This enormous internal tension thus discharged
itself in terrible and reckless hostility outside the
state : the various states mutually tore each other
to bits, in order that each individual state could re-
main at peace with itself.
itself in terrible and reckless hostility outside the
state : the various states mutually tore each other
to bits, in order that each individual state could re-
main at peace with itself.
Nietzsche - v16 - Twilight of the Idols
—That which we did
not know formerly, and know now, or might know
if we chose,—is the fact that a retrograde formation,
a reversion in any sense or degree, is absolutely im-
possible. We physiologists, at least, are aware of
this. But all priests and moralists have believed in
it,—they wished to drag and screw man back to a
former standard of virtue. Morality has always been
a Procrustean bed. Even the politicians have imi-
tated the preachers of virtue in this matter. There
are parties at the present day whose one aim and
dream is to make all things adopt the crab-march.
But not everyone can be a crab. It cannot be helped:
we must go forward,—that is to say step by step
further and further into decadence (this is my
definition of modern “progress”). We can hinder
this development, and by so doing dam up and
accumulate degeneration itself and render it more
convulsive, more volcanic: we cannot do more.
a
C
44
My concept of Genius. —Great men, like great
ages, are explosive material, in which a stupendous
amount of power is accumulated; the first conditions
of their existence are always historical and physio-
logical; they are the outcome of the fact that for
long ages energy has been collected, hoarded up,
saved
up and preserved for their use, and that no
explosion has taken place. When the tension in
the bulk has become sufficiently excessive, the most
fortuitous stimulus suffices in order to call " "genius,"
## p. 102 (#122) ############################################
102
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
'great deeds,” and momentous fate into the world.
What then is the good of all environment, historical
periods, “ Zeitgeist” (Spirit of the age) and “public
opinion”? _Take the case of Napoleon. France of
the Revolution, and still more of the period pre-
ceding the Revolution, would have brought forward
a type which was the very reverse of Napoleon : it
actually did produce such a type. And because
Napoleon was something different, the heir of a
stronger, more lasting and older civilisation than
that which in France was being smashed to atoms
he became master there, he was the only master
there. Great men are necessary,
the age in which
they appear is a matter of chance; the fact that they
almost invariably master their age is accounted for
simply by the fact that they are stronger, that they
are older, and that power has been stored longer for ·
them. The relation of a genius to his age is that
which exists between strength and weakness and
between maturity and youth: the age is relatively
always very much younger, thinner, less mature, less
resolute and more childish. The fact that the general
opinion in France at the present day, is utterly differ-
ent on this very point (in Germany too, but that is
of no consequence); the fact that in that country
the theory of environment-a regular neuropathic
notion has become sacrosanct and almost scientific,
and finds acceptance even among the physiologists,
is a very bad, and exceedingly depressing sign. In
England too the same belief prevails : but nobody
will be surprised at that. The Englishman knows
only two ways of understanding the genius and the
"great man”: either democratically in the style of
## p. 103 (#123) ############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE
103
Buckle, or religiously after the manner of Carlyle. -
The danger which great men and great ages repre-
sent, is simply extraordinary ; every kind of exhaus-
tion and of sterility follows in their wake. The great
man is an end; the great age—the Renaissance for
instance,—is an end. The genius—in work and in
deed,-is necessarily a squanderer : the fact that
he spends himself constitutes his greatness. The
instinct of self-preservation is as it were suspended
in him; the overpowering pressure of out-flowing
energy in him forbids any such protection and pru-
dence. People call this “self-sacrifice,” they praise
his “heroism,” his indifference to his own well-being,
his utter devotion to an idea, a great cause, a father-
land: All misunderstandings. . . He flows out,
, he consumes himself, he does not spare
himself,--and does all this with fateful necessity,
irrevocably, involuntarily, just as a river involuntarily
bursts its dams. But, owing to the fact that human-
ity has been much indebted to such explosives, it
has endowed them with many things, for instance,
with a kind of higher morality. . . . This is indeed
.
the sort of gratitude that humanity is capable of :
it misunderstands its benefactors.
he flows over,
45
-
The criminal and his like. —The criminal type is
the type of the strong man amid unfavourable con-
ditions, a strong man made sick. He lacks the wild
and savage state, a form of nature and existence
which is freer and more dangerous, in which every-
thing that constitutes the shield and the sword in
## p. 104 (#124) ############################################
104
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
the instinct of the strong man, takes a place by right.
Society puts a ban upon his virtues; the most
spirited instincts inherent in him immediately be-
come involved with the depressing passions, with
suspicion, fear and dishonour. But this is almost
the recipe for physiological degeneration. When a
man has to do that which he is best suited to do,
which he is most fond of doing, not only clandes-
tinely, but also with long suspense, caution and ruse,
he becomes anæmic; and inasmuch as he is always
having to pay for his instincts in the form of danger,
persecution and fatalities, even his feelings begin
to turn against these instincts—he begins to regard
them as fatal. It is society, our tame, mediocre,
castrated society, in which an untutored son of
nature who comes to us from his mountains or from
his adventures at sea, must necessarily degenerate
into a criminal. Or almost necessarily: for there
are cases in which such a man shows himself to be
stronger than society: the Corsican Napoleon is
the most celebrated case of this. Concerning the
problem before us, Dostoiewsky's testimony is of
importance-Dostoiewsky who, incidentally, was
the only psychologist from whom I had anything
to learn: he belongs to the happiest windfalls of
my life, happier even than the discovery of Stendhal.
This profound man, who was right ten times over in
esteeming the superficial Germans low, found the
Siberian convicts among whom he lived for many
years,—those thoroughly hopeless criminals for
whom no road back to society stood open-very
different from what even he had expected,—that is
to say carved from about the best, hardest and most
## p. 105 (#125) ############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE
105
a
valuable material that grows on Russian soil. * Let
us generalise the case of the criminal ; let us imagine
creatures who for some reason or other fail to meet
with public approval, who know that they are re-
garded neither as beneficent nor useful,—the feeling
of the Chandala, who are aware that they are not
looked upon as equal, but as proscribed, unworthy,
polluted. The thoughts and actions of all such
natures are tainted with a subterranean mouldiness;
everything in them is of a paler hue than in those
on whose existence the sun shines. But almost all
those creatures whom, nowadays, we honour and
respect, formerly lived in this semi-sepulchral atmo-
sphere: the man of science, the artist, the genius,
the free spirit, the actor, the business man, and the
great explorer. As long as the priest represented
the highest type of man, every valuable kind of man
was depreciated. . The time is coming—this I
guarantee—when he will pass as the lowest type, as
our Chandala, as the falsest and most disreputable
kind of man.
I call your attention to the fact
that even now, under the sway of the mildest
customs and usages which have ever ruled on earth
or at least in Europe, every form of standing aside,
every kind of prolonged, excessively prolonged con-
cealment, every unaccustomed and obscure form of
existence tends to approximate to that type which
the criminal exemplifies to perfection. All pioneers
of the spirit have, for a while, the grey and fatalistic
mark of the Chandala on their brows: not because
they are regarded as Chandala, but because they
* See “Memoirs of a House of the Dead,” by Dostoiewsky
(translation by Marie von Thilo : "Buried Alive"). -TR.
.
## p. 106 (#126) ############################################
106
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
themselves feel the terrible chasm which separates
them from all that is traditional and honourable.
Almost every genius knows the “Catilinarian life”
as one of the stages in his development, a feeling
of hate, revenge and revolt against everything that
exists, that has ceased to evolve. Catiline-the
early stage of every Cæsar.
.
.
46
Here the outlook is free. -When a philosopher
holds his tongue it may be the sign of the loftiness
of his soul : when he contradicts himself it may be
love; and the very courtesy of a knight of knowledge
may force him to lie. It has been said, and not with-
out subtlety :-il est indigne des grands cæurs de ré-
pandre le trouble qu'ils ressentent* : but it is neces-
sary to add that there may also be grandeur de cæur
in not shrinking from the most undignified proceed-
ing. A woman who loves sacrifices her honour; a
knight of knowledge who“ loves,” sacrifices perhaps
his humanity; a God who loved, became a Jew. . .
a
47
Beauty no accident. —Even the beauty of a race or
of a family, the charm and perfection of all its move-
ments, is attained with pains : like genius it is the
final result of the accumulated work of generations.
Great sacrifices must have been made on the altar of
good taste, for its sake many things must have been
done, and much must have been left undone-the
seventeenth century in France is admirable for both of
* Clothilde de Veaux. -TR.
*
## p. 107 (#127) ############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE 107
these things,-in this century there must have been
a principle of selection in respect to company,
locality, clothing, the gratification of the instinct of
sex; beauty must have been preferred to profit, to
habit, to opinion and to indolence. The first rule of
all :-nobody must “let himself go," not even when
he is alone. —Good things are exceedingly costly:
and in all cases the law obtains that he who possesses
them is a different person from him who is acquiring
them. Everything good is an inheritance: that
which is not inherited is imperfect, it is simply a be-
a
ginning. In Athens at the time of Cicero—who ex-
presses his surprise at the fact-the men and youths
were by far superior in beauty to the women: but
what hard work and exertions the male sex had for
centuries imposed upon itself in the service of beauty!
