The Greeks seemed like
children
to the
French.
French.
Nietzsche - v14 - Will to Power - a
The cosmopolitanism of articles of diet, of literature,
newspapers, forms, tastes, and even landscapes.
The speed of this affluence is prestissimo; im-.
pressions are wiped out, and people instinctively
guard against assimilating anything or against
taking anything seriously and “ digesting” it; the
result is a weakening of the powers of digestion.
There begins a sort of adaptation to this accumula-
tion of impressions. Man unlearns the art of doing,
and all he does is to react to stimuli coming from
his environment. He spends his strength, partly
in the process of assimilation, partly in defending
himself, and again partly in responding to stimuli.
Profound enfeeblement of spontaneity :—the his-
torian, the critic, the analyst, the interpreter, the
observer, the collector, the reader, all reactive
talents all science!
Artificial modification of one's own nature in
order to make it resemble a “mirror”; one is
interested, but only epidermally: this is system-
atic coolness, equilibrium, a steady low temperature,
## p. 64 (#88) ##############################################
64
THE WILL TO POWER.
just beneath the thin surface on which warmth,
movement, “storm,” and undulations play.
Opposition of external mobility to a certain dead
heaviness and fatigue.
72.
Where must our modern world be classed
under exhaustion or under increasing strength ?
Its multiformity and lack of repose are brought
about by the highest form of consciousness.
73
Overwork, curiosity and sympathy-our modern
vices.
74.
A contribution to the characterisation of "Moder-
nity. ”—Exaggerated development of intermediate
forms; the decay of types; the break-up of tradi-
tion, schools; the predominance of the instincts
(philosophically prepared : the unconscious has the
greater value) after the appearance of the enfeeble-
ment of will power and of the will to an end and
to the means thereto.
75.
A capable artisan or scholar cuts a good figure
if he have his pride in his art, and looks pleasantly
and contentedly upon life. On the other hand,
there is no sight more wretched than that of a
cobbler or a schoolmaster who, with the air of a
martyr, gives one to understand that he was really
## p. 65 (#89) ##############################################
NIHILISM.
65
born for something better. There is nothing better
than what is good! and that is : to have a certain
kind of capacity and to use it. This is virtù in
the Italian style of the Renaissance.
Nowadays, when the state has a nonsensically
oversized belly, in all fields and branches of work
there are “ representatives" over and above the
real workman: for instance, in addition to the
scholars, there are the journalists; in addition to
the suffering masses, there is a crowd of jabbering
and bragging ne'er-do-wells who "represent" that
suffering—not to speak of the professional politi-
cians who, though quite satisfied with their lot,
stand up in Parliament and, with strong lungs,
represent” grievances. Our modern life is ex-
tremely expensive, thanks to the host of middlemen
that infest it; whereas in the city of antiquity,
and in many a city of Spain and Italy to-day,
where there is an echo of the ancient spirit, the
man himself comes forward and will have nothing
to do with a representative or an intermediary in
the modern style-except perhaps to kick him
hence !
76.
The pre-eminence of the merchant and the
middleman, even in the most intellectual spheres :
the journalist, the “representative,” the historian
(as an intermediary between the past and the pre-
sent), the exotic and cosmopolitan, the middleman
between natural science and philosophy, the semi-
theologians.
E
VOL. I,
## p. 66 (#90) ##############################################
66
THE WILL TO POWER.
77.
The men I have regarded with the most loathing,
heretofore, are the parasites of intellect: they are
to be found everywhere, already, in our modern
Europe, and as a matter of fact their conscience is
as light as it possibly can be. They may be a
little turbid, and savour somewhat of Pessimism,
but in the main they are voracious, dirty, dirtying,
stealthy, insinuating, light-fingered gentry, scabby
-and as innocent as all small sinners and microbes
are. They live at the expense of those who have
intellect and who distribute it liberally: they know
that it is peculiar to the rich mind to live in a dis-
interested fashion, without taking too much petty
thought for the morrow, and to distribute its wealth
prodigally. For intellect is a bad domestic econo-
mist, and pays no heed whatever to the fact that
everything lives on it and devours it.
78.
MODERN MUMMERY
The motleyness of modern men and its charm
Essentially a mask and a sign of boredom.
The journalist.
The political man in the "national swindle").
Mummery in the arts :
The lack of honesty in preparing and school-
ing oneself for them (Fromentin);
## p. 67 (#91) ##############################################
1
NIHILISM,
67
The Romanticists (their lack of philosophy
and science and their excess of literature);
The novelists (Walter Scott, but also the
monsters of the Nibelung, with their in-
ordinately nervous music);
The lyricists.
