This profound man, who was right ten times over in
esteeming the superficial Germans low, found the
Siberian convicts among whom he lived for many
years,—those thoroughly hopeless criminals for
whom no road back to society stood open-very
different from what even he had expected,—that is
to say carved from about the best, hardest and most
## p.
esteeming the superficial Germans low, found the
Siberian convicts among whom he lived for many
years,—those thoroughly hopeless criminals for
whom no road back to society stood open-very
different from what even he had expected,—that is
to say carved from about the best, hardest and most
## p.
Nietzsche - v16 - Twilight of the Idols
One never
perishes through anybody's fault but one's own.
The only thing is that the death which takes place
in the most contemptible circumstances, the death
that is not free, the death which occurs at the wrong
time, is the death of a coward. Out of the very love
one bears to life, one should wish death to be different
from this—that is to say, free, deliberate, and neither
a matter of chance nor of surprise. Finally let me
whisper a word of advice to our friends the pessi-
mists and all other decadents. We have not the
power to prevent ourselves from being born: but
this error-for sometimes it is an error-can be recti-
fied if we choose. The man who does away with
himself, performs the most estimable of deeds: he
almost deserves to live for having done so. Society
-nay, life itself, derives more profit from such a
deed than from any sort of life spent in renunciation,
anæmia and other virtues,—at least the suicide frees
others from the sight of him, at least he removes one
objection against life. Pessimism pur et vert, can
be proved only by the self efutation of the pessimists
themselves: one should go a step further in one's
## p. 90 (#110) #############################################
90
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
consistency; one should not merely deny life with
“The World as Will and Idea," as Schopenhauer
did; one should in the first place deny Schopen-
hauer. . . . Incidentally, Pessimism, however infec-
tious it may be, does not increase the morbidness of
an age or of a whole species; it is rather the expres-
a
sion of that morbidness. One falls a victim to it in
the same way as one falls a victim to cholera ; one
must already be predisposed to the disease. Pessi-
mism in itself does not increase the number of the
world's decadents by a single unit. Let me remind
you of the statistical fact that in those years in which
cholera
rages,
the total number of deaths does not
exceed that of other years.
37
Have we become more moral? —As might have been
expected, the whole ferocity of moral stultification,
which, as is well known, passes for morality itself in
Germany, hurled itself against my concept“ Beyond
Good and Evil. ” I could tell you some nice tales
about this. Above all, people tried to make me see
the “incontestable superiority” of our age in regard
to moral sentiment, and the progress we had made
in these matters. Compared with us, a Cæsar Borgia
was by no means to be represented as “higher man,"
the sort of Superman, which I declared him to be.
The editor of the Swiss paper the Bund went so far
as not only to express his admiration for the courage
displayed by my enterprise, but also to pretend to
“understand” that the intended purpose of my work
was to abolish all decent feeling. Much obliged ! -
In reply, I venture to raise the following question ;
## p. 91 (#111) #############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE
91
have we really become more moral? The fact that
everybody believes that we have is already an objec-
tion to the belief. We modern men, so extremely
delicate and susceptible, full of consideration one
for the other, actually dare to suppose that the
pampering fellow-feeling which we all display, this
unanimity which we have at last acquired in sparing
and helping and trusting one another marksa definite
step forward, and shows us to be far ahead of the
man of the Renaissance. But every age thinks the
same, it is bound to think the same. This at least
is certain, that we should not dare to stand amid
the conditions which prevailed at the Renaissance,
we should not even dare to imagine ourselves in
those conditions : our nerves could not endure that
reality, not to speak of our muscles. The inability
to do this however does not denote any progress;
but simply the different and more senile quality of our
particular nature, its greater weakness, delicateness,
and susceptibility, out of which a morality more rich
in consideration was bound to arise. If we imagine
our delicateness and senility, our physiological de-
crepitude as non-existent, our morality of “human-
isation” would immediately lose all value—no
morality has
per se—it would even fill us
with scorn.
On the other hand, do not let us doubt
that we moderns, wrapped as we are in the thick
cotton wool of our humanitarianism which would
shrink even from grazing a stone, would present a
comedy to Cæsar Borgia's contemporaries which
would literally make them die of laughter. We are
indeed, without knowing it, exceedingly ridiculous
with our modern“ virtues. ” The decline of the
any value
## p. 92 (#112) #############################################
92
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
"
.
.
instincts of hostility and of those instincts that arouse
suspicion,-for this if anything is what constitutes
our progress—is only one of the results mani-
fested by the general decline in vitality: it requires a
hundred times more trouble and caution to live such
a dependent and senile existence. In such circum-
stances everybody gives everybody else a helping
hand, and, to a certain extent, everybody is either
an invalid or an invalid's attendant. This is then
called “virtue”: among those men who knew a
different life-that is to say, a fuller, more prodigal,
more superabundant sort of life, it might have
been called by another name,-possibly “cowardice,"
or “vileness,” or “old woman's morality. " Our
mollification of morals—this is my cry; this if you
will is my innovation—is the outcome of our decline;
conversely hardness and terribleness in morals may
be the result of a surplus of life. When the latter
state prevails, much is dared, much is challenged,
and much is also squandered. That which formerly
was simply the salt of life, would now be our poison.
To be indifferent-even this is a form of strength-
for that, likewise, we are too senile, too decrepit: our
morality of fellow-feeling, against which I was the
first to raise a finger of warning, that which might be
called moral impressionism, is one symptom the more
of the excessive physiological irritability which is
peculiar to everything decadent. That movement
which attempted to introduce itself in a scientific
manner on the shoulders of Schopenhauer's morality
of pity-a very sad attempt ! -is in its essence the
movement of decadence in morality, and as such it
is intimately related to Christian morality. Strong
a
## p. 93 (#113) #############################################
SKIKMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE 93
.
a
ages and noble cultures see something contemptible
in pity, in the “love of one's neighbour,” and in a
lack of egoism and of self-esteem. -Ages should be
measured according to their positive forces ;-valued
by this standard that prodigal and fateful age of the
Renaissance, appears as the last great age, while we
moderns with our anxious care of ourselves and love
of our neighbours, with all our unassuming virtues
of industry, equity, and scientific method—with our
lust of collection, of economy and of mechanism-
representa weak
age. . . Ourvirtues are necessarily
determined, and are even stimulated, by our weak-
ness. “Equality,"acertain definite process of making
everybody uniform, which only finds its expression
in the theory of equal rights, is essentially bound up
with a declining culture: the chasm between man
and
man,
class and class, the multiplicity of types,
the will to be one's self, and to distinguish one's self
—that, in fact, which I call the pathos of distance
is proper to all strong ages. The force of tension,
-nay, the tension itself, between extremes grows
slighter every day,—the extremes themselves are
tending to become obliterated to the point of becom-
ing identical. All our political theories and state con-
stitutions, not by any means excepting “The German
Empire,” are the logical consequences, the necessary
consequences of decline; the unconscious effect of
decadence has begun to dominate even the ideals
of the various sciences. My objection to the whole
of English and French sociology still continues to
be this, that it knows only the decadent form of
society from experience, and with perfectly childlike
innocence takes the instincts of decline as the norm,
## p. 94 (#114) #############################################
94
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
the standard, of sociological valuations. Descending
life, the decay of all organising power—that is to
say, of all that power which separates, cleaves gulfs,
and establishes rank above and below, formulated
itself in modern sociology as the ideal. Our socialists
are decadents: but Herbert Spencer was also a
decadent,-he saw something to be desired in the
triumph of altruism! .
.
38
My Concept of Freedom. —Sometimes the value
of a thing does not lie in that which it helps us to
achieve, but in the amount we have to pay for it, —
what it costs us. For instance, liberal institutions
straightway cease from being liberal, the moment
they are soundly established: once this is attained
no more grievous and more thorough enemies of
freedom exist than liberal institutions! One knows,
of course, what they bring about: they undermine
the Will to Power, they are the levelling of mountain
and valley exalted to a morality, they make people
small, cowardly and pleasure-loving,—by means of
them the gregarious animal invariably triumphs.
Liberalism, or, in plain English, the transformation
of mankind into cattle. The same institutions, so long
as they are fought for, produce quite other results ;
then indeed they promote the cause of freedom
quite powerfully. Regarded more closely, it is war
which produces these results, war in favour of liberal
institutions, which, as war, allows the illiberal in-
stincts to subsist. For war trains men to be free.
What in sooth is freedom? Freedom is the will to
be responsible for ourselves. It is to preserve the
## p. 95 (#115) #############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE 95
*
distance which separates us from other men. To
grow more indifferent to hardship, to severity, to
privation, and even to life itself. To be ready to
sacrifice men for one's cause, one's self included.
Freedom denotes that the virile instincts which
rejoice in war and in victory, prevail over other in-
stincts; for instance,over the instincts of “happiness. ”
The man who has won his freedom, and how much
more so, therefore, the spirit that has won its freedom,
tramples ruthlessly upon that contemptible kind of
comfort which tea-grocers, Christians, cows, women,
Englishmen and other democrats worship in their
dreams. The free man is a warrior. -How is free-
dom measured in individuals as well as in nations ?
According to the resistance which has to be over-
come, according to the pains which it costs to
remain uppermost. The highest type of free man
would have to be sought where the greatest resist-
ance has continually to be overcome: five paces
away from tyranny, on the very threshold of the
danger of thraldom. This is psychologically true
if, by the word “Tyrants” we mean inexorable and
terrible instincts which challenge the maximum
amount of authority and discipline to oppose them
-the finest example of this is Julius Cæsar ; it is also
true politically : just examine the course of history.
The nations which were worth anything, which got
to be worth anything, never attained to that condi-
tion under liberal institutions : great danger made
out of them something which deserves reverence,
that danger which alone can make us aware of our
resources, our virtues, our means of defence, our
weapons, our genius,—which compels us to be strong,
»
## p. 96 (#116) #############################################
96
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
First principle: a man must need to be strong, other-
wise he will never attain it. —Those great forcing-
houses of the strong, of the strongest kind of men
that have ever existed on earth, the aristocratic com-
munities like those of Rome and Venice, understood
freedom precisely as I understand the word : as
something that one has and that one has not, as
something that one will have and that one seizes by
force.
39
A Criticism of Modernity. –Our institutions are
no longer any good; on this point we are all agreed.
But the fault does not lie with them ; but with us.
Now that we have lost all the instincts out of
which institutions grow, the latter on their part are
beginning to disappear from our midst because we
are no longer fit for them. Democracy has always
been the death agony of the power of organisation :
already in “Human All-too-Human,” Part I. , Aph.