We must not be mistaken in regard to the method
employed here: the mere discipline of feelings and
thoughts is little better than nil (-it is in this that
the great error of German culture, which is quite
illusory, lies): the body must be persuaded first. The
strict maintenance of a distinguished and tasteful
demeanour, the obligation of frequenting only those
who do not “let themselves go,” is amply sufficient
to render one distinguished and tasteful : in two or
three generations everything has already taken deep
root. The fate of a people and of humanity is de-
cided according to whether they begin culture at the
right place—not at the “soul” (as the fatal supersti-
tion of the priests and half-priests would have it):
the right place is the body, demeanour, diet, physio-
logy—the rest follows as the night the day. .
That is why the Greeks remain the first event in
.
## p. 108 (#128) ############################################
108
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
culture—they knew and they did what was needful.
Christianity with its contempt of the body is the
greatest mishap that has ever befallen mankind.
.
48
Progress in my sense. —I also speak of a “return to
nature,” although it is not a process of going back
but of going up-up into lofty, free and even terrible
nature and naturalness; such a nature as can play
with great tasks and may play with them. . . . To
speak in a parable, Napoleon was an example of a
“ return to nature," as I understand it (for instance
in rebus tacticis, and still more, as military experts
know, in strategy). But Rousseau-whither did he
want to return? Rousseau this first modern man,
idealist and canaille in one person; who was in need
of moral" dignity,” in order even to endure the sight
of his own person,-ill with unbridled vanity and
wanton self-contempt; this abortion, who planted
his tent on the threshold of modernity, also wanted
a “return to nature”; but, I ask once more, whither
did he wish to return? I hate Rousseau, even in
the Revolution itself: the latter was the historical
expression of this hybrid of idealist and canaille.
The bloody farce which this Revolution ultimately
became, its “immorality," concerns me but slightly;
what I loathe however is its Rousseauesque morality
-the so-called “truths" of the Revolution, by means
of which it still exercises power and draws all flat
and mediocre things over to its side. The doctrine
of equality! . . . But there is no more deadly poison
!
than this ; for it seems to proceed from the very lips
of justice, whereas in reality it draws the curtain
)
.
## p. 109 (#129) ############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE
109
down on all justice. . . . “To equals equality, to
unequals inequality”—that would be the real speech
of justice and that which follows from it. “Never
make unequal things equal. ” The fact that so much
horror and blood are associated with this doctrine of
equality, has lent this “modern idea" par excellence
such a halo of fire and glory, that the Revolution as
a drama has misled even the most noble minds.
That after all is no reason for honouring it the more.
-I can see only one who regarded it as it should be
regarded—that is to say, with loathing ; I speak of
Goethe.
49
Goethe. —No mere German, but a European event :
a magnificent attempt to overcome the eighteenth
century by means of a return to nature, by means
of an ascent to the naturalness of the Renaissance,
a kind of self-overcoming on the part of the century
in question. —He bore the strongest instincts of
this century in his breast: its sentimentality, and
idolatry of nature, its anti-historic, idealistic, unreal,
and revolutionary spirit (the latter is only a form
of the unreal). He enlisted history, natural science,
antiquity, as well as Spinoza, and above all practi-
cal activity, in his service. He drew a host of very
definite horizons around him ; far from liberating
himself from life, he plunged right into it; he did
not give in; he took as much as he could on his own
shoulders, and into his heart. That to which he
aspired was totality ; he was opposed to the sunder-
ing of reason, sensuality, feeling and will (as preached
with most repulsive scholasticism by Kant, the
antipodes of Goethe); he disciplined himself into a
harmonious whole, he created himself. Goethe in the
## p. 110 (#130) ############################################
IIO
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
midst of an age of unreal sentiment, was a convinced
realist: he said yea to everything that was like him
in this regard,—there was no greater event in his
life than that ens realissimum, surnamed Napoleon.
Goethe conceived a strong, highly-cultured man,
skilful in all bodily accomplishments, able to keep
himself in check, having a feeling of reverence for
himself, and so constituted as to be able to risk the
full enjoyment of naturalness in all its rich profusion
and be strong enough for this freedom; a man of
tolerance, not out of weakness but out of strength,
because he knows how to turn to his own profit
that which would ruin the mediocre nature; a man
unto whom nothing is any longer forbidden, unless
it be weakness either as a vice or as a virtue. Such
a spirit, become free, appears in the middle of the
universe with a feeling of cheerful and confident
fatalism he believes that only individual things are
bad, and that as a whole the universe justifies and
affirms itself—He no longer denies. . . . But such a
faith is the highest of all faiths : I christened it with
the name of Dionysus.
50
It might be said that, in a certain sense,
the nine-
teenth century also strove after all that Goethe
himself aspired to: catholicity in understanding, in
approving; a certain reserve towards everything,
daring realism, and a reverence for every fact. How
is it that the total result of this is not a Goethe, but
a state of chaos, a nihilistic groan, an inability to
discover where one is, an instinct of fatigue which
in praxi is persistently driving Europe to hark back
to the eighteenth century ? (-For instance in the
form of maudlin romanticism, altruism, hyper-senti-
## p. 111 (#131) ############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE
III
mentality, pessimism in taste, and socialism in
politics). Is not the nineteenth century, at least in
its closing years, merely an accentuated, brutalised
eighteenth century,—that is to say a century of
decadence? And has not Goethe been—not alone
for Germany, but also for the whole of Europe, -
merely an episode, a beautiful “in vain"? But great
men are misunderstood when they are regarded
from the wretched standpoint of public utility.
The fact that no advantage can be derived from
them-this in itself may perhaps be peculiar to great-
ness.
51
Goethe is the last German whom I respect : he
had understood three things as I understand them.
We also agree as to the “cross. ”* People often ask
me why on earth I write in German : nowhere am I
less read than in the Fatherland. But who knows
whether I even desire to be read at present ? —To
create things on which time may try its teeth in
vain; to be concerned both in the form and the
substance of my writing, about a certain degree of
immortality-never have I been modest enough to
demand less of myself. The aphorism, the sentence,
in both of which I, as the first among Germans, am
a master, are the forms of "eternity”; it is my
ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else
says in a whole book,—what everyone else does not
say in a whole book.
I have given mankind the deepest book it pos-
sesses, my Zarathustra ; before long I shall give
it the most independent one.
* See my note on p. 147 of Vol. I. of the Will to Power. -TR.
1
## p. 112 (#132) ############################################
THINGS I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS
I
-
In conclusion I will just say a word concerning that
world to which I have sought new means of access,
to which I may perhaps have found a new passage
-the ancient world. My taste, which is perhaps
the reverse of tolerant, is very far from saying yea
through and through even to this world: on the
whole it is not over eager to say Yea, it would prefer
to say Nay, and better still nothing whatever.
This is true of whole cultures; it is true of books,-
it is also true of places and of landscapes. Truth to
tell, the number of ancient books that count for some-
thing in my life is but small; and the most famous
are not of that number. My sense of style, for the
epigramasstyle, was awakened almost spontaneously
upon my acquaintance with Sallust. I have not for-
gotten the astonishment of my respected teacher
Corssen, when he was forced to give his worst Latin
pupil the highest marks,-at one stroke I had learned
all there was to learn. Condensed, severe, with as
much substance as possible in the background, and
with cold but roguish hostility towards all “ beauti-
ful words” and “beautiful feelings"—in these things
I found my own particular bent. In my writings
up to my “ Zarathustra,” there will be found a very
earnest ambition to attain to the Roman style, to
112
## p. 113 (#133) ############################################
THINGS I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS
113
the “aere perennius” in style. —The same thing hap-
pened on my first acquaintance with Horace. Up
to the present no poet has given me the same artistic
raptures as those which from the first I received from
an Horatian ode. In certain languages it would be
absurd even to aspire to what is accomplished by
this poet. This mosaic of words, in which every
,
unit spreads its power to the left and to the right
over the whole, by its sound, by its place in the sen-
tence, and by its meaning, this minimum in the com-
pass and number of the signs, and the maximum of
energy in the signs which is thereby achieved—all
this is Roman, and, if you will believe me, noble par
excellence. By the side of this all the rest of poetry
becomes something popular,—nothing more than
senseless sentimental twaddle.
-
2
I am not indebted to the Greeks for anything like
such strong impressions; and, to speak frankly, they
cannot be to us what the Romans are. One cannot
learn from the Greeks—their style is too strange, it
is also too fluid, to be imperative or to have the effect
of a classic. Who would ever have learnt writing
from a Greek! Who would ever have learned it
without the Romans! . . . Do not let anyone
suggest Plato to me. In regard to Plato I am a
thorough sceptic, and have never been able to agree
to the admiration of Plato the artist, which is tradi-
tional among scholars. And after all, in this matter,
the most refined judges of taste in antiquity are on
my side. In my opinion Plato bundles all the forms
of style pell-mell together, in this respect he is one
8
## p. 114 (#134) ############################################
114
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
-
of the first decadents of style: he has something
similar on his conscience to that which the Cynics
had who invented the satura Menippea. For the
Platonic dialogue—this revoltingly self-complacent
and childish kind of dialectics—to exercise any
charm over you, you must never have read any good
French authors,—Fontenelle for instance. Plato is
boring. In reality my distrust of Platois fundamental.
I find him so very much astray from all the deepest
instincts of the Hellenes, so steeped in moral pre-
judices, so pre-existently Christian—the concept
“good” is already the highest value with him,—that
rather than use any other expression I would prefer
to designate the whole phenomenon Plato with the
hard word “superior bunkum,” or, if you would like
it better, “idealism. ” Humanity has had to pay
dearly for this Athenian having gone to school among
the Egyptians (-or among the Jews in Egypt? . . . ).