Scientificality. ”
Virtuosos (Jews).
The popular ideals are overcome, but not yet
in the presence of the people :
The saint, the sage, the prophet.
79.
The want of discipline in the modern spirit con-
cealed beneath all kinds of moral finery. The
show-words are: Toleration (for the "incapacity
of saying yes or no "); la largeur de sympathie
(= a third of indifference, a third of curiosity, and
a third of morbid susceptibility); "objectivity”
(the lack of personality and of will, and the in-
ability to "love"); "freedom” in regard to the
rule (Romanticism); "truth” as opposed to false-
hood and lying (Naturalism); the “scientific
spirit” (the “human document": or, in plain
English, the serial story which means "addition"
-instead of “composition”); “passion” in the
place of disorder and intemperance; " depth” in
the place of confusion and the pell-mell of symbols.
"
80.
Concerning the criticism of big words. --I ain full
of mistrust and malice towards what is called
## p. 68 (#92) ##############################################
68
THE WILL TO POWER.
C
“ideal”: this is my Pessimism, that I have recog-
nised to what extent sublime sentiments are
a source of evil—that is to say, a belittling and
depreciating of man.
Every time "progress" is expected to result
from an ideal, disappointment invariably follows;
the triumph of an ideal has always been a retro-
grade movement.
Christianity, revolution, the abolition of slavery,
equal rights, philanthropy, love of peace, justice,
truth: all these big words are only valuable in a
struggle, as banners : not as realities, but as show-
words, for something quite different (yea, even quite
opposed to what they mean ! ).
81.
The kind of man is known who has fallen in
love with the sentence "tout comprendre c'est tout
pardonner. " It is the weak and, above all, the dis-
illusioned: if there is something to pardon in
everything, there is also something to contemn!
It is the philosophy of disappointment, which here
swathes itself so humanly in pity, and gazes out
So sweetly,
They are Romanticists, whose faith has gone to
pot: now they at least wish to look on and see
how everything vanishes and fades. They call it
l'art pour l'art, " objectivity,” etc.
82.
The main symptoms of Pessimism :-Dinners at
Magny's; Russian Pessimism (Tolstoy, Dostoiew-
## p. 69 (#93) ##############################################
NIHILISM.
69
sky); æsthetic Pessimism, l'art pour l'art, “ de-
scription" (the romantic and the anti-romantic
Pessimism); Pessimism in the theory of know-
ledge (Schopenhauer: phenomenalism); anarchical
Pessimism; the “ religion of pity," Buddhistic
preparation; the Pessimism of culture (exoticness,
cosmopolitanism); moral Pessimism, myself.
»
.
83.
“Without the Christian Faith," said Pascal," you
would yourselves be like nature and history, un
monstre et un chaos. " We fulfilled this prophecy :
once the weak and optimistic eighteenth century
had embellished and rationalised man.
Schopenhauer and Pascal. -Inone essential point,
Schopenhauer is the first who takes up Pascal's
movement again : un monstre et un chaos, conse-
quently something that must be negatived
history, nature, and man himself!
"Our inability to know the truth is the result of
our corruption, of our moral decay,” says Pascal.
And Schopenhauer says essentially the same.
“The more profound the corruption of reason is,
the more necessary is the doctrine of salvation
or, putting it into Schopenhauerian phraseology,
negation.
84.
Schopenhauer as an epigone (state of affairs
before the Revolution) :
-Pity, sensuality, art,
weakness of will, Catholicism of the most intel-
lectual desires—that is, at bottom, the good old
eighteenth century.
## p. 70 (#94) ##############################################
70
THE WILL TO POWER,
Schopenhauer's fundamental misunderstanding
of the will (just as though passion, instinct, and
desire were the essential factors of will) is typical :
the depreciation of the will to the extent of mis-
taking it altogether. Likewise the hatred of
willing: the attempt at seeing something superior
-yea, even superiority itself, and that which really
matters, in non-willing, in the “subject-being
without aim or intention. " Great symptom of
fatigue or of the weakness of will: for this, in
reality, is what treats the passions as master, and
directs them as to the way and to the measure.
.
.
85.
The undignified attempt has been made to regard
Wagner and Schopenhauer as types of the mentally
unsound : an infinitely more essential understanding
of the matter would have been gained if the exact
decadent type which each of them represents had
been scientifically and accurately defined.
86.
"
Henrik Ibsen has become very clear to me.
With all his robust idealism and “Will to Truth,"
he never dared to ring himself free from moral-
illusionism which says " freedom,” and will not
admit, even to itself, what freedom is: the second
stage in the metamorphosis of the "Will to Power,"
in him who lacks In the first stage, one
demands justice at the hands of those who have
power. In the second, one speaks of “freedom,"
## p. 71 (#95) ##############################################
NIHILISM.
