispense from the very ﬁrst with a painful portrayal of reality.
Yet it is, not an arbitrary world placed by fancy betwixt heaven and earth; rather is it a world possessing the same reality and trustworthiness that Olympus with its dwellers possessed for the believ- ing Hellene. The satyr, as being the Dionysian chorist, lives in a religiously acknowledged reality under the sanction of the myth and cult. That tragedy begins with him, that the Dionysian wisdom of tragedy speaks through him, is just as surprising a phenomenon to us as, in general, the derivation of tragedy from the chorus. Perhaps we shall get a starting-point for our inquiry, if I put forward the proposition that the satyr, the ﬁctitious natural being, is to the man of culture what Dionysian music is to civilisation. Concerning this latter, Richard Wagner says that it is neutralised by music even as lamplight by daylight. In like manner, I believe, the Greek man of culture felt himself neutralised in the presence of the satyric chorus: and this is the most immediate effect of the Dionysian tragedy, that the state and society, and, in general, the gaps between man and man give way to an overwhelming feeling of oneness, which leads back to the heart of nature. The metaphysical comfort,—with which, as I have here intimated, every true tragedy dismisses us—that, in spite of the perpetual change of phenomena, life at bottom is indestructibly powerful and pleasurable, this comfort appears with corporeal lucidity as the satyric chorus, as the chorus of natural beings, who live ineradicable as it were behind all civilisation, and who, in spite of the ceaseless change of generations and the history of nations, remain for ever the same. With this chorus the deep-minded Hellene, who is so singularly qualiﬁed for the most delicate and severe suffering, consoles himself:—he who has glanced with piercing eye into the very heart of the terrible destructive processes of so-called universal history, as also into the cruelty of nature, and is in danger of longing for a Buddhistic negation of the will. Art saves him, and through art life saves him—for herself. For we must know that in the rapture of the Dionysian state, with its annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of existence, there is a lethargic element, wherein all personal experiences of the past are submerged. It is by this gulf of oblivion that the everyday world and the world of Dionysian reality are separated from each other. But as soon as this everyday reality rises again in consciousness, it is felt as such, and nauseates us; an ascetic will-paralysing mood is the fruit of these states. In this sense the Dionysian man may be said to resemble Hamlet: both have for once seen into the true nature of things, —they have perceived, but they are loath to act; for their action cannot change the eternal nature of things; they regard it as shameful or ridiculous that one should require of them to set aright the time which is out of joint. Knowledge kills action, action requires the veil of illusion—it is this lesson which Hamlet teaches, and not the cheap wisdom of John-aDreams who from too much reﬂection, as it were from a surplus of possibilities, does not arrive at action at all. Not reﬂection, no!—true knowledge, insight into appalling truth, preponderates over all motives inciting to action, in Hamlet as well as in the Dionysian man. No comfort avails any longer; his longing goes beyond a world after death, beyond the gods themselves; existence with its glittering reﬂection in the gods, or in an immortal other world is abjured. In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence, he now understands the symbolism in the fate of Ophelia, he now discerns the wisdom of the sylvan god Silenus: and loathing seizes him. Here, in this extremest danger of the will, art approaches, as a saving and healing enchantress; she alone is able to transform these nauseating reﬂections on the awfulness or absurdity of existence into representations wherewith it is possible to live: these are the representations of the sublime as the artistic subjugation of the awful, and the comic as the artistic delivery from the nausea of the absurd. The satyric chorus of dithyramb is the saving deed of Greek art; the paroxysms described above spent their force in the intermediary world of these Dionysian followers. 8.
The satyr, like the idyllic shepherd of our more recent time, is the offspring of a longing after the Primitive and the Natural; but mark with what ﬁrmness and fearlessness the Greek embraced the man of the woods, and again, how coyly and mawkishly the modern man dallied with the ﬂattering picture of a tender, ﬂute-playing, soft-natured shepherd! Nature, on which as yet no knowledge has been at work, which maintains unbroken barriers to culture—this is what the Greek saw in his satyr, which still was not on this account supposed to coincide with the ape. On the contrary: it was the archetype of man, the embodiment of his highest and strongest emotions, as the enthusiastic reveller enraptured By the proximity of his god, as the fellow-suffering companion in whom the suffering of the god repeats itself, as the herald of wisdom speaking from the very depths of nature, as the emblem of the sexual omnipotence of nature, which the Greek was wont to contemplate with reverential awe. The satyr was something sublime and godlike: he could not but appear so, especially to the sad and wearied eye of the Dionysian man. He would have been offended by our spurious trickedup shepherd, while his eye dwelt with sublime satisfaction on the naked and unstuntedly magniﬁcent characters of nature: here the illusion of culture was brushed away from the archetype of man; here the true man, the bearded satyr, revealed himself, who shouts joyfully to his god. Before him the cultured man shrank to a lying caricature. Schiller is right also with reference to these beginnings of tragic art: the chorus is a living bulwark against the onsets of reality, because it—the satyric chorus—portrays existence more truthfully, more realistically, more perfectly than the cultured man who ordinarily considers himself as the only reality. The sphere of poetry does not lie outside the world, like some fantastic impossibility of a poet's imagination: it seeks to be the very opposite, the unvarnished expression of truth, and must for this very reason cast aside the false ﬁnery of that supposed reality of the cultured man. The contrast between this intrinsic truth of nature and the falsehood of culture, which poses as the only reality, is similar to that existing between the eternal kernel of things, the thing in itself, and the collective world of phenomena. And even as tragedy, with its metaphysical comfort, points to the eternal life of this kernel of existence, notwithstanding the perpetual dissolution of phenomena, so the symbolism of the satyric chorus already expresses ﬁguratively this primordial relation between the thing in itself and phenomenon. The idyllic shepherd of the modern man is but a copy of the sum of the illusions of culture which he calls nature; the Dionysian Greek desires truth and nature in their most potent form;—he sees himself metamorphosed into the satyr. The revelling crowd of the votaries of Dionysus rejoices, swayed by such moods and perceptions, the power of which transforms them before their own eyes, so that they imagine they behold themselves as reconstituted genii of nature, as satyrs. The later constitution of the tragic chorus is the artistic imitation of this natural phenomenon, which of course required a separation of the Dionysian spectators from the enchanted Dionysians. However, we must never lose sight of the fact that the public of the Attic tragedy rediscovered itself in the chorus of the orchestra, that there was in reality no antithesis of public and chorus: for all was but one great sublime chorus of dancing and singing satyrs, or of such as allowed themselves to be represented by the satyrs. The Schlegelian observation must here reveal itself to us in a deeper sense. The chorus is the "ideal spectator"[5] in so far as it is the only beholder,[6] the beholder of the visionary world of the scene. A public of spectators, as known to us, was unknown to the Greeks. In their theatres the terraced structure of the spectators' space rising in concentric arcs enabled every one, in the strictest sense, to overlook the entire world of culture around him, and in surfeited contemplation to imagine himself a chorist. According to this view, then, we may call the chorus in its primitive stage in proto-tragedy, a self-mirroring of the Dionysian man: a phenomenon which may be best exempliﬁed by the process of the actor, who, if he be truly gifted, sees hovering before his eyes with almost tangible perceptibility the character he is to represent.
The satyric chorus is ﬁrst of all a vision of the Dionysian throng, just as the world of the stage is, in turn, a vision of the satyric chorus: the power of this vision is great enough to render the eye dull and insensible to the impression of "reality," to the presence of the cultured men occupying the tiers of seats on every side. The form of the Greek theatre reminds one of a lonesome mountain-valley: the architecture of the scene appears like a luminous cloud-picture which the Bacchants swarming on the mountains behold from the heights, as the splendid encirclement in the midst of which the image of Dionysus is revealed to them. Owing to our learned conception of the elementary artistic processes, this artistic proto-phenomenon, which is here introduced to explain the tragic chorus, is almost shocking: while nothing can be more certain than that the poet is a poet only in that he beholds himself surrounded by forms which live and act before him, into the innermost being of which his glance penetrates. By reason of a strange defeat in our capacities, we modern men are apt to represent to ourselves the æsthetic proto-phenomenon as too complex and abstract. For the true poet the metaphor is not a rhetorical ﬁgure, but a vicarious image which actually hovers before him in place of a concept. The character is not for him an aggregate composed of a studied collection of particular traits, but an irrepressibly live person appearing before his eyes, and differing only from the corresponding vision of the painter by its ever continued life and action. Why is it that Homer sketches much more vividly[7] than all the other poets? Because he contemplates[8] much more. We talk so abstractly about poetry, because we are all wont to be bad poets. At bottom the æsthetic phenomenon is simple: let a man but have the faculty of perpetually seeing a lively play and of constantly living surrounded by hosts of spirits, then he is a poet: let him but feel the impulse to transform himself and to talk from out the bodies and souls of others, then he is a dramatist. The Dionysian excitement is able to impart to a whole mass of men this artistic faculty of seeing themselves surrounded by such a host of spirits, with whom they know themselves to be inwardly one. This function of the tragic chorus is the dramatic proto-phenomenon: to see one's self transformed before one's self, and then to act as if one had really entered into another body, into another character. This function stands at the beginning of the development of the drama. Here we have something different from the rhapsodist, who does not blend with his pictures, but only sees them, like the painter, with contemplative eye outside of him; here we actually have a surrender of the individual by his entering into another nature. Moreover this phenomenon appears in the form of an epidemic: a whole throng feels itself metamorphosed in this wise. Hence it is that the dithyramb is essentially different from every other variety of the choric song. The virgins, who with laurel twigs in their hands solemnly proceed to the temple of Apollo and sing a processional hymn, remain what they are and retain their civic names: the dithyrambic chorus is a chorus of transformed beings, whose civic past and social rank are totally forgotten: they have become the timeless servants of their god that live aloof from all the spheres of society. Every other variety of the choric lyric of the Hellenes is but an enormous enhancement of the Apollonian unit-singer: while in the dithyramb we have before us a community of unconscious actors, who mutually regard themselves as transformed among one another. This enchantment is the prerequisite of all dramatic art. In this enchantment the Dionysian reveller sees himself as a satyr, and as satyr he in turn beholds the god, that is, in his transformation he sees a new vision outside him as the Apollonian consummation of his state. With this new vision the drama is complete. According to this view, we must understand Greek tragedy as the Dionysian chorus, which always disburdens itself anew in an Apollonian world of pictures. The choric parts, therefore, with which tragedy is interlaced, are in a manner the mother-womb of the entire so-called dialogue, that is, of the whole stage-world, of the drama proper.
In several successive outbursts does this primordial basis of tragedy beam forth the vision of the drama, which is a dream-phenomenon throughout, and, as such, epic in character: on the other hand, however, as objectivation of a Dionysian state, it does not represent the Apollonian redemption in appearance, but, conversely, the dissolution of the individual and his uniﬁcation with primordial existence. Accordingly, the drama is the Apollonian embodiment of Dionysian perceptions and inﬂuences, and is thereby separated from the epic as by an immense gap. The chorus of Greek tragedy, the symbol of the mass of the people moved by Dionysian excitement, is thus fully explained by our conception of it as here set forth. Whereas, being accustomed to the position of a chorus on the modern stage, especially an operatic chorus, we could never comprehend why the tragic chorus of the Greeks should be older, more primitive, indeed, more important than the "action" proper,—as has been so plainly declared by the voice of tradition; whereas, furthermore, we could not reconcile with this traditional paramount importance and primitiveness the fact of the chorus' being composed only of humble, ministering beings; indeed, at ﬁrst only of goatlike satyrs; whereas, ﬁnally, the orchestra before the scene was always a riddle to us; we have learned to comprehend at length that the scene, together with the action, was fundamentally and originally conceived only as a vision, that the only reality is just the chorus, which of itself generates the vision and speaks thereof with the entire symbolism of dancing, tone, and word. This chorus beholds in the vision its lord and master Dionysus, and is thus for ever the serving chorus: it sees how he, the god, suffers and gloriﬁes himself, and therefore does not itself act. But though its attitude towards the god is throughout the attitude of ministration, this is nevertheless the highest expression, the Dionysian expression of Nature, and therefore, like Nature herself, the chorus utters oracles and wise sayings when transported with enthusiasm: as fellow-sufferer it is also the sage proclaiming truth from out the heart of Nature. Thus, then, originates the fantastic ﬁgure, which seems so shocking, of the wise and enthusiastic satyr, who is at the same time "the dumb man" in contrast to the god: the image of Nature and her strongest impulses, yea, the symbol of Nature, and at the same time the herald of her art and wisdom: musician, poet, dancer, and visionary in one person. Agreeably to this view, and agreeably to tradition, Dionysus, the proper stage-hero and focus of vision, is not at ﬁrst actually present in the oldest period of tragedy, but is only imagined as present: i.e., tragedy is originally only "chorus" and not "drama." Later on the attempt is made to exhibit the god as real and to display the visionary ﬁgure together with its glorifying encirclement before the eyes of all; it is here that the "drama" in the narrow sense of the term begins. To the dithyrambic chorus is now assigned the task of exciting the minds of the hearers to such a pitch of Dionysian frenzy, that, when the tragic hero appears on the stage, they do not behold in him, say, the unshapely masked man, but a visionary ﬁgure, born as it were of their own ecstasy. Let us picture Admetes thinking in profound meditation of his lately departed wife Alcestis, and quite consuming himself in spiritual contemplation thereof—when suddenly the veiled ﬁgure of a woman resembling her in form and gait is led towards him: let us picture his sudden trembling anxiety, his agitated comparisons, his instinctive conviction—and we shall have an analogon to the sensation with which the spectator, excited to Dionysian frenzy, saw the god approaching on the stage, a god with whose sufferings he had already become identiﬁed. He involuntarily transferred the entire picture of the god, ﬂuttering magically before his soul, to this masked ﬁgure and resolved its reality as it were into a phantasmal unreality. This is the Apollonian dream-state, in which the world of day is veiled, and a new world, clearer, more intelligible, more striking than the former, and nevertheless more shadowy, is ever born anew in perpetual change before our eyes.
We accordingly recognise in tragedy a thoroughgoing stylistic contrast: the language, colour, ﬂexibility and dynamics of the dialogue fall apart in the Dionysian lyrics of the chorus on the one hand, and in the Apollonian dream-world of the scene on the other, into entirely separate spheres of expression. The Apollonian appearances, in which Dionysus objectiﬁes himself, are no longer "ein ewiges Meer, ein wechselnd Weben, ein glühend Leben,"[9] as is the music of the chorus, they are no longer the forces merely felt, but not condensed into a picture, by which the inspired votary of Dionysus divines the proximity of his god: the clearness and ﬁrmness of epic form now speak to him from the scene, Dionysus now no longer speaks through forces, but as an epic hero, almost in the language of Homer. [5] Zuschauer. [6] Schauer. [7] Anschaulicher. [8] Anschaut. [9] An eternal sea, A weaving, ﬂowing, Life, all glowing. Faust, trans. of Bayard Taylor.—TR. 9. Whatever rises to the surface in the dialogue of the Apollonian part of Greek tragedy, appears simple, transparent, beautiful. In this sense the dialogue is a copy of the Hellene, whose nature reveals itself in the dance, because in the dance the greatest energy is merely potential, but betrays itself nevertheless in ﬂexible and vivacious movements. The language of the Sophoclean heroes, for instance, surprises us by its Apollonian precision and clearness, so that we at once imagine we see into the innermost recesses of their being, and marvel not a little that the way to these recesses is so short. But if for the moment we disregard the character of the hero which rises to the surface and grows visible—and which at bottom is nothing but the light-picture cast on a dark wall, that is, appearance through and through,—if rather we enter into the myth which projects itself in these bright mirrorings, we shall of a sudden experience a phenomenon which bears a reverse relation to one familiar in optics. When, after a vigorous effort to gaze into the sun, we turn away blinded, we have dark-coloured spots before our eyes as restoratives, so to speak; while, on the contrary, those light-picture phenomena of the Sophoclean hero,—in short, the Apollonian of the mask,—are the necessary productions of a glance into the secret and terrible things of nature, as it were shining spots to heal the eye which dire night has seared. Only in this sense can we hope to be able to grasp the true meaning of the serious and signiﬁcant notion of "Greek cheerfulness"; while of course we encounter the misunderstood notion of this cheerfulness, as resulting from a state of unendangered comfort, on all the ways and paths of the present time. The most sorrowful ﬁgure of the Greek stage, the hapless Œdipus, was understood by Sophocles as the noble man, who in spite of his wisdom was destined to error and misery, but nevertheless through his extraordinary sufferings ultimately exerted a magical, wholesome inﬂuence on all around him, which continues effective even after his death. The noble man does not sin; this is what the thoughtful poet wishes to tell us: all laws, all natural order, yea, the moral world itself, may be destroyed through his action, but through this very action a higher magic circle of inﬂuences is brought into play, which establish a new world on the ruins of the old that has been overthrown. This is what the poet, in so far as he is at the same time a religious thinker, wishes to tell us: as poet, he shows us ﬁrst of all a wonderfully complicated legal mystery, which the judge slowly unravels, link by link, to his own destruction. The truly Hellenic delight at this dialectical loosening is so great, that a touch of surpassing cheerfulness is thereby communicated to the entire play, which everywhere blunts the edge of the horrible presuppositions of the procedure. In the "Œdipus at Colonus" we ﬁnd the same cheerfulness, elevated, however, to an inﬁnite transﬁguration: in contrast to the aged king, subjected to an excess of misery, and exposed solely as a sufferer to all that befalls him, we have here a supermundane cheerfulness, which descends from a divine sphere and intimates to us that in his purely passive attitude the hero attains his highest activity, the inﬂuence of which extends far beyond his life, while his earlier conscious musing and striving led him only to passivity.
Thus, then, the legal knot of the fable of Œdipus, which to mortal eyes appears indissolubly entangled, is slowly unravelled— and the profoundest human joy comes upon us in the presence of this divine counterpart of dialectics. If this explanation does justice to the poet, it may still be asked whether the substance of the myth is thereby exhausted; and here it turns out that the entire conception of the poet is nothing but the light-picture which healing nature holds up to us after a glance into the abyss. Œdipus, the murderer of his father, the husband of his mother, Œdipus, the interpreter of the riddle of the Sphinx! What does the mysterious triad of these deeds of destiny tell us? There is a primitive popular belief, especially in Persia, that a wise Magian can be born only of incest: which we have forthwith to interpret to ourselves with reference to the riddle-solving and mother-marrying Œdipus, to the effect that when the boundary of the present and future, the rigid law of individuation and, in general, the intrinsic spell of nature, are broken by prophetic and magical powers, an extraordinary counter-naturalness—as, in this case, incest—must have preceded as a cause; for how else could one force nature to surrender her secrets but by victoriously opposing her, i.e., by means of the Unnatural? It is this intuition which I see imprinted in the awful triad of the destiny of Œdipus: the very man who solves the riddle of nature—that double-constituted Sphinx—must also, as the murderer of his father and husband of his mother, break the holiest laws of nature. Indeed, it seems as if the myth sought to whisper into our ears that wisdom, especially Dionysian wisdom, is an unnatural abomination, and that whoever, through his knowledge, plunges nature into an abyss of annihilation, must also experience the dissolution of nature in himself. "The sharpness of wisdom turns round upon the sage: wisdom is a crime against nature": such terrible expressions does the myth call out to us: but the Hellenic poet touches like a sunbeam the sublime and formidable Memnonian statue of the myth, so that it suddenly begins to sound—in Sophoclean melodies. With the glory of passivity I now contrast the glory of activity which illuminates the Prometheus of Æschylus. That which Æschylus the thinker had to tell us here, but which as a poet he only allows us to surmise by his symbolic picture, the youthful Goethe succeeded in disclosing to us in the daring words of his Prometheus:— "Hier sitz' ich, forme Menschen Nach meinem Bilde, Ein Geschlecht, das mir gleich sei, Zu leiden, zu weinen, Zu geniessen und zu freuen sich, Und dein nicht zu achten, Wie ich!"[10] Man, elevating himself to the rank of the Titans, acquires his culture by his own efforts, and compels the gods to unite with him, because in his selfsufﬁcient wisdom he has their existence and their limits in his hand. What is most wonderful, however, in this Promethean form, which according to its fundamental conception is the speciﬁc hymn of impiety, is the profound Æschylean yearning for justice: the untold sorrow of the bold "single-handed being" on the one hand, and the divine need, ay, the foreboding of a twi- light of the gods, on the other, the power of these two worlds of suffering constraining to reconciliation, to metaphysical oneness—all this suggests most forcibly the central and main position of the Æschylean view of things, which sees Moira as eternal justice enthroned above gods and men. In view of the astonishing boldness with which Æschylus places the Olympian world on his scales of justice, it must be remembered that the deep-minded Greek had an immovably ﬁrm substratum of metaphysical thought in his mysteries, and that all his sceptical paroxysms could be discharged upon the Olympians. With reference to these deities, the Greek artist, in particular, had an obscure feeling as to mutual dependency: and it is just in the Prometheus of Æschylus that this feeling is symbolised. The Titanic artist found in himself the daring belief that he could create men and at least destroy Olympian deities: namely, by his superior wisdom, for which, to be sure, he had to atone by eternal suffering.
The splendid "caning" of the great genius, bought too cheaply even at the price of eternal suffering, the stern pride of the artist: this is the essence and soul of Æschylean poetry, while Sophocles in his Œdipus preludingly strikes up the victorysong of the saint. But even this interpretation which Æschylus has given to the myth does not fathom its astounding depth of terror; the fact is rather that the artist's delight in unfolding, the cheerfulness of artistic creating bidding deﬁance to all calamity, is but a shining stellar and nebular image reﬂected in a black sea of sadness. The tale of Prometheus is an original possession of the entire Aryan family of races, and documentary evidence of their capacity for the profoundly tragic; indeed, it is not improbable that this myth has the same characteristic signiﬁcance for the Aryan race that the myth of the fall of man has for the Semitic, and that there is a relationship between the two myths like that of brother and sister. The presupposition of the Promethean myth is the transcendent value which a naïve humanity attach to ﬁre as the true palladium of every ascending culture: that man, however, should dispose at will of this ﬁre, and should not receive it only as a gift from heaven, as the igniting lightning or the warming solar ﬂame, appeared to the contemplative primordial men as crime and robbery of the divine nature. And thus the ﬁrst philosophical problem at once causes a painful, irreconcilable antagonism between man and God, and puts as it were a mass of rock at the gate of every culture. The best and highest that men can acquire they obtain by a crime, and must now in their turn take upon themselves its consequences, namely the whole ﬂood of sufferings and sorrows with which the offended celestials must visit the nobly aspiring race of man: a bitter reﬂection, which, by the dignity it confers on crime, contrasts strangely with the Semitic myth of the fall of man, in which curiosity, beguilement, seducibility, wantonness,—in short, a whole series of pre-eminently feminine passions,—were regarded as the origin of evil. What distinguishes the Aryan representation is the sublime view of active sin as the properly Promethean virtue, which suggests at the same time the ethical basis of pessimistic tragedy as the justiﬁcation of human evil—of human guilt as well as of the suffering incurred thereby. The misery in the essence of things—which the contemplative Aryan is not disposed to explain away—the antagonism in the heart of the world, manifests itself to him as a medley of different worlds, for instance, a Divine and a human world, each of which is in the right individually, but as a separate existence alongside of another has to suffer for its individuation. With the heroic effort made by the individual for universality, in his attempt to pass beyond the bounds of individuation and become the one universal being, he experiences in himself the primordial contradiction concealed in the essence of things, i.e., he trespasses and suffers. Accordingly crime[11] is understood by the Aryans to be a man, sin[12] by the Semites a woman; as also, the original crime is committed by man, the original sin by woman. Besides, the witches' chorus says: "Wir nehmen das nicht so genau: Mit tausend Schritten macht's die Frau; Doch wie sie auch sich eilen kann Mit einem Sprunge macht's der Mann."[13] He who understands this innermost core of the tale of Prometheus— namely the necessity of crime imposed on the titanically striving individual —will at once be conscious of the un-Apollonian nature of this pessimistic representation: for Apollo seeks to pacify individual beings precisely by drawing boundary lines between them, and by again and again calling attention thereto, with his requirements of self-knowledge and due proportion, as the holiest laws of the universe. In order, however, to prevent the form from congealing to Egyptian rigidity and coldness in consequence of this Apollonian tendency, in order to prevent the extinction of the motion of the entire lake in the effort to prescribe to the individual wave its path and compass, the high tide of the Dionysian tendency destroyed from time to time all the little circles in which the one-sided Apollonian "will" sought to conﬁne the Hellenic world. The suddenly swelling tide of the Dionysian then takes the separate little wave-mountains of individuals on its back, just as the brother of Prometheus, the Titan Atlas, does with the earth.
This Titanic impulse, to become as it were the Atlas of all individuals, and to carry them on broad shoulders higher and higher, farther and farther, is what the Promethean and the Dionysian have in common. In this respect the Æschylean Prometheus is a Dionysian mask, while, in the afore-mentioned profound yearning for justice, Æschylus betrays to the intelligent observer his paternal descent from Apollo, the god of individuation and of the boundaries of justice. And so the double-being of the Æschylean Prometheus, his conjoint Dionysian and Apollonian nature, might be thus expressed in an abstract formula: "Whatever exists is alike just and unjust, and equally justiﬁed in both." Das ist deine Welt! Das heisst eine Welt![14] [10] "Here sit I, forming mankind In my image, A race resembling me,— To sorrow and to weep, To taste, to hold, to enjoy, And not have need of thee, As I!" (Translation in Hæckel's History of the Evolution of Man.) [11] Der Frevel. [12] Die Sünde. [13] We do not measure with such care: Woman in thousand steps is there, But howsoe'er she hasten may. Man in one leap has cleared the way. Faust, trans. of Bayard Taylor.—TR. [14] This is thy world, and what a world!—Faust. 10. It is an indisputable tradition that Greek tragedy in its earliest form had for its theme only the sufferings of Dionysus, and that for some time the only stage-hero therein was simply Dionysus himself. With the same conﬁdence, however, we can maintain that not until Euripides did Dionysus cease to be the tragic hero, and that in fact all the celebrated ﬁgures of the Greek stage—Prometheus, Œdipus, etc.—are but masks of this original hero, Dionysus. The presence of a god behind all these masks is the one essential cause of the typical "ideality," so oft exciting wonder, of these celebrated ﬁgures. Some one, I know not whom, has maintained that all individuals are comic as individuals and are consequently un-tragic: from whence it might be inferred that the Greeks in general could not endure individuals on the tragic stage. And they really seem to have had these sentiments: as, in general, it is to be observed that the Platonic discrimination and valuation of the "idea" in contrast to the "eidolon," the image, is deeply rooted in the Hellenic being. Availing ourselves of Plato's terminology, however, we should have to speak of the tragic ﬁgures of the Hellenic stage somewhat as follows. The one truly real Dionysus appears in a multiplicity of forms, in the mask of a ﬁghting hero and entangled, as it were, in the net of an individual will. As the visibly appearing god now talks and acts, he resembles an erring, striving, suffering individual: and that, in general, he appears with such epic precision and clearness, is due to the dream-reading Apollo, who reads to the chorus its Dionysian state through this symbolic appearance. In reality, however, this hero is the suffering Dionysus of the mysteries, a god experiencing in himself the sufferings of individuation, of whom wonderful myths tell that as a boy he was dismembered by the Titans and has been worshipped in this state as Zagreus:[15] whereby is intimated that this dismemberment, the properly Dionysian suffering, is like a transformation into air, water, earth, and ﬁre, that we must therefore regard the state of individuation as the source and primal cause of all suffering, as something objectionable in itself. From the smile of this Dionysus sprang the Olympian gods, from his tears sprang man. In his existence as a dismembered god, Dionysus has the dual nature of a cruel barbarised demon, and a mild paciﬁc ruler. But the hope of the epopts looked for a new birth of Dionysus, which we have now to conceive of in anticipation as the end of individuation: it was for this coming third Dionysus that the stormy jubilation-hymns of the epopts resounded.
And it is only this hope that sheds a ray of joy upon the features of a world torn asunder and shattered into individuals: as is symbolised in the myth by Demeter sunk in eternal sadness, who rejoices again only when told that she may once more give birth to Dionysus In the views of things here given we already have all the elements of a profound and pessimistic contemplation of the world, and along with these we have the mystery doctrine of tragedy: the fundamental knowledge of the oneness of all existing things, the consideration of individuation as the primal cause of evil, and art as the joyous hope that the spell of individuation may be broken, as the augury of a restored oneness. It has already been intimated that the Homeric epos is the poem of Olympian culture, wherewith this culture has sung its own song of triumph over the terrors of the war of the Titans. Under the predominating inﬂuence of tragic poetry, these Homeric myths are now reproduced anew, and show by this metempsychosis that meantime the Olympian culture also has been vanquished by a still deeper view of things. The haughty Titan Prometheus has announced to his Olympian tormentor that the extremest danger will one day menace his rule, unless he ally with him betimes. In Æschylus we perceive the terriﬁed Zeus, apprehensive of his end, in alliance with the Titan. Thus, the former age of the Titans is subsequently brought from Tartarus once more to the light of day. The philosophy of wild and naked nature beholds with the undissembled mien of truth the myths of the Homeric world as they dance past: they turn pale, they tremble before the lightning glance of this goddess—till the powerful ﬁst[16] of the Dionysian artist forces them into the service of the new deity. Dionysian truth takes over the entire domain of myth as symbolism of its knowledge, which it makes known partly in the public cult of tragedy and partly in the secret celebration of the dramatic mysteries, always, however, in the old mythical garb. What was the power, which freed Prometheus from his vultures and transformed the myth into a vehicle of Dionysian wisdom? It is the Heracleian power of music: which, having reached its highest manifestness in tragedy, can invest myths with a new and most profound signiﬁcance, which we have already had occasion to characterise as the most powerful faculty of music. For it is the fate of every myth to insinuate itself into the narrow limits of some alleged historical reality, and to be treated by some later generation as a solitary fact with historical claims: and the Greeks were already fairly on the way to restamp the whole of their mythical juvenile dream sagaciously and arbitrarily into a historico-pragmatical juvenile history. For this is the manner in which religions are wont to die out: when of course under the stern, intelligent eyes of an orthodox dogmatism, the mythical presuppositions of a religion are systematised as a completed sum of historical events, and when one begins apprehensively to defend the credibility of the myth, while at the same time opposing all continuation of their natural vitality and luxuriance; when, accordingly, the feeling for myth dies out, and its place is taken by the claim of religion to historical foundations. This dying myth was now seized by the new-born genius of Dionysian music, in whose hands it bloomed once more, with such colours as it had never yet displayed, with a fragrance that awakened a longing anticipation of a metaphysical world. After this ﬁnal effulgence it collapses, its leaves wither, and soon the scofﬁng Lucians of antiquity catch at the discoloured and faded ﬂowers which the winds carry off in every direction. Through tragedy the myth attains its profoundest signiﬁcance, its most expressive form; it rises once more like a wounded hero, and the whole surplus of vitality, together with the philosophical calmness of the Dying, burns in its eyes with a last powerful gleam. What meantest thou, oh impious Euripides, in seeking once more to enthral this dying one? It died under thy ruthless hands: and then thou madest use of counterfeit, masked myth, which like the ape of Heracles could only trick itself out in the old ﬁnery. And as myth died in thy hands, so also died the genius of music; though thou couldst covetously plunder all the gardens of music—thou didst only realise a counterfeit, masked music.
And because thou hast forsaken Dionysus. Apollo hath also forsaken thee; rout up all the passions from their haunts and conjure them into thy sphere, sharpen and polish a sophistical dialectics for the speeches of thy heroes—thy very heroes have only counterfeit, masked passions, and speak only counterfeit, masked music. [15] See article by Mr. Arthur Symons in The Academy, 30th August 1902. [16] Die mächtige Faust.—Cf. Faust, Chorus of Spirits.—TR. 11. Greek tragedy had a fate different from that of all her older sister arts: she died by suicide, in consequence of an irreconcilable conﬂict; accordingly she died tragically, while they all passed away very calmly and beautifully in ripe old age. For if it be in accordance with a happy state of things to depart this life without a struggle, leaving behind a fair posterity, the closing period of these older arts exhibits such a happy state of things: slowly they sink out of sight, and before their dying eyes already stand their fairer progeny, who impatiently lift up their heads with courageous mien. The death of Greek tragedy, on the other hand, left an immense void, deeply felt everywhere. Even as certain Greek sailors in the time of Tiberius once heard upon a lonesome island the thrilling cry, "great Pan is dead": so now as it were sorrowful wailing sounded through the Hellenic world: "Tragedy is dead! Poetry itself has perished with her! Begone, begone, ye stunted, emaciated epigones! Begone to Hades, that ye may for once eat your ﬁll of the crumbs of your former masters!" But when after all a new Art blossomed forth which revered tragedy as her ancestress and mistress, it was observed with horror that she did indeed bear the features of her mother, but those very features the latter had exhibited in her long death-struggle. It was Euripides who fought this deathstruggle of tragedy; the later art is known as the New Attic Comedy. In it the degenerate form of tragedy lived on as a monument of the most painful and violent death of tragedy proper. This connection between the two serves to explain the passionate attachment to Euripides evinced by the poets of the New Comedy, and hence we are no longer surprised at the wish of Philemon, who would have got himself hanged at once, with the sole design of being able to visit Euripides in the lower regions: if only he could be assured generally that the deceased still had his wits. But if we desire, as brieﬂy as possible, and without professing to say aught exhaustive on the subject, to characterise what Euripides has in common with Menander and Philemon, and what appealed to them so strongly as worthy of imitation: it will sufﬁce to say that the spectator was brought upon the stage by Euripides. He who has perceived the material of which the Promethean tragic writers prior to Euripides formed their heroes, and how remote from their purpose it was to bring the true mask of reality on the stage, will also know what to make of the wholly divergent tendency of Euripides. Through him the commonplace individual forced his way from the spectators' benches to the stage itself; the mirror in which formerly only great and bold traits found expression now showed the painful exactness that conscientiously reproduces even the abortive lines of nature. Odysseus, the typical Hellene of the Old Art, sank, in the hands of the new poets, to the ﬁgure of the Græculus, who, as the good-naturedly cunning domestic slave, stands henceforth in the centre of dramatic interest. What Euripides takes credit for in the Aristophanean "Frogs," namely, that by his household remedies he freed tragic art from its pompous corpulency, is apparent above all in his tragic heroes. The spectator now virtually saw and heard his double on the Euripidean stage, and rejoiced that he could talk so well. But this joy was not all: one even learned of Euripides how to speak: he prides himself upon this in his contest with Æschylus: how the people have learned from him how to observe, debate, and draw conclusions according to the rules of art and with the cleverest sophistications. In general it may be said that through this revolution of the popular language he made the New Comedy possible. For it was henceforth no longer a secret, how—and with what saws—the commonplace could represent and express itself on the stage.
Civic mediocrity, on which Euripides built all his political hopes, was now suffered to speak, while heretofore the demigod in tragedy and the drunken satyr, or demiman, in comedy, had determined the character of the language. And so the Aristophanean Euripides prides himself on having portrayed the common, familiar, everyday life and dealings of the people, concerning which all are qualiﬁed to pass judgment. If now the entire populace philosophises, manages land and goods with unheard-of circumspection, and conducts law-suits, he takes all the credit to himself, and glories in the splendid results of the wisdom with which he inoculated the rabble. It was to a populace prepared and enlightened in this manner that the New Comedy could now address itself, of which Euripides had become as it were the chorus-master; only that in this case the chorus of spectators had to be trained. As soon as this chorus was trained to sing in the Euripidean key, there arose that chesslike variety of the drama, the New Comedy, with its perpetual triumphs of cunning and artfulness. But Euripides—the chorusmaster—was praised incessantly: indeed, people would have killed themselves in order to learn yet more from him, had they not known that tragic poets were quite as dead as tragedy. But with it the Hellene had surrendered the belief in his immortality; not only the belief in an ideal past, but also the belief in an ideal future. The saying taken from the well-known epitaph, "as an old man, frivolous and capricious," applies also to aged Hellenism. The passing moment, wit, levity, and caprice, are its highest deities; the ﬁfth class, that of the slaves, now attains to power, at least in sentiment: and if we can still speak at all of "Greek cheerfulness," it is the cheerfulness of the slave who has nothing of consequence to answer for, nothing great to strive for, and cannot value anything of the past or future higher than the present. It was this semblance of "Greek cheerfulness" which so revolted the deepminded and formidable natures of the ﬁrst four centuries of Christianity: this womanish ﬂight from earnestness and terror, this cowardly contentedness with easy pleasure, was not only contemptible to them, but seemed to be a speciﬁcally anti-Christian sentiment. And we must ascribe it to its inﬂuence that the conception of Greek antiquity, which lived on for centuries, preserved with almost enduring persistency that peculiar hectic colour of cheerfulness—as if there had never been a Sixth Century with its birth of tragedy, its Mysteries, its Pythagoras and Heraclitus, indeed as if the artworks of that great period did not at all exist, which in fact—each by itself —can in no wise be explained as having sprung from the soil of such a decrepit and slavish love of existence and cheerfulness, and point to an altogether different conception of things as their source. The assertion made a moment ago, that Euripides introduced the spectator on the stage to qualify him the better to pass judgment on the drama, will make it appear as if the old tragic art was always in a false relation to the spectator: and one would be tempted to extol the radical tendency of Euripides to bring about an adequate relation between art-work and public as an advance on Sophocles. But, as things are, "public" is merely a word, and not at all a homogeneous and constant quantity. Why should the artist be under obligations to accommodate himself to a power whose strength is merely in numbers? And if by virtue of his endowments and aspirations he feels himself superior to every one of these spectators, how could he feel greater respect for the collective expression of all these subordinate capacities than for the relatively highest-endowed individual spectator? In truth, if ever a Greek artist treated his public throughout a long life with presumptuousness and self-sufﬁciency, it was Euripides, who, even when the masses threw themselves at his feet, with sublime deﬁance made an open assault on his own tendency, the very tendency with which he had triumphed over the masses. If this genius had had the slightest reverence for the pandemonium of the public, he would have broken down long before the middle of his career beneath the weighty blows of his own failures.