In the great fatality of Christianity, Plato is that
double-faced fascination called the “ideal,” which
made it possible for the more noble natures of anti-
quity to misunderstand themselves and to tread the
bridge which led to the “cross. ” And what an amount
of Plato is still to be found in the concept “church,"
and in the construction, the system and the practice
of the church! —My recreation, my predilection, my
cure,after all Platonism, has always been Thucydides.
Thucydides and perhaps Machiavelli's principe are
most closely related to me owing to the absolute
determination which they show of refusing to deceive
themselves and of seeing reason in reality,—not in
“ rationality,” and still less in “morality. ” There is
no moreradical cure than Thucydides for the lament-
## p. 115 (#135) ############################################
THINGS I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS
115
ably rose-coloured idealisation of the Greeks which
the “classically-cultured” stripling bears with him
into life, as a reward for his public school training.
His writings must be carefully studied line by line,
and his unuttered thoughts must be read as distinctly
as what he actually says. There are few thinkers so
rich in unuttered thoughts. In him the culture “of
the Sophists "—that is to say, the culture of realism,
receives its most perfect expression: this inestim-
able movement in the midst of the moral and ideal-
istic knavery of the Socratic Schools which was then
breaking out in all directions. Greek philosophy
is the decadence of the Greek instinct: Thucydides
is the great summing up, the final manifestation
of that strong, severe positivism which lay in the
instincts of the ancient Hellene. After all, it is
courage in the face of reality that distinguishes such
natures as Thucydides from Plato: Plato is a coward
in the face of reality-consequently he takes refuge
in the ideal : Thucydides is master of himself,-
consequently he is able to master life.
»
means
3
To rout up cases of “beautiful souls,” “golden
and other perfections among the Greeks, to
admire, say, their calm grandeur, their ideal attitude
of mind, their exalted simplicity-from this “exalted
simplicity,” which after all is a piece of niaiserie
allemande, I was preserved by the psychologist within
I saw their strongest instinct, the Will to
Power, I saw them quivering with the fierce violence
of this instinct,-I saw all their institutions grow
out of measures of security calculated to preserve
me.
## p. 116 (#136) ############################################
116
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
each member of their society from the inner ex-
plosive material that lay in his neighbour's breast.
This enormous internal tension thus discharged
itself in terrible and reckless hostility outside the
state : the various states mutually tore each other
to bits, in order that each individual state could re-
main at peace with itself. It was then necessary to
be strong ; for danger lay close at hand,-it lurked
in ambush everywhere. The superb suppleness of
their bodies, the daring realism and immorality
which is peculiar to the Hellenes, was a necessity
not an inherent quality. It was a result, it had not
been there from the beginning. Even their festivals
and their arts were but means in producing a
feeling of superiority, and of showing it: they are
measures of self-glorification ; and in certain circum-
stances of making one's self terrible. . . . Fancy
judging the Greeks in the German style, from their
philosophers; fancy using the suburban respecta-
bility of the Socratic schools as a key to what is
fundamentally Hellenic! . . The philosophers are
of course the decadents of Hellas, the counter-
movement directed against the old and noble taste
against the agonal instinct, against the Polis,
against the value of the race, against the authority
of tradition). Socratic virtues were preached to the
Greeks, because the Greeks had lost virtue : irritable,
cowardly, unsteady, and all turned to play-actors,
they had more than sufficient reason to submit to
having morality preached to them. Not that it
helped them in any way; but great words and atti-
tudes are so becoming to decadents.
## p. 117 (#137) ############################################
THINGS I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS
117
4
I was the first who, in order to understand the
ancient, still rich and even superabundant Hellenic
instinct, took that marvellous phenomenon, which
bears the name of Dionysus, seriously: it can be ex-
plained only as a manifestation of excessive energy.
Whoever had studied the Greeks, as that most pro-
found of modern connoisseurs of their culture, Jakob
Burckhardt of Bâle, had done, knew at once that
something had been achieved by means of this in-
terpretation. And in his “ Cultur der Griechen,"
Burckhardt inserted a special chapter on the pheno-
menon in question. If you would like a glimpse of
the other side, you have only to refer to the almost
laughable poverty of instinct among German philo-
logists when they approach the Dionysian question.
The celebrated Lobeck, especially, who with the
venerable assurance of a worm dried up between
books, crawled into this world of mysterious states,
succeeded in convincing himself that he was scientific,
whereas he was simply revoltingly superficial and
childish,-Lobeck, with all the pomp of profound
erudition, gave us to understand that, as a matter of
fact, there was nothing at all in all these curiosities.
Truth to tell, the priests may well have communi-
cated not a few things of value to the participators
in such orgies; for instance, the fact that wine pro-
vokes desire, that man in certain circumstances lives
on fruit, that plants bloom in the spring and fade
in the autumn. As regards the astounding wealth
of rites, symbols and myths which take their origin
in the
orgy,
and with which the world of antiquity
## p. 118 (#138) ############################################
118
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
is literally smothered, Lobeck finds that it prompts
him to a feat of even greater ingenuity than the
foregoing phenomenon did. "The Greeks,” he says,
(Aglaophamus, I. p. 672), “when they had nothing
.
better to do, laughed, sprang and romped about, or,
inasmuch as men also like a change at times, they
would sit down, weep and bewail their lot. Others
then came up who tried to discover some reason for
this strange behaviour; and thus, as an explanation
of these habits, there arose an incalculable number of
festivals, legends, and myths. On the other hand it
was believed that the farcical performances which
then perchance began to take place on festival days,
necessarily formed part of the celebrations, and they
were retained as an indispensable part of the ritual. ”
- This is contemptible nonsense, and no one will
take a man like Lobeck seriously for a moment.
We are very differently affected when we examine
the notion “Hellenic," as Winckelmann and Goethe
conceived it, and find it incompatible with that ele-
ment out of which Dionysian art springs—I speak
of orgiasm. In reality I do not doubt that Goethe
would have completely excluded any such thing
from the potentialities of the Greek soul. Conse-
quently Goethe did not understand the Greeks. For
it is only in the Dionysian mysteries, in the psycho-
logy of the Dionysian state, that the fundamental
fact of the Hellenic instinct—its “will to life”—is ex-
pressed. What did the Hellene secure himself with
these mysteries? Eternal life, the eternal recurrence
of life; the future promised and hallowed in the past;
the triumphant Yea to life despite death and change;
real life conceived as the collective prolongation of
## p. 119 (#139) ############################################
THINGS I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS
119
life through procreation, through the mysteries of
sexuality. To the Greeks, the symbol of sex was
the most venerated of symbols, the really deep
significance of all the piety of antiquity. All the
details of the act of procreation, pregnancy and birth
gave rise to the loftiest and most solemn feelings.
In the doctrine of mysteries, pain was pronounced
holy: the “pains of childbirth” sanctify pain in
general,—all becoming and all growth, everything
that guarantees the future involves pain. . . . In
order that there may be eternal joy in creating, in
order that the will to life may say Yea to itself in
all eternity, the “pains of childbirth” must also be
eternal. All this is what the word Dionysus signi-
fies: I know of no higher symbolisin than this Greek
symbolism, this symbolism of the Dionysian pheno-
In it the profoundest instinct of life, the
instinct that guarantees the future of life and life
eternal, is understood religiously,—the road to life
itself, procreation, is pronounced holy. . . . It was
only Christianity which, with its fundamental resent-
ment against life, made something impure out of
sexuality: it flung filth at the very basis, the very
first condition of our life.
menon.
.
The psychology of orgiasm
conceived as the feel-
ing of a superabundance of vitality and strength,
within the scope of whicheven pain acts as a stimulus,
gave me the key to the concept tragic-feeling which
has been misunderstood not only by Aristotle, but
also even more by our pessimists. Tragedy is so far
from proving anything in regard to the pessimism of
|
1
## p. 120 (#140) ############################################
120
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
the Greeks, as Schopenhauer maintains, that it ought
rather to be considered as the categorical repudiation
and condemnation thereof. The saying of Yea to
life, including even its most strange and most terrible
problems, the will to life rejoicing over its own in-
exhaustibleness in the sacrifice of its highest types
—this is what I called Dionysian, this is what I
divined as the bridge leading to the psychology of
the tragic poet. Not in order to escape from terror
and pity, not to purify one's self of a dangerous
passion by discharging it with vehemence—this is
how Aristotle understood it-but to be far beyond
terror and pity and to be the eternal lust of Becoming
itself—that lust which also involves the lust of de-
struction. And with this I once more come into
touch with the spot from which I once set out-the
“ Birth of Tragedy” was my first transvaluation of
all values : with this I again take my stand upon
soil from out of which my will and my capacity
spring—1, the last disciple of the philosopher Diony-
sus,–I, the prophet of eternal recurrence.
upon the
THE END
## p. 121 (#141) ############################################
THE HAMMER
HAMMER SPEAKETH
“Why so hard ! ”—said the diamond once unto the char-
coal ; “are we then not next of kin ? ”
“Why so soft? O my brethren; this is my question to
you. For are ye not--my brothers ?
“Why so soft, so servile and yielding? Why are your
hearts so fond of denial and self-denial? Ilow is it that so
little fate looketh out from your eyes?
“And if ye will not be men of fate and inexorable, how
can ye hope one day to conquer with me?
“And if your hardness will not sparkle, cut and divide,
how can ye hope one day to create with me?
“For all creators are hard. And it must seem to you
blessed to stamp your hand upon millenniums as upon
wax,-
-Blessed to write upon the will of millenniums as upon
brass,-harder than brass, nobler than brass. -Hard
through and through is only the noblest.