71
that is to say, one wishes to “shake oneself free
from those who have power.
In the third stage,
one speaks of "equal rights "—that is to say, so
long as one is not a predominant personality one
wishes to prevent one's competitors from growing
in power.
87.
The Decline of Protestantism: theoretically and
historically understood as a half-measure. Un-
deniable predominance of Catholicism to-day:
Protestant feeling is so dead that the strongest
anti-Protestant movements (Wagner's Parsifal, for
instance) are no longer regarded as such. The
whole of the more elevated intellectuality in France
is Catholic in instinct; Bismarck recognised that
there was no longer any such thing as Protest-
antism.
88.
Protestantism, that spiritually unclean and
tiresome form of decadence, in which Christianity
has known how to survive in the mediocre North,
is something incomplete and complexly valuable
for knowledge, in so far as it was able to bring
experiences of different kinds and origins into the
same heads.
89.
What has the German spirit not made out of
Christianity! And, to refer to Protestantism
again, how much beer is there not still in Pro-
testant Christianity! Can a crasser, more indolent,
and more lounging form of Christian belief be
## p. 72 (#96) ##############################################
72
THE WILL TO POWER.
imagined, than that of the average German Pro-
testant? . . . It is indeed a very humble Christi-
anity. I call it the Homeopathy of Christianity !
I am reminded that, to-day, there also exists a
less humble sort of Protestantism; it is taught by
royal chaplains and anti-Semitic speculators: but
nobody has ever maintained that any “spirit”
'
“ hovers
over these waters. It is merely a less
respectable form of Christian faith, not by any
means a more comprehensible one.
90.
Progress. -Let us be on our guard lest we
deceive ourselves! Time flies forward apace, —
we would fain believe that everything flies forward
with it, that evolution is an advancing develop-
ment. . . . That is the appearance of things which
deceives the most circumspect. But the nineteenth
century shows no advance whatever on the six-
teenth: and the German spirit of 1888 is an
example of a backward movement when compared
with that of 1788. • Mankind does not
advance, it does not even exist. The aspect of
the whole is much more like that of a huge experi-
menting workshop where some things in all ages
succeed, while an incalculable number of things
fail ; where all order, logic, co-ordination, and
responsibility is lacking. How dare we blink the
fact that the rise of Christianity is a decadent
movement ? —that the German Reformation was
a recrudescence of Christian barbarism - that the
Revolution destroyed the instinct for an organisa-
## p. 73 (#97) ##############################################
NIHILISM.
73
tion of society on a large scale? . . . Man is not
an example of progress as compared with animals :
the tender son of culture is an abortion compared
with the Arab or the Corsican; the Chinaman
is a more successful type-- that is to say, possess-
ing more lasting powers than the European.
(6) THE LAST CENTURIES.
91.
Gloominess and pessimistic influence necessarily
follow in the wake of enlightenment. Towards
1770 a falling-off in cheerfulness was already
noticeable; women, with that very feminine instinct
which always defends virtue, believed that immor-
ality was the cause of it. Galiani hit the bull's
eye: he quotes Voltaire's verse:
“Un monstre gai vaut mieux
Qu'un sentimental ennuyeux.
If now I maintain that I am ahead, by a
century or two of enlightenment, of Voltaire and
Galiani—who was much more profound, how
-
deeply must I have sunk into gloominess! This
is also true, and betimes I somewhat reluctantly
manifested some caution in regard to the German
and Christian narrowness and inconsistency of
Schopenhauerian or, worse still, Leopardian Pessim-
ism, and sought the most characteristic form (Asia).
But, in order to endure that extreme Pessimism
(which here and there peeps out of my Birth of
Tragedy), to live alone“ without God or morality,”
## p. 74 (#98) ##############################################
74
THE WILL TO POWER.
I was compelled to invent a counter-prop for my-
self. Perhaps I know best why man is the only
animal that laughs: he alone suffers so excruciat-
ingly that he was compelled to invent laughter,
The unhappiest and most melancholy animal is,
as might have been expected, the most cheerful.
92.
In regard to German culture, I have always had
a feeling as of decline. The fact that I learned to
know a declining form of culture has often made
me unfair towards the whole phenomenon of
European culture. The Germans always follow
at some distance behind : they always go to the
root of things, for instance :
Dependance upon foreigners; Kant-Rousseau,
the sensualists, Hume, Swedenborg.
Schopenhauer—the Indians and Romanticism,
Voltaire,
Wagner-the French cult of the ugly and of
grand opera, Paris, and the flight into primitive
barbarism (the marriage of brother and sister).