472, I pointed out that modern democracy, together
with its half-measures, of which the “German
Empire” is an example, was a decaying form of
the State. For institutions to be possible there must
exist a sort of will, instinct, imperative, which cannot
be otherwise than antiliberal to the point of wicked-
ness: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsi-
bility for centuries to come, to solidarity in long
family lines forwards and backwards in infinitum.
If this will is present, something is founded which
resembles the imperium Romanum : or Russia, the
only great nation to-day that has some lasting power
and grit in her, that can bide her time, that can
still promise something. -Russia the opposite of all
## p. 97 (#117) #############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE 97
wretched European petty-statism and neurasthenia,
which the foundation of the German Empire has
brought to a crisis. The whole of the Occident no
longer possesses those instincts from which institu-
tions spring, out of which a future grows: maybe
nothing is more opposed to its “modern spirit
than these things. People live for the present, they
live at top speed,—they certainly live without any
sense of responsibility; and this is precisely what
they call “freedom. ” Everything in institutions
which makes them institutions, is scorned, loathed
and repudiated : everybody is in mortal fear of a
new slavery, wherever the word "authority” is so
much as whispered. The decadence of the valuing
instinct, both in our politicians and in our political
parties, goes so far, that they instinctively prefer
that which acts as a solvent, that which precipitates
the final catastrophe. . . . As an example of this
behold modern marriage. All reason has obviously
been divorced from modern marriage : but this is no
objection to matrimony itself but to modernity.
The rational basis of marriage-it lay in the ex-
clusive legal responsibility of the man: by this means
some ballast was laid in the ship of matrimony,
whereas nowadays it has a list, now on this side, now
on that. The rational basis of marriage—it lay in its
absolute indissolubleness : in this way it was given
a gravity which knew how to make its influence felt,
in the face of the accident of sentiment, passion and
momentary impulse: it lay also in the fact that the
responsibility of choosing the parties to the contract,
lay with the families. By showing ever more and
more favour to love-marriages, the very foundation
:
7
## p. 98 (#118) #############################################
98
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
of matrimony, that which alone makes it an institu-
tion, has been undermined. No institution ever has
been nor ever will be built upon an idiosyncrasy; as
I say, marriage cannot be based upon “love. " It
can be based upon sexual desire ; upon the instinct
of property (wife and child as possessions); upon the
instinct of dominion, which constantly organises for
itself the smallest form of dominion, the family
which requires children and heirs in order to hold
fast, also in the physiological sense, to a certain
quantum of acquired power, influence and wealth,
so as to prepare for lasting tasks, and for solidarity in
the instincts from one century to another. Marriage
as an institution presupposes the affirmation of the
greatest and most permanent form of organisation;
if society cannot as a whole stand security for itself
into the remotest generations, marriage has no mean-
ing whatsoever. —Modern marriage has lost its mean-
ing; consequently it is being abolished.
40
The question of the Working-man. —The mere fact
that there is such a thing as the question of the work-
ing-man is due to stupidity, or at bottom to degen-
erate instincts which are the cause of all the stu-
pidity of modern times. Concerning certain things
no questions ought to be put: the first imperative
principle of instinct. For the life of me I cannot
see what people want to do with the working-man
of Europe, now that they have made a question of
him. He is far too comfortable to cease from ques-
tioning ever more and more, and with ever less
modesty. After all, he has the majority on his side.
## p. 99 (#119) #############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE 99
There is now not the slightest hope that an unassum-
ing and contented sort of man, after the style of the
Chinaman, will come into being in this quarter : and
this would have been the reasonable course, it was
even a dire necessity. What has been done? Every-
thing has been done with the view of nipping the
very pre-requisite of this accomplishment in the bud,
—with the most frivolous thoughtlessness those self-
same instincts by means of which a working-class
becomes possible, and tolerable even to its members
themselves, have been destroyed root and branch.
The working-man has been declared fit for military
service; he has been granted the right of combina-
tion, and of voting : can it be wondered at that he
already regards his condition as one of distress (ex-
pressed morally, as an injustice)? But, again I ask,
what do people want? If they desire a certain end,
then they should desire the means thereto. If they
will have slaves, then it is madness to educate them
to be masters.
41
»*_In
-
“The kind of freedom I do not mean. . .
an age like the present, it simply adds to one's perils
to be left to one's instincts. The instincts contra-
dict, disturb, and destroy each other ; I have already
defined modernism as physiological self-contra-
diction. A reasonable system of education would
insist upon at least one of these instinct-systems
being paralysed beneath an iron pressure, in order to
* This is a playful adaptation of Max von Schenkendorf's
poem “ Freiheit. ” The proper line reads : "Freiheit die ich
meine” (The freedom that I do mean). —TR.
## p. 100 (#120) ############################################
IOO
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
allow others to assert their power, to grow strong,
and to dominate. At present, the only conceivable
way of making the individual possible would be to
prune him :-of making him possible—that is to say,
whole. The very reverse occurs. Independence,
free development, and laisser aller are clamoured
for most violently precisely by those for whom no
restraint could be too severe—this is true in politics, it
is true in Art. But this is a symptom of decadence:
our modern notion of “freedom” is one proof the
more of the degeneration of instinct.
42
Where faith is necessary. —Nothing is more rare
among moralists and saints than uprightness; may-
be they say the reverse is true, maybe they even be-
lieve it. For, when faith is more useful, more effec-
tive, more convincing than conscious hypocrisy, by
instinct that hypocrisy forthwith becomes innocent :
first principle towards the understanding of great
saints. The same holds good of philosophers, that
other order of saints; their whole business compels
them to concede only certain truths—that is to say,
those by means of which their particular trade
receives the public sanction,—to speak“ Kantingly":
the truths of practical reason. They know what
they must prove ; in this respect they are practical,
—they recognise each other by the fact that they
agree upon “certain truths. ”—“Thou shalt not lie”
-in plain English :-Beware, Mr Philosopher, of
speaking the truth. . . .
-
.
## p. 101 (#121) ############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE
IOI
1
1
43
A quiet hint to Conservatives. —That which we did
not know formerly, and know now, or might know
if we chose,—is the fact that a retrograde formation,
a reversion in any sense or degree, is absolutely im-
possible. We physiologists, at least, are aware of
this. But all priests and moralists have believed in
it,—they wished to drag and screw man back to a
former standard of virtue. Morality has always been
a Procrustean bed. Even the politicians have imi-
tated the preachers of virtue in this matter. There
are parties at the present day whose one aim and
dream is to make all things adopt the crab-march.
But not everyone can be a crab. It cannot be helped:
we must go forward,—that is to say step by step
further and further into decadence (this is my
definition of modern “progress”). We can hinder
this development, and by so doing dam up and
accumulate degeneration itself and render it more
convulsive, more volcanic: we cannot do more.
a
C
44
My concept of Genius. —Great men, like great
ages, are explosive material, in which a stupendous
amount of power is accumulated; the first conditions
of their existence are always historical and physio-
logical; they are the outcome of the fact that for
long ages energy has been collected, hoarded up,
saved
up and preserved for their use, and that no
explosion has taken place. When the tension in
the bulk has become sufficiently excessive, the most
fortuitous stimulus suffices in order to call " "genius,"
## p. 102 (#122) ############################################
102
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
'great deeds,” and momentous fate into the world.
What then is the good of all environment, historical
periods, “ Zeitgeist” (Spirit of the age) and “public
opinion”? _Take the case of Napoleon. France of
the Revolution, and still more of the period pre-
ceding the Revolution, would have brought forward
a type which was the very reverse of Napoleon : it
actually did produce such a type. And because
Napoleon was something different, the heir of a
stronger, more lasting and older civilisation than
that which in France was being smashed to atoms
he became master there, he was the only master
there. Great men are necessary,
the age in which
they appear is a matter of chance; the fact that they
almost invariably master their age is accounted for
simply by the fact that they are stronger, that they
are older, and that power has been stored longer for ·
them. The relation of a genius to his age is that
which exists between strength and weakness and
between maturity and youth: the age is relatively
always very much younger, thinner, less mature, less
resolute and more childish. The fact that the general
opinion in France at the present day, is utterly differ-
ent on this very point (in Germany too, but that is
of no consequence); the fact that in that country
the theory of environment-a regular neuropathic
notion has become sacrosanct and almost scientific,
and finds acceptance even among the physiologists,
is a very bad, and exceedingly depressing sign. In
England too the same belief prevails : but nobody
will be surprised at that. The Englishman knows
only two ways of understanding the genius and the
"great man”: either democratically in the style of
## p. 103 (#123) ############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE
103
Buckle, or religiously after the manner of Carlyle. -
The danger which great men and great ages repre-
sent, is simply extraordinary ; every kind of exhaus-
tion and of sterility follows in their wake. The great
man is an end; the great age—the Renaissance for
instance,—is an end. The genius—in work and in
deed,-is necessarily a squanderer : the fact that
he spends himself constitutes his greatness. The
instinct of self-preservation is as it were suspended
in him; the overpowering pressure of out-flowing
energy in him forbids any such protection and pru-
dence. People call this “self-sacrifice,” they praise
his “heroism,” his indifference to his own well-being,
his utter devotion to an idea, a great cause, a father-
land: All misunderstandings. . . He flows out,
, he consumes himself, he does not spare
himself,--and does all this with fateful necessity,
irrevocably, involuntarily, just as a river involuntarily
bursts its dams. But, owing to the fact that human-
ity has been much indebted to such explosives, it
has endowed them with many things, for instance,
with a kind of higher morality. . . . This is indeed
.
the sort of gratitude that humanity is capable of :
it misunderstands its benefactors.
he flows over,
45
-
The criminal and his like. —The criminal type is
the type of the strong man amid unfavourable con-
ditions, a strong man made sick. He lacks the wild
and savage state, a form of nature and existence
which is freer and more dangerous, in which every-
thing that constitutes the shield and the sword in
## p. 104 (#124) ############################################
104
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
the instinct of the strong man, takes a place by right.
