Part 15

(6) And the result was: what had been done? A ban had been placed on the strongest, the most natural, yea, the only genuine impulses, henceforward, in order that an action might be praiseworthy, there must be no trace in it of any of those genuine impulses--_monstrous fraud in psychology._ Every kind of "self-satisfaction" had to be remodelled and made possible by means of misunderstanding and adjusting one's self _sub specie boni._ Conversely: that species which found its advantage in depriving mankind of its self-satisfaction, the representatives of the gregarious instincts, _e.g._ the priests and the philosophers, were sufficiently crafty and psychologically astute to show how selfishness ruled everywhere. The Christian conclusion from this was: "Everything is sin, even our virtues. Man is utterly undesirable. Selfless actions are impossible." Original sin. In short, once man had opposed his instincts to a purely imaginary world of the good, he concluded by despising himself as incapable of performing "good" actions.

_N.B._ In this way Christianity represents a step forward in the sharpening of psychological insight: La Rochefoucauld and Pascal. It perceived the essential equality of human actions, and the equality of their values as a whole (all immoral).

***

Now the first serious object was to rear men in whom self-seeking impulses were extinguished. _priests, saints._ And if people doubted that perfection was possible, they did not doubt what perfection was.

The psychology of the saint and of the priest and of the "good" man, must naturally have seemed purely phantasmagorical. The real motive of all action had been declared bad: therefore, in order to make action still possible, deeds had to be prescribed which, though not possible, had to be declared possible and sanctified. They now honoured and idealised things with as much falsity as they had previously slandered them.

Inveighing against the instincts of life came to be regarded as holy and estimable. The priestly ideal was: absolute chastity, absolute obedience, absolute poverty! The lay ideal: alms, pity, self-sacrifice, renunciation of the beautiful, of reason, and of sensuality, and a dark frown for all the strong qualities that existed.

***

An advance is made: the slandered instincts attempt to re-establish their rights (_e.g._ Luther's Reformation, the coarsest form of moral falsehood under the cover of "Evangelical freedom"), they are rechristened with holy names.

The calumniated instincts try to demonstrate that they are necessary in order that the virtuous instincts may be possible. _Il faut vivre, afin de vivre pour autrui:_ egoism as a means to an end.[7]

But people go still further: they try to grant both the egoistic and altruistic impulses the right to exist--equal rights for both--from the utilitarian standpoint.

People go further: they see greater utility in placing the egoistic rights before the altruistic--greater utility in the sense of more happiness for the majority, or of the elevation of mankind, etc. etc. Thus the rights of egoism begin to preponderate, but under the cloak of an extremely altruistic standpoint--the collective utility of humanity.

An attempt is made to reconcile the altruistic mode of action with the natural order of things. Altruism is sought in the very roots of life. Altruism and egoism are both based upon the essence of life and nature.

The disappearance of the opposition between them is dreamt of as a future possibility. Continued adaptation, it is hoped, will merge the two into one.

At last it is seen that altruistic actions are merely a species of the egoistic--and that the degree to which one loves and spends one's self is a proof of the extent of one's individual power and personality. In short, that the more evil man can be made, the better he is, and that one cannot be the one without the other. At this point the curtain rises which concealed the monstrous fraud of the psychology that has prevailed hitherto.

***

_Results._--There are only immoral intentions and actions; the so-called moral actions must be shown to be immoral. All emotions are traced to a single will, the will to power, and are called essentially equal. The concept of life: in the apparent antithesis good and evil, degrees of power in the instincts alone are expressed. A temporary order of rank is established according to which certain instincts are either controlled or enlisted in our service. Morality is justified: economically, etc.

***

Against proposition two.--Determinism: the attempt to rescue the moral world by transferring it to the unknown.

Determinism is only a manner of allowing ourselves to conjure our valuations away, once they have lost their place in a world interpreted mechanistically. Determinism must therefore be attacked and undermined at all costs: just as our right to distinguish between an absolute and phenomenal world should be disputed.

[Footnote 7: Spencer's conclusion in the _Data of Ethics._--Tr.]

787.

It is absolutely necessary to emancipate ourselves from motives: otherwise we should not be allowed to attempt to sacrifice ourselves or to neglect ourselves! Only the innocence of Becoming gives us the highest courage and the highest freedom.

788.

A clean conscience must be restored to the evil man--has this been my involuntary endeavour all the time? for I take as the evil man him who is strong (Dostoievsky's belief concerning the convicts in prison should be referred to here).

789.