The law of the laggard (the provinces go to
Paris, Germany goes to France).
How is it that precisely Germans discovered the
Greek (the more an instinct is developed, the more
it is tempted to run for once into its opposite).
Music is the last breath of every culture.
93.
Renaissance and Reformation. -What does the
Renaissance prove ? That the reign of the
## p. 75 (#99) ##############################################
NIHILISM,
75
"
“individual” can be only a short one. The out-
put is too great; there is not even the possibility
of husbanding or of capitalising forces, and ex-
haustion sets in step by step.
These are times
when everything is squandered, when even the
strength itself with which one collects, capitalises,
and heaps riches upon riches, is squandered.
Even the opponents of such movements are driven
to preposterous extremes in the dissipation of
their strength: and they too are very soon
exhausted, used up, and completely sapped.
In the Reformation we are face to face with
a wild and plebeian counterpart of the Italian
Renaissance, generated by similar impulses, except
that the former, in the backward and still vulgar
North, had to assume a religious form—there the
concept of a higher life had not yet been divorced
from that of a religious one.
Even the Reformation was a movement for
individual liberty; "every one his own priest" is
really no more than a formula for libertinage. As a
matter of fact, the words “Evangelical freedom"
would have sufficed—and all instincts which had
reasons for remaining concealed broke out like wild
hounds, the most brutal needs suddenly acquired
the courage to show themselves, everything seemed
justified . . . men refused to specify the kind of
freedom they had aimed at, they preferred to shut
But the fact that their eyes were
closed and that their lips were moistened with
gushing orations, did not prevent their hands from
being ready to snatch at whatever there was to
snatch at, that the belly became the god of the
their eyes.
## p. 76 (#100) #############################################
76
THE WILL TO POWER.
“free gospel," and that all lusts of revenge and of
hatred were indulged with insatiable fury.
This lasted for a while: then exhaustion super-
vened, just as it had done in Southern Europe;
and again here, it was a low form of exhaustion,
a sort of general ruere in servitium. . . . Then the
. . .
disreputable century of Germany dawned.
94.
Chivalry—the position won by power : its
gradual break-up (and partial transference to
broader and more bourgeois spheres). In the case
of Larochefoucauld we find a knowledge of the
actual impulses of a noble temperament-together
with the gloomy Christian estimate of these
impulses.
The protraction of Christianity through the
French Revolution. The seducer is Rousseau ;
he once again liberates woman, who thenceforward
is always represented as ever more interesting-
suffering. Then come the slaves and Mrs. Beecher-
Stowe. Then the poor and the workmen. Then
the vicious and the sick—all this is drawn into
the foreground (even for the purpose of disposing
people in favour of the genius, it has been custom-
ary for five hundred years to press him forward as
the great sufferer! ). Then comes the cursing of
all voluptuousness (Beaudelaire and Schopen-
hauer); the most decided conviction that the lust
of power is the greatest vice; absolute certainty
that morality and disinterestedness are identical
things; that the "happiness of all” is a goal worth
1
## p. 77 (#101) #############################################
NIHILISM.
77
striving after (i. e. , Christ's Kingdom of Heaven).
We are on the best road to it: the Kingdom of
Heaven of the poor in spirit has begun. -Inter-
mediate stages: the bourgeois (as a result of the
nouveau riche) and the workman (as a result of
the machine).
Greek and French culture of the time of Louis
XIV. compared. A decided belief in oneself.
A leisured class which makes things hard for itself
and exercises a great deal of self-control. The
power of form, the will to form oneself.
“ Happi-
ness" acknowledged as a purpose.
Much strength
and
energy
behind all formality of manners.
Pleasure at the sight of a life that is seemingly so
easy.
The Greeks seemed like children to the
French.
95.
The Three Centuries.
Their different kinds of sensitiveness may
perhaps be best expressed as follows:
Aristocracy: Descartes, the reign of reason,
evidence showing the sovereignty of the will.
Feminism : Rousseau, the reign of feeling,
evidence showing the sovereignty of the senses;
all lies.
Animalism: Schopenhauer, the reign of passion,
evidence showing the sovereignty of animality,
more honest, but gloomy.
The seventeenth century is aristocratic, all for
order, haughty towards everything animal, severe
in regard to the heart, " austere," and even free
from sentiment, “non-German," averse to all that
## p. 78 (#102) #############################################
78
THE WILL TO POWER.
is burlesque and natural, generalising and main-
taining an attitude of sovereignty towards the
pastº for it believes in itself. At bottom it
partakes very much of the beast of prey, and
practises asceticism in order to remain master.
It is the century of strength of will, as also that of
strong passion.