These considerations here make it obvious that our formula—namely, that Euripides brought the spectator upon the stage, in order to make him truly competent to pass judgment—was but a provisional one, and that we must seek for a deeper understanding of his tendency. Conversely, it is undoubtedly well known that Æschylus and Sophocles, during all their lives, indeed, far beyond their lives, enjoyed the full favour of the people, and that therefore in the case of these predecessors of Euripides the idea of a false relation between art-work and public was altogether excluded. What was it that thus forcibly diverted this highly gifted artist, so incessantly impelled to production, from the path over which shone the sun of the greatest names in poetry and the cloudless heaven of popular favour? What strange consideration for the spectator led him to defy, the spectator? How could he, owing to too much respect for the public —dis-respect the public? Euripides—and this is the solution of the riddle just propounded—felt himself, as a poet, undoubtedly superior to the masses, but not to two of his spectators: he brought the masses upon the stage; these two spectators he revered as the only competent judges and masters of his art: in compliance with their directions and admonitions, he transferred the entire world of sentiments, passions, and experiences, hitherto present at every festival representation as the invisible chorus on the spectators' benches, into the souls of his stage-heroes; he yielded to their demands when he also sought for these new characters the new word and the new tone; in their voices alone he heard the conclusive verdict on his work, as also the cheering promise of triumph when he found himself condemned as usual by the justice of the public. Of these two, spectators the one is—Euripides himself, Euripides as thinker, not as poet. It might be said of him, that his unusually large fund of critical ability, as in the case of Lessing, if it did not create, at least constantly fructiﬁed a productively artistic collateral impulse. With this faculty, with all the clearness and dexterity of his critical thought, Euripides had sat in the theatre and striven to recognise in the masterpieces of his great predecessors, as in faded paintings, feature and feature, line and line. And here had happened to him what one initiated in the deeper arcana of Æschylean tragedy must needs have expected: he observed something incommensu- rable in every feature and in every line, a certain deceptive distinctness and at the same time an enigmatic profundity, yea an inﬁnitude, of background. Even the clearest ﬁgure had always a comet's tail attached to it, which seemed to suggest the uncertain and the inexplicable. The same twilight shrouded the structure of the drama, especially the signiﬁcance of the chorus. And how doubtful seemed the solution of the ethical problems to his mind! How questionable the treatment of the myths! How unequal the distribution of happiness and misfortune! Even in the language of the Old Tragedy there was much that was objectionable to him, or at least enigmatical; he found especially too much pomp for simple affairs, too many tropes and immense things for the plainness of the characters. Thus he sat restlessly pondering in the theatre, and as a spectator he acknowledged to himself that he did not understand his great predecessors. If, however, he thought the understanding the root proper of all enjoyment and productivity, he had to inquire and look about to see whether any one else thought as he did, and also acknowledged this incommensurability. But most people, and among them the best individuals, had only a distrustful smile for him, while none could explain why the great masters were still in the right in face of his scruples and objections. And in this painful condition he found that other spectator, who did not comprehend, and therefore did not esteem, tragedy. In alliance with him he could venture, from amid his lonesomeness, to begin the prodigious struggle against the art of Æschylus and Sophocles—not with polemic writings, but as a dramatic poet, who opposed his own conception of tragedy to the traditional one. 12. Before we name this other spectator, let us pause here a moment in order to recall our own impression, as previously described, of the discordant and incommensurable elements in the nature of Æschylean tragedy.
Let us think of our own astonishment at the chorus and the tragic hero of that type of tragedy, neither of which we could reconcile with our practices any more than with tradition—till we rediscovered this duplexity itself as the origin and essence of Greek tragedy, as the expression of two interwoven artistic impulses, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. To separate this primitive and all-powerful Dionysian element from tragedy, and to build up a new and puriﬁed form of tragedy on the basis of a non-Dionysian art, morality, and conception of things—such is the tendency of Euripides which now reveals itself to us in a clear light. In a myth composed in the eve of his life, Euripides himself most urgently propounded to his contemporaries the question as to the value and signiﬁcation of this tendency. Is the Dionysian entitled to exist at all? Should it not be forcibly rooted out of the Hellenic soil? Certainly, the poet tells us, if only it were possible: but the god Dionysus is too powerful; his most intelligent adversary—like Pentheus in the "Bacchæ"—is unwittingly enchanted by him, and in this enchantment meets his fate. The judgment of the two old sages, Cadmus and Tiresias, seems to be also the judgment of the aged poet: that the reﬂection of the wisest individuals does not overthrow old popular traditions, nor the perpetually propagating worship of Dionysus, that in fact it behoves us to display at least a diplomatically cautious concern in the presence of such strange forces: where however it is always possible that the god may take offence at such lukewarm participation, and ﬁnally change the diplomat—in this case Cadmus—into a dragon. This is what a poet tells us, who opposed Dionysus with heroic valour throughout a long life—in order ﬁnally to wind up his career with a gloriﬁcation of his adversary, and with suicide, like one staggering from giddiness, who, in order to escape the horrible vertigo he can no longer endure, casts himself from a tower. This tragedy—the Bacchæ—is a protest against the practicability of his own tendency; alas, and it has already been put into practice! The surprising thing had happened: when the poet recanted, his tendency had already conquered. Dionysus had already been scared from the tragic stage, and in fact by a demonic power which spoke through Euripides. Even Euripides was, in a certain sense, only a mask: the deity that spoke through him was neither Dionysus nor Apollo, but an altogether new-born demon, called Socrates. This is the new antithesis: the Dionysian and the Socratic, and the art-work of Greek tragedy was wrecked on it. What if even Euripides now seeks to comfort us by his recantation? It is of no avail: the most magniﬁcent temple lies in ruins. What avails the lamentation of the destroyer, and his confession that it was the most beautiful of all temples? And even that Euripides has been changed into a dragon as a punishment by the art-critics of all ages —who could be content with this wretched compensation? Let us now approach this Socratic tendency with which Euripides combated and vanquished Æschylean tragedy. We must now ask ourselves, what could be the ulterior aim of the Euripidean design, which, in the highest ideality of its execution, would found drama exclusively on the non-Dionysian? What other form of drama could there be, if it was not to be born of the womb of music, in the mysterious twilight of the Dionysian? Only the dramatised epos: in which Apollonian domain of art the tragic effect is of course unattainable. It does not depend on the subject-matter of the events here represented; indeed, I venture to assert that it would have been impossible for Goethe in his projected "Nausikaa" to have rendered tragically effective the suicide of the idyllic being with which he intended to complete the ﬁfth act; so extraordinary is the power of the epic-Apollonian representation, that it charms, before our eyes, the most terrible things by the joy in appearance and in redemption through appearance. The poet of the dramatised epos cannot completely blend with his pictures any more than the epic rhapsodist. He is still just the calm, unmoved embodiment of Contemplation whose wide eyes see the picture before them. The actor in this dramatised epos still remains intrinsically rhapsodist: the consecration of inner dreaming is on all his actions, so that he is never wholly an actor.
How, then, is the Euripidean play related to this ideal of the Apollonian drama? Just as the younger rhapsodist is related to the solemn rhapsodist of the old time. The former describes his own character in the Platonic "Ion" as follows: "When I am saying anything sad, my eyes ﬁll with tears; when, however, what I am saying is awful and terrible, then my hair stands on end through fear, and my heart leaps." Here we no longer observe anything of the epic absorption in appearance, or of the unemotional coolness of the true actor, who precisely in his highest activity is wholly appearance and joy in appearance. Euripides is the actor with leaping heart, with hair standing on end; as Socratic thinker he designs the plan, as passionate actor he executes it. Neither in the designing nor in the execution is he an artist pure and simple. And so the Euripidean drama is a thing both cool and ﬁery, equally capable of freezing and burning; it is impossible for it to attain the Apollonian, effect of the epos, while, on the other hand, it has severed itself as much as possible from Dionysian elements, and now, in order to act at all, it requires new stimulants, which can no longer lie within the sphere of the two unique art-impulses, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The stimulants are cool, paradoxical thoughts, in place of Apollonian intuitions—and ﬁery passions—in place Dionysean ecstasies; and in fact, thoughts and passions very realistically copied, and not at all steeped in the ether of art. Accordingly, if we have perceived this much, that Euripides did not succeed in establishing the drama exclusively on the Apollonian, but that rather his non-Dionysian inclinations deviated into a naturalistic and inartistic tendency, we shall now be able to approach nearer to the character æsthetic Socratism. supreme law of which reads about as follows: "to be beautiful everything must be intelligible," as the parallel to the Socratic proposition, "only the knowing is one virtuous." With this canon in his hands Euripides measured all the separate elements of the drama, and rectiﬁed them according to his principle: the language, the characters, the dramaturgic structure, and the choric music. The poetic deﬁciency and retrogression, which we are so often wont to impute to Euripides in comparison with Sophoclean tragedy, is for the most part the product of this penetrating critical process, this daring intelligibility. The Euripidian prologue may serve us as an example of the productivity of this, rationalistic method. Nothing could be more opposed to the technique of our stage than the prologue in the drama of Euripides. For a single person to appear at the outset of the play telling us who he is, what precedes the action, what has happened thus far, yea, what will happen in the course of the play, would be designated by a modern playwright as a wanton and unpardonable abandonment of the effect of suspense. Everything that is about to happen is known beforehand; who then cares to wait for it actually to happen?—considering, moreover, that here there is not by any means the exciting relation of a predicting dream to a reality taking place later on. Euripides speculated quite differently. The effect of tragedy never depended on epic suspense, on the fascinating uncertainty as to what is to happen now and afterwards: but rather on the great rhetoro-lyric scenes in which the passion and dialectics of the chief hero swelled to a broad and mighty stream. Everything was arranged for pathos, not for action: and whatever was not arranged for pathos was regarded as objectionable. But what interferes most with the hearer's pleasurable satisfaction in such scenes is a missing link, a gap in the texture of the previous history. So long as the spectator has to divine the meaning of this or that person, or the presuppositions of this or that conﬂict of inclinations and intentions, his complete absorption in the doings and sufferings of the chief persons is impossible, as is likewise breathless fellow-feeling and fellowfearing. The Æschyleo-Sophoclean tragedy employed the most ingenious devices in the ﬁrst scenes to place in the hands of the spectator as if by chance all the threads requisite for understanding the whole: a trait in which that noble artistry is approved, which as it were masks the inevitably formal, and causes it to appear as something accidental.
But nevertheless Euripides thought he observed that during these ﬁrst scenes the spectator was in a strange state of anxiety to make out the problem of the previous history, so that the poetic beauties and pathos of the exposition were lost to him. Accordingly he placed the prologue even before the exposition, and put it in the mouth of a person who could be trusted: some deity had often as it were to guarantee the particulars of the tragedy to the public and remove every doubt as to the reality of the myth: as in the case of Descartes, who could only prove the reality of the empiric world by an appeal to the truthfulness of God and His inability to utter falsehood. Euripides makes use of the same divine truthfulness once more at the close of his drama, in order to ensure to the public the future of his heroes; this is the task of the notorious deus ex machina. Between the preliminary and the additional epic spectacle there is the dramatico-lyric present, the "drama" proper. Thus Euripides as a poet echoes above all his own conscious knowledge; and it is precisely on this account that he occupies such a notable position in the history of Greek art. With reference to his critico-productive activity, he must often have felt that he ought to actualise in the drama the words at the beginning of the essay of Anaxagoras: "In the beginning all things were mixed together; then came the understanding and created order." And if Anaxagoras with his "νοῡς" seemed like the ﬁrst sober person among nothing but drunken philosophers, Euripides may also have conceived his relation to the other tragic poets under a similar ﬁgure. As long as the sole ruler and disposer of the universe, the νοῡς, was still excluded from artistic activity, things were all mixed together in a chaotic, primitive mess;—it is thus Euripides was obliged to think, it is thus he was obliged to condemn the "drunken" poets as the ﬁrst "sober" one among them. What Sophocles said of Æschylus, that he did what was right, though unconsciously, was surely not in the mind of Euripides: who would have admitted only thus much, that Æschylus, because he wrought unconsciously, did what was wrong. So also the divine Plato speaks for the most part only ironically of the creative faculty of the poet, in so far as it is not conscious insight, and places it on a par with the gift of the soothsayer and dream-interpreter; insinuating that the poet is incapable of composing until he has become unconscious and reason has deserted him. Like Plato, Euripides undertook to show to the world the reverse of the "unintelligent" poet; his æsthetic principle that "to be beautiful everything must be known" is, as I have said, the parallel to the Socratic "to be good everything must be known." Accordingly we may regard Euripides as the poet of æsthetic Socratism. Socrates, however, was that second spectator who did not comprehend and therefore did not esteem the Old Tragedy; in alliance with him Euripides ventured to be the herald of a new artistic activity. If, then, the Old Tragedy was here destroyed, it follows that æsthetic Socratism was the murderous principle; but in so far as the struggle is directed against the Dionysian element in the old art, we recognise in Socrates the opponent of Dionysus, the new Orpheus who rebels against Dionysus; and although destined to be torn to pieces by the Mænads of the Athenian court, yet puts to ﬂight the overpowerful god himself, who, when he ﬂed from Lycurgus, the king of Edoni, sought refuge in the depths of the ocean—namely, in the mystical ﬂood of a secret cult which gradually overspread the earth. 13. That Socrates stood in close relationship to Euripides in the tendency of his teaching, did not escape the notice of contemporaneous antiquity; the most eloquent expression of this felicitous insight being the tale current in Athens, that Socrates was accustomed to help Euripides in poetising. Both names were mentioned in one breath by the adherents of the "good old time," whenever they came to enumerating the popular agitators of the day: to whose inﬂuence they attributed the fact that the old Marathonian stalwart capacity of body and soul was more and more being sacriﬁced to a dubious enlightenment, involving progressive degeneration of the physical and mental powers.
It is in this tone, half indignantly and half contemptuously, that Aristophanic comedy is wont to speak of both of them—to the consterna- tion of modern men, who would indeed be willing enough to give up Euripides, but cannot suppress their amazement that Socrates should appear in Aristophanes as the ﬁrst and head sophist, as the mirror and epitome of all sophistical tendencies; in connection with which it offers the single consolation of putting Aristophanes himself in the pillory, as a rakish, lying Alcibiades of poetry. Without here defending the profound instincts of Aristophanes against such attacks, I shall now indicate, by means of the sentiments of the time, the close connection between Socrates and Euripides. With this purpose in view, it is especially to be remembered that Socrates, as an opponent of tragic art, did not ordinarily patronise tragedy, but only appeared among the spectators when a new play of Euripides was performed. The most noted thing, however, is the close juxtaposition of the two names in the Delphic oracle, which designated Socrates as the wisest of men, but at the same time decided that the second prize in the contest of wisdom was due to Euripides. Sophocles was designated as the third in this scale of rank; he who could pride himself that, in comparison with Æschylus, he did what was right, and did it, moreover, because he knew what was right. It is evidently just the degree of clearness of this knowledge, which distinguishes these three men in common as the three "knowing ones" of their age. The most decisive word, however, for this new and unprecedented esteem of knowledge and insight was spoken by Socrates when he found that he was the only one who acknowledged to himself that he knew nothing while in his critical pilgrimage through Athens, and calling on the greatest statesmen, orators, poets, and artists, he discovered everywhere the conceit of knowledge. He perceived, to his astonishment, that all these celebrities were without a proper and accurate insight, even with regard to their own callings, and practised them only by instinct. "Only by instinct": with this phrase we touch upon the heart and core of the Socratic tendency. Socratism condemns therewith existing art as well as existing ethics; wherever Socratism turns its searching eyes it beholds the lack of insight and the power of illusion; and from this lack infers the inner perversity and objectionableness of existing conditions. From this point onwards, Socrates believed that he was called upon to, correct existence; and, with an air of disregard and superiority, as the precursor of an altogether different culture, art, and morality, he enters single-handed into a world, of which, if we reverently touched the hem, we should count it our greatest happiness. Here is the extraordinary hesitancy which always seizes upon us with regard to Socrates, and again and again invites us to ascertain the sense and purpose of this most questionable phenomenon of antiquity. Who is it that ventures single-handed to disown the Greek character, which, as Homer, Pindar, and Æschylus, as Phidias, as Pericles, as Pythia and Dionysus, as the deepest abyss and the highest height, is sure of our wondering admiration? What demoniac power is it which would presume to spill this magic draught in the dust? What demigod is it to whom the chorus of spirits of the noblest of mankind must call out: "Weh! Weh! Du hast sie zerstört, die schöne Welt, mit mächtiger Faust; sie stürzt, sie zerfällt!"[17] A key to the character of Socrates is presented to us by the surprising phenomenon designated as the "daimonion" of Socrates. In special circumstances, when his gigantic intellect began to stagger, he got a secure support in the utterances of a divine voice which then spake to him. This voice, whenever it comes, always dissuades. In this totally abnormal nature instinctive wisdom only appears in order to hinder the progress of conscious perception here and there. While in all productive men it is instinct which is the creatively afﬁrmative force, consciousness only comporting itself critically and dissuasively; with Socrates it is instinct which becomes critic; it is consciousness which becomes creator—a perfect monstrosity per defectum! And we do indeed observe here a monstrous defectus of all mystical aptitude, so that Socrates might be designated as the speciﬁc non-mystic, in whom the logical nature is developed, through a superfoetation, to the same excess as instinctive wisdom is developed in the mystic.
On the other hand, however, the logical instinct which appeared in Socrates was absolutely prohibited from turning against itself; in its unchecked ﬂow it manifests a native power such as we meet with, to our shocking surprise, only among the very greatest instinctive forces. He who has experienced even a breath of the divine naïveté and security of the Socratic course of life in the Platonic writings, will also feel that the enormous driving-wheel of logical Socratism is in motion, as it were, behind Socrates, and that it must be viewed through Socrates as through a shadow. And that he himself had a boding of this relation is apparent from the digniﬁed earnestness with which he everywhere, and even before his judges, insisted on his divine calling. To refute him here was really as impossible as to approve of his instinct-disintegrating inﬂuence. In view of this indissoluble conﬂict, when he had at last been brought before the forum of the Greek state, there was only one punishment demanded, namely exile; he might have been sped across the borders as something thoroughly enigmatical, irrubricable and inexplicable, and so posterity would have been quite unjustiﬁed in charging the Athenians with a deed of ignominy. But that the sentence of death, and not mere exile, was pronounced upon him, seems to have been brought about by Socrates himself, with perfect knowledge of the circumstances, and without the natural fear of death: he met his death with the calmness with which, according to the description of Plato, he leaves the symposium at break of day, as the last of the revellers, to begin a new day; while the sleepy companions remain behind on the benches and the ﬂoor, to dream of Socrates, the true eroticist. The dying Socrates became the new ideal of the noble Greek youths,—an ideal they had never yet beheld,—and above all, the typical Hellenic youth, Plato, prostrated himself before this scene with all the fervent devotion of his visionary soul. [17] Woe! Woe! Thou hast it destroyed, The beautiful world; With powerful ﬁst; In ruin 'tis hurled! Faust, trans. of Bayard Taylor.—TR. 14. Let us now imagine the one great Cyclopean eye of Socrates ﬁxed on tragedy, that eye in which the ﬁne frenzy of artistic enthusiasm had never glowed—let us think how it was denied to this eye to gaze with pleasure into the Dionysian abysses—what could it not but see in the "sublime and greatly lauded" tragic art, as Plato called it? Something very absurd, with causes that seemed to be without effects, and effects apparently without causes; the whole, moreover, so motley and diversiﬁed that it could not but be repugnant to a thoughtful mind, a dangerous incentive, however, to sensitive and irritable souls. We know what was the sole kind of poetry which he comprehended: the Æsopian fable: and he did this no doubt with that smiling complaisance with which the good honest Gellert sings the praise of poetry in the fable of the bee and the hen:— "Du siehst an mir, wozu sie nützt, Dem, der nicht viel Verstand besitzt, Die Wahrheit durch ein Bild zu sagen."[18] But then it seemed to Socrates that tragic art did not even "tell the truth": not to mention the fact that it addresses itself to him who "hath but little wit"; consequently not to the philosopher: a twofold reason why it should be avoided. Like Plato, he reckoned it among the seductive arts which only represent the agreeable, not the useful, and hence he required of his disciples abstinence and strict separation from such unphilosophical allurements; with such success that the youthful tragic poet Plato ﬁrst of all burned his poems to be able to become a scholar of Socrates. But where unconquerable native capacities bore up against the Socratic maxims, their power, together with the momentum of his mighty character, still sufﬁced to force poetry itself into new and hitherto unknown channels. An instance of this is the aforesaid Plato: he, who in the condemnation of tragedy and of art in general certainly did not fall short of the naïve cynicism of his master, was nevertheless constrained by sheer artistic necessity to create a form of art which is inwardly related even to the then existing forms of art which he repudiated.
Plato's main objection to the old art—that it is the imitation of a phantom,[19] and hence belongs to a sphere still lower than the empiric world—could not at all apply to the new art: and so we ﬁnd Plato endeavouring to go beyond reality and attempting to represent the idea which underlies this pseudo-reality. But Plato, the thinker, thereby arrived by a roundabout road just at the point where he had always been at home as poet, and from which Sophocles and all the old artists had solemnly protested against that objection. If tragedy absorbed into itself all the earlier varieties of art, the same could again be said in an unusual sense of Platonic dialogue, which, engendered by a mixture of all the then existing forms and styles, hovers midway between narrative, lyric and drama, between prose and poetry, and has also thereby broken loose from the older strict law of unity of linguistic form; a movement which was carried still farther by the cynic writers, who in the most promiscuous style, oscillating to and fro betwixt prose and metrical forms, realised also the literary picture of the "raving Socrates" whom they were wont to represent in life. Platonic dialogue was as it were the boat in which the shipwrecked ancient poetry saved herself together with all her children: crowded into a narrow space and timidly obsequious to the one steersman, Socrates, they now launched into a new world, which never tired of looking at the fantastic spectacle of this procession. In very truth, Plato has given to all posterity the prototype of a new form of art, the prototype of the novel which must be designated as the inﬁnitely evolved Æsopian fable, in which poetry holds the same rank with reference to dialectic philosophy as this same philosophy held for many centuries with reference to theology: namely, the rank of ancilla. This was the new position of poetry into which Plato forced it under the pressure of the demon-inspired Socrates. Here philosophic thought overgrows art and compels it to cling close to the trunk of dialectics. The Apollonian tendency has chrysalised in the logical schematism; just as something analogous in the case of Euripides (and moreover a translation of the Dionysian into the naturalistic emotion) was forced upon our attention. Socrates, the dialectical hero in Platonic drama, reminds us of the kindred nature of the Euripidean hero, who has to defend his actions by arguments and counter-arguments, and thereby so often runs the risk of forfeiting our tragic pity; for who could mistake the optimistic element in the essence of dialectics, which celebrates a jubilee in every conclusion, and can breathe only in cool clearness and consciousness: the optimistic element, which, having once forced its way into tragedy, must gradually overgrow its Dionysian regions, and necessarily impel it to self-destruction—even to the death-leap into the bourgeois drama. Let us but realise the consequences of the Socratic maxims: "Virtue is knowledge; man only sins from ignorance; he who is virtuous is happy": these three fundamental forms of optimism involve the death of tragedy. For the virtuous hero must now be a dialectician; there must now be a necessary, visible connection between virtue and knowledge, between belief and morality; the transcendental justice of the plot in Æschylus is now degraded to the superﬁcial and audacious principle of poetic justice with its usual deus ex machina. How does the chorus, and, in general, the entire Dionyso-musical substratum of tragedy, now appear in the light of this new Socrato-optimistic stage-world? As something accidental, as a readily dispensable reminiscence of the origin of tragedy; while we have in fact seen that the chorus can be understood only as the cause of tragedy, and of the tragic generally. This perplexity with respect to the chorus ﬁrst manifests itself in Sophocles —an important sign that the Dionysian basis of tragedy already begins to disintegrate with him. He no longer ventures to entrust to the chorus the main share of the effect, but limits its sphere to such an extent that it now appears almost co-ordinate with the actors, just as if it were elevated from the orchestra into the scene: whereby of course its character is completely destroyed, notwithstanding that Aristotle countenances this very theory of the chorus.
This alteration of the position of the chorus, which Sophocles at any rate recommended by his practice, and, according to tradition, even by a treatise, is the ﬁrst step towards the annihilation of the chorus, the phases of which follow one another with alarming rapidity in Euripides, Agathon, and the New Comedy. Optimistic dialectics drives, music out of tragedy with the scourge of its syllogisms: that is, it destroys the essence of tragedy, which can be explained only as a manifestation and illustration of Dionysian states, as the visible symbolisation of music, as the dream-world of Dionysian ecstasy. If, therefore, we are to assume an anti-Dionysian tendency operating even before Socrates, which received in him only an unprecedentedly grand expression, we must not shrink from the question as to what a phenomenon like that of Socrates indicates: whom in view of the Platonic dialogues we are certainly not entitled to regard as a purely disintegrating, negative power. And though there can be no doubt whatever that the most immediate effect of the Socratic impulse tended to the dissolution of Dionysian tragedy, yet a profound experience of Socrates' own life compels us to ask whether there is necessarily only an antipodal relation between Socratism and art, and whether the birth of an "artistic Socrates" is in general something contradictory in itself. For that despotic logician had now and then the feeling of a gap, or void, a sentiment of semi-reproach, as of a possibly neglected duty with respect to art. There often came to him, as he tells his friends in prison, one and the same dream-apparition, which kept constantly repeating to him: "Socrates, practise music." Up to his very last days he solaces himself with the opinion that his philosophising is the highest form of poetry, and ﬁnds it hard to believe that a deity will remind him of the "common, popular music." Finally, when in prison, he consents to practise also this despised music, in order thoroughly to unburden his conscience. And in this frame of mind he composes a poem on Apollo and turns a few Æsopian fables into verse. It was something similar to the demonian warning voice which urged him to these practices; it was because of his Apollonian insight that, like a barbaric king, he did not understand the noble image of a god and was in danger of sinning against a deity—through ignorance. The prompting voice of the Socratic dream-vision is the only sign of doubtfulness as to the limits of logical nature. "Perhaps "—thus he had to ask himself—"what is not intelligible to me is not therefore unreasonable? Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is banished? Perhaps art is even a necessary correlative of and supplement to science?" [18] In me thou seest its beneﬁt,— To him who hath but little wit, Through parables to tell the truth. [19] Scheinbild = ειδολον.—TR. 15. In the sense of these last portentous questions it must now be indicated how the inﬂuence of Socrates (extending to the present moment, indeed, to all futurity) has spread over posterity like an ever-increasing shadow in the evening sun, and how this inﬂuence again and again necessitates a regeneration of art,—yea, of art already with metaphysical, broadest and profoundest sense,—and its own eternity guarantees also the eternity of art. Before this could be perceived, before the intrinsic dependence of every art on the Greeks, the Greeks from Homer to Socrates, was conclusively demonstrated, it had to happen to us with regard to these Greeks as it hap- pened to the Athenians with regard to Socrates. Nearly every age and stage of culture has at some time or other sought with deep displeasure to free itself from the Greeks, because in their presence everything self-achieved, sincerely admired and apparently quite original, seemed all of a sudden to lose life and colour and shrink to an abortive copy, even to caricature. And so hearty indignation breaks forth time after time against this presumptuous little nation, which dared to designate as "barbaric" for all time everything not native: who are they, one asks one's self, who, though they possessed only an ephemeral historical splendour, ridiculously restricted institutions, a dubious excellence in their customs, and were even branded with ugly vices, yet lay claim to the dignity and singular position among the peoples to which genius is entitled among the masses.
What a pity one has not been so fortunate as to ﬁnd the cup of hemlock with which such an affair could be disposed of without ado: for all the poison which envy, calumny, and rankling resentment engendered within themselves have not sufﬁced to destroy that self-sufﬁcient grandeur! And so one feels ashamed and afraid in the presence of the Greeks: unless one prize truth above all things, and dare also to acknowledge to one's self this truth, that the Greeks, as charioteers, hold in their hands the reins of our own and of every culture, but that almost always chariot and horses are of too poor material and incommensurate with the glory of their guides, who then will deem it sport to run such a team into an abyss: which they themselves clear with the leap of Achilles. In order to assign also to Socrates the dignity of such a leading position, it will sufﬁce to recognise in him the type of an unheard-of form of existence, the type of the theoretical man, with regard to whose meaning and purpose it will be our next task to attain an insight. Like the artist, the theorist also ﬁnds an inﬁnite satisfaction in what is and, like the former, he is shielded by this satisfaction from the practical ethics of pessimism with its lynx eyes which shine only in the dark. For if the artist in every unveiling of truth always cleaves with raptured eyes only to that which still remains veiled after the unveiling, the theoretical man, on the other hand, enjoys and contents himself with the cast-off veil, and ﬁnds the consummation of his pleasure in the process of a continuously successful unveiling through his own unaided efforts. There would have been no science if it had only been concerned about that one naked goddess and nothing else. For then its disciples would have been obliged to feel like those who purposed to dig a hole straight through the earth: each one of whom perceives that with the utmost lifelong exertion he is able to excavate only a very little of the enormous depth, which is again ﬁlled up before his eyes by the labours of his successor, so that a third man seems to do well when on his own account he selects a new spot for his attempts at tunnelling. If now some one proves conclusively that the antipodal goal cannot be attained in this direct way, who will still care to toil on in the old depths, unless he has learned to content himself in the meantime with ﬁnding precious stones or discovering natural laws? For that reason Lessing, the most honest theoretical man, ventured to say that he cared more for the search after truth than for truth itself: in saying which he revealed the fundamental secret of science, to the astonishment, and indeed, to the vexation of scientiﬁc men. Well, to be sure, there stands alongside of this detached perception, as an excess of honesty, if not of presumption, a profound illusion which ﬁrst came to the world in the person of Socrates, the imperturbable belief that, by means of the clue of causality, thinking reaches to the deepest abysses of being, and that thinking is able not only to perceive being but even to correct it. This sublime metaphysical illusion is added as an instinct to science and again and again leads the latter to its limits, where it must change into art; which is really the end, to be attained by this mechanism. If we now look at Socrates in the light of this thought, he appears to us as the ﬁrst who could not only live, but—what is far more—also die under the guidance of this instinct of science: and hence the picture of the dying, Socrates, as the man delivered from the fear of death by knowledge and argument, is the escutcheon, above the entrance to science which reminds every one of its mission, namely, to make existence appear to be comprehensible, and therefore to be justiﬁed: for which purpose, if arguments do not sufﬁce, myth also must be used, which I just now designated even as the necessary consequence, yea, as the end of science.
He who once makes intelligible to himself how, after the death of Socrates, the mystagogue of science, one philosophical school succeeds another, like wave upon wave,—how an entirely unfore-shadowed universal development of the thirst for knowledge in the widest compass of the cultured world (and as the speciﬁc task for every one highly gifted) led science on to the high sea from which since then it has never again been able to be completely ousted; how through the universality of this movement a common net of thought was ﬁrst stretched over the entire globe, with prospects, moreover, of conformity to law in an entire solar system;—he who realises all this, together with the amazingly high pyramid of our present-day knowledge, cannot fail to see in Socrates the turning-point and vortex of socalled universal history. For if one were to imagine the whole incalculable sum of energy which has been used up by that universal tendency,—employed, not in the service of knowledge, but for the practical, i.e., egoistical ends of individuals and peoples,—then probably the instinctive love of life would be so much weakened in universal wars of destruction and incessant migrations of peoples, that, owing to the practice of suicide, the individual would perhaps feel the last remnant of a sense of duty, when, like the native of the Fiji Islands, as son he strangles his parents and, as friend, his friend: a practical pessimism which might even give rise to a horrible ethics of general slaughter out of pity—which, for the rest, exists and has existed wherever art in one form or another, especially as science and religion, has not appeared as a remedy and preventive of that pestilential breath. In view of this practical pessimism, Socrates is the archetype of the theoretical optimist, who in the above-indicated belief in the fathomableness of the nature of things, attributes to knowledge and perception the power of a universal medicine, and sees in error and evil. To penetrate into the depths of the nature of things, and to separate true perception from error and illusion, appeared to the Socratic man the noblest and even the only truly human calling: just as from the time of Socrates onwards the mechanism of concepts, judgments, and inferences was prized above all other capacities as the highest activity and the most admirable gift of nature. Even the sublimest moral acts, the stirrings of pity, of self-sacriﬁce, of heroism, and that tranquillity of soul, so difﬁcult of attainment, which the Apollonian Greek called Sophrosyne, were derived by Socrates, and his like-minded successors up to the present day, from the dialectics of knowledge, and were accordingly designated as teachable. He who has experienced in himself the joy of a Socratic perception, and felt how it seeks to embrace, in constantly widening circles, the entire world of phenomena, will thenceforth ﬁnd no stimulus which could urge him to existence more forcible than the desire to complete that conquest and to knit the net impenetrably close. To a person thus minded the Platonic Socrates then appears as the teacher of an entirely new form of "Greek cheerfulness" and felicity of existence, which seeks to discharge itself in actions, and will ﬁnd its discharge for the most part in maieutic and pedagogic inﬂuences on noble youths, with a view to the ultimate production of genius. But now science, spurred on by its powerful illusion, hastens irresistibly to its limits, on which its optimism, hidden in the essence of logic, is wrecked. For the periphery of the circle of science has an inﬁnite number of points, and while there is still no telling how this circle can ever be completely measured, yet the noble and gifted man, even before the middle of his career, inevitably comes into contact with those extreme points of the periphery where he stares at the inexplicable. When he here sees to his dismay how logic coils round itself at these limits and ﬁnally bites its own tail —then the new form of perception discloses itself, namely tragic perception, which, in order even to be endured, requires art as a safeguard and remedy.
If, with eyes strengthened and refreshed at the sight of the Greeks, we look upon the highest spheres of the world that surrounds us, we behold the avidity of the insatiate optimistic knowledge, of which Socrates is the typical representative, transformed into tragic resignation and the need of art: while, to be sure, this same avidity, in its lower stages, has to exhibit itself as antagonistic to art, and must especially have an inward detestation of Dionyso-tragic art, as was exempliﬁed in the opposition of Socratism to Æschylean tragedy. Here then with agitated spirit we knock at the gates of the present and the future: will that "transforming" lead to ever new conﬁgurations of genius, and especially of the music-practising Socrates? Will the net of art which is spread over existence, whether under the name of religion or of science, be knit always more closely and delicately, or is it destined to be torn to shreds under the restlessly barbaric activity and whirl which is called "the present day"?—Anxious, yet not disconsolate, we stand aloof for a little while, as the spectators who are permitted to be witnesses of these tremendous struggles and transitions. Alas! It is the charm of these struggles that he who beholds them must also ﬁght them! 16. By this elaborate historical example we have endeavoured to make it clear that tragedy perishes as surely by evanescence of the spirit of music as it can be born only out of this spirit. In order to qualify the singularity of this assertion, and, on the other hand, to disclose the source of this insight of ours, we must now confront with clear vision the analogous phenomena of the present time; we must enter into the midst of these struggles, which, as I said just now, are being carried on in the highest spheres of our present world between the insatiate optimistic perception and the tragic need of art. In so doing I shall leave out of consideration all other antagonistic tendencies which at all times oppose art, especially tragedy, and which at present again extend their sway triumphantly, to such an extent that of the theatrical arts only the farce and the ballet, for example, put forth their blossoms, which perhaps not every one cares to smell, in tolerably rich luxuriance. I will speak only of the Most Illustrious Opposition to the tragic conception of things—and by this I mean essentially optimistic science, with its ancestor Socrates at the head of it. Presently also the forces will be designated which seem to me to guarantee a re-birth of tragedy—and who knows what other blessed hopes for the German genius! Before we plunge into the midst of these struggles, let us array ourselves in the armour of our hitherto acquired knowledge. In contrast to all those who are intent on deriving the arts from one exclusive principle, as the necessary vital source of every work of art, I keep my eyes ﬁxed on the two artistic deities of the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysus, and recognise in them the living and conspicuous representatives of two worlds of art which differ in their intrinsic essence and in their highest aims. Apollo stands before me as the transﬁguring genius of the principium individuationis through which alone the redemption in appearance is to be truly attained, while by the mystical cheer of Dionysus the spell of individuation is broken, and the way lies open to the Mothers of Being,[20] to the innermost heart of things. This extraordinary antithesis, which opens up yawningly between plastic art as the Apollonian and music as the Dionysian art, has become manifest to only one of the great thinkers, to such an extent that, even without this key to the symbolism of the Hellenic divinities, he allowed to music a different character and origin in advance of all the other arts, because, unlike them, it is not a copy of the phenomenon, but a direct copy of the will itself, and therefore represents the metaphysical of everything physical in the world, the thing-in-itself of every phenomenon. (Schopenhauer, Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, I.
310.) To this most important perception of æsthetics (with which, taken in a serious sense, æsthetics properly commences), Richard Wagner, by way of conﬁrmation of its eternal truth, afﬁxed his seal, when he asserted in his Beethoven that music must be judged according to æsthetic principles quite different from those which apply to the plastic arts, and not, in general, according to the category of beauty: although an erroneous æsthetics, inspired by a misled and degenerate art, has by virtue of the concept of beauty prevailing in the plastic domain accustomed itself to demand of music an effect analogous to that of the works of plastic art, namely the suscitating delight in beautiful forms. Upon perceiving this extraordinary antithesis, I felt a strong inducement to approach the essence of Greek tragedy, and, by means of it, the profoundest revelation of Hellenic genius: for I at last thought myself to be in possession of a charm to enable me—far beyond the phraseology of our usual æsthetics—to represent vividly to my mind the primitive problem of tragedy: whereby such an astounding insight into the Hellenic character was afforded me that it necessarily seemed as if our proudly comporting classico-Hellenic science had thus far contrived to subsist almost exclusively on phantasmagoria and externalities. Perhaps we may lead up to this primitive problem with the question: what æsthetic effect results when the intrinsically separate art-powers, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, enter into concurrent actions? Or, in briefer form: how is music related to image and concept?—Schopenhauer, whom Richard Wagner, with especial reference to this point, accredits with an unsurpassable clearness and perspicuity of exposition, expresses himself most copiously on the subject in the following passage which I shall cite here at full length[21] (Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, I. p. 309): "According to all this, we may regard the phenomenal world, or nature, and music as two different expressions of the same thing,[20] which is therefore itself the only medium of the analogy between these two expressions, so that a knowledge of this medium is required in order to understand that analogy. Music, therefore, if regarded as an expression of the world, is in the highest degree a universal language, which is related indeed to the universality of concepts, much as these are related to the particular things. Its universality, however, is by no means the empty universality of abstraction, but of quite a different kind, and is united with thorough and distinct deﬁniteness. In this respect it resembles geometrical ﬁgures and numbers, which are the universal forms of all possible objiects of experience and applicable to them all a priori, and yet are not abstract but perceptiple and thoroughly determinate. All possible efforts, excitements and manifestations of will, all that goes on in the heart of man and that reason includes in the wide, negative concept of feeling, may be expressed by the inﬁnite number of possible melodies, but always in the universality of mere form, without the material, always according to the thing-in-itself, not the phenomenon,—of which they reproduce the very soul and essence as it were, without the body. This deep relation which music bears to the true nature of all things also explains the fact that suitable music played to any scene, action, event, or surrounding seems to disclose to us its most secret meaning, and appears as the most accurate and distinct commentary upon it; as also the fact that whoever gives himself up entirely to the impression of a symphony seems to see all the possible events of life and the world take place in himself: nevertheless upon reﬂection he can ﬁnd no likeness between the music and the things that passed before his mind. For, as we have said, music is distinguished from all the other arts by the fact that it is not a copy of the phenomenon, or, more accurately, the adequate objectivity of the will, but the direct copy of the will itself, and therefore represents the metaphysical of everything physical in the world, and the thing-in-itself of every phenomenon. We might, therefore, just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will: and this is the reason why music makes every picture, and indeed every scene of real life and of the world, at once appear with higher signiﬁcance; all the more so, to be sure, in proportion as its melody is analogous to the inner spirit of the given phenomenon.