Our new "freedom." What a feeling of relief there is in the thought that we emancipated spirits do not feel ourselves harnessed to any system of teleological aims. Likewise that the concepts reward and punishment have no roots in the essence of existence! Likewise that good and evil actions are not good or evil in themselves, but only from the point of view of the self-preservative tendencies of certain species of humanity! Likewise that our speculations concerning pleasure and pain are not of cosmic, far less then of metaphysical, importance! (That form of pessimism associated with the name of Hartmann, which pledges itself to put even the pain and pleasure of existence into the balance, with its arbitrary confinement in the prison and within the bounds of pre-Copernican thought, would be something not only retrogressive, but degenerate, unless it be merely a bad joke on the part of a "Berliner."[8])

[Footnote 8: "Berliner"--The citizens of Berlin are renowned in Germany for their poor jokes.--Tr.]

790.

If one is clear as to the "wherefore" of one's life, then the "how" of it can take care of itself.

It is already even a sign of disbelief in the wherefore and in the purpose and sense of life--in fact, it is a sign of a lack of will--when the value of pleasure and pain step into the foreground, and hedonistic and pessimistic teaching becomes prevalent; and self-abnegation, resignation, virtue, "objectivity," _may,_ at the very least, be signs that the most important factor is beginning to make its absence felt.

791.

Hitherto there has been no German culture. It is no refutation of this assertion to say that there have been great anchorites in Germany (Goethe, for instance); for these had their own culture. But it was precisely around them, as though around mighty, defiant, and isolated rocks, that the remaining spirit of Germany, _as their antithesis,_ lay that is to say, as a soft, swampy, slippery soil, upon which every step and every footprint of the rest of Europe made an impression and created forms. German culture was a thing devoid of character and of almost unlimited yielding power.

792.

Germany, though very rich in clever and well-informed scholars, has for some time been so excessively poor in great souls and in mighty minds, that it almost seems to have forgotten what a great soul or a mighty mind is; and to-day mediocre and even ill-constituted men place themselves in the market square without the suggestion of a conscience-prick or a sign of embarrassment, and declare themselves great men, reformers, etc. Take the case of Eugen Dühring, for instance, a really clever and well-informed scholar, but a man who betrays with almost every word he says that he has a miserably small soul, and that he is horribly tormented by narrow envious feelings; moreover, that it is no mighty overflowing, benevolent, and spendthrift spirit that drives him on, but only the spirit of ambition! But to be ambitious in such an age as this is much more unworthy of a philosopher than ever it was: to-day, when it is the mob that rules, when it is the mob that dispenses the honours.

793.

My "future": a severe polytechnic education. Conscription; so that as a rule every man of the higher classes should be an officer, whatever else he may be besides.

IV.

THE WILL TO POWER IN ART.

794.

Our religion, morality, and philosophy are decadent human institutions. The counter-agent. Art.

795.

The _Artist-philosopher._ A higher concept of art. Can man stand at so great a distance from his fellows as to mould them? (Preliminary exercises thereto:--

1. To become a self-former, an anchorite.

2. To do what artists have done hitherto, _i.e._ to reach a small degree of perfection in a certain medium.)

796.

Art as it appears without the artist, _i.e._ as a body, an organisation (the Prussian Officers' Corps, the Order of the Jesuits). To what extent is the artist merely a preliminary stage? The world regarded as a self-generating work of art.

797.

The phenomenon, "artist," is the easiest to see through: from it one can look down upon the fundamental instincts of power, of nature, etc., even of religion and morality.

"Play," uselessness--as the ideal of him who is overflowing with power, as the ideal of the child. The childishness of God, παῑς παίζων.

798.

_Apollonian, Dionysian._ There are two conditions in which art manifests itself in man even as a force of nature, and disposes of him whether he consent or not: it may be as a constraint to visionary states, or it may be an orgiastic impulse. Both conditions are to be seen in normal life, but they are then somewhat weaker: in dreams and in moments of elation or intoxication.[9]

But the same contrast exists between the dream state and the state of intoxication; both of these states let loose all manner of artistic powers within us, but each unfetters powers of a different kind. Dreamland gives us the power of vision, of association, of poetry: intoxication gives us the power of grand attitudes, of passion, of song, and of dance.

[Footnote 9: German: "Rausch."--There is no word in English for the German expression "Rausch." When Nietzsche uses it, he means a sort of blend of our two words: intoxication and elation.--Tr.]

799.