The eighteenth century is dominated by woman,
it is gushing, spiritual, and flat; but with intellect
at the service of aspirations and of the heart, it is
a libertine in the pleasures of intellect, undermining
all authorities; emotionally intoxicated, cheerful,
clear, humane, and sociable, false to itself and at
bottom very rascally. . . .
The nineteenth century is more animal, more
subterranean, hateful, realistic, plebeian, and on
that very account “better," “ more honest,” more
submissive to "reality" of what kind soever, and
truer; but weak of will, sad, obscurely exacting
and fatalistic. It has no feeling of timidity or
reverence, either in the presence of “reason”
the “heart”; thoroughly convinced of the
dominion of the desires (Schopenhauer said “Will,”
but nothing is more characteristic of his philosophy
than that it entirely lacks all actual willing). Even
morality is reduced to an instinct (“ Pity ").
Auguste Comte is the continuation of the
eighteenth century (the dominion of the heart over
the head, sensuality in the theory of knowledge,
altruistic exaltation).
The fact that science has become as sovereign
as it is to-day, proves how the nineteenth century
has emancipated itself from the dominion of ideals.
>
or
1
## p. 79 (#103) #############################################
NIHILISM.
79
)
A certain absence of“ needs "and wishes makes our
scientific curiosity and rigour possible this is
our kind of virtue.
Romanticism is the counterstroke of the
eighteenth century; a sort of accumulated longing
for its grand style of exaltation (as a matter of fact,
largely mingled with mummery and self-deception :
the desire was to represent strong nature and strong
passion).
The nineteenth century instinctively goes in
search of theories by means of which it may feel
its fatalistic submission to the empire of facts
justified. Hegel's success against sentimentality
and romantic idealism was already a sign of its
fatalistic trend of thought, in its belief that
superior reason belongs to the triumphant side,
and in its justification of the actual "state" (in
the place of“ humanity," etc. ). -Schopenhauer: we
are something foolish, and at the best self-
suppressive. The success of determinism, the
genealogical derivation of obligations which were
formerly held to be absolute, the teaching of
environment and adaptation, the reduction of will
to a process of reflex movement, the denial of the
will as
“working cause"; finally — a real
process of re-christening: so little will is observed
that the word itself becomes available for another
purpose. Further theories: the teaching of
objectivity, “will-less”
“ will-less” contemplation, as the only
road to truth, as also to beauty (also the belief
in "genius," in order to have the right to be
submissive); mechanism, the determinable rigidity
of the mechanical process; so-called " Naturalism,"
a
## p. 80 (#104) #############################################
80
THE WILL TO POWER.
»
the elimination of the choosing, directing, inter-
preting subject, on principle.
Kant, with his practical reason," with his moral
fanaticism, is quite eighteenth century style; still
completely outside the historical movement, without
any notion whatsoever of the reality of his time, for
instance, revolution; he is not affected by Greek
philosophy; he is a phantasist of the notion of duty,
a sensualist with a hidden leaning to dogmatic
pampering.
The return to Kant in our century means a return
to the eighteenth century: people desire to create
themselves a right to the old ideas and to the old
exaltation-hence a theory of knowledge which“ de-
scribes limits,” that is to say, which admits of the
option of fixing a Beyond to the domain of reason.
Hegel's way of thinking is not so very far
removed from that of Goethe: see the latter on
the subject of Spinoza, for instance. The will to
deify the All and Life, in order to find both peace
and happiness in contemplating them: Hegel
looks for reason everywhere in the presence of
reason man may be submissive and resigned. In
Goethe we find a kind of fatalism which is almost
joyous and confiding, which neither revolts nor
weakens, which strives to make a totality out of
itself, in the belief that only in totality does every-
thing seem good and justified, and find itself
resolved.
96.
The period of rationalism -- followed by a
period of sentimentality. To what extent does
## p. 81 (#105) #############################################
NIHILISM.
81
“sentimentality”?
Schopenhauer come under
(Hegel under intellectuality ? )
97.
The seventeenth century suffers from humanity
as from a host of contradictions (“l'amas de con-
tradictions ” that we are ); it endeavours to discover
man, to co-ordinate him, to excavate him: whereas
the eighteenth century tries to forget what is
known of man's nature, in order to adapt him to
its Utopia. “Superficial, soft, humane”-gushes
,
over "humanity. "
The seventeenth century tries to banish all
traces of the individual in order that the artist's
work may resemble life as much as possible.
The eighteenth century strives to create interest in
the author by means of the work. The seventeenth
century seeks art in art, a piece of culture; the
eighteenth uses art in its propaganda for political
and social reforms.
