Twilight of Idols and Anti-Christ

by Friedrich Nietzsche

  37

  Whether we have grown more moral. – As was only to be expected, the whole ferocity of the moral stupidity which, as is well known, is considered morality as such in Germany, has launched itself against my concept ‘beyond good and evil’: I could tell some pretty stories about it. Above all, I was invited to reflect on the ‘undeniable superiority’ of our age in moral judgement, our real advance in this respect: compared with us, a Cesare Borgia was certainly not to be set up as a ‘higher man’, as a kind of superman, in the way I set him up.… A Swiss editor, that of the ‘Bund’, went so far – not without expressing his admiration of the courage for so hazardous an enterprise – as to ‘understand’ that the meaning of my work lay in a proposal to abolish all decent feeling. Much obliged!* – by way of reply I permit myself to raise the question whether we have really grown more moral. That all the world believes so is already an objection to it.… We modern men, very delicate, very vulnerable and paying and receiving consideration in a hundred ways, imagine in fact that this sensitive humanity which we represent, this achieved unanimity in forbearance, in readiness to help, in mutual trust, is a positive advance, that with this we have gone far beyond the men of the Renaissance. But every age thinks in this way, has to think in this way. What is certain is that we would not dare to place ourselves in Renaissance circumstances, or even imagine ourselves in them: our nerves could not endure that reality, not to speak of our muscles. This incapacity, however, demonstrates, not an advance, but only a different, a more belated constitution, a weaker, more delicate, more vulnerable one, out of which is necessarily engendered a morality which is full of consideration. If we think away our delicacy and belatedness, our physiological ageing, then our morality of ‘humanization’ too loses its value at once – no morality has any value in itself – : we would even despise it. On the other hand, let us be in no doubt that we modern men, with our thick padding of humanity which dislikes to give the slightest offence, would provide the contemporaries of Cesare Borgia with a side-splitting comedy. We are, in fact, involuntarily funny beyond all measure, we with our modern ‘virtues’.… The decay of our hostile and mistrust-arousing instincts – and that is what constitutes our ‘advance’ – represents only one of the effects attending our general decay of vitality: it costs a hundred times more effort, more foresight, to preserve so dependent, so late an existence as we are. Here everyone helps everyone else, here everyone is to a certain degree an invalid and everyone a nurse. This is then called ‘virtue’ – : among men who knew a different kind of life, a fuller, more prodigal, more overflowing life, it would be called something else: ‘cowardice’, perhaps, ‘pitiableness’, ‘old woman’s morality’.… Our softening of customs – this is my thesis, my innovation if you like – is a consequence of decline; stern and frightful customs can, conversely, be a consequence of a superabundance of life. For in the latter case much may be risked, much demanded and much squandered. What was formerly a spice of life would be poison to us.… We are likewise too old, too belated, to be capable of indifference –also a form of strength: our morality of pity, against which I was the first to warn, that which one might call l’impressionisme morale, is one more expression of the physiological over-excitability pertaining to everything décadent. That movement which with Schopenhauer’s morality of pity attempted to present itself as scientific – a very unsuccessful attempt! – is the actual décadence movement in morality; as such it is profoundly related to Christian morality. Strong ages, noble cultures, see in pity, in ‘love of one’s neighbour’, in a lack of self and self-reliance, something contemptible. – Ages are to be assessed according to their positive forces – and by this assessment the age of the Renaissance, so prodigal and so fateful, appears as the last great age, and we, we moderns with our anxious care for ourselves and love of our neighbour, with our virtues of work, of unpretentiousness, of fair play, of scientificality – acquisitive, economical, machine-minded – appear as a weak age.… Our virtues are conditioned, are demanded by our weakness.… ‘Equality’, a certain actual rendering similar of which the theory of ‘equal rights’ is only the expression, belongs essentially to decline: the chasm between man and man, class and class, the multiplicity of types, the will to be oneself, to stand out – that which I call pathos of distance – characterizes every strong age. The tension, the range between the extremes is today growing less and less – the extremes themselves are finally obliterated to the point of similarity.… All our political theories and state constitutions, the ‘German Reich ‘certainly not excluded, are consequences, necessary effects of decline; the unconscious influence of décadence has gained ascendancy even over the ideals of certain of the sciences. My objection to the whole of sociology in England and France is that it knows from experience only the decaying forms of society and takes its own decaying instincts with perfect innocence as the norm of sociological value judgement. Declining life, the diminution of all organizing power, that is to say the power of separating, of opening up chasms, of ranking above and below, formulates itself in the sociology of today as the ideal.… Our Socialists are décadents, but Mr Herbert Spencer is also a décadent – he sees in the victory of altruism something desirable!…

