To have conceived even the plan of such a
breeding scheme, presupposes the "existence of a
man who is a hundred times milder and more reason-
able than the mere lion-tamer.
breeding scheme, presupposes the "existence of a
man who is a hundred times milder and more reason-
able than the mere lion-tamer.
Nietzsche - v16 - Twilight of the Idols
Man should be different!
" He
even knows what man should be like, does this sancti-
monious prig: he draws his own face on the wall and
declares : 'ecce homo ! ” But even when the moralist
addresses himself only to the individual and says
“thus and thus shouldst thou be! ” he still makes
## p. 32 (#52) ##############################################
32
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
an ass of himself. The individual in his past and
future is a piece of fate, one law the more, one neces-
sity the more for all that is to come and is to be.
To say to him “change thyself,” is tantamount to
saying that everything should change, even back-
wards as well. Truly these have been consistent
moralists, they wished man to be different, i. e. , virtu-
ous; they wished him to be after their own image,
that is to say sanctimonious humbugs. And to this
end they denied the world! No slight form of in-
sanity! No modest form of immodesty! Morality,
in so far it condemns per se, and not out of any
aim, consideration or motive of life, is a specific
error, for which no one should feel any mercy, a de-
generate idiosyncrasy, that has done an unutterable
amount of harm. We others, we immoralists, on the
contrary, have opened our hearts wide to all kinds
of comprehension, understanding and approbation. *
We do not deny readily, we glory in saying yea to
things. Our
eyes have opened ever wider and wider
to that economy which still employs and knows how
to use to its own advantage all that which the sacred
craziness of priests and the morbid reason in priests,
rejects; to that economy in the law of life which
draws its own advantage even out of the repulsive
race of bigots, the priests and the virtuous,—what
advantage? —But we ourselves, we immoralists, are
the reply to this question.
* Cf. Spinoza, who says in the Tractatus politicus (1677),
Chap. I, § 4: “Sedulo curavi, humanas actiones non ridere,
non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere” (“I have carefully
endeavoured not to deride, or deplore, or detest human ac-
tions, but to understand them. ”). - TR.
## p. 33 (#53) ##############################################
THE FOUR GREAT ERRORS
I
))
The error of the confusion of cause and effect. -
There is no more dangerous error than to confound
the effect with the cause : I call this error the in-
trinsic perversion of reason. Nevertheless this error
is one of the most ancient and most recent habits of
mankind. In one part of the world it has even been
canonised; and it bears the name of “Religion”
and “Morality. ” Every postulate formulated by
religion and morality contains it. Priests and the
promulgators of moral laws are the promoters of this
perversion of reason. —Let me give you an example.
Everybody knows the book of the famous Cornaro,
in which he recommends his slender diet as the recipe
for a long, happy and also virtuous life. Few books
have been so widely read, and to this day many
thousand copies of it are still printed annually in
England. I do not doubt that there is scarcely a
single book (the Bible of course excepted) that has
worked more mischief, shortened more lives, than
this well-meant curiosity. The reason of this is the
confusion of effect and cause. This worthy Italian
saw the cause of his long life in his diet : whereas
the prerequisites of long life, which are exceptional
slowness of molecular change, and a low rate of ex-
penditure in energy, were the cause of his meagre
3
33
## p. 34 (#54) ##############################################
34
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
diet. He was not at liberty to eat a small or a great
amount. His frugality was not the result of free
choice, he would have been ill had he eaten more.
He who does not happen to be a carp, however, is
not only wise to eat well, but is also compelled to
do so. A scholar of the present day, with his rapid
consumption of nervous energy, would soon go to
the dogs on Cornaro's diet. Crede experto.
2
.
The most general principle lying at the root of
every religion and morality, is this: “Do this and
that and avoid this and that—and thou wilt be
happy. Otherwise-” Every morality and every
religion is this Imperative-I call it the great ori-
ginal sin of reason,-immortal unreason. In my
mouth this principle is converted into its opposite-
first example of my“ Transvaluation of all Values”:
a well-constituted man, a man who is one of
“Nature's lucky strokes," must perform certain
actions and instinctively fear other actions; he intro-
duces the element of order, of which he is the physi-
ological manifestation, into his relations with men
and things. In a formula : his virtue is the conse-
quence of his good constitution. Longevity and
plentiful offspring are not the reward of virtue, virtue
itself is on the contrary that retardation of the meta-
bolic process which, among other things, results in
a long life and in plentiful offspring, in short in
Cornarism. The Church and morality say: “A race,
a people perish through vice and luxury. " My re-
instated reason says: when a people are going to
## p. 35 (#55) ##############################################
THE FOUR GREAT ERRORS
35
the dogs, when they are degenerating physiologi-
cally, vice and luxury (that is to say, the need of ever
stronger and more frequent stimuli such as all ex-
hausted natures are acquainted with) are bound to
result. Such and such a young man grows pale and
withered prematurely. His friends say this or that
illness is the cause of it. I say: the fact that he be-
came ill, the fact that he did not resist illness, was
in itself already the outcome of impoverished life, of
hereditary exhaustion. The newspaper reader says:
such and such a party by committing such an error
will meet its death. My superior politics say: a
party that can make such mistakes, is in its last
agony-it no longer possesses any certainty of in-
stinct. Every mistake is in every sense the sequel
to degeneration of the instincts, to disintegration
of the will. This is almost the definition of evil,
Everything valuable is instinct-and consequently
easy, necessary, free. Exertion is an objection,
the god is characteristically different from the hero
(in my language: light feet are the first attribute
of divinity).
3
The error of false causality. In all ages men have
believed that they knew what a cause was: but
whence did we derive this knowledge, or more ac-
curately, this faith in the fact that we know? Out
of the realm of the famous “inner facts of conscious-
ness,” not one of which has yet proved itself to be
a fact. We believed ourselves to be causes even in
the action of the will; we thought that in this matter
at least we caught causality red-handed. No one
## p. 36 (#56) ##############################################
36
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
-
doubted that all the antecedentia of an action were to
be sought in consciousness, and could be discovered
there — as “motive" -- if only they were sought.
Otherwise we should not be free to perform them,
we should not have been responsible for them. Fin-
ally who would have questioned that a thought is
caused ? that the ego causes the thought? Of these
three “facts of inner consciousness” by means of
which causality seemed to be guaranteed, the first
and most convincing is that of the will as cause; the
conception of consciousness (“spirit") as a cause,
and subsequently that of the ego (the “subject")
as a cause, were merely born afterwards, once the
causality of the will stood established as "given,” as
a fact of experience. Meanwhile we have come to
our senses. To-day we no longer believe a word
of all this. The “inner world” is full of phantoms
and will-o'-the-wisps : the will is one of these. The
will no longer actuates, consequently it no longer
explains anything—all it does is to accompany
processes; it may even be absent. The so-called
“motive" is another error. It is merely a ripple on
the surface of consciousness, a side issue of the action,
which is much more likely to conceal than to reveal
the antecedentia of the latter. And as for the ego! It
has become legendary, fictional, a play upon words:
it has ceased utterly and completely from thinking,
feeling, and willing! What is the result of it all ?
There are no such things as spiritual causes. The
whole of popular experience on this subject went
to the devil! That is the result of it all. For we
had blissfully abused that experience, we had built
the world upon it as a world of causes, as a world
## p. 37 (#57) ##############################################
THE FOUR GREAT ERRORS
37
of will, as a world of spirit. The most antiquated
and most traditional psychology has been at work
here, it has done nothing else: all phenomena were
deeds in the light of this psychology, and all deeds
were the result of will; according to it the world was
a complex mechanism of agents, an agent (a “sub-
ject") lay at the root of all things. Man projected
his three "inner facts of consciousness,” the will, the
spirit, and the ego in which he believed most firmly,
outside himself. He first deduced the concepi Be-
ing out of the concept Ego, he supposed "things” to
exist as he did himself, according to his notion oí
the ego as cause. Was it to be wondered at that
later on he always found in things only that which
he had laid in them? —The thing itself, I repeat, the
I
concept thing was merely a reflex of the belief in
the ego as cause. And even your atom, my dear
good Mechanists and Physicists, what an amount
of error, of rudimentary psychology still adheres to
it! -Not to speak of the “thing-in-itself," of the
horrendum pudendum of the metaphysicians! The
error of spirit regarded as a cause, confounded with
reality! And made the measure of reality! And
called God!
-
4
The Error of imaginary Causes. Starting out
from dreamland, we find that to any definite sensa-
tion, like that produced by a distant cannon shot
for instance, we are wont to ascribe a cause after the
fact (very often quite a little romance in which the
dreamer himself is, of course, the hero). Meanwhile
the sensation becomes protracted like a sort of con-
## p. 38 (#58) ##############################################
38
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
tinuous echo, until, as it were, the instinct of causality
allows it to come to the front rank, no longer however
as a chance occurrence, but as a thing which has
some meaning. The cannon shot presents itself in
a causal manner, by means of an apparent reversal
in the order of time. That which occurs last, the
motivation, is experienced first, often with a hundred
details which flash past like lightning, and the
shot is the result. What has happened? The ideas
suggested by a particular state of our senses, are mis-
interpreted as the cause of that state. As a matter
of fact we proceed in precisely the same manner
when we are awake. The greater number of our
general sensations—every kind of obstacle, pressure,
tension, explosion in the interplay of the organs, and
more particularly the condition of the nervus sym-
pathicus-stimulate our instinct of causality: we will
have a reason which will account for our feeling thus
or thus,- for feeling ill or well. We are never satis-
fied by merely ascertaining the fact that we feel thus
or thus : we admit this fact-we become conscious
of it-only when we have attributed it to some kind
of motivation. Memory, which, in such circum-
stances unconsciously becomes active, adduces for-
mer conditions of a like kind, together with the causal
interpretations with which they are associated,-but
not their real cause. The belief that the ideas, the
accompanying processes of consciousness, have been
the causes, is certainly produced by the agency of
memory. And in this way we become accustomed
to a particular interpretation of causes which, truth
to tell, actually hinders and even utterly prevents
the investigation of the proper cause.
## p. 39 (#59) ##############################################
THE FOUR GREAT ERRORS
39
C
5
The Psychological Explanation of the above Fact.