Utopia,” the “ideal man,” the deification of
Nature, the vanity of making one's own personality
the centre of interest, subordination to the propa-
ganda of social ideas, charlatanism-all this we
derive from the eighteenth century.
The style of the seventeenth century: propre
exact et libre.
The strong individual who is self-sufficient, or
who appeals ardently to God—and that obtrusive.
ness and indiscretion of modern authors-these
things are opposites. “Showing-oneself-off”—what
a contrast to the Scholars of Port-Royal !
F
»
VOL. I.
## p. 82 (#106) #############################################
82
THE WILL TO POWER.
Alfieri had a sense for the grand style.
The hate of the burlesque (that which lacks
dignity), the lack of a sense of Nature belongs to
the seventeenth century.
98.
Against Rousseau. -Alas! man is no longer
sufficiently evil ; Rousseau's opponents, who say
that “man is a beast of prey,” are unfortunately
wrong Not the corruption of man, but the
softening and moralising of him is the curse. In
the sphere which Rousseau attacked most violently,
the relatively strongest and most successful type
of man was still to be found (the type which still
possessed the great passions intact: Will to Power,
Will to Pleasure, the Will and Ability to Com-
mand). The man of the eighteenth century must
be compared with the man of the Renaissance (also
with the man of the seventeenth century in France)
if the matter is to be understood at all: Rousseau
is a symptom of self-contempt and of inflamed
vanity—both signs that the dominating will is
lacking: he moralises and seeks the cause of his
own misery after the style of a revengeful man in
the ruling classes.
99.
-
Voltaire Rousseau. A state of nature is
terrible; man is a beast of prey: our civilisation
is an extraordinary triumph over this beast of
prey in nature—this was Voltaire's conclusion.
He was conscious of the mildness, the refinements,
## p. 83 (#107) #############################################
NIHILISM.
83
the intellectual joys of the civilised state; he
despised obtuseness, even in the form of virtue,
and the lack of delicacy even in ascetics and
monks.
The moral depravity of man seemed to pre-
occupy Rousseau ; the words “ unjust,” “ cruel," are
the best possible for the purpose of exciting the
instincts of the oppressed, who otherwise find
themselves under the ban of the vetitum and of
disgrace; so that their conscience is opposed to their
indulging any insurrectional desires. These
emancipators seek one thing above all: to give
their party the great accents and attitudes of
higher Nature
100.
hall and
Rousseau : the rule founded on sentiment;
Nature as the source of justice; man perfects
himself in proportion as he approaches Nature
(according to Voltaire, in proportion as he leaves
Nature behind). The very same periods seem to
the one to demonstrate the progress of humanity
and, to the other, the increase of injustice and
inequality.
Voltaire, who still understood umanità in the
sense of the Renaissance, as also virtù (as “higher
culture"), fights for the cause of the "honnêtes
gens," "la bonne compagnie," taste, science, arts,
and even for the cause of progress and civilisation.
The flare-up occurred towards 1760: On the
one hand the citizen of Geneva, on the other le
seigneur de Ferney. It is only from that moment
and henceforward that Voltaire was the man of
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THE WILL TO POWER.
his age, the philosopher, the representative of
Toleration and of Disbelief (theretofore he had
been merely un bel esprit). His envy and hatred
of Rousseau's success forced him upwards.
“ Pour la canaille' un dieu rémunérateur et
vengeur”- Voltaire,
.
The criticism of both standpoints in regard to
the value of civilisation. To Voltaire nothing
seems finer than the social invention : there is
no higher goal than to uphold and perfect it.
L'honnêteté consists precisely in respecting social
usage; virtue in a certain obedience towards
various necessary "prejudices” which favour the
maintenance of society. Missionary of Culture,
aristocrat, representative of the triumphant and
ruling classes and their values. But Rousseau
remained a plebeian, even as hommes de lettres, this
was preposterous; his shameless contempt for
everything that was not himself.
The morbid feature in Rousseau is the one
which happens to have been most admired and
imitated. (Lord Byron resembled him somewhat,
he too screwed himself up to sublime attitudes
and to revengeful rage—a sign of vulgarity ; later
;
on, when Venice restored his equilibrium, he under-
stood what was more alleviating and did more
good . . . l'insouciance. )
In spite of his antecedents, Rousseau is proud
of himself; but he is incensed if he is reminded of
his origin. :
In Rousseau there was undoubtedly some brain
trouble; in Voltaire-rare health and lightsome-
The revengefulness of the sick ; his periods
ness
## p. 85 (#109) #############################################
NIHILISM.
85
>>
of insanity as also those of his contempt of man,
and of his mistrust.