Society puts a ban upon his virtues; the most
spirited instincts inherent in him immediately be-
come involved with the depressing passions, with
suspicion, fear and dishonour. But this is almost
the recipe for physiological degeneration. When a
man has to do that which he is best suited to do,
which he is most fond of doing, not only clandes-
tinely, but also with long suspense, caution and ruse,
he becomes anæmic; and inasmuch as he is always
having to pay for his instincts in the form of danger,
persecution and fatalities, even his feelings begin
to turn against these instincts—he begins to regard
them as fatal. It is society, our tame, mediocre,
castrated society, in which an untutored son of
nature who comes to us from his mountains or from
his adventures at sea, must necessarily degenerate
into a criminal. Or almost necessarily: for there
are cases in which such a man shows himself to be
stronger than society: the Corsican Napoleon is
the most celebrated case of this. Concerning the
problem before us, Dostoiewsky's testimony is of
importance-Dostoiewsky who, incidentally, was
the only psychologist from whom I had anything
to learn: he belongs to the happiest windfalls of
my life, happier even than the discovery of Stendhal.
This profound man, who was right ten times over in
esteeming the superficial Germans low, found the
Siberian convicts among whom he lived for many
years,—those thoroughly hopeless criminals for
whom no road back to society stood open-very
different from what even he had expected,—that is
to say carved from about the best, hardest and most
## p. 105 (#125) ############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE
105
a
valuable material that grows on Russian soil. * Let
us generalise the case of the criminal ; let us imagine
creatures who for some reason or other fail to meet
with public approval, who know that they are re-
garded neither as beneficent nor useful,—the feeling
of the Chandala, who are aware that they are not
looked upon as equal, but as proscribed, unworthy,
polluted. The thoughts and actions of all such
natures are tainted with a subterranean mouldiness;
everything in them is of a paler hue than in those
on whose existence the sun shines. But almost all
those creatures whom, nowadays, we honour and
respect, formerly lived in this semi-sepulchral atmo-
sphere: the man of science, the artist, the genius,
the free spirit, the actor, the business man, and the
great explorer. As long as the priest represented
the highest type of man, every valuable kind of man
was depreciated. . The time is coming—this I
guarantee—when he will pass as the lowest type, as
our Chandala, as the falsest and most disreputable
kind of man.
I call your attention to the fact
that even now, under the sway of the mildest
customs and usages which have ever ruled on earth
or at least in Europe, every form of standing aside,
every kind of prolonged, excessively prolonged con-
cealment, every unaccustomed and obscure form of
existence tends to approximate to that type which
the criminal exemplifies to perfection. All pioneers
of the spirit have, for a while, the grey and fatalistic
mark of the Chandala on their brows: not because
they are regarded as Chandala, but because they
* See “Memoirs of a House of the Dead,” by Dostoiewsky
(translation by Marie von Thilo : "Buried Alive"). -TR.
.
## p. 106 (#126) ############################################
106
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
themselves feel the terrible chasm which separates
them from all that is traditional and honourable.
Almost every genius knows the “Catilinarian life”
as one of the stages in his development, a feeling
of hate, revenge and revolt against everything that
exists, that has ceased to evolve. Catiline-the
early stage of every Cæsar.
.
.
46
Here the outlook is free. -When a philosopher
holds his tongue it may be the sign of the loftiness
of his soul : when he contradicts himself it may be
love; and the very courtesy of a knight of knowledge
may force him to lie. It has been said, and not with-
out subtlety :-il est indigne des grands cæurs de ré-
pandre le trouble qu'ils ressentent* : but it is neces-
sary to add that there may also be grandeur de cæur
in not shrinking from the most undignified proceed-
ing. A woman who loves sacrifices her honour; a
knight of knowledge who“ loves,” sacrifices perhaps
his humanity; a God who loved, became a Jew. . .
a
47
Beauty no accident. —Even the beauty of a race or
of a family, the charm and perfection of all its move-
ments, is attained with pains : like genius it is the
final result of the accumulated work of generations.
Great sacrifices must have been made on the altar of
good taste, for its sake many things must have been
done, and much must have been left undone-the
seventeenth century in France is admirable for both of
* Clothilde de Veaux. -TR.
*
## p. 107 (#127) ############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE 107
these things,-in this century there must have been
a principle of selection in respect to company,
locality, clothing, the gratification of the instinct of
sex; beauty must have been preferred to profit, to
habit, to opinion and to indolence. The first rule of
all :-nobody must “let himself go," not even when
he is alone. —Good things are exceedingly costly:
and in all cases the law obtains that he who possesses
them is a different person from him who is acquiring
them. Everything good is an inheritance: that
which is not inherited is imperfect, it is simply a be-
a
ginning. In Athens at the time of Cicero—who ex-
presses his surprise at the fact-the men and youths
were by far superior in beauty to the women: but
what hard work and exertions the male sex had for
centuries imposed upon itself in the service of beauty!
We must not be mistaken in regard to the method
employed here: the mere discipline of feelings and
thoughts is little better than nil (-it is in this that
the great error of German culture, which is quite
illusory, lies): the body must be persuaded first. The
strict maintenance of a distinguished and tasteful
demeanour, the obligation of frequenting only those
who do not “let themselves go,” is amply sufficient
to render one distinguished and tasteful : in two or
three generations everything has already taken deep
root. The fate of a people and of humanity is de-
cided according to whether they begin culture at the
right place—not at the “soul” (as the fatal supersti-
tion of the priests and half-priests would have it):
the right place is the body, demeanour, diet, physio-
logy—the rest follows as the night the day. .
That is why the Greeks remain the first event in
.
## p. 108 (#128) ############################################
108
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
culture—they knew and they did what was needful.
Christianity with its contempt of the body is the
greatest mishap that has ever befallen mankind.
.
48
Progress in my sense. —I also speak of a “return to
nature,” although it is not a process of going back
but of going up-up into lofty, free and even terrible
nature and naturalness; such a nature as can play
with great tasks and may play with them. . . . To
speak in a parable, Napoleon was an example of a
“ return to nature," as I understand it (for instance
in rebus tacticis, and still more, as military experts
know, in strategy). But Rousseau-whither did he
want to return? Rousseau this first modern man,
idealist and canaille in one person; who was in need
of moral" dignity,” in order even to endure the sight
of his own person,-ill with unbridled vanity and
wanton self-contempt; this abortion, who planted
his tent on the threshold of modernity, also wanted
a “return to nature”; but, I ask once more, whither
did he wish to return? I hate Rousseau, even in
the Revolution itself: the latter was the historical
expression of this hybrid of idealist and canaille.
The bloody farce which this Revolution ultimately
became, its “immorality," concerns me but slightly;
what I loathe however is its Rousseauesque morality
-the so-called “truths" of the Revolution, by means
of which it still exercises power and draws all flat
and mediocre things over to its side. The doctrine
of equality! . . . But there is no more deadly poison
!
than this ; for it seems to proceed from the very lips
of justice, whereas in reality it draws the curtain
)
.
## p. 109 (#129) ############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE
109
down on all justice. . . . “To equals equality, to
unequals inequality”—that would be the real speech
of justice and that which follows from it. “Never
make unequal things equal. ” The fact that so much
horror and blood are associated with this doctrine of
equality, has lent this “modern idea" par excellence
such a halo of fire and glory, that the Revolution as
a drama has misled even the most noble minds.
That after all is no reason for honouring it the more.
-I can see only one who regarded it as it should be
regarded—that is to say, with loathing ; I speak of
Goethe.
49
Goethe. —No mere German, but a European event :
a magnificent attempt to overcome the eighteenth
century by means of a return to nature, by means
of an ascent to the naturalness of the Renaissance,
a kind of self-overcoming on the part of the century
in question. —He bore the strongest instincts of
this century in his breast: its sentimentality, and
idolatry of nature, its anti-historic, idealistic, unreal,
and revolutionary spirit (the latter is only a form
of the unreal). He enlisted history, natural science,
antiquity, as well as Spinoza, and above all practi-
cal activity, in his service. He drew a host of very
definite horizons around him ; far from liberating
himself from life, he plunged right into it; he did
not give in; he took as much as he could on his own
shoulders, and into his heart. That to which he
aspired was totality ; he was opposed to the sunder-
ing of reason, sensuality, feeling and will (as preached
with most repulsive scholasticism by Kant, the
antipodes of Goethe); he disciplined himself into a
harmonious whole, he created himself. Goethe in the
## p. 110 (#130) ############################################
IIO
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
midst of an age of unreal sentiment, was a convinced
realist: he said yea to everything that was like him
in this regard,—there was no greater event in his
life than that ens realissimum, surnamed Napoleon.
Goethe conceived a strong, highly-cultured man,
skilful in all bodily accomplishments, able to keep
himself in check, having a feeling of reverence for
himself, and so constituted as to be able to risk the
full enjoyment of naturalness in all its rich profusion
and be strong enough for this freedom; a man of
tolerance, not out of weakness but out of strength,
because he knows how to turn to his own profit
that which would ruin the mediocre nature; a man
unto whom nothing is any longer forbidden, unless
it be weakness either as a vice or as a virtue. Such
a spirit, become free, appears in the middle of the
universe with a feeling of cheerful and confident
fatalism he believes that only individual things are
bad, and that as a whole the universe justifies and
affirms itself—He no longer denies. . . . But such a
faith is the highest of all faiths : I christened it with
the name of Dionysus.
50
It might be said that, in a certain sense,
the nine-
teenth century also strove after all that Goethe
himself aspired to: catholicity in understanding, in
approving; a certain reserve towards everything,
daring realism, and a reverence for every fact. How
is it that the total result of this is not a Goethe, but
a state of chaos, a nihilistic groan, an inability to
discover where one is, an instinct of fatigue which
in praxi is persistently driving Europe to hark back
to the eighteenth century ? (-For instance in the
form of maudlin romanticism, altruism, hyper-senti-
## p. 111 (#131) ############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE
III
mentality, pessimism in taste, and socialism in
politics). Is not the nineteenth century, at least in
its closing years, merely an accentuated, brutalised
eighteenth century,—that is to say a century of
decadence? And has not Goethe been—not alone
for Germany, but also for the whole of Europe, -
merely an episode, a beautiful “in vain"? But great
men are misunderstood when they are regarded
from the wretched standpoint of public utility.
The fact that no advantage can be derived from
them-this in itself may perhaps be peculiar to great-
ness.
51
Goethe is the last German whom I respect : he
had understood three things as I understand them.
We also agree as to the “cross. ”* People often ask
me why on earth I write in German : nowhere am I
less read than in the Fatherland. But who knows
whether I even desire to be read at present ? —To
create things on which time may try its teeth in
vain; to be concerned both in the form and the
substance of my writing, about a certain degree of
immortality-never have I been modest enough to
demand less of myself. The aphorism, the sentence,
in both of which I, as the first among Germans, am
a master, are the forms of "eternity”; it is my
ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else
says in a whole book,—what everyone else does not
say in a whole book.