Sexuality and voluptuousness belong to the Dionysiac intoxication: but neither of them is lacking in the Apollonian state. There is also a difference of tempo between the states.... _The extreme peace of certain feelings of intoxication_ (or, more strictly, the slackening of the feeling of time, and the reduction of the feeling of space) is wont to reflect itself in the vision of the most restful attitudes and states of the soul. The classical style essentially represents repose, simplification, foreshortening, and concentration--the _highest feeling of power_ is concentrated in the classical type. To react with difficulty: great consciousness: no feeling of strife.

800.

The feeling of intoxication is, as a matter of fact, equivalent to a sensation of _surplus power_: it is strongest in seasons of rut: new organs, new accomplishments, new colours, new forms. Embellishment is an outcome of _increased power._ Embellishment is merely an expression of a triumphant will, of an increased state of co-ordination, of a harmony of all the strong desires, of an infallible and perpendicular equilibrium. Logical and geometrical simplification is the result of an increase of power: conversely, the mere aspect of such a simplification increases the sense of power in the beholder.... The zenith of development: the grand style.

Ugliness signifies _the decadence of a type_: contradiction and faulty co-ordination among the inmost desires--this means a decline in the _organising_ power, or, psychologically speaking, in the will. The condition of pleasure which is called intoxication is really an exalted feeling of power. ... Sensations of space and time are altered; inordinate distances are traversed by the eye, and only then become visible; the extension of the vision over greater masses and expanses; the refinement of the organ which apprehends the smallest and most elusive things; divination, the power of understanding at the slightest hint, at the smallest suggestion; intelligent sensitiveness; _strength_ as a feeling of dominion in the muscles, as agility and love of movement, as dance, as levity and quick time; strength as the love of proving strength, as bravado, adventurousness, fearlessness, indifference in regard to life and death.... All these elated moments of life stimulate each other; the world of images and of imagination of the one suffices as a suggestion for the other: in this way states finally merge into each other, which might do better to keep apart, _e.g._ the feeling of religious intoxication and sexual irritability (two very profound feelings, always wonderfully co-ordinated. What is it that pleases almost all pious women, old or young? Answer: a saint with beautiful legs, still young, still innocent). Cruelty in tragedy and pity (likewise normally correlated). Spring-time, dancing, music, --all these things are but the display of one sex before the other,--as also that "infinite yearning of the heart" peculiar to Faust.

Artists when they are worth anything at all are men of strong propensities (even physically), with surplus energy, powerful animals, sensual; without a certain overheating of the sexual system a man like Raphael is unthinkable.... To produce music is also in a sense to produce children; chastity is merely the economy of the artist, and in all creative artists productiveness certainly ceases with sexual potency.... Artists should not see things as they are; they should see them fuller, simpler, stronger: to this end, however, a kind of youthfulness, of vernality, a sort of perpetual elation, must be peculiar to their lives.

801.

The states in which we transfigure things and make them fuller, and rhapsodise about them, until they reflect our own fulness and love of life back upon us: sexuality, intoxication, post-prandial states, spring, triumph over our enemies, scorn, bravado, cruelty, the ecstasy of religious feeling. But three elements above all are active: _sexuality, intoxication, cruelty_; all these belong to the oldest _festal joys_ of mankind, they also preponderate in budding artists.

Conversely: there are things with which we meet which already show us this transfiguration and fulness, and the animal world's response thereto is a state of excitement in the spheres where these states of happiness originate. A blending of these very delicate shades of animal well-being and desires is the _æsthetic state._ The latter only manifests itself in those natures which are capable of that spendthrift and overflowing fulness of bodily vigour; the latter is always the _primum mobile._ The sober-minded man, the tired man, the exhausted and dried-up man (_e.g._ the scholar), can have no feeling for art, because he does not possess the primitive force of art, which is the tyranny of inner riches: he who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything either.

_"Perfection"_--In these states (more particularly in the case of sexual love) there is an ingenuous betrayal of what the profoundest instinct regards as the highest, the most desirable, the most valuable, the ascending movement of its type; also of the condition towards which it is actually striving. Perfection: the extraordinary expansion of this instinct's feeling of power, its riches, its necessary overflowing of all banks.

802.

Art reminds us of states of physical vigour: it may be the overflow and bursting forth of blooming life in the world of pictures and desires; on the other hand, it may be an excitation of the physical functions by means of pictures and desires of exalted life--an enhancement of the feeling of life, the latter's stimulant.

To what extent can ugliness exercise this power? In so far as it may communicate something of the triumphant energy of the artist who has become master of the ugly and the repulsive; or in so far as it gently excites our lust of cruelty (in some circumstances even the lust of doing harm to ourselves, self-violence, and therewith the feeling of power over ourselves).

803.