To trace something unfamiliar back to something
familiar, is at once a relief, a comfort and a satisfac-
tion, while it also produces a feeling of power. The
unfamiliar involves danger, anxiety and care,—the
fundamental instinct is to get rid of these painful
circumstances. First principle: any explanation is
better than none at all. Since, at bottom, it is only
a question of shaking one's self free from certain
oppressive ideas, the means employed to this end
are not selected with overmuch punctiliousness :
the first idea by means of which the unfamiliar is
revealed as familiar, produces a feeling of such com-
fort that it is “held to be true. ” The proof of happi-
ness (“ of power") as the criterion of truth. The
instinct of causality is therefore conditioned and
stimulated by the feeling of fear. Whenever possible,
the question "why? " should not only educe the cause
as cause, but rather a certain kind of cause-a com-
forting, liberating and reassuring cause.
The first
result of this need is that something known or already
experienced, and recorded in the memory, is posited
as the cause. The new factor, that which has not
been experienced and which isunfamiliar, is excluded
from the sphere of causes. Not only do we try to
find a certain kind of explanation as the cause, but
those kinds of explanations are selected and preferred
which dissipate most rapidly the sensation of strange-
ness, novelty and unfamiliarity,-in fact the most
ordinary explanations. And the result is that a
certain manner of postulating causes tends to pre-
dominate ever more and more, becomes concentrated
## p. 40 (#60) ##############################################
40
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
1
into a system, and finally reigns supreme, to the
complete exclusion of all other causes and explana-
tions. The banker thinks immediately of business,
the Christian of "sin," and the girl of her love affair.
6
The whole Domain of Morality and Religion may
be classified under the Rubric“ Imaginary Causes. ”
The "explanation" of general unpleasant sensa-
tions. These sensations are dependent upon certain
creatures who are hostile to us (evil spirits : the most
famous example of this—the mistaking of hysterical
women for witches). These sensations are depen-
dent
upon
actions which are reprehensible (the feel-
ing of “sin,” “ sinfulness" is a manner of accounting
for a certain physiological disorder—people always
find reasons for being dissatisfied with themselves).
These sensations depend upon punishment, upon
compensation for something which we ought not to
have done, which we ought not to have been (this idea
was generalised in a more impudent form by Schopen-
hauer, into that principle in which morality appears
in its real colours,—that is to say, as a veritable
poisoner and slanderer of life: “all great suffering,
whether mental or physical, reveals what we deserve:
for it could not visit us if we did not deserve it,"
“ The World as Will and Idea,” vol. 2, p. 666).
These sensations are the outcome of ill-considered
actions, having evil consequences, (the passions,
the senses, postulated as causes, as guilty. By means
of other calamities distressing physiological condi-
tions are interpreted as “merited”). —The “explana-
tion" of pleasant sensations. These sensations are
9)
-
1
## p. 41 (#61) ##############################################
THE FOUR GREAT ERRORS
41
»
dependent upon a trust in God. They may depend
upon our consciousness of having done one or two
good actions (a so-called “good conscience” is a
physiological condition, which may be the outcome
of good digestion). They may depend upon the
happy issue of certain undertakings (-an ingenuous
mistake: the happy issue of an undertaking certainly
does not give a hypochondriac or a Pascal any
general sensation of pleasure). They may depend
upon faith, love and hope,--the Christian virtues.
As a matter of fact all these pretended explanations
are but the results of certain states, and as it were
translations of feelings of pleasure and pain into a
false dialect: a man is in a condition of hopefulness
because the dominant physiological sensation of his
being is again one of strength and wealth ; he trusts
in God because the feeling of abundance and power
gives him a peaceful state of mind. Morality and
religion are completely and utterly parts of the psy-
chology of error: in every particular case cause and
effect are confounded; as truth is confounded with
the effect of that which is believed to be true; or a
certain state of consciousness is confounded with the
chain of causes which brought it about.
7
The Error of Free-Will. At present we no longer
have any mercy upon the concept “free-will”: we
know only too well what it is—the most egregious
theological trick that has ever existed for the purpose
of making mankind "responsible” in a theological
manner,—that is to say, to make mankind dependent
upon theologians. I will now explain to you only
## p. 42 (#62) ##############################################
42
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
the psychology of the whole process of inculcating
the sense of responsibility. Wherever men try to
trace responsibility home to anyone, it is the instinct
of punishment and of the desire to judge which is
active. Becoming is robbed of its innocence when
any particular condition of things is traced to a
will, to intentions and to responsible actions. The
doctrine of the will was invented principally for the
purpose of punishment,—that is to say, with the
intention of tracing guilt. The whole of ancient
psychology, or the psychology of the will, is the
outcome of the fact that its originators, who were
the priests at the head of ancient communities,
wanted to create for themselves a right to administer
punishments-or the right for God to do so. Men
were thought of as "free" in order that they might
be judged and punished-in order that they might
be held guilty: consequently every action had to be
regarded as voluntary, and the origin of every action
had to be imagined as lying in consciousness(-in this
way the most fundamentally fraudulent character of
psychology was established as the very principle of
psychology itself). Now that we have entered upon
the opposite movement, now that we immoralists are
trying with all our power to eliminate the concepts of
guilt and punishment from the world once more, and
to cleanse psychology, history, nature and all social
institutions and customs of all signs of those two
concepts, we recognise no more radical opponents
than the theologians, who with their notion of “a
moral order of things,” still continue to pollute the
innocence of Becoming with punishment and guilt.
Christianity is the metaphysics of the hangman.
## p. 43 (#63) ##############################################
THE FOUR GREAT ERRORS
43
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What then, alone, can our teaching be? —That
no one gives man his qualities, neither God, society
his parents, his ancestors, nor himself (this non-
sensical idea which is at last refuted here, was
taught as “intelligible freedom” by Kant, and per-
haps even as early as Plato himself). No one is
responsible for the fact that he exists at all, that he
is constituted as he is, and that he happens to be in
certain circumstances and in a particular environ-
ment. The fatality of his being cannot be divorced Cars
from the fatality of all that which has been and will
be. This is not the result of an individual intention,
of a will, of an aim, there is no attempt at attaining
to any “ideal man," or "ideal happiness” or “ideal
morality” with him,-it is absurd to wish him to
be careering towards some sort of purpose. We in-
vented the concept“purpose"; in reality purpose is
altogether lacking. One is necessary, one is a piece
of fate, one belongs to the whole,
one is in the whole,
- there is nothing that could judge, measure, com-
pare, and condemn our existence, for that would
mean judging, measuting, comparing and condemn-
ing the whole. But there is nothing outside the whole!
The fact that no one shall any longer be made re-
sponsible, that the nature of existence may not be
traced to a causa prima, that the world is an entity
neither as a sensorium nor as a spirit-this alone is
the great deliverance,—thus alone is the innocence
of Becoming restored. . . . The concept “God” has
.
been the greatest objection to existence hitherto. . . .
We deny God, we deny responsibility in God : thus
alone do we save the world. -
خوری ورگ
## p. 44 (#64) ##############################################
THE “IMPROVERS” OF MANKIND
I
You are aware of my demand upon philosophers,
that they should take up a stand Beyond Good and
Evil,—that they should have the illusion of the moral
judgment beneath them. This demand is the result
of a point of view which I was the first to formulate:
that there are no such things as moral facts. Moral
judgment has this in common with the religious one,
that it believes in realities which are not real. Mor-
ality is only an interpretation of certain phenomena:
or, more strictly speaking, a misinterpretation of
them. Moral judgment, like the religious one, be-
longs to a stage of ignorance in which even the con-
cept of reality, the distinction between real and im-
agined things, is still lacking : so that truth, at such
a stage, is applied to a host of things which to-day
we call “imaginary. ” That is why the moral judg-
ment must never be taken quite literally: as such
it is sheer nonsense. As a sign code, however, it is
invaluable: to him at least who knows, it reveals the
most valuable facts concerning cultures and inner
conditions, which did not know enough to "under-
stand” themselves. Morality is merely a sign-
language, simply symptomatology: one must already
know what it is all about in order to turn it to any
use.
## p. 45 (#65) ##############################################
THE “IMPROVERS” OF MANKIND
45
2
Let me give you one example, quite provisionally.
In all ages there have been people who wished to
“improve" mankind : this above all is what was
called morality. But the most different tendencies
are concealed beneath the same word. Both the
taming of the beast man, and the rearing of a par-
ticular type of man, have been called “improve-
ment”: these zoological termini, alone, represent
real things—real things of which the typical “im-
prover,” the priest, naturally knows nothing, and
will know nothing. To call the taming of an animal
“improving” it, sounds to our ears almost like a
joke. He who knows what goes on in menageries,
doubts very much whether an animal is improved
in such places. It is certainly weakened, it is made
less dangerous, and by means of the depressing in-
fluence of fear, pain, wounds, and hunger, it is con-
verted into a sick animal. And the same holds good
of the tamed man whom the priest has “improved. ”
In the early years of the Middle Ages, during which
the Church was most distinctly and above all a
menagerie, the most beautiful examples of the
“ blond beast” were hunted down in all directions,
-the noble Germans, for instance, were “improved. ”
But what did this “improved ” German, who had
been lured to the monastery look like after the pro-
cess? He looked like a caricature of man, like an
abortion : he had become a “sinner,” he was caged
up, he had been imprisoned behind a host of appal-
ling notions. He now lay there, sick, wretched,
malevolent even toward himself: full of hate for the
## p. 46 (#66) ##############################################
46
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
instincts of life, full of suspicion in regard to all that
is still strong and happy. In short a “Christian. ”
In physiological terms: in a fight with an animal,
the only way of making it weak may be to make it
sick. The Church undersood this : it ruined man,
it made him weak,but it laid claim to having
improved ”him.
3
Now let us consider the other case which is called
morality, the case of the rearing of a particular race
and species. The most magnificent example of this
is offered by Indian morality, and is sanctioned
religiously as the “ Law of Manu. ” In this book the
task is set of rearing no less than four races at once:
a priestly race, a warrior race, a merchant and agri-
cultural race, and finally a race of servants—the
Sudras. It is quite obvious that we are no longer
in a circus watching tamers of wild animals in this
book.