  38

  My conception of freedom. – The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it – what it costs us. I give an example. Liberal institutions immediately cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: subsequently there is nothing more thoroughly harmful to freedom than liberal institutions. One knows, indeed, what they bring about: they undermine the will to power, they are the levelling of mountain and valley exalted to a moral principle, they make small, cowardly and smug – it is the herd animal which triumphs with them every time. Liberalism: in plain words, reduction to the herd animal.… As long as they are still being fought for, these same institutions produce quite different effects; they then in fact promote freedom mightily. Viewed more closely, it is war which produces these effects, war for liberal institutions which as war permits the illiberal instincts to endure. And war is a training in freedom. For what is freedom? That one has the will to self-responsibility. That one preserves the distance which divides us. That one has become more indifferent to hardship, toil, privation, even to life. That one is ready to sacrifice men to one’s cause, oneself not excepted. Freedom means that the manly instincts that delight in war and victory have gained mastery over the other instincts – for example, over the instinct for ‘happiness’. The man who has become free – and how much more the mind that has become free – spurns the contemptible sort of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats. The free man is a warrior. – How is freedom measured, in individuals as in nations? By the resistance which has to be overcome, by the effort it costs to stay aloft. One would have to seek the highest type of free man where the greatest resistance is constantly being overcome: five steps from tyranny, near the threshold of the danger of servitude. This is true psychologically when one understands by ‘tyrants’ pitiless and dreadful instincts, to combat which demands the maximum of authority and discipline towards oneself – finest type Julius Caesar –; it is also true politically: one has only to look at history. The nations which were worth something, which became worth something, never became so under liberal institutions: it was great danger which made of them something deserving reverence, danger which first teaches us to know our resources, our virtues, our shield and spear, our spirit – which compels us to be strong.… First principle: one must need strength, otherwise one will never have it. – Those great forcing-houses for strong human beings, for the strongest kind there has ever been, the aristocratic communities of the pattern of Rome and Venice, understood freedom in precisely the sense which I understand the word ‘freedom’: as something one has and does not have, something one wants, something one conquers…

  39

  Criticism of modernity. – Our institutions are no lo
nger fit for anything: everyone is unanimous about that. But the fault lies not in them but in us. Having lost all the instincts out of which institutions grow, we are losing the institutions themselves, because we are no longer fit for them. Democracy has always been the declining form of the power to organize: I have already, in Human, All Too Human, characterized modern democracy, together with its imperfect manifestations such as the ‘German Reich’, as the decaying form of the state. For institutions to exist there must exist the kind of will, instinct, imperative which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to centuries-long responsibility, to solidarity between succeeding generations backwards and forwards in infinitum. If this will is present, there is established something such as the Imperium Romanum: or such as Russia, the only power today which has durability in it, which can wait, which can still promise something – Russia, the antithesis of that pitiable European petty-state politics and nervousness which with the foundation of the German Reich has entered a critical phase.… The entire West has lost those instincts out of which institutions grow, out of which the future grows: perhaps nothing goes so much against the grain of its ‘modern spirit’ as this. One lives for today, one lives very fast – one lives very irresponsibly: it is precisely this which one calls ‘freedom’. That which makes institutions institutions is despised, hated, rejected: whenever the word ‘authority’ is so much as heard one believes oneself in danger of a new slavery. The décadence in the valuating instinct of our politicians, our political parties, goes so deep that they instinctively prefer that which leads to dissolution, that which hastens the end.… Witness modern marriage. It is obvious that all sense has gone out of modern marriage: which is, however, no objection to marriage but to modernity. The rationale of marriage lay in the legal sole responsibility of the man: marriage thereby had a centre of gravity, whereas now it limps with both legs. The rationale of marriage lay in its indissolubility in principle: it thereby acquired an accent which could make itself heard against the accidents of feeling, passion and the moment. It lay likewise in the responsibility of the families for the selection of mates. With the increasing indulgence of love matches one has simply eliminated the foundation of marriage, that alone which makes it an institution. One never establishes an institution on the basis of an idiosyncrasy, one does not, as aforesaid, establish marriage on the basis of ‘love’ – one establishes it on the basis of the sexual drive, the drive to own property (wife and child considered as property), the drive to dominate which continually organizes the smallest type of domain, the family, which needs children and heirs so as to retain, in a physiological sense as well, an achieved measure of power, influence, wealth, so as to prepare for protracted tasks, for a solidarity of instinct between the centuries. Marriage as an institution already includes in itself the affirmation of the largest, the most enduring form of organization: if society as a whole cannot stand security for itself to the most distant generations, then marriage has really no meaning. – Modern marriage has lost its meaning – consequently it is being abolished.