This new table of values, O my brethren, I set over your
heads : Become hard. "
_"Thus Spake Zarathustra,"
III. , 29.
-
121
## p. 122 (#142) ############################################
## p. 123 (#143) ############################################
THE ANTICHRIST
An Attempted Criticism of
Christianity
## p. 124 (#144) ############################################
## p. 125 (#145) ############################################
PREFACE
This book belongs to the very few. Maybe not
one of them is yet alive; unless he be of those
who understand my Zarathustra. How can I con-
found myself with those who to-day already find a
hearing ? -Only the day after to-morrow belongs
to me. Some are born posthumously.
I am only too well aware of the conditions under
which a man understands me, and then necessarily
understands. He must be intellectually upright to
the point of hardness, in order even to endure my
seriousness and my passion. He must be used to
living on mountain-tops, and to feeling the
wretched gabble of politics and national egotism
beneath him. He must have become indifferent; he
must never inquire whether truth is profitable or
whether it may prove fatal. . . . Possessing from
strength a predilection for questions for which no
one has enough courage nowadays; the courage for
the forbidden; his predestination must be the laby-
rinth. The experience of seven solitudes. New ears
for new music. New eyes for the most remote
things. A new conscience for truths which hitherto
have remained dumb. And the will to economy
on a large scale: to husband his strength and his
enthusiasm. He must honour himself, he must
love himself; he must be absolutely free with regard
125
## p. 126 (#146) ############################################
126
PREFACE
to himself. . . . Very well then! Such men alone
are my readers, my proper readers, my preordained
readers : of what account are the rest ? —the rest
are simply—humanity. —One must be superior to
humanity in power, in loftiness of soul,—in contempt.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.
## p. 127 (#147) ############################################
I
.
LET us look each other in the face. We are hy- tre math wind,
is
a fabled race living beyond
north
perboreans,—we know well enough how far outside eten zerrenos
a land of sunshine.
eternal bliss.
the crowd we stand. “Thou wilt find the way to the
Hyperboreans neither by land nor by water”: Pindar
already knew this much about us. Beyond the north,
the ice, and death-our life, our happiness. . . . We
discovered happiness; we know the way, we found
the way out of thousands of years oflabyrinth. Who
else would have found it ? -Not the modern man,
surely –“I do not know where I am or what I am
to do; I am everything that knows not where it is
or what to do,”—sighs the modern man. We were
made quite ill by this modernity,—with its indolent
peace, its cowardly compromise, and the whole of
the virtuous filth of its Yea and Nay. This toler-
ance and largeur de cæur which “forgives" every-
thing, because it "understands” everything, is a
,
Sirocco for us. We prefer to live amid ice than to
be breathed upon by modern virtues and other
southerly winds! . . . We were brave enough; we
spared neither ourselves nor others : but we were
very far from knowing whither to direct our bravery.
We were becoming gloomy; people called us fatal-
ists. Our fate-it was the abundance, the tension
V
127
## p. 128 (#148) ############################################
128
THE ANTICHRIST
kay of
Chushanty
and the storing up of power.
We thirsted for
thunderbolts and great deeds; we kept at the most
respectful distance from the joy of the weakling,
from “resignation. ” Thunder was in our air,
that part of nature which we are, became overcast-
for we had no direction. The formula of our happi-
ness : a Yea, a Nay, a straight line, a goal.
.
2
*
What is good ? All that enhances the feeling of
power, the Will to Power, and power itself in man.
What is bad ? —All that proceeds from weakness.
What is happiness. The feeling that power is
increasing,—that resistance has been overcome.
Not contentment, but more power; not peace at
any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency* (virtue
in the Renaissance sense, virtù, free from all moralic
acid). The weak and the botched shall perish: first
principle of our humanity. And they ought even to
be helped to perish.
What is more harmful than any vice ? - Prac-
tical sympathy with all the botched and the weak-
Christianity.
3
The problem I set in this work is not what will
replace mankind in the order of living beings
(-Man is an end--); but, what type of man must
be reared, must be willed, as having the highest
value, as being the most worthy of life and the
surest guarantee of the future.
* The German “Tüchtigkeit” has a nobler ring than our
word “efficiency. ”—TR.
## p. 129 (#149) ############################################
A CRITICISM OF CHRISTIANITY
129
This more valuable type has appeared often
enough already : but as a happy accident, as an
exception, never as willed. He has rather been
precisely the most feared ; hitherto he has been
almost the terrible in itself;—and from out the very
fear he provoked there arose the will to rear the
type which has now been reared, attained: the
domestic animal, the gregarious animal, the sick
animal man,—the Christian.
4.
Mankind does not represent a development to-
wards a better, stronger or higher type, in the sense
in which this is supposed to occur to-day. “Pro-
gress” is merely a modern idea
that is to say, a
false idea. * The modern European is still far be-
low the European of the Renaissance in value. The
process of evolution does not by any means imply
elevation, enhancement and increasing strength.
On the other hand isolated and individual cases
are continually succeeding in different places on
earth, as the outcome of the most different cultures,
and in these a higher type certainly manifests itself:
something which by the side of mankind in general,
represents a kind of superman. Such lucky strokes
of great success have always been possible and will
perhaps always be possible. And even whole races,
tribes and nations may in certain circumstances re-
present such lucky strokes.
* Cf. Disraeli: “But enlightened Europe is not happy.
Its existence is a fever which it calls progress. Progress to
what? " ("Tancred,” Book III. , Chap. vii. ). —TR.
9
## p. 130 (#150) ############################################
130
THE ANTICHRIST
OUTCAST
5
We must not deck out and adorn Christianity :
it has waged a deadly war upon this higher type of
man, it has set a ban upon all the fundamental
instincts of this type, and has distilled evil and the
devil himself out of these instincts:—the strong man
as the typical pariań, the villain. Christianity has
sided with everything weak, low, and botched ; it
has made an ideal out of antagonism towards all
the self-preservative instincts of strong life: it has
corrupted even the reason of the strongest intellects,
by teaching that the highest values of intellectuality
are sinful, misleading and full of temptations. The
most lamentable example of this was the corrup-
tion of Pascal, who believed in the perversion of his
shift from proper purpose
reason through original sin, whereas it had only
been perverted by his Christianity.
6
A painful and ghastly spectacle has just risen
before my eyes. I tore down the curtain which
concealed mankind's corruption. This word in my
mouth is at least secure from the suspicion that it
contains a moral charge against mankind. It is—I
а
would fain emphasise this again-free from moralic
acid : to such an extent is this so, that I am most
thoroughly conscious of the corruption in question
precisely in those quarters in which hitherto people
have aspired with most determination to “virtue"
and to “godliness. ” As you have already surmised,
I understand corruption in the sense of decadence.
What I maintain is this, that all the values upon
## p. 131 (#151) ############################################
A CRITICISM OF CHRISTIANITY
131
1
which mankind builds its highest hopes and desires
are decadent values.
I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt,
when it loses its instincts, when it selects and
prefers that which is detrimental to it. A history
of the “higher feelings,” of “human ideals”-and
it is not impossible that I shall have to write it-
would almost explain why man is so corrupt. Life
itself, to my mind, is nothing more nor less than
the instinct of growth, of permanence, of accumulat-
,
ing forces, of power : where the will to power is
lacking, degeneration sets in. My contention is
that all the highest values of mankind lack this will,
--that the values of decline and of Nihilism mares
exercising the sovereign power under the cover of
the holiest names.
7
Christianity is called the religion of pity. - Pity is latt
opposed to the tonic passions which enhance the
energy of the feeling of life : its action is depressing.
A man loses power when he pities. By means of
pity the drain on strength which suffering itself
already introduces into the world is multiplied a
thousandfold. . Through pity, suffering itself be-
comes infectious in certain circumstances it may
lead to a total loss of life and vital energy, which is
absurdly out of proportion to the magnitude of
the cause (the case of the death of the Nazarene).
This is the first standpoint; but there is a stitt
more important one. Supposing one measures pity
according to the value of the reactions it usually
stimulates, its danger to life appears in a much more
telling light. On the whole, pity thwarts the law
.
## p. 132 (#152) ############################################
132
THE ANTICHRIST
-
*
[
of development which is the law of selection. It
preserves that which is ripe for death, it fights in
favour of the disinherited and the condemned of
life; thanks to the multitude of abortions of all
kinds which it maintains in life, it lends life itself a
sombre and questionable aspect. People have dared
to call pity a virtue (-in every noble culture it is con-
sidered as a weakness—); people went still further,
they exalted it to the virtue, the root and origin of
all virtues,—but, of course, what must never be for-
gotten is the fact that this was done from the stand-
point of a philosophy which was nihilistic, and on
whose shield the device The Denial of Life was
inscribed. Schopenhauer was right in this respect :
by means of pity, life is denied and made more
worthy of denial,ắpity is the praxis of Nihilism. I
repeat, thisdepressing and infectious instinct thwärts
those instincts which aim at the preservation and
enhancement of the valuelife: by multiplying misery
quite as much as by preserving all that is miserable,
it is the principal agent in promoting decadence,-
IMAGINARY PERSON
pity exhorts people to nothing, to nonentity? But
they do not say “nonentity,” they say “Beyond," or
“God,” or “the true life"; or Nirvana, or Salvation,
or Blessedness, instead. This innocent rhetoric,
which belongs to the realm of the religio-moral
idiosyncrasy, immediately appears to be very much
less innocent if one realises what the tendency is
which here tries to drape itself in the mantle of
sublime expressions—the tendency of hostility to
life. Schopenhauer was hostile to life: that is why
he elevated pity to a virtue.
not know formerly, and know now, or might know
if we chose,—is the fact that a retrograde formation,
a reversion in any sense or degree, is absolutely im-
possible. We physiologists, at least, are aware of
this. But all priests and moralists have believed in
it,—they wished to drag and screw man back to a
former standard of virtue. Morality has always been
a Procrustean bed. Even the politicians have imi-
tated the preachers of virtue in this matter. There
are parties at the present day whose one aim and
dream is to make all things adopt the crab-march.