To have conceived even the plan of such a
breeding scheme, presupposes the "existence of a
man who is a hundred times milder and more reason-
able than the mere lion-tamer. One breathes more
freely, after stepping out of the Christian atmosphere
of hospitals and prisons, into this more salubrious,
loftier and more spacious world. What a wretched
thing the New Testament is beside Manu, what an
evil odour hangs around it! —But even this organisa-
tion found it necessary to be terrible, not this time
in a struggle with the animal-man, but with his
opposite, the non-caste man, the hotch-potch man,
the Chandala. Andonce again it had no other means
of making him weak and harmless, than by making
him sick,-it was the struggle with the greatest
a
## p. 47 (#67) ##############################################
THE “IMPROVERS” OF MANKIND
47
“number. ” Nothing perhaps is more offensive to
our feelings than these measures of security on the
part of Indian morality. The third edict, for in-
stance (Avadana-Sastra I. ), which treats “of impure
vegetables,” ordains that the only nourishment that
the Chandala should be allowed must consist of
garlic and onions, as the holy scriptures forbid their
being given corn or grain-bearing fruit, water and
fire. The same edict declares that the water which
they need must be drawn neither out of rivers, wells
or ponds, but only out of the ditches leading to
swamps and out of the holes left by the footprints
of animals. They are likewise forbidden to wash
either their linen or themselves, since the water which
is graciously granted to them must only be used for
quenching their thirst. Finally Sudra women are for-
bidden to assist Chandala women at their confine-
ments, while Chandala women are also forbidden to
assist each other at such times. The results of sani-
tary regulations of this kind could not fail to make
themselves felt; deadly epidemics and the most
ghastly venereal diseases soon appeared, and in coni-
sequence of these again “the Law of the Knife,”-
that is to say circumcision, was prescribed for male
children and the removal of the small labia from the
females. Manu himself says: “the Chandala are
the fruit of adultery, incest, and crime (this is the
necessary consequence of the idea of breeding).
Their clothes shall consist only of the rags torn from
corpses, their vessels shall be the fragments of broken
pottery, their ornaments shall be made of old iron,
and their religion shall be the worship of evil spirits;
without rest they shall wander from place to place.
## p. 48 (#68) ##############################################
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
They are forbidden to write from left to right or to
use their right hand in writing: the use of the right
hand and writing from left to right are reserved to
people of virtue, to people of race. ”
4
These regulations are instructive enough: we
can see in them the absolutely pure and primeval
humanity of the Aryans,—we learn that the notion
"pure blood,” is the reverse of harmless. On the
other hand it becomes clear among which people the
hatred, the Chandala hatred of this humanity has
been immortalised, among which people it has be-
come religion and genius. From this point of view
the gospels are documents of the highest value; and
the Book of Enoch is still more so. Christianity
as sprung from Jewish roots and comprehensible
only as grown upon this soil, represents the counter-
movement against that morality of breeding, of race
and of privilege :-it is essentially an anti-Aryan
religion: Christianity is the transvaluation of all
Aryan values, the triumph of Chandala values,
the proclaimed gospel of the poor and of the low,
the general insurrection of all the down-trodden, the
wretched, the bungled and the botched, against the
"race,"—the immortal revenge of the Chandala as
the religion of love.
5
The morality of breeding and the morality of
taming, in the means which they adopt in order to
prevail, are quite worthy of each other: we may lay
down as a leading principle that in order to create
morality a man must have the absolute will to im-
## p. 49 (#69) ##############################################
THE “IMPROVERS” OF MANKIND
49
"
morality. This is the great and strange problem
with which I have so long been occupied : the
psychology of the “Improvers” of mankind. A
small, and at bottom perfectly insignificant fact,
known as the “pia fraus,” first gave me access to
this problem : the pia fraus, the heirloom of all
philosophers and priests who “improve ” mankind.
Neither Manu, nor Plato, nor Confucius, nor the
teachers of Judaism and Christianity, have ever
doubted their right to falsehood. They have never
doubted their right to quite a number of other things
To express oneself in a formula, one might say :-
all means which have been used heretofore with the
object of making man moral, were through and
through immoral.
1
4
## p. 50 (#70) ##############################################
THINGS THE GERMANS LACK
I
AMONG Germans at the present day it does not
suffice to have intellect; one is actually forced to
appropriate it, to lay claim to it.
Maybe I know the Germans, perhaps I may
tell them a few home-truths. Modern Germany
represents such an enormous store of inherited and
acquired capacity, that for some time it might spendefulne
this accumulated treasure even with some prodi-
(lavish. . essgality. It is no superior culture that has ultimately
become prevalent with this modern tendency, nor is
it by any means delicate taste, or noble beauty of
the instincts; but rather a number of virtues more
manly than any that other European countries can
show. An amount of good spirits and self-respect,
plenty of firmness in human relations and in the re-
ciprocity of duties; much industry and much per-
severance-and a certain inherited soberness which
is much more in need of a spur than of a brake.
Let me add that in this country people still obey
without feeling that obedience humiliates. And no
one despises his opponent.
You observe that it is my desire to be fair to the
Germans: and in this respect I should not like to
be untrue to myself, I must therefore also state
my objections to them. It costs a good deal to
50
## p. 51 (#71) ##############################################
THINGS THE GERMANS LACK
51
caues one to k
attain to a position of power ; for power stultifies: foolish
The Germans—they were once called a people of
I
thinkers : do they really think at all at present?
Nowadays the Germans are bored by intellect,
they mistrust intellect; politics have swallowed up
all earnestness for really intellectual things—“Ger-
many, Germany above all. ”* I fear this was the
death-blow to German philosophy. “Are there
any German philosophers? Are there any German
poets ?
Are there any good German books ? "
people ask me abroad. I blush; but with that
pluck which is peculiar to me, even in moments of
desperation, I reply: “Yes, Bismarck ! "_Could I
I have dared to confess what books are read to-day?
Cursed instinct of mediocrity ?
2
What might not German intellect have been !
who has not thought sadly upon this question !
But this nation has deliberately stultified itself for
almost a thousand years: nowhere else have the
two great European narcotics, alcohol and Chris-
tianity, been so viciously abused as in Germany.
Recently a third opiate was added to the list, one
which in itself alone would have sufficed to complete
the ruin of all subtle and daring intellectual anima-
tion, I speak of music, our costive and constipating
German music. How much peevish ponderous-
ness, paralysis, dampness, dressing-gown languor,
and beer is there not in German intelligence !
How is it really possible that young men who
* The German national hymn : “Deutschland, Deutsch-
land über alles. ”_TR.
cic
I alcoinoi, Christianity
,
## p. 52 (#72) ##############################################
52
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
-
consecrate their whole lives to the pursuit of intel-
lectual ends, should not feel within them the first
instinct of intellectuality, the self-preservative in-
stinct of the intellect—and should drink beer? The
alcoholism of learned youths does not incapacitate
them for becoming scholars--a man quite devoid
of intellect may be a great scholar,—but it is a
problem in every other respect. Where can that
soft degeneracy not be found, which is produced in
the intellect by beer! I once laid my finger upon
a case of this sort, which became almost famous,
—the degeneration of our leading German free-
spirit, the clever David Strauss, into the author of
a suburban gospel and New Faith. Not in vain
had he sung the praises of “the dear old brown
liquor” in verse—true unto death.
It
3
I have spoken of German intellect. I have said
that it is becoming coarser and shallower. Is
that enough? —In reality something very different
frightens me, and that is the ever steady decline
of German earnestness, German profundity, and
German passion in things intellectual. Not only
intellectuality, but also pathos has altered. From
time to time I come in touch with German universi-
ties; what an extraordinary atmosphere prevails
among their scholars! what barrenness! and what
self-satisfied and lukewarm intellectuality! For any
bne to point to German science as an argument
against me would show that he grossly misunder-
stood my meaning, while it would also prove that
he had not read a word of my writings. For seven-
then he
the an
aurreratus
culture
## p. 53 (#73) ##############################################
THINGS THE GERMANS LACK
53
teen years I have done little else than expose the
de-intellectualising influence of our modern scientific
studies. The severe slavery to which every indi-
vidual nowadays is condemned by the enormous
range covered by the sciences, is the chiei reason
why fuller, richer and profounder natures can find no
education or educators that are fit for them. No-
thing is more deleterious to this
age
than the
super-
fluity of pretentious loafers and fragmentary human
beings; our universities are really the involuntary
forcing houses for this kind of withering-up of the
instincts of intellectuality. And the whole of Europe
is beginning to know this—politics on a large scale
deceive no one. Germany is becoming ever more
and more the Flat-land of Europe. I am still in
search of a German with whom I could be serious
after my own fashion. And how much more am I
in search of one with whom I could be cheerful
-The Twilight of the Idols : ah! what man to-day
would be capable of understanding the kind of
seriousness from which a philosopher is recovering
in this work! It is our cheerfulness that people
understand least.
4
Let us examine another aspect oi the question :
it is not only obvious that German culture is declin-
ing, but adequate reasons for this decline are not
lacking. After all, nobody can spend more than he
has :—this is true of individuals, it is also true of
nations. If you spend your strength in acquiring
power, or in politics on a large scale, or in economy,
or in universal commerce, or in parliamentarism, or
in military interests—if you dissipate the modicum
## p. 54 (#74) ##############################################
54
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
1
of reason, of earnestness, of will, and of self-
control that constitutes your nature in one particular
fashion, you cannot dissipate it in another. Culture
and the state-let no one be deceived on this point
are antagonists: A “culture-state”* is merely a
modern idea. The one lives upon the other, the
one flourishes, at the expense of the other. All
great periods of culture have been periods of politi-
cal decline; that which is great from the stand-
point of culture, was always unpolitical—even anti-
political. Goethe's heart opened at the coming
of Napoleon—it closed at the thought of the “Wars
of Liberation. ” At the very moment when Germany
arose as a great power in the world of politics,
France won new importance as a force in the world
of culture. Even at this moment a large amount
of fresh intellectual earnestness and passion has.
emigrated to Paris ; the question of pessimism, for
instance, and the question of Wagner; in France
almost all psychological and artistic questions are
considered with incomparably more subtlety and
thoroughness than they are in Germany,—the Ger-
mans are even incapable of this kind of earnestness.
In the history of European culture the rise of the
Empire signifies, above all, a displacement of the
centre of gravity. Everywhere people are already
aware of this: in things that really matter—and
these after all constitute culture, the Germans are
no longer worth considering. I ask you, can you
show me one single man of brains who could be
* The word Kultur-Staat “culture-state" has become a
standard expression in the German language, and is applied
to the leading European States. --TR.
## p. 55 (#75) ##############################################
THINGS THE GERMANS LACK
55
mentioned in the same breath with
other European
thinkers, like your Goethe,your Hegel, your Heinrich
Heine, and your Schopenhauer ? —The fact that
there is no longer a single German philosopher
worth mentioning is an increasing wonder.