It rests upon this that we are able to set a poem to music as a song, or a perceptible representation as a pantomime, or both as an opera. Such particular pictures of human life, set to the universal language of music, are never bound to it or correspond to it with stringent necessity, but stand to it only in the relation of an example chosen at will to a general concept. In the determinateness of the real they represent that which music expresses in the universality of mere form. For melodies are to a certain extent, like general concepts, an abstraction from the actual. This actual world, then, the world of particular things, affords the object of perception, the special and the individual, the particular case, both to the universality of concepts and to the universality of the melodies. But these two universalities are in a certain respect opposed to each other; for the concepts contain only the forms, which are ﬁrst of all abstracted from perception,—the separated outward shell of things, as it were,—and hence they are, in the strictest sense of the term, abstracta; music, on the other hand, gives the inmost kernel which precedes all forms, or the heart of things. This relation may be very well expressed in the language of the schoolmen, by saying: the concepts are the universalia post rem, but music gives the universalia ante rem, and the real world the universalia in re.—But that in general a relation is possible between a composition and a perceptible representation rests, as we have said, upon the fact that both are simply different expressions of the same inner being of the world. When now, in the particular case, such a relation is actually given, that is to say, when the composer has been able to express in the universal language of music the emotions of will which constitute the heart of an event, then the melody of the song, the music of the opera, is expressive. But the analogy discovered by the composer between the two must have proceeded from the direct knowledge of the nature of the world unknown to his reason, and must not be an imitation produced with conscious intention by means of conceptions; otherwise the music does not express the inner nature of the will itself, but merely gives an inadequate imitation of its phenomenon: all specially imitative music does this." We have therefore, according to the doctrine of Schopenhauer, an immediate understanding of music as the language of the will, and feel our imagination stimulated to give form to this invisible and yet so actively stirred spirit-world which speaks to us, and prompted to embody it in an analogous example. On the other hand, image and concept, under the inﬂuence of a truly conformable music, acquire a higher signiﬁcance. Dionysian art therefore is wont to exercise—two kinds of inﬂuences, on the Apollonian artfaculty: music ﬁrstly incites to the symbolic intuition of Dionysian universality, and, secondly, it causes the symbolic image to stand forth in its fullest signiﬁcance. From these facts, intelligible in themselves and not inaccessible to profounder observation, I infer the capacity of music to give birth to myth, that is to say, the most signiﬁcant exemplar, and precisely tragic myth: the myth which speaks of Dionysian knowledge in symbols. In the phenomenon of the lyrist, I have set forth that in him music strives to express itself with regard to its nature in Apollonian images. If now we reﬂect that music in its highest potency must seek to attain also to its highest symbolisation, we must deem it possible that it also knows how to ﬁnd the symbolic expression of its inherent Dionysian wisdom; and where shall we have to seek for this expression if not in tragedy and, in general, in the conception of the tragic? From the nature of art, as it is ordinarily conceived according to the single category of appearance and beauty, the tragic cannot be honestly deduced at all; it is only through the spirit of music that we understand the joy in the annihilation of the individual. For in the particular examples of such annihilation only is the eternal phenomenon of Dionysian art made clear to us, which gives expression to the will in its omnipotence, as it were, behind the principium individuationis, the eternal life beyond all phenomena, and in spite of all annihilation.
The metaphysical delight in the tragic is a translation of the instinctively unconscious Dionysian wisdom into the language of the scene: the hero, the highest manifestation of the will, is disavowed for our pleasure, because he is only phenomenon, and because the eternal life of the will is not affected by his annihilation. "We believe in eternal life," tragedy exclaims; while music is the proximate idea of this life. Plastic art has an altogether different object: here Apollo vanquishes the suffering of the individual by the radiant gloriﬁcation of the eternity of the phenomenon; here beauty triumphs over the suffering inherent in life; pain is in a manner surreptitiously obliterated from the features of nature. In Dionysian art and its tragic symbolism the same nature speaks to us with its true undissembled voice: "Be as I am! Amidst the ceaseless change of phenomena the eternally creative primordial mother, eternally impelling to existence, self-satisfying eternally with this change of phenomena!" [20] Cf. World and Will as Idea, I. p. 339, trans. by Haldane and Kemp. [21] That is "the will" as understood by Schopenhauer.—TR. 17. Dionysian art, too, seeks to convince us of the eternal joy of existence: only we are to seek this joy not in phenomena, but behind phenomena. We are to perceive how all that comes into being must be ready for a sorrowful end; we are compelled to look into the terrors of individual existence—yet we are not to become torpid: a metaphysical comfort tears us momentarily from the bustle of the transforming ﬁgures. We are really for brief moments Primordial Being itself, and feel its indomitable desire for being and joy in existence; the struggle, the pain, the destruction of phenomena, now appear to us as something necessary, considering the surplus of innumerable forms of existence which throng and push one another into life, considering the exuberant fertility of the universal will. We are pierced by the maddening sting of these pains at the very moment when we have become, as it were, one with the immeasurable primordial joy in existence, and when we anticipate, in Dionysian ecstasy, the indestructibility and eternity of this joy. In spite of fear and pity, we are the happy living beings, not as individuals, but as the one living being, with whose procreative joy we are blended. The history of the rise of Greek tragedy now tells us with luminous precision that the tragic art of the Greeks was really born of the spirit of music: with which conception we believe we have done justice for the ﬁrst time to the original and most astonishing signiﬁcance of the chorus. At the same time, however, we must admit that the import of tragic myth as set forth above never became transparent with sufﬁcient lucidity to the Greek poets, let alone the Greek philosophers; their heroes speak, as it were, more superﬁcially than they act; the myth does not at all ﬁnd its adequate objectiﬁcation in the spoken word. The structure of the scenes and the conspicuous images reveal a deeper wisdom than the poet himself can put into words and concepts: the same being also observed in Shakespeare, whose Hamlet, for instance, in an analogous manner talks more superﬁcially than he acts, so that the previously mentioned lesson of Hamlet is to be gathered not from his words, but from a more profound contemplation and survey of the whole. With respect to Greek tragedy, which of course presents itself to us only as word-drama, I have even intimated that the incongruence between myth and expression might easily tempt us to regard it as shallower and less signiﬁcant than it really is, and accordingly to postulate for it a more superﬁcial effect than it must have had according to the testimony of the ancients: for how easily one forgets that what the word-poet did not succeed in doing, namely realising the highest spiritualisation and ideality of myth, he might succeed in doing every moment as creative musician! We require, to be sure, almost by philological method to reconstruct for ourselves the ascendency of musical inﬂuence in order to receive something of the incomparable comfort which must be characteristic of true tragedy.
Even this musical ascendency, however, would only have been felt by us as such had we been Greeks: while in the entire development of Greek music—as compared with the inﬁnitely richer music known and familiar to us—we imagine we hear only the youthful song of the musical genius intoned with a feeling of difﬁdence. The Greeks are, as the Egyptian priests say, eternal children, and in tragic art also they are only children who do not know what a sublime play-thing has originated under their hands and—is being demolished. That striving of the spirit of music for symbolic and mythical manifestation, which increases from the beginnings of lyric poetry to Attic tragedy, breaks off all of a sudden immediately after attaining luxuriant development, and disappears, as it were, from the surface of Hellenic art: while the Dionysian view of things born of this striving lives on in Mysteries and, in its strangest metamorphoses and debasements, does not cease to attract earnest natures. Will it not one day rise again as art out of its mystic depth? Here the question occupies us, whether the power by the counteracting inﬂuence of which tragedy perished, has for all time strength enough to prevent the artistic reawaking of tragedy and of the tragic view of things. If ancient tragedy was driven from its course by the dialectical desire for knowledge and the optimism of science, it might be inferred that there is an eternal conﬂict between the theoretic and the tragic view of things, and only after the spirit of science has been led to its boundaries, and its claim to universal validity has been destroyed by the evidence of these boundaries, can we hope for a re-birth of tragedy: for which form of culture we should have to use the symbol of the music-practising Socrates in the sense spoken of above. In this contrast, I understand by the spirit of science the belief which ﬁrst came to light in the person of Socrates,—the belief in the fathomableness of nature and in knowledge as a panacea. He who recalls the immediate consequences of this restlessly onwardpressing spirit of science will realise at once that myth was annihilated by it, and that, in consequence of this annihilation, poetry was driven as a homeless being from her natural ideal soil. If we have rightly assigned to music the capacity to reproduce myth from itself, we may in turn expect to ﬁnd the spirit of science on the path where it inimically opposes this mythopoeic power of music. This takes place in the development of the New Attic Dithyramb, the music of which no longer expressed the inner essence, the will itself, but only rendered the phenomenon insufﬁciently, in an imitation by means of concepts; from which intrinsically degenerate music the truly musical natures turned away with the same repugnance that they felt for the art-destroying tendency of Socrates. The unerring instinct of Aristophanes surely did the proper thing when it comprised Socrates himself, the tragedy of Euripides, and the music of the new Dithyrambic poets in the same feeling of hatred, and perceived in all three phenomena the symptoms of a degenerate culture. By this New Dithyramb, music has in an outrageous manner been made the imitative portrait of phenomena, for instance, of a battle or a storm at sea, and has thus, of course, been entirely deprived of its mythopoeic power. For if it endeavours to excite our delight only by compelling us to seek external analogies between a vital or natural process and certain rhythmical ﬁgures and characteristic sounds of music; if our understanding is expected to satisfy itself with the perception of these analogies, we are reduced to a frame of mind in which the reception of the mythical is impossible; for the myth as a unique exemplar of generality and truth towering into the inﬁnite, desires to be conspicuously perceived. The truly Dionysean music presents itself to us as such a general mirror of the universal will: the conspicuous event which is refracted in this mirror expands at once for our consciousness to the copy of an eternal truth.
Conversely, such a conspicious event is at once divested of every mythical character by the tone-painting of the New Dithyramb; music has here become a wretched copy of the phenomenon, and therefore inﬁnitely poorer than the phenomenon itself: through which poverty it still further reduces even the phenomenon for our consciousness, so that now, for instance, a musically imitated battle of this sort exhausts itself in marches, signal-sounds, etc., and our imagination is arrested precisely by these superﬁcialities. Tone-painting is therefore in every respect the counterpart of true music with its mythopoeic power: through it the phenomenon, poor in itself, is made still poorer, while through an isolated Dionysian music the phenomenon is evolved and expanded into a picture of the world. It was an immense triumph of the non-Dionysian spirit, when, in the development of the New Dithyramb, it had estranged music from itself and reduced it to be the slave of phenomena. Euripides, who, albeit in a higher sense, must be designated as a thoroughly unmusical nature, is for this very reason a passionate adherent of the New Dithyrambic Music, and with the liberality of a freebooter employs all its effective turns and mannerisms. In another direction also we see at work the power of this un-Dionysian, myth-opposing spirit, when we turn our eyes to the prevalence of character representation and psychological reﬁnement from Sophocles onwards. The character must no longer be expanded into an eternal type, but, on the contrary, must operate individually through artistic by-traits and shadings, through the nicest precision of all lines, in such a manner that the spectator is in general no longer conscious of the myth, but of the mighty naturemyth and the imitative power of the artist. Here also we observe the victory of the phenomenon over the Universal, and the delight in the particular quasi-anatomical preparation; we actually breathe the air of a theoretical world, in which scientiﬁc knowledge is valued more highly than the artistic reﬂection of a universal law. The movement along the line of the representation of character proceeds rapidly: while Sophocles still delineates complete characters and employs myth for their reﬁned development, Euripides already delineates only prominent individual traits of character, which can express themselves in violent bursts of passion; in the New Attic Comedy, however, there are only masks with one expression: frivolous old men, duped panders, and cunning slaves in untiring repetition. Where now is the mythopoeic spirit of music? What is still left now of music is either excitatory music or souvenir music, that is, either a stimulant for dull and used-up nerves, or tone-painting. As regards the former, it hardly matters about the text set to it: the heroes and choruses of Euripides are already dissolute enough when once they begin to sing; to what pass must things have come with his brazen successors? The new un-Dionysian spirit, however, manifests itself most clearly in the dénouements of the new dramas. In the Old Tragedy one could feel at the close the metaphysical comfort, without which the delight in tragedy cannot be explained at all; the conciliating tones from another world sound purest, perhaps, in the Œdipus at Colonus. Now that the genius of music has ﬂed from tragedy, tragedy is, strictly speaking, dead: for from whence could one now draw the metaphysical comfort? One sought, therefore, for an earthly unravelment of the tragic dissonance; the hero, after he had been sufﬁciently tortured by fate, reaped a well-deserved reward through a superb marriage or divine tokens of favour. The hero had turned gladiator, on whom, after being liberally battered about and covered with wounds, freedom was occasionally bestowed. The deus ex machina took the place of metaphysical comfort. I will not say that the tragic view of things was everywhere completely destroyed by the intruding spirit of the unDionysian: we only know that it was compelled to ﬂee from art into the under-world as it were, in the degenerate form of a secret cult.
Over the widest extent of the Hellenic character, however, there raged the consuming blast of this spirit, which manifests itself in the form of "Greek cheerfulness," which we have already spoken of as a senile, unproductive love of existence; this cheerfulness is the counterpart of the splendid "naïveté" of the earlier Greeks, which, according to the characteristic indicated above, must be conceived as the blossom of the Apollonian culture growing out of a dark abyss, as the victory which the Hellenic will, through its mirroring of beauty, obtains over suffering and the wisdom of suffering. The noblest manifestation of that other form of "Greek cheerfulness," the Alexandrine, is the cheerfulness of the theoretical man: it exhibits the same symptomatic characteristics as I have just inferred concerning the spirit of the unDionysian:—it combats Dionysian wisdom and art, it seeks to dissolve myth, it substitutes for metaphysical comfort an earthly consonance, in fact, a deus ex machina of its own, namely the god of machines and crucibles, that is, the powers of the genii of nature recognised and employed in the service of higher egoism; it believes in amending the world by knowledge, in guiding life by science, and that it can really conﬁne the individual within a narrow sphere of solvable problems, where he cheerfully says to life: "I desire thee: it is worth while to know thee." 18. It is an eternal phenomenon: the avidious will can always, by means of an illusion spread over things, detain its creatures in life and compel them to live on. One is chained by the Socratic love of knowledge and the vain hope of being able thereby to heal the eternal wound of existence; another is ensnared by art's seductive veil of beauty ﬂuttering before his eyes; still another by the metaphysical comfort that eternal life ﬂows on indestructibly beneath the whirl of phenomena: to say nothing of the more ordinary and almost more powerful illusions which the will has always at hand. These three specimens of illusion are on the whole designed only for the more nobly endowed natures, who in general feel profoundly the weight and burden of existence, and must be deluded into forgetfulness of their displeasure by exquisite stimulants. All that we call culture is made up of these stimulants; and, according to the proportion of the ingredients, we have either a specially Socratic or artistic or tragic culture: or, if historical exempliﬁcations are wanted, there is either an Alexandrine or a Hellenic or a Buddhistic culture. Our whole modern world is entangled in the meshes of Alexandrine culture, and recognises as its ideal the theorist equipped with the most potent means of knowledge, and labouring in the service of science, of whom the archetype and progenitor is Socrates. All our educational methods have originally this ideal in view: every other form of existence must struggle onwards wearisomely beside it, as something tolerated, but not intended. In an almost alarming manner the cultured man was here found for a long time only in the form of the scholar: even our poetical arts have been forced to evolve from learned imitations, and in the main effect of the rhyme we still recognise the origin of our poetic form from artistic experiments with a non-native and thoroughly learned language. How unintelligible must Faust, the modern cultured man, who is in himself intelligible, have appeared to a true Greek,—Faust, storming discontentedly through all the faculties, devoted to magic and the devil from a desire for knowledge, whom we have only to place alongside of Socrates for the purpose of comparison, in order to see that modern man begins to divine the boundaries of this Socratic love of perception and longs for a coast in the wide waste of the ocean of knowledge. When Goethe on one occasion said to Eckermann with reference to Napoleon: "Yes, my good friend, there is also a productiveness of deeds," he reminded us in a charmingly naïve manner that the non-theorist is something incredible and astounding to modern man; so that the wisdom of Goethe is needed once more in order to discover that such a surprising form of existence is comprehensible, nay even pardonable. Now, we must not hide from ourselves what is concealed in the heart of this Socratic culture: Optimism, deeming itself absolute!
Well, we must not be alarmed if the fruits of this optimism ripen,—if society, leavened to the very lowest strata by this kind of culture, gradually begins to tremble through wanton agitations and desires, if the belief in the earthly happiness of all, if the belief in the possibility of such a general intellectual culture is gradually transformed into the threatening demand for such an Alexandrine earthly happiness, into the conjuring of a Euripidean deus ex machina. Let us mark this well: the Alexandrine culture requires a slave class, to be able to exist permanently: but, in its optimistic view of life, it denies the necessity of such a class, and consequently, when the effect of its beautifully seductive and tranquillising utterances about the "dignity of man" and the "dignity of labour" is spent, it gradually drifts towards a dreadful destination. There is nothing more terrible than a barbaric slave class, who have learned to regard their existence as an injustice, and now prepare to take vengeance, not only for themselves, but for all generations. In the face of such threatening storms, who dares to appeal with conﬁdent spirit to our pale and exhausted religions, which even in their foundations have degenerated into scholastic religions?—so that myth, the necessary prerequisite of every religion, is already paralysed everywhere, and even in this domain the optimistic spirit—which we have just designated as the annihilating germ of society—has attained the mastery. While the evil slumbering in the heart of theoretical culture gradually begins to disquiet modern man, and makes him anxiously ransack the stores of his experience for means to avert the danger, though not believing very much in these means; while he, therefore, begins to divine the consequences his position involves: great, universally gifted natures have contrived, with an incredible amount of thought, to make use of the apparatus of science itself, in order to point out the limits and the relativity of knowledge generally, and thus deﬁnitely to deny the claim of science to universal validity and universal ends: with which demonstration the illusory notion was for the ﬁrst time recognised as such, which pretends, with the aid of causality, to be able to fathom the innermost essence of things. The extraordinary courage and wisdom of Kant and Schopenhauer have succeeded in gaining the most, difﬁcult, victory, the victory over the optimism hidden in the essence of logic, which optimism in turn is the basis of our culture. While this optimism, resting on apparently unobjectionable æterna veritates, believed in the intelligibility and solvability of all the riddles of the world, and treated space, time, and causality as totally unconditioned laws of the most universal validity, Kant, on the other hand, showed that these served in reality only to elevate the mere phenomenon, the work of Mâyâ, to the sole and highest reality, putting it in place of the innermost and true essence of things, thus making the actual knowledge of this essence impossible, that is, according to the expression of Schopenhauer, to lull the dreamer still more soundly asleep (Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, I. 498). With this knowledge a culture is inaugurated which I venture to designate as a tragic culture; the most important characteristic of which is that wisdom takes the place of science as the highest end,—wisdom, which, uninﬂuenced by the seductive distractions of the sciences, turns with unmoved eye to the comprehensive view of the world, and seeks to apprehend therein the eternal suffering as its own with sympathetic feelings of love.
Let us imagine a rising generation with this undauntedness of vision, with this heroic desire for the prodigious, let us imagine the bold step of these dragon-slayers, the proud and daring spirit with which they turn their backs on all the effeminate doctrines of optimism in order "to live resolutely" in the Whole and in the Full: would it not be necessary for the tragic man of this culture, with his self-discipline to earnestness and terror, to desire a new art, the art of metaphysical comfort, —namely, tragedy, as the Hellena belonging to him, and that he should exclaim with Faust: Und sollt' ich nicht, sehnsüchtigster Gewalt, In's Leben ziehn die einzigste Gestalt?[21] But now that the Socratic culture has been shaken from two directions, and is only able to hold the sceptre of its infallibility with trembling hands, —once by the fear of its own conclusions which it at length begins to surmise, and again, because it is no longer convinced with its former naïve trust of the eternal validity of its foundation, —it is a sad spectacle to behold how the dance of its thought always rushes longingly on new forms, to embrace them, and then, shuddering, lets them go of a sudden, as Mephistopheles does the seductive Lamiæ. It is certainly the symptom of the "breach" which all are wont to speak of as the primordial suffering of modern culture that the theoretical man, alarmed and dissatisﬁed at his own conclusions, no longer dares to entrust himself to the terrible ice-stream of existence: he runs timidly up and down the bank. He no longer wants to have anything entire, with all the natural cruelty of things, so thoroughly has he been spoiled by his optimistic contemplation. Besides, he feels that a culture built up on the principles of science must perish when it begins to grow illogical, that is, to avoid its own conclusions. Our art reveals this universal trouble: in vain does one seek help by imitating all the great productive periods and natures, in vain does one accumulate the entire "world-lit- erature" around modern man for his comfort, in vain does one place one's self in the midst of the art-styles and artists of all ages, so that one may give names to them as Adam did to the beasts: one still continues the eternal hungerer, the "critic" without joy and energy, the Alexandrine man, who is in the main a librarian and corrector of proofs, and who, pitiable wretch goes blind from the dust of books and printers' errors. [21] Cf. Introduction, p. 14. 19. We cannot designate the intrinsic substance of Socratic culture more distinctly than by calling it the culture of the opera: for it is in this department that culture has expressed itself with special naïveté concerning its aims and perceptions, which is sufﬁciently surprising when we compare the genesis of the opera and the facts of operatic development with the eternal truths of the Apollonian and Dionysian. I call to mind ﬁrst of all the origin of the stilo rappresentativo and the recitative. Is it credible that this thoroughly externalised operatic music, incapable of devotion, could be received and cherished with enthusiastic favour, as a re-birth, as it were, of all true music, by the very age in which the ineffably sublime and sacred music of Palestrina had originated? And who, on the other hand, would think of making only the diversion-craving luxuriousness of those Florentine circles and the vanity of their dramatic singers responsible for the love of the opera which spread with such rapidity? That in the same age, even among the same people, this passion for a half-musical mode of speech should awaken alongside of the vaulted structure of Palestrine harmonies which the entire Christian Middle Age had been building up, I can explain to myself only by a cooperating extra-artistic tendency in the essence of the recitative. The listener, who insists on distinctly hearing the words under the music, has his wishes met by the singer in that he speaks rather than sings, and intensiﬁes the pathetic expression of the words in this half-song: by this intensiﬁcation of the pathos he facilitates the understanding of the words and surmounts the remaining half of the music.
The speciﬁc danger which now threatens him is that in some unguarded moment he may give undue importance to music, which would forthwith result in the destruction of the pathos of the speech and the distinctness of the words: while, on the other hand, he always feels himself impelled to musical delivery and to virtuose exhibition of vocal talent. Here the "poet" comes to his aid, who knows how to provide him with abundant opportunities for lyrical interjections, repetitions of words and sentences, etc.,—at which places the singer, now in the purely musical element, can rest himself without minding the words. This alternation of emotionally impressive, yet only half-sung speech and wholly sung interjections, which is characteristic of the stilo rappresentativo, this rapidly changing endeavour to operate now on the conceptional and representative faculty of the hearer, now on his musical sense, is something so thoroughly unnatural and withal so intrinsically contradictory both to the Apollonian and Dionysian artistic impulses, that one has to infer an origin of the recitative foreign to all artistic instincts. The recitative must be deﬁned, according to this description, as the combination of epic and lyric delivery, not indeed as an intrinsically stable combination which could not be attained in the case of such totally disparate elements, but an entirely superﬁcial mosaic conglutination, such as is totally unprecedented in the domain of nature and experience. But this was not the opinion of the inventors of the recitative: they themselves, and their age with them, believed rather that the mystery of antique music had been solved by this stilo rappresentativo, in which, as they thought, the only explanation of the enormous inﬂuence of an Orpheus, an Amphion, and even of Greek tragedy was to be found. The new style was regarded by them as the re-awakening of the most effective music, the Old Greek music: indeed, with the universal and popular conception of the Homeric world as the primitive world, they could abandon themselves to the dream of having descended once more into the paradisiac beginnings of mankind, wherein music also must needs have had the unsurpassed purity, power, and innocence of which the poets could give such touching accounts in their pastoral plays. Here we see into the internal process of development of this thoroughly modern variety of art, the opera: a powerful need here acquires an art, but it is a need of an unæsthetic kind: the yearning for the idyll, the belief in the prehistoric existence of the artistic, good man. The recitative was regarded as the rediscovered language of this primitive man; the opera as the recovered land of this idyllically or heroically good creature, who in every action follows at the same time a natural artistic impulse, who sings a little along with all he has to say, in order to sing immediately with full voice on the slightest emotional excitement. It is now a matter of indifference to us that the humanists of those days combated the old ecclesiastical representation of man as naturally corrupt and lost, with this newcreated picture of the paradisiac artist: so that opera may be understood as the oppositional dogma of the good man, whereby however a solace was at the same time found for the pessimism to which precisely the seriously-disposed men of that time were most strongly incited, owing to the frightful uncertainty of all conditions of life. It is enough to have perceived that the intrinsic charm, and therefore the genesis, of this new form of art lies in the gratiﬁcation of an altogether unæsthetic need, in the optimistic gloriﬁcation of man as such, in the conception of the primitive man as the man naturally good and artistic: a principle of the opera which has gradually changed into a threatening and terrible demand, which, in face of the socialistic movements of the present time, we can no longer ignore. The "good primitive man" wants his rights: what paradisiac prospects! I here place by way of parallel still another equally obvious conﬁrmation of my view that opera is built up on the same principles as our Alexandrine culture. Opera is the birth of the theoretical man, of the critical layman, not of the artist: one of the most surprising facts in the whole history of art.
It was the demand of thoroughly unmusical hearers that the words must above all be understood, so that according to them a re-birth of music is only to be expected when some mode of singing has been discovered in which the text-word lords over the counterpoint as the master over the servant. For the words, it is argued, are as much nobler than the accompanying harmonic system as the soul is nobler than the body. It was in accordance with the laically unmusical crudeness of these views that the combination of music, picture and expression was effected in the beginnings of the opera: in the spirit of this æsthetics the ﬁrst experiments were also made in the leading laic circles of Florence by the poets and singers patronised there. The man incapable of art creates for himself a species of art precisely because he is the inartistic man as such. Because he does not divine the Dionysian depth of music, he changes his musical taste into appreciation of the understandable word-and-tone-rhetoric of the passions in the stilo rappresentativo, and into the voluptuousness of the arts of song; because he is unable to behold a vision, he forces the machinist and the decorative artist into his service; because he cannot apprehend the true nature of the artist, he conjures up the "artistic primitive man" to suit his taste, that is, the man who sings and recites verses under the inﬂuence of passion. He dreams himself into a time when passion sufﬁces to generate songs and poems: as if emotion had ever been able to create anything artistic. The postulate of the opera is a false belief concerning the artistic process, in fact, the idyllic belief that every sentient man is an artist. In the sense of this belief, opera is the expression of the taste of the laity in art, who dictate their laws with the cheerful optimism of the theorist. Should we desire to unite in one the two conceptions just set forth as inﬂuential in the origin of opera, it would only remain for us to speak of an idyllic tendency of the opera: in which connection we may avail ourselves exclusively of the phraseology and illustration of Schiller.[22] "Nature and the ideal," he says, "are either objects of grief, when the former is represented as lost, the latter unattained; or both are objects of joy, in that they are represented as real. The ﬁrst case furnishes the elegy in its narrower signiﬁcation, the second the idyll in its widest sense." Here we must at once call attention to the common characteristic of these two conceptions in operatic genesis, namely, that in them the ideal is not regarded as unattained or nature as lost Agreeably to this sentiment, there was a primitive age of man when he lay close to the heart of nature, and, owing to this naturalness, had attained the ideal of mankind in a paradisiac goodness and artist-organisation: from which perfect primitive man all of us were supposed to be descended; whose faithful copy we were in fact still said to be: only we had to cast off some few things in order to recognise ourselves once more as this primitive man, on the strength of a voluntary renunciation of superﬂuous learnedness, of super-abundant culture. It was to such a concord of nature and the ideal, to an idyllic reality, that the cultured man of the Renaissance suffered himself to be led back by his operatic imitation of Greek tragedy; he made use of this tragedy, as Dante made use of Vergil, in order to be led up to the gates of paradise: while from this point he went on without assistance and passed over from an imitation of the highest form of Greek art to a "restoration of all things," to an imitation of man's original art-world. What delightfully naïve hopefulness of these daring endeavours, in the very heart of theoretical culture!—solely to be explained by the comforting belief, that "man-in-himself" is the eternally virtuous hero of the opera, the eternally ﬂuting or singing shepherd, who must always in the end rediscover himself as such, if he has at any time really lost himself; solely the fruit of the optimism, which here rises like a sweetishly seductive column of vapour out of the depth of the Socratic conception of the world.
The features of the opera therefore do not by any means exhibit the elegiac sorrow of an eternal loss, but rather the cheerfulness of eternal rediscovery, the indolent delight in an idyllic reality which one can at least represent to one's self each moment as real: and in so doing one will perhaps surmise some day that this supposed reality is nothing but a fantastically silly dawdling, concerning which every one, who could judge it by the terrible earnestness of true nature and compare it with the actual primitive scenes of the beginnings of mankind, would have to call out with loathing: Away with the phantom! Nevertheless one would err if one thought it possible to frighten away merely by a vigorous shout such a dawdling thing as the opera, as if it were a spectre. He who would destroy the opera must join issue with Alexandrine cheerfulness, which expresses itself so naïvely therein concerning its favourite representation; of which in fact it is the speciﬁc form of art. But what is to be expected for art itself from the operation of a form of art, the beginnings of which do not at all lie in the æsthetic province; which has rather stolen over from a half-moral sphere into the artistic domain, and has been able only now and then to delude us concerning this hybrid origin? By what sap is this parasitic opera-concern nourished, if not by that of true art? Must we not suppose that the highest and indeed the truly serious task of art—to free the eye from its glance into the horrors of night and to deliver the "subject" by the healing balm of appearance from the spasms of volitional agitations—will degenerate under the inﬂuence of its idyllic seductions and Alexandrine adulation to an empty dissipating tendency, to pastime? What will become of the eternal truths of the Dionysian and Apollonian in such an amalgamation of styles as I have exhibited in the character of the stilo rappresentativo? where music is regarded as the servant, the text as the master, where music is compared with the body, the text with the soul? where at best the highest aim will be the realisation of a paraphrastic tone-painting, just as formerly in the New Attic Dithyramb? where music is completely alienated from its true dignity of being, the Dionysian mirror of the world, so that the only thing left to it is, as a slave of phenomena, to imitate the formal character thereof, and to excite an external pleasure in the play of lines and proportions. On close observation, this fatal inﬂuence of the opera on music is seen to coincide absolutely with the universal development of modern music; the optimism lurking in the genesis of the opera and in the essence of culture represented thereby, has, with alarming rapidity, succeeded in divesting music of its Dionyso-cosmic mission and in impressing on it a playfully formal and pleasurable character: a change with which perhaps only the metamorphosis of the Æschylean man into the cheerful Alexandrine man could be compared. If, however, in the exempliﬁcation herewith indicated we have rightly associated the evanescence of the Dionysian spirit with a most striking, but hitherto unexplained transformation and degeneration of the Hellene—what hopes must revive in us when the most trustworthy auspices guarantee the reverse process, the gradual awakening of the Dionysian spirit in our modern world! It is impossible for the divine strength of Herakles to languish for ever in voluptuous bondage to Omphale. Out of the Dionysian root of the German spirit a power has arisen which has nothing in common with the primitive conditions of Socratic culture, and can neither be explained nor excused thereby, but is rather regarded by this culture as something terribly inexplicable and overwhelmingly hostile,mdash;namely, German music as we have to understand it, especially in its vast solar orbit from Bach to Beethoven, from Beethoven to Wagner. What even under the most favourable circumstances can the knowledge-craving Socratism of our days do with this demon rising from unfathomable depths? Neither by means of the zig-zag and arabesque work of operatic melody, nor with the aid of the arithmetical counting board of fugue and contrapuntal dialectics is the formula to be found, in the trebly powerful light[23] of which one could subdue this demon and compel it to speak.
What a spectacle, when our æsthetes, with a net of "beauty" peculiar to themselves, now pursue and clutch at the genius of music romping about before them with incomprehensible life, and in so doing display activities which are not to be judged by the standard of eternal beauty any more than by the standard of the sublime. Let us but observe these patrons of music as they are, at close range, when they call out so indefatigably "beauty! beauty!" to discover whether they have the marks of nature's darling children who are fostered and fondled in the lap of the beautiful, or whether they do not rather seek a disguise for their own rudeness, an æsthetical pretext for their own unemotional insipidity: I am thinking here, for instance, of Otto Jahn. But let the liar and the hypocrite beware of our German music: for in the midst of all our culture it is really the only genuine, pure and purifying ﬁre-spirit from which and towards which, as in the teaching of the great Heraclitus of Ephesus, all things move in a double orbit-all that we now call culture, education, civilisation, must appear some day before the unerring judge, Dionysus. Let us recollect furthermore how Kant and Schopenhauer made it possible for the spirit of German philosophy streaming from the same sources to annihilate the satisﬁed delight in existence of scientiﬁc Socratism by the delimitation of the boundaries thereof; how through this delimitation an inﬁnitely profounder and more serious view of ethical problems and of art was inaugurated, which we may unhesitatingly designate as Dionysian wisdom comprised in concepts. To what then does the mystery of this oneness of German music and philosophy point, if not to a new form of existence, concerning the substance of which we can only inform ourselves presentiently from Hellenic analogies? For to us who stand on the boundary line between two different forms of existence, the Hellenic prototype retains the immeasurable value, that therein all these transitions and struggles are imprinted in a classically instructive form: except that we, as it were, experience analogically in reverse order the chief epochs of the Hellenic genius, and seem now, for instance, to pass backwards from the Alexandrine age to the period of tragedy. At the same time we have the feeling that the birth of a tragic age betokens only a return to itself of the German spirit, a blessed self-rediscovering after excessive and urgent external inﬂuences have for a long time compelled it, living as it did in helpless barbaric formlessness, to servitude under their form. It may at last, after returning to the primitive source of its being, venture to stalk along boldly and freely before all nations without hugging the leading-strings of a Romanic civilisation: if only it can learn implicitly of one people—the Greeks, of whom to learn at all is itself a high honour and a rare distinction. And when did we require these highest of all teachers more than at present, when we experience a re-birth of tragedy and are in danger alike of not knowing whence it comes, and of being unable to make clear to ourselves whither it tends. [22] Essay on Elegiac Poetry.—TR. [23] See Faust, Part 1.1. 965—TR. 20. It may be weighed some day before an impartial judge, in what time and in what men the German spirit has thus far striven most resolutely to learn of the Greeks: and if we conﬁdently assume that this unique praise must be accorded to the noblest intellectual efforts of Goethe, Schiller, and Winkelmann, it will certainly have to be added that since their time, and subsequently to the more immediate inﬂuences of these efforts, the endeavour to attain to culture and to the Greeks by this path has in an incomprehensible manner grown feebler and feebler. In order not to despair altogether of the German spirit, must we not infer therefrom that possibly, in some essential matter, even these champions could not penetrate into the core of the Hellenic nature, and were unable to establish a permanent friendly alliance between German and Greek culture? So that perhaps an unconscious perception of this shortcoming might raise also in more serious minds the disheartening doubt as to whether after such predecessors they could advance still farther on this path of culture, or could reach the goal at all.
Accordingly, we see the opinions concerning the value of Greek contribution to culture degenerate since that time in the most alarming manner; the expression of compassionate superiority may be heard in the most heterogeneous intellectual and non-intellectual camps, and elsewhere a totally ineffective declamation dallies with "Greek harmony," "Greek beauty," "Greek cheerfulness." And in the very circles whose dignity it might be to draw indefatigably from the Greek channel for the good of German culture, in the circles of the teachers in the higher educational institutions, they have learned best to compromise with the Greeks in good time and on easy terms, to the extent often of a sceptical abandonment of the Hellenic ideal and a total perversion of the true purpose of antiquarian studies. If there be any one at all in these circles who has not completely exhausted himself in the endeavour to be a trustworthy corrector of old texts or a natural-history microscopist of language, he perhaps seeks also to appropriate Grecian antiquity "historically" along with other antiquities, and in any case according to the method and with the supercilious air of our present cultured historiography. When, therefore, the intrinsic efﬁciency of the higher educational institutions has never perhaps been lower or feebler than at present, when the "journalist," the paper slave of the day, has triumphed over the academic teacher in all matters pertaining to culture, and there only remains to the latter the often previously experienced metamorphosis of now ﬂuttering also, as a cheerful cultured butterﬂy, in the idiom of the journalist, with the "light elegance" peculiar thereto—with what painful confusion must the cultured persons of a period like the present gaze at the phenomenon (which can perhaps be comprehended analogically only by means of the profoundest principle of the hitherto unintelligible Hellenic genius) of the reawakening of the Dionysian spirit and the re-birth of tragedy? Never has there been another art-period in which so-called culture and true art have been so estranged and opposed, as is so obviously the case at present. We understand why so feeble a culture hates true art; it fears destruction thereby. But must not an entire domain of culture, namely the Socratic-Alexandrine, have exhausted its powers after contriving to culminate in such a daintily-tapering point as our present culture? When it was not permitted to heroes like Goethe and Schiller to break open the enchanted gate which leads into the Hellenic magic mountain, when with their most dauntless striving they did not get beyond the longing gaze which the Goethean Iphigenia cast from barbaric Tauris to her home across the ocean, what could the epigones of such heroes hope for, if the gate should not open to them suddenly of its own accord, in an entirely different position, quite overlooked in all endeavours of culture hitherto—amidst the mystic tones of reawakened tragic music. Let no one attempt to weaken our faith in an impending re-birth of Hellenic antiquity; for in it alone we ﬁnd our hope of a renovation and puriﬁcation of the German spirit through the ﬁre-magic of music. What else do we know of amidst the present desolation and languor of culture, which could awaken any comforting expectation for the future? We look in vain for one single vigorously-branching root, for a speck of fertile and healthy soil: there is dust, sand, torpidness and languishing everywhere! Under such circumstances a cheerless solitary wanderer could choose for himself no better symbol than the Knight with Death and the Devil, as Dürer has sketched him for us, the mail-clad knight, grim and stern of visage, who is able, unperturbed by his gruesome companions, and yet hopelessly, to pursue his terrible path with horse and hound alone. Our Schopenhauer was such a Dürerian knight: he was destitute of all hope, but he sought the truth. There is not his equal. But how suddenly this gloomily depicted wilderness of our exhausted culture changes when the Dionysian magic touches it! A hurricane seizes everything decrepit, decaying, collapsed, and stunted; wraps it whirlingly into a red cloud of dust; and carries it like a vulture into the air. Confused thereby, our glances seek for what has vanished: for what they see is something risen to the golden light as from a depression, so full and green, so luxuriantly alive, so ardently inﬁnite.
