Part 5

Nowadays, when the state has a nonsensically oversized belly, in all fields and branches of work there are "representatives" over and above the real workman: for instance, in addition to the scholars, there are the journalists; in addition to the suffering masses, there is a crowd of jabbering and bragging ne'er-do-wells who "represent" that suffering--not to speak of the professional politicians who, though quite satisfied with their lot, stand up in Parliament and, with strong lungs, "represent" grievances. Our modern life is extremely _expensive,_ thanks to the host of middlemen that infest it; whereas in the city of antiquity, and in many a city of Spain and Italy to-day, where there is an echo of the ancient spirit, the man himself comes forward and will have nothing to do with a representative or an intermediary in the modern style--except perhaps to kick him hence!

76.

The pre-eminence of the _merchant_ and the _middleman,_ even in the most intellectual spheres: the journalist, the "representative," the historian (as an intermediary between the past and the present), the exotic and cosmopolitan, the middleman between natural science and philosophy, the semi-theologians.

77.

The men I have regarded with the most loathing, heretofore, are the parasites of intellect: they are to be found everywhere, already, in our modern Europe, and as a matter of fact their conscience is as light as it possibly can be. They may be a little turbid, and savour somewhat of Pessimism, but in the main they are voracious, dirty, dirtying, stealthy, insinuating, light-fingered gentry, scabby--and as innocent as all small sinners and microbes are. They live at the expense of those who have intellect and who distribute it liberally: they know that it is peculiar to the rich mind to live in a disinterested fashion, without taking too much petty thought for the morrow, and to distribute its wealth prodigally. For intellect is a bad domestic economist, and pays no heed whatever to the fact that everything lives on it and devours it.

78.

MODERN MUMMERY

The motleyness of modern men and its charm Essentially a mask and a sign of boredom.

The journalist.

The political man (in the "national swindle").

Mummery in the arts:--

The lack of honesty in preparing and schooling oneself for them (Fromentin);

The Romanticists (their lack of philosophy and science and their excess in literature);

The novelists (Walter Scott, but also the monsters of the _Nibelung,_ with their inordinately nervous music);

The lyricists.

"Scientifically."

Virtuosos (Jews).

The popular ideals are overcome, but not yet _in the presence of the people_:

The saint, the sage, the prophet.

79.

_The want of discipline in the modern spirit_ concealed beneath all kinds of moral finery.--The show-words are: Toleration (for the "incapacity of saying yes or no"); _la largeur de sympathie_ (= a third of indifference, a third of curiosity, and a third of morbid susceptibility); "objectivity" (the lack of personality and of will, and the inability to "love"); "freedom" in regard to the rule (Romanticism); "truth" as opposed to falsehood and lying (Naturalism); the "scientific spirit" (the "human document": or, in plain English, the serial story which means "addition"--instead of "composition"); "passion" in the place of disorder and intemperance; "depth" in the place of confusion and the pell-mell of symbols.

80.

_Concerning the criticism of big words._--I am full of mistrust and malice towards what is called "ideal": this is my _Pessimism,_ that I have recognised to what extent "sublime sentiments" are a source of evil--that is to say, a belittling and depreciating of man.

Every time "progress" is expected to result from an ideal, disappointment invariably follows; the triumph of an ideal has always been a _retrograde movement_.

Christianity, revolution, the abolition of slavery, equal rights, philanthropy, love of peace, justice, truth: all these big words are only valuable in a struggle, as banners: not as realities, but as _show-words,_ for something quite different (yea, even quite opposed to what they mean!).

81.

The kind of man is known who has fallen in love with the sentence "_tout comprendre à est tout pardonner"_ It is the weak and, above all, the disillusioned: if there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to contemn! It is the philosophy of disappointment, which here swathes itself so humanly in pity, and gazes out so sweetly.

They are Romanticists, whose faith has gone to pot: now they at least wish to look on and see how everything vanishes and fades. They call it _l'art pour l'art,_ "objectivity," etc.

82.

_The main symptoms of Pessimism_:--Dinners at Magny's; Russian Pessimism (Tolstoy, Dostoiewsky); æsthetic Pessimism, _l'art pour l'art,_ "description" (the romantic and the anti-romantic Pessimism); Pessimism in the theory of knowledge (Schopenhauer: phenomenalism); anarchical Pessimism; the "religion of pity," Buddhistic preparation; the Pessimism of culture (exoticness, cosmopolitanism); moral Pessimism, myself.

83.

"_Without the Christian Faith_" said Pascal, "you would yourselves be like nature and history, _un monstre et un chaos._" We fulfilled this prophecy: once the weak and optimistic eighteenth century had _embellished_ and _rationalised_ man.

_Schopenhauer_ and _Pascal._--I none essential point, Schopenhauer is the first who _takes up Pascal's_ movement again: _un monstre et un chaos,_ consequently something that must be negatived ... history, nature, and man himself!

"_Our inability to know the truth_ is the result of our _corruption,_ of our moral _decay_" says Pascal. And Schopenhauer says essentially the same. "The more profound the corruption of reason is, the more necessary is the doctrine of salvation"--or, putting it into Schopenhauerian phraseology, negation.

84.

_Schopenhauer as an epigone_ (state of affairs before the Revolution):--Pity, sensuality, art, weakness of will, Catholicism of the most intellectual desires--that is, at bottom, the good old eighteenth century.

_Schopenhauer's_ fundamental misunderstanding of the _will_ (just as though passion, instinct, and desire were the essential factors of will) is typical: the depreciation of the will to the extent of mistaking it altogether. Likewise the hatred of willing: the attempt at seeing something superior--yea, even superiority itself, and that which really matters, in non-willing, in the "subject-being _without_ aim or intention." Great symptom of _fatigue or of the weakness of will_: for this, in reality, is what treats the passions as master, and directs them as to the way and to the measure....

85.

The undignified attempt has been made to regard Wagner and Schopenhauer as types of the mentally unsound: an infinitely more essential understanding of the matter would have been gained if the exact decadent type which each of them represents had been scientifically and accurately defined.

86.

In my opinion, Henrik Ibsen has become very German. With all his robust idealism and "Will to Truth," he never dared to ring himself free from moral-illusionism which says "freedom," and will not admit, even to itself, what freedom is: the second stage in the metamorphosis of the "Will to Power" in him who lacks it. In the first stage, one demands justice at the hands of those who have power. In the second, one speaks of "freedom," that is to say, one wishes to "shake oneself free" from those who have power. In the third stage, one speaks of "equal rights"--that is to say, so long as one is not a predominant personality one wishes to prevent one's competitors from growing in power.

87.

The Decline of _Protestantism_: theoretically and historically understood as a half-measure. Undeniable predominance of Catholicism to-day: Protestant feeling is so dead that the strongest _anti-Protestant_ movements (Wagner's _Parsifal,_ for instance) are no longer regarded as such. The whole of the more elevated intellectuality in France is _Catholic_ in instinct; Bismarck recognised that there was no longer any such thing as Protestantism.

88.

Protestantism, that spiritually unclean and tiresome form of decadence, in which Christianity has known how to survive in the mediocre North, is something incomplete and complexly valuable for knowledge, in so far as it was able to bring experiences of different kinds and origins into the same heads.

89.

What has the German spirit not made out of Christianity! And, to refer to Protestantism again, how much beer is there not still in Protestant Christianity! Can a crasser, more indolent, and more lounging form of Christian belief be imagined, than that of the average German Protestant?... It is indeed a very humble Christianity. I call