I have given mankind the deepest book it pos-
sesses, my Zarathustra ; before long I shall give
it the most independent one.
* See my note on p. 147 of Vol. I. of the Will to Power. -TR.
1
## p. 112 (#132) ############################################
THINGS I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS
I
-
In conclusion I will just say a word concerning that
world to which I have sought new means of access,
to which I may perhaps have found a new passage
-the ancient world. My taste, which is perhaps
the reverse of tolerant, is very far from saying yea
through and through even to this world: on the
whole it is not over eager to say Yea, it would prefer
to say Nay, and better still nothing whatever.
This is true of whole cultures; it is true of books,-
it is also true of places and of landscapes. Truth to
tell, the number of ancient books that count for some-
thing in my life is but small; and the most famous
are not of that number. My sense of style, for the
epigramasstyle, was awakened almost spontaneously
upon my acquaintance with Sallust. I have not for-
gotten the astonishment of my respected teacher
Corssen, when he was forced to give his worst Latin
pupil the highest marks,-at one stroke I had learned
all there was to learn. Condensed, severe, with as
much substance as possible in the background, and
with cold but roguish hostility towards all “ beauti-
ful words” and “beautiful feelings"—in these things
I found my own particular bent. In my writings
up to my “ Zarathustra,” there will be found a very
earnest ambition to attain to the Roman style, to
112
## p. 113 (#133) ############################################
THINGS I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS
113
the “aere perennius” in style. —The same thing hap-
pened on my first acquaintance with Horace. Up
to the present no poet has given me the same artistic
raptures as those which from the first I received from
an Horatian ode. In certain languages it would be
absurd even to aspire to what is accomplished by
this poet. This mosaic of words, in which every
,
unit spreads its power to the left and to the right
over the whole, by its sound, by its place in the sen-
tence, and by its meaning, this minimum in the com-
pass and number of the signs, and the maximum of
energy in the signs which is thereby achieved—all
this is Roman, and, if you will believe me, noble par
excellence. By the side of this all the rest of poetry
becomes something popular,—nothing more than
senseless sentimental twaddle.
-
2
I am not indebted to the Greeks for anything like
such strong impressions; and, to speak frankly, they
cannot be to us what the Romans are. One cannot
learn from the Greeks—their style is too strange, it
is also too fluid, to be imperative or to have the effect
of a classic. Who would ever have learnt writing
from a Greek! Who would ever have learned it
without the Romans! . . . Do not let anyone
suggest Plato to me. In regard to Plato I am a
thorough sceptic, and have never been able to agree
to the admiration of Plato the artist, which is tradi-
tional among scholars. And after all, in this matter,
the most refined judges of taste in antiquity are on
my side. In my opinion Plato bundles all the forms
of style pell-mell together, in this respect he is one
8
## p. 114 (#134) ############################################
114
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
-
of the first decadents of style: he has something
similar on his conscience to that which the Cynics
had who invented the satura Menippea. For the
Platonic dialogue—this revoltingly self-complacent
and childish kind of dialectics—to exercise any
charm over you, you must never have read any good
French authors,—Fontenelle for instance. Plato is
boring. In reality my distrust of Platois fundamental.
I find him so very much astray from all the deepest
instincts of the Hellenes, so steeped in moral pre-
judices, so pre-existently Christian—the concept
“good” is already the highest value with him,—that
rather than use any other expression I would prefer
to designate the whole phenomenon Plato with the
hard word “superior bunkum,” or, if you would like
it better, “idealism. ” Humanity has had to pay
dearly for this Athenian having gone to school among
the Egyptians (-or among the Jews in Egypt? . . . ).
In the great fatality of Christianity, Plato is that
double-faced fascination called the “ideal,” which
made it possible for the more noble natures of anti-
quity to misunderstand themselves and to tread the
bridge which led to the “cross. ” And what an amount
of Plato is still to be found in the concept “church,"
and in the construction, the system and the practice
of the church! —My recreation, my predilection, my
cure,after all Platonism, has always been Thucydides.
Thucydides and perhaps Machiavelli's principe are
most closely related to me owing to the absolute
determination which they show of refusing to deceive
themselves and of seeing reason in reality,—not in
“ rationality,” and still less in “morality. ” There is
no moreradical cure than Thucydides for the lament-
## p. 115 (#135) ############################################
THINGS I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS
115
ably rose-coloured idealisation of the Greeks which
the “classically-cultured” stripling bears with him
into life, as a reward for his public school training.
His writings must be carefully studied line by line,
and his unuttered thoughts must be read as distinctly
as what he actually says. There are few thinkers so
rich in unuttered thoughts. In him the culture “of
the Sophists "—that is to say, the culture of realism,
receives its most perfect expression: this inestim-
able movement in the midst of the moral and ideal-
istic knavery of the Socratic Schools which was then
breaking out in all directions. Greek philosophy
is the decadence of the Greek instinct: Thucydides
is the great summing up, the final manifestation
of that strong, severe positivism which lay in the
instincts of the ancient Hellene. After all, it is
courage in the face of reality that distinguishes such
natures as Thucydides from Plato: Plato is a coward
in the face of reality-consequently he takes refuge
in the ideal : Thucydides is master of himself,-
consequently he is able to master life.
»
means
3
To rout up cases of “beautiful souls,” “golden
and other perfections among the Greeks, to
admire, say, their calm grandeur, their ideal attitude
of mind, their exalted simplicity-from this “exalted
simplicity,” which after all is a piece of niaiserie
allemande, I was preserved by the psychologist within
I saw their strongest instinct, the Will to
Power, I saw them quivering with the fierce violence
of this instinct,-I saw all their institutions grow
out of measures of security calculated to preserve
me.
## p. 116 (#136) ############################################
116
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
each member of their society from the inner ex-
plosive material that lay in his neighbour's breast.
This enormous internal tension thus discharged
itself in terrible and reckless hostility outside the
state : the various states mutually tore each other
to bits, in order that each individual state could re-
main at peace with itself. It was then necessary to
be strong ; for danger lay close at hand,-it lurked
in ambush everywhere. The superb suppleness of
their bodies, the daring realism and immorality
which is peculiar to the Hellenes, was a necessity
not an inherent quality. It was a result, it had not
been there from the beginning. Even their festivals
and their arts were but means in producing a
feeling of superiority, and of showing it: they are
measures of self-glorification ; and in certain circum-
stances of making one's self terrible. . . . Fancy
judging the Greeks in the German style, from their
philosophers; fancy using the suburban respecta-
bility of the Socratic schools as a key to what is
fundamentally Hellenic! . . The philosophers are
of course the decadents of Hellas, the counter-
movement directed against the old and noble taste
against the agonal instinct, against the Polis,
against the value of the race, against the authority
of tradition). Socratic virtues were preached to the
Greeks, because the Greeks had lost virtue : irritable,
cowardly, unsteady, and all turned to play-actors,
they had more than sufficient reason to submit to
having morality preached to them. Not that it
helped them in any way; but great words and atti-
tudes are so becoming to decadents.
## p. 117 (#137) ############################################
THINGS I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS
117
4
I was the first who, in order to understand the
ancient, still rich and even superabundant Hellenic
instinct, took that marvellous phenomenon, which
bears the name of Dionysus, seriously: it can be ex-
plained only as a manifestation of excessive energy.
Whoever had studied the Greeks, as that most pro-
found of modern connoisseurs of their culture, Jakob
Burckhardt of Bâle, had done, knew at once that
something had been achieved by means of this in-
terpretation. And in his “ Cultur der Griechen,"
Burckhardt inserted a special chapter on the pheno-
menon in question. If you would like a glimpse of
the other side, you have only to refer to the almost
laughable poverty of instinct among German philo-
logists when they approach the Dionysian question.
The celebrated Lobeck, especially, who with the
venerable assurance of a worm dried up between
books, crawled into this world of mysterious states,
succeeded in convincing himself that he was scientific,
whereas he was simply revoltingly superficial and
childish,-Lobeck, with all the pomp of profound
erudition, gave us to understand that, as a matter of
fact, there was nothing at all in all these curiosities.
Truth to tell, the priests may well have communi-
cated not a few things of value to the participators
in such orgies; for instance, the fact that wine pro-
vokes desire, that man in certain circumstances lives
on fruit, that plants bloom in the spring and fade
in the autumn. As regards the astounding wealth
of rites, symbols and myths which take their origin
in the
orgy,
and with which the world of antiquity
## p. 118 (#138) ############################################
118
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
is literally smothered, Lobeck finds that it prompts
him to a feat of even greater ingenuity than the
foregoing phenomenon did. "The Greeks,” he says,
(Aglaophamus, I. p. 672), “when they had nothing
.
better to do, laughed, sprang and romped about, or,
inasmuch as men also like a change at times, they
would sit down, weep and bewail their lot. Others
then came up who tried to discover some reason for
this strange behaviour; and thus, as an explanation
of these habits, there arose an incalculable number of
festivals, legends, and myths. On the other hand it
was believed that the farcical performances which
then perchance began to take place on festival days,
necessarily formed part of the celebrations, and they
were retained as an indispensable part of the ritual. ”
- This is contemptible nonsense, and no one will
take a man like Lobeck seriously for a moment.
We are very differently affected when we examine
the notion “Hellenic," as Winckelmann and Goethe
conceived it, and find it incompatible with that ele-
ment out of which Dionysian art springs—I speak
of orgiasm. In reality I do not doubt that Goethe
would have completely excluded any such thing
from the potentialities of the Greek soul. Conse-
quently Goethe did not understand the Greeks. For
it is only in the Dionysian mysteries, in the psycho-
logy of the Dionysian state, that the fundamental
fact of the Hellenic instinct—its “will to life”—is ex-
pressed. What did the Hellene secure himself with
these mysteries? Eternal life, the eternal recurrence
of life; the future promised and hallowed in the past;
the triumphant Yea to life despite death and change;
real life conceived as the collective prolongation of
## p. 119 (#139) ############################################
THINGS I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS
119
life through procreation, through the mysteries of
sexuality. To the Greeks, the symbol of sex was
the most venerated of symbols, the really deep
significance of all the piety of antiquity. All the
details of the act of procreation, pregnancy and birth
gave rise to the loftiest and most solemn feelings.