Tragedy sits in the midst of this exuberance of life, sorrow and joy, in sublime ecstasy; she listens to a distant doleful song—it tells of the Mothers of Being, whose names are: Wahn, Wille, Wehe[21]—Yes, my friends, believe with me in Dionysian life and in the re-birth of tragedy. The time of the Socratic man is past: crown yourselves with ivy, take in your hands the thyrsus, and do not marvel if tigers and panthers lie down fawning at your feet. Dare now to be tragic men, for ye are to be redeemed! Ye are to accompany the Dionysian festive procession from India to Greece! Equip yourselves for severe conﬂict, but believe in the wonders of your god! 21. Gliding back from these hortative tones into the mood which beﬁts the contemplative man, I repeat that it can only be learnt from the Greeks what such a sudden and miraculous awakening of tragedy must signify for the essential basis of a people's life. It is the people of the tragic mysteries who ﬁght the battles with the Persians: and again, the people who waged such wars required tragedy as a necessary healing potion. Who would have imagined that there was still such a uniformly powerful effusion of the simplest political sentiments, the most natural domestic instincts and the primitive manly delight in strife in this very people after it had been shaken to its foundations for several generations by the most violent convulsions of the Dionysian demon? If at every considerable spreading of the Dionysian commotion one always perceives that the Dionysian loosing from the shackles of the individual makes itself felt ﬁrst of all in an increased encroachment on the political instincts, to the extent of indifference, yea even hostility, it is certain, on the other hand, that the state-forming Apollo is also the genius of the principium individuationis, and that the state and domestic sentiment cannot live without an assertion of individual personality. There is only one way from orgasm for a people,—the way to Indian Bud- dhism, which, in order to be at all endured with its longing for nothingness, requires the rare ecstatic states with their elevation above space, time, and the individual; just as these in turn demand a philosophy which teaches how to overcome the indescribable depression of the intermediate states by means of a fancy. With the same necessity, owing to the unconditional dominance of political impulses, a people drifts into a path of extremest secularisation, the most magniﬁcent, but also the most terrible expression of which is the Roman imperium. Placed between India and Rome, and constrained to a seductive choice, the Greeks succeeded in devising in classical purity still a third form of life, not indeed for long private use, but just on that account for immortality. For it holds true in all things that those whom the gods love die young, but, on the other hand, it holds equally true that they then live eternally with the gods. One must not demand of what is most noble that it should possess the durable toughness of leather; the staunch durability, which, for instance, was inherent in the national character of the Romans, does not probably belong to the indispensable predicates of perfection. But if we ask by what physic it was possible for the Greeks, in their best period, notwithstanding the extraordinary strength of their Dionysian and political impulses, neither to exhaust themselves by ecstatic brooding, nor by a consuming scramble for empire and worldly honour, but to attain the splendid mixture which we ﬁnd in a noble, inﬂaming, and contemplatively disposing wine, we must remember the enormous power of tragedy, exciting, purifying, and disburdening the entire life of a people; the highest value of which we shall divine only when, as in the case of the Greeks, it appears to us as the essence of all the prophylactic healing forces, as the mediator arbitrating between the strongest and most inherently fateful characteristics of a people.
Tragedy absorbs the highest musical orgasm into itself, so that it absolutely brings music to perfection among the Greeks, as among ourselves; but it then places alongside thereof tragic myth and the tragic hero, who, like a mighty Titan, takes the entire Dionysian world on his shoulders and disburdens us thereof; while, on the other hand, it is able by means of this same tragic myth, in the person of the tragic hero, to deliver us from the intense longing for this existence, and reminds us with warning hand of another existence and a higher joy, for which the struggling hero prepares himself presentiently by his destruction, not by his victories. Tragedy sets a sublime symbol, namely the myth between the universal authority of its music and the receptive Dionysian hearer, and produces in him the illusion that music is only the most effective means for the animation of the plastic world of myth. Relying upon this noble illusion, she can now move her limbs for the dithyrambic dance, and abandon herself unhesitatingly to an orgiastic feeling of freedom, in which she could not venture to indulge as music itself, without this illusion. The myth protects us from the music, while, on the other hand, it alone gives the highest freedom thereto. By way of return for this service, music imparts to tragic myth such an impressive and convincing metaphysical signiﬁcance as could never be attained by word and image, without this unique aid; and the tragic spectator in particular experiences thereby the sure presentiment of supreme joy to which the path through destruction and negation leads; so that he thinks he hears, as it were, the innermost abyss of things speaking audibly to him. If in these last propositions I have succeeded in giving perhaps only a preliminary expression, intelligible to few at ﬁrst, to this difﬁcult representation, I must not here desist from stimulating my friends to a further attempt, or cease from beseeching them to prepare themselves, by a detached example of our common experience, for the perception of the universal proposition. In this example I must not appeal to those who make use of the pictures of the scenic processes, the words and the emotions of the performers, in order to approximate thereby to musical perception; for none of these speak music as their mother-tongue, and, in spite of the aids in question, do not get farther than the precincts of musical perception, without ever being allowed to touch its innermost shrines; some of them, like Gervinus, do not even reach the precincts by this path. I have only to address myself to those who, being immediately allied to music, have it as it were for their mother's lap, and are connected with things almost exclusively by unconscious musical relations. I ask the question of these genuine musicians: whether they can imagine a man capable of hearing the third act of Tristan und Isolde without any aid of word or scenery, purely as a vast symphonic period, without expiring by a spasmodic distention of all the wings of the soul? A man who has thus, so to speak, put his ear to the heart-chamber of the cosmic will, who feels the furious desire for existence issuing therefrom as a thundering stream or most gently dispersed brook, into all the veins of the world, would he not collapse all at once? Could he endure, in the wretched fragile tenement of the human individual, to hear the re-echo of countless cries of joy and sorrow from the "vast void of cosmic night," without ﬂying irresistibly towards his primitive home at the sound of this pastoral dancesong of metaphysics? But if, nevertheless, such a work can be heard as a whole, without a renunciation of individual existence, if such a creation could be created without demolishing its creator—where are we to get the solution of this contradiction? Here there interpose between our highest musical excitement and the music in question the tragic myth and the tragic hero—in reality only as symbols of the most universal facts, of which music alone can speak directly. If, however, we felt as purely Dionysian beings, myth as a symbol would stand by us absolutely ineffective and unnoticed, and would never for a moment prevent us from giving ear to the re-echo of the universalia ante rem.
Here, however, the Apollonian power, with a view to the restoration of the wellnigh shattered individual, bursts forth with the healing balm of a blissful illusion: all of a sudden we imagine we see only Tristan, motionless, with hushed voice saying to himself: "the old tune, why does it wake me?" And what formerly interested us like a hollow sigh from the heart of being, seems now only to tell us how "waste and void is the sea." And when, breathless, we thought to expire by a convulsive distention of all our feelings, and only a slender tie bound us to our present existence, we now hear and see only the hero wounded to death and still not dying, with his despairing cry: "Longing! Longing! In dying still longing! for longing not dying!" And if formerly, after such a surplus and superabundance of consuming agonies, the jubilation of the born rent our hearts almost like the very acme of agony, the rejoicing Kurwenal now stands between us and the "jubilation as such," with face turned toward the ship which carries Isolde. However powerfully fellow-suffering encroaches upon us, it nevertheless delivers us in a manner from the primordial suffering of the world, just as the symbol-image of the myth delivers us from the immediate perception of the highest cosmic idea, just as the thought and word deliver us from the unchecked effusion of the unconscious will. The glorious Apollonian illusion makes it appear as if the very realm of tones presented itself to us as a plastic cosmos, as if even the fate of Tristan and Isolde had been merely formed and moulded therein as out of some most delicate and impressible material. Thus does the Apollonian wrest us from Dionysian universality and ﬁll us with rapture for individuals; to these it rivets our sympathetic emotion, through these it satisﬁes the sense of beauty which longs for great and sublime forms; it brings before us biographical portraits, and incites us to a thoughtful apprehension of the essence of life contained therein. With the immense potency of the image, the concept, the ethical teaching and the sympathetic emotion—the Apollonian inﬂuence uplifts man from his orgiastic self-annihilation, and beguiles him concerning the universality of the Dionysian process into the belief that he is seeing a detached picture of the world, for instance, Tristan and Isolde, and that, through music, he will be enabled to see it still more clearly and intrinsically. What can the healing magic of Apollo not accomplish when it can even excite in us the illusion that the Dionysian is actually in the service of the Apollonian, the effects of which it is capable of enhancing; yea, that music is essentially the representative art for an Apollonian substance? With the pre-established harmony which obtains between perfect drama and its music, the drama attains the highest degree of conspicuousness, such as is usually unattainable in mere spoken drama. As all the animated ﬁgures of the scene in the independently evolved lines of melody simplify themselves before us to the distinctness of the catenary curve, the coexistence of these lines is also audible in the harmonic change which sympathises in a most delicate manner with the evolved process: through which change the relations of things become immediately perceptible to us in a sensible and not at all abstract manner, as we likewise perceive thereby that it is only in these relations that the essence of a character and of a line of melody manifests itself clearly. And while music thus compels us to see more extensively and more intrinsically than usual, and makes us spread out the curtain of the scene before ourselves like some delicate texture, the world of the stage is as inﬁnitely expanded for our spiritualised, introspective eye as it is illumined outwardly from within. How can the word-poet furnish anything analogous, who strives to attain this internal expansion and illumination of the visible stage-world by a much more imperfect mechanism and an indirect path, proceeding as he does from word and concept? Albeit musical tragedy likewise avails itself of the word, it is at the same time able to place alongside thereof its basis and source, and can make the unfolding of the word, from within outwards, obvious to us.
Of the process just set forth, however, it could still be said as decidedly that it is only a glorious appearance, namely the afore-mentioned Apollon- ian illusion, through the inﬂuence of which we are to be delivered from the Dionysian obtrusion and excess. In point of fact, the relation of music to drama is precisely the reverse; music is the adequate idea of the world, drama is but the reﬂex of this idea, a detached umbrage thereof. The identity between the line of melody and the lining form, between the harmony and the character-relations of this form, is true in a sense antithetical to what one would suppose on the contemplation of musical tragedy. We may agitate and enliven the form in the most conspicuous manner, and enlighten it from within, but it still continues merely phenomenon, from which there is no bridge to lead us into the true reality, into the heart of the world. Music, however, speaks out of this heart; and though countless phenomena of the kind might be passing manifestations of this music, they could never exhaust its essence, but would always be merely its externalised copies. Of course, as regards the intricate relation of music and drama, nothing can be explained, while all may be confused by the popular and thoroughly false antithesis of soul and body; but the unphilosophical crudeness of this antithesis seems to have become—who knows for what reasons—a readily accepted Article of Faith with our æstheticians, while they have learned nothing concerning an antithesis of phenomenon and thing-in-itself, or perhaps, for reasons equally unknown, have not cared to learn anything thereof. Should it have been established by our analysis that the Apollonian element in tragedy has by means of its illusion gained a complete victory over the Dionysian primordial element of music, and has made music itself subservient to its end, namely, the highest and clearest elucidation of the drama, it would certainly be necessary to add the very important restriction: that at the most essential point this Apollonian illusion is dissolved and annihilated. The drama, which, by the aid of music, spreads out before us with such inwardly illumined distinctness in all its movements and ﬁgures, that we imagine we see the texture unfolding on the loom as the shuttle ﬂies to and fro,—attains as a whole an effect which transcends all Apollonian artistic effects. In the collective effect of tragedy, the Dionysian gets the upper hand once more; tragedy ends with a sound which could never emanate from the realm of Apollonian art. And the Apollonian illusion is thereby found to be what it is,—the assiduous veiling during the performance of tragedy of the intrinsically Dionysian effect: which, however, is so powerful, that it ﬁnally forces the Apollonian drama itself into a sphere where it begins to talk with Dionysian wisdom, and even denies itself and its Apollonian conspicuousness. Thus then the intricate relation of the Apollonian and the Dionysian in tragedy must really be symbolised by a fraternal union of the two deities: Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo; Apollo, however, ﬁnally speaks the language of Dionysus; and so the highest goal of tragedy and of art in general is attained. 22. Let the attentive friend picture to himself purely and simply, according to his experiences, the effect of a true musical tragedy. I think I have so portrayed the phenomenon of this effect in both its phases that he will now be able to interpret his own experiences. For he will recollect that with regard to the myth which passed before him he felt himself exalted to a kind of omniscience, as if his visual faculty were no longer merely a surface faculty, but capable of penetrating into the interior, and as if he now saw before him, with the aid of music, the ebullitions of the will, the conﬂict of motives, and the swelling stream of the passions, almost sensibly visible, like a plenitude of actively moving lines and ﬁgures, and could thereby dip into the most tender secrets of unconscious emotions.
While he thus becomes conscious of the highest exaltation of his instincts for conspicuousness and transﬁguration, he nevertheless feels with equal deﬁnitiveness that this long series of Apollonian artistic effects still does not generate the blissful continuance in will-less contemplation which the plasticist and the epic poet, that is to say, the strictly Apollonian artists, produce in him by their artistic productions: to wit, the justiﬁcation of the world of the individuatio attained in this contemplation,—which is the object and essence of Apollonian art. He beholds the transﬁgured world of the stage and nevertheless denies it. He sees before him the tragic hero in epic clearness and beauty, and nevertheless delights in his annihilation. He comprehends the incidents of the scene in all their details, and yet loves to ﬂee into the incomprehensible. He feels the actions of the hero to be justiﬁed, and is nevertheless still more elated when these actions annihilate their originator. He shudders at the sufferings which will befall the hero, and yet anticipates therein a higher and much more overpowering joy. He sees more extensively and profoundly than ever, and yet wishes to be blind. Whence must we derive this curious internal dissension, this collapse of the Apollonian apex, if not from the Dionysian spell, which, though apparently stimulating the Apollonian emotions to their highest pitch, can nevertheless force this superabundance of Apollonian power into its service? Tragic myth is to be understood only as a symbolisation of Dionysian wisdom by means of the expedients of Apollonian art: the mythus conducts the world of phenomena to its boundaries, where it denies itself, and seeks to ﬂee back again into the bosom of the true and only reality; where it then, like Isolde, seems to strike up its metaphysical swan-song:— In des Wonnemeeres wogendem Schwall, in der Duft-Wellen tönendem Schall, in des Weltathems wehendem All— ertrinken—versinken unbewusst—höchste Lust![24] We thus realise to ourselves in the experiences of the truly æsthetic hearer the tragic artist himself when he proceeds like a luxuriously fertile divinity of individuation to create his ﬁgures (in which sense his work can hardly be understood as an "imitation of nature")—and when, on the other hand, his vast Dionysian impulse then absorbs the entire world of phenomena, in order to anticipate beyond it, and through its annihilation, the highest artistic primal joy, in the bosom of the Primordial Unity. Of course, our æsthetes have nothing to say about this return in fraternal union of the two art-deities to the original home, nor of either the Apollonian or Dionysian excitement of the hearer, while they are indefatigable in characterising the struggle of the hero with fate, the triumph of the moral order of the world, or the disburdenment of the emotions through tragedy, as the properly Tragic: an indefatigableness which makes me think that they are perhaps not æsthetically excitable men at all, but only to be regarded as moral beings when hearing tragedy. Never since Aristotle has an explanation of the tragic effect been proposed, by which an æsthetic activity of the hearer could be inferred from artistic circumstances. At one time fear and pity are supposed to be forced to an alleviating discharge through the serious procedure, at another time we are expected to feel elevated and inspired at the triumph of good and noble principles, at the sacriﬁce of the hero in the interest of a moral conception of things; and however certainly I believe that for countless men precisely this, and only this, is the effect of tragedy, it as obviously follows therefrom that all these, together with their interpreting æsthetes, have had no experience of tragedy as the highest art. The pathological discharge, the catharsis of Aristotle, which philologists are at a loss whether to include under medicinal or moral phenomena, recalls a remarkable anticipation of Goethe. "Without a lively pathological interest," he says, "I too have never yet succeeded in elaborating a tragic situation of any kind, and hence I have rather avoided than sought it.
Can it perhaps have been still another of the merits of the ancients that the deepest pathos was with them merely æsthetic play, whereas with us the truth of nature must co-operate in order to produce such a work?" We can now answer in the afﬁrmative this latter profound question after our glorious experiences, in which we have found to our astonishment in the case of musical tragedy itself, that the deepest pathos can in reality be merely æsthetic play: and therefore we are justiﬁed in believing that now for the ﬁrst time the proto-phenomenon of the tragic can be portrayed with some degree of success. He who now will still persist in talking only of those vicarious effects proceeding from ultra-æsthetic spheres, and does not feel himself raised above the pathologically-moral process, may be left to despair of his æsthetic nature: for which we recommend to him, by way of innocent equivalent, the interpretation of Shakespeare after the fashion of Gervinus, and the diligent search for poetic justice. Thus with the re-birth of tragedy the æsthetic hearer is also born anew, in whose place in the theatre a curious quid pro quo was wont to sit with halfmoral and half-learned pretensions,—the "critic." In his sphere hitherto everything has been artiﬁcial and merely glossed over with a semblance of life. The performing artist was in fact at a loss what to do with such a critically comporting hearer, and hence he, as well as the dramatist or operatic composer who inspired him, searched anxiously for the last remains of life in a being so pretentiously barren and incapable of enjoyment. Such "critics," however, have hitherto constituted the public; the student, the schoolboy, yea, even the most harmless womanly creature, were already unwittingly prepared by education and by journals for a similar perception of works of art. The nobler natures among the artists counted upon exciting the moral-religious forces in such a public, and the appeal to a moral order of the world operated vicariously, when in reality some powerful artistic spell should have enraptured the true hearer. Or again, some imposing or at all events exciting tendency of the contemporary political and social world was presented by the dramatist with such vividness that the hearer could forget his critical exhaustion and abandon himself to similar emotions, as, in patriotic or warlike moments, before the tribune of parliament, or at the condemnation of crime and vice:—an estrangement of the true aims of art which could not but lead directly now and then to a cult of tendency. But here there took place what has always taken place in the case of factitious arts, an extraordinary rapid depravation of these tendencies, so that for instance the tendency to employ the theatre as a means for the moral education of the people, which in Schiller's time was taken seriously, is already reckoned among the incredible antiquities of a surmounted culture. While the critic got the upper hand in the theatre and concert-hall, the journalist in the school, and the press in society, art degenerated into a topic of conversation of the most trivial kind, and æsthetic criticism was used as the cement of a vain, distracted, selﬁsh and moreover piteously unoriginal sociality, the signiﬁcance of which is suggested by the Schopenhauerian parable of the porcupines, so that there has never been so much gossip about art and so little esteem for it. But is it still possible to have intercourse with a man capable of conversing on Beethoven or Shakespeare? Let each answer this question according to his sentiments: he will at any rate show by his answer his conception of "culture," provided he tries at least to answer the question, and has not already grown mute with astonishment. On the other hand, many a one more nobly and delicately endowed by nature, though he may have gradually become a critical barbarian in the manner described, could tell of the unexpected as well as totally unintelligible effect which a successful performance of Lohengrin, for example, exerted on him: except that perhaps every warning and interpreting hand was lacking to guide him; so that the incomprehensibly heterogeneous and altogether incomparable sensation which then affected him also remained isolated and became extinct, like a mysterious star after a brief brilliancy. He then divined what the æsthetic hearer is.
[24] In the sea of pleasure's Billowing roll, In the ether-waves Knelling and toll, In the world-breath's Wavering whole— To drown in, go down in— Lost in swoon—greatest boon! 23. He who wishes to test himself rigorously as to how he is related to the true æsthetic hearer, or whether he belongs rather to the community of the Socrato-critical man, has only to enquire sincerely concerning the sentiment with which he accepts the wonder represented on the stage: whether he feels his historical sense, which insists on strict psychological causality, insulted by it, whether with benevolent concession he as it were admits the wonder as a phenomenon intelligible to childhood, but relinquished by him, or whether he experiences anything else thereby. For he will thus be enabled to determine how far he is on the whole capable of understanding myth, that is to say, the concentrated picture of the world, which, as abbreviature of phenomena, cannot dispense with wonder. It is probable, however, that nearly every one, upon close examination, feels so disintegrated by the critico-historical spirit of our culture, that he can only perhaps make the former existence of myth credible to himself by learned means through intermediary abstractions. Without myth, however, every culture loses its healthy, creative natural power: it is only a horizon encompassed with myths which rounds off to unity a social movement. It is only by myth that all the powers of the imagination and of the Apollonian dream are freed from their random rovings. The mythical ﬁgures have to be the invisibly omnipresent genii, under the care of which the young soul grows to maturity, by the signs of which the man gives a meaning to his life and struggles: and the state itself knows no more powerful unwritten law than the mythical foundation which vouches for its connection with religion and its growth from mythical ideas. Let us now place alongside thereof the abstract man proceeding independently of myth, the abstract education, the abstract usage, the abstract right, the abstract state: let us picture to ourselves the lawless roving of the artistic imagination, not bridled by any native myth: let us imagine a culture which has no ﬁxed and sacred primitive seat, but is doomed to exhaust all its possibilities, and has to nourish itself wretchedly from the other cultures—such is the Present, as the result of Socratism, which is bent on the destruction of myth. And now the myth-less man remains eternally hungering among all the bygones, and digs and grubs for roots, though he have to dig for them even among the remotest antiquities. The stupendous historical exigency of the unsatisﬁed modern culture, the gathering around one of countless other cultures, the consuming desire for knowledge—what does all this point to, if not to the loss of myth, the loss of the mythical home, the mythical source? Let us ask ourselves whether the feverish and so uncanny stirring of this culture is aught but the eager seizing and snatching at food of the hungerer—and who would care to contribute anything more to a culture which cannot be appeased by all it devours, and in contact with which the most vigorous and wholesome nourishment is wont to change into "history and criticism"? We should also have to regard our German character with despair and sorrow, if it had already become inextricably entangled in, or even identical with this culture, in a similar manner as we can observe it to our horror to be the case in civilised France; and that which for a long time was the great advantage of France and the cause of her vast preponderance, to wit, this very identity of people and culture, might compel us at the sight thereof to congratulate ourselves that this culture of ours, which is so questionable, has hitherto had nothing in common with the noble kernel of the character of our people. All our hopes, on the contrary, stretch out longingly towards the perception that beneath this restlessly palpitating civilised life and educational convulsion there is concealed a glorious, intrinsically healthy, primeval power, which, to be sure, stirs vigorously only at intervals in stupendous moments, and then dreams on again in view of a future awakening. It is from this abyss that the German Reformation came forth: in the choral- hymn of which the future melody of German music ﬁrst resounded.
So deep, courageous, and soul-breathing, so exuberantly good and tender did this chorale of Luther sound,—as the ﬁrst Dionysian-luring call which breaks forth from dense thickets at the approach of spring. To it responded with emulative echo the solemnly wanton procession of Dionysian revellers, to whom we are indebted for German music—and to whom we shall be indebted for the re-birth of German myth. I know that I must now lead the sympathising and attentive friend to an elevated position of lonesome contemplation, where he will have but few companions, and I call out encouragingly to him that we must hold fast to our shining guides, the Greeks. For the rectiﬁcation of our æsthetic knowledge we previously borrowed from them the two divine ﬁgures, each of which sways a separate realm of art, and concerning whose mutual contact and exaltation we have acquired a notion through Greek tragedy. Through a remarkable disruption of both these primitive artistic impulses, the ruin of Greek tragedy seemed to be necessarily brought about: with which process a degeneration and a transmutation of the Greek national character was strictly in keeping, summoning us to earnest reﬂection as to how closely and necessarily art and the people, myth and custom, tragedy and the state, have coalesced in their bases. The ruin of tragedy was at the same time the ruin of myth. Until then the Greeks had been involuntarily compelled immediately to associate all experiences with their myths, indeed they had to comprehend them only through this association: whereby even the most immediate present necessarily appeared to them sub specie æterni and in a certain sense as timeless. Into this current of the timeless, however, the state as well as art plunged in order to ﬁnd repose from the burden and eagerness of the moment. And a people—for the rest, also a man—is worth just as much only as its ability to impress on its experiences the seal of eternity: for it is thus, as it were, desecularised, and reveals its unconscious inner conviction of the relativity of time and of the true, that is, the metaphysical signiﬁcance of life. The contrary happens when a people begins to comprehend itself historically and to demolish the mythical bulwarks around it: with which there is usually connected a marked secularisation, a breach with the unconscious metaphysics of its earlier existence, in all ethical consequences. Greek art and especially Greek tragedy delayed above all the annihilation of myth: it was necessary to annihilate these also to be able to live detached from the native soil, unbridled in the wilderness of thought, custom, and action. Even in such circumstances this metaphysical impulse still endeavours to create for itself a form of apotheosis (weakened, no doubt) in the Socratism of science urging to life: but on its lower stage this same impulse led only to a feverish search, which gradually merged into a pandemonium of myths and superstitions accumulated from all quarters: in the midst of which, nevertheless, the Hellene sat with a yearning heart till he contrived, as Græculus, to mask his fever with Greek cheerfulness and Greek levity, or to narcotise himself completely with some gloomy Oriental superstition. We have approached this condition in the most striking manner since the reawakening of the Alexandro—Roman antiquity in the ﬁfteenth century, after a long, not easily describable, interlude. On the heights there is the same exuberant love of knowledge, the same insatiate happiness of the discoverer, the same stupendous secularisation, and, together with these, a homeless roving about, an eager intrusion at foreign tables, a frivolous deiﬁcation of the present or a dull senseless estrangement, all sub speci sæculi, of the present time: which same symptoms lead one to infer the same defect at the heart of this culture, the annihilation of myth. It seems hardly possible to transplant a foreign myth with permanent success, without dreadfully injuring the tree through this transplantation: which is perhaps occasionally strong enough and sound enough to eliminate the foreign element after a terrible struggle; but must ordinarily consume itself in a languishing and stunted condition or in sickly luxuriance. Our opinion of the pure and vigorous kernel of the German being is such that we venture to expect of it, and only of it, this elimination of forcibly ingrafted foreign elements, and we deem it possible that the German spirit will reﬂect anew on itself.
Perhaps many a one will be of opinion that this spirit must begin its struggle with the elimination of the Romanic element: for which it might recognise an external preparation and encouragement in the victorious bravery and bloody glory of the late war, but must seek the inner constraint in the emulative zeal to be for ever worthy of the sublime protagonists on this path, of Luther as well as our great artists and poets. But let him never think he can ﬁght such battles without his household gods, without his mythical home, without a "restoration" of all German things I And if the German should look timidly around for a guide to lead him back to his long-lost home, the ways and paths of which he knows no longer—let him but listen to the delightfully luring call of the Dionysian bird, which hovers above him, and would fain point out to him the way thither. 24. Among the peculiar artistic effects of musical tragedy we had to emphasise an Apollonian illusion, through which we are to be saved from immediate oneness with the Dionysian music, while our musical excitement is able to discharge itself on an Apollonian domain and in an interposed visible middle world. It thereby seemed to us that precisely through this discharge the middle world of theatrical procedure, the drama generally, became visible and intelligible from within in a degree unattainable in the other forms of Apollonian art: so that here, where this art was as it were winged and borne aloft by the spirit of music, we had to recognise the highest exaltation of its powers, and consequently in the fraternal union of Apollo and Dionysus the climax of the Apollonian as well as of the Dionysian artistic aims. Of course, the Apollonian light-picture did not, precisely with this inner illumination through music, attain the peculiar effect of the weaker grades of Apollonian art. What the epos and the animated stone can do—constrain the contemplating eye to calm delight in the world of the individuatio— could not be realised here, notwithstanding the greater animation and distinctness. We contemplated the drama and penetrated with piercing glance into its inner agitated world of motives—and yet it seemed as if only a symbolic picture passed before us, the profoundest signiﬁcance of which we almost believed we had divined, and which we desired to put aside like a curtain in order to behold the original behind it. The greatest distinctness of the picture did not sufﬁce us: for it seemed to reveal as well as veil something; and while it seemed, with its symbolic revelation, to invite the rending of the veil for the disclosure of the mysterious background, this illumined allconspicuousness itself enthralled the eye and prevented it from penetrating more deeply He who has not experienced this,—to have to view, and at the same time to have a longing beyond the viewing,—will hardly be able to conceive how clearly and deﬁnitely these two processes coexist in the con- templation of tragic myth and are felt to be conjoined; while the truly æsthetic spectators will conﬁrm my assertion that among the peculiar effects of tragedy this conjunction is the most noteworthy. Now let this phenomenon of the æsthetic spectator be transferred to an analogous process in the tragic artist, and the genesis of tragic myth will have been understood. It shares with the Apollonian sphere of art the full delight in appearance and contemplation, and at the same time it denies this delight and ﬁnds a still higher satisfaction in the annihilation of the visible world of appearance. The substance of tragic myth is ﬁrst of all an epic event involving the gloriﬁcation of the ﬁghting hero: but whence originates the essentially enigmatical trait, that the suffering in the fate of the hero, the most painful victories, the most agonising contrasts of motives, in short, the exempliﬁcation of the wisdom of Silenus, or, æsthetically expressed, the Ugly and Discordant, is always represented anew in such countless forms with such predilection, and precisely in the most youthful and exuberant age of a people, unless there is really a higher delight experienced in all this? For the fact that things actually take such a tragic course would least of all explain the origin of a form of art; provided that art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.
Tragic myth, in so far as it really belongs to art, also fully participates in this transﬁguring metaphysical purpose of art in general: What does it transﬁgure, however, when it presents the phenomenal world in the guise of the suffering hero? Least of all the "reality" of this phenomenal world, for it says to us: "Look at this! Look carefully! It is your life! It is the hour-hand of your clock of existence!" And myth has displayed this life, in order thereby to transﬁgure it to us? If not, how shall we account for the æsthetic pleasure with which we make even these representations pass before us? I am inquiring concerning the æsthetic pleasure, and am well aware that many of these representations may moreover occasionally create even a moral delectation, say under the form of pity or of a moral triumph. But he who would derive the effect of the tragic exclusively from these moral sources, as was usually the case far too long in æsthetics, let him not think that he has done anything for Art thereby; for Art must above all insist on purity in her domain. For the explanation of tragic myth the very ﬁrst requirement is that the pleasure which characterises it must be sought in the purely æsthetic sphere, without encroaching on the domain of pity, fear, or the morally-sublime. How can the ugly and the discordant, the substance of tragic myth, excite an æsthetic pleasure? Here it is necessary to raise ourselves with a daring bound into a metaphysics of Art. I repeat, therefore, my former proposition, that it is only as an æsthetic phenomenon that existence and the world, appear justiﬁed: and in this sense it is precisely the function of tragic myth to convince us that even the Ugly and Discordant is an artistic game which the will, in the eternal fulness of its joy, plays with itself. But this not easily comprehensible proto-phenomenon of Dionysian Art becomes, in a direct way, singularly intelligible, and is immediately apprehended in the wonderful signiﬁcance of musical dissonance: just as in general it is music alone, placed in contrast to the world, which can give us an idea as to what is meant by the justiﬁcation of the world as an æsthetic phenomenon. The joy that the tragic myth excites has the same origin as the joyful sensation of dissonance in music. The Dionysian, with its primitive joy experienced in pain itself, is the common source of music and tragic myth. Is it not possible that by calling to our aid the musical relation of dissonance, the difﬁcult problem of tragic effect may have meanwhile been materially facilitated? For we now understand what it means to wish to view tragedy and at the same time to have a longing beyond the viewing: a frame of mind, which, as regards the artistically employed dissonance, we should simply have to characterise by saying that we desire to hear and at the same time have a longing beyond the hearing. That striving for the inﬁnite, the pinion-ﬂapping of longing, accompanying the highest delight in the clearlyperceived reality, remind one that in both states we have to recognise a Dionysian phenomenon, which again and again reveals to us anew the playful up-building and demolishing of the world of individuals as the efﬂux of a primitive delight, in like manner as when Heraclitus the Obscure compares the world-building power to a playing child which places stones here and there and builds sandhills only to overthrow them again. Hence, in order to form a true estimate of the Dionysian capacity of a people, it would seem that we must think not only of their music, but just as much of their tragic myth, the second witness of this capacity. Considering this most intimate relationship between music and myth, we may now in like manner suppose that a degeneration and depravation of the one involves a deterioration of the other: if it be true at all that the weakening of the myth is generally expressive of a debilitation of the Dionysian capacity. Concerning both, however, a glance at the development of the German genius should not leave us in any doubt; in the opera just as in the abstract character of our myth-less existence, in an art sunk to pastime just as in a life guided by concepts, the inartistic as well as life-consuming nature of Socratic optimism had revealed itself to us.
Yet there have been indications to console us that nevertheless in some inaccessible abyss the German spirit still rests and dreams, undestroyed, in glorious health, profundity, and Dionysian strength, like a knight sunk in slumber: from which abyss the Dionysian song rises to us to let us know that this German knight even still dreams his primitive Dionysian myth in blissfully earnest visions. Let no one believe that the German spirit has for ever lost its mythical home when it still understands so obviously the voices of the birds which tell of that home. Some day it will ﬁnd itself awake in all the morning freshness of a deep sleep: then it will slay the dragons, destroy the malignant dwarfs, and waken Brünnhilde—and Wotan's spear itself will be unable to obstruct its course! My friends, ye who believe in Dionysian music, ye know also what tragedy means to us. There we have tragic myth, born anew from music,— and in this latest birth ye can hope for everything and forget what is most afﬂicting. What is most afﬂicting to all of us, however, is—the prolonged degradation in which the German genius has lived estranged from house and home in the service of malignant dwarfs. Ye understand my allusion— as ye will also, in conclusion, understand my hopes. 25. Music and tragic myth are equally the expression of the Dionysian capacity of a people, and are inseparable from each other. Both originate in an ultra Apollonian sphere of art; both transﬁgure a region in the delightful accords of which all dissonance, just like the terrible picture of the world, dies charmingly away; both play with the sting of displeasure, trusting to their most potent magic; both justify thereby the existence even of the "worst world." Here the Dionysian, as compared with the Apollonian, exhibits itself as the eternal and original artistic force, which in general calls into existence the entire world of phenomena: in the midst of which a new transﬁguring appearance becomes necessary, in order to keep alive the animated world of individuation. If we could conceive an incarnation of dissonance— and what is man but that?—then, to be able to live this dissonance would require a glorious illusion which would spread a veil of beauty over its peculiar nature. This is the true function of Apollo as deity of art: in whose name we comprise all the countless manifestations of the fair realm of illusion, which each moment render life in general worth living and make one impatient for the experience of the next moment. At the same time, just as much of this basis of all existence—the Dionysian substratum of the world—is allowed to enter into the consciousness of human beings, as can be surmounted again by the Apollonian transﬁguring power, so that these two art-impulses are constrained to develop their powers in strictly mutual proportion, according to the law of eternal justice. When the Dionysian powers rise with such vehemence as we experience at present, there can be no doubt that, veiled in a cloud, Apollo has already descended to us; whose grandest beautifying inﬂuences a coming generation will perhaps behold. That this effect is necessary, however, each one would most surely perceive by intuition, if once he found himself carried back—even in a dream —into an Old-Hellenic existence. In walking under high Ionic colonnades, looking upwards to a horizon deﬁned by clear and noble lines, with reﬂections of his transﬁgured form by his side in shining marble, and around him solemnly marching or quietly moving men, with harmoniously sounding voices and rhythmical pantomime, would he not in the presence of this perpetual inﬂux of beauty have to raise his hand to Apollo and exclaim: "Blessed race of Hellenes! How great Dionysus must be among you, when the Delian god deems such charms necessary to cure you of your dithyrambic madness!"—To one in this frame of mind, however, an aged Athenian, looking up to him with the sublime eye of Æschylus, might answer: "Say also this, thou curious stranger: what sufferings this people must have un- dergone, in order to be able to become thus beautiful! But now follow me to a tragic play, and sacriﬁce with me in the temple of both the deities!" APPENDIX. [Late in the year 1888, not long before he was overcome by his sudden attack of insanity, Nietzsche wrote down a few notes concerning his early work, the Birth of Tragedy.
These were printed in his sister's biography (Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsches, vol. ii. pt. i. pp. 102 ff.), and are here translated as likely to be of interest to readers of this remarkable work. They also appear in the Ecce Homo.—TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.] "To be just to the Birth of Tragedy(1872), one will have to forget some few things. It has wrought effects, it even fascinated through that wherein it was amiss—through its application to Wagnerism, just as if this Wagnerism were symptomatic of a rise and going up. And just on that account was the book an event in Wagner's life: from thence and only from thence were great hopes linked to the name of Wagner. Even to-day people remind me, sometimes right in the midst of a talk on Parsifal, that I and none other have it on my conscience that such a high opinion of the cultural value of this movement came to the top. More than once have I found the book referred to as 'the Re-birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music': one only had an ear for a new formula of Wagner's art, aim, task,—and failed to hear withal what was at bottom valuable therein. 'Hellenism and Pessimism' had been a more unequivocal title: namely, as a ﬁrst lesson on the way in which the Greeks got the better of pessimism,—on the means whereby they overcame it. Tragedy simply proves that the Greeks were no pessimists: Schopenhauer was mistaken here as he was mistaken in all other things. Considered with some neutrality, the Birth of Tragedy appears very unseasonable: one would not even dream that it was begun amid the thunders of the battle of Wörth. I thought these problems through and through before the walls of Metz in cold September nights, in the midst of the work of nursing the sick; one might even believe the book to be ﬁfty years older. It is politically indifferent—un-German one will say to-day,—it smells shockingly Hegelian, in but a few formulæ does it scent of Schopenhauer's funereal perfume. An 'idea'—the antithesis of 'Dionysian versus Apollonian'— translated into metaphysics; history itself as the evolution of this 'idea'; the antithesis dissolved into oneness in Tragedy; through this optics things that had never yet looked into one another's face, confronted of a sudden, and illumined and comprehended through one another: for instance, Opera and Revolution. The two decisive innovations of the book are, on the one hand, the comprehension of the Dionysian phenomenon among the Greeks (it gives the ﬁrst psychology thereof, it sees therein the One root of all Grecian art); on the other, the comprehension of Socratism: Socrates diagnosed for the ﬁrst time as the tool of Grecian dissolution, as a typical decadent. 'Rationality' against instinct! 'Rationality' at any price as a dangerous, as a lifeundermining force! Throughout the whole book a deep hostile silence on Christianity: it is neither Apollonian nor Dionysian; it negatives all æsthetic values (the only values recognised by the Birth of Tragedy), it is in the widest sense nihilistic, whereas in the Dionysian symbol the utmost limit of afﬁrmation is reached. Once or twice the Christian priests are alluded to as a 'malignant kind of dwarfs,' as 'subterraneans.'" 2. "This beginning is singular beyond measure. I had for my own inmost experience discovered the only symbol and counterpart of history,—I had just thereby been the ﬁrst to grasp the wonderful phenomenon of the Dionysian. And again, through my diagnosing Socrates as a decadent, I had given a wholly unequivocal proof of how little risk the trustworthiness of my psychological grasp would run of being weakened by some moralistic idiosyncrasy—to view morality itself as a symptom of decadence is an innovation, a novelty of the ﬁrst rank in the history of knowledge. How far I had leaped in either case beyond the smug shallow-pate-gossip of optimism contra pessimism! I was the ﬁrst to see the intrinsic antithesis: here, the degenerating instinct which, with subterranean vindictiveness, turns against life (Christianity, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, in a certain sense already the philosophy of Plato, all idealistic systems as typical forms), and there, a formula of highest afﬁrmation, born of fullness and overfullness, a yea-saying without reserve to suffering's self, to guilt's self, to all that is questionable and strange in existence itself.