Rousseau's defence of Providence (against Vol-
taire's Pessimism): he had need of God in order
to be able to curse society and civilisation; every-
thing must be good per se, because God had
created it; man alone has corrupted man. The
good man as a man of Nature was pure fantasy ;
but with the dogma of God's authorship he became
something probable and even not devoid of found-
ation.
Romanticism à la Rousseau : passion (“the
sovereign right of passion "); "naturalness"; the
fascination of madness (foolishness reckoned as
greatness); the senseless vanity of the weak; the
revengefulness of the masses elevated to the posi-
tion of justice (“in politics, for one hundred years,
the leader has been an invalid").
IOI.
Kant: makes the scepticism of Englishmen, in
regard to the theory of knowledge, possible for
Germans.
(1) By enlisting in its cause the interest of the
German's religious and moral needs : just as the
new academicians used scepticism for the same
reasons, as a preparation for Platonism (vide
Augustine); just as
just as Pascal even used moral
scepticism in order to provoke (to justify) thel
need of belief;
(2) By complicating and entangling it with
scholastic flourishes in view of making it more
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THE WILL TO POWER.
acceptable to the German's scientific taste in form
(for Locke and Hume, alone, were too illuminating,
too clear--that is to say, judged according to the
German valuing instinct, "too superficial ”).
Kant: a poor psychologist and mediocre judge
of human nature, made hopeless mistakes in
regard to great historical values (the French
Revolution); a moral fanatic à la Rousseau ; with
a subterranean current of Christian values; a
thorough dogmatist, but bored to extinction by
this tendency, to the extent of wishing to tyrannise
over it, but quickly tired, even of scepticism; and
not yet affected by any cosmopolitan thought or
antique beauty . . . a dawdler and a go-between,
not at all original (like Leibnitz, something between
mechanism and spiritualism ; like Goethe, something
between the taste of the eighteenth century and
that of the “historical sense" (which is essentially
a sense of exoticism); like German music, between
French and Italian music; like Charles the Great,
who mediated and built bridges between the
Roman Empire and Nationalism-a dawdler par
excellence).
102.
In what respect have the Christian centuries
with their Pessimism been stronger centuries than
the eighteenth-and how do they correspond
with the tragic age of the Greeks?
The nineteenth century versus the eighteenth.
How was it an heir ? -how was it a step backwards
from the latter ? (more lacking in "spirit” and
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NIHILISM.
87
in taste)—how did it show an advance on the
latter ? (more gloomy, more realistic, stronger).
103.
How can we explain the fact that we feel
something in common with the Campagna romana?
And the high mountain chain ?
Chateaubriand in a letter to M. de Fontanes
in 1803 writes his first impression of the Campagna
romana.
The President de Brosses says of the Campagna
romana : Il fallait
que
Romulus fût ivre quand il
songea à bâtir une ville dans un terrain aussi laid. ”
Even Delacroix would have nothing to do with
Rome, it frightened him. He loved Venice, just
as Shakespeare, Byron, and Georges Sand did.
Théophile Gautier's and Richard Wagner's dislike
of Rome must not be forgotten.
Lamartine has the language for Sorrento and
Posilippo.
Victor Hugo raves about Spain,"parce que
aucune autre nation n'a moins emprunté à
l'antiquité, parce qu'elle n'a subi aucune influence
classique. "
(
104. )
The two great attempts that were made to
overcome the eighteenth century:
Napoleon, in that he called man, the soldier,
and the great struggle for power, to life again,
and conceived Europe as a united political power.
Goethe, in that he imagined a European culture
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THE WILL TO POWER.
which would consist of the whole heritage of what
humanity had attained to up to his time.
German culture in this century inspires mistrust
-the music of the period lacks that complete
element which liberates and binds as well, to
wit-Goethe.
The pre-eminence of music in the romanticists
of 1830 and 1840. Delacroix. Ingresma
passionate musician (admired Gluck, Haydn,
Beethoven, Mozart), said to his pupils in Rome:
“Si je pouvais vous rendre tous musiciens, vous y
gagneriez comme peintres "-likewise Horace
Vernet, who was particularly fond of Don Juan (as
Mendelssohn assures us, 1831); Stendhal, too, who
says of himself: “Combien de lieues ne ferais-je
pas à pied, et à combien de jours de prison ne me
soumetterais-je pas pour entendre Don Juan ou le
Matrimonio segreto; et je ne sais pour quelle autre
chose je ferais cet effort. ” He was then fifty-six
years old.
The borrowed forms, for instance: Brahms as
a typical “ Epigone,” likewise Mendelssohn's cul-
tured Protestantism (a former “soul" is turned
into poetry posthumously . . . )
--the moral and poetical substitutions in
Wagner, who used one art as a stop-gap to make
up for what another lacked.