But not everyone can be a crab. It cannot be helped:
we must go forward,—that is to say step by step
further and further into decadence (this is my
definition of modern “progress”). We can hinder
this development, and by so doing dam up and
accumulate degeneration itself and render it more
convulsive, more volcanic: we cannot do more.
a
C
44
My concept of Genius. —Great men, like great
ages, are explosive material, in which a stupendous
amount of power is accumulated; the first conditions
of their existence are always historical and physio-
logical; they are the outcome of the fact that for
long ages energy has been collected, hoarded up,
saved
up and preserved for their use, and that no
explosion has taken place. When the tension in
the bulk has become sufficiently excessive, the most
fortuitous stimulus suffices in order to call " "genius,"
## p. 102 (#122) ############################################
102
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
'great deeds,” and momentous fate into the world.
What then is the good of all environment, historical
periods, “ Zeitgeist” (Spirit of the age) and “public
opinion”? _Take the case of Napoleon. France of
the Revolution, and still more of the period pre-
ceding the Revolution, would have brought forward
a type which was the very reverse of Napoleon : it
actually did produce such a type. And because
Napoleon was something different, the heir of a
stronger, more lasting and older civilisation than
that which in France was being smashed to atoms
he became master there, he was the only master
there. Great men are necessary,
the age in which
they appear is a matter of chance; the fact that they
almost invariably master their age is accounted for
simply by the fact that they are stronger, that they
are older, and that power has been stored longer for ·
them. The relation of a genius to his age is that
which exists between strength and weakness and
between maturity and youth: the age is relatively
always very much younger, thinner, less mature, less
resolute and more childish. The fact that the general
opinion in France at the present day, is utterly differ-
ent on this very point (in Germany too, but that is
of no consequence); the fact that in that country
the theory of environment-a regular neuropathic
notion has become sacrosanct and almost scientific,
and finds acceptance even among the physiologists,
is a very bad, and exceedingly depressing sign. In
England too the same belief prevails : but nobody
will be surprised at that. The Englishman knows
only two ways of understanding the genius and the
"great man”: either democratically in the style of
## p. 103 (#123) ############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE
103
Buckle, or religiously after the manner of Carlyle. -
The danger which great men and great ages repre-
sent, is simply extraordinary ; every kind of exhaus-
tion and of sterility follows in their wake. The great
man is an end; the great age—the Renaissance for
instance,—is an end. The genius—in work and in
deed,-is necessarily a squanderer : the fact that
he spends himself constitutes his greatness. The
instinct of self-preservation is as it were suspended
in him; the overpowering pressure of out-flowing
energy in him forbids any such protection and pru-
dence. People call this “self-sacrifice,” they praise
his “heroism,” his indifference to his own well-being,
his utter devotion to an idea, a great cause, a father-
land: All misunderstandings. . . He flows out,
, he consumes himself, he does not spare
himself,--and does all this with fateful necessity,
irrevocably, involuntarily, just as a river involuntarily
bursts its dams. But, owing to the fact that human-
ity has been much indebted to such explosives, it
has endowed them with many things, for instance,
with a kind of higher morality. . . . This is indeed
.
the sort of gratitude that humanity is capable of :
it misunderstands its benefactors.
he flows over,
45
-
The criminal and his like. —The criminal type is
the type of the strong man amid unfavourable con-
ditions, a strong man made sick. He lacks the wild
and savage state, a form of nature and existence
which is freer and more dangerous, in which every-
thing that constitutes the shield and the sword in
## p. 104 (#124) ############################################
104
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
the instinct of the strong man, takes a place by right.
Society puts a ban upon his virtues; the most
spirited instincts inherent in him immediately be-
come involved with the depressing passions, with
suspicion, fear and dishonour. But this is almost
the recipe for physiological degeneration. When a
man has to do that which he is best suited to do,
which he is most fond of doing, not only clandes-
tinely, but also with long suspense, caution and ruse,
he becomes anæmic; and inasmuch as he is always
having to pay for his instincts in the form of danger,
persecution and fatalities, even his feelings begin
to turn against these instincts—he begins to regard
them as fatal. It is society, our tame, mediocre,
castrated society, in which an untutored son of
nature who comes to us from his mountains or from
his adventures at sea, must necessarily degenerate
into a criminal. Or almost necessarily: for there
are cases in which such a man shows himself to be
stronger than society: the Corsican Napoleon is
the most celebrated case of this. Concerning the
problem before us, Dostoiewsky's testimony is of
importance-Dostoiewsky who, incidentally, was
the only psychologist from whom I had anything
to learn: he belongs to the happiest windfalls of
my life, happier even than the discovery of Stendhal.
This profound man, who was right ten times over in
esteeming the superficial Germans low, found the
Siberian convicts among whom he lived for many
years,—those thoroughly hopeless criminals for
whom no road back to society stood open-very
different from what even he had expected,—that is
to say carved from about the best, hardest and most
## p. 105 (#125) ############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE
105
a
valuable material that grows on Russian soil. * Let
us generalise the case of the criminal ; let us imagine
creatures who for some reason or other fail to meet
with public approval, who know that they are re-
garded neither as beneficent nor useful,—the feeling
of the Chandala, who are aware that they are not
looked upon as equal, but as proscribed, unworthy,
polluted. The thoughts and actions of all such
natures are tainted with a subterranean mouldiness;
everything in them is of a paler hue than in those
on whose existence the sun shines. But almost all
those creatures whom, nowadays, we honour and
respect, formerly lived in this semi-sepulchral atmo-
sphere: the man of science, the artist, the genius,
the free spirit, the actor, the business man, and the
great explorer. As long as the priest represented
the highest type of man, every valuable kind of man
was depreciated. . The time is coming—this I
guarantee—when he will pass as the lowest type, as
our Chandala, as the falsest and most disreputable
kind of man.
I call your attention to the fact
that even now, under the sway of the mildest
customs and usages which have ever ruled on earth
or at least in Europe, every form of standing aside,
every kind of prolonged, excessively prolonged con-
cealment, every unaccustomed and obscure form of
existence tends to approximate to that type which
the criminal exemplifies to perfection. All pioneers
of the spirit have, for a while, the grey and fatalistic
mark of the Chandala on their brows: not because
they are regarded as Chandala, but because they
* See “Memoirs of a House of the Dead,” by Dostoiewsky
(translation by Marie von Thilo : "Buried Alive"). -TR.
.
## p. 106 (#126) ############################################
106
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
themselves feel the terrible chasm which separates
them from all that is traditional and honourable.
Almost every genius knows the “Catilinarian life”
as one of the stages in his development, a feeling
of hate, revenge and revolt against everything that
exists, that has ceased to evolve. Catiline-the
early stage of every Cæsar.
.
.
46
Here the outlook is free. -When a philosopher
holds his tongue it may be the sign of the loftiness
of his soul : when he contradicts himself it may be
love; and the very courtesy of a knight of knowledge
may force him to lie. It has been said, and not with-
out subtlety :-il est indigne des grands cæurs de ré-
pandre le trouble qu'ils ressentent* : but it is neces-
sary to add that there may also be grandeur de cæur
in not shrinking from the most undignified proceed-
ing. A woman who loves sacrifices her honour; a
knight of knowledge who“ loves,” sacrifices perhaps
his humanity; a God who loved, became a Jew. . .
a
47
Beauty no accident. —Even the beauty of a race or
of a family, the charm and perfection of all its move-
ments, is attained with pains : like genius it is the
final result of the accumulated work of generations.
Great sacrifices must have been made on the altar of
good taste, for its sake many things must have been
done, and much must have been left undone-the
seventeenth century in France is admirable for both of
* Clothilde de Veaux. -TR.
*
## p. 107 (#127) ############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE 107
these things,-in this century there must have been
a principle of selection in respect to company,
locality, clothing, the gratification of the instinct of
sex; beauty must have been preferred to profit, to
habit, to opinion and to indolence. The first rule of
all :-nobody must “let himself go," not even when
he is alone. —Good things are exceedingly costly:
and in all cases the law obtains that he who possesses
them is a different person from him who is acquiring
them. Everything good is an inheritance: that
which is not inherited is imperfect, it is simply a be-
a
ginning. In Athens at the time of Cicero—who ex-
presses his surprise at the fact-the men and youths
were by far superior in beauty to the women: but
what hard work and exertions the male sex had for
centuries imposed upon itself in the service of beauty!
We must not be mistaken in regard to the method
employed here: the mere discipline of feelings and
thoughts is little better than nil (-it is in this that
the great error of German culture, which is quite
illusory, lies): the body must be persuaded first. The
strict maintenance of a distinguished and tasteful
demeanour, the obligation of frequenting only those
who do not “let themselves go,” is amply sufficient
to render one distinguished and tasteful : in two or
three generations everything has already taken deep
root. The fate of a people and of humanity is de-
cided according to whether they begin culture at the
right place—not at the “soul” (as the fatal supersti-
tion of the priests and half-priests would have it):
the right place is the body, demeanour, diet, physio-
logy—the rest follows as the night the day. .