This ﬁnal, cheerfullest, exuberantly mad-and-merriest Yea to life is not only the highest insight, it is also the deepest, it is that which is most rigorously conﬁrmed and upheld by truth and science. Naught that is, is to be deducted, naught is dispensable; the phases of existence rejected by the Christians and other nihilists are even of an inﬁnitely higher order in the hierarchy of values than that which the instinct of decadence sanctions, yea durst sanction. To comprehend this courage is needed, and, as a condition thereof, a surplus of strength: for precisely in degree as courage dares to thrust forward, precisely according to the measure of strength, does one approach truth. Perception, the yeasaying to reality, is as much a necessity to the strong as to the weak, under the inspiration of weakness, cowardly shrinking, and ﬂight from reality— the 'ideal.' ... They are not free to perceive: the decadents have need of the lie,—it is one of their conditions of self-preservation. Whoso not only comprehends the word Dionysian, but also grasps his self in this word, requires no refutation of Plato or of Christianity or of Schopenhauer—he smells the putrefaction." 3. "To what extent I had just thereby found the concept 'tragic,' the deﬁnitive perception of the psychology of tragedy, I have but lately stated in the Twilight of the Idols, page 139 (1st edit.): 'The afﬁrmation of life, even in its most unfamiliar and severe problems, the will to life, enjoying its own inexhaustibility in the sacriﬁce of its highest types,—that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I divined as the bridge to a psychology of the tragic poet. Not in order to get rid of terror and pity, not to purify from a dangerous passion by its vehement discharge (it was thus that Aristotle misunderstood it); but, beyond terror and pity, to realise in fact the eternal delight of becoming, that delight which even involves in itself the joy of annihilating! [1] In this sense I have the right to understand myself to be the ﬁrst tragic philosopher—that is, the utmost antithesis and antipode to a pessimistic philosopher. Prior to myself there is no such translation of the Dionysian into the philosophic pathos: there lacks the tragic wisdom,—I have sought in vain for an indication thereof even among the great Greeks of philosophy, the thinkers of the two centuries before Socrates. A doubt still possessed me as touching Heraclitus, in whose proximity I in general begin to feel warmer and better than anywhere else. The afﬁrmation of transiency and annihilation, to wit the decisive factor in a Dionysian philosophy, the yea-saying to antithesis and war, to becoming, with radical rejection even of the concept 'being,'—that I must directly acknowledge as, of all thinking hitherto, the nearest to my own. The doctrine of 'eternal recurrence,' that is, of the unconditioned and inﬁnitely repeated cycle of all things—this doctrine of Zarathustra's might after all have been already taught by Heraclitus. At any rate the portico[2] which inherited well-nigh all its fundamental conceptions from Heraclitus, shows traces thereof." Facsimile of Nietzsches handwriting. 4. "In this book speaks a prodigious hope. In ﬁne, I see no reason whatever for taking back my hope of a Dionysian future for music. Let us cast a glance a century ahead, let us suppose my assault upon two millenniums of anti-nature and man-viliﬁcation succeeds! That new party of life which will take in hand the greatest of all tasks, the upbreeding of mankind to something higher,—add thereto the relentless annihilation of all things degenerating and parasitic, will again make possible on earth that too-much of life, from which there also must needs grow again the Dionysian state. I promise a tragic age: the highest art in the yea-saying to life, tragedy, will be born anew, when mankind have behind them the consciousness of the hardest but most necessary wars, without suffering therefrom. A psychologist might still add that what I heard in my younger years in Wagnerian music had in general naught to do with Wagner; that when I described Wagnerian music I described what I had heard, that I had instinctively to translate and transﬁgure all into the new spirit which I bore within myself...." [1] Mr. Common's translation, pp. 227-28. [2] Greek: στοά. TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.
While the translator ﬂatters himself that this version of Nietzsche's early work—having been submitted to unsparingly scrutinising eyes—is not altogether unworthy of the original, he begs to state that he holds twentieth-century English to be a rather unsatisfactory vehicle for philosophical thought. Accordingly, in conjunction with his friend Dr. Ernest Lacy, he has prepared a second, more unconventional translation,—in brief, a translation which will enable one whose knowledge of English extends to, say, the period of Elizabeth, to appreciate Nietzsche in more forcible language, because the language of a stronger age. It is proposed to provide this second translation with an appendix, containing many references to the translated writings of Wagner and Schopenhauer; to the works of Pater, Browning, Burckhardt, Rohde, and others, and a summmary and index. For help in preparing the present translation, the translator wishes to express his thanks to his friends Dr. Ernest Lacy, Litt.D.; Dr. James Waddell Tupper, Ph.D.; Prof. Harry Max Ferren; Mr. James M'Kirdy, Pittsburg; and Mr. Thomas Common, Edinburgh. WILLIAM AUGUST HAUSSMANN, A.B., Ph.D. AliceAndBooks.com logo This book has been downloaded from www.aliceandbooks.com. You can ﬁnd many more public domain books in our website 1. The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism 1. THE 2. BIRTH OF TRAGEDY 3. OR 4. HELLENISM AND PESSIMISM 5. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 1. TRANSLATED BY WM. A. HAUSSMANN, PH.D. 2. The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche 3. Edited by Dr Oscar Levy Volume One 4. INTRODUCTION.[1] 5. AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-CRITICISM. I. 6. 2. 7. 3. 8. 4. 9. 5. 10. 6. 11. 7. 12. THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY 1. FROM THE SPIRIT OF MUSIC 2. FOREWORD TO RICHARD WAGNER. 13. THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 1. 1. 2. 2. 3. 3. 4. 4. 5. 5. 6. 6. 7. 7. 8. 8. 9. 9. 10. 11. 11. 12. 12. 13. 13. 14. 14. 15. 15. 16. 16. 17. 17. 18. 18. 19. 19. 20. 20. 21. 21. 22. 22. 23. 23. 24. 24. 25. 25. APPENDIX. 26. 2. 27. 3. 28. 4. 29. TRANSLATOR'S NOTE. The Dawn of Day Friedrich Nietzsche Published: 1881 Source: Project Gutenberg Translator: John McFarland Kennedy Edition: The MacMillan Company, New York, 1911 This book has been downloaded from www.aliceandbooks.com. You can find many more public domain books in our website Contents Introduction. Author's Preface. Book I. Book II. Book III. Book IV. Book V. Footnotes Introduction When Nietzsche called his book The Dawn of Day, he was far from giving it a merely fanciful title to attract the attention of that large section of the public which judges books by their titles rather than by their contents. The Dawn of Day represents, figuratively, the dawn of Nietzsche's own philosophy. Hitherto he had been considerably influenced in his outlook, if not in his actual thoughts, by Schopenhauer, Wagner, and perhaps also Comte. Human, all-tooHuman, belongs to a period of transition. After his rupture with Bayreuth, Nietzsche is, in both parts of that work, trying to stand on his own legs, and to regain his spiritual freedom; he is feeling his way to his own philosophy. The Dawn of Day, written in 1881 under the invigorating influence of a Genoese spring, is the dawn of this new Nietzsche. “With this book I open my campaign against morality,” he himself said later in his autobiography, the Ecce Homo. Just as in the case of the books written in his prime—The Joyful Wisdom, Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and The Genealogy of Morals—we cannot fail to be impressed in this work by Nietzsche's deep psychological insight, the insight that showed him to be a powerful judge of men and things unequalled in the nineteenth or, perhaps, any [pg vi] other century. One example of this is seen in his searching analysis of the Apostle Paul (Aphorism 68), in which the soul of the “First Christian” is ruthlessly and realistically laid bare to us. Nietzsche's summing-up of the Founder of Christianity—for of course, as is now generally recognised, it was Paul, and not Christ, who founded the Christian Church—has not yet called forth those bitter attacks from theologians that might have been expected, though one reason for this apparent neglect is no doubt that the portrait is so true, and in these circumstances silence is certainly golden on the part of defenders of the faith, who are otherwise, as a rule, loquacious enough.
Nor has the taunt in Aphorism 84 elicited an answer from the quarter whither it was directed; and the “free” (not to say dishonest) interpretation of the Bible by Christian scholars and theologians, which is still proceeding merrily, is now being turned to Nietzsche's own writings. For the philosopher's works are now being “explained away” by German theologians in a most naïve and daring fashion, and with an ability which has no doubt been acquired as the result of centuries of skilful interpretation of the Holy Writ. Nor are professional theologians the only ones who have failed to answer Nietzsche; for in other than religious matters the majority of savants have not succeeded in plumbing his depths. There is, for example, the question of race. Ten years ago, twenty years after the publication of The Dawn of Day, Nietzsche's countrymen enthusiastically hailed a book which has recently been translated into English, Chamberlain's Foundations of [pg vii]the Nineteenth Century. In this book the Teutons are said to be superior to all the other peoples in the world, the reason given being that they have kept their race pure. It is due to this purity of race that they have produced so many great men; for every “good” man in history is a Teuton, and every bad man something else. Considerable skill is exhibited by the author in filching from his opponents the Latins their best trump cards, and likewise the trump card, Jesus Christ, from the Jews; for Jesus Christ, according to Chamberlain's very plausible argument, was not a Jew but an Aryan, i.e. a member of that great family of which the Teutons are a branch. What would Nietzsche have said to this legerdemain? He has constantly pointed out that the Teutons are so far from being a pure race that they have, on the contrary, done everything in their power to ruin even the idea of a pure race for ever. For the Teutons, through their Reformation and their Puritan revolt in England, and the philosophies developed by the democracies that necessarily followed, were the spiritual forbears of the French Revolution and of the Socialistic régime under which we are beginning to suffer nowadays. Thus this noble race has left nothing undone to blot out the last remnant of race in Europe, and it even stands in the way of the creation of a new race. And with such a record in history the Germans write books, eulogising themselves as the salt of the earth, the people of peoples, the race of races, while in truth they are nothing else than nouveaux-riches endeavouring to draw up a decent pedigree for themselves. [pg viii] We know that honesty is not a prerequisite of such pedigrees, and that patriotism may be considered as a good excuse even for a wrong pedigree; but the race-pandemonium that followed the publication of Mr. Chamberlain's book in Germany was really a very unwise proceeding in view of the false and misleading document produced. What, it may be asked again, would Nietzsche have said if he had heard his countrymen screaming odes to their own glory as the “flower of Europe”? He would assuredly have dismissed their exalted pretensions with a good-natured smile; for his study of history had shown him that even slaves must have their saturnalia now and then. But as to his philosophical answer there can be no doubt; for in Aphorism 272 of The Dawn of Day there is a single sentence which completely refutes the view of modern racemongers like Chamberlain and his followers: “It is probable,” we read, “that there are no pure races, but only races which have become purified, and even these are extremely rare.” There are even stronger expressions to be met with in “Peoples and Countries” (Aphorism 20; see the Genealogy of Morals, p. 226): “What quagmires and mendacity must there be about if it is possible, in the modern European hotch-potch, to raise the question of ‘race’!” and again, in Aphorism 21: “Maxim— to associate with no man who takes any part in the mendacious race-swindle.” A man like Nietzsche, who makes so little impression upon mankind in general, is certainly not, as some people have thought and openly said, a public danger, so the guardians of the State need not [pg ix] be uneasy.
There is little danger of Nietzsche's revolutionising either the masses or the classes; for, as Goethe used to say, “Seulement celui qui ressemble le peuple, l'émeut.” Nietzsche's voice has as yet hardly been lifted in this country; and, until it is fully heard, both masses and classes will calmly proceed on their way to the extremes of democracy and anarchy, as they now appear to be doing. Anarchy, though, may be too strong a word; for there is some doubt whether, throughout Europe and America at all events, the people are not now too weak even for anarchy. A revolt is a sign of strength in a slave; but our modern slaves have no strength left. In the meantime, however, it will have become clear that Nietzsche tried to stop this threatening degradation of the human race, that he endeavoured to supplant the morality of altruism—the cause of this degradation—by another, a super-Christian morality, and that he has succeeded in this aim, if not where the masses and the classes are concerned, at any rate in the case of that small minority of thinkers to which he really wished to appeal. And this minority is naturally grateful to the philosopher for having supplied them with a morality which enables them to be “good” without being fools—an unpleasant combination which, unfortunately, the Nazarene morality is seldom able to avoid. This Nazarene morality has doubtless its own merits, and its “good” and “evil” in many cases coincide with ours; but common sense and certain intellectual qualities are not too highly appreciated in the table of Christian values (see, for instance, 1 Cor. iii. 19), whence it will be observed that the enlightenment [pg x] of a Christian is not always quite equal to his otherwise excellent intentions. We Nietzschians, however, must show that patience to them which they always pretend to show to their opponents. Nietzsche himself, indeed, recommends this in Aphorism 103 of this book, an aphorism which is almost too well known to need repetition; for it likewise disproves the grotesque though widely circulated supposition that all kinds of immorality would be indulged in under the sway of the “Immoralistic” philosopher: “I should not, of course, deny—unless I were a fool—that many actions which are called immoral should be avoided and resisted; and in the same way that many which are called moral should be performed and encouraged; but I hold that in both cases these actions should be performed from motives other than those which have prevailed up to the present time. We must learn anew in order that at last, perhaps very late in the day, we may be able to do something more: feel anew.” In regard to the translation itself—which owes a good deal to many excellent suggestions made by Mr. Thomas Common—it adheres, as a rule, closely to the German text; and in only two or three instances has a slightly freer rendering been adopted in order to make the sense quite clear. There are one or two cases in which a punning or double meaning could not be adequately rendered in English: e.g. Aphorism 50, where the German word “Rausch” means both “intoxication” and also “elation” (i.e. the exalted feelings of the religious fanatic). Again, we have “Einleid,” “Einleidigkeit,” [pg xi] in Aphorism 63—words which do not quite correspond to pity, compassion, or fellow-feeling, and which, indeed, are not yet known to German lexicographers. A literal translation, “one-feeling,” would be almost meaningless. What is actually signified is that both sufferer and sympathiser have nerves and feelings in common: an experience which Schopenhauer, as Nietzsche rightly points out, mistook for compassion or pity (“Mitleid”), and which lacked a word, even in German, until the later psychologist coined “Einleid.” Again, in Aphorism 554 we have a play upon the words “Vorschritt” (leading, guidance) and “Fortschritt” (progress). All these, however, are trifling matters in comparison with the substance of the book, and they are of more interest to philologists than to psychologists. It is for psychologists that this book was written; and such minds, somewhat rare in our time, may read in it with much profit. J. M. Kennedy. London, September 1911. Author's Preface In this book we find a “subterrestrial” at work, digging, mining, undermining. You can see him, always provided that you have eyes for such deep work,—how he makes his way slowly, cautiously, gently but surely, without showing signs of the weariness that usually accompanies a long privation of light and air.
He might even be called happy, despite his labours in the dark. Does it not seem as if some faith were leading him on, some solace recompensing him for his toil? Or that he himself desires a long period of darkness, an unintelligible, hidden, enigmatic something, knowing as he does that he will in time have his own morning, his own redemption, his own rosy dawn?—Yea, verily he will return: ask him not what he seeketh in the depths; for he himself will tell you, this apparent Trophonius and subterrestrial, whensoever he once again becomes man. One easily unlearns how to hold one's tongue when one has for so long been a mole, and all alone, like him.— 2 Indeed, my indulgent friends, I will tell you—here, in this late preface,1 which might easily have [pg 002] become an obituary or a funeral oration—what I sought in the depths below: for I have come back, and—I have escaped. Think not that I will urge you to run the same perilous risk! or that I will urge you on even to the same solitude! For whoever proceeds on his own path meets nobody: this is the feature of one's “own path.” No one comes to help him in his task: he must face everything quite alone—danger, bad luck, wickedness, foul weather. He goes his own way; and, as is only right, meets with bitterness and occasional irritation because he pursues this “own way” of his: for instance, the knowledge that not even his friends can guess who he is and whither he is going, and that they ask themselves now and then: “Well? Is he really moving at all? Has he still ... a path before him?”—At that time I had undertaken something which could not have been done by everybody: I went down into the deepest depths; I tunnelled to the very bottom; I started to investigate and unearth an old faith which for thousands of years we philosophers used to build on as the safest of all foundations—which we built on again and again although every previous structure fell in: I began to undermine our faith in morals. But ye do not understand me?— 3 So far it is on Good and Evil that we have meditated least profoundly: this was always too dangerous a subject. Conscience, a good reputation, hell, and at times even the police, have not [pg 003] allowed and do not allow of impartiality; in the presence of morality, as before all authority, we must not even think, much less speak: here we must obey! Ever since the beginning of the world, no authority has permitted itself to be made the subject of criticism; and to criticise morals—to look upon morality as a problem, as problematic—what! was that not—is that not—immoral?—But morality has at its disposal not only every means of intimidation wherewith to keep itself free from critical hands and instruments of torture: its security lies rather in a certain art of enchantment, in which it is a past master—it knows how to “enrapture.” It can often paralyse the critical will with a single look, or even seduce it to itself: yea, there are even cases where morality can turn the critical will against itself; so that then, like the scorpion, it thrusts the sting into its own body. Morality has for ages been an expert in all kinds of devilry in the art of convincing: even at the present day there is no orator who would not turn to it for assistance (only hearken to our anarchists, for instance: how morally they speak when they would fain convince! In the end they even call themselves “the good and the just”). Morality has shown herself to be the greatest mistress of seduction ever since men began to discourse and persuade on earth —and, what concerns us philosophers even more, she is the veritable Circe of philosophers. For, to what is it due that, from Plato onwards, all the philosophic architects in Europe have built in vain? that everything which they themselves honestly believed to be aere perennius [pg 004] threatens to subside or is already laid in ruins?
Oh, how wrong is the answer which, even in our own day, rolls glibly off the tongue when this question is asked: “Because they have all neglected the prerequisite, the examination of the foundation, a critique of all reason”—that fatal answer made by Kant, who has certainly not thereby attracted us modern philosophers to firmer and less treacherous ground! (and, one may ask apropos of this, was it not rather strange to demand that an instrument should criticise its own value and effectiveness? that the intellect itself should “recognise” its own worth, power, and limits? was it not even just a little ridiculous?) The right answer would rather have been, that all philosophers, including Kant himself were building under the seductive influence of morality—that they aimed at certainty and “truth” only in appearance; but that in reality their attention was directed towards “majestic moral edifices,” to use once more Kant's innocent mode of expression, who deems it his “less brilliant, but not undeserving” task and work “to level the ground and prepare a solid foundation for the erection of those majestic moral edifices” (Critique of Pure Reason, ii. 257). Alas! He did not succeed in his aim, quite the contrary—as we must acknowledge to-day. With this exalted aim, Kant was merely a true son of his century, which more than any other may justly be called the century of exaltation: and this he fortunately continued to be in respect to the more valuable side of this century (with that solid piece of sensuality, for example, which he introduced into his theory of [pg 005] knowledge). He, too, had been bitten by the moral tarantula, Rousseau; he, too, felt weighing on his soul that moral fanaticism of which another disciple of Rousseau's, Robespierre, felt and proclaimed himself to be the executor: de fonder sur la terre l'empire de la sagesse, de la justice, et de la vertu. (Speech of June 4th, 1794.) On the other hand, with such a French fanaticism in his heart, no one could have cultivated it in a less French, more deep, more thorough and more German manner —if the word German is still permissible in this sense—than Kant did: in order to make room for his “moral kingdom,” he found himself compelled to add to it an indemonstrable world, a logical “beyond”— that was why he required his critique of pure reason! In other words, he would not have wanted it, if he had not deemed one thing to be more important than all the others: to render his moral kingdom unassailable by—or, better still, invisible to, reason,—for he felt too strongly the vulnerability of a moral order of things in the face of reason. For, when confronted with nature and history, when confronted with the ingrained immorality of nature and history, Kant was, like all good Germans from the earliest times, a pessimist: he believed in morality, not because it is demonstrated through nature and history, but despite its being steadily contradicted by them. To understand this “despite,” we should perhaps recall a somewhat similar trait in Luther, that other great pessimist, who once urged it upon his friends with true Lutheran audacity: “If we could conceive by reason alone how that God who shows so much [pg 006] wrath and malignity could be merciful and just, what use should we have for faith?” For, from the earliest times, nothing has ever made a deeper impression upon the German soul, nothing has ever “tempted” it more, than that deduction, the most dangerous of all, which for every true Latin is a sin against the intellect: credo quia absurdum est.—With it German logic enters for the first time into the history of Christian dogma; but even to-day, a thousand years later, we Germans of the present, late Germans in every way, catch the scent of truth, a possibility of truth, at the back of the famous fundamental principle of dialectics with which Hegel secured the victory of the German spirit over Europe—“contradiction moves the world; all things contradict themselves.” We are pessimists—even in logic. 4 But logical judgments are not the deepest and most fundamental to which the daring of our suspicion descends: the confidence in reason which is inseparable from the validity of these judgments, is, as confidence, a moral phenomenon ... perhaps German pessimism has yet to take its last step? Perhaps it has once more to draw up its “credo” opposite its “absurdum” in a terrible manner?
And if this book is pessimistic even in regard to morals, even above the confidence in morals—should it not be a German book for that very reason? For, in fact, it represents a contradiction, and one which it does not fear: in it confidence in morals is retracted—but why? Out of morality! Or how [pg 007] shall we call that which takes place in it—in us? for our taste inclines to the employment of more modest phrases. But there is no doubt that to us likewise there speaketh a “thou shalt”; we likewise obey a strict law which is set above us—and this is the last cry of morals which is still audible to us, which we too must live: here, if anywhere, are we still men of conscience, because, to put the matter in plain words, we will not return to that which we look upon as decayed, outlived, and superseded, we will not return to something “unworthy of belief,” whether it be called God, virtue, truth, justice, love of one's neighbour, or what not; we will not permit ourselves to open up a lying path to old ideals; we are thoroughly and unalterably opposed to anything that would intercede and mingle with us; opposed to all forms of present-day faith and Christianity; opposed to the lukewarmness of all romanticism and fatherlandism; opposed also to the artistic sense of enjoyment and lack of principle which would fain make us worship where we no longer believe—for we are artists—opposed, in short, to all this European feminism (or idealism, if this term be thought preferable) which everlastingly “draws upward,” and which in consequence everlastingly “lowers” and “degrades.” Yet, being men of this conscience, we feel that we are related to that German uprightness and piety which dates back thousands of years, although we immoralists and atheists may be the late and uncertain offspring of these virtues—yea, we even consider ourselves, in a certain respect, as their heirs, the executors of their inmost will: a pessimistic will, as I have already [pg 008] pointed out, which is not afraid to deny itself, because it denies itself with joy! In us is consummated, if you desire a formula—the autosuppression of morals. 5 But, after all, why must we proclaim so loudly and with such intensity what we are, what we want, and what we do not want? Let us look at this more calmly and wisely; from a higher and more distant point of view. Let us proclaim it, as if among ourselves, in so low a tone that all the world fails to hear it and us! Above all, however, let us say it slowly.... This preface comes late, but not too late: what, after all, do five or six years matter? Such a book, and such a problem, are in no hurry; besides, we are friends of the lento, I and my book. I have not been a philologist in vain—perhaps I am one yet: a teacher of slow reading. I even come to write slowly. At present it is not only my habit, but even my taste—a perverted taste, maybe—to write nothing but what will drive to despair every one who is “in a hurry.” For philology is that venerable art which exacts from its followers one thing above all—to step to one side, to leave themselves spare moments, to grow silent, to become slow—the leisurely art of the goldsmith applied to language: an art which must carry out slow, fine work, and attains nothing if not lento. For this very reason philology is now more desirable than ever before; for this very reason it is the highest attraction and incitement in an age of “work”: that is to say, of haste, of unseemly and immoderate hurry-skurry, [pg 009] which is intent upon “getting things done” at once, even every book, whether old or new. Philology itself, perhaps, will not “get things done” so hurriedly: it teaches how to read well: i.e. slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with the mental doors ajar, with delicate fingers and eyes ... my patient friends, this book appeals only to perfect readers and philologists: learn to read me well! Ruta, near Genoa, Autumn, 1886. Book I 1 Subsequent Judgment.—All things that endure for a long time are little by little so greatly permeated by reason that their origin in unreason becomes improbable. Does not almost every exact statement of an origin strike us as paradoxical and sacrilegious?
Indeed, does not the true historian constantly contradict? 2 Prejudice of the Learned.—Savants are quite correct in maintaining the proposition that men in all ages believed that they knew what was good and evil, praiseworthy and blamable. But it is a prejudice of the learned to say that we now know it better than any other age. 3 A Time for Everything.—When man assigned a sex to all things, he did not believe that he [pg 012] was merely playing; but he thought, on the contrary, that he had acquired a profound insight:—it was only at a much later period, and then only partly, that he acknowledged the enormity of his error. In the same way, man has attributed a moral relationship to everything that exists, throwing the cloak of ethical significance over the world's shoulders. One day all that will be of just as much value, and no more, as the amount of belief existing to-day in the masculinity or femininity of the sun.2 4 Against the Fanciful Disharmony of the Spheres.—We must once more sweep out of the world all this false grandeur, for it is contrary to the justice that all things about us may claim. And for this reason we must not see or wish the world to be more disharmonic than it is! 5 Be Thankful!—The most important result of the past efforts of humanity is that we need no longer go about in continual fear of wild beasts, barbarians, gods, and our own dreams. 6 The Juggler and his Counterpart.—That which is wonderful in science is contrary to that [pg 013] which is wonderful in the art of the juggler. For the latter would wish to make us believe that we see a very simple causality, where, in reality, an exceedingly complex causality is in operation. Science, on the other hand, forces us to give up our belief in the simple causality exactly where everything looks so easily comprehensible and we are merely the victims of appearances. The simplest things are very “complicated”—we can never be sufficiently astonished at them! 7 Reconceiving Our Feeling of Space.—Is it real or imaginary things which have built up the greater proportion of man's happiness? It is certain, at all events, that the extent of the distance between the highest point of happiness and the lowest point of unhappiness has been established only with the help of imaginary things. As a consequence, this kind of a conception of space is always, under the influence of science, becoming smaller and smaller: in the same way as science has taught us, and is still teaching us, to look upon the earth as small—yea, to look upon the entire solar system as a mere point. 8 Transfiguration.—Perplexed sufferers, confused dreamers, the hysterically ecstatic—here we have the three classes into which Raphael divided mankind. We no longer consider the world in this [pg 014] light—and Raphael himself dare not do so: his own eyes would show him a new transfiguration. 9 Conception of the Morality of Custom.—In comparison with the mode of life which prevailed among men for thousands of years, we men of the present day are living in a very immoral age: the power of custom has been weakened to a remarkable degree, and the sense of morality is so refined and elevated that we might almost describe it as volatilised. That is why we late comers experience such difficulty in obtaining a fundamental conception of the origin of morality: and even if we do obtain it, our words of explanation stick in our throats, so coarse would they sound if we uttered them! or to so great an extent would they seem to be a slander upon morality! Thus, for example, the fundamental clause: morality is nothing else (and, above all, nothing more) than obedience to customs, of whatsoever nature they may be. But customs are simply the traditional way of acting and valuing. Where there is no tradition there is no morality; and the less life is governed by tradition, the narrower the circle of morality. The free man is immoral, because it is his will to depend upon himself and not upon tradition: in all the primitive states of humanity “evil” is equivalent to “individual,” “free,” “arbitrary,” “unaccustomed,” “unforeseen,” “incalculable.” In such primitive conditions, always measured by this standard, any action performed—not because tradition commands [pg 015] it, but for other reasons (e.g.
on account of its individual utility), even for the same reasons as had been formerly established by custom—is termed immoral, and is felt to be so even by the very man who performs it, for it has not been done out of obedience to the tradition. What is tradition? A higher authority, which is obeyed, not because it commands what is useful to us, but merely because it commands. And in what way can this feeling for tradition be distinguished from a general feeling of fear? It is the fear of a higher intelligence which commands, the fear of an incomprehensible power, of something that is more than personal—there is superstition in this fear. In primitive times the domain of morality included education and hygienics, marriage, medicine, agriculture, war, speech and silence, the relationship between man and man, and between man and the gods—morality required that a man should observe her prescriptions without thinking of himself as individual. Everything, therefore, was originally custom, and whoever wished to raise himself above it, had first of all to make himself a kind of lawgiver and medicine-man, a sort of demi-god—in other words, he had to create customs, a dangerous and fearful thing to do!—Who is the most moral man? On the one hand, he who most frequently obeys the law: e.g. he who, like the Brahmins, carries a consciousness of the law about with him wherever he may go, and introduces it into the smallest divisions of time, continually exercising his mind in finding opportunities for obeying the law. On the other [pg 016] hand, he who obeys the law in the most difficult cases. The most moral man is he who makes the greatest sacrifices to morality; but what are the greatest sacrifices? In answering this question several different kinds of morality will be developed: but the distinction between the morality of the most frequent obedience and the morality of the most difficult obedience is of the greatest importance. Let us not be deceived as to the motives of that moral law which requires, as an indication of morality, obedience to custom in the most difficult cases! Self-conquest is required, not by reason of its useful consequences for the individual; but that custom and tradition may appear to be dominant, in spite of all individual counter desires and advantages. The individual shall sacrifice himself—so demands the morality of custom. On the other hand, those moralists who, like the followers of Socrates, recommend self-control and sobriety to the individual as his greatest possible advantage and the key to his greatest personal happiness, are exceptions—and if we ourselves do not think so, this is simply due to our having been brought up under their influence. They all take a new path, and thereby bring down upon themselves the utmost disapproval of all the representatives of the morality of custom. They sever their connection with the community, as immoralists, and are, in the fullest sense of the word, evil ones. In the same way, every Christian who “sought, above all things, his own salvation,” must have seemed evil to a virtuous Roman of the old school. Wherever a community exists, and consequently also a [pg 017] morality of custom, the feeling prevails that any punishment for the violation of a custom is inflicted, above all, on the community: this punishment is a supernatural punishment, the manifestations and limits of which are so difficult to understand, and are investigated with such superstitious fear. The community can compel any one member of it to make good, either to an individual or to the community itself, any ill consequences which may have followed upon such a member's action. It can also call down a sort of vengeance upon the head of the individual by endeavouring to show that, as the result of his action, a storm of divine anger has burst over the community,—but, above all, it regards the guilt of the individual more particularly as its own guilt, and bears the punishment of the isolated individual as its own punishment —“Morals,” they bewail in their innermost heart, “morals have grown lax, if such deeds as these are possible.” And every individual action, every individual mode of thinking, causes dread. It is impossible to determine how much the more select, rare, and original minds must have suffered in the course of time by being considered as evil and dangerous, yea, because they even looked upon themselves as such.
Under the dominating influence of the morality of custom, originality of every kind came to acquire a bad conscience; and even now the sky of the best minds seems to be more overcast by this thought than it need be. 10 Counter-motion between the Sense of Morality and the Sense of Causality.—As [pg 018] the sense of causality increases, so does the extent of the domain of morality decrease: for every time one has been able to grasp the necessary effects, and to conceive them as distinct from all incidentals and chance possibilities (post hoc), one has, at the same time, destroyed an enormous number of imaginary causalities, which had hitherto been believed in as the basis of morals—the real world is much smaller than the world of our imagination—and each time also one casts away a certain amount of one's anxiousness and coercion, and some of our reverence for the authority of custom is lost: morality in general undergoes a diminution. He who, on the other hand, wishes to increase it must know how to prevent results from becoming controllable. 11 Morals and Medicines of the People.—Every one is continuously occupied in bringing more or less influence to bear upon the morals which prevail in a community: most of the people bring forward example after example to show the alleged relationship between cause and effect, guilt and punishment, thus upholding it as well founded and adding to the belief in it. A few make new observations upon the actions and their consequences, drawing conclusions therefrom and laying down laws; a smaller number raise objections and allow belief in these things to become weakened.—But they are all alike in the crude and unscientific manner in which they set about their work: if it is a question of objections to a law, or examples or [pg 019] observations of it, or of its proof, confirmation, expression or refutation, we always find the material and method entirely valueless, as valueless as the material and form of all popular medicine. Popular medicines and popular morals are closely related, and should not be considered and valued, as is still customary, in so different a way: both are most dangerous and make-believe sciences. 12 Consequence as Adjuvant Cause.—Formerly the consequences of an action were considered, not as the result of that action, but a voluntary adjuvant—i.e. on the part of God. Can a greater confusion be imagined? Entirely different practices and means have to be brought into use for actions and effects! 13 Towards the New Education of Mankind.—Help us, all ye who are well-disposed and willing to assist, lend your aid in the endeavour to do away with that conception of punishment which has swept over the whole world! No weed more harmful than this! It is not only to the consequences of our actions that this conception has been applied—and how horrible and senseless it is to confuse cause and effect with cause and punishment!—but worse has followed: the pure accidentality of events has been robbed of its innocence by this execrable manner of interpreting conception of punishment. Yea, they have even pushed their folly to such extremes [pg 020] that they would have us look upon existence itself as a punishment—from which it would appear that the education of mankind had hitherto been confided to cranky gaolers and hangmen. 14 The Signification of Madness in the History of Morality.—If, despite that formidable pressure of the “morality of custom,” under which all human communities lived—thousands of years before our own era, and during our own era up to the present day (we ourselves are dwelling in the small world of exceptions, and, as it were, in an evil zone):—if, I say, in spite of all this, new and divergent ideas, valuations, and impulses have made their appearance time after time, this state of things has been brought about only with the assistance of a dreadful associate: it was insanity almost everywhere that paved the way for the new thought and cast off the spell of an old custom and superstition. Do ye understand why this had to be done through insanity? by something which is in both voice and appearance as horrifying and incalculable as the demoniac whims of wind and sea, and consequently calling for like dread and respect?
by something bearing upon it the signs of entire lack of consciousness as clearly as the convulsions and foam of the epileptic, which appeared to typify the insane person as the mask and speaking-trumpet of some divine being? by something that inspired even the bearer of the new thought with awe and fear of himself, and that, suppressing all remorse, drove [pg 021] him on to become its prophet and martyr?—Well, in our own time, we continually hear the statement reiterated that genius is tinctured with madness instead of good sense. Men of earlier ages were far more inclined to believe that, wherever traces of insanity showed themselves, a certain proportion of genius and wisdom was likewise present—something “divine,” as they whispered to one another. More than this, they expressed their opinions on the point with sufficient emphasis. “All the greatest benefits of Greece have sprung from madness,” said Plato, setting on record the opinion of the entire ancient world. Let us take a step further: all those superior men, who felt themselves irresistibly urged on to throw off the yoke of some morality or other, had no other resource—if they were not really mad —than to feign madness, or actually to become insane. And this holds good for innovators in every department of life, and not only in religion and politics. Even the reformer of the poetic metre was forced to justify himself by means of madness. (Thus even down to gentler ages madness remained a kind of convention in poets, of which Solon, for instance, took advantage when urging the Athenians to reconquer Salamis.)—“How can one make one's self mad when one is not mad and dare not feign to be so?” Almost all the eminent men of antiquity have given themselves up to this dreadful mode of reasoning: a secret doctrine of artifices and dietetic jugglery grew up around this subject and was handed down from generation to generation, together with the feeling of the innocence, even sanctity, of such plans and meditations. The means of becoming [pg 022] a medicine-man among the Indians, a saint among Christians of the Middle Ages, an angecok among Greenlanders, a Pagee among Brazilians, are the same in essence: senseless fasting, continual abstention from sexual intercourse, isolation in a wilderness, ascending a mountain or a pillar, “sitting on an aged willow that looks out upon a lake,” and thinking of absolutely nothing but what may give rise to ecstasy or mental derangements. Who would dare to glance at the desert of the bitterest and most superfluous agonies of spirit, in which probably the most productive men of all ages have pined away? Who could listen to the sighs of those lonely and troubled minds: “O ye heavenly powers, grant me madness! Madness, that I at length may believe in myself! Vouchsafe delirium and convulsions, sudden flashes of light and periods of darkness; frighten me with such shivering and feverishness as no mortal ever experienced before, with clanging noises and haunting spectres; let me growl and whine and creep about like a beast, if only I can come to believe in myself! I am devoured by doubt. I have slain the law, and I now dread the law as a living person dreads a corpse. If I am not above the law, I am the most abandoned of wretches. Whence cometh this new spirit that dwelleth within me but from you? Prove to me, then, that I am one of you—nothing but madness will prove it to me.” And only too often does such a fervour attain its object: at the very time when Christianity was giving the greatest proof of its fertility in the production of saints and martyrs, believing that it was thus proving itself, Jerusalem [pg 023] contained large lunatic asylums for shipwrecked saints, for those whose last spark of good sense had been quenched by the floods of insanity. 15 The most Ancient Means of Solace.—First stage: In every misfortune or discomfort man sees something for which he must make somebody else suffer, no matter who—in this way he finds out the amount of power still remaining to him; and this consoles him. Second stage: In every misfortune or discomfort, man sees a punishment, i.e. an expiation of guilt and the means by which he may get rid of the malicious enchantment of a real or apparent wrong.