  40

  The labour question. – The stupidity, fundamentally the instinct degeneration which is the cause of every stupidity today, lies in the existence of a labour question at all. About certain things one does not ask questions: first imperative of instinct. – I simply cannot see what one wishes to do with the European worker now one has made a question of him. He finds himself far too well placed not to go on asking for more, or to ask more and more impudently. After all, he has the great majority on his side. There is absolutely no hope left that a modest and self-sufficient kind of human being, a type of Chinaman, should here form itself into a class: and this would have been sensible, this was actually a necessity. What has one done? – Everything designed to nip in the bud even the prerequisites for it – through the most irresponsible thoughtlessness one has totally destroyed the instincts by virtue of which the worker becomes possible as a class, possible for himself. The worker has been made liable for military service, he has been allowed to form unions and to vote: no wonder the worker already feels his existence to be a state of distress (expressed in moral terms as a state of injustice). But what does one want? – to ask it again. If one wills an end, one must also will the means to it: if one wants slaves, one is a fool if one educates them to be masters. –

  41

  ‘Freedom as I do not mean it.*…’ – In times like these, to have to rely on one’s instincts is one fatality more. These instincts contradict, disturb and destroy one another; I have already defined the modern as physiological self-contradiction. The rationale of education would seem to require that at least one of these instinct-systems should be paralysed beneath an iron pressure, so as to permit another to come into force, become strong, become master. Today the only way of making the individual possible would be by pruning him: possible, that is to say complete.… The reverse is what actually happens: the claim to independence, to free development, to laisser aller, is advanced most heatedly by precisely those for whom no curb could be too strong – this applies in politics, it applies in art. But this is a symptom of décadence: our modern concept ‘freedom’ is one more proof of degeneration of instinct. –

  42

  Where faith is needed. – Nothing is rarer among moralists and saints than integrity; perhaps they say the opposite, perhaps they even believe it. For when faith is more useful, effective, convincing than conscious hypocrisy, hypocrisy instinctively and forthwith becomes innocent: first principle for the understanding of great saints. In the case of philosophers too, a different kind of saint, their entire trade demands that they concede only certain truths: namely those through which their trade receives public sanction – in Kantian terms, truths of practical reason. They know what they have to prove, they are practical in that – they recognize one another by their agreement over ‘truths’. – ‘Thou shalt not lie’ – in plain words: take care, philosopher, not to tell the truth…

  43

  In the ear of the Conservatives. – What was formerly not known, what is known today or could be known – a reversion, a turning back in any sense and to any degree, is quite impossible. We physiologists at least know that. But all priests and moralists have believed it was possible – they have wanted to take mankind back, force it back, to an earlier standard of virtue. Morality has always been a bed of Procrustes. Even politicians have in this matter imitated the preachers of virtue: even today there are parties whose goal is a dream of the crabwise retrogression of all things. But no one is free to be a crab. There is nothing for it: one has to go forward, which is to say step by step further into décadence (– this is my definition of modern ‘progress’…). One can retard this development and, through retardation, dam and gather up degeneration itself and make it more vehement and sudden: more one cannot do. –