In the doctrine of mysteries, pain was pronounced
holy: the “pains of childbirth” sanctify pain in
general,—all becoming and all growth, everything
that guarantees the future involves pain. . . . In
order that there may be eternal joy in creating, in
order that the will to life may say Yea to itself in
all eternity, the “pains of childbirth” must also be
eternal. All this is what the word Dionysus signi-
fies: I know of no higher symbolisin than this Greek
symbolism, this symbolism of the Dionysian pheno-
In it the profoundest instinct of life, the
instinct that guarantees the future of life and life
eternal, is understood religiously,—the road to life
itself, procreation, is pronounced holy. . . .
perishes through anybody's fault but one's own.
The only thing is that the death which takes place
in the most contemptible circumstances, the death
that is not free, the death which occurs at the wrong
time, is the death of a coward. Out of the very love
one bears to life, one should wish death to be different
from this—that is to say, free, deliberate, and neither
a matter of chance nor of surprise. Finally let me
whisper a word of advice to our friends the pessi-
mists and all other decadents. We have not the
power to prevent ourselves from being born: but
this error-for sometimes it is an error-can be recti-
fied if we choose. The man who does away with
himself, performs the most estimable of deeds: he
almost deserves to live for having done so. Society
-nay, life itself, derives more profit from such a
deed than from any sort of life spent in renunciation,
anæmia and other virtues,—at least the suicide frees
others from the sight of him, at least he removes one
objection against life. Pessimism pur et vert, can
be proved only by the self efutation of the pessimists
themselves: one should go a step further in one's
## p. 90 (#110) #############################################
90
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
consistency; one should not merely deny life with
“The World as Will and Idea," as Schopenhauer
did; one should in the first place deny Schopen-
hauer. . . . Incidentally, Pessimism, however infec-
tious it may be, does not increase the morbidness of
an age or of a whole species; it is rather the expres-
a
sion of that morbidness. One falls a victim to it in
the same way as one falls a victim to cholera ; one
must already be predisposed to the disease. Pessi-
mism in itself does not increase the number of the
world's decadents by a single unit. Let me remind
you of the statistical fact that in those years in which
cholera
rages,
the total number of deaths does not
exceed that of other years.
37
Have we become more moral? —As might have been
expected, the whole ferocity of moral stultification,
which, as is well known, passes for morality itself in
Germany, hurled itself against my concept“ Beyond
Good and Evil. ” I could tell you some nice tales
about this. Above all, people tried to make me see
the “incontestable superiority” of our age in regard
to moral sentiment, and the progress we had made
in these matters. Compared with us, a Cæsar Borgia
was by no means to be represented as “higher man,"
the sort of Superman, which I declared him to be.
The editor of the Swiss paper the Bund went so far
as not only to express his admiration for the courage
displayed by my enterprise, but also to pretend to
“understand” that the intended purpose of my work
was to abolish all decent feeling. Much obliged ! -
In reply, I venture to raise the following question ;
## p. 91 (#111) #############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE
91
have we really become more moral? The fact that
everybody believes that we have is already an objec-
tion to the belief. We modern men, so extremely
delicate and susceptible, full of consideration one
for the other, actually dare to suppose that the
pampering fellow-feeling which we all display, this
unanimity which we have at last acquired in sparing
and helping and trusting one another marksa definite
step forward, and shows us to be far ahead of the
man of the Renaissance. But every age thinks the
same, it is bound to think the same. This at least
is certain, that we should not dare to stand amid
the conditions which prevailed at the Renaissance,
we should not even dare to imagine ourselves in
those conditions : our nerves could not endure that
reality, not to speak of our muscles. The inability
to do this however does not denote any progress;
but simply the different and more senile quality of our
particular nature, its greater weakness, delicateness,
and susceptibility, out of which a morality more rich
in consideration was bound to arise. If we imagine
our delicateness and senility, our physiological de-
crepitude as non-existent, our morality of “human-
isation” would immediately lose all value—no
morality has
per se—it would even fill us
with scorn.
On the other hand, do not let us doubt
that we moderns, wrapped as we are in the thick
cotton wool of our humanitarianism which would
shrink even from grazing a stone, would present a
comedy to Cæsar Borgia's contemporaries which
would literally make them die of laughter. We are
indeed, without knowing it, exceedingly ridiculous
with our modern“ virtues. ” The decline of the
any value
## p. 92 (#112) #############################################
92
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
"
.
.
instincts of hostility and of those instincts that arouse
suspicion,-for this if anything is what constitutes
our progress—is only one of the results mani-
fested by the general decline in vitality: it requires a
hundred times more trouble and caution to live such
a dependent and senile existence. In such circum-
stances everybody gives everybody else a helping
hand, and, to a certain extent, everybody is either
an invalid or an invalid's attendant. This is then
called “virtue”: among those men who knew a
different life-that is to say, a fuller, more prodigal,
more superabundant sort of life, it might have
been called by another name,-possibly “cowardice,"
or “vileness,” or “old woman's morality. " Our
mollification of morals—this is my cry; this if you
will is my innovation—is the outcome of our decline;
conversely hardness and terribleness in morals may
be the result of a surplus of life. When the latter
state prevails, much is dared, much is challenged,
and much is also squandered. That which formerly
was simply the salt of life, would now be our poison.
To be indifferent-even this is a form of strength-
for that, likewise, we are too senile, too decrepit: our
morality of fellow-feeling, against which I was the
first to raise a finger of warning, that which might be
called moral impressionism, is one symptom the more
of the excessive physiological irritability which is
peculiar to everything decadent. That movement
which attempted to introduce itself in a scientific
manner on the shoulders of Schopenhauer's morality
of pity-a very sad attempt ! -is in its essence the
movement of decadence in morality, and as such it
is intimately related to Christian morality. Strong
a
## p. 93 (#113) #############################################
SKIKMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE 93
.
a
ages and noble cultures see something contemptible
in pity, in the “love of one's neighbour,” and in a
lack of egoism and of self-esteem. -Ages should be
measured according to their positive forces ;-valued
by this standard that prodigal and fateful age of the
Renaissance, appears as the last great age, while we
moderns with our anxious care of ourselves and love
of our neighbours, with all our unassuming virtues
of industry, equity, and scientific method—with our
lust of collection, of economy and of mechanism-
representa weak
age. . . Ourvirtues are necessarily
determined, and are even stimulated, by our weak-
ness. “Equality,"acertain definite process of making
everybody uniform, which only finds its expression
in the theory of equal rights, is essentially bound up
with a declining culture: the chasm between man
and
man,
class and class, the multiplicity of types,
the will to be one's self, and to distinguish one's self
—that, in fact, which I call the pathos of distance
is proper to all strong ages. The force of tension,
-nay, the tension itself, between extremes grows
slighter every day,—the extremes themselves are
tending to become obliterated to the point of becom-
ing identical. All our political theories and state con-
stitutions, not by any means excepting “The German
Empire,” are the logical consequences, the necessary
consequences of decline; the unconscious effect of
decadence has begun to dominate even the ideals
of the various sciences. My objection to the whole
of English and French sociology still continues to
be this, that it knows only the decadent form of
society from experience, and with perfectly childlike
innocence takes the instincts of decline as the norm,
## p. 94 (#114) #############################################
94
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
the standard, of sociological valuations. Descending
life, the decay of all organising power—that is to
say, of all that power which separates, cleaves gulfs,
and establishes rank above and below, formulated
itself in modern sociology as the ideal. Our socialists
are decadents: but Herbert Spencer was also a
decadent,-he saw something to be desired in the
triumph of altruism! .
.
38
My Concept of Freedom. —Sometimes the value
of a thing does not lie in that which it helps us to
achieve, but in the amount we have to pay for it, —
what it costs us. For instance, liberal institutions
straightway cease from being liberal, the moment
they are soundly established: once this is attained
no more grievous and more thorough enemies of
freedom exist than liberal institutions! One knows,
of course, what they bring about: they undermine
the Will to Power, they are the levelling of mountain
and valley exalted to a morality, they make people
small, cowardly and pleasure-loving,—by means of
them the gregarious animal invariably triumphs.
Liberalism, or, in plain English, the transformation
of mankind into cattle. The same institutions, so long
as they are fought for, produce quite other results ;
then indeed they promote the cause of freedom
quite powerfully. Regarded more closely, it is war
which produces these results, war in favour of liberal
institutions, which, as war, allows the illiberal in-
stincts to subsist. For war trains men to be free.
What in sooth is freedom? Freedom is the will to
be responsible for ourselves. It is to preserve the
## p. 95 (#115) #############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE 95
*
distance which separates us from other men. To
grow more indifferent to hardship, to severity, to
privation, and even to life itself. To be ready to
sacrifice men for one's cause, one's self included.
Freedom denotes that the virile instincts which
rejoice in war and in victory, prevail over other in-
stincts; for instance,over the instincts of “happiness. ”
The man who has won his freedom, and how much
more so, therefore, the spirit that has won its freedom,
tramples ruthlessly upon that contemptible kind of
comfort which tea-grocers, Christians, cows, women,
Englishmen and other democrats worship in their
dreams. The free man is a warrior. -How is free-
dom measured in individuals as well as in nations ?
According to the resistance which has to be over-
come, according to the pains which it costs to
remain uppermost. The highest type of free man
would have to be sought where the greatest resist-
ance has continually to be overcome: five paces
away from tyranny, on the very threshold of the
danger of thraldom. This is psychologically true
if, by the word “Tyrants” we mean inexorable and
terrible instincts which challenge the maximum
amount of authority and discipline to oppose them
-the finest example of this is Julius Cæsar ; it is also
true politically : just examine the course of history.
The nations which were worth anything, which got
to be worth anything, never attained to that condi-
tion under liberal institutions : great danger made
out of them something which deserves reverence,
that danger which alone can make us aware of our
resources, our virtues, our means of defence, our
weapons, our genius,—which compels us to be strong,
»
## p. 96 (#116) #############################################
96
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
First principle: a man must need to be strong, other-
wise he will never attain it. —Those great forcing-
houses of the strong, of the strongest kind of men
that have ever existed on earth, the aristocratic com-
munities like those of Rome and Venice, understood
freedom precisely as I understand the word : as
something that one has and that one has not, as
something that one will have and that one seizes by
force.
39
A Criticism of Modernity. –Our institutions are
no longer any good; on this point we are all agreed.
But the fault does not lie with them ; but with us.
Now that we have lost all the instincts out of
which institutions grow, the latter on their part are
beginning to disappear from our midst because we
are no longer fit for them. Democracy has always
been the death agony of the power of organisation :
already in “Human All-too-Human,” Part I. , Aph.
472, I pointed out that modern democracy, together
with its half-measures, of which the “German
Empire” is an example, was a decaying form of
the State. For institutions to be possible there must
exist a sort of will, instinct, imperative, which cannot
be otherwise than antiliberal to the point of wicked-
ness: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsi-
bility for centuries to come, to solidarity in long
family lines forwards and backwards in infinitum.