When he perceives the advantage which misfortune bring with it, he believes he need no longer make another person suffer for it—he gives up this kind of satisfaction, because he now has another. 16 First Principle of Civilisation.—Among savage tribes there is a certain category of customs which appear to aim at nothing but custom. They therefore lay down strict, and, on the whole, superfluous regulations (e.g. the rules of the Kamchadales, which forbid snow to be scraped off the boots with a knife, coal to be stuck on the point of a knife, or a piece of iron to be put into the fire—and death to be the portion of every one who shall act contrariwise!) Yet these laws serve to keep people continually reminded of the custom, and [pg 024] the imperative necessity on their parts to conform to it: and all this in support of the great principle which stands at the beginning of all civilisation: any custom is better than none. 17 Goodness and Malignity.—At first men imposed their own personalities on Nature: everywhere they saw themselves and their like, i.e. their own evil and capricious temperaments, hidden, as it were, behind clouds, thunder-storms, wild beasts, trees, and plants: it was then that they declared Nature was evil. Afterwards there came a time, that of Rousseau, when they sought to distinguish themselves from Nature: they were so tired of each other that they wished to have separate little hiding-places where man and his misery could not penetrate: then they invented “nature is good.” 18 The Morality of Voluntary Suffering.—What is the highest enjoyment for men living in a state of war in a small community, the existence of which is continually threatened, and the morality of which is the strictest possible? i.e. for souls which are vigorous, vindictive, malicious, full of suspicion, ready to face the direst events, hardened by privation and morality? The enjoyment of cruelty: just as, in such souls and in such circumstances, it would be regarded as a virtue to be ingenious and insatiable in cruelty. Such a community would [pg 025] find its delight in performing cruel deeds, casting aside, for once, the gloom of constant anxiety and precaution. Cruelty is one of the most ancient enjoyments at their festivities. As a consequence it is believed that the gods likewise are pleased by the sight of cruelty and rejoice at it—and in this way the belief is spread that voluntary suffering, self-chosen martyrdom, has a high signification and value of its own. In the community custom gradually brings about a practice in conformity with this belief: henceforward people become more suspicious of all exuberant well-being, and more confident as they find themselves in a state of great pain; they think that the gods may be unfavourable to them on account of happiness, and favourable on account of pain—not compassionate! For compassion is looked upon with contempt, and unworthy of a strong and awe-inspiring soul—but agreeable to them, because the sight of human suffering put these gods into good humour and makes them feel powerful, and a cruel mind revels in the sensation of power. It was thus that the “most moral man” of the community was considered as such by virtue of his frequent suffering, privation, laborious existence, and cruel mortification—not, to repeat it again and again, as a means of discipline or self-control or a desire for individual happiness—but a a virtue which renders the evil gods welldisposed towards the community, a virtue which continually wafts up to them the odour of an expiatory sacrifice. All those intellectual leaders of the nations who reached the point of being able to stir up the sluggish though [pg 026] prolific mire of their customs had to possess this factor of voluntary martyrdom as well as insanity in order to obtain belief—especially, and above all, as is always the case, belief in themselves! The more their minds followed new paths, and were consequently tormented by pricks of conscience, the more cruelly they battled against their own flesh, their own desires, and their own health—as if they were offering the gods a compensation in pleasure, lest these gods should wax wroth at the neglect of ancient customs and the setting up of new aims. Let no one be too hasty in thinking that we have now entirely freed ourselves from such a logic of feeling! Let the most heroic souls among us question themselves on this very point.
The least step forward in the domain of free thought and individual life has been achieved in all ages to the accompaniment of physical and intellectual tortures: and not only the mere step forward, no! but every form of movement and change has rendered necessary innumerable martyrs, throughout the entire course of thousands of years which sought their paths and laid down their foundationstones, years, however, which we do not think of when we speak about “world-history,” that ridiculously small division of mankind's existence. And even in this so-called world-history, which in the main is merely a great deal of noise about the latest novelties, there is no more important theme than the old, old tragedy of the martyrs who tried to move the mire. Nothing has been more dearly bought than the minute portion of human reason and feeling of liberty upon which we now pride ourselves. But [pg 027] it is this very pride which makes it almost impossible for us to-day to be conscious of that enormous lapse of time, preceding the period of “world-history” when “morality of custom” held the field, and to consider this lapse of time as the real and decisive epoch that established the character of mankind: an epoch when suffering was considered as a virtue, cruelty as a virtue, hypocrisy as a virtue, revenge as a virtue, and the denial of the reason as a virtue, whereas, on the other hand, wellbeing was regarded as a danger, longing for knowledge as a danger, peace as a danger, compassion as a danger: an epoch when being pitied was looked upon as an insult, work as an insult, madness as a divine attribute, and every kind of change as immoral and pregnant with ruin! You imagine that all this has changed, and that humanity must likewise have changed its character? Oh, ye poor psychologists, learn to know yourselves better! 19 Morality and Stupefaction.—Custom represents the experiences of men of earlier times in regard to what they considered as useful and harmful; but the feeling of custom (morality) does not relate to these feelings as such, but to the age, the sanctity, and the unquestioned authority of the custom. Hence this feeling hinders our acquiring new experiences and amending morals: i.e. morality is opposed to the formation of new and better morals: it stupefies. [pg 028] 20 Free-doers and Free-thinkers.—Compared with free-thinkers, free-doers are at a disadvantage, because it is evident that men suffer more from the consequences of actions than of thoughts. If we remember, however, that both seek their own satisfaction, and that free-thinkers have already found their satisfaction in reflection upon and utterance of forbidden things, there is no difference in the motives; but in respect of the consequences the issue will be decided against the free-thinker, provided that it be not judged from the most superficial and vulgar external appearance, i.e. not as every one would judge it. We must make up for a good deal of the calumny with which men have covered all those who have, by their actions, broken away from the authority of some custom—they are generally called criminals. Every one who has hitherto overthrown a law of established morality has always at first been considered as a wicked man: but when it was afterwards found impossible to re- establish the law, and people gradually became accustomed to the change, the epithet was changed by slow degrees. History deals almost exclusively with these wicked men, who later on came to be recognised as good men. 21 “Fulfilment of the Law.”—In cases where the observance of a moral precept has led to different consequence from that expected and [pg 029] promised, and does not bestow upon the moral man the happiness he had hoped for, but leads rather to misfortune and misery, the conscientious and timid man has always his excuse ready: “Something was lacking in the proper carrying out of the law.” If the worst comes to the worst, a deeply-suffering and down-trodden humanity will even decree: “It is impossible to carry out the precept faithfully: we are too weak and sinful, and, in the depths of our soul, incapable of morality: consequently we have no claim to happiness and success. Moral precepts and promises have been given for better beings than ourselves.” 22 Works and Faith.—Protestant teachers are still spreading the fundamental error that faith only is of consequence, and that works must follow naturally upon faith.
This doctrine is certainly not true, but it is so seductive in appearance that it has succeeded in fascinating quite other intellects than that of Luther (e.g. the minds of Socrates and Plato): though the plain evidence and experience of our daily life prove the contrary. The most assured knowledge and faith cannot give us either the strength or the dexterity required for action, or the practice in that subtle and complicated mechanism which is a prerequisite for anything to be changed from an idea into action. Then, I say, let us first and foremost have works! and this means practice! practice! practice! The necessary faith will come later—be certain of that! [pg 030] 23 In what Respect we are most Subtle.—By the fact that, for thousands of years, things (nature, tools, property of all kinds) were thought to be alive and to possess souls, and able to hinder and interfere with the designs of man, the feeling of impotence among men has become greater and more frequent than it need have been: for one had to secure one's things like men and beasts, by means of force, compulsion, flattery, treaties, sacrifices—and it is here that we may find the origin of the greater number of superstitious customs, i.e. of an important, perhaps paramount, and nevertheless wasted and useless division of mankind's activity!—But since the feeling of impotence and fear was so strong, and for such a length of time in a state of constant stimulation, the feeling of power in man has been developed in so subtle a manner that, in this respect, he can compare favourably with the most delicately-adjusted balance. This feeling has become his strongest propensity: and the means he discovered for creating it form almost the entire history of culture. 24 The Proof of a Precept.—The worth or worthlessness of a recipe —that for baking bread, for example—is proved, generally speaking, by the result expected coming to pass or not, provided, of course, that the directions given have been carefully [pg 031] followed. The case is different, however, when we come to deal with moral precepts, for here the results cannot be ascertained, interpreted, and divined. These precepts, indeed, are based upon hypotheses of but little scientific value, the proof or refutation of which by means of results is impossible:—but in former ages, when all science was crude and primitive, and when a matter was taken for granted on the smallest evidence, then the worth or worthlessness of a moral recipe was determined as we now determine any other precept: by reference to the results. If the natives of Alaska believe in a command which says: “Thou shalt not throw a bone into the fire or give it to a dog,” this will be proved by the warning: “If thou dost thou wilt have no luck when hunting.” Yet, in one sense or another, it almost invariably happens that one has “no luck when hunting.” It is no easy matter to refute the worth of the precept in this way, the more so as it is the community, and not the individual, which is regarded as the bearer of the punishment; and, again, some occurrence is almost certain to happen which seems to prove the rule. 25 Customs and Beauty.—In justice to custom it must not be overlooked that, in the case of all those who conform to it wholeheartedly from the very start, the organs of attack and defence, both physical and intellectual, begin to waste away; i.e. these individuals gradually become more beautiful! For it is the exercise of these organs and their corresponding [pg 032] feelings that brings about ugliness and helps to preserve it. It is for this reason that the old baboon is uglier than the young one, and that the young female baboon most closely resembles man, and is hence the most handsome.—Let us draw from this our own conclusions as to the origin of female beauty!
26 Animals and Morals.—The rules insisted upon in polite society, such, for example, as the avoidance of everything ridiculous, fantastic, presumptuous; the suppression of one's virtues just as much as of one's most violent desires, the instant bringing of one's self down to the general level, submitting one's self to etiquette and self-depreciation: all this, generally speaking, is to be found, as a social morality, even in the lowest scale of the animal world—and it is only in this low scale that we see the innermost plan of all these amiable precautionary regulations: one wishes to escape from one's pursuers and to be aided in the search for plunder. Hence animals learn to control and to disguise themselves to such an extent that some of them can even adapt the colour of their bodies to that of their surroundings (by means of what is known as the “chromatic function”). Others can simulate death, or adopt the forms and colours of other animals, or of sand, leaves, moss, or fungi (known to English naturalists as “mimicry”). It is in this way that an individual conceals himself behind the universality of the generic term [pg 033] “man” or “society,” or adapts and attaches himself to princes, castes, political parties, current opinions of the time, or his surroundings: and we may easily find the animal equivalent of all those subtle means of making ourselves happy, thankful, powerful, and fascinating. Even that sense of truth, which is at bottom merely the sense of security, is possessed by man in common with the animals: we do not wish to be deceived by others or by ourselves; we hear with some suspicion the promptings of our own passions, we control ourselves and remain on the watch against ourselves. Now, the animal does all this as well as man; and in the animal likewise self-control originates in the sense of reality (prudence). In the same way, the animal observes the effects it exercises on the imagination of other beasts: it thus learns to view itself from their position, to consider itself “objectively”; it has its own degree of self-knowledge. The animal judges the movements of its friends and foes, it learns their peculiarities by heart and acts accordingly: it gives up, once and for all, the struggle against individual animals of certain species, and it likewise recognises, in the approach of certain varieties, whether their intentions are agreeable and peaceful. The beginnings of justice, like those of wisdom—in short, everything which we know as the Socratic virtues —are of an animal nature: a consequence of those instincts which teach us to search for food and to avoid our enemies. If we remember that the higher man has merely raised and refined himself in the quality of his food and in the conception of what is contrary to his nature, it [pg 034] may not be going too far to describe the entire moral phenomenon as of an animal origin. 27 The Value of the Belief in Superhuman Passions.—The institution of marriage stubbornly upholds the belief that love, although a passion, is nevertheless capable of duration as such, yea, that lasting, lifelong love may be taken as a general rule. By means of the tenacity of a noble belief, in spite of such frequent and almost customary refutations—thereby becoming a pia fraus— marriage has elevated love to a higher rank. Every institution which has conceded to a passion the belief in the duration of the latter, and responsibility for this duration, in spite of the nature of the passion itself, has raised the passion to a higher level: and he who is thenceforth seized with such a passion does not, as formerly, think himself lowered in the estimation of others or brought into danger on that account, but on the contrary believes himself to be raised, both in the opinion of himself and of his equals. Let us recall institutions and customs which, out of the fiery devotion of a moment, have created eternal fidelity; out of the pleasure of anger, eternal vengeance; out of despair, eternal mourning; out of a single hasty word, eternal obligation. A great deal of hypocrisy and falsehood came into the world as the result of such transformations; but each time, too, at the cost of such disadvantages, a new and superhuman conception which elevates mankind. [pg 035] 28 State of Mind as Argument.—Whence arises within us a cheerful readiness for action?—such is the question which has greatly occupied the attention of men.
The most ancient answer, and one which we still hear, is: God is the cause; in this way He gives us to understand that He approves of our actions. When, in former ages, people consulted the oracles, they did so that they might return home strengthened by this cheerful readiness; and every one answered the doubts which came to him, if alternative actions suggested themselves, by saying: “I shall do whatever brings about that feeling.” They did not decide, in other words, for what was most reasonable, but upon some plan the conception of which imbued the soul with courage and hope. A cheerful outlook was placed in the scales as an argument and proved to be heavier than reasonableness; for the state of mind was interpreted in a superstitious manner as the action of a god who promises success; and who, by this argument, lets his reason speak as the highest reasonableness. Now, let the consequences of such a prejudice be considered when shrewd men, thirsting for power, availed themselves of it—and still do so! “Bring about the right state of mind!”—in this way you can do without all arguments and overcome every objection! 29 Actors of Virtue and Sin.—Among the ancients who became celebrated for their virtue [pg 036] there were many, it would seem, who acted to themselves, especially the Greeks, who, being actors by nature, must have acted quite unconsciously, seeing no reason why they should not do so. In addition, every one was striving to outdo some one else's virtue with his own, so why should they not have made use of every artifice to show off their virtues, especially among themselves, if only for the sake of practice! Of what use was a virtue which one could not display, and which did not know how to display itself!—Christianity put an end to the career of these actors of virtue; instead it devised the disgusting ostentation and parading of sins: it brought into the world a state of mendacious sinfulness (even at the present day this is considered as bon ton among orthodox Christians). 30 Refined Cruelty as Virtue.—Here we have a morality which is based entirely upon our thirst for distinction—do not therefore entertain too high an opinion of it! Indeed, we may well ask what kind of an impulse it is, and what is its fundamental signification? It is sought, by our appearance, to grieve our neighbour, to arouse his envy, and to awaken his feelings of impotence and degradation; we endeavour to make him taste the bitterness of his fate by dropping a little of our honey on his tongue, and, while conferring this supposed benefit on him, looking sharply and triumphantly into his eyes. Behold such a man, now become humble, and perfect in his humility—and seek those for whom, through his humility, he has for a long time been [pg 037] preparing a torture; for you are sure to find them! Here is another man who shows mercy towards animals, and is admired for doing so—but there are certain people on whom he wishes to vent his cruelty by this very means. Look at that great artist: the pleasure he enjoyed beforehand in conceiving the envy of the rivals he had outstripped, refused to let his powers lie dormant until he became a great man—how many bitter moments in the souls of other men has he asked for as payment for his own greatness! The nun's chastity: with what threatening eyes she looks into the faces of other women who live differently from her! what a vindictive joy shines in those eyes! The theme is short, and its variations, though they might well be innumerable, could not easily become tiresome—for it is still too paradoxical a novelty, and almost a painful one, to affirm that the morality of distinction is nothing, at bottom, but joy in refined cruelty. When I say “at bottom,” I mean here, every time in the first generation. For, when the habit of some distinguished action becomes hereditary, its root, so to speak, is not transmitted, but only its fruits (for only feelings, and not thoughts, can become hereditary): and, if we presuppose that this root is not reintroduced by education, in the second generation the joy in the cruelty is no longer felt: but only pleasure in the habit as such.
This joy, however, is the first degree of the “good.” 31 Pride in Spirit.—The pride of man, which strives to oppose the theory of our own descent [pg 038] from animals and establishes a wide gulf between nature and man himself—this pride is founded upon a prejudice as to what the mind is; and this prejudice is relatively recent. In the long prehistorical period of humanity it was supposed that the mind was everywhere, and men did not look upon it as a particular characteristic of their own. Since, on the contrary, everything spiritual (including all impulses, maliciousness, and inclinations) was regarded as common property, and consequently accessible to everybody, primitive mankind was not ashamed of being descended from animals or trees (the noble races thought themselves honoured by such legends), and saw in the spiritual that which unites us with nature, and not that which severs us from her. Thus man was brought up in modesty—and this likewise was the result of a prejudice. 32 The Brake.—To suffer morally, and then to learn afterwards that this kind of suffering was founded upon an error, shocks us. For there is a unique consolation in acknowledging, by our suffering, a “deeper world of truth” than any other world, and we would much rather suffer and feel ourselves above reality by doing so (through the feeling that, in this way, we approach nearer to that “deeper world of truth”), than live without suffering and hence without this feeling of the sublime. Thus it is pride, and the habitual fashion of satisfying it, which opposes this new interpretation of morality. What power, then, must we bring into operation to [pg 039] get rid of this brake? Greater pride? A new pride? 32 The Contempt of Causes, Consequences, and Reality.—Those unfortunate occurrences which take place at times in the community, such as sudden storms, bad harvests, or plagues, lead members of the community to suspect that offences against custom have been committed, or that new customs must be invented to appease a new demoniac power and caprice. Suspicion and reasoning of this kind, however, evade an inquiry into the real and natural causes, and take the demoniac cause for granted. This is one source of the hereditary perversion of the human intellect; and the other one follows in its train, for, proceeding on the same principle, people paid much less attention to the real and natural consequences of an action than to the supernatural consequences (the so-called punishments and mercies of the Divinity). It is commanded, for instance, that certain baths are to be taken at certain times: and the baths are taken, not for the sake of cleanliness, but because the command has been made. We are not taught to avoid the real consequences of dirt, but merely the supposed displeasure of the gods because a bath has been omitted. Under the pressure of superstitious fear, people began to suspect that these ablutions were of much greater importance than they seemed; they ascribed inner and supplementary meanings to them, gradually lost their sense of and pleasure in reality, and finally reality is considered as valuable [pg 040] only to the extent that it is a symbol. Hence a man who is under the influence of the morality of custom comes to despise causes first of all, secondly consequences, and thirdly reality, and weaves all his higher feelings (reverence, sublimity, pride, gratitude, love) into an imaginary world: the so-called higher world. And even to-day we can see the consequences of this: wherever, and in whatever fashion, man's feelings are raised, that imaginary world is in evidence. It is sad to have to say it; but for the time being all higher sentiments must be looked upon with suspicion by the man of science, to so great an extent are they intermingled with illusion and extravagance. Not that they need necessarily be suspected per se and for ever; but there is no doubt that, of all the gradual purifications which await humanity, the purification of the higher feelings will be one of the slowest. 34 Moral Feelings and Conceptions.—It is clear that moral feelings are transmitted in such a way that children perceive in adults violent predilections and aversions for certain actions, and then, like born apes, imitate such likes and dislikes.
Later on in life, when they are thoroughly permeated by these acquired and well-practised feelings, they think it a matter of propriety and decorum to provide a kind of justification for these predilections and aversions. These “justifications,” however, are in no way connected with the origin or the degree of the feeling: people simply [pg 041] accommodate themselves to the rule that, as rational beings, they must give reasons for their pros and cons, reasons which must be assignable and acceptable into the bargain. Up to this extent the history of the moral feelings is entirely different from the history of moral conceptions. The first-mentioned are powerful before the action, and the latter especially after it, in view of the necessity for making one's self clear in regard to them. 35 Feelings and their Descent from Judgments.—“Trust in your feelings!” But feelings comprise nothing final, original; feelings are based upon the judgments and valuations which are transmitted to us in the shape of feelings (inclinations, dislikes). The inspiration which springs from a feeling is the grandchild of a judgment—often an erroneous judgment!—and certainly not one's own judgment! Trusting in our feelings simply means obeying our grandfather and grandmother more than the gods within ourselves: our reason and experience. 36 A Foolish Piety, with Arrière-pensées.—What! the inventors of ancient civilisations, the first makers of tools and tape lines, the first builders of vehicles, ships, and houses, the first observers of the laws of the heavens and the multiplication tables—is it contended that they were entirely different from the inventors and observers of our own time, [pg 042] and superior to them? And that the first slow steps forward were of a value which has not been equalled by the discoveries we have made with all our travels and circumnavigations of the earth? It is the voice of prejudice that speaks thus, and argues in this way to depreciate the importance of the modern mind. And yet it is plain to be seen that, in former times, hazard was the greatest of all discoverers and observers and the benevolent prompter of these ingenious ancients, and that, in the case of the most insignificant invention now made, a greater intellect, discipline, and scientific imagination are required than formerly existed throughout long ages. 37 Wrong Conclusions From Usefulness.—When we have demonstrated the highest utility of a thing, we have nevertheless made no progress towards an explanation of its origin; in other words, we can never explain, by mere utility, the necessity of existence. But precisely the contrary opinion has been maintained up to the present time, even in the domain of the most exact science. In astronomy, for example, have we not heard it stated that the (supposed) usefulness of the system of satellites—(replacing the light which is diminished in intensity by the greater distance of the sun, in order that the inhabitants of the various celestial bodies should not want for light)—was the final object of this system and explained its origin? Which may remind us of the conclusions of Christopher Columbus The earth has been [pg 043] created for man, ergo, if there are countries, they must be inhabited. “Is it probable that the sun would throw his rays on nothing, and that the nocturnal vigils of the stars should be wasted upon untravelled seas and unpeopled countries?” 38 Impulses Transformed by Moral Judgments.—The same impulse, under the impression of the blame cast upon it by custom, develops into the painful feeling of cowardice, or else the pleasurable feeling of humility, in case a morality, like that of Christianity, has taken it to its heart and called it good. In other words, this instinct will fall under the influence of either a good conscience or a bad one! In itself, like every instinct, it does not possess either this or indeed any other moral character and name, or even a definite accompanying feeling of pleasure or displeasure; it does not acquire all these qualities as its second nature until it comes into contact with impulses which have already been baptized as good and evil, or has been recognised as the attribute of beings already weighed and valued by the people from a moral point of view. Thus the ancient conception of envy differed entirely from ours. Hesiod reckons it among the qualities of the good, benevolent Eris, and it was not considered as offensive to attribute some kind of envy even to the gods.
This is easy to understand in a state of things inspired mainly by emulation, but emulation was looked upon as good, and valued accordingly. [pg 044] The Greeks were likewise different from us in the value they set upon hope: they conceived it as blind and deceitful. Hesiod in one of his poems has made a strong reference to it—a reference so strong, indeed, that no modern commentator has quite understood it; for it runs contrary to the modern mind, which has learnt from Christianity to look upon hope as a virtue. Among the Greeks, on the other hand, the portal leading to a knowledge of the future seemed only partly closed, and, in innumerable instances, it was impressed upon them as a religious obligation to inquire into the future, in those cases where we remain satisfied with hope. It thus came about that the Greeks, thanks to their oracles and seers, held hope in small esteem, and even lowered it to the level of an evil and a danger. The Jews, again, took a different view of anger from that held by us, and sanctified it: hence they have placed the sombre majesty of the wrathful man at an elevation so high that a European cannot conceive it. They moulded their wrathful and holy Jehovah after the images of their wrathful and holy prophets. Compared with them, all the Europeans who have exhibited the greatest wrath are, so to speak, only second-hand creatures. 39 The Prejudice concerning “Pure Spirit.”—Wherever the doctrine of pure spirituality has prevailed, its excesses have resulted in the destruction of the tone of the nerves: it taught that the [pg 045] body should be despised, neglected, or tormented, and that, on account of his impulses, man himself should be tortured and regarded with contempt. It gave rise to gloomy, strained, and downcast souls— who, besides, thought they knew the reason of their misery and how it might possibly be relieved! “It must be in the body! For it still thrives too well!”—such was their conclusion, whilst the fact was that the body, through its agonies, protested time after time against this never-ending mockery. Finally, a universal and chronic hypernervousness seized upon those virtuous representatives of the pure spirit: they learned to recognise joy only in the shape of ecstasies and other preliminary symptoms of insanity—and their system reached its climax when it came to look upon ecstasy as the highest aim of life, and as the standard by which all earthly things must be condemned. 40 Meditations upon Observances.—Numerous moral precepts, carelessly drawn from a single event, quickly became incomprehensible; it was as difficult a matter to deduce their intentions with any degree of certainty as it was to recognise the punishment which was to follow the breaking of the rule. Doubts were even held regarding the order of the ceremonies; but, while people guessed at random about such matters, the object of their investigations increased in importance, it was precisely the greatest absurdity [pg 046] of an observance that developed into a holy of holies. Let us not think too little of the energy wasted by man in this regard throughout thousands of years, and least of all of the effects of such meditations upon observances! Here we find ourselves on the wide training-ground of the intellect—not only do religions develop and continue to increase within its boundaries: but here also is the venerable, though dreadful, primeval world of science; here grow up the poet, the thinker, the physician, the lawgiver. The dread of the unintelligible, which, in an ambiguous fashion, demanded ceremonies from us, gradually assumed the charm of the intricate, and where man could not unravel he learnt to create. 41 To Determine the Value of the Vita Contemplativa.—Let us not forget, as men leading a contemplative life, what kind of evil and misfortunes have overtaken the men of the vita activa as the result of contemplation—in short, what sort of contra-account the vita activa has to offer us, if we exhibit too much boastfulness before it with respect to our good deeds. It would show us, in the first place, those so-called religious natures, who predominate among the lovers of contemplation and consequently represent their commonest type.
They have at all times acted in such a manner as to render life difficult to practical men, and tried to make them disgusted with it, if possible: to darken the sky, to obliterate the [pg 047] sun, to cast suspicion upon joy, to depreciate hope, to paralyse the active hand— all this they knew how to do, just as, for miserable times and feelings, they had their consolations, alms, blessings, and benedictions. In the second place, it can show us the artists, a species of men leading the vita contemplativa, rarer than the religious element, but still often to be met with. As beings, these people are usually intolerable, capricious, jealous, violent, quarrelsome: this, however, must be deduced from the joyous and exalting effects of their works. Thirdly, we have the philosophers, men who unite religious and artistic qualities, combined, however, with a third element, namely, dialectics and the love of controversy. They are the authors of evil in the same sense as the religious men and artists, in addition to which they have wearied many of their fellow-men with their passion for dialectics, though their number has always been very small. Fourthly, the thinkers and scientific workers. They but rarely strove after effects, and contented themselves with silently sticking to their own groove. Thus they brought about little envy and discomfort, and often, as objects of mockery and derision, they served, without wishing to do so, to make life easier for the men of the vita activa. Lastly, science ended by becoming of much advantage to all; and if, on account of this utility, many of the men who were destined for the vita activa are now slowly making their way along the road to science in the sweat of their brow, and not without brain-racking and maledictions, this is not the [pg 048] fault of the crowd of thinkers and scientific workers: it is “self-wrought pain.”3 42 Origin of the Vita Contemplativa.—During barbarous ages, when pessimistic judgments held sway over men and the world, the individual, in the consciousness of his full power, always endeavoured to act in conformity with such judgments, that is to say, he put his ideas into action by means of hunting, robbery, surprise attacks, brutality, and murder: including the weaker forms of such acts, as far as they are tolerated within the community. When his strength declines, however, and he feels tired, ill, melancholy, or satiated—consequently becoming temporarily void of wishes or desires—he is a relatively better man, that is to say, less dangerous; and his pessimistic ideas will now discharge themselves only in words and reflections—upon his companions, for example, or his wife, his life, his gods,—his judgments will be evil ones. In this frame of mind he develops into a thinker and prophet, or he adds to his superstitions and invents new observances, or mocks his enemies. Whatever he may devise, however, all the productions of his brain will necessarily reflect his frame of mind, such as the increase of fear and weariness, and the lower value he attributes to action and enjoyment. The substance of these productions must correspond to the substance of [pg 049] these poetic, thoughtful, and priestly moods; the evil judgment must be supreme. In later years, all those who acted continuously as this man did in those special circumstances—i.e. those who gave out pessimistic judgments, and lived a melancholy life, poor in action—were called poets, thinkers, priests, or “medicine-men.” The general body of men would have liked to disregard such people, because they were not active enough, and to turn them out of the community; but there was a certain risk in doing so: these inactive men had found out and were following the tracks of superstition and divine power, and no one doubted that they had unknown means of power at their disposal. This was the value which was set upon the ancient race of contemplative natures—despised as they were in just the same degree as they were not dreaded! In such a masked form, in such an ambiguous aspect, with an evil heart and often with a troubled head, did Contemplation make its first appearance on earth: both weak and terrible at the same time, despised in secret, and covered in public with every mark of superstitious veneration. Here, as always, we must say: pudenda origo!
43 How many Forces must now be united in a Thinker.—To rise superior to considerations of the senses, to raise one's self to abstract contemplations: this is what was formerly regarded as elevation; but now it is not practicable for us to share the same feelings. Luxuriating in the [pg 050] most shadowy images of words and things; playing with those invisible, inaudible, imperceptible beings, was considered as existence in another and higher world, a world that sprang from the deep contempt felt for the world which was perceptible to the senses, this seductive and wicked world of ours. “These abstracta no longer mislead us, but they may lead us”—with such words men soared aloft. It was not the substance of these intellectual sports, but the sports themselves, which was looked upon as “the higher thing” in the primeval ages of science. Hence we have Plato's admiration for dialectics, and his enthusiastic belief in the necessary relationship of dialectics to the good man who has risen superior to the considerations of his senses. It was not only knowledge that was discovered little by little, but also the different means of acquiring it, the conditions and operations which precede knowledge in man. And it always seemed as if the newly-discovered operation or the newly-experienced condition were not a means of acquiring knowledge, but was even the substance, goal, and sumtotal of everything that was worth knowing. What does the thinker require?—imagination, inspiration, abstraction, spirituality, invention, presentiment, induction, dialectics, deduction, criticism, ability to collect materials, an impersonal mode of thinking, contemplation, comprehensiveness, and lastly, but not least, justice, and love for everything that exists—but each one of these means was at one time considered, in the history of the vita contemplativa, as a goal and final purpose, and they all secured for [pg 051] their inventors that perfect happiness which fills the human soul when its final purpose dawns upon it. 44 Origin and Meaning.—Why does this thought come into my mind again and again, always in more and more vivid colours?—that, in former times, investigators, in the course of their search for the origin of things, always thought that they found something which would be of the highest importance for all kinds of action and judgment: yea, that they even invariably postulated that the salvation of mankind depended upon insight into the origin of things—whereas now, on the other hand, the more we examine into origins, the less do they concern our interests: on the contrary, all the valuations and interestedness which we have placed upon things begin to lose their meaning, the more we retrogress where knowledge is concerned and approach the things themselves. The origin becomes of less significance in proportion as we acquire insight into it; whilst things nearest to ourselves, around and within us, gradually begin to manifest their wealth of colours, beauties, enigmas, and diversity of meaning, of which earlier humanity never dreamed. In former ages thinkers used to move furiously about, like wild animals in cages, steadily glaring at the bars which hemmed them in, and at times springing up against them in a vain endeavour to break through them: and happy indeed was he who could look through a gap to the outer world and could fancy that [pg 052] he saw something of what lay beyond and afar off. 45 A Tragic Termination to Knowledge.—Of all the means of exaltation, human sacrifices have at times done most to elevate man. And perhaps the one powerful thought—the idea of selfsacrificing humanity—might be made to prevail over every other aspiration, and thus to prove the victor over even the most victorious. But to whom should the sacrifice be made? We may already swear that, if ever the constellation of such an idea appeared on the horizon, the knowledge of truth would remain the single but enormous object with which a sacrifice of such a nature would be commensurate—because no sacrifice is too great for it. In the meantime the problem has never been expounded as to how far humanity, considered as a whole, could take steps to encourage the advancement of knowledge; and even less as to what thirst for knowledge could impel humanity to the point of sacrificing itself with the light of an anticipated wisdom in its eyes.
When, perhaps, with a view to the advancement of knowledge, we are able to enter into communication with the inhabitants of other stars, and when, during thousands of years, wisdom will have been carried from star to star, the enthusiasm of knowledge may rise to such a dizzy height! 46 Doubt in Doubt.—“What a good pillow doubt is for a well-balanced head!” This saying of [pg 053] Montaigne always made Pascal angry, for nobody ever wanted a good pillow so much as he did. Whatever was the matter with him? 47 Words block up our Path.—Wherever primitive men put down a word, they thought they had made a discovery. How different the case really was!—they had come upon a problem, and, while they thought they had solved it, they had in reality placed an obstacle in the way of its solution. Now, with every new piece of knowledge, we stumble over petrified words and mummified conceptions, and would rather break a leg than a word in doing so. 48 “Know Thyself” is the Whole of Science.—Only when man shall have acquired a knowledge of all things will he be able to know himself. For things are but the boundaries of man. 49 The New Fundamental Feeling: our Final Corruptibility.—In former times people sought to show the feeling of man's greatness by pointing to his divine descent. This, however, has now become a forbidden path, for the ape stands at its entrance, and likewise other fearsome animals, showing their teeth in a knowing fashion, as if to say, No further this way! Hence people now try the opposite direction: the road along which humanity is proceeding shall stand as an indication of their [pg 054] greatness and their relationship to God. But alas! this, too, is useless! At the far end of this path stands the funeral urn of the last man and grave-digger (with the inscription, Nihil humani a me alienum puto). To whatever height mankind may have developed—and perhaps in the end it will not be so high as when they began!—there is as little prospect of their attaining to a higher order as there is for the ant and the earwig to enter into kinship with God and eternity at the end of their career on earth. What is to come will drag behind it that which has passed: why should any little star, or even any little species on that star, form an exception to that eternal drama? Away with such sentimentalities! 50 Belief in Inebriation.—Those men who have moments of sublime ecstasy, and who, on ordinary occasions, on account of the contrast and the excessive wearing away of their nervous forces, usually feel miserable and desolate, come to consider such moments as the true manifestation of their real selves, of their “ego,” and their misery and dejection, on the other hand, as the effect of the “non-ego”. This is why they think of their environment, the age in which they live, and the whole world in which they have their being, with feelings of vindictiveness. This intoxication appears to them as their true life, their actual ego; and everywhere else they see only those who strive to oppose and prevent this intoxication, whether of an intellectual, moral, religious, or artistic nature. [pg 055] Humanity owes no small part of its evils to these fantastic enthusiasts; for they are the insatiable sowers of the weed of discontent with one's self and one's neighbour, of contempt for the world and the age, and, above all, of world-lassitude. An entire hell of criminals could not, perhaps, bring about such unfortunate and far-reaching consequences, such heavy and disquieting effects that corrupt earth and sky, as are brought about by that “noble” little community of unbridled, fantastic, half-mad people—of geniuses, too —who cannot control themselves, or experience any inward joy, until they have lost themselves completely: while, on the other hand, the criminal often gives a proof of his admirable self-control, sacrifice, and wisdom, and thus maintains these qualities in those who fear him. Through him life's sky may at times seem overcast and threatening, but the atmosphere ever remains brisk and vigorous.— Furthermore, these enthusiasts bring their entire strength to bear on the task of imbuing mankind with belief in inebriation as in life itself: a dreadful belief!
As savages are now quickly corrupted and ruined by “fire-water,” so likewise has mankind in general been slowly though thoroughly corrupted by these spiritual “fire-waters” of intoxicating feelings and by those who keep alive the craving for them. It may yet be ruined thereby. 51 Such as we still are.—“Let us be indulgent to the great one-eyed!” said Stuart Mill, as if it [pg 056] were necessary to ask for indulgence when we are willing to believe and almost to worship them. I say: Let us be indulgent towards the two-eyed, both great and small; for, such as we are now, we shall never rise beyond indulgence! 52 Where are the New Physicians of the Soul?—It is the means of consolation which have stamped life with that fundamental melancholy character in which we now believe: the worst disease of mankind has arisen from the struggle against diseases, and apparent remedies have in the long run brought about worse conditions than those which it was intended to remove by their use. Men, in their ignorance, used to believe that the stupefying and intoxicating means, which appeared to act immediately, the so-called “consolations,” were the true healing powers: they even failed to observe that they had often to pay for their immediate relief by a general and profound deterioration in health, that the sick ones had to suffer from the after-effects of the intoxication, then from the absence of the intoxication, and, later on, from a feeling of disquietude, depression, nervous starts, and ill-health. Again, men whose illness had advanced to a certain extent never recovered from it—those physicians of the soul, universally believed in and worshipped as they were, took care of that. It has been justly said of Schopenhauer that he was one who again took the sufferings of humanity seriously: where is the man who will at length take [pg 057] the antidotes against these sufferings seriously, and who will pillory the unheard-of quackery with which men, even up to our own age, and in the most sublime nomenclature, have been wont to treat the illnesses of their souls? 53 Abuse of the Conscientious Ones.—It is the conscientious, and not the unscrupulous, who have suffered so greatly from exhortations to penitence and the fear of hell, especially if they happened to be men of imagination. In other words, a gloom has been cast over the lives of those who had the greatest need of cheerfulness and agreeable images—not only for the sake of their own consolation and recovery from themselves, but that humanity itself might take delight in them and absorb a ray of their beauty. Alas, how much superfluous cruelty and torment have been brought about by those religions which invented sin! and by those men who, by means of such religions, desired to reach the highest enjoyment of their power! 54 Thoughts on Disease.—To soothe the imagination of the patient, in order that he may at least no longer keep on thinking about his illness, and thus suffer more from such thoughts than from the complaint itself, which has been the case hitherto—that, it seems to me, is something! and it is by no means a trifle! And now do ye understand our task? [pg 058] 55 The “Ways.”—So-called “short cuts” have always led humanity to run great risks: on hearing the “glad tidings” that a “short cut” had been found, they always left the straight path—and lost their way. 56 The Apostate of the Free Spirit.—Is there any one, then, who seriously dislikes pious people who hold formally to their belief? Do we not, on the contrary, regard them with silent esteem and pleasure, deeply regretting at the same time that these excellent people do not share our own feelings? But whence arises that sudden, profound, and unreasonable dislike for the man who, having at one time possessed freedom of spirit, finally becomes a “believer”? In thinking of him we involuntarily experience the sensation of having beheld some loathsome spectacle, which we must quickly efface from our recollection. Should we not turn our backs upon even the most venerated man if we entertained the least suspicion of him in this regard? Not, indeed, from a moral point of view, but because of sudden disgust and horror! Whence comes this sharpness of feeling? Perhaps we shall be given to understand that, at bottom, we are not quite certain of our own selves?