피
5
Everything that matters has been lost sight of
by the whole of the higher educational system of
Germany: the end quite as much as the means to
that end. People forget that education, the
pro-
cess of cultivation itself, is the end-and not "the
Empire”--they forget that the educator is required
"for this end—and not the public-school teacher and
university scholar. Educators are needed who are
themselves educated, superior and noble intellects,
who can prove that they are thus qualified, that they
are ripe and mellow products of culture at every
moment of their lives, in word and in gesture ;-not
the learned louts who, like“ superior wet-nurses,"are
now thrust upon the youth of the land by public
schools and universities. With but rare exceptions,
that which is lacking in Germany is the first pre-
requisite of educationthat is to say, the educators;
hence the decline of German culture. One of those
rarest exceptions is my highly respected friend
Jacob Burckhardt of Bâle: to him above all is Bâle
indebted for its foremost position in human culture
What the higher schools of Germany really do ac-
complish is this, they brutally train a vast crowd of
young men, in the smallest amountof time possible, to
become useful and exploitable servants of the state.
## p. 56 (#76) ##############################################
56
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
a
1
I
“Higher education” and a vast crowd—these terms
contradict each other from the start. All superior
.
education can only concern the exception: a man
must be privileged in order to have a right to such
a great privilege. All great and beautiful things
cannot be a common possession: pulchrum est pau-
corum hominum. —What is it that brings about the
decline of German culture? The fact that" higher
education” is no longer a special privilege—the de-
mocracy of a process of cultivation that has become
general," common. Nor must it be forgotten that
the privileges of the military profession by urging
many too many to attend the higher schools, in-
volve the downfall of the latter. In modern Germany
nobody is at liberty to give his children a noble
education: in regard to their teachers, their curricula,
and their educational aims, our higher schools are
one and all established upon a fundamentally doubt-
ful mediocre basis. Everywhere, too, a hastiness
which is unbecoming rules supreme; just as if some-
thing would be forfeited if the young man were not
“ finished” at the age of twenty-three, or did not
know how to reply to the most essential question,
"which calling to choose? ”—The superior kind of
,
you please, does not like "callings,” precisely
because he knows himself to be called. He has time,
he takes time, he cannot possibly think of becom-
ing “finished,”—in the matter of higher culture, a
man of thirty years is a beginner, a child. Our
overcrowded public-schools, our accumulation of
foolishly manufactured public-school masters, are a
scandal :) maybe there are very serious motives for
defending this state of affairs, as was shown quite
-
man, if
## p. 57 (#77) ##############################################
THINGS THE GERMANS LACK
57
recently by the professors of Heidelberg ; but there
can be no reasons for doing so.
6
In order to be true to my nature, which is affirma-
tive and which concerns itself with contradictions
and criticism only indirectly and with reluctance,
let me state at once what the three objects are for
which we need educators. People must learn to
see; they must learn to think, and they must learn
to speak and to write: the object of all three of
these pursuits is a noble culture. To learn to see-
to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to
allow things to come up to it; to defer judgment,
and to acquire the habit of approaching and grasp-
ing an individual case from all sides. This is the
first preparatory schooling of intellectuality. One
must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one
must acquire a command of the obstructing and
isolating instincts. To learn to see, as I under-
stand this matter, amounts almost to that which in
popular language is called "strength of will”: its
essential feature is precisely not to wish to see, to
be able to postpone one's decision. All lack of
intellectuality, all vulgarity, arises out of the inability
to resist a stimulus :-one must respond or react,
every impulse is indulged. In many cases such
necessary action is already a sign of morbidity, of
decline, and a symptom of exhaustion. Almost
everything that coarse popular language character-
ises as vicious, is merely that physiological inability
to refrain from reacting. --As an instance of what it
means to have learnt to see, let me state that a man
1
## p. 58 (#78) ##############################################
58
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
thus trained will as a learner have become generally
slow, suspicious, and refractory. With hostile calm
he will first allow every kind of strange and new
thing to come right up to him,- he will draw back
his hand at its approach. To stand with all the
doors of one's soul wide open, to lie slavishly in the
dust before every trivial fact, at all times of the day
to be strained ready for the leap, in order to deposit
one's self, to plunge one's self, into other souls and
other things, in short, the famous "objectivity" of
modern times, is bad taste, it is essentially vulgar
and cheap.
7
As to learning how to think-our schools no
longer have any notion of such a thing. Even at
the universities, among the actual scholars in philo-
sophy, logic as a theory, as a practical pursuit, and
as a business, is beginning to die out. Turn to any
German book : you will not find the remotest trace
of a realisation that there is such a thing as a
technique, a plan of study, a will to mastery, in
the matter of thinking,—that thinking insists upon
being learnt, just as dancing insists upon being
learnt, and that thinking insists upon being learnt
as a form of dancing. What single German can
still say he knows from experience that delicate
shudder which light footfalls in matters intellectual
cause to pervade his whole body and limbs! Stiff
awkwardness in intellectual attitudes, and the clumsy
fist in grasping—these things are so essentially
German, that outside Germany they are absolutely
confounded with the German spirit. The German
has no fingers for delicate nuances. The fact that
## p. 59 (#79) ##############################################
THINGS THE GERMANS LACK
59
the people of Germany have actually tolerated
their philosophers, more particularly that most de-
formed cripple of ideas that has ever existed—the
great Kant, gives one no inadequate notion of their
native elegance. For, truth to tell, dancing in all
its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum
of all noble education : dancing with the feet, with
ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must
also be able to dance with the pen—that one must
learn ow to write ? —But at this stage I should
become utterly enigmatical to German readers.
## p. 60 (#80) ##############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE
AGE
I
! My Impossible People. —Seneca, or the toreador of
virtue. —Rousseau, or the return to nature, in impuris
naturalibus. ---Schiller, or the Moral-Trumpeter of
Säckingen. -Dante, or the hyæna that writes poetry
in tombs. -Kant, or cant as an intelligible character.
-Victor Hugo, or the lighthouse on the sea of non-
sense. —Liszt, or the school of racing—after women.
- George Sand, or lactea ubertas, in plain English :
the cow with plenty of beautiful milk. -Michelet, or
enthusiasm in its shirt sleeves. —Carlyle, or Pessim-
ism after undigested meals. —John Stuart Mill, or
offensive lucidity. —The brothers Goncourt, or the
two Ajaxes fighting with Homer. Music by Offen-
bach. -Zola, or the love of stinking.
2
Renan. —Theology, or the corruption of reason by
original sin (Christianity). Proof of this,—Renan
who, even in those rare cases where he ventures to
say either Yes or No on a general question, invari-
ably misses the point with painful regularity. For
instance, he would fain associate science and nobility:
but surely it must be obvious that science is demo-
cratic. He seems to be actuated by a strong desire
to represent an aristocracy of intellect: but, at the
60
## p. 61 (#81) ##############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE
61
same time he grovels on his knees, and not only on
his knees, before the opposite doctrine, the gospel
of the humble. What is the good of all free-spirited-
ness, modernity, mockery and acrobatic suppleness,
if in one's belly one is still a Christian, a Catholic,
and even a priest! Renan's forte, precisely like that
of a Jesuit and Father Confessor, lies in his seduc-
tiveness. His intellectuality is not devoid of that
unctuous complacency of a parson,—like all priests,
he becomes dangerous only when he loves. He is
second to none in the art of skilfully worshipping a
dangerous thing. This intellect of Renan's, which
in its action is enervating, is one calamity the more,
for poor, sick France with her will-power all going
to pieces.
3
Sainte-Beuve. -There is naught of man in him;
he is full of petty spite towards all virile spirits.
He wanders erratically; he is subtle, inquisitive, a
little bored, for ever with his ear to key-holes,-at
bottom a woman, with all woman's revengefulness
and sensuality. As a psychologist he is a genius of
slander ; inexhaustively rich in means to this end;
no one understands better than he how to intro-
duce a little poison into praise. In his fundamental
instincts he is plebeian and next of kin to Rousseau's
resentful spirit: consequently he is a Romanticist-
for beneath all romanticism Rousseau's instinct for
revenge grunts and frets. He is a revolutionary,
but kept within bounds by "funk. ” He is embar-
rassed in the face of everything that is strong (public
opinion, the Academy, the court, even Port Royal).
He is embittered against everything great in men
## p. 62 (#82) ##############################################
62
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
and things, against everything that believes in itself.
Enough of a poet and of a female to be able to feel
greatness as power; he is always turning and twist-
ing, because, like the proverbial worm, he constantly
feels that he is being trodden upon. As a critic he
has no standard of judgment, no guiding principle,
no backbone. Although he possesses the tongue of
the Cosmopolitan libertine which can chatter about
a thousand things, he has not the courage even to
acknowledge his libertinage. As a historian he has
no philosophy, and lacks the power of philosophical
vision,-hence his refusal to act the part of a judge,
and his adoption of the mask of “objectivity” in all
important matters. His attitude is better in regard
to all those things in which subtle and effete taste
is the highest tribunal : in these things he really
does have the courage of his own personality_he
really does enjoy his own nature—he actually is a
master. -In some respects he is a prototype of
Beaudelaire.
4
“ The Imitation of Christ” is one of those books
which I cannot even take hold of without physical
loathing: it exhales a perfume of the eternally
feminine, which to appreciate fully one must be a
Frenchman or a Wagnerite. This saint has a way
of speaking about love which makes even Parisiennes
feel a little curious. -I am told that that most intelli-
gent of Jesuits, Auguste Comte, who wished to lead
his compatriots back to Rome by the circuitous route
of science, drew his inspiration from this book. And
I believe it: “The religion of the heart. ”
»
## p. 63 (#83) ##############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE 63
5
G. Eliot. They are rid of the Christian God and
therefore think it all the more incumbent upon them
to hold tight to Christian morality: this is an English
way of reasoning; but let us not take it ill in moral
females à la Eliot. In England, every man who
indulges in any trifling emancipation from theology,
must retrieve his honourin the most terrifying manner
by becoming a moral fanatic. That is how they do
penancein thatcountry. -Asfor us, we act differently.
When we renounce the Christian faith, we abandon
all right to Christian morality. This is not by any
means self-evident, and in defianceof English shallow-
pates the point must be made ever more and more
plain. Christianity is a system, a complete outlook
upon the world, conceived as a whole. If its leading
concept, the belief in God, is wrenched from it, the
wholeisdestroyed; nothing vital remainsinour grasp.