That is why the Greeks remain the first event in
.
## p. 108 (#128) ############################################
108
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
culture—they knew and they did what was needful.
Christianity with its contempt of the body is the
greatest mishap that has ever befallen mankind.
.
48
Progress in my sense. —I also speak of a “return to
nature,” although it is not a process of going back
but of going up-up into lofty, free and even terrible
nature and naturalness; such a nature as can play
with great tasks and may play with them. . . . To
speak in a parable, Napoleon was an example of a
“ return to nature," as I understand it (for instance
in rebus tacticis, and still more, as military experts
know, in strategy). But Rousseau-whither did he
want to return? Rousseau this first modern man,
idealist and canaille in one person; who was in need
of moral" dignity,” in order even to endure the sight
of his own person,-ill with unbridled vanity and
wanton self-contempt; this abortion, who planted
his tent on the threshold of modernity, also wanted
a “return to nature”; but, I ask once more, whither
did he wish to return? I hate Rousseau, even in
the Revolution itself: the latter was the historical
expression of this hybrid of idealist and canaille.
The bloody farce which this Revolution ultimately
became, its “immorality," concerns me but slightly;
what I loathe however is its Rousseauesque morality
-the so-called “truths" of the Revolution, by means
of which it still exercises power and draws all flat
and mediocre things over to its side. The doctrine
of equality! . . . But there is no more deadly poison
!
than this ; for it seems to proceed from the very lips
of justice, whereas in reality it draws the curtain
)
.
## p. 109 (#129) ############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE
109
down on all justice. . . . “To equals equality, to
unequals inequality”—that would be the real speech
of justice and that which follows from it. “Never
make unequal things equal. ” The fact that so much
horror and blood are associated with this doctrine of
equality, has lent this “modern idea" par excellence
such a halo of fire and glory, that the Revolution as
a drama has misled even the most noble minds.
That after all is no reason for honouring it the more.
-I can see only one who regarded it as it should be
regarded—that is to say, with loathing ; I speak of
Goethe.
49
Goethe. —No mere German, but a European event :
a magnificent attempt to overcome the eighteenth
century by means of a return to nature, by means
of an ascent to the naturalness of the Renaissance,
a kind of self-overcoming on the part of the century
in question. —He bore the strongest instincts of
this century in his breast: its sentimentality, and
idolatry of nature, its anti-historic, idealistic, unreal,
and revolutionary spirit (the latter is only a form
of the unreal). He enlisted history, natural science,
antiquity, as well as Spinoza, and above all practi-
cal activity, in his service. He drew a host of very
definite horizons around him ; far from liberating
himself from life, he plunged right into it; he did
not give in; he took as much as he could on his own
shoulders, and into his heart. That to which he
aspired was totality ; he was opposed to the sunder-
ing of reason, sensuality, feeling and will (as preached
with most repulsive scholasticism by Kant, the
antipodes of Goethe); he disciplined himself into a
harmonious whole, he created himself. Goethe in the
## p. 110 (#130) ############################################
IIO
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
midst of an age of unreal sentiment, was a convinced
realist: he said yea to everything that was like him
in this regard,—there was no greater event in his
life than that ens realissimum, surnamed Napoleon.
Goethe conceived a strong, highly-cultured man,
skilful in all bodily accomplishments, able to keep
himself in check, having a feeling of reverence for
himself, and so constituted as to be able to risk the
full enjoyment of naturalness in all its rich profusion
and be strong enough for this freedom; a man of
tolerance, not out of weakness but out of strength,
because he knows how to turn to his own profit
that which would ruin the mediocre nature; a man
unto whom nothing is any longer forbidden, unless
it be weakness either as a vice or as a virtue. Such
a spirit, become free, appears in the middle of the
universe with a feeling of cheerful and confident
fatalism he believes that only individual things are
bad, and that as a whole the universe justifies and
affirms itself—He no longer denies. . . . But such a
faith is the highest of all faiths : I christened it with
the name of Dionysus.
50
It might be said that, in a certain sense,
the nine-
teenth century also strove after all that Goethe
himself aspired to: catholicity in understanding, in
approving; a certain reserve towards everything,
daring realism, and a reverence for every fact. How
is it that the total result of this is not a Goethe, but
a state of chaos, a nihilistic groan, an inability to
discover where one is, an instinct of fatigue which
in praxi is persistently driving Europe to hark back
to the eighteenth century ? (-For instance in the
form of maudlin romanticism, altruism, hyper-senti-
## p. 111 (#131) ############################################
SKIRMISHES IN A WAR WITH THE AGE
III
mentality, pessimism in taste, and socialism in
politics). Is not the nineteenth century, at least in
its closing years, merely an accentuated, brutalised
eighteenth century,—that is to say a century of
decadence? And has not Goethe been—not alone
for Germany, but also for the whole of Europe, -
merely an episode, a beautiful “in vain"? But great
men are misunderstood when they are regarded
from the wretched standpoint of public utility.
The fact that no advantage can be derived from
them-this in itself may perhaps be peculiar to great-
ness.
51
Goethe is the last German whom I respect : he
had understood three things as I understand them.
We also agree as to the “cross. ”* People often ask
me why on earth I write in German : nowhere am I
less read than in the Fatherland. But who knows
whether I even desire to be read at present ? —To
create things on which time may try its teeth in
vain; to be concerned both in the form and the
substance of my writing, about a certain degree of
immortality-never have I been modest enough to
demand less of myself. The aphorism, the sentence,
in both of which I, as the first among Germans, am
a master, are the forms of "eternity”; it is my
ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else
says in a whole book,—what everyone else does not
say in a whole book.
I have given mankind the deepest book it pos-
sesses, my Zarathustra ; before long I shall give
it the most independent one.
* See my note on p. 147 of Vol. I. of the Will to Power. -TR.
1
## p. 112 (#132) ############################################
THINGS I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS
I
-
In conclusion I will just say a word concerning that
world to which I have sought new means of access,
to which I may perhaps have found a new passage
-the ancient world. My taste, which is perhaps
the reverse of tolerant, is very far from saying yea
through and through even to this world: on the
whole it is not over eager to say Yea, it would prefer
to say Nay, and better still nothing whatever.
This is true of whole cultures; it is true of books,-
it is also true of places and of landscapes. Truth to
tell, the number of ancient books that count for some-
thing in my life is but small; and the most famous
are not of that number. My sense of style, for the
epigramasstyle, was awakened almost spontaneously
upon my acquaintance with Sallust. I have not for-
gotten the astonishment of my respected teacher
Corssen, when he was forced to give his worst Latin
pupil the highest marks,-at one stroke I had learned
all there was to learn. Condensed, severe, with as
much substance as possible in the background, and
with cold but roguish hostility towards all “ beauti-
ful words” and “beautiful feelings"—in these things
I found my own particular bent. In my writings
up to my “ Zarathustra,” there will be found a very
earnest ambition to attain to the Roman style, to
112
## p. 113 (#133) ############################################
THINGS I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS
113
the “aere perennius” in style. —The same thing hap-
pened on my first acquaintance with Horace. Up
to the present no poet has given me the same artistic
raptures as those which from the first I received from
an Horatian ode. In certain languages it would be
absurd even to aspire to what is accomplished by
this poet. This mosaic of words, in which every
,
unit spreads its power to the left and to the right
over the whole, by its sound, by its place in the sen-
tence, and by its meaning, this minimum in the com-
pass and number of the signs, and the maximum of
energy in the signs which is thereby achieved—all
this is Roman, and, if you will believe me, noble par
excellence. By the side of this all the rest of poetry
becomes something popular,—nothing more than
senseless sentimental twaddle.
-
2
I am not indebted to the Greeks for anything like
such strong impressions; and, to speak frankly, they
cannot be to us what the Romans are. One cannot
learn from the Greeks—their style is too strange, it
is also too fluid, to be imperative or to have the effect
of a classic. Who would ever have learnt writing
from a Greek! Who would ever have learned it
without the Romans! . . . Do not let anyone
suggest Plato to me. In regard to Plato I am a
thorough sceptic, and have never been able to agree
to the admiration of Plato the artist, which is tradi-
tional among scholars. And after all, in this matter,
the most refined judges of taste in antiquity are on
my side. In my opinion Plato bundles all the forms
of style pell-mell together, in this respect he is one
8
## p. 114 (#134) ############################################
114
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
-
of the first decadents of style: he has something
similar on his conscience to that which the Cynics
had who invented the satura Menippea. For the
Platonic dialogue—this revoltingly self-complacent
and childish kind of dialectics—to exercise any
charm over you, you must never have read any good
French authors,—Fontenelle for instance. Plato is
boring. In reality my distrust of Platois fundamental.
I find him so very much astray from all the deepest
instincts of the Hellenes, so steeped in moral pre-
judices, so pre-existently Christian—the concept
“good” is already the highest value with him,—that
rather than use any other expression I would prefer
to designate the whole phenomenon Plato with the
hard word “superior bunkum,” or, if you would like
it better, “idealism. ” Humanity has had to pay
dearly for this Athenian having gone to school among
the Egyptians (-or among the Jews in Egypt? . . . ).
In the great fatality of Christianity, Plato is that
double-faced fascination called the “ideal,” which
made it possible for the more noble natures of anti-
quity to misunderstand themselves and to tread the
bridge which led to the “cross. ” And what an amount
of Plato is still to be found in the concept “church,"
and in the construction, the system and the practice
of the church! —My recreation, my predilection, my
cure,after all Platonism, has always been Thucydides.