Or that, early in life, we build round ourselves hedges of the most pointed contempt, in order that, when old age makes us weak and forgetful, we may not feel inclined to brush our own contempt away from us? [pg 059] Now, speaking frankly, this suspicion is quite erroneous, and whoever forms it knows nothing of what agitates and determines the free spirit: how little, to him, does the changing of an opinion seem contemptible per se! On the contrary, how highly he prizes the ability to change an opinion as a rare and valuable distinction, especially if he can retain it far into old age! And his pride (not his pusillanimity) even reaches so high as to be able to pluck the fruits of the spernere se sperni and the spernere se ipsum: without his being troubled by the sensation of fear of vain and easy-going men. Furthermore, the doctrine of the innocence of all opinions appears to him to be as certain as the doctrine of the innocence of all actions: how could he act as judge and hangman before the apostate of intellectual liberty! On the contrary, the sight of such a person would disgust him as much as the sight of a nauseous illness disgusts the physician: the physical repulsion caused by everything spongy, soft, and suppurating momentarily overcomes reason and the desire to help. Hence our goodwill is overcome by the conception of the monstrous dishonesty which must have gained the upper hand in the apostate from the free spirit: by the conception of a general gnawing which is eating its way down even to the framework of the character. 57 Other Fears, other Safeties.—Christianity overspread life with a new and unlimited insecurity, thereby creating new safeties, enjoyments [pg 060] and recreations, and new valuations of all things. Our own century denies the existence of this insecurity, and does so with a good conscience, yet it clings to the old habit of Christian certainties, enjoyments, recreations, and valuations!—even in its noblest arts and philosophies. How feeble and worn out must all this now seem, how imperfect and clumsy, how arbitrarily fanatical, and, above all, how uncertain: now that its horrible contrast has been taken away—the ever-present fear of the Christian for his eternal salvation! 58 Christianity and the Emotions.—In Christianity we may see a great popular protest against philosophy: the reasoning of the sages of antiquity had withdrawn men from the influence of the emotions, but Christianity would fain give men their emotions back again. With this aim in view, it denies any moral value to virtue such as philosophers understood it—as a victory of the reason over the passions—generally condemns every kind of goodness, and calls upon the passions to manifest themselves in their full power and glory: as love of God, fear of God, fanatic belief in God, blind hope in God. 59 Error as a Cordial.—Let people say what they will, it is nevertheless certain that it was the aim of Christianity to deliver mankind from the yoke of moral engagements by indicating what it [pg 061] believed to be the shortest way to perfection: exactly in the same manner as a few philosophers thought they could dispense with tedious and laborious dialectics, and the collection of strictlyproved facts, and point out a royal road to truth. It was an error in both cases, but nevertheless a great cordial for those who were worn out and despairing in the wilderness. 60 All Spirit finally becomes Visible.—Christianity has assimilated the entire spirituality of an incalculable number of men who were by nature submissive, all those enthusiasts of humiliation and reverence, both refined and coarse. It has in this way freed itself from its own original rustic coarseness—of which we are vividly reminded when we look at the oldest image of St. Peter the Apostle —and has become a very intellectual religion, with thousands of wrinkles, arrière-pensées, and masks on its face. It has made European humanity more clever, and not only cunning from a theological standpoint.
By the spirit which it has thus given to European humanity—in conjunction with the power of abnegation, and very often in conjunction with the profound conviction and loyalty of that abnegation—it has perhaps chiselled and shaped the most subtle individualities which have ever existed in human society: the individualities of the higher ranks of the Catholic clergy, especially when these priests have sprung from a noble family, and have brought to their work, from the very beginning, the innate grace of gesture, the dominating glance [pg 062] of the eye, and beautiful hands and feet. Here the human face acquires that spiritualisation brought about by the continual ebb and flow of two kinds of happiness (the feeling of power and the feeling of submission) after a carefully-planned manner of living has conquered the beast in man. Here an activity, which consists in blessing, forgiving sins, and representing the Almighty, ever keeps alive in the soul, and even in the body, the consciousness of a supreme mission; here we find that noble contempt concerning the perishable nature of the body, of well-being, and of happiness, peculiar to born soldiers: their pride lies in obedience, a distinctly aristocratic trait; their excuse and their idealism arise from the enormous impossibility of their task. The surpassing beauty and subtleties of these princes of the Church have always proved to the people the truth of the Church; a momentary brutalisation of the clergy (such as came about in Luther's time) always tended to encourage the contrary belief. And would it be maintained that this result of beauty and human subtlety, shown in harmony of figure, intellect, and task, would come to an end with religions? and that nothing higher could be obtained, or even conceived? 61 The Needful Sacrifice.—Those earnest, able, and just men of profound feelings, who are still Christians at heart, owe it to themselves to make one attempt to live for a certain space of time without Christianity! they owe it to their faith that they should thus for once take up their [pg 063] abode “in the wilderness”—if for no other reason than that of being able to pronounce on the question as to whether Christianity is needful. So far, however, they have confined themselves to their own narrow domain and insulted every one who happened to be outside of it: yea, they even become highly irritated when it is suggested to them that beyond this little domain of theirs lies the great world, and that Christianity is, after all, only a corner of it! No; your evidence on the question will be valueless until you have lived year after year without Christianity, and with the inmost desire to continue to exist without it: until, indeed, you have withdrawn far, far away from it. It is not when your nostalgia urges you back again, but when your judgment, based on a strict comparison, drives you back, that your homecoming has any significance!—Men of coming generations will deal in this manner with all the valuations of the past; they must be voluntarily lived over again, together with their contraries, in order that such men may finally acquire the right of shifting them. 62 On the Origin of Religions.—How can any one regard his own opinion of things as a revelation? This is the problem of the formation of religions: there has always been some man in whom this phenomenon was possible. A postulate is that such a man already believed in revelations. Suddenly, however, a new idea occurs to him one day, his idea; and the entire blessedness of a great [pg 064] personal hypothesis, which embraces all existence and the whole world, penetrates with such force into his conscience that he dare not think himself the creator of such blessedness, and he therefore attributes to his God the cause of this new idea and likewise the cause of the cause, believing it to be the revelation of his God. How could a man be the author of so great a happiness? ask his pessimistic doubts. But other levers are secretly at work: an opinion may be strengthened by one's self if it be considered as a revelation; and in this way all its hypothetic nature is removed; the matter is set beyond criticism and even beyond doubt: it is sanctified.
It is true that, in this way, a man lowers himself to playing the rôle of “mouthpiece,” but his thought will end by being victorious as a divine thought—the feeling of finally gaining the victory conquers the feeling of degradation. There is also another feeling in the background: if a man raises his products above himself, and thus apparently detracts from his own worth, there nevertheless remains a kind of joyfulness, paternal love, and paternal pride, which compensates man—more than compensates man—for everything. 63 Hatred of One's Neighbour.—Supposing that we felt towards our neighbour as he does himself—Schopenhauer calls this compassion, though it would be more correct to call it auto-passion, fellow-feeling—we should be compelled to hate him, if, like Pascal, he thought himself hateful. And this was [pg 065] probably the general feeling of Pascal regarding mankind, and also that of ancient Christianity, which, under Nero, was “convicted” of odium generis humani, as Tacitus has recorded. 64 The Broken-Hearted Ones.—Christianity has the instinct of a hunter for finding out all those who may by hook or by crook be driven to despair—only a very small number of men can be brought to this despair. Christianity lies in wait for such as those, and pursues them. Pascal made an attempt to find out whether it was not possible, with the help of the very subtlest knowledge, to drive everybody into despair. He failed: to his second despair. 65 Brahminism and Christianity.—There are certain precepts for obtaining a consciousness of power: on the one hand, for those who already know how to control themselves, and who are therefore already quite used to the feeling of power; and, on the other hand, for those who cannot control themselves. Brahminism has given its care to the former type of man; Christianity to the latter. 66 The Faculty of Vision.—During the whole of the Middle Ages it was believed that the real distinguishing trait of higher men was the faculty of [pg 066] having visions—that is to say, of having a grave mental trouble. And, in fact, the rules of life of all the higher natures of the Middle Ages (the religiosi) were drawn up with the object of making man capable of vision! Little wonder, then, that the exaggerated esteem for these half-mad fanatics, so-called men of genius, has continued even to our own days. “They have seen things that others do not see”—no doubt! and this fact should inspire us with caution where they are concerned, and not with belief! 67 The Price of Believers.—He who sets such a value on being believed in has to promise heaven in recompense for this belief: and every one, even a thief on the Cross, must have suffered from a terrible doubt and experienced crucifixion in every form: otherwise he would not buy his followers so dearly. 68 The First Christian.—The whole world still believes in the literary career of the “Holy Ghost,” or is still influenced by the effects of this belief: when we look into our Bibles we do so for the purpose of “edifying ourselves,” to find a few words of comfort for our misery, be it great or small—in short, we read ourselves into it and out of it. But who—apart from a few learned men—know that it likewise records the history of one of the most ambitious and importunate souls that ever [pg 067] existed, of a mind full of superstition and cunning: the history of the Apostle Paul? Nevertheless, without this singular history, without the tribulations and passions of such a mind, and of such a soul, there would have been no Christian kingdom; we should have scarcely have even heard of a little Jewish sect, the founder of which died on the Cross. It is true that, if this history had been understood in time, if we had read, really read, the writings of St. Paul, not as the revelations of the “Holy Ghost,” but with honest and independent minds, oblivious of all our personal troubles—there were no such readers for fifteen centuries—it would have been all up with Christianity long ago: so searchingly do these writings of the Jewish Pascal lay bare the origins of Christianity, just as the French Pascal let us see its destiny and how it will ultimately perish.
That the ship of Christianity threw overboard no inconsiderable part of its Jewish ballast, that it was able to sail into the waters of the heathen and actually did do so: this is due to the history of one single man, this apostle who was so greatly troubled in mind and so worthy of pity, but who was also very disagreeable to himself and to others. This man suffered from a fixed idea, or rather a fixed question, an ever-present and ever-burning question: what was the meaning of the Jewish Law? and, more especially, the fulfilment of this Law? In his youth he had done his best to satisfy it, thirsting as he did for that highest distinction which the Jews could imagine—this people, which raised the imagination of moral loftiness to a greater elevation than any other people, and which alone succeeded [pg 068] in uniting the conception of a holy God with the idea of sin considered as an offence against this holiness. St. Paul became at once the fanatic defender and guard-of-honour of this God and His Law. Ceaselessly battling against and lying in wait for all transgressors of this Law and those who presumed to doubt it, he was pitiless and cruel towards all evil-doers, whom he would fain have punished in the most rigorous fashion possible. Now, however, he was aware in his own person of the fact that such a man as himself—violent, sensual, melancholy, and malicious in his hatred—could not fulfil the Law; and furthermore, what seemed strangest of all to him, he saw that his boundless craving for power was continually provoked to break it, and that he could not help yielding to this impulse. Was it really “the flesh” which made him a trespasser time and again? Was it not rather, as it afterwards occurred to him, the Law itself, which continually showed itself to be impossible to fulfil, and seduced men into transgression with an irresistible charm? But at that time he had not thought of this means of escape. As he suggests here and there, he had many things on his conscience—hatred, murder, sorcery, idolatry, debauchery, drunkenness, and orgiastic revelry,—and to however great an extent he tried to soothe his conscience, and, even more, his desire for power, by the extreme fanaticism of his worship for and defence of the Law, there were times when the thought struck him: “It is all in vain! The anguish of the unfulfilled Law cannot be overcome.” Luther must have experienced similar [pg 069] feelings, when, in his cloister, he endeavoured to become the ideal man of his imagination; and, as Luther one day began to hate the ecclesiastical ideal, and the Pope, and the saints, and the whole clergy, with a hatred which was all the more deadly as he could not avow it even to himself, an analogous feeling took possession of St. Paul. The Law was the Cross on which he felt himself crucified. How he hated it! What a grudge he owed it! How he began to look round on all sides to find a means for its total annihilation, that he might no longer be obliged to fulfil it himself! And at last a liberating thought, together with a vision —which was only to be expected in the case of an epileptic like himself—flashed into his mind: to him, the stern upholder of the Law —who, in his innermost heart, was tired to death of it—there appeared on the lonely path that Christ, with the divine effulgence on His countenance, and Paul heard the words: “Why persecutest thou Me?” What actually took place, then, was this: his mind was suddenly enlightened, and he said to himself: “It is unreasonable to persecute this Jesus Christ! Here is my means of escape, here is my complete vengeance, here and nowhere else have I the destroyer of the Law in my hands!” The sufferer from anguished pride felt himself restored to health all at once, his moral despair disappeared in the air; for morality itself was blown away, annihilated—that is to say, fulfilled, there on the Cross! Up to that time that ignominious death had seemed to him to be the principal argument against the “Messiahship” [pg 070] proclaimed by the followers of the new doctrine: but what if it were necessary for doing away with the Law?
The enormous consequences of this thought, of this solution of the enigma, danced before his eyes, and he at once became the happiest of men. The destiny of the Jews, yea, of all mankind, seemed to him to be intertwined with this instantaneous flash of enlightenment: he held the thought of thoughts, the key of keys, the light of lights; history would henceforth revolve round him! For from that time forward he would be the apostle of the annihilation of the Law! To be dead to sin—that meant to be dead to the Law also; to be in the flesh—that meant to be under the Law! To be one with Christ —that meant to have become, like Him, the destroyer of the Law; to be dead with Him—that meant likewise to be dead to the Law. Even if it were still possible to sin, it would not at any rate be possible to sin against the Law: “I am above the Law,” thinks Paul; adding, “If I were now to acknowledge the Law again and to submit to it, I should make Christ an accomplice in the sin”; for the Law was there for the purpose of producing sin and setting it in the foreground, as an emetic produces sickness. God could not have decided upon the death of Christ had it been possible to fulfil the Law without it; henceforth, not only are all sins expiated, but sin itself is abolished; henceforth the Law is dead; henceforth “the flesh” in which it dwelt is dead—or at all events dying, gradually wasting away. To live for a short time longer amid this decay!—this is the Christian's fate, until the time when, having become [pg 071] one with Christ, he arises with Him, sharing with Christ the divine glory, and becoming, like Christ, a “Son of God.” Then Paul's exaltation was at its height, and with it the importunity of his soul—the thought of union with Christ made him lose all shame, all submission, all constraint, and his ungovernable ambition was shown to be revelling in the expectation of divine glories. Such was the first Christian, the inventor of Christianity! before him there were only a few Jewish sectaries. 69 Inimitable.—There is an enormous strain and distance between envy and friendship, between self-contempt and pride: the Greek lived in the former, the Christian in the latter. 70 The Use of a Coarse Intellect.—The Christian Church is an encyclopædia of primitive cults and views of the most varied origin; and is, in consequence, well adapted to missionary work: in former times she could—and still does—go wherever she would, and in doing so always found something resembling herself, to which she could assimilate herself and gradually substitute her own spirit for it. It is not to what is Christian in her usages, but to what is universally pagan in them, that we have to attribute the development of this universal religion. Her thoughts, which have their origin at once in the Judaic and in the Hellenic spirit, were able from the very beginning to raise [pg 072] themselves above the exclusiveness and subtleties of races and nations, as above prejudices. Although we may admire the power which makes even the most difficult things coalesce, we must nevertheless not overlook the contemptible qualities of this power—the astonishing coarseness and narrowness of the Church's intellect when it was in process of formation, a coarseness which permitted it to accommodate itself to any diet, and to digest contradictions like pebbles. 71 The Christian Vengeance against Rome.—Perhaps nothing is more fatiguing than the sight of a continual conqueror: for more than two hundred years the world had seen Rome overcoming one nation after another, the circle was closed, all future seemed to be at an end, everything was done with a view to its lasting for all time—yea, when the Empire built anything it was erected with a view to being aere perennius. We, who know only the “melancholy of ruins,” can scarcely understand that totally different melancholy of eternal buildings, from which men endeavoured to save themselves as best they could—with the light-hearted fancy of a Horace, for example. Others sought different consolations for the weariness which was closely akin to despair, against the deadening knowledge that from henceforth all progress of thought and heart would be hopeless, that the huge spider sat everywhere and mercilessly continued to drink all the blood within its reach, no matter where it might spring forth.
[pg 073] This mute, century-old hatred of the wearied spectators against Rome, wherever Rome's domination extended, was at length vented in Christianity, which united Rome, “the world,” and “sin” into a single conception. The Christians took their revenge on Rome by proclaiming the immediate and sudden destruction of the world; by once more introducing a future—for Rome had been able to transform everything into the history of its own past and present—a future in which Rome was no longer the most important factor; and by dreaming of the last judgment—while the crucified Jew, as the symbol of salvation, was the greatest derision on the superb Roman prætors in the provinces; for now they seemed to be only the symbols of ruin and a “world” ready to perish. 72 The “Life after Death.”—Christianity found the idea of punishment in hell in the entire Roman Empire: for the numerous mystic cults have hatched this idea with particular satisfaction as being the most fecund egg of their power. Epicurus thought he could do nothing better for his followers than to tear this belief up by the roots: his triumph found its finest echo in the mouth of one of his disciples, the Roman Lucretius, a poet of a gloomy, though afterwards enlightened, temperament. Alas! his triumph had come too soon: Christianity took under its special protection this belief in subterranean horrors, which was already beginning to die away in the minds of men; and that [pg 074] was clever of it. For, without this audacious leap into the most complete paganism, how could it have proved itself victorious over the popularity of Mithras and Isis? In this way it managed to bring timorous folk over to its side—the most enthusiastic adherents of a new faith! The Jews, being a people which, like the Greeks, and even in a greater degree than the Greeks, loved and still love life, had not cultivated that idea to any great extent: the thought of final death as the punishment of the sinner, death without resurrection as an extreme menace: this was sufficient to impress these peculiar men, who did not wish to get rid of their bodies, but hoped, with their refined Egypticism, to preserve them for ever. (A Jewish martyr, about whom we may read in the Second Book of the Maccabees, would not think of giving up his intestines, which had been torn out: he wanted to have them at the resurrection: quite a Jewish characteristic!) Thoughts of eternal damnation were far from the minds of the early Christians: they thought they were delivered from death, and awaited a transformation from day to day, but not death. (What a curious effect the first death must have produced on these expectant people! How many different feelings must have been mingled together—astonishment, exultation, doubt, shame, and passion! Verily, a subject worthy of a great artist!) St. Paul could say nothing better in praise of his Saviour than that he had opened the gates of immortality to everybody—he did not believe in the resurrection of those who had not been saved: more [pg 075] than this, by reason of his doctrine of the impossibility of carrying out the Law, and of death considered as a consequence of sin, he even suspected that, up to that time, no one had become immortal (or at all events only a very few, solely owing to special grace and not to any merits of their own): it was only in his time that immortality had begun to open its gates— and only a few of the elect would finally gain admittance, as the pride of the elect cannot help saying. In other places, where the impulse towards life was not so strong as among the Jews and the Christian Jews, and where the prospect of immortality did not appear to be more valuable than the prospect of a final death, that pagan, yet not altogether un-Jewish addition of Hell became a very useful tool in the hands of the missionaries: then arose the new doctrine that even the sinners and the unsaved are immortal, the doctrine of eternal damnation, which was more powerful than the idea of a final death, which thereafter began to fade away. It was science alone which could overcome this idea, at the same time brushing aside all other ideas about death and an after-life. We are poorer in one particular: the “life after death” has no further interest for us!
an indescribable blessing, which is as yet too recent to be considered as such throughout the world. And Epicurus is once more triumphant. 73 For the “Truth”!—“The truth of Christianity was attested by the virtuous lives of the [pg 076] Christians, their firmness in suffering, their unshakable belief and above all by the spread and increase of the faith in spite of all calamities.”—That's how you talk even now. The more's the pity. Learn, then, that all this proves nothing either in favour of truth or against it; that truth must be demonstrated differently from conscientiousness, and that the latter is in no respect whatever an argument in favour of the former. 74 A Christian Arrière-pensée.—Would not this have been a general reservation among Christians of the first century: “It is better to persuade ourselves into the belief that we are guilty rather than that we are innocent; for it is impossible to ascertain the disposition of so powerful a judge—but it is to be feared that he is looking out only for those who are conscious of guilt. Bearing in mind his great power, it is more likely that he will pardon a guilty person than admit that any one is innocent, in his presence.” This was the feeling of poor provincial folk in the presence of the Roman prætor: “He is too proud for us to dare to be innocent.” And may not this very sentiment have made its influence felt when the Christians endeavoured to picture to themselves the aspect of the Supreme Judge? 75 Neither European nor Noble.—There is something Oriental and feminine in Christianity, and [pg 077] this is shown in the thought, “Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth”; for women in the Orient consider castigations and the strict seclusion of their persons from the world as a sign of their husband's love, and complain if these signs of love cease. 76 If you think it Evil, you make it Evil.—The passions become evil and malignant when regarded with evil and malignant eyes. It is in this way that Christianity has succeeded in transforming Eros and Aphrodite—sublime powers, capable of idealisation—into hellish genii and phantom goblins, by means of the pangs which every sexual impulse was made to raise in the conscience of the believers. Is it not a dreadful thing to transform necessary and regular sensations into a source of inward misery, and thus arbitrarily to render interior misery necessary and regular in the case of every man! Furthermore, this misery remains secret with the result that it is all the more deeply rooted, for it is not all men who have the courage, which Shakespeare shows in his sonnets, of making public their Christian gloom on this point. Must a feeling, then, always be called evil against which we are forced to struggle, which we must restrain even within certain limits, or, in given cases, banish entirely from our minds? Is it not the habit of vulgar souls always to call an enemy evil! and must we call Eros an enemy? The sexual feelings, like the feelings of pity and adoration, possess the particular characteristic that, in their case, one being [pg 078] gratifies another by the pleasure he enjoys—it is but rarely that we meet with such a benevolent arrangement in nature. And yet we calumniate and corrupt it all by our bad conscience! We connect the procreation of man with a bad conscience! But the outcome of this diabolisation of Eros is a mere farce: the “demon” Eros becomes an object of greater interest to mankind than all the angels and saints put together, thanks to the mysterious Mumbo-Jumboism of the Church in all things erotic: it is due to the Church that love stories, even in our own time, have become the one common interest which appeals to all classes of people—with an exaggeration which would be incomprehensible to antiquity, and which will not fail to provoke roars of laughter in coming generations. All our poetising and thinking, from the highest to the lowest, is marked, and more than marked, by the exaggerated importance bestowed upon the love story as the principal item of our existence. Posterity may perhaps, on this account, come to the conclusion that its entire legacy of Christian culture is tainted with narrowness and insanity. 77.
The Tortures of the Soul.—The whole world raises a shout of horror at the present day if one man presumes to torture the body of another: the indignation against such a being bursts forth almost spontaneously. Nay; we tremble even at the very thought of torture being inflicted on a man or an animal, and we undergo unspeakable [pg 079] misery when we hear of such an act having been accomplished. But the same feeling is experienced in a very much lesser degree and extent when it is a question of the tortures of the soul and the dreadfulness of their infliction. Christianity has introduced such tortures on an unprecedented scale, and still continues to preach this kind of martyrdom—yea, it even complains innocently of backsliding and indifference when it meets with a state of soul which is free from such agonies. From all this it now results that humanity, in the face of spiritual racks, tortures of the mind, and instruments of punishment, behaves even to-day with the same awesome patience and indecision which it exhibited in former times in the presence of the cruelties practised on the bodies of men or animals. Hell has certainly not remained merely an empty sound; and a new kind of pity has been devised to correspond to the newlycreated fears of hell—a horrible and ponderous compassion, hitherto unknown; with people “irrevocably condemned to hell,” as, for example, the Stony Guest gave Don Juan to understand, and which, during the Christian era, should often have made the very stones weep. Plutarch presents us with a gloomy picture of the state of mind of a superstitious man in pagan times: but this picture pales when compared with that of a Christian of the Middle Ages, who supposes that nothing can save him from “torments everlasting.” Dreadful omens appear to him: perhaps he sees a stork holding a snake in his beak and hesitating to swallow it. Or all nature suddenly becomes pale; or bright, fiery colours appear across the surface [pg 080] of the earth. Or the ghosts of his dead relations approach him, with features showing traces of dreadful sufferings. Or the dark walls of the room in which the man is sleeping are suddenly lighted up, and there, amidst a yellow flame, he perceives instruments of torture and a motley horde of snakes and devils. Christianity has surely turned this world of ours into a fearful habitation by raising the crucifix in all parts and thereby proclaiming the earth to be a place “where the just man is tortured to death!” And when the ardour of some great preacher for once disclosed to the public the secret sufferings of the individual, the agonies of the lonely souls, when, for example, Whitefield preached “like a dying man to the dying,” now bitterly weeping, now violently stamping his feet, speaking passionately, in abrupt and incisive tones, without fearing to turn the whole force of his attack upon any one individual present, excluding him from the assembly with excessive harshness—then indeed did it seem as if the earth were being transformed into a “field of evil.” The huge crowds were then seen to act as if seized with a sudden attack of madness: many were in fits of anguish; others lay unconscious and motionless; others, again, trembled or rent the air with their piercing shrieks. Everywhere there was a loud breathing, as of half-choked people who were gasping for the breath of life. “Indeed,” said an eyewitness once, “almost all the noises appeared to come from people who were dying in the bitterest agony.” Let us never forget that it was Christianity which first turned the death-bed into a bed of agony, and [pg 081] that, by the scenes which took place there, and the terrifying sounds which were made possible there for the first time, it has poisoned the senses and the blood of innumerable witnesses and their children. Imagine the ordinary man who can never efface the recollection of words like these: “Oh, eternity! Would that I had no soul! Would that I had never been born! My soul is damned, damned; lost for ever! Six days ago you might have helped me. But now all is over. I belong to the devil, and with him I will go down to hell. Break, break, ye poor hearts of stone! Ye will not break? What more can be done for hearts of stone? I am damned that ye may be saved! There he is!
Yea; there he is! Come, good devil! Come!” 78. Avenging Justice.—Misfortune and guilt: these two things have been put on one scale by Christianity; so that, when the misfortune which follows a fault is a serious one, this fault is always judged accordingly to be a very heinous one. But this was not the valuation of antiquity, and that is why Greek tragedy—in which misfortune and punishment are discussed at length, and yet in another sense— forms part of the great liberators of the mind to an extent which even the ancients themselves could not realise. They remained ingenuous enough not to set up an “adequate relation” between guilt and misfortune. The guilt of their tragic heroes is, indeed, the little pebble that makes them stumble, and on which account they [pg 082] sometimes happen to break an arm or knock out an eye. Upon this the feeling of antiquity made the comment, “Well, he should have gone his way with more caution and less pride.” It was reserved for Christianity, however, to say: “Here we have a great misfortune, and behind this great misfortune there must lie a great fault, an equally serious fault, though we cannot clearly see it! If, wretched man, you do not feel it, it is because your heart is hardened—and worse than this will happen to you!” Besides this, antiquity could point to examples of real misfortunes, misfortunes that were pure and innocent; it was only with the advent of Christianity that all punishment became well-merited punishment: in addition to this it renders the imagination of the sufferer still more suffering, so that the victim, in the midst of his distress, is seized with the feeling that he has been morally reproved and cast away. Poor humanity! The Greeks had a special word to stand for the feeling of indignation which was experienced at the misfortune of another: among Christian peoples this feeling was prohibited and was not permitted to develop; hence the reason why they have no name for this more virile brother of pity. 79. A Proposal.—If, according to the arguments of Pascal and Christianity, our ego is always hateful, how can we permit and suppose other people, whether God or men, to love it? It would be contrary to all good principles to let ourselves be [pg 083] loved when we know very well that we deserve nothing but hatred—not to speak of other repugnant feelings. “But this is the very Kingdom of Grace.” Then you look upon your love for your neighbour as a grace? Your pity as a grace? Well, then, if you can do all this, there is no reason why you should not go a step further: love yourselves through grace, and then you will no longer find your God necessary, and the entire drama of the Fall and Redemption of mankind will reach its last act in yourselves! 80. The Compassionate Christian.—A Christian's compassion in the presence of his neighbour's suffering has another side to it: viz. his profound suspicion of all the joy of his neighbour, of his neighbour's joy in everything that he wills and is able to do. 81. The Saint's Humanity.—A saint had fallen into the company of believers, and could no longer stand their continually expressed hatred for sin. At last he said to them: “God created all things, except sin: therefore it is no wonder that He does not like it. But man has created sin, and why, then, should he disown this only child of his merely because it is not regarded with a friendly eye by God, its grandfather? Is that human? Honour to whom honour is due—but one's heart and duty must speak, above all, in favour of the child— and only in the second place for the honour of the grandfather!” [pg 084] 82. The Theological Attack.—“You must arrange that with yourself; for your life is at stake!”—Luther it is who suddenly springs upon us with these words and imagines that we feel the knife at our throats. But we throw him off with the words of one higher and more considerate than he: “We need form no opinion in regard to this or that matter, and thus save our souls from trouble. For, by their very nature, the things themselves cannot compel us to express an opinion.” 83.
Poor Humanity!—A single drop of blood too much or too little in the brain may render our life unspeakably miserable and difficult, and we may suffer more from this single drop of blood than Prometheus from his vulture. But the worst is when we do not know that this drop is causing our sufferings—and we think it is “the devil!” Or “sin!” 84. The Philology of Christianity.—How little Christianity cultivates the sense of honesty can be inferred from the character of the writings of its learned men. They set out their conjectures as audaciously as if they were dogmas, and are but seldom at a disadvantage in regard to the interpretation of Scripture. Their continual cry is: “I am right, for it is written”—and then follows an explanation so shameless and capricious that a [pg 085] philologist, when he hears it, must stand stock-still between anger and laughter, asking himself again and again: Is it possible? Is it honest? Is it even decent? It is only those who never—or always—attend church that underestimate the dishonesty with which this subject is still dealt in Protestant pulpits; in what a clumsy fashion the preacher takes advantage of his security from interruption; how the Bible is pinched and squeezed; and how the people are made acquainted with every form of the art of false reading. When all is said and done, however, what can be expected from the effects of a religion which, during the centuries when it was being firmly established, enacted that huge philological farce concerning the Old Testament? I refer to that attempt to tear the Old Testament from the hands of the Jews under the pretext that it contained only Christian doctrines and belonged to the Christians as the true people of Israel, while the Jews had merely arrogated it to themselves without authority. This was followed by a mania of would-be interpretation and falsification, which could not under any circumstances have been allied with a good conscience. However strongly Jewish savants protested, it was everywhere sedulously asserted that the Old Testament alluded everywhere to Christ, and nothing but Christ, more especially His Cross, and thus, wherever reference was made to wood, a rod, a ladder, a twig, a tree, a willow, or a staff, such a reference could not but be a prophecy relating to the wood of the Cross: even the setting-up [pg 086] of the Unicorn and the Brazen Serpent, even Moses stretching forth his hands in prayer—yea, the very spits on which the Easter lambs were roasted: all these were allusions to the Cross, and, as it were, preludes to it! Did any one who kept on asserting these things ever believe in them? Let it not be forgotten that the Church did not shrink from putting interpolations in the text of the Septuagint (e.g. Ps. xcvi. 10), in order that she might later on make use of these interpolated passages as Christian prophecies. They were engaged in a struggle, and thought of their foes rather than of honesty. 85. Subtlety in Penury.—Take care not to laugh at the mythology of the Greeks merely because it so little resembles your own profound metaphysics! You should admire a people who checked their quick intellect at this point, and for a long time afterwards had tact enough to avoid the danger of scholasticism and hair-splitting superstition. 86. The Christian Interpreters of the Body.—Whatever originates in the stomach, the intestines, the beating of the heart, the nerves, the bile, the seed—all those indispositions, debilities, irritations, and the whole contingency of that machine about which we know so little —a Christian like Pascal considers it all as a moral and religious phenomenon, asking himself whether God or the [pg 087] devil, good or evil, salvation or damnation, is the cause. Alas for the unfortunate interpreter! How he must distort and worry his system! How he must distort and worry himself in order to gain his point! 87. The Moral Miracle.—In the domain of morality, Christianity knows of nothing but the miracle; the sudden change in all valuations, the sudden renouncement of all habits, the sudden and irresistible predilection for new things and persons. Christianity looks upon this phenomenon as the work of God, and calls it the act of regeneration, thus giving it a unique and incomparable value.
Everything else which is called morality, and which bears no relation to this miracle, becomes in consequence a matter of indifference to the Christian, and indeed, so far as it is a feeling of well-being and pride, an object of fear. The canon of virtue, of the fulfilled law, is established in the New Testament, but in such a way as to be the canon of impossible virtue: men who still aspire to moral perfections must come to understand, in the face of this canon, that they are further and further removed from their aim; they must despair of virtue, and end by throwing themselves at the feet of the Merciful One. It is only in reaching a conclusion like this that moral efforts on the part of the Christian can still be regarded as possessing any value: the condition that these efforts shall always remain sterile, painful, and melancholy is therefore indispensable; and it [pg 088] is in this way that those efforts could still avail to bring about that moment of ecstasy when man experiences the “overflow of grace” and the moral miracle. This struggle for morality is, however, not necessary; for it is by no means uncommon for this miracle to happen to the sinner at the very moment when he is, so to speak, wallowing in the mire of sin: yea, the leap from the deepest and most abandoned sinfulness into its contrary seems easier, and, as a clear proof of the miracle, even more desirable. What, for the rest, may be the signification of such a sudden, unreasonable, and irresistible revolution, such a change from the depths of misery into the heights of happiness? (might it be a disguised epilepsy?) This should at all events be considered by alienists, who have frequent opportunities of observing similar “miracles”—for example, the mania of murder or suicide. The relatively “more pleasant consequences” in the case of the Christian make no important difference. 88. Luther, the Great Benefactor.—Luther's most important result is the suspicion which he awakened against the saints and the entire Christian vita contemplativa; only since his day has an un-Christian vita contemplativa again become possible in Europe, only since then has contempt for laymen and worldly activity ceased. Luther continued to be an honest miner's son even after he had been shut up in a monastery, and there, for lack of other [pg 089] depths and “borings,” he descended into himself, and bored terrifying and dark passages through his own depths—finally coming to recognise that an introspective and saintly life was impossible to him, and that his innate “activity” in body and soul would end by being his ruin. For a long time, too long, indeed, he endeavoured to find the way to holiness through castigations; but at length he made up his mind, and said to himself: “There is no real vita contemplativa! We have been deceived. The saints were no better than the rest of us.” This was truly a rustic way of gaining one's case; but for the Germans of that period it was the only proper way. How edified they felt when they could read in their Lutheran catechism: “Apart from the Ten Commandments there is no work which could find favour in the eyes of God—these much-boasted spiritual works of the saints are purely imaginary!” 89. Doubt As Sin.—Christianity has done all it possibly could to draw a circle round itself, and has even gone so far as to declare doubt itself to be a sin. We are to be precipitated into faith by a miracle, without the help of reason, after which we are to float in it as the clearest and least equivocal of elements—a mere glance at some solid ground, the thought that we exist for some purpose other than floating, the least movement of our amphibious nature: all this is a sin! Let it be noted that, following this decision, the proofs and demonstration of the faith, and all meditations upon its origin, [pg 090] are prohibited as sinful. Christianity wants blindness and frenzy and an eternal swan-song above the waves under which reason has been drowned! 90. Egoism versus Egoism.—How many are there who still come to the conclusion: “Life would be intolerable were there no God!” Or, as is said in idealistic circles: “Life would be intolerable if its ethical signification were lacking.” Hence there must be a God—or an ethical signification of existence!
In reality the case stands thus: He who is accustomed to conceptions of this sort does not desire a life without them, hence these conceptions are necessary for him and his preservation—but what a presumption it is to assert that everything necessary for my preservation must exist in reality! As if my preservation were really necessary! What if others held the contrary opinion? if they did not care to live under the conditions of these two articles of faith, and did not regard life as worth living if they were realised!—And that is the present position of affairs. 91. The Honesty of God.—An omniscient and omnipotent God who does not even take care that His intentions shall be understood by His creatures—could He be a God of goodness? A God, who, for thousands of years, has permitted innumerable doubts and scruples to continue unchecked as if they were of no importance in the salvation of mankind, [pg 091] and who, nevertheless, announces the most dreadful consequences for any one who mistakes his truth? Would he not be a cruel god if, being himself in possession of the truth, he could calmly contemplate mankind, in a state of miserable torment, worrying its mind as to what was truth? Perhaps, however, he really is a God of goodness, and was unable to express Himself more clearly? Perhaps he lacked intelligence enough for this? Or eloquence? All the worse! For in such a case he may have been deceived himself in regard to what he calls his “truth,” and may not be far from being another “poor, deceived devil!” Must he not therefore experience all the torments of hell at seeing His creatures suffering so much here below—and even more, suffering through all eternity—when he himself can neither advise nor help them, except as a deaf and dumb person, who makes all kinds of equivocal signs when his child or his dog is threatened with the most fearful danger? A distressed believer who argues thus might be pardoned if his pity for the suffering God were greater than his pity for his “neighbours”; for they are his neighbours no longer if that most solitary and primeval being is also the greatest sufferer and stands most in need of consolation. Every religion shows some traits of the fact that it owes its origin to a state of human intellectuality which was as yet too young and immature: they all make light of the necessity for speaking the truth: as yet they know nothing of the duty of God, the duty of being clear and truthful in His communications with men. No one was more [pg 092] eloquent than Pascal in speaking of the “hidden God” and the reasons why He had to keep Himself hidden, all of which indicates clearly enough that Pascal himself could never make his mind easy on this point: but he speaks with such confidence that one is led to imagine that he must have been let into the secret at some time or other. He seemed to have some idea that the deus absconditus bore a few slight traces of immorality; and he felt too much ashamed and afraid of acknowledging this to himself: consequently, like a man who is afraid, he spoke as loudly as he could. 92. At the Death-bed of Christianity.—All truly active men now do without inward Christianity, and the most moderate and thoughtful men of the intellectual middle classes possess only a kind of modified Christianity; that is, a peculiarly simplified Christianity. A God who, in his love, ordains everything so that it may be best for us, a God who gives us our virtue and our happiness and then takes them away from us, so that everything at length goes on smoothly and there is no reason left why we should take life ill or grumble about it: in short, resignation and modesty raised to the rank of divinities—that is the best and most lifelike remnant of Christianity now left to us. It must be remembered, however, that in this way Christianity has developed into a soft moralism: instead of “God, freedom, and immortality,” we have now a kind of benevolence and honest sentiments, and the belief that, in the entire universe, benevolence [pg 093] and honest sentiments will finally prevail: this is the euthanasia of Christianity. 93.
