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The Imitatio Christi* is one of the books I cannot hold in my hand without experiencing a physiological resistance: it exhales a parfum of the ‘eternal feminine’† for which one has to be French – or a Wagnerian.… This saint has a way of talking about love that makes even Parisiennes curious. – I am told that cunningest of Jesuits, A. Comte, who wanted to lead his Frenchmen to Rome via the détour of science, inspired himself with this book. I believe it: ‘the religion of the heart’…
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G. Eliot. – They have got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality: that is English consistency, let us not blame it on little bluestockings à la Eliot. In England, in response to every little emancipation from theology one has to reassert one’s position in a fear-inspiring manner as a moral fanatic. That is the penance one pays there. – With us it is different. When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. For the latter is absolutely not self-evident: one must make this point clear again and again, in spite of English shallowpates. Christianity is a system, a consistently thought out and complete view of things. If one breaks out of it a fundamental idea, the belief in God, one thereby breaks the whole thing to pieces: one has nothing of any consequence left in one’s hands. Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know what is good for him and what evil: he believes in God, who alone knows. Christian morality is a command: its origin is transcendental; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticize; it possesses truth only if God is truth – it stands or falls with the belief in God. – If the English really do believe they will know, of their own accord, ‘intuitively’, what is good and evil; if they consequently think they no longer have need of Christianity as a guarantee of morality; that is merely the consequence of the ascendancy of Christian evaluation and an expression of the strength and depth of this ascendancy: so that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, so that the highly conditional nature of its right to exist is no longer felt. For the Englishman morality is not yet a problem…
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George Sand. – I have read the first Lettres d’un voyageur: like everything deriving from Rousseau false, artificial, fustian, exaggerated. I cannot endure this coloured-wallpaper style; nor the vulgar ambition to possess generous feelings. The worst, to be sure, is the female coquetting with male mannerisms, with the manners of ill-bred boys. – How cold she must have been withal, this insupportable authoress! She wound herself up like a clock – and wrote.… Cold, like Hugo, like Balzac, like all Romantics as soon as they started writing! And how complacently she liked to lie there, this prolific writing-cow, who had something German in the bad sense about her, like Rousseau her master, and who was in any case possible only with the decline of French taste! – But Renan respects her…
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Moral code for psychologists. – No colportage psychology! Never observe for the sake of observing! That produces a false perspective, a squint, something forced and exaggerated. To experience from a desire to experience – that’s no good. In experiencing, one must not look back towards oneself, or every glance becomes an ‘evil eye’. A born psychologist instinctively guards against seeing for the sake of seeing; the same applies to the born painter. He never works ‘from nature’ – he leaves it to his instinct, his camera obscura, to sift and strain ‘nature’, the ‘case’, the ‘experience’.… He is conscious only of the universal, the conclusion, the outcome: he knows nothing of that arbitrary abstraction from the individual case. – What will be the result if one does otherwise? Carries on colportage psychology in, for example, the manner of Parisian romanciers great and small? It is that sort of thing which as it were lies in wait for reality, which brings a handful of curiosities home each evening.… But just see what finally emerges – a pile of daubs, a mosaic at best, in any event something put together, restless, flashy. The worst in this kind is achieved by the Goncourts: they never put three sentences together which are not simply painful to the eye, the psychologist’s eye. – Nature, artistically considered, is no model. It exaggerates, it distorts, it leaves gaps. Nature is chance. To study ‘from nature’ seems to me a bad sign: it betrays subjection, weakness, fatalism – this lying in the dust before petits faits* is unworthy of a complete artist. Seeing what is – that pertains to a different species of spirit, the anti-artistic, the prosaic. One has to know who one is…
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Towards a psychology of the artist. – For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication. Intoxication must first have heightened the excitability of the entire machine: no art results before that happens. All kinds of intoxication, however different their origin, have the power to do this: above all, the intoxication of sexual excitement, the oldest and most primitive form of intoxication. Likewise the intoxication which comes in the train of all great desires, all strong emotions; the intoxication of feasting, of contest, of the brave deed, of victory, of all extreme agitation; the intoxication of cruelty; intoxication in destruction; intoxication under certain meteorological influences, for example the intoxication of spring; or under the influence of narcotics; finally the intoxication of the will, the intoxication of an overloaded and distended will. – The essence of intoxication is the feeling of plenitude and increased energy. From out of this feeling one gives to things, one compels them to take, one rapes them – one calls this procedure idealizing. Let us get rid of a prejudice here: idealization does not consist, as is commonly believed, in a subtracting or deducting of the petty and secondary. A tremendous expulsion of the principal features rather is the decisive thing, so that thereupon the others too disappear.