"Beauty" therefore is, to the artist, something which is above all order of rank, because in beauty contrasts are overcome, the highest sign of power thus manifesting itself in the conquest of opposites; and achieved without a feeling of tension: violence being no longer necessary, everything submitting and obeying so easily, and doing so with good grace; this is what delights the powerful will of the artist.

804.

The biological value of _beauty_ and _ugliness._ That which we feel instinctively opposed to us æsthetically is, according to the longest experience of mankind, felt to be harmful, dangerous, and worthy of suspicion: the sudden utterance of the æsthetic instinct, _e.g._ in the case of loathing, implies an act of judgment. To this extent beauty lies within the general category of the biological values, useful, beneficent, and life-promoting: thus, a host of stimuli which for ages have been associated with, and remind us of, useful things and conditions, give us the feeling of beauty, _i.e._ the increase of the feeling of power (not only things, therefore, but the sensations which are associated with such things or their symbols). In this way beauty and ugliness are recognised as determined by our most fundamental self-preservative values. Apart from this, it is nonsense to postulate anything as beautiful or ugly. Absolute beauty exists just as little as absolute goodness and truth. In a particular case it is a matter of the self-preservative conditions of a certain type of man: thus the gregarious man will have quite a different feeling for beauty from the exceptional or super-man.

It is the optics of things in the foreground which only consider immediate consequences, from which the value beauty (also goodness and truth) arises.

All instinctive judgments are short-sighted in regard to the concatenation of consequences: they merely advise what must be done forthwith. Reason is essentially an obstructing apparatus preventing the immediate response to instinctive judgments: it halts, it calculates, it traces the chain of consequences further.

Judgments concerning beauty and ugliness are short-sighted (reason is always opposed to them): but they are convincing in the highest degree; they appeal to our instincts in that quarter where the latter decide most quickly and say yes or no with least hesitation, even before reason can interpose.

The most common affirmations of beauty stimulate each other reciprocally; where the æsthetic impulse once begins to work, a whole host of other and foreign perfections crystallise around the "particular form of beauty." It is impossible to remain objective, it is certainly impossible to dispense with the interpreting, bestowing, transfiguring, and poetising power (the latter is a stringing together of affirmations concerning beauty itself). The sight of a beautiful woman....

Thus (1) judgment concerning beauty is short-sighted; it sees only the immediate consequences.

(2) It smothers the object which gives rise to it with a charm that is determined by the association of various judgments concerning beauty, which, however, are quite alien to the _essence of the particular object._ To regard a thing as beautiful is necessarily to regard it falsely (that is why incidentally love marriages are from the social point of view the most unreasonable form of matrimony).

805.

_Concerning the genesis of Art._ That making perfect and seeing perfect, which is peculiar to the cerebral system overladen with sexual energy (a lover alone with his sweetheart at eventide transfigures the smallest details: life is a chain of sublime things, "the misfortune of an unhappy love affair is more valuable than anything else"); on the other hand, everything perfect and beautiful operates like an unconscious recollection of that amorous condition and of the point of view peculiar to it--all perfection, and the whole of the beauty of things, through contiguity, revives aphrodisiac bliss. (Physiologically it is the creative instinct of the artist and the distribution of his semen in his blood.) The desire for art and beauty is an indirect longing for the ecstasy; of sexual desire, which gets communicated to the brain. The world become perfect through "love."

806.

_Sensuality in its various disguises._--(1) As idealism (Plato), common to youth, constructing a kind of concave-mirror in which the image of the beloved is an incrustation, an exaggeration, a transfiguration, an attribution of infinity to everything. (2) In the religion of love, "a fine young man," "a beautiful woman," in some way divine; a bridegroom, a bride of the soul. (3) In art, as a decorating force, _e.g._ just as the man sees the woman and makes her a present of everything that can enhance her personal charm, so the sensuality of the artist adorns an object with everything else that he honours and esteems, and by this means perfects it (or idealises it). Woman, knowing what man feels in regard to her, tries to meet his idealising endeavours half-way by decorating herself, by walking and dancing well, by expressing delicate thoughts: in addition, she may practise modesty, shyness, reserve--prompted by her instinctive feeling that the idealising power of man increases with all this, (In the extraordinary finesse of woman's instincts, modesty must not by any means be considered as conscious hypocrisy: she guesses that it is precisely artlessness and real shame which seduces man most and urges him to an exaggerated esteem of her. On this account, woman is ingenuous, owing to the subtlety of her instincts which reveal to her the utility of a state of innocence. A wilful closing of one's eyes to one's self.... Wherever dissembling has a stronger influence by being unconscious it actually becomes unconscious.)

807.