If this will is present, something is founded which
resembles the imperium Romanum : or Russia, the
only great nation to-day that has some lasting power
and grit in her, that can bide her time, that can
still promise something. -Russia the opposite of all
## p. 97 (#117) #############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE 97
wretched European petty-statism and neurasthenia,
which the foundation of the German Empire has
brought to a crisis. The whole of the Occident no
longer possesses those instincts from which institu-
tions spring, out of which a future grows: maybe
nothing is more opposed to its “modern spirit
than these things. People live for the present, they
live at top speed,—they certainly live without any
sense of responsibility; and this is precisely what
they call “freedom. ” Everything in institutions
which makes them institutions, is scorned, loathed
and repudiated : everybody is in mortal fear of a
new slavery, wherever the word "authority” is so
much as whispered. The decadence of the valuing
instinct, both in our politicians and in our political
parties, goes so far, that they instinctively prefer
that which acts as a solvent, that which precipitates
the final catastrophe. . . . As an example of this
behold modern marriage. All reason has obviously
been divorced from modern marriage : but this is no
objection to matrimony itself but to modernity.
The rational basis of marriage-it lay in the ex-
clusive legal responsibility of the man: by this means
some ballast was laid in the ship of matrimony,
whereas nowadays it has a list, now on this side, now
on that. The rational basis of marriage—it lay in its
absolute indissolubleness : in this way it was given
a gravity which knew how to make its influence felt,
in the face of the accident of sentiment, passion and
momentary impulse: it lay also in the fact that the
responsibility of choosing the parties to the contract,
lay with the families. By showing ever more and
more favour to love-marriages, the very foundation
:
7
## p. 98 (#118) #############################################
98
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
of matrimony, that which alone makes it an institu-
tion, has been undermined. No institution ever has
been nor ever will be built upon an idiosyncrasy; as
I say, marriage cannot be based upon “love. " It
can be based upon sexual desire ; upon the instinct
of property (wife and child as possessions); upon the
instinct of dominion, which constantly organises for
itself the smallest form of dominion, the family
which requires children and heirs in order to hold
fast, also in the physiological sense, to a certain
quantum of acquired power, influence and wealth,
so as to prepare for lasting tasks, and for solidarity in
the instincts from one century to another. Marriage
as an institution presupposes the affirmation of the
greatest and most permanent form of organisation;
if society cannot as a whole stand security for itself
into the remotest generations, marriage has no mean-
ing whatsoever. —Modern marriage has lost its mean-
ing; consequently it is being abolished.
40
The question of the Working-man. —The mere fact
that there is such a thing as the question of the work-
ing-man is due to stupidity, or at bottom to degen-
erate instincts which are the cause of all the stu-
pidity of modern times. Concerning certain things
no questions ought to be put: the first imperative
principle of instinct. For the life of me I cannot
see what people want to do with the working-man
of Europe, now that they have made a question of
him. He is far too comfortable to cease from ques-
tioning ever more and more, and with ever less
modesty. After all, he has the majority on his side.
## p. 99 (#119) #############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE 99
There is now not the slightest hope that an unassum-
ing and contented sort of man, after the style of the
Chinaman, will come into being in this quarter : and
this would have been the reasonable course, it was
even a dire necessity. What has been done? Every-
thing has been done with the view of nipping the
very pre-requisite of this accomplishment in the bud,
—with the most frivolous thoughtlessness those self-
same instincts by means of which a working-class
becomes possible, and tolerable even to its members
themselves, have been destroyed root and branch.
The working-man has been declared fit for military
service; he has been granted the right of combina-
tion, and of voting : can it be wondered at that he
already regards his condition as one of distress (ex-
pressed morally, as an injustice)? But, again I ask,
what do people want? If they desire a certain end,
then they should desire the means thereto. If they
will have slaves, then it is madness to educate them
to be masters.
41
»*_In
-
“The kind of freedom I do not mean. . .
an age like the present, it simply adds to one's perils
to be left to one's instincts. The instincts contra-
dict, disturb, and destroy each other ; I have already
defined modernism as physiological self-contra-
diction. A reasonable system of education would
insist upon at least one of these instinct-systems
being paralysed beneath an iron pressure, in order to
* This is a playful adaptation of Max von Schenkendorf's
poem “ Freiheit. ” The proper line reads : "Freiheit die ich
meine” (The freedom that I do mean). —TR.
## p. 100 (#120) ############################################
IOO
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
allow others to assert their power, to grow strong,
and to dominate. At present, the only conceivable
way of making the individual possible would be to
prune him :-of making him possible—that is to say,
whole. The very reverse occurs. Independence,
free development, and laisser aller are clamoured
for most violently precisely by those for whom no
restraint could be too severe—this is true in politics, it
is true in Art. But this is a symptom of decadence:
our modern notion of “freedom” is one proof the
more of the degeneration of instinct.
42
Where faith is necessary. —Nothing is more rare
among moralists and saints than uprightness; may-
be they say the reverse is true, maybe they even be-
lieve it. For, when faith is more useful, more effec-
tive, more convincing than conscious hypocrisy, by
instinct that hypocrisy forthwith becomes innocent :
first principle towards the understanding of great
saints. The same holds good of philosophers, that
other order of saints; their whole business compels
them to concede only certain truths—that is to say,
those by means of which their particular trade
receives the public sanction,—to speak“ Kantingly":
the truths of practical reason. They know what
they must prove ; in this respect they are practical,
—they recognise each other by the fact that they
agree upon “certain truths. ”—“Thou shalt not lie”
-in plain English :-Beware, Mr Philosopher, of
speaking the truth. . . .
-
.
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SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE
IOI
1
1
43
A quiet hint to Conservatives. —That which we did
not know formerly, and know now, or might know
if we chose,—is the fact that a retrograde formation,
a reversion in any sense or degree, is absolutely im-
possible. We physiologists, at least, are aware of
this. But all priests and moralists have believed in
it,—they wished to drag and screw man back to a
former standard of virtue. Morality has always been
a Procrustean bed. Even the politicians have imi-
tated the preachers of virtue in this matter. There
are parties at the present day whose one aim and
dream is to make all things adopt the crab-march.
But not everyone can be a crab. It cannot be helped:
we must go forward,—that is to say step by step
further and further into decadence (this is my
definition of modern “progress”). We can hinder
this development, and by so doing dam up and
accumulate degeneration itself and render it more
convulsive, more volcanic: we cannot do more.
a
C
44
My concept of Genius. —Great men, like great
ages, are explosive material, in which a stupendous
amount of power is accumulated; the first conditions
of their existence are always historical and physio-
logical; they are the outcome of the fact that for
long ages energy has been collected, hoarded up,
saved
up and preserved for their use, and that no
explosion has taken place. When the tension in
the bulk has become sufficiently excessive, the most
fortuitous stimulus suffices in order to call " "genius,"
## p. 102 (#122) ############################################
102
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
'great deeds,” and momentous fate into the world.
What then is the good of all environment, historical
periods, “ Zeitgeist” (Spirit of the age) and “public
opinion”? _Take the case of Napoleon. France of
the Revolution, and still more of the period pre-
ceding the Revolution, would have brought forward
a type which was the very reverse of Napoleon : it
actually did produce such a type. And because
Napoleon was something different, the heir of a
stronger, more lasting and older civilisation than
that which in France was being smashed to atoms
he became master there, he was the only master
there. Great men are necessary,
the age in which
they appear is a matter of chance; the fact that they
almost invariably master their age is accounted for
simply by the fact that they are stronger, that they
are older, and that power has been stored longer for ·
them. The relation of a genius to his age is that
which exists between strength and weakness and
between maturity and youth: the age is relatively
always very much younger, thinner, less mature, less
resolute and more childish. The fact that the general
opinion in France at the present day, is utterly differ-
ent on this very point (in Germany too, but that is
of no consequence); the fact that in that country
the theory of environment-a regular neuropathic
notion has become sacrosanct and almost scientific,
and finds acceptance even among the physiologists,
is a very bad, and exceedingly depressing sign. In
England too the same belief prevails : but nobody
will be surprised at that. The Englishman knows
only two ways of understanding the genius and the
"great man”: either democratically in the style of
## p. 103 (#123) ############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE
103
Buckle, or religiously after the manner of Carlyle. -
The danger which great men and great ages repre-
sent, is simply extraordinary ; every kind of exhaus-
tion and of sterility follows in their wake. The great
man is an end; the great age—the Renaissance for
instance,—is an end. The genius—in work and in
deed,-is necessarily a squanderer : the fact that
he spends himself constitutes his greatness. The
instinct of self-preservation is as it were suspended
in him; the overpowering pressure of out-flowing
energy in him forbids any such protection and pru-
dence. People call this “self-sacrifice,” they praise
his “heroism,” his indifference to his own well-being,
his utter devotion to an idea, a great cause, a father-
land: All misunderstandings. . . He flows out,
, he consumes himself, he does not spare
himself,--and does all this with fateful necessity,
irrevocably, involuntarily, just as a river involuntarily
bursts its dams. But, owing to the fact that human-
ity has been much indebted to such explosives, it
has endowed them with many things, for instance,
with a kind of higher morality. . . . This is indeed
.
the sort of gratitude that humanity is capable of :
it misunderstands its benefactors.
he flows over,
45
-
The criminal and his like. —The criminal type is
the type of the strong man amid unfavourable con-
ditions, a strong man made sick. He lacks the wild
and savage state, a form of nature and existence
which is freer and more dangerous, in which every-
thing that constitutes the shield and the sword in
## p. 104 (#124) ############################################
104
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
the instinct of the strong man, takes a place by right.
Society puts a ban upon his virtues; the most
spirited instincts inherent in him immediately be-
come involved with the depressing passions, with
suspicion, fear and dishonour. But this is almost
the recipe for physiological degeneration. When a
man has to do that which he is best suited to do,
which he is most fond of doing, not only clandes-
tinely, but also with long suspense, caution and ruse,
he becomes anæmic; and inasmuch as he is always
having to pay for his instincts in the form of danger,
persecution and fatalities, even his feelings begin
to turn against these instincts—he begins to regard
them as fatal. It is society, our tame, mediocre,
castrated society, in which an untutored son of
nature who comes to us from his mountains or from
his adventures at sea, must necessarily degenerate
into a criminal. Or almost necessarily: for there
are cases in which such a man shows himself to be
stronger than society: the Corsican Napoleon is
the most celebrated case of this. Concerning the
problem before us, Dostoiewsky's testimony is of
importance-Dostoiewsky who, incidentally, was
the only psychologist from whom I had anything
to learn: he belongs to the happiest windfalls of
my life, happier even than the discovery of Stendhal.