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In this condition one enriches everything out of one’s own abundance: what one sees, what one desires, one sees swollen, pressing, strong, overladen with energy. The man in this condition transforms things until they mirror his power – until they are reflections of his perfection. This compulsion to transform into the perfect is – art. Even all that which he is not becomes for him none the less part of his joy in himself; in art, man takes delight in himself as perfection. – It would be permissible to imagine an antithetical condition, a specific anti-artisticality of instinct – a mode of being which impoverishes and attenuates things and makes them consumptive. And history is in fact rich in such anti-artists, in such starvelings of life, who necessarily have to take things to themselves, impoverish them, make them leaner. This is, for example, the case with the genuine Christian, with Pascal for example: a Christian who is at the same time an artist does not exist.… Let no one be childish and cite Raphael as an objection, or some homoeopathic Christian of the nineteenth century: Raphael said Yes, Raphael did Yes, consequently Raphael was not a Christian…
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What is the meaning of the antithetical concepts Apollinian and Dionysian, both conceived as forms of intoxication, which I introduced into aesthetics?* – Apollinian intoxication alerts above all the eye, so that it acquires power of vision. The painter, the sculptor, the epic poet are visionaries par excellence. In the Dionysian state, on the other hand, the entire emotional system is alerted and intensified: so that it discharges all its powers of representation, imitation, transfiguration, transmutation, every kind of mimicry and playacting, conjointly. The essential thing remains the facility of the metamorphosis, the incapacity not to react (– in a similar way to certain types of hysteric, who also assume any role at the slightest instigation). It is impossible for the Dionysian man not to understand any suggestion of whatever kind, he ignores no signal from the emotions, he possesses to the highest degree the instinct for understanding and divining, just as he possesses the art of communication to the highest degree. He enters into every skin, into every emotion; he is continually transforming himself. – Music, as we understand it today, is likewise a collective arousal and discharging of the emotions, but
for all that only a vestige of a much fuller emotional world of expression, a mere residuum of Dionysian histrionicism. To make music possible as a separate art one had to immobilize a number of senses, above all the muscular sense (at least relatively: for all rhythm still speaks to our muscles to a certain extent): so that man no longer straightway imitates and represents bodily everything he feels. None the less, that is the true Dionysian normal condition, at least its original condition: music is the gradually-achieved specialization of this at the expense of the most closely related faculties.
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The actor, the mime, the dancer, the musician, the lyric poet are fundamentally related in their instincts and essentially one, only gradually specialized and separated from one another – even to the point of opposition. The lyric poet stayed united longest with the musician, the actor with the dancer. – The architect represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollinian condition: here it is the mighty act of will, the will which moves mountains, the intoxication of the strong will, which demands artistic expression. The most powerful men have always inspired the architects; the architect has always been influenced by power. Pride, victory over weight and gravity, the will to power, seek to render themselves visible in a building; architecture is a kind of rhetoric of power, now persuasive, even cajoling in form, now bluntly imperious. The highest feeling of power and security finds expression in that which possesses grand style. Power which no longer requires proving; which disdains to please; which is slow to answer; which is conscious of no witness around it; which lives oblivious of the existence of any opposition; which reposes in itself, fatalistic, a law among laws: that is what speaks of itself in the form of grand style. –
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I have read the life of Thomas Carlyle, that unwitting and involuntary farce, that heroical-moralistical interpretation of dyspepsia. – Carlyle, a man of strong words and attitudes, a rhetorician from necessity, continually agitated by the desire for a strong faith and the feeling of incapacity for it (– in this a typical Romantic!) The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of scepticism: one is secure enough, firm enough, fixed enough for it. Carlyle deafens something within him by the fortissimo of his reverence for men of strong faith and by his rage against the less single-minded: he requires noise. A continual passionate dishonesty towards himself – that is his proprium, because of that he is and will remain interesting. – To be sure, in England he is admired precisely on account of his honesty.… Well, that is English; and, considering the English are the nation of consummate cant, even appropriate and not merely understandable. Fundamentally, Carlyle is an English atheist who wants to be honoured for not being one.
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Emerson. – Much more enlightened, adventurous, multifarious, refined than Carlyle; above all, happier.… Such a man as instinctively feeds on pure ambrosia and leaves alone the indigestible in things. Compared with Carlyle a man of taste. – Carlyle, who had a great affection for him, nevertheless said of him: ‘He does not give us enough to bite on’: which may be truly said, but not to the detriment of Emerson. – Emerson possesses that good-natured and quickwitted cheerfulness that discourages all earnestness; he has absolutely no idea how old he is or how young he will be – he could say of himself, in the words of Lope de Vega: ‘yo me sucedo a mi mismo’.* His spirit is always finding reasons for being contented and even grateful; and now and then he verges on the cheerful transcendence of that worthy gentleman who, returning from an amorous rendezvous tamquam re bene gesta, said gratefully: ‘Ut desint vires, tamen est laudanda voluptas. ‘†
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Anti-Darwin. – As regards the celebrated ‘struggle for life’, it seems to me for the present to have been rather asserted than proved. It does occur, but as the exception; the general aspect of life is not hunger and distress, but rather wealth, luxury, even absurd prodigality – where there is a struggle it is a struggle for power.… One should not mistake Malthus for nature. – Supposing, however, that this struggle exists – and it does indeed occur – its outcome is the reverse of that desired by the school of Darwin, of that which one ought perhaps to desire with them: namely, the defeat of the stronger, the more privileged, the fortunate exceptions. Species do not grow more perfect: the weaker dominate the strong again and again – the reason being they are the great majority, and they are also cleverer.… Darwin forgot the mind (– that is English!): the weak possess more mind.… To acquire mind one must need mind – one loses it when one no longer needs it. He who possesses strength divests himself of mind (– ‘let it depart!’ they think today in Germany, ‘– the Reich will still be ours.’…)* One will see that under mind I include foresight, patience, dissimulation, great self-control, and all that is mimicry (this last includes a great part of what is called virtue).