Christianity presupposes that man does not and can-
not know what is good or bad for him : the Christian
believes in God who, alone, can know these things.
Christian morality is a command, its origin is tran-
scendental.
even knows what man should be like, does this sancti-
monious prig: he draws his own face on the wall and
declares : 'ecce homo ! ” But even when the moralist
addresses himself only to the individual and says
“thus and thus shouldst thou be! ” he still makes
## p. 32 (#52) ##############################################
32
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
an ass of himself. The individual in his past and
future is a piece of fate, one law the more, one neces-
sity the more for all that is to come and is to be.
To say to him “change thyself,” is tantamount to
saying that everything should change, even back-
wards as well. Truly these have been consistent
moralists, they wished man to be different, i. e. , virtu-
ous; they wished him to be after their own image,
that is to say sanctimonious humbugs. And to this
end they denied the world! No slight form of in-
sanity! No modest form of immodesty! Morality,
in so far it condemns per se, and not out of any
aim, consideration or motive of life, is a specific
error, for which no one should feel any mercy, a de-
generate idiosyncrasy, that has done an unutterable
amount of harm. We others, we immoralists, on the
contrary, have opened our hearts wide to all kinds
of comprehension, understanding and approbation. *
We do not deny readily, we glory in saying yea to
things. Our
eyes have opened ever wider and wider
to that economy which still employs and knows how
to use to its own advantage all that which the sacred
craziness of priests and the morbid reason in priests,
rejects; to that economy in the law of life which
draws its own advantage even out of the repulsive
race of bigots, the priests and the virtuous,—what
advantage? —But we ourselves, we immoralists, are
the reply to this question.
* Cf. Spinoza, who says in the Tractatus politicus (1677),
Chap. I, § 4: “Sedulo curavi, humanas actiones non ridere,
non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere” (“I have carefully
endeavoured not to deride, or deplore, or detest human ac-
tions, but to understand them. ”). - TR.
## p. 33 (#53) ##############################################
THE FOUR GREAT ERRORS
I
))
The error of the confusion of cause and effect. -
There is no more dangerous error than to confound
the effect with the cause : I call this error the in-
trinsic perversion of reason. Nevertheless this error
is one of the most ancient and most recent habits of
mankind. In one part of the world it has even been
canonised; and it bears the name of “Religion”
and “Morality. ” Every postulate formulated by
religion and morality contains it. Priests and the
promulgators of moral laws are the promoters of this
perversion of reason. —Let me give you an example.
Everybody knows the book of the famous Cornaro,
in which he recommends his slender diet as the recipe
for a long, happy and also virtuous life. Few books
have been so widely read, and to this day many
thousand copies of it are still printed annually in
England. I do not doubt that there is scarcely a
single book (the Bible of course excepted) that has
worked more mischief, shortened more lives, than
this well-meant curiosity. The reason of this is the
confusion of effect and cause. This worthy Italian
saw the cause of his long life in his diet : whereas
the prerequisites of long life, which are exceptional
slowness of molecular change, and a low rate of ex-
penditure in energy, were the cause of his meagre
3
33
## p. 34 (#54) ##############################################
34
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
diet. He was not at liberty to eat a small or a great
amount. His frugality was not the result of free
choice, he would have been ill had he eaten more.
He who does not happen to be a carp, however, is
not only wise to eat well, but is also compelled to
do so. A scholar of the present day, with his rapid
consumption of nervous energy, would soon go to
the dogs on Cornaro's diet. Crede experto.
2
.
The most general principle lying at the root of
every religion and morality, is this: “Do this and
that and avoid this and that—and thou wilt be
happy. Otherwise-” Every morality and every
religion is this Imperative-I call it the great ori-
ginal sin of reason,-immortal unreason. In my
mouth this principle is converted into its opposite-
first example of my“ Transvaluation of all Values”:
a well-constituted man, a man who is one of
“Nature's lucky strokes," must perform certain
actions and instinctively fear other actions; he intro-
duces the element of order, of which he is the physi-
ological manifestation, into his relations with men
and things. In a formula : his virtue is the conse-
quence of his good constitution. Longevity and
plentiful offspring are not the reward of virtue, virtue
itself is on the contrary that retardation of the meta-
bolic process which, among other things, results in
a long life and in plentiful offspring, in short in
Cornarism. The Church and morality say: “A race,
a people perish through vice and luxury. " My re-
instated reason says: when a people are going to
## p. 35 (#55) ##############################################
THE FOUR GREAT ERRORS
35
the dogs, when they are degenerating physiologi-
cally, vice and luxury (that is to say, the need of ever
stronger and more frequent stimuli such as all ex-
hausted natures are acquainted with) are bound to
result. Such and such a young man grows pale and
withered prematurely. His friends say this or that
illness is the cause of it. I say: the fact that he be-
came ill, the fact that he did not resist illness, was
in itself already the outcome of impoverished life, of
hereditary exhaustion. The newspaper reader says:
such and such a party by committing such an error
will meet its death. My superior politics say: a
party that can make such mistakes, is in its last
agony-it no longer possesses any certainty of in-
stinct. Every mistake is in every sense the sequel
to degeneration of the instincts, to disintegration
of the will. This is almost the definition of evil,
Everything valuable is instinct-and consequently
easy, necessary, free. Exertion is an objection,
the god is characteristically different from the hero
(in my language: light feet are the first attribute
of divinity).
3
The error of false causality. In all ages men have
believed that they knew what a cause was: but
whence did we derive this knowledge, or more ac-
curately, this faith in the fact that we know? Out
of the realm of the famous “inner facts of conscious-
ness,” not one of which has yet proved itself to be
a fact. We believed ourselves to be causes even in
the action of the will; we thought that in this matter
at least we caught causality red-handed. No one
## p. 36 (#56) ##############################################
36
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
-
doubted that all the antecedentia of an action were to
be sought in consciousness, and could be discovered
there — as “motive" -- if only they were sought.
Otherwise we should not be free to perform them,
we should not have been responsible for them. Fin-
ally who would have questioned that a thought is
caused ? that the ego causes the thought? Of these
three “facts of inner consciousness” by means of
which causality seemed to be guaranteed, the first
and most convincing is that of the will as cause; the
conception of consciousness (“spirit") as a cause,
and subsequently that of the ego (the “subject")
as a cause, were merely born afterwards, once the
causality of the will stood established as "given,” as
a fact of experience. Meanwhile we have come to
our senses. To-day we no longer believe a word
of all this. The “inner world” is full of phantoms
and will-o'-the-wisps : the will is one of these. The
will no longer actuates, consequently it no longer
explains anything—all it does is to accompany
processes; it may even be absent. The so-called
“motive" is another error. It is merely a ripple on
the surface of consciousness, a side issue of the action,
which is much more likely to conceal than to reveal
the antecedentia of the latter. And as for the ego! It
has become legendary, fictional, a play upon words:
it has ceased utterly and completely from thinking,
feeling, and willing! What is the result of it all ?
There are no such things as spiritual causes. The
whole of popular experience on this subject went
to the devil! That is the result of it all. For we
had blissfully abused that experience, we had built
the world upon it as a world of causes, as a world
## p. 37 (#57) ##############################################
THE FOUR GREAT ERRORS
37
of will, as a world of spirit. The most antiquated
and most traditional psychology has been at work
here, it has done nothing else: all phenomena were
deeds in the light of this psychology, and all deeds
were the result of will; according to it the world was
a complex mechanism of agents, an agent (a “sub-
ject") lay at the root of all things. Man projected
his three "inner facts of consciousness,” the will, the
spirit, and the ego in which he believed most firmly,
outside himself. He first deduced the concepi Be-
ing out of the concept Ego, he supposed "things” to
exist as he did himself, according to his notion oí
the ego as cause. Was it to be wondered at that
later on he always found in things only that which
he had laid in them? —The thing itself, I repeat, the
I
concept thing was merely a reflex of the belief in
the ego as cause. And even your atom, my dear
good Mechanists and Physicists, what an amount
of error, of rudimentary psychology still adheres to
it! -Not to speak of the “thing-in-itself," of the
horrendum pudendum of the metaphysicians! The
error of spirit regarded as a cause, confounded with
reality! And made the measure of reality! And
called God!
-
4
The Error of imaginary Causes. Starting out
from dreamland, we find that to any definite sensa-
tion, like that produced by a distant cannon shot
for instance, we are wont to ascribe a cause after the
fact (very often quite a little romance in which the
dreamer himself is, of course, the hero). Meanwhile
the sensation becomes protracted like a sort of con-
## p. 38 (#58) ##############################################
38
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
tinuous echo, until, as it were, the instinct of causality
allows it to come to the front rank, no longer however
as a chance occurrence, but as a thing which has
some meaning. The cannon shot presents itself in
a causal manner, by means of an apparent reversal
in the order of time. That which occurs last, the
motivation, is experienced first, often with a hundred
details which flash past like lightning, and the
shot is the result. What has happened? The ideas
suggested by a particular state of our senses, are mis-
interpreted as the cause of that state. As a matter
of fact we proceed in precisely the same manner
when we are awake. The greater number of our
general sensations—every kind of obstacle, pressure,
tension, explosion in the interplay of the organs, and
more particularly the condition of the nervus sym-
pathicus-stimulate our instinct of causality: we will
have a reason which will account for our feeling thus
or thus,- for feeling ill or well. We are never satis-
fied by merely ascertaining the fact that we feel thus
or thus : we admit this fact-we become conscious
of it-only when we have attributed it to some kind
of motivation. Memory, which, in such circum-
stances unconsciously becomes active, adduces for-
mer conditions of a like kind, together with the causal
interpretations with which they are associated,-but
not their real cause. The belief that the ideas, the
accompanying processes of consciousness, have been
the causes, is certainly produced by the agency of
memory. And in this way we become accustomed
to a particular interpretation of causes which, truth
to tell, actually hinders and even utterly prevents
the investigation of the proper cause.
## p. 39 (#59) ##############################################
THE FOUR GREAT ERRORS
39
C
5
The Psychological Explanation of the above Fact.