This profound man, who was right ten times over in
esteeming the superficial Germans low, found the
Siberian convicts among whom he lived for many
years,—those thoroughly hopeless criminals for
whom no road back to society stood open-very
different from what even he had expected,—that is
to say carved from about the best, hardest and most
## p. 105 (#125) ############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE
105
a
valuable material that grows on Russian soil. * Let
us generalise the case of the criminal ; let us imagine
creatures who for some reason or other fail to meet
with public approval, who know that they are re-
garded neither as beneficent nor useful,—the feeling
of the Chandala, who are aware that they are not
looked upon as equal, but as proscribed, unworthy,
polluted. The thoughts and actions of all such
natures are tainted with a subterranean mouldiness;
everything in them is of a paler hue than in those
on whose existence the sun shines. But almost all
those creatures whom, nowadays, we honour and
respect, formerly lived in this semi-sepulchral atmo-
sphere: the man of science, the artist, the genius,
the free spirit, the actor, the business man, and the
great explorer. As long as the priest represented
the highest type of man, every valuable kind of man
was depreciated. . The time is coming—this I
guarantee—when he will pass as the lowest type, as
our Chandala, as the falsest and most disreputable
kind of man.
I call your attention to the fact
that even now, under the sway of the mildest
customs and usages which have ever ruled on earth
or at least in Europe, every form of standing aside,
every kind of prolonged, excessively prolonged con-
cealment, every unaccustomed and obscure form of
existence tends to approximate to that type which
the criminal exemplifies to perfection. All pioneers
of the spirit have, for a while, the grey and fatalistic
mark of the Chandala on their brows: not because
they are regarded as Chandala, but because they
* See “Memoirs of a House of the Dead,” by Dostoiewsky
(translation by Marie von Thilo : "Buried Alive"). -TR.
.
## p. 106 (#126) ############################################
106
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
themselves feel the terrible chasm which separates
them from all that is traditional and honourable.
Almost every genius knows the “Catilinarian life”
as one of the stages in his development, a feeling
of hate, revenge and revolt against everything that
exists, that has ceased to evolve. Catiline-the
early stage of every Cæsar.
.
.
46
Here the outlook is free. -When a philosopher
holds his tongue it may be the sign of the loftiness
of his soul : when he contradicts himself it may be
love; and the very courtesy of a knight of knowledge
may force him to lie. It has been said, and not with-
out subtlety :-il est indigne des grands cæurs de ré-
pandre le trouble qu'ils ressentent* : but it is neces-
sary to add that there may also be grandeur de cæur
in not shrinking from the most undignified proceed-
ing. A woman who loves sacrifices her honour; a
knight of knowledge who“ loves,” sacrifices perhaps
his humanity; a God who loved, became a Jew. . .
a
47
Beauty no accident. —Even the beauty of a race or
of a family, the charm and perfection of all its move-
ments, is attained with pains : like genius it is the
final result of the accumulated work of generations.
Great sacrifices must have been made on the altar of
good taste, for its sake many things must have been
done, and much must have been left undone-the
seventeenth century in France is admirable for both of
* Clothilde de Veaux. -TR.
*
## p. 107 (#127) ############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE 107
these things,-in this century there must have been
a principle of selection in respect to company,
locality, clothing, the gratification of the instinct of
sex; beauty must have been preferred to profit, to
habit, to opinion and to indolence. The first rule of
all :-nobody must “let himself go," not even when
he is alone. —Good things are exceedingly costly:
and in all cases the law obtains that he who possesses
them is a different person from him who is acquiring
them. Everything good is an inheritance: that
which is not inherited is imperfect, it is simply a be-
a
ginning. In Athens at the time of Cicero—who ex-
presses his surprise at the fact-the men and youths
were by far superior in beauty to the women: but
what hard work and exertions the male sex had for
centuries imposed upon itself in the service of beauty!
We must not be mistaken in regard to the method
employed here: the mere discipline of feelings and
thoughts is little better than nil (-it is in this that
the great error of German culture, which is quite
illusory, lies): the body must be persuaded first. The
strict maintenance of a distinguished and tasteful
demeanour, the obligation of frequenting only those
who do not “let themselves go,” is amply sufficient
to render one distinguished and tasteful : in two or
three generations everything has already taken deep
root. The fate of a people and of humanity is de-
cided according to whether they begin culture at the
right place—not at the “soul” (as the fatal supersti-
tion of the priests and half-priests would have it):
the right place is the body, demeanour, diet, physio-
logy—the rest follows as the night the day. .
That is why the Greeks remain the first event in
.
## p. 108 (#128) ############################################
108
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culture—they knew and they did what was needful.
Christianity with its contempt of the body is the
greatest mishap that has ever befallen mankind.
.
48
Progress in my sense. —I also speak of a “return to
nature,” although it is not a process of going back
but of going up-up into lofty, free and even terrible
nature and naturalness; such a nature as can play
with great tasks and may play with them. . . . To
speak in a parable, Napoleon was an example of a
“ return to nature," as I understand it (for instance
in rebus tacticis, and still more, as military experts
know, in strategy). But Rousseau-whither did he
want to return? Rousseau this first modern man,
idealist and canaille in one person; who was in need
of moral" dignity,” in order even to endure the sight
of his own person,-ill with unbridled vanity and
wanton self-contempt; this abortion, who planted
his tent on the threshold of modernity, also wanted
a “return to nature”; but, I ask once more, whither
did he wish to return? I hate Rousseau, even in
the Revolution itself: the latter was the historical
expression of this hybrid of idealist and canaille.
The bloody farce which this Revolution ultimately
became, its “immorality," concerns me but slightly;
what I loathe however is its Rousseauesque morality
-the so-called “truths" of the Revolution, by means
of which it still exercises power and draws all flat
and mediocre things over to its side. The doctrine
of equality! . . . But there is no more deadly poison
!
than this ; for it seems to proceed from the very lips
of justice, whereas in reality it draws the curtain
)
.
## p. 109 (#129) ############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE
109
down on all justice. . . . “To equals equality, to
unequals inequality”—that would be the real speech
of justice and that which follows from it. “Never
make unequal things equal. ” The fact that so much
horror and blood are associated with this doctrine of
equality, has lent this “modern idea" par excellence
such a halo of fire and glory, that the Revolution as
a drama has misled even the most noble minds.
That after all is no reason for honouring it the more.
-I can see only one who regarded it as it should be
regarded—that is to say, with loathing ; I speak of
Goethe.
49
Goethe. —No mere German, but a European event :
a magnificent attempt to overcome the eighteenth
century by means of a return to nature, by means
of an ascent to the naturalness of the Renaissance,
a kind of self-overcoming on the part of the century
in question. —He bore the strongest instincts of
this century in his breast: its sentimentality, and
idolatry of nature, its anti-historic, idealistic, unreal,
and revolutionary spirit (the latter is only a form
of the unreal). He enlisted history, natural science,
antiquity, as well as Spinoza, and above all practi-
cal activity, in his service. He drew a host of very
definite horizons around him ; far from liberating
himself from life, he plunged right into it; he did
not give in; he took as much as he could on his own
shoulders, and into his heart. That to which he
aspired was totality ; he was opposed to the sunder-
ing of reason, sensuality, feeling and will (as preached
with most repulsive scholasticism by Kant, the
antipodes of Goethe); he disciplined himself into a
harmonious whole, he created himself. Goethe in the
## p. 110 (#130) ############################################
IIO
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
midst of an age of unreal sentiment, was a convinced
realist: he said yea to everything that was like him
in this regard,—there was no greater event in his
life than that ens realissimum, surnamed Napoleon.
Goethe conceived a strong, highly-cultured man,
skilful in all bodily accomplishments, able to keep
himself in check, having a feeling of reverence for
himself, and so constituted as to be able to risk the
full enjoyment of naturalness in all its rich profusion
and be strong enough for this freedom; a man of
tolerance, not out of weakness but out of strength,
because he knows how to turn to his own profit
that which would ruin the mediocre nature; a man
unto whom nothing is any longer forbidden, unless
it be weakness either as a vice or as a virtue. Such
a spirit, become free, appears in the middle of the
universe with a feeling of cheerful and confident
fatalism he believes that only individual things are
bad, and that as a whole the universe justifies and
affirms itself—He no longer denies. . . . But such a
faith is the highest of all faiths : I christened it with
the name of Dionysus.
50
It might be said that, in a certain sense,
the nine-
teenth century also strove after all that Goethe
himself aspired to: catholicity in understanding, in
approving; a certain reserve towards everything,
daring realism, and a reverence for every fact. How
is it that the total result of this is not a Goethe, but
a state of chaos, a nihilistic groan, an inability to
discover where one is, an instinct of fatigue which
in praxi is persistently driving Europe to hark back
to the eighteenth century ? (-For instance in the
form of maudlin romanticism, altruism, hyper-senti-
## p. 111 (#131) ############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE
III
mentality, pessimism in taste, and socialism in
politics). Is not the nineteenth century, at least in
its closing years, merely an accentuated, brutalised
eighteenth century,—that is to say a century of
decadence? And has not Goethe been—not alone
for Germany, but also for the whole of Europe, -
merely an episode, a beautiful “in vain"? But great
men are misunderstood when they are regarded
from the wretched standpoint of public utility.
The fact that no advantage can be derived from
them-this in itself may perhaps be peculiar to great-
ness.
51
Goethe is the last German whom I respect : he
had understood three things as I understand them.
We also agree as to the “cross. ”* People often ask
me why on earth I write in German : nowhere am I
less read than in the Fatherland. But who knows
whether I even desire to be read at present ? —To
create things on which time may try its teeth in
vain; to be concerned both in the form and the
substance of my writing, about a certain degree of
immortality-never have I been modest enough to
demand less of myself. The aphorism, the sentence,
in both of which I, as the first among Germans, am
a master, are the forms of "eternity”; it is my
ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else
says in a whole book,—what everyone else does not
say in a whole book.
I have given mankind the deepest book it pos-
sesses, my Zarathustra ; before long I shall give
it the most independent one.
* See my note on p. 147 of Vol. I. of the Will to Power. -TR.