What is Truth?—Who will not be pleased with the conclusions which the faithful take such delight in coming to?—“Science cannot be true; for it denies God. Hence it does not come from God; and consequently it cannot be true—for God is truth.” It is not the deduction but the premise which is fallacious. What if God were not exactly truth, and if this were proved? And if he were instead the vanity, the desire for power, the ambitions, the fear, and the enraptured and terrified folly of mankind? 94. Remedy for the Displeased.—Even Paul already believed that some sacrifice was necessary to take away the deep displeasure which God experienced concerning sin: and ever since then Christians have never ceased to vent the ill-humour which they felt with themselves upon some victim or another—whether it was “the world,” or “history,” or “reason,” or joy, or the tranquillity of other men —something good, no matter what, had to die for their sins (even if only in effigie)! 95. The Historical Refutation as the Decisive One.—Formerly it was sought to prove that there was no God—now it is shown how the belief that a God existed could have originated, [pg 094] and by what means this belief gained authority and importance: in this way the counterproof that there is no God becomes unnecessary and superfluous.—In former times, when the “evidences of the existence of God” which had been brought forward were refuted, a doubt still remained, viz. whether better proofs could not be found than those which had just been refuted: at that time the atheists did not understand the art of making a tabula rasa. 96. “In hoc signo vinces.”—To whatever degree of progress Europe may have attained in other respects, where religious affairs are concerned it has not yet reached the liberal naïveté of the ancient Brahmins, which proves that, in India, four thousand years ago, people meditated more profoundly and transmitted to their descendants more pleasure in meditating than is the case in our own days. For those Brahmins believed in the first place that the priests were more powerful than the gods, and in the second place that it was observances which constituted the power of the priests: as a result of which their poets were never tired of glorifying those observances (prayers, ceremonies, sacrifices, chants, improvised melodies) as the real dispensers of all benefits. Although a certain amount of superstition and poetry was mingled with all this, the principles were true! A step further, and the gods were cast aside— which Europe likewise will have to do before very long! One more step further, and priests and intermediaries [pg 095] could also be dispensed with—and then Buddha, the teacher of the religion of selfredemption, appeared. How far Europe is still removed from this degree of culture! When at length all the customs and observances, upon which rests the power of gods, priests, and saviours, shall have been destroyed, when as a consequence morality, in the old sense, will be dead, then there will come ... yea, what will come then? But let us refrain from speculating; let us rather make certain that Europe will retrieve that which, in India, amidst this people of thinkers, was carried out thousands of years ago as a commandment of thought! Scattered among the different nations of Europe there are now from ten to twenty millions of men who no longer “believe in God”—is it too much to ask that they should give each other some indication or password? As soon as they recognise each other in this way, they will also make themselves known to each other; and they will immediately become a power in Europe, and, happily, a power among the nations! among the classes! between rich and poor! between those who command, and those who obey! between the most restless and the most tranquil, tranquillising people! [pg 097] Book II 97. One becomes Moral—but not because one is moral! Submission to morals may be due to slavishness or vanity, egoism or resignation, dismal fanaticism or thoughtlessness. It may, again, be an act of despair, such as submission to the authority of a ruler; but there is nothing moral about it per se. 98. Alterations in Morals.—Morals are constantly undergoing changes and transformations, occasioned by successful crimes. (To these, for example, belong all innovations in moral judgments.) 99.
Wherein we are all Irrational.—We still continue to draw conclusions from judgments which we consider as false, or doctrines in which we no longer believe,—through our feelings. 100. Awaking from a Dream.—Noble and wise men once upon a time believed in the music of the [pg 098] spheres; there are still noble and wise men who believe in “the moral significance of existence,” but there will come a day when this music of the spheres also will no longer be audible to them. They will awake and perceive that their ears have been dreaming. 101. Open to Doubt.—To accept a belief simply because it is customary implies that one is dishonest, cowardly, and lazy.—Must dishonesty, cowardice, and laziness, therefore, be the primary conditions of morality? 102. The most Ancient Moral Judgments.—What attitude do we assume towards the acts of our neighbour?—In the first place, we consider how they may benefit ourselves—we see them only in this light. It is this effect which we regard as the intention of the acts,— and in the end we come to look upon these intentions of our neighbour as permanent qualities in him, and we call him, for example, “a dangerous man.” Triple error! Triple and most ancient mistake! Perhaps this inheritance comes to us from the animals and their faculty of judgment! Must not the origin of all morality be sought in these detestable narrow-minded conclusions: “Whatever injures me is evil (something injurious in itself), whatever benefits me is good (beneficial and profitable in itself), whatever injures me once or several times is hostile per se; whatever benefits me once or several times is [pg 099] friendly per se.” O pudenda origo! Is not this equivalent to interpreting the contemptible, occasional, and often merely accidental relations of another person to us as his primary and most essential qualities, and affirming that towards himself and every one else he is only capable of such actions as we ourselves have experienced at his hands once or several times! And is not this thorough folly based upon the most immodest of all mental reservations: namely, that we ourselves must be the standard of what is good, since we determine good and evil? 103. There are Two Classes of People who deny Morality.—To deny morality may mean, in the first place, to deny the moral inducements which, men pretend, have urged them on to their actions,—which is equivalent to saying that morality merely consists of words and forms, part of that coarse and subtle deceit (especially self-deceit) which is characteristic of mankind, and perhaps more especially of those men who are celebrated for their virtues. In the second place, it may mean our denying that moral judgments are founded on truths. It is admitted in such a case that these judgments are, in fact, the motives of the actions, but that in this way it is really errors as the basis of all moral judgments which urge men on to their moral actions. This is my point of view; but I should be far from denying that in very many cases a subtle suspicion in accordance with the former point of view—i.e. in the spirit of La Rochefoucauld— is [pg 100] also justifiable, and in any case of a high general utility.— Therefore I deny morality in the same way as I deny alchemy, i.e. I deny its hypotheses; but I do not deny that there have been alchemists who believed in these hypotheses and based their actions upon them. I also deny immorality—not that innumerable people feel immoral, but that there is any true reason why they should feel so. I should not, of course, deny—unless I were a fool— that many actions which are called immoral should be avoided and resisted; and in the same way that many which are called moral should be performed and encouraged; but I hold that in both cases these actions should be performed from motives other than those which have prevailed up to the present time. We must learn anew in order that at last, perhaps very late in the day, we may be able to do something more: feel anew. 104. Our Valuations.—All actions may be referred back to valuations, and all valuations are either one's own or adopted, the latter being by far the more numerous. Why do we adopt them? Through fear, i.e.
we think it more advisable to pretend that they are our own, and so well do we accustom ourselves to do so that it at last becomes second nature to us. A valuation of our own, which is the appreciation of a thing in accordance with the pleasure or displeasure it causes us and no one else, is something very rare indeed!—But must not our valuation of our neighbour—which [pg 101] is prompted by the motive that we adopt his valuation in most cases—proceed from ourselves and by our own decision? Of course, but then we come to these decisions during our childhood, and seldom change them. We often remain during our whole lifetime the dupes of our childish and accustomed judgments in our manner of judging our fellow-men (their minds, rank, morality, character, and reprehensibility), and we find it necessary to subscribe to their valuations. 105. Pseudo-egoism.—The great majority of people, whatever they may think and say about their “egoism,” do nothing for their ego all their life long, but only for a phantom of this ego which has been formed in regard to them by their friends and communicated to them. As a consequence, they all live in a haze of impersonal and half-personal opinions and of arbitrary and, as it were, poetic valuations: the one always in the head of another, and this head, again, in the head of somebody else—a queer world of phantoms which manages to give itself a rational appearance! This haze of opinions and habits grows in extent and lives almost independently of the people it surrounds; it is it which gives rise to the immense effect of general judgments on “man”—all those men, who do not know themselves, believe in a bloodless abstraction which they call “man,” i.e. in a fiction; and every change caused in this abstraction by the judgments of powerful individualities [pg 102] (such as princes and philosophers) produces an extraordinary and irrational effect on the great majority, —for the simple reason that not a single individual in this haze can oppose a real ego, an ego which is accessible to and fathomed by himself, to the universal pale fiction, which he could thereby destroy. 106. Against Definitions of Moral Aims.—On all sides we now hear the aim of morals defined as the preservation and advancement of humanity; but this is merely the expression of a wish to have a formula and nothing more. Preservation wherein? advancement whither? These are questions which must at once be asked. Is not the most essential point, the answer to this wherein? and whither? left out of the formula? What results therefrom, so far as our own actions and duties are concerned, which is not already tacitly and instinctively understood? Can we sufficiently understand from this formula whether we must prolong as far as possible the existence of the human race, or bring about the greatest possible disanimalisation of man? How different the means, i.e. the practical morals, would have to be in the two cases! Supposing that the greatest possible rationality were given to mankind, this certainly would not guarantee the longest possible existence for them! Or supposing that their “greatest happiness” was thought to be the answer to the questions put, do we thereby mean the highest degree of happiness which a few individuals [pg 103] might attain, or an incalculable, though finally attainable, average state of happiness for all? And why should morality be the way to it? Has not morality, considered as a whole, opened up so many sources of displeasure as to lead us to think that man up to the present, with every new refinement of morality, has become more and more discontented with himself, with his neighbour, and with his own lot? Has not the most moral of men hitherto believed that the only justifiable state of mankind in the face of morals is that of the deepest misery? 107. Our Right to our Folly.—How must we act? Why must we act? So far as the coarse and immediate needs of the individual are concerned, it is easy to answer these questions, but the more we enter upon the more important and more subtle domains of action, the more does the problem become uncertain and the more arbitrary its solution.
An arbitrary decision, however, is the very thing that must be excluded here,—thus commands the authority of morals: an obscure uneasiness and awe must relentlessly guide man in those very actions the objects and means of which he cannot at once perceive. This authority of morals undermines our thinking faculty in regard to those things concerning which it might be dangerous to think wrongly,—it is in this way, at all events, that morality usually justifies itself to its accusers. Wrong in this place means dangerous; but dangerous to whom? It [pg 104] is not, as a rule, the danger of the doer of the action which the supporters of authoritative morals have in view, but their own danger; the loss which their power and influence might undergo if the right to act according to their own greater or lesser reason, however wilfully and foolishly, were accorded to all men. They on their part make unhesitating use of their right to arbitrariness and folly,—they even command in cases where it is hardly possible, or at all events very difficult, to answer the questions, “How must they act, why must they act?” And if the reason of mankind grows with such extraordinary slowness that it was often possible to deny its growth during the whole course of humanity, what is more to blame for this than this solemn presence, even omnipresence, of moral commands, which do not even permit the individual question of how and why to be asked at all? Have we not been educated precisely in such a way as to make us feel pathetic, and thus to obscure our vision at the very time when our reason should be able to see as clearly and calmly as possible—i.e. in all higher and more important circumstances? 108. Some Theses.—We should not give the individual, in so far as he desires his own happiness, any precepts or recommendations as to the road leading to happiness; for individual happiness arises from particular laws that are unknown to anybody, and such a man will only be hindered or obstructed by recommendations which come to him from outside [pg 105] sources. Those precepts which are called moral are in reality directed against individuals, and do not by any means make for the happiness of such individuals. The relationship of these precepts to the "happiness and well-being of mankind" is equally slight, for it is quite impossible to assign a definite conception to these words, and still less can they be employed as guiding stars on the dark sea of moral aspirations. It is a prejudice to think that morality is more favourable to the development of the reason than immorality. It is erroneous to suppose that the unconscious aim in the development of every conscious being (namely, animal, man, humanity, etc.) is its “greatest happiness”: on the contrary, there is a particular and incomparable happiness to be attained at every stage of our development, one that is neither high nor low, but quite an individual happiness. Evolution does not make happiness its goal; it aims merely at evolution, and nothing else. It is only if humanity had a universally recognised goal that we could propose to do this or that: for the time being there is no such goal. It follows that the pretensions of morality should not be brought into any relationship with mankind: this would be merely childish and irrational. It is quite another thing to recommend a goal to mankind: this goal would then be something that would depend upon our own will and pleasure. Provided that mankind in general agreed to adopt such a goal, it could then impose a moral law upon itself, a law which would, at all events, be imposed by their own free will. Up to now, however, the moral law has had to be placed [pg 106] above our own free will: strictly speaking, men did not wish to impose this law upon themselves; they wished to take it from somewhere, to discover it, or to let themselves be commanded by it from somewhere. 109. Self-control and Moderation, and their Final Motive.—I find not more than six essentially different methods for combating the vehemence of an impulse. First of all, we may avoid the occasion for satisfying the impulse, weakening and mortifying it by refraining from satisfying it for long and ever-lengthening periods. Secondly, we may impose a severe and regular order upon ourselves in regard to the satisfying of our appetites.
By thus regulating the impulse and limiting its ebb and flow to fixed periods, we may obtain intervals in which it ceases to disturb us; and by beginning in this way we may perhaps be able to pass on to the first method. In the third place, we may deliberately give ourselves over to an unrestrained and unbounded gratification of the impulse in order that we may become disgusted with it, and to obtain by means of this very disgust a command over the impulse: provided, of course, that we do not imitate the rider who rides his horse to death and breaks his own neck in doing so. For this, unhappily, is generally the outcome of the application of this third method. In the fourth place, there is an intellectual trick, which consists in associating the idea of the gratification [pg 107] so firmly with some painful thought, that after a little practice the thought of gratification is itself immediately felt as a very painful one. (For example, when the Christian accustoms himself to think of the presence and scorn of the devil in the course of sensual enjoyment, or everlasting punishment in hell for revenge by murder; or even merely of the contempt which he will meet with from those of his fellow-men whom he most respects, if he steals a sum of money, or if a man has often checked an intense desire for suicide by thinking of the grief and self-reproaches of his relations and friends, and has thus succeeded in balancing himself upon the edge of life: for, after some practice, these ideas follow one another in his mind like cause and effect.) Among instances of this kind may be mentioned the cases of Lord Byron and Napoleon, in whom the pride of man revolted and took offence at the preponderance of one particular passion over the collective attitude and order of reason. From this arises the habit and joy of tyrannising over the craving and making it, as it were, gnash its teeth. “I will not be a slave of any appetite,” wrote Byron in his diary. In the fifth place, we may bring about a dislocation of our powers by imposing upon ourselves a particularly difficult and fatiguing task, or by deliberately submitting to some new charm and pleasure in order thus to turn our thoughts and physical powers into other channels. It comes to the same thing if we temporarily favour another impulse by affording it numerous opportunities of gratification, and thus rendering it the squanderer of the power which would otherwise be commandeered, [pg 108] so to speak, by the tyrannical impulse. A few, perhaps, will be able to restrain the particular passion which aspires to domination by granting their other known passions a temporary encouragement and license in order that they may devour the food which the tyrant wishes for himself alone. In the sixth and last place, the man who can stand it, and thinks it reasonable to weaken and subdue his entire physical and psychical organisation, likewise, of course, attains the goal of weakening a single violent instinct; as, for example, those who starve their sensuality and at the same time their vigour, and often destroy their reason into the bargain, such as the ascetics.—Hence, shunning the opportunities, regulating the impulse, bringing about satiety and disgust in the impulse, associating a painful idea (such as that of discredit, disgust, or offended pride), then the dislocation of one's forces, and finally general debility and exhaustion: these are the six methods. But the will to combat the violence of a craving is beyond our power, equally with the method we adopt and the success we may have in applying it. In all this process our intellect is rather merely the blind instrument of another rival craving, whether it be the impulse to repose, or the fear of disgrace and other evil consequences, or love. While “we” thus imagine that we are complaining of the violence of an impulse, it is at bottom merely one impulse which is complaining of another, i.e. the perception of the violent suffering which is being caused us presupposes that there is another equally or more violent impulse, and that a struggle [pg 109] is impending in which our intellect must take part. 110. That which Opposes.—We may observe the following process in ourselves, and I should like it to be often observed and confirmed.
There arises in us the scent of a kind of pleasure hitherto unknown to us, and consequently a new craving. Now, the question is, What opposes itself to this craving? If it be things and considerations of a common kind, or people whom we hold in no very high esteem, the aim of the new craving assumes the appearance of a “noble, good, praiseworthy feeling, and one worthy of sacrifice”: all the moral dispositions which have been inherited will adopt it and will add it to the number of those aims which we consider as moral—and now we imagine that we are no longer striving after a pleasure, but after a morality, which greatly increases our confidence in our aspirations. 111. To the Admirers of Objectiveness.—He who, as a child, has observed in his parents and acquaintances in the midst of whom he has grown up, certain varied and strong feelings, with but little subtle discernment and inclination for intellectual justice, and has therefore employed his best powers and his most precious time in imitating these feelings, will observe in himself when he arrives at years of discretion that every new thing or man he meets with excites in him either sympathy or [pg 110] aversion, envy or contempt. Under the domination of this experience, which he is powerless to shake off, he admires neutrality of feeling or “objectivity” as an extraordinary thing, as something connected with genius or a very rare morality, and he cannot believe that even this neutrality is merely the product of education and habit. 112. On the Natural History of Duty and Right.—Our duties are the claims which others have upon us. How did they acquire these claims? By the fact that they considered us as capable of making and holding agreements and contracts, by assuming that we were their like and equals, and by consequently entrusting something to us, bringing us up, educating us, and supporting us. We do our duty, i.e. we justify that conception of our power for the sake of which all these things were done for us. We return them in proportion as they were meted out to us. It is thus our pride that orders us to do our duty—we desire to re-establish our own independence by opposing to that which others have done for us something that we do for them, for in that way the others invade our sphere of power, and would for ever have a hand in it if we did not make reprisals by means of “duty,” and thus encroach upon their power. The rights of others can only have regard to that which lies within our power; it would be unreasonable on their part to require something from us which does not belong to us. To put the matter more [pg 111] accurately, their rights can only relate to what they imagine to be in our power, provided that it is something that we ourselves consider as being in our power. The same error may easily occur on either side. The feeling of duty depends upon our having the same belief in regard to the extent of our power as other people have, i.e. that we can promise certain things and undertake to do them freely (“free will”). My rights consist of that part of my power which others have not only conceded to me, but which they wish to maintain for me. Why do they do it? On the one hand they are actuated by wisdom, fear and prudence: whether they expect something similar from us (the protection of their rights), whether they consider a struggle with us as dangerous or inopportune, or whether they see a disadvantage to themselves in every diminution of our power, since in that case we should be ill adapted for an alliance with them against a hostile third power. On the other hand rights are granted by donations and cessions. In this latter case, the other people have not only enough power, but more than enough, so that they can give up a portion and guarantee it to the person to whom they give it: whereby they presuppose a certain restricted sense of power in the person upon whom they have bestowed the gift. In this way rights arise: recognised and guaranteed degrees of power.
When the relations of powers to one another are materially changed, rights disappear and new ones are formed, as is demonstrated by the constant flux and reflux of the rights of nations. When our power diminishes [pg 112] to any great extent, the feelings of those who hitherto guaranteed it undergo some change: they consider whether they shall once again restore us to our former possession, and if they do not see their way to do this they deny our “rights” from that time forward. In the same way, if our power increases to a considerable extent the feelings of those who previously recognised it, and whose recognition we no longer require, likewise change: they will then try to reduce our power to its former dimensions, and they will endeavour to interfere in our affairs, justifying their interference by an appeal to their “duty.” But this is merely useless word-quibbling. Where right prevails, a certain state and degree of power is maintained, and all attempts at its augmentation and diminution are resisted. The right of others is the concession of our feeling of power to the feeling of power in these others. Whenever our power shows itself to be thoroughly shattered and broken, our rights cease: on the other hand, when we have become very much stronger, the rights of others cease in our minds to be what we have hitherto admitted them to be. The man who aims at being just, therefore, must keep a constant lookout for the changes in the indicator of the scales in order that he may properly estimate the degrees of power and right which, with the customary transitoriness of human things, retain their equilibrium for only a short time and in most cases continue to rise and fall. As a consequence it is thus very difficult to be “just,” and requires much experience, good intentions, and an unusually large amount of good sense. [pg 113] 113. Striving for Distinction.—When we strive after distinction we must ceaselessly keep our eyes fixed on our neighbour and endeavour to ascertain what his feelings are; but the sympathy and knowledge which are necessary to satisfy this desire are far from being inspired by harmlessness, compassion, or kindness. On the contrary, we wish to perceive or find out in what way our neighbour suffers from us, either internally or externally, how he loses control over himself and yields to the impression which our hand or even our mere appearance makes on him. Even when he who aspires to distinction makes or wishes to make a joyful, elevating, or cheerful impression, he does not enjoy this success in that he rejoices, exalts, or cheers his neighbour, but in that he leaves his impress on the latter's soul, changing its form and dominating it according to his will. The desire for distinction is the desire to subject one's neighbour, even if it be merely in an indirect fashion, one only felt or even only dreamt of. There is a long series of stages in this secretlydesired will to subdue, and a very complete record of them would perhaps almost be like an excellent history of culture from the early distortions of barbarism down to the caricatures of modern overrefinement and sickly idealism. This desire for distinction entails upon our neighbour—to indicate only a few rungs of the long ladder—torture first of all, followed by blows, then terror, anxious surprise, wonder, envy, admiration, [pg 114] elevation, pleasure, joy, laughter, derision, mockery, sneers, scourging and self-inflicted torture. There at the very top of the ladder stands the ascetic and martyr, who himself experiences the utmost satisfaction, because he inflicts on himself, as a result of his desire for distinction, that pain which his opposite, the barbarian on the first rung of the ladder, inflicts upon those others, upon whom and before whom he wishes to distinguish himself.
The triumph of the ascetic over himself, his introspective glance, which beholds a man split up into a sufferer and a spectator, and which henceforth never looks at the outside world but to gather from it, as it were, wood for his own funeral pyre: this final tragedy of the desire for distinction which shows us only one person who, so to speak, is consumed internally—that is an end worthy of the beginning: in both cases there is an inexpressible happiness at the sight of torture; indeed, happiness considered as a feeling of power developed to the utmost, has perhaps never reached a higher pitch of perfection on earth than in the souls of superstitious ascetics. This is expressed by the Brahmins in the story of King Visvamitra, who obtained so much strength by thousands of years of penance that he undertook to construct a new heaven. I believe that in the entire category of inward experiences the people of our time are mere novices and clumsy guessers who “try to have a shot at it”: four thousand years ago much more was known about these execrable refinements of self-enjoyment. Perhaps at that time the creation of the world was imagined by some Hindu dreamer [pg 115] to have been an ascetic operation which a god took upon himself! Perhaps this god may have wished to join himself to a mobile nature as an instrument of torture in order thus to feel his happiness and power doubled! And even supposing him to have been a god of love: what a delight it would have been for him to create a suffering mankind in order that he himself might suffer divinely and super-humanly from the sight of the continual torture of his creatures, and thus to tyrannise over himself! And, again, supposing him to have been not only a god of love, but also a god of holiness, we can scarcely conceive the ecstasies of this divine ascetic while creating sins and sinners and eternal punishment, and an immense place of eternal torture below his throne where there is a continual weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth! It is not by any means impossible that the soul of a St. Paul, a Dante, or a Calvin, and people like them, may once have penetrated into the terrifying secrets of such voluptuousness of power, and in view of such souls we may well ask whether the circle of this desire for distinction has come to a close with the ascetic. Might it not be possible for the course of this circle to be traversed a second time, by uniting the fundamental idea of the ascetic, and at the same time that of a compassionate Deity? In other words, pain would be given to others in order that pain might be given to one's self, so that in this way one could triumph over one's self and one's pity to enjoy the extreme voluptuousness of power.—Forgive me these digressions, which come to my mind when I think [pg 116] of all the possibilities in the vast domain of psychical debaucheries to which one may be led by the desire for power! 114. On the Knowledge of the Sufferer.—The state of sick men who have suffered long and terribly from the torture inflicted upon them by their illness, and whose reason has nevertheless not been in any way affected, is not without a certain amount of value in our search for knowledge—quite apart from the intellectual benefits which follow upon every profound solitude and every sudden and justified liberation from duties and habits. The man who suffers severely looks forth with terrible calmness from his state of suffering upon outside things: all those little lying enchantments, by which things are usually surrounded when seen through the eye of a healthy person, have vanished from the sufferer; his own life even lies there before him, stripped of all bloom and colour. If by chance it has happened that up to then he has lived in some kind of dangerous fantasy, this extreme disenchantment through pain is the means, and possibly the only means, of extricating him from it.
(It is possible that this is what happened to the Founder of Christianity when suspended from the Cross; for the bitterest words ever pronounced, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” if understood in their deepest sense, as they ought to be understood, contain the evidence of a complete disillusionment and enlightenment [pg 117] in regard to the deceptions of life: in that moment of supreme suffering Christ obtained a clear insight into Himself, just as in the poet's narrative did the poor dying Don Quixote.) The formidable tension of the intellect that wishes to hold its own against pain shows everything that one now looks upon in a new light, and the inexpressible charm of this new light is often powerful enough to withstand all the seductiveness of suicide and to make the continuation of life seem very desirable to the sufferer. His mind scornfully turns to the warm and comfortable dream-world in which the healthy man moves about thoughtlessly, and he thinks with contempt of the noblest and most cherished illusions in which he formerly indulged. He experiences delight in conjuring up this contempt as if from the depths of hell, and thus inflicting the bitterest sufferings upon his soul: it is by this counterpoise that he bears up against physical suffering—he feels that such a counterpoise is now essential! In one terrible moment of clear-sightedness he says to himself, “Be for once thine own accuser and hangman; for once regard thy suffering as a punishment which thou hast inflicted on thyself! Enjoy thy superiority as a judge: better still, enjoy thine own will and pleasure, thy tyrannical arbitrariness! Raise thyself above thy life as above thy suffering, and look down into the depth of reason and unreason!” Our pride revolts as it never did before, it experiences an incomparable charm in defending life against such a tyrant as suffering and against all the insinuations of this tyrant, who would fain urge [pg 118] us to give evidence against life,—we are taking the part of life in the face of this tyrant. In this state of mind we take up a bitter stand against all pessimism in order that it may not appear to be a consequence of our condition, and thus humiliate us as conquered ones. The charm of being just in our judgments was also never greater than now; for now this justice is a triumph over ourselves and over so irritated a state of mind that unfairness of judgment might be excused,—but we will not be excused, it is now, if ever, that we wish to show that we need no excuse. We pass through downright orgies of pride. And now appears the first ray of relief, of recovery, and one of its first effects is that we turn against the preponderance of our pride: we call ourselves foolish and vain, as if we had undergone some unique experience. We humiliate ungratefully this all-powerful pride, the aid of which enabled us to endure the pain we suffered, and we call vehemently for some antidote for this pride: we wish to become strangers to ourselves and to be freed from our own person after pain has forcibly made us personal too long. “Away with this pride,” we cry, “it was only another illness and convulsion!” Once more we look longingly at men and nature and recollect with a sorrowful smile that now since the veil has fallen we regard many things concerning them in a new and different light,—but we are refreshed by once more seeing the softened lights of life, and emerge from that fearfully dispassionate daylight in which we as sufferers saw things and through things. We [pg 119] do not get angry when we see the charms of health resume their play, and we contemplate the sight as if transformed, gently and still fatigued. In this state we cannot listen to music without weeping. 115. The so-called “Ego.”—Language and the prejudices upon which language is based very often act as obstacles in our paths when we proceed to explore internal phenomena and impulses: as one example, we may instance the fact that there are only words to express the superlative degrees of these phenomena and impulses.
Now, it is our habit no longer to observe accurately when words fail us, since it is difficult in such cases to think with precision: in former times, even, people involuntarily came to the conclusion that where the domain of words ceased, the domain of existence ceased also. Wrath, hatred, love, pity, desire, recognition, joy, pain: all these are names indicating extreme conditions; the milder and middle stages, and even more particularly the ever active lower stages, escape our attention, and yet it is they which weave the warp and woof of our character and destiny. It often happens that these extreme outbursts —and even the most moderate pleasure or displeasure of which we are actually conscious, whether in partaking of food or listening to a sound, is possibly, if properly estimated, merely an extreme outburst, —destroy the texture and are then violent exceptions, in most cases the consequences of some congestions,—and how easily as such can they [pg 120] mislead the observer! as indeed they mislead the person acting! We are all of us not what we appear to be according to the conditions for which alone we have consciousness and words, and consequently praise and blame. We fail to recognise ourselves after these coarse outbursts which are known to ourselves alone, we draw conclusions from data where the exceptions prove stronger than the rules; we misinterpret ourselves in reading our own ego's pronouncements, which appeared to be so clear. But our opinion of ourselves, this so-called ego which we have arrived at by this wrong method, contributes henceforth to form our character and destiny. 116. The Unknown World of the “Subject.”—What men have found it so difficult to understand from the most ancient times down to the present day is their ignorance in regard to themselves, not merely with respect to good and evil, but something even more essential. The oldest of illusions lives on, namely, that we know, and know precisely in each case, how human action is originated. Not only “God who looks into the heart,” not only the man who acts and reflects upon his action, but everybody does not doubt that he understands the phenomena of action in every one else. “I know what I want and what I have done, I am free and responsible for my act, and I make others responsible for their acts; I can mention by its name every moral possibility and every internal movement which precedes an act,—ye may act as [pg 121] ye will, I understand myself and I understand you all!” Such was what every one thought once upon a time, and almost every one thinks so even now. Socrates and Plato, who in this matter were great sceptics and admirable innovators, were nevertheless intensely credulous in regard to that fatal prejudice, that profound error, which holds that “The right knowledge must necessarily be followed by the right action.” In holding this principle they were still the heirs of the universal folly and presumption that knowledge exists concerning the essence of an action. “It would indeed be dreadful if the comprehension of the essence of a right action were not followed by that right action itself”—this was the only manner in which these great men thought it necessary to demonstrate this idea, the contrary seemed to them to be inconceivable and mad; and nevertheless this contrary corresponds to the naked reality which has been demonstrated daily and hourly from time immemorial. Is it not a “dreadful” truth that all that we know about an act is never sufficient to accomplish it, that the bridge connecting the knowledge of the act with the act itself has never yet been built? Acts are never what they appear to us to be. We have taken great pains to learn that external things are not as they appear to us.—Well! It is the same with internal phenomena. All moral acts are in reality “something different,”—we cannot say anything more about them, and all acts are essentially unknown to us.
The general belief, however, has been and still is quite the contrary: the most ancient realism [pg 122] is against us: up to the present humanity has thought, “An action is what it appears to be.” (In re-reading these words a very expressive passage from Schopenhauer occurs to me, and I will quote it as a proof that he, too, without the slightest scruple, continued to adhere to this moral realism: “Each one of us is in reality a competent and perfect moral judge, knowing exactly good and evil, made holy by loving good and despising evil,—such is every one of us in so far as the acts of others and not his own are under consideration, and when he has merely to approve or disapprove, whilst the burden of the performance of the acts is borne by other shoulders. Every one is therefore justified in occupying as confessor the place of God.”) 117. In Prison.—My eye, whether it be keen or weak, can only see a certain distance, and it is within this space that I live and move: this horizon is my immediate fate, greater or lesser, from which I cannot escape. Thus, a concentric circle is drawn round every being, which has a centre and is peculiar to himself. In the same way our ear encloses us in a small space, and so likewise does our touch. We measure the world by these horizons within which our senses confine each of us within prison walls. We say that this is near and that is far distant, that this is large and that is small, that one thing is hard and another soft; and this appreciation of things we call sensation—but it is all an error per se! According to the number [pg 123] of events and emotions which it is on an average possible for us to experience in a given space of time, we measure our lives; we call them short or long, rich or poor, full or empty; and according to the average of human life we estimate that of other beings,—and all this is an error per se! If we had eyes a hundred times more piercing to examine the things that surround us, men would seem to us to be enormously tall; we can even imagine organs by means of which men would appear to us to be of immeasurable stature. On the other hand, certain organs could be so formed as to permit us to view entire solar systems as if they were contracted and brought close together like a single cell: and to beings of an inverse order a single cell of the human body could be made to appear in its construction, movement, and harmony as if it were a solar system in itself. The habits of our senses have wrapped us up in a tissue of lying sensations which in their turn lie at the base of all our judgments and our “knowledge,”— there are no means of exit or escape to the real world! We are like spiders in our own webs, and, whatever we may catch in them, it will only be something that our web is capable of catching. 118. What is our Neighbour?—What do we conceive of our neighbour except his limits: I mean that whereby he, as it were, engraves and stamps himself in and upon us? We can understand nothing of him except the changes which take place [pg 124] upon our own person and of which he is the cause, what we know of him is like a hollow, modelled space. We impute to him the feelings which his acts arouse in us, and thus give him a wrong and inverted positivity. We form him after our knowledge of ourselves into a satellite of our own system, and if he shines upon us, or grows dark, and we in any case are the ultimate cause of his doing so, we nevertheless still believe the contrary! O world of phantoms in which we live! O world so perverted, topsy-turvy and empty, and yet dreamt of as full and upright! 119. Experience and Invention.—To however high a degree a man can attain to knowledge of himself, nothing can be more incomplete than the conception which he forms of the instincts constituting his individuality.
He can scarcely name the more common instincts: their number and force, their flux and reflux, their action and counteraction, and, above all, the laws of their nutrition, remain absolutely unknown to him. This nutrition, therefore, becomes a work of chance: the daily experiences of our lives throw their prey now to this instinct and now to that, and the instincts gradually seize upon it; but the ebb and flow of these experiences does not stand in any rational relationship to the nutritive needs of the total number of the instincts. Two things, then, must always happen: some cravings will be neglected and starved to death, while others will be overfed. Every moment in the life of man causes some polypous arms of his being to grow and [pg 125] others to wither away, in accordance with the nutriment which that moment may or may not bring with it. Our experiences, as I have already said, are all in this sense means of nutriment, but scattered about with a careless hand and without discrimination between the hungry and the overfed. As a consequence of this accidental nutrition of each particular part, the polypus in its complete development will be something just as fortuitous as its growth. To put this more clearly: let us suppose that an instinct or craving has reached that point when it demands gratification,—either the exercise of its power or the discharge of it, or the filling up of a vacuum (all this is metaphorical language),—then it will examine every event that occurs in the course of the day to ascertain how it can be utilised with the object of fulfilling its aim: whether the man runs or rests, or is angry, or reads or speaks or fights or rejoices, the unsatiated instinct watches, as it were, every condition into which the man enters, and, as a rule, if it finds nothing for itself it must wait, still unsatisfied. After a little while it becomes feeble, and at the end of a few days or a few months, if it has not been satisfied, it will wither away like a plant which has not been watered. This cruelty of chance would perhaps be more conspicuous if all the cravings were as vehement in their demands as hunger, which refuses to be satisfied with imaginary dishes; but the great majority of our instincts, especially those which are called moral, are thus easily satisfied,—if it be permitted to suppose that our dreams serve as compensation to a certain extent for the accidental [pg 126] absence of “nutriment” during the day. Why was last night's dream full of tenderness and tears, that of the night before amusing and gay, and the previous one adventurous and engaged in some continual obscure search? How does it come about that in this dream I enjoy indescribable beauties of music, and in that one I soar and fly upwards with the delight of an eagle to the most distant heights? These inventions in which our instincts of tenderness, merriment, or adventurousness, or our desire for music and mountains, can have free play and scope—and every one can recall striking instances—are interpretations of our nervous irritations during sleep, very free and arbitrary interpretations of the movements of our blood and intestines, and the pressure of our arm and the bed coverings, or the sound of a church bell, the weathercocks, the moths, and so on. That this text, which on the whole is very much the same for one night as another, is so differently commented upon, that our creative reason imagines such different causes for the nervous irritations of one day as compared with another, may be explained by the fact that the prompter of this reason was different to-day from yesterday— another instinct or craving wished to be satisfied, to show itself, to exercise itself and be refreshed and discharged: this particular one being at its height to-day and another one being at its height last night. Real life has not the freedom of interpretation possessed by dream life; it is less poetic and less unrestrained—but is it necessary for me to show that our instincts, when we are awake, likewise merely interpret our nervous irritations and [pg 127] determine their “causes” in accordance with their requirements? that there is no really essential difference between waking and dreaming!
that even in comparing different degrees of culture, the freedom of the conscious interpretation of the one is not in any way inferior to the freedom in dreams of the other! that our moral judgments and valuations are only images and fantasies concerning physiological processes unknown to us, a kind of habitual language to describe certain nervous irritations? that all our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary of an unknown text, one which is perhaps unknowable but yet felt? Consider some insignificant occurrence. Let us suppose that some day as we pass along a public street we see some one laughing at us. In accordance with whatever craving has reached its culminating point within us at that moment, this incident will have this or that signification for us; and it will be a very different occurrence in accordance with the class of men to which we belong. One man will take it like a drop of rain, another will shake it off like a fly, a third person will try to pick a quarrel on account of it, a fourth will examine his garments to see if there is anything about them likely to cause laughter, and a fifth will in consequence think about what is ridiculous per se, a sixth will be pleased at having involuntarily contributed to add a ray of sunshine and mirth to the world,—in all these cases some craving is gratified, whether anger, combativeness, meditation, or benevolence. This instinct, whatever it may be, has seized upon that incident as its prey: why that particular one? [pg 128] Because, hungry and thirsty, it was lying in ambush. Not long ago at 11 o'clock in the morning a man suddenly collapsed and fell down in front of me as if struck by lightning. All the women who were near at once gave utterance to cries of horror, while I set the man on his feet again and waited until he recovered his speech. During this time no muscle of my face moved and I experienced no sensation of fear or pity; I simply did what was most urgent and reasonable and calmly proceeded on my way. Supposing some one had told me on the previous evening that at 11 o'clock on the following day a man would fall down in front of me like this, I should have suffered all kinds of agonies in the interval, lying awake all night, and at the decisive moment should also perhaps have fallen down like the man instead of helping him; for in the meantime all the imaginable cravings within me would have had leisure to conceive and to comment upon this incident. What are our experiences, then? Much more what we attribute to them than what they really are. Or should we perhaps say that nothing is contained in them? that experiences in themselves are merely works of fancy? 120. To Tranquillise the Sceptic.—“I don't know at all what I am doing. I don't know in the least what I ought to do!”—You are right, but be sure of this: you are being done at every moment! Mankind has at all times mistaken the [pg 129] active for the passive: it is its eternal grammatical blunder. 121. Cause and Effect.—On this mirror—and our intellect is a mirror— something is going on that indicates regularity: a certain thing is each time followed by another certain thing. When we perceive this and wish to give it a name, we call it cause and effect,—fools that we are! as if in this we had understood or could understand anything! For, of course, we have seen nothing but the images of causes and effects, and it is just this figurativeness which renders it impossible for us to see a more substantial relation than that of sequence! 122. The Purposes in Nature.—Any impartial investigator who examines the history of the eye and its form in the lower creatures, and sees how the visual organ was slowly developed, cannot help recognising that sight was not the first purpose of the eye, but probably only asserted itself when pure hazard had contributed to bring together the apparatus. One single example of this kind, and the “final purposes” fall from our eyes like scales. 123. Reason.—How did reason come into the world? As is only proper, in an irrational manner; by accident. We shall have to guess at this accident as a riddle. [pg 130] 124.