Thucydides and perhaps Machiavelli's principe are
most closely related to me owing to the absolute
determination which they show of refusing to deceive
themselves and of seeing reason in reality,—not in
“ rationality,” and still less in “morality. ” There is
no moreradical cure than Thucydides for the lament-
## p. 115 (#135) ############################################
THINGS I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS
115
ably rose-coloured idealisation of the Greeks which
the “classically-cultured” stripling bears with him
into life, as a reward for his public school training.
His writings must be carefully studied line by line,
and his unuttered thoughts must be read as distinctly
as what he actually says. There are few thinkers so
rich in unuttered thoughts. In him the culture “of
the Sophists "—that is to say, the culture of realism,
receives its most perfect expression: this inestim-
able movement in the midst of the moral and ideal-
istic knavery of the Socratic Schools which was then
breaking out in all directions. Greek philosophy
is the decadence of the Greek instinct: Thucydides
is the great summing up, the final manifestation
of that strong, severe positivism which lay in the
instincts of the ancient Hellene. After all, it is
courage in the face of reality that distinguishes such
natures as Thucydides from Plato: Plato is a coward
in the face of reality-consequently he takes refuge
in the ideal : Thucydides is master of himself,-
consequently he is able to master life.
»
means
3
To rout up cases of “beautiful souls,” “golden
and other perfections among the Greeks, to
admire, say, their calm grandeur, their ideal attitude
of mind, their exalted simplicity-from this “exalted
simplicity,” which after all is a piece of niaiserie
allemande, I was preserved by the psychologist within
I saw their strongest instinct, the Will to
Power, I saw them quivering with the fierce violence
of this instinct,-I saw all their institutions grow
out of measures of security calculated to preserve
me.
## p. 116 (#136) ############################################
116
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
each member of their society from the inner ex-
plosive material that lay in his neighbour's breast.
This enormous internal tension thus discharged
itself in terrible and reckless hostility outside the
state : the various states mutually tore each other
to bits, in order that each individual state could re-
main at peace with itself. It was then necessary to
be strong ; for danger lay close at hand,-it lurked
in ambush everywhere. The superb suppleness of
their bodies, the daring realism and immorality
which is peculiar to the Hellenes, was a necessity
not an inherent quality. It was a result, it had not
been there from the beginning. Even their festivals
and their arts were but means in producing a
feeling of superiority, and of showing it: they are
measures of self-glorification ; and in certain circum-
stances of making one's self terrible. . . . Fancy
judging the Greeks in the German style, from their
philosophers; fancy using the suburban respecta-
bility of the Socratic schools as a key to what is
fundamentally Hellenic! . . The philosophers are
of course the decadents of Hellas, the counter-
movement directed against the old and noble taste
against the agonal instinct, against the Polis,
against the value of the race, against the authority
of tradition). Socratic virtues were preached to the
Greeks, because the Greeks had lost virtue : irritable,
cowardly, unsteady, and all turned to play-actors,
they had more than sufficient reason to submit to
having morality preached to them. Not that it
helped them in any way; but great words and atti-
tudes are so becoming to decadents.
## p. 117 (#137) ############################################
THINGS I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS
117
4
I was the first who, in order to understand the
ancient, still rich and even superabundant Hellenic
instinct, took that marvellous phenomenon, which
bears the name of Dionysus, seriously: it can be ex-
plained only as a manifestation of excessive energy.
Whoever had studied the Greeks, as that most pro-
found of modern connoisseurs of their culture, Jakob
Burckhardt of Bâle, had done, knew at once that
something had been achieved by means of this in-
terpretation. And in his “ Cultur der Griechen,"
Burckhardt inserted a special chapter on the pheno-
menon in question. If you would like a glimpse of
the other side, you have only to refer to the almost
laughable poverty of instinct among German philo-
logists when they approach the Dionysian question.
The celebrated Lobeck, especially, who with the
venerable assurance of a worm dried up between
books, crawled into this world of mysterious states,
succeeded in convincing himself that he was scientific,
whereas he was simply revoltingly superficial and
childish,-Lobeck, with all the pomp of profound
erudition, gave us to understand that, as a matter of
fact, there was nothing at all in all these curiosities.
Truth to tell, the priests may well have communi-
cated not a few things of value to the participators
in such orgies; for instance, the fact that wine pro-
vokes desire, that man in certain circumstances lives
on fruit, that plants bloom in the spring and fade
in the autumn. As regards the astounding wealth
of rites, symbols and myths which take their origin
in the
orgy,
and with which the world of antiquity
## p. 118 (#138) ############################################
118
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
is literally smothered, Lobeck finds that it prompts
him to a feat of even greater ingenuity than the
foregoing phenomenon did. "The Greeks,” he says,
(Aglaophamus, I. p. 672), “when they had nothing
.
better to do, laughed, sprang and romped about, or,
inasmuch as men also like a change at times, they
would sit down, weep and bewail their lot. Others
then came up who tried to discover some reason for
this strange behaviour; and thus, as an explanation
of these habits, there arose an incalculable number of
festivals, legends, and myths. On the other hand it
was believed that the farcical performances which
then perchance began to take place on festival days,
necessarily formed part of the celebrations, and they
were retained as an indispensable part of the ritual. ”
- This is contemptible nonsense, and no one will
take a man like Lobeck seriously for a moment.
We are very differently affected when we examine
the notion “Hellenic," as Winckelmann and Goethe
conceived it, and find it incompatible with that ele-
ment out of which Dionysian art springs—I speak
of orgiasm. In reality I do not doubt that Goethe
would have completely excluded any such thing
from the potentialities of the Greek soul. Conse-
quently Goethe did not understand the Greeks. For
it is only in the Dionysian mysteries, in the psycho-
logy of the Dionysian state, that the fundamental
fact of the Hellenic instinct—its “will to life”—is ex-
pressed. What did the Hellene secure himself with
these mysteries? Eternal life, the eternal recurrence
of life; the future promised and hallowed in the past;
the triumphant Yea to life despite death and change;
real life conceived as the collective prolongation of
## p. 119 (#139) ############################################
THINGS I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS
119
life through procreation, through the mysteries of
sexuality. To the Greeks, the symbol of sex was
the most venerated of symbols, the really deep
significance of all the piety of antiquity. All the
details of the act of procreation, pregnancy and birth
gave rise to the loftiest and most solemn feelings.
In the doctrine of mysteries, pain was pronounced
holy: the “pains of childbirth” sanctify pain in
general,—all becoming and all growth, everything
that guarantees the future involves pain. . . . In
order that there may be eternal joy in creating, in
order that the will to life may say Yea to itself in
all eternity, the “pains of childbirth” must also be
eternal. All this is what the word Dionysus signi-
fies: I know of no higher symbolisin than this Greek
symbolism, this symbolism of the Dionysian pheno-
In it the profoundest instinct of life, the
instinct that guarantees the future of life and life
eternal, is understood religiously,—the road to life
itself, procreation, is pronounced holy. . . . It was
only Christianity which, with its fundamental resent-
ment against life, made something impure out of
sexuality: it flung filth at the very basis, the very
first condition of our life.
menon.
.
The psychology of orgiasm
conceived as the feel-
ing of a superabundance of vitality and strength,
within the scope of whicheven pain acts as a stimulus,
gave me the key to the concept tragic-feeling which
has been misunderstood not only by Aristotle, but
also even more by our pessimists. Tragedy is so far
from proving anything in regard to the pessimism of
|
1
## p. 120 (#140) ############################################
120
THE TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS
the Greeks, as Schopenhauer maintains, that it ought
rather to be considered as the categorical repudiation
and condemnation thereof. The saying of Yea to
life, including even its most strange and most terrible
problems, the will to life rejoicing over its own in-
exhaustibleness in the sacrifice of its highest types
—this is what I called Dionysian, this is what I
divined as the bridge leading to the psychology of
the tragic poet. Not in order to escape from terror
and pity, not to purify one's self of a dangerous
passion by discharging it with vehemence—this is
how Aristotle understood it-but to be far beyond
terror and pity and to be the eternal lust of Becoming
itself—that lust which also involves the lust of de-
struction. And with this I once more come into
touch with the spot from which I once set out-the
“ Birth of Tragedy” was my first transvaluation of
all values : with this I again take my stand upon
soil from out of which my will and my capacity
spring—1, the last disciple of the philosopher Diony-
sus,–I, the prophet of eternal recurrence.
upon the
THE END
## p. 121 (#141) ############################################
THE HAMMER
HAMMER SPEAKETH
“Why so hard ! ”—said the diamond once unto the char-
coal ; “are we then not next of kin ? ”
“Why so soft? O my brethren; this is my question to
you. For are ye not--my brothers ?
“Why so soft, so servile and yielding? Why are your
hearts so fond of denial and self-denial? Ilow is it that so
little fate looketh out from your eyes?
“And if ye will not be men of fate and inexorable, how
can ye hope one day to conquer with me?
“And if your hardness will not sparkle, cut and divide,
how can ye hope one day to create with me?
“For all creators are hard. And it must seem to you
blessed to stamp your hand upon millenniums as upon
wax,-
-Blessed to write upon the will of millenniums as upon
brass,-harder than brass, nobler than brass. -Hard
through and through is only the noblest.