To trace something unfamiliar back to something
familiar, is at once a relief, a comfort and a satisfac-
tion, while it also produces a feeling of power. The
unfamiliar involves danger, anxiety and care,—the
fundamental instinct is to get rid of these painful
circumstances. First principle: any explanation is
better than none at all. Since, at bottom, it is only
a question of shaking one's self free from certain
oppressive ideas, the means employed to this end
are not selected with overmuch punctiliousness :
the first idea by means of which the unfamiliar is
revealed as familiar, produces a feeling of such com-
fort that it is “held to be true. ” The proof of happi-
ness (“ of power") as the criterion of truth. The
instinct of causality is therefore conditioned and
stimulated by the feeling of fear. Whenever possible,
the question "why? " should not only educe the cause
as cause, but rather a certain kind of cause-a com-
forting, liberating and reassuring cause.
The first
result of this need is that something known or already
experienced, and recorded in the memory, is posited
as the cause. The new factor, that which has not
been experienced and which isunfamiliar, is excluded
from the sphere of causes. Not only do we try to
find a certain kind of explanation as the cause, but
those kinds of explanations are selected and preferred
which dissipate most rapidly the sensation of strange-
ness, novelty and unfamiliarity,-in fact the most
ordinary explanations. And the result is that a
certain manner of postulating causes tends to pre-
dominate ever more and more, becomes concentrated
## p. 40 (#60) ##############################################
40
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
1
into a system, and finally reigns supreme, to the
complete exclusion of all other causes and explana-
tions. The banker thinks immediately of business,
the Christian of "sin," and the girl of her love affair.
6
The whole Domain of Morality and Religion may
be classified under the Rubric“ Imaginary Causes. ”
The "explanation" of general unpleasant sensa-
tions. These sensations are dependent upon certain
creatures who are hostile to us (evil spirits : the most
famous example of this—the mistaking of hysterical
women for witches). These sensations are depen-
dent
upon
actions which are reprehensible (the feel-
ing of “sin,” “ sinfulness" is a manner of accounting
for a certain physiological disorder—people always
find reasons for being dissatisfied with themselves).
These sensations depend upon punishment, upon
compensation for something which we ought not to
have done, which we ought not to have been (this idea
was generalised in a more impudent form by Schopen-
hauer, into that principle in which morality appears
in its real colours,—that is to say, as a veritable
poisoner and slanderer of life: “all great suffering,
whether mental or physical, reveals what we deserve:
for it could not visit us if we did not deserve it,"
“ The World as Will and Idea,” vol. 2, p. 666).
These sensations are the outcome of ill-considered
actions, having evil consequences, (the passions,
the senses, postulated as causes, as guilty. By means
of other calamities distressing physiological condi-
tions are interpreted as “merited”). —The “explana-
tion" of pleasant sensations. These sensations are
9)
-
1
## p. 41 (#61) ##############################################
THE FOUR GREAT ERRORS
41
»
dependent upon a trust in God. They may depend
upon our consciousness of having done one or two
good actions (a so-called “good conscience” is a
physiological condition, which may be the outcome
of good digestion). They may depend upon the
happy issue of certain undertakings (-an ingenuous
mistake: the happy issue of an undertaking certainly
does not give a hypochondriac or a Pascal any
general sensation of pleasure). They may depend
upon faith, love and hope,--the Christian virtues.
As a matter of fact all these pretended explanations
are but the results of certain states, and as it were
translations of feelings of pleasure and pain into a
false dialect: a man is in a condition of hopefulness
because the dominant physiological sensation of his
being is again one of strength and wealth ; he trusts
in God because the feeling of abundance and power
gives him a peaceful state of mind. Morality and
religion are completely and utterly parts of the psy-
chology of error: in every particular case cause and
effect are confounded; as truth is confounded with
the effect of that which is believed to be true; or a
certain state of consciousness is confounded with the
chain of causes which brought it about.
7
The Error of Free-Will. At present we no longer
have any mercy upon the concept “free-will”: we
know only too well what it is—the most egregious
theological trick that has ever existed for the purpose
of making mankind "responsible” in a theological
manner,—that is to say, to make mankind dependent
upon theologians. I will now explain to you only
## p. 42 (#62) ##############################################
42
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
the psychology of the whole process of inculcating
the sense of responsibility. Wherever men try to
trace responsibility home to anyone, it is the instinct
of punishment and of the desire to judge which is
active. Becoming is robbed of its innocence when
any particular condition of things is traced to a
will, to intentions and to responsible actions. The
doctrine of the will was invented principally for the
purpose of punishment,—that is to say, with the
intention of tracing guilt. The whole of ancient
psychology, or the psychology of the will, is the
outcome of the fact that its originators, who were
the priests at the head of ancient communities,
wanted to create for themselves a right to administer
punishments-or the right for God to do so. Men
were thought of as "free" in order that they might
be judged and punished-in order that they might
be held guilty: consequently every action had to be
regarded as voluntary, and the origin of every action
had to be imagined as lying in consciousness(-in this
way the most fundamentally fraudulent character of
psychology was established as the very principle of
psychology itself). Now that we have entered upon
the opposite movement, now that we immoralists are
trying with all our power to eliminate the concepts of
guilt and punishment from the world once more, and
to cleanse psychology, history, nature and all social
institutions and customs of all signs of those two
concepts, we recognise no more radical opponents
than the theologians, who with their notion of “a
moral order of things,” still continue to pollute the
innocence of Becoming with punishment and guilt.
Christianity is the metaphysics of the hangman.
## p. 43 (#63) ##############################################
THE FOUR GREAT ERRORS
43
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What then, alone, can our teaching be? —That
no one gives man his qualities, neither God, society
his parents, his ancestors, nor himself (this non-
sensical idea which is at last refuted here, was
taught as “intelligible freedom” by Kant, and per-
haps even as early as Plato himself). No one is
responsible for the fact that he exists at all, that he
is constituted as he is, and that he happens to be in
certain circumstances and in a particular environ-
ment. The fatality of his being cannot be divorced Cars
from the fatality of all that which has been and will
be. This is not the result of an individual intention,
of a will, of an aim, there is no attempt at attaining
to any “ideal man," or "ideal happiness” or “ideal
morality” with him,-it is absurd to wish him to
be careering towards some sort of purpose. We in-
vented the concept“purpose"; in reality purpose is
altogether lacking. One is necessary, one is a piece
of fate, one belongs to the whole,
one is in the whole,
- there is nothing that could judge, measure, com-
pare, and condemn our existence, for that would
mean judging, measuting, comparing and condemn-
ing the whole. But there is nothing outside the whole!
The fact that no one shall any longer be made re-
sponsible, that the nature of existence may not be
traced to a causa prima, that the world is an entity
neither as a sensorium nor as a spirit-this alone is
the great deliverance,—thus alone is the innocence
of Becoming restored. . . . The concept “God” has
.
been the greatest objection to existence hitherto. . . .
We deny God, we deny responsibility in God : thus
alone do we save the world. -
خوری ورگ
## p. 44 (#64) ##############################################
THE “IMPROVERS” OF MANKIND
I
You are aware of my demand upon philosophers,
that they should take up a stand Beyond Good and
Evil,—that they should have the illusion of the moral
judgment beneath them. This demand is the result
of a point of view which I was the first to formulate:
that there are no such things as moral facts. Moral
judgment has this in common with the religious one,
that it believes in realities which are not real. Mor-
ality is only an interpretation of certain phenomena:
or, more strictly speaking, a misinterpretation of
them. Moral judgment, like the religious one, be-
longs to a stage of ignorance in which even the con-
cept of reality, the distinction between real and im-
agined things, is still lacking : so that truth, at such
a stage, is applied to a host of things which to-day
we call “imaginary. ” That is why the moral judg-
ment must never be taken quite literally: as such
it is sheer nonsense. As a sign code, however, it is
invaluable: to him at least who knows, it reveals the
most valuable facts concerning cultures and inner
conditions, which did not know enough to "under-
stand” themselves. Morality is merely a sign-
language, simply symptomatology: one must already
know what it is all about in order to turn it to any
use.
## p. 45 (#65) ##############################################
THE “IMPROVERS” OF MANKIND
45
2
Let me give you one example, quite provisionally.
In all ages there have been people who wished to
“improve" mankind : this above all is what was
called morality. But the most different tendencies
are concealed beneath the same word. Both the
taming of the beast man, and the rearing of a par-
ticular type of man, have been called “improve-
ment”: these zoological termini, alone, represent
real things—real things of which the typical “im-
prover,” the priest, naturally knows nothing, and
will know nothing. To call the taming of an animal
“improving” it, sounds to our ears almost like a
joke. He who knows what goes on in menageries,
doubts very much whether an animal is improved
in such places. It is certainly weakened, it is made
less dangerous, and by means of the depressing in-
fluence of fear, pain, wounds, and hunger, it is con-
verted into a sick animal. And the same holds good
of the tamed man whom the priest has “improved. ”
In the early years of the Middle Ages, during which
the Church was most distinctly and above all a
menagerie, the most beautiful examples of the
“ blond beast” were hunted down in all directions,
-the noble Germans, for instance, were “improved. ”
But what did this “improved ” German, who had
been lured to the monastery look like after the pro-
cess? He looked like a caricature of man, like an
abortion : he had become a “sinner,” he was caged
up, he had been imprisoned behind a host of appal-
ling notions. He now lay there, sick, wretched,
malevolent even toward himself: full of hate for the
## p. 46 (#66) ##############################################
46
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
instincts of life, full of suspicion in regard to all that
is still strong and happy. In short a “Christian. ”
In physiological terms: in a fight with an animal,
the only way of making it weak may be to make it
sick. The Church undersood this : it ruined man,
it made him weak,but it laid claim to having
improved ”him.
3
Now let us consider the other case which is called
morality, the case of the rearing of a particular race
and species. The most magnificent example of this
is offered by Indian morality, and is sanctioned
religiously as the “ Law of Manu. ” In this book the
task is set of rearing no less than four races at once:
a priestly race, a warrior race, a merchant and agri-
cultural race, and finally a race of servants—the
Sudras. It is quite obvious that we are no longer
in a circus watching tamers of wild animals in this
book.