1
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THINGS I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS
I
-
In conclusion I will just say a word concerning that
world to which I have sought new means of access,
to which I may perhaps have found a new passage
-the ancient world. My taste, which is perhaps
the reverse of tolerant, is very far from saying yea
through and through even to this world: on the
whole it is not over eager to say Yea, it would prefer
to say Nay, and better still nothing whatever.
This is true of whole cultures; it is true of books,-
it is also true of places and of landscapes. Truth to
tell, the number of ancient books that count for some-
thing in my life is but small; and the most famous
are not of that number. My sense of style, for the
epigramasstyle, was awakened almost spontaneously
upon my acquaintance with Sallust. I have not for-
gotten the astonishment of my respected teacher
Corssen, when he was forced to give his worst Latin
pupil the highest marks,-at one stroke I had learned
all there was to learn. Condensed, severe, with as
much substance as possible in the background, and
with cold but roguish hostility towards all “ beauti-
ful words” and “beautiful feelings"—in these things
I found my own particular bent. In my writings
up to my “ Zarathustra,” there will be found a very
earnest ambition to attain to the Roman style, to
112
## p. 113 (#133) ############################################
THINGS I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS
113
the “aere perennius” in style. —The same thing hap-
pened on my first acquaintance with Horace. Up
to the present no poet has given me the same artistic
raptures as those which from the first I received from
an Horatian ode. In certain languages it would be
absurd even to aspire to what is accomplished by
this poet. This mosaic of words, in which every
,
unit spreads its power to the left and to the right
over the whole, by its sound, by its place in the sen-
tence, and by its meaning, this minimum in the com-
pass and number of the signs, and the maximum of
energy in the signs which is thereby achieved—all
this is Roman, and, if you will believe me, noble par
excellence. By the side of this all the rest of poetry
becomes something popular,—nothing more than
senseless sentimental twaddle.
-
2
I am not indebted to the Greeks for anything like
such strong impressions; and, to speak frankly, they
cannot be to us what the Romans are. One cannot
learn from the Greeks—their style is too strange, it
is also too fluid, to be imperative or to have the effect
of a classic. Who would ever have learnt writing
from a Greek! Who would ever have learned it
without the Romans! . . . Do not let anyone
suggest Plato to me. In regard to Plato I am a
thorough sceptic, and have never been able to agree
to the admiration of Plato the artist, which is tradi-
tional among scholars. And after all, in this matter,
the most refined judges of taste in antiquity are on
my side. In my opinion Plato bundles all the forms
of style pell-mell together, in this respect he is one
8
## p. 114 (#134) ############################################
114
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
-
of the first decadents of style: he has something
similar on his conscience to that which the Cynics
had who invented the satura Menippea. For the
Platonic dialogue—this revoltingly self-complacent
and childish kind of dialectics—to exercise any
charm over you, you must never have read any good
French authors,—Fontenelle for instance. Plato is
boring. In reality my distrust of Platois fundamental.
I find him so very much astray from all the deepest
instincts of the Hellenes, so steeped in moral pre-
judices, so pre-existently Christian—the concept
“good” is already the highest value with him,—that
rather than use any other expression I would prefer
to designate the whole phenomenon Plato with the
hard word “superior bunkum,” or, if you would like
it better, “idealism. ” Humanity has had to pay
dearly for this Athenian having gone to school among
the Egyptians (-or among the Jews in Egypt? . . . ).
In the great fatality of Christianity, Plato is that
double-faced fascination called the “ideal,” which
made it possible for the more noble natures of anti-
quity to misunderstand themselves and to tread the
bridge which led to the “cross. ” And what an amount
of Plato is still to be found in the concept “church,"
and in the construction, the system and the practice
of the church! —My recreation, my predilection, my
cure,after all Platonism, has always been Thucydides.
Thucydides and perhaps Machiavelli's principe are
most closely related to me owing to the absolute
determination which they show of refusing to deceive
themselves and of seeing reason in reality,—not in
“ rationality,” and still less in “morality. ” There is
no moreradical cure than Thucydides for the lament-
## p. 115 (#135) ############################################
THINGS I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS
115
ably rose-coloured idealisation of the Greeks which
the “classically-cultured” stripling bears with him
into life, as a reward for his public school training.
His writings must be carefully studied line by line,
and his unuttered thoughts must be read as distinctly
as what he actually says. There are few thinkers so
rich in unuttered thoughts. In him the culture “of
the Sophists "—that is to say, the culture of realism,
receives its most perfect expression: this inestim-
able movement in the midst of the moral and ideal-
istic knavery of the Socratic Schools which was then
breaking out in all directions. Greek philosophy
is the decadence of the Greek instinct: Thucydides
is the great summing up, the final manifestation
of that strong, severe positivism which lay in the
instincts of the ancient Hellene. After all, it is
courage in the face of reality that distinguishes such
natures as Thucydides from Plato: Plato is a coward
in the face of reality-consequently he takes refuge
in the ideal : Thucydides is master of himself,-
consequently he is able to master life.
»
means
3
To rout up cases of “beautiful souls,” “golden
and other perfections among the Greeks, to
admire, say, their calm grandeur, their ideal attitude
of mind, their exalted simplicity-from this “exalted
simplicity,” which after all is a piece of niaiserie
allemande, I was preserved by the psychologist within
I saw their strongest instinct, the Will to
Power, I saw them quivering with the fierce violence
of this instinct,-I saw all their institutions grow
out of measures of security calculated to preserve
me.
## p. 116 (#136) ############################################
116
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
each member of their society from the inner ex-
plosive material that lay in his neighbour's breast.
This enormous internal tension thus discharged
itself in terrible and reckless hostility outside the
state : the various states mutually tore each other
to bits, in order that each individual state could re-
main at peace with itself. It was then necessary to
be strong ; for danger lay close at hand,-it lurked
in ambush everywhere. The superb suppleness of
their bodies, the daring realism and immorality
which is peculiar to the Hellenes, was a necessity
not an inherent quality. It was a result, it had not
been there from the beginning. Even their festivals
and their arts were but means in producing a
feeling of superiority, and of showing it: they are
measures of self-glorification ; and in certain circum-
stances of making one's self terrible. . . . Fancy
judging the Greeks in the German style, from their
philosophers; fancy using the suburban respecta-
bility of the Socratic schools as a key to what is
fundamentally Hellenic! . . The philosophers are
of course the decadents of Hellas, the counter-
movement directed against the old and noble taste
against the agonal instinct, against the Polis,
against the value of the race, against the authority
of tradition). Socratic virtues were preached to the
Greeks, because the Greeks had lost virtue : irritable,
cowardly, unsteady, and all turned to play-actors,
they had more than sufficient reason to submit to
having morality preached to them. Not that it
helped them in any way; but great words and atti-
tudes are so becoming to decadents.
## p. 117 (#137) ############################################
THINGS I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS
117
4
I was the first who, in order to understand the
ancient, still rich and even superabundant Hellenic
instinct, took that marvellous phenomenon, which
bears the name of Dionysus, seriously: it can be ex-
plained only as a manifestation of excessive energy.
Whoever had studied the Greeks, as that most pro-
found of modern connoisseurs of their culture, Jakob
Burckhardt of Bâle, had done, knew at once that
something had been achieved by means of this in-
terpretation. And in his “ Cultur der Griechen,"
Burckhardt inserted a special chapter on the pheno-
menon in question. If you would like a glimpse of
the other side, you have only to refer to the almost
laughable poverty of instinct among German philo-
logists when they approach the Dionysian question.
The celebrated Lobeck, especially, who with the
venerable assurance of a worm dried up between
books, crawled into this world of mysterious states,
succeeded in convincing himself that he was scientific,
whereas he was simply revoltingly superficial and
childish,-Lobeck, with all the pomp of profound
erudition, gave us to understand that, as a matter of
fact, there was nothing at all in all these curiosities.
Truth to tell, the priests may well have communi-
cated not a few things of value to the participators
in such orgies; for instance, the fact that wine pro-
vokes desire, that man in certain circumstances lives
on fruit, that plants bloom in the spring and fade
in the autumn. As regards the astounding wealth
of rites, symbols and myths which take their origin
in the
orgy,
and with which the world of antiquity
## p. 118 (#138) ############################################
118
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
is literally smothered, Lobeck finds that it prompts
him to a feat of even greater ingenuity than the
foregoing phenomenon did. "The Greeks,” he says,
(Aglaophamus, I. p. 672), “when they had nothing
.
better to do, laughed, sprang and romped about, or,
inasmuch as men also like a change at times, they
would sit down, weep and bewail their lot. Others
then came up who tried to discover some reason for
this strange behaviour; and thus, as an explanation
of these habits, there arose an incalculable number of
festivals, legends, and myths. On the other hand it
was believed that the farcical performances which
then perchance began to take place on festival days,
necessarily formed part of the celebrations, and they
were retained as an indispensable part of the ritual. ”
- This is contemptible nonsense, and no one will
take a man like Lobeck seriously for a moment.
We are very differently affected when we examine
the notion “Hellenic," as Winckelmann and Goethe
conceived it, and find it incompatible with that ele-
ment out of which Dionysian art springs—I speak
of orgiasm. In reality I do not doubt that Goethe
would have completely excluded any such thing
from the potentialities of the Greek soul. Conse-
quently Goethe did not understand the Greeks. For
it is only in the Dionysian mysteries, in the psycho-
logy of the Dionysian state, that the fundamental
fact of the Hellenic instinct—its “will to life”—is ex-
pressed. What did the Hellene secure himself with
these mysteries? Eternal life, the eternal recurrence
of life; the future promised and hallowed in the past;
the triumphant Yea to life despite death and change;
real life conceived as the collective prolongation of
## p. 119 (#139) ############################################
THINGS I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS
119
life through procreation, through the mysteries of
sexuality. To the Greeks, the symbol of sex was
the most venerated of symbols, the really deep
significance of all the piety of antiquity. All the
details of the act of procreation, pregnancy and birth
gave rise to the loftiest and most solemn feelings.
In the doctrine of mysteries, pain was pronounced
holy: the “pains of childbirth” sanctify pain in
general,—all becoming and all growth, everything
that guarantees the future involves pain. . . . In
order that there may be eternal joy in creating, in
order that the will to life may say Yea to itself in
all eternity, the “pains of childbirth” must also be
eternal. All this is what the word Dionysus signi-
fies: I know of no higher symbolisin than this Greek
symbolism, this symbolism of the Dionysian pheno-
In it the profoundest instinct of life, the
instinct that guarantees the future of life and life
eternal, is understood religiously,—the road to life
itself, procreation, is pronounced holy. . . .