This new table of values, O my brethren, I set over your
heads : Become hard. "
_"Thus Spake Zarathustra,"
III. , 29.
-
121
## p. 122 (#142) ############################################
## p. 123 (#143) ############################################
THE ANTICHRIST
An Attempted Criticism of
Christianity
## p. 124 (#144) ############################################
## p. 125 (#145) ############################################
PREFACE
This book belongs to the very few. Maybe not
one of them is yet alive; unless he be of those
who understand my Zarathustra. How can I con-
found myself with those who to-day already find a
hearing ? -Only the day after to-morrow belongs
to me. Some are born posthumously.
I am only too well aware of the conditions under
which a man understands me, and then necessarily
understands. He must be intellectually upright to
the point of hardness, in order even to endure my
seriousness and my passion. He must be used to
living on mountain-tops, and to feeling the
wretched gabble of politics and national egotism
beneath him. He must have become indifferent; he
must never inquire whether truth is profitable or
whether it may prove fatal. . . . Possessing from
strength a predilection for questions for which no
one has enough courage nowadays; the courage for
the forbidden; his predestination must be the laby-
rinth. The experience of seven solitudes. New ears
for new music. New eyes for the most remote
things. A new conscience for truths which hitherto
have remained dumb. And the will to economy
on a large scale: to husband his strength and his
enthusiasm. He must honour himself, he must
love himself; he must be absolutely free with regard
125
## p. 126 (#146) ############################################
126
PREFACE
to himself. . . . Very well then! Such men alone
are my readers, my proper readers, my preordained
readers : of what account are the rest ? —the rest
are simply—humanity. —One must be superior to
humanity in power, in loftiness of soul,—in contempt.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.
## p. 127 (#147) ############################################
I
.
LET us look each other in the face. We are hy- tre math wind,
is
a fabled race living beyond
north
perboreans,—we know well enough how far outside eten zerrenos
a land of sunshine.
eternal bliss.
the crowd we stand. “Thou wilt find the way to the
Hyperboreans neither by land nor by water”: Pindar
already knew this much about us. Beyond the north,
the ice, and death-our life, our happiness. . . . We
discovered happiness; we know the way, we found
the way out of thousands of years oflabyrinth. Who
else would have found it ? -Not the modern man,
surely –“I do not know where I am or what I am
to do; I am everything that knows not where it is
or what to do,”—sighs the modern man. We were
made quite ill by this modernity,—with its indolent
peace, its cowardly compromise, and the whole of
the virtuous filth of its Yea and Nay. This toler-
ance and largeur de cæur which “forgives" every-
thing, because it "understands” everything, is a
,
Sirocco for us. We prefer to live amid ice than to
be breathed upon by modern virtues and other
southerly winds! . . . We were brave enough; we
spared neither ourselves nor others : but we were
very far from knowing whither to direct our bravery.
We were becoming gloomy; people called us fatal-
ists. Our fate-it was the abundance, the tension
V
127
## p. 128 (#148) ############################################
128
THE ANTICHRIST
kay of
Chushanty
and the storing up of power.
We thirsted for
thunderbolts and great deeds; we kept at the most
respectful distance from the joy of the weakling,
from “resignation. ” Thunder was in our air,
that part of nature which we are, became overcast-
for we had no direction. The formula of our happi-
ness : a Yea, a Nay, a straight line, a goal.
.
2
*
What is good ? All that enhances the feeling of
power, the Will to Power, and power itself in man.
What is bad ? —All that proceeds from weakness.
What is happiness. The feeling that power is
increasing,—that resistance has been overcome.
Not contentment, but more power; not peace at
any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency* (virtue
in the Renaissance sense, virtù, free from all moralic
acid). The weak and the botched shall perish: first
principle of our humanity. And they ought even to
be helped to perish.
What is more harmful than any vice ? - Prac-
tical sympathy with all the botched and the weak-
Christianity.
3
The problem I set in this work is not what will
replace mankind in the order of living beings
(-Man is an end--); but, what type of man must
be reared, must be willed, as having the highest
value, as being the most worthy of life and the
surest guarantee of the future.
* The German “Tüchtigkeit” has a nobler ring than our
word “efficiency. ”—TR.
## p. 129 (#149) ############################################
A CRITICISM OF CHRISTIANITY
129
This more valuable type has appeared often
enough already : but as a happy accident, as an
exception, never as willed. He has rather been
precisely the most feared ; hitherto he has been
almost the terrible in itself;—and from out the very
fear he provoked there arose the will to rear the
type which has now been reared, attained: the
domestic animal, the gregarious animal, the sick
animal man,—the Christian.
4.
Mankind does not represent a development to-
wards a better, stronger or higher type, in the sense
in which this is supposed to occur to-day. “Pro-
gress” is merely a modern idea
that is to say, a
false idea. * The modern European is still far be-
low the European of the Renaissance in value. The
process of evolution does not by any means imply
elevation, enhancement and increasing strength.
On the other hand isolated and individual cases
are continually succeeding in different places on
earth, as the outcome of the most different cultures,
and in these a higher type certainly manifests itself:
something which by the side of mankind in general,
represents a kind of superman. Such lucky strokes
of great success have always been possible and will
perhaps always be possible. And even whole races,
tribes and nations may in certain circumstances re-
present such lucky strokes.
* Cf. Disraeli: “But enlightened Europe is not happy.
Its existence is a fever which it calls progress. Progress to
what? " ("Tancred,” Book III. , Chap. vii. ). —TR.
9
## p. 130 (#150) ############################################
130
THE ANTICHRIST
OUTCAST
5
We must not deck out and adorn Christianity :
it has waged a deadly war upon this higher type of
man, it has set a ban upon all the fundamental
instincts of this type, and has distilled evil and the
devil himself out of these instincts:—the strong man
as the typical pariań, the villain. Christianity has
sided with everything weak, low, and botched ; it
has made an ideal out of antagonism towards all
the self-preservative instincts of strong life: it has
corrupted even the reason of the strongest intellects,
by teaching that the highest values of intellectuality
are sinful, misleading and full of temptations. The
most lamentable example of this was the corrup-
tion of Pascal, who believed in the perversion of his
shift from proper purpose
reason through original sin, whereas it had only
been perverted by his Christianity.
6
A painful and ghastly spectacle has just risen
before my eyes. I tore down the curtain which
concealed mankind's corruption. This word in my
mouth is at least secure from the suspicion that it
contains a moral charge against mankind. It is—I
а
would fain emphasise this again-free from moralic
acid : to such an extent is this so, that I am most
thoroughly conscious of the corruption in question
precisely in those quarters in which hitherto people
have aspired with most determination to “virtue"
and to “godliness. ” As you have already surmised,
I understand corruption in the sense of decadence.
What I maintain is this, that all the values upon
## p. 131 (#151) ############################################
A CRITICISM OF CHRISTIANITY
131
1
which mankind builds its highest hopes and desires
are decadent values.
I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt,
when it loses its instincts, when it selects and
prefers that which is detrimental to it. A history
of the “higher feelings,” of “human ideals”-and
it is not impossible that I shall have to write it-
would almost explain why man is so corrupt. Life
itself, to my mind, is nothing more nor less than
the instinct of growth, of permanence, of accumulat-
,
ing forces, of power : where the will to power is
lacking, degeneration sets in. My contention is
that all the highest values of mankind lack this will,
--that the values of decline and of Nihilism mares
exercising the sovereign power under the cover of
the holiest names.
7
Christianity is called the religion of pity. - Pity is latt
opposed to the tonic passions which enhance the
energy of the feeling of life : its action is depressing.
A man loses power when he pities. By means of
pity the drain on strength which suffering itself
already introduces into the world is multiplied a
thousandfold. . Through pity, suffering itself be-
comes infectious in certain circumstances it may
lead to a total loss of life and vital energy, which is
absurdly out of proportion to the magnitude of
the cause (the case of the death of the Nazarene).
This is the first standpoint; but there is a stitt
more important one. Supposing one measures pity
according to the value of the reactions it usually
stimulates, its danger to life appears in a much more
telling light. On the whole, pity thwarts the law
.
## p. 132 (#152) ############################################
132
THE ANTICHRIST
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*
[
of development which is the law of selection. It
preserves that which is ripe for death, it fights in
favour of the disinherited and the condemned of
life; thanks to the multitude of abortions of all
kinds which it maintains in life, it lends life itself a
sombre and questionable aspect. People have dared
to call pity a virtue (-in every noble culture it is con-
sidered as a weakness—); people went still further,
they exalted it to the virtue, the root and origin of
all virtues,—but, of course, what must never be for-
gotten is the fact that this was done from the stand-
point of a philosophy which was nihilistic, and on
whose shield the device The Denial of Life was
inscribed. Schopenhauer was right in this respect :
by means of pity, life is denied and made more
worthy of denial,ắpity is the praxis of Nihilism. I
repeat, thisdepressing and infectious instinct thwärts
those instincts which aim at the preservation and
enhancement of the valuelife: by multiplying misery
quite as much as by preserving all that is miserable,
it is the principal agent in promoting decadence,-
IMAGINARY PERSON
pity exhorts people to nothing, to nonentity? But
they do not say “nonentity,” they say “Beyond," or
“God,” or “the true life"; or Nirvana, or Salvation,
or Blessedness, instead. This innocent rhetoric,
which belongs to the realm of the religio-moral
idiosyncrasy, immediately appears to be very much
less innocent if one realises what the tendency is
which here tries to drape itself in the mantle of
sublime expressions—the tendency of hostility to
life. Schopenhauer was hostile to life: that is why
he elevated pity to a virtue.