To have conceived even the plan of such a
breeding scheme, presupposes the "existence of a
man who is a hundred times milder and more reason-
able than the mere lion-tamer. One breathes more
freely, after stepping out of the Christian atmosphere
of hospitals and prisons, into this more salubrious,
loftier and more spacious world. What a wretched
thing the New Testament is beside Manu, what an
evil odour hangs around it! —But even this organisa-
tion found it necessary to be terrible, not this time
in a struggle with the animal-man, but with his
opposite, the non-caste man, the hotch-potch man,
the Chandala. Andonce again it had no other means
of making him weak and harmless, than by making
him sick,-it was the struggle with the greatest
a
## p. 47 (#67) ##############################################
THE “IMPROVERS” OF MANKIND
47
“number. ” Nothing perhaps is more offensive to
our feelings than these measures of security on the
part of Indian morality. The third edict, for in-
stance (Avadana-Sastra I. ), which treats “of impure
vegetables,” ordains that the only nourishment that
the Chandala should be allowed must consist of
garlic and onions, as the holy scriptures forbid their
being given corn or grain-bearing fruit, water and
fire. The same edict declares that the water which
they need must be drawn neither out of rivers, wells
or ponds, but only out of the ditches leading to
swamps and out of the holes left by the footprints
of animals. They are likewise forbidden to wash
either their linen or themselves, since the water which
is graciously granted to them must only be used for
quenching their thirst. Finally Sudra women are for-
bidden to assist Chandala women at their confine-
ments, while Chandala women are also forbidden to
assist each other at such times. The results of sani-
tary regulations of this kind could not fail to make
themselves felt; deadly epidemics and the most
ghastly venereal diseases soon appeared, and in coni-
sequence of these again “the Law of the Knife,”-
that is to say circumcision, was prescribed for male
children and the removal of the small labia from the
females. Manu himself says: “the Chandala are
the fruit of adultery, incest, and crime (this is the
necessary consequence of the idea of breeding).
Their clothes shall consist only of the rags torn from
corpses, their vessels shall be the fragments of broken
pottery, their ornaments shall be made of old iron,
and their religion shall be the worship of evil spirits;
without rest they shall wander from place to place.
## p. 48 (#68) ##############################################
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
They are forbidden to write from left to right or to
use their right hand in writing: the use of the right
hand and writing from left to right are reserved to
people of virtue, to people of race. ”
4
These regulations are instructive enough: we
can see in them the absolutely pure and primeval
humanity of the Aryans,—we learn that the notion
"pure blood,” is the reverse of harmless. On the
other hand it becomes clear among which people the
hatred, the Chandala hatred of this humanity has
been immortalised, among which people it has be-
come religion and genius. From this point of view
the gospels are documents of the highest value; and
the Book of Enoch is still more so. Christianity
as sprung from Jewish roots and comprehensible
only as grown upon this soil, represents the counter-
movement against that morality of breeding, of race
and of privilege :-it is essentially an anti-Aryan
religion: Christianity is the transvaluation of all
Aryan values, the triumph of Chandala values,
the proclaimed gospel of the poor and of the low,
the general insurrection of all the down-trodden, the
wretched, the bungled and the botched, against the
"race,"—the immortal revenge of the Chandala as
the religion of love.
5
The morality of breeding and the morality of
taming, in the means which they adopt in order to
prevail, are quite worthy of each other: we may lay
down as a leading principle that in order to create
morality a man must have the absolute will to im-
## p. 49 (#69) ##############################################
THE “IMPROVERS” OF MANKIND
49
"
morality. This is the great and strange problem
with which I have so long been occupied : the
psychology of the “Improvers” of mankind. A
small, and at bottom perfectly insignificant fact,
known as the “pia fraus,” first gave me access to
this problem : the pia fraus, the heirloom of all
philosophers and priests who “improve ” mankind.
Neither Manu, nor Plato, nor Confucius, nor the
teachers of Judaism and Christianity, have ever
doubted their right to falsehood. They have never
doubted their right to quite a number of other things
To express oneself in a formula, one might say :-
all means which have been used heretofore with the
object of making man moral, were through and
through immoral.
1
4
## p. 50 (#70) ##############################################
THINGS THE GERMANS LACK
I
AMONG Germans at the present day it does not
suffice to have intellect; one is actually forced to
appropriate it, to lay claim to it.
Maybe I know the Germans, perhaps I may
tell them a few home-truths. Modern Germany
represents such an enormous store of inherited and
acquired capacity, that for some time it might spendefulne
this accumulated treasure even with some prodi-
(lavish. . essgality. It is no superior culture that has ultimately
become prevalent with this modern tendency, nor is
it by any means delicate taste, or noble beauty of
the instincts; but rather a number of virtues more
manly than any that other European countries can
show. An amount of good spirits and self-respect,
plenty of firmness in human relations and in the re-
ciprocity of duties; much industry and much per-
severance-and a certain inherited soberness which
is much more in need of a spur than of a brake.
Let me add that in this country people still obey
without feeling that obedience humiliates. And no
one despises his opponent.
You observe that it is my desire to be fair to the
Germans: and in this respect I should not like to
be untrue to myself, I must therefore also state
my objections to them. It costs a good deal to
50
## p. 51 (#71) ##############################################
THINGS THE GERMANS LACK
51
caues one to k
attain to a position of power ; for power stultifies: foolish
The Germans—they were once called a people of
I
thinkers : do they really think at all at present?
Nowadays the Germans are bored by intellect,
they mistrust intellect; politics have swallowed up
all earnestness for really intellectual things—“Ger-
many, Germany above all. ”* I fear this was the
death-blow to German philosophy. “Are there
any German philosophers? Are there any German
poets ?
Are there any good German books ? "
people ask me abroad. I blush; but with that
pluck which is peculiar to me, even in moments of
desperation, I reply: “Yes, Bismarck ! "_Could I
I have dared to confess what books are read to-day?
Cursed instinct of mediocrity ?
2
What might not German intellect have been !
who has not thought sadly upon this question !
But this nation has deliberately stultified itself for
almost a thousand years: nowhere else have the
two great European narcotics, alcohol and Chris-
tianity, been so viciously abused as in Germany.
Recently a third opiate was added to the list, one
which in itself alone would have sufficed to complete
the ruin of all subtle and daring intellectual anima-
tion, I speak of music, our costive and constipating
German music. How much peevish ponderous-
ness, paralysis, dampness, dressing-gown languor,
and beer is there not in German intelligence !
How is it really possible that young men who
* The German national hymn : “Deutschland, Deutsch-
land über alles. ”_TR.
cic
I alcoinoi, Christianity
,
## p. 52 (#72) ##############################################
52
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
-
consecrate their whole lives to the pursuit of intel-
lectual ends, should not feel within them the first
instinct of intellectuality, the self-preservative in-
stinct of the intellect—and should drink beer? The
alcoholism of learned youths does not incapacitate
them for becoming scholars--a man quite devoid
of intellect may be a great scholar,—but it is a
problem in every other respect. Where can that
soft degeneracy not be found, which is produced in
the intellect by beer! I once laid my finger upon
a case of this sort, which became almost famous,
—the degeneration of our leading German free-
spirit, the clever David Strauss, into the author of
a suburban gospel and New Faith. Not in vain
had he sung the praises of “the dear old brown
liquor” in verse—true unto death.
It
3
I have spoken of German intellect. I have said
that it is becoming coarser and shallower. Is
that enough? —In reality something very different
frightens me, and that is the ever steady decline
of German earnestness, German profundity, and
German passion in things intellectual. Not only
intellectuality, but also pathos has altered. From
time to time I come in touch with German universi-
ties; what an extraordinary atmosphere prevails
among their scholars! what barrenness! and what
self-satisfied and lukewarm intellectuality! For any
bne to point to German science as an argument
against me would show that he grossly misunder-
stood my meaning, while it would also prove that
he had not read a word of my writings. For seven-
then he
the an
aurreratus
culture
## p. 53 (#73) ##############################################
THINGS THE GERMANS LACK
53
teen years I have done little else than expose the
de-intellectualising influence of our modern scientific
studies. The severe slavery to which every indi-
vidual nowadays is condemned by the enormous
range covered by the sciences, is the chiei reason
why fuller, richer and profounder natures can find no
education or educators that are fit for them. No-
thing is more deleterious to this
age
than the
super-
fluity of pretentious loafers and fragmentary human
beings; our universities are really the involuntary
forcing houses for this kind of withering-up of the
instincts of intellectuality. And the whole of Europe
is beginning to know this—politics on a large scale
deceive no one. Germany is becoming ever more
and more the Flat-land of Europe. I am still in
search of a German with whom I could be serious
after my own fashion. And how much more am I
in search of one with whom I could be cheerful
-The Twilight of the Idols : ah! what man to-day
would be capable of understanding the kind of
seriousness from which a philosopher is recovering
in this work! It is our cheerfulness that people
understand least.
4
Let us examine another aspect oi the question :
it is not only obvious that German culture is declin-
ing, but adequate reasons for this decline are not
lacking. After all, nobody can spend more than he
has :—this is true of individuals, it is also true of
nations. If you spend your strength in acquiring
power, or in politics on a large scale, or in economy,
or in universal commerce, or in parliamentarism, or
in military interests—if you dissipate the modicum
## p. 54 (#74) ##############################################
54
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
1
of reason, of earnestness, of will, and of self-
control that constitutes your nature in one particular
fashion, you cannot dissipate it in another. Culture
and the state-let no one be deceived on this point
are antagonists: A “culture-state”* is merely a
modern idea. The one lives upon the other, the
one flourishes, at the expense of the other. All
great periods of culture have been periods of politi-
cal decline; that which is great from the stand-
point of culture, was always unpolitical—even anti-
political. Goethe's heart opened at the coming
of Napoleon—it closed at the thought of the “Wars
of Liberation. ” At the very moment when Germany
arose as a great power in the world of politics,
France won new importance as a force in the world
of culture. Even at this moment a large amount
of fresh intellectual earnestness and passion has.
emigrated to Paris ; the question of pessimism, for
instance, and the question of Wagner; in France
almost all psychological and artistic questions are
considered with incomparably more subtlety and
thoroughness than they are in Germany,—the Ger-
mans are even incapable of this kind of earnestness.
In the history of European culture the rise of the
Empire signifies, above all, a displacement of the
centre of gravity. Everywhere people are already
aware of this: in things that really matter—and
these after all constitute culture, the Germans are
no longer worth considering. I ask you, can you
show me one single man of brains who could be
* The word Kultur-Staat “culture-state" has become a
standard expression in the German language, and is applied
to the leading European States. --TR.
## p. 55 (#75) ##############################################
THINGS THE GERMANS LACK
55
mentioned in the same breath with
other European
thinkers, like your Goethe,your Hegel, your Heinrich
Heine, and your Schopenhauer ? —The fact that
there is no longer a single German philosopher
worth mentioning is an increasing wonder.