—the "historical sense,” inspiration derived
from poems, sagas.
-that characteristic transformation of which
G. Flaubert is the most striking example among
Frenchmen, and Richard Wagner the most strik-
ing example among Germans, shows how the
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NIHILISM.
89
romantic belief in love and the future changes
into a longing for nonentity in 1830-50.
10б.
How is it that German music reaches its head
culminating point in the age of German romanti- wdon stock
cism? How is it that German music lacks
Goethe ? On the other hand, how much Schiller,
or more exactly, how much “ Thekla " * is there
not in Beethoven !
Schumann has Eichendorff, Uhland, Heine,
Hoffman, Tieck, in him. Richard Wagner has
Freischütz, Hoffmann, Grimm, the romantic Saga,
the mystic catholicism of instinct, symbolism,
“the free-spiritedness of passion' (Rousseau's
intention). The Flying Dutchman savours of.
France, where le ténébreux (1830) was the type
of the seducer.
The cult of music, the revolutionary romanticism
of form. Wagner synthesises German and French
romanticism.
107.
From the point of view only of his value to
Germany and to German culture, Richard Wagner
is still a great problem, perhaps a German mis-
fortune: in any case, however, a fatality. But
what does it matter ? Is he not very much
more than a German event ? It also seems to
me that to no country on earth is he less related
than to Germany; nothing was prepared there for
* Thekla is the sentimental heroine in Schiller's Wallen-
stein. --TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.
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THE WILL TO POWER.
his advent; his whole type is simply strange
amongst Germans; there he stands in their midst,
wonderful, misunderstood, incomprehensible. But
people carefully avoid acknowledging this : they are
too kind, too square-headed—too German for that.
“Credo quia absurdus est”: thus did the German
spirit wish it to be, in this case too-hence it is
content meanwhile to believe everything Richard
Wagner wanted to have believed about himself. In
all ages the spirit of Germany has been deficient in
subtlety and divining powers concerning psycho-
1 logical matters. Now that it happens to be under the
high pressure of patrioticnonsense and self-adoration,
it is visibly growing thicker and coarser : how could
it therefore be equal to the problem of Wagner !
108.
Cathemat
* *32***
byl
mozaims
d ut?
The Germans are not yet anything, but they
are becoming something; that is why they have
not yet any culture ;—that is why they cannot
yet have any culture ! —They are not yet anything:
that means they are all kinds of things. They
are becoming something: that means that they will
one day cease from being all kinds of things. The
latter is at bottom only a wish, scarcely a hope
yet. Fortunately it is a wish with which one
can live, a question of will, of work, of discipline,
a question of training, as also of resentment, of
longing, of privation, of discomfort,-yea, even
of bitterness,-in short, we Germans will get
something out of ourselves, something that has not
yet been wanted of us we want something more!
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NIHILISM.
91
That this "German, as he is not as yet”—
has a right to something better than the present
German “culture”; that all who wish to become
something better, must wax angry when they
perceive a sort of contentment, an impudent
“setting-oneself-at-ease,” or “a process of self-
censing," in this quarter: that is my second
principle, in regard to which my opinions have
not yet changed.
(*) SIGNS OF INCREASING STRENGTH.
109.
First Principle: everything that characterises
modern men savours of decay: but side by side
with the prevailing sickness there are signs of a
strength and powerfulness of soul which are still
untried. The same causes which tend to promote
the belittling of men, also force the stronger and
rarer individuals upwards to greatness.
I1O.
General survey : the ambiguous character of our
modern world precisely the same symptoms
might at the same time be indicative of either
decline or strength. And the signs of strength
and of emancipation dearly bought, might in view
of traditional (or hereditary) appreciations con-
cerned with the feelings, be misunderstood as in-
dications of weakness. In short, feeling, as
means of fixing valuations, is not on a level with
the times.
a
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THE WILL TO POWER.
Generalised: Every valuation is always back-
ward; it is merely the expression of the con-
ditions which favoured survival and growth in
a much earlier age: it struggles against new
conditions of existence out of which it did not
arise, and which it therefore necessarily misunder-
stands : it hinders, and excites suspicion against,
all that is new.
III.
The problem of the nineteenth century. To dis-
cover whether its strong and weak side belong to
each other.
Whether they have been cut from
one and the same piece. Whether the variety of
its ideals and their contradictions are conditioned
by a higher purpose: whether they are something
higher. For it might be the prerequisite of great-
ness, that growth should take place amid such
violent tension. Dissatisfaction, Nihilism, might
be a good sign.
I 12.
General survey.