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Psychologist’s casuistry. This man is a human psychologist: what does he really study men for? He wants to gain little advantages over them, or big ones too – he is a politician!… This other man is also a human psychologist: and you say he wants nothing for himself, that he is ‘impersonal’. Take a closer look! Pehaps he wants an even worse advantage: to feel himself superior to men, to have the right to look down on them, no longer to confuse himself with them. This ‘impersonal’ man is a despiser of men: and the former is a more humane species, which may even be clear from his appearance. At least he thinks himself equal to others, he involves himself with others…
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The psychological taste of the Germans seems to me to be called in question by a whole series of instances which modesty forbids me to enumerate. There is one instance, however, which offers me a grand opportunity for establishing my thesis: I bear the Germans a grudge for their having blundered over Kant and his ‘backdoor philosophy’, as I call it – this was not the pattern of intellectual integrity. – Another thing I loathe to hear is an infamous ‘and’: the Germans say ‘Goethe and Schiller’ – I am afraid they say ‘Schiller and Goethe’.… Don’t people know this Schiller yet? – There are even worse ‘ands’; I have heard ‘Schopenhauer and Hartmann’ with my own ears, though only among university professors, admittedly…
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The most spiritual human beings, assuming they are the most courageous, also by experience by far the most painful tragedies: but it is precisely for this reason that they honour life, because it brings against them its most formidable weapons.
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On the subject of ‘intellectual conscience’. – Nothing seems to me to be rarer today than genuine hypocrisy. I greatly suspect that this plant finds the mild atmosphere of our culture unendurable. Hypocrisy has its place in the ages of strong belief: in which even when one is compelled to exhibit a different belief one does not abandon the belief one already has. Today one does abandon it; or, which is even more common, one acquires a second belief – one remains honest in any event. Beyond doubt, a very much larger number of convictions are possible today, than formerly: possible, that means permitted, that means harmless. That is the origin of self-tolerance. – Self-tolerance permits one to possess several convictions; these conciliate one another – they take care, as all the world does today, not to compromise themselves. How does one compromise oneself today? By being consistent. By going in a straight line. By being less than ambiguous. By being genuine.… I greatly fear that modern man is simply too indolent for certain vices: so that they are actually dying out. All evil which is dependent on strong will – and perhaps there is nothing evil without strength of will – is degenerating, in our tepid atmosphere, into virtue.… The few hypocrites I have known impersonated hypocrisy: they were, like virtually every tenth man nowadays, actors. –
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Beautiful and ugly.* – Nothing is so conditional, let us say circumscribed, as our feeling for the beautiful. Anyone who tried to divorce it from man’s pleasure in man would at once find the ground give way beneath him. The ‘beau
tiful in itself’ is not even a concept, merely a phrase. In the beautiful, man sets himself up as the standard of perfection; in select cases he worships himself in it. A species cannot do otherwise than affirm itself alone in this manner. Its deepest instinct, that of self-preservation and self-aggrandizement, is still visible in such sublimated forms. Man believes that the world itself is filled with beauty – he forgets that it is he who has created it. He alone has bestowed beauty upon the world – alas! only a very human, all too human beauty.… Man really mirrors himself in things, that which give him back his own reflection he considers beautiful: the judgement ‘beautiful’ is his conceit of his species.… For a tiny suspicion whispers into the sceptic’s ear: is the world actually made beautiful because man finds it so? Man has humanized the world: that is all. But there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to guarantee to us that man constitutes the model for the beautiful. Who knows what figure he would cut in the eyes of a higher arbiter of taste? Perhaps a presumptuous one? perhaps even risible? perhaps a little arbitrary?… ‘O Dionysos, divine one, why do you pull my ears?’ Ariadne once asked her philosophical lover during one of those celebrated dialogues on Naxos.† ‘I find a kind of humour in your ears, Ariadne: why are they not longer?’
Twilight of Idols and Anti-Christ (Penguin Classics) Page 8