피
5
Everything that matters has been lost sight of
by the whole of the higher educational system of
Germany: the end quite as much as the means to
that end. People forget that education, the
pro-
cess of cultivation itself, is the end-and not "the
Empire”--they forget that the educator is required
"for this end—and not the public-school teacher and
university scholar. Educators are needed who are
themselves educated, superior and noble intellects,
who can prove that they are thus qualified, that they
are ripe and mellow products of culture at every
moment of their lives, in word and in gesture ;-not
the learned louts who, like“ superior wet-nurses,"are
now thrust upon the youth of the land by public
schools and universities. With but rare exceptions,
that which is lacking in Germany is the first pre-
requisite of educationthat is to say, the educators;
hence the decline of German culture. One of those
rarest exceptions is my highly respected friend
Jacob Burckhardt of Bâle: to him above all is Bâle
indebted for its foremost position in human culture
What the higher schools of Germany really do ac-
complish is this, they brutally train a vast crowd of
young men, in the smallest amountof time possible, to
become useful and exploitable servants of the state.
## p. 56 (#76) ##############################################
56
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
a
1
I
“Higher education” and a vast crowd—these terms
contradict each other from the start. All superior
.
education can only concern the exception: a man
must be privileged in order to have a right to such
a great privilege. All great and beautiful things
cannot be a common possession: pulchrum est pau-
corum hominum. —What is it that brings about the
decline of German culture? The fact that" higher
education” is no longer a special privilege—the de-
mocracy of a process of cultivation that has become
general," common. Nor must it be forgotten that
the privileges of the military profession by urging
many too many to attend the higher schools, in-
volve the downfall of the latter. In modern Germany
nobody is at liberty to give his children a noble
education: in regard to their teachers, their curricula,
and their educational aims, our higher schools are
one and all established upon a fundamentally doubt-
ful mediocre basis. Everywhere, too, a hastiness
which is unbecoming rules supreme; just as if some-
thing would be forfeited if the young man were not
“ finished” at the age of twenty-three, or did not
know how to reply to the most essential question,
"which calling to choose? ”—The superior kind of
,
you please, does not like "callings,” precisely
because he knows himself to be called. He has time,
he takes time, he cannot possibly think of becom-
ing “finished,”—in the matter of higher culture, a
man of thirty years is a beginner, a child. Our
overcrowded public-schools, our accumulation of
foolishly manufactured public-school masters, are a
scandal :) maybe there are very serious motives for
defending this state of affairs, as was shown quite
-
man, if
## p. 57 (#77) ##############################################
THINGS THE GERMANS LACK
57
recently by the professors of Heidelberg ; but there
can be no reasons for doing so.
6
In order to be true to my nature, which is affirma-
tive and which concerns itself with contradictions
and criticism only indirectly and with reluctance,
let me state at once what the three objects are for
which we need educators. People must learn to
see; they must learn to think, and they must learn
to speak and to write: the object of all three of
these pursuits is a noble culture. To learn to see-
to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to
allow things to come up to it; to defer judgment,
and to acquire the habit of approaching and grasp-
ing an individual case from all sides. This is the
first preparatory schooling of intellectuality. One
must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one
must acquire a command of the obstructing and
isolating instincts. To learn to see, as I under-
stand this matter, amounts almost to that which in
popular language is called "strength of will”: its
essential feature is precisely not to wish to see, to
be able to postpone one's decision. All lack of
intellectuality, all vulgarity, arises out of the inability
to resist a stimulus :-one must respond or react,
every impulse is indulged. In many cases such
necessary action is already a sign of morbidity, of
decline, and a symptom of exhaustion. Almost
everything that coarse popular language character-
ises as vicious, is merely that physiological inability
to refrain from reacting. --As an instance of what it
means to have learnt to see, let me state that a man
1
## p. 58 (#78) ##############################################
58
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
thus trained will as a learner have become generally
slow, suspicious, and refractory. With hostile calm
he will first allow every kind of strange and new
thing to come right up to him,- he will draw back
his hand at its approach. To stand with all the
doors of one's soul wide open, to lie slavishly in the
dust before every trivial fact, at all times of the day
to be strained ready for the leap, in order to deposit
one's self, to plunge one's self, into other souls and
other things, in short, the famous "objectivity" of
modern times, is bad taste, it is essentially vulgar
and cheap.
7
As to learning how to think-our schools no
longer have any notion of such a thing. Even at
the universities, among the actual scholars in philo-
sophy, logic as a theory, as a practical pursuit, and
as a business, is beginning to die out. Turn to any
German book : you will not find the remotest trace
of a realisation that there is such a thing as a
technique, a plan of study, a will to mastery, in
the matter of thinking,—that thinking insists upon
being learnt, just as dancing insists upon being
learnt, and that thinking insists upon being learnt
as a form of dancing. What single German can
still say he knows from experience that delicate
shudder which light footfalls in matters intellectual
cause to pervade his whole body and limbs! Stiff
awkwardness in intellectual attitudes, and the clumsy
fist in grasping—these things are so essentially
German, that outside Germany they are absolutely
confounded with the German spirit. The German
has no fingers for delicate nuances. The fact that
## p. 59 (#79) ##############################################
THINGS THE GERMANS LACK
59
the people of Germany have actually tolerated
their philosophers, more particularly that most de-
formed cripple of ideas that has ever existed—the
great Kant, gives one no inadequate notion of their
native elegance. For, truth to tell, dancing in all
its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum
of all noble education : dancing with the feet, with
ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must
also be able to dance with the pen—that one must
learn ow to write ? —But at this stage I should
become utterly enigmatical to German readers.
## p. 60 (#80) ##############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE
AGE
I
! My Impossible People. —Seneca, or the toreador of
virtue. —Rousseau, or the return to nature, in impuris
naturalibus. ---Schiller, or the Moral-Trumpeter of
Säckingen. -Dante, or the hyæna that writes poetry
in tombs. -Kant, or cant as an intelligible character.
-Victor Hugo, or the lighthouse on the sea of non-
sense. —Liszt, or the school of racing—after women.
- George Sand, or lactea ubertas, in plain English :
the cow with plenty of beautiful milk. -Michelet, or
enthusiasm in its shirt sleeves. —Carlyle, or Pessim-
ism after undigested meals. —John Stuart Mill, or
offensive lucidity. —The brothers Goncourt, or the
two Ajaxes fighting with Homer. Music by Offen-
bach. -Zola, or the love of stinking.
2
Renan. —Theology, or the corruption of reason by
original sin (Christianity). Proof of this,—Renan
who, even in those rare cases where he ventures to
say either Yes or No on a general question, invari-
ably misses the point with painful regularity. For
instance, he would fain associate science and nobility:
but surely it must be obvious that science is demo-
cratic. He seems to be actuated by a strong desire
to represent an aristocracy of intellect: but, at the
60
## p. 61 (#81) ##############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE
61
same time he grovels on his knees, and not only on
his knees, before the opposite doctrine, the gospel
of the humble. What is the good of all free-spirited-
ness, modernity, mockery and acrobatic suppleness,
if in one's belly one is still a Christian, a Catholic,
and even a priest! Renan's forte, precisely like that
of a Jesuit and Father Confessor, lies in his seduc-
tiveness. His intellectuality is not devoid of that
unctuous complacency of a parson,—like all priests,
he becomes dangerous only when he loves. He is
second to none in the art of skilfully worshipping a
dangerous thing. This intellect of Renan's, which
in its action is enervating, is one calamity the more,
for poor, sick France with her will-power all going
to pieces.
3
Sainte-Beuve. -There is naught of man in him;
he is full of petty spite towards all virile spirits.
He wanders erratically; he is subtle, inquisitive, a
little bored, for ever with his ear to key-holes,-at
bottom a woman, with all woman's revengefulness
and sensuality. As a psychologist he is a genius of
slander ; inexhaustively rich in means to this end;
no one understands better than he how to intro-
duce a little poison into praise. In his fundamental
instincts he is plebeian and next of kin to Rousseau's
resentful spirit: consequently he is a Romanticist-
for beneath all romanticism Rousseau's instinct for
revenge grunts and frets. He is a revolutionary,
but kept within bounds by "funk. ” He is embar-
rassed in the face of everything that is strong (public
opinion, the Academy, the court, even Port Royal).
He is embittered against everything great in men
## p. 62 (#82) ##############################################
62
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
and things, against everything that believes in itself.
Enough of a poet and of a female to be able to feel
greatness as power; he is always turning and twist-
ing, because, like the proverbial worm, he constantly
feels that he is being trodden upon. As a critic he
has no standard of judgment, no guiding principle,
no backbone. Although he possesses the tongue of
the Cosmopolitan libertine which can chatter about
a thousand things, he has not the courage even to
acknowledge his libertinage. As a historian he has
no philosophy, and lacks the power of philosophical
vision,-hence his refusal to act the part of a judge,
and his adoption of the mask of “objectivity” in all
important matters. His attitude is better in regard
to all those things in which subtle and effete taste
is the highest tribunal : in these things he really
does have the courage of his own personality_he
really does enjoy his own nature—he actually is a
master. -In some respects he is a prototype of
Beaudelaire.
4
“ The Imitation of Christ” is one of those books
which I cannot even take hold of without physical
loathing: it exhales a perfume of the eternally
feminine, which to appreciate fully one must be a
Frenchman or a Wagnerite. This saint has a way
of speaking about love which makes even Parisiennes
feel a little curious. -I am told that that most intelli-
gent of Jesuits, Auguste Comte, who wished to lead
his compatriots back to Rome by the circuitous route
of science, drew his inspiration from this book. And
I believe it: “The religion of the heart. ”
»
## p. 63 (#83) ##############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE 63
5
G. Eliot. They are rid of the Christian God and
therefore think it all the more incumbent upon them
to hold tight to Christian morality: this is an English
way of reasoning; but let us not take it ill in moral
females à la Eliot. In England, every man who
indulges in any trifling emancipation from theology,
must retrieve his honourin the most terrifying manner
by becoming a moral fanatic. That is how they do
penancein thatcountry. -Asfor us, we act differently.
When we renounce the Christian faith, we abandon
all right to Christian morality. This is not by any
means self-evident, and in defianceof English shallow-
pates the point must be made ever more and more
plain. Christianity is a system, a complete outlook
upon the world, conceived as a whole. If its leading
concept, the belief in God, is wrenched from it, the
wholeisdestroyed; nothing vital remainsinour grasp.
Christianity presupposes that man does not and can-
not know what is good or bad for him : the Christian
believes in God who, alone, can know these things.
Christian morality is a command, its origin is tran-
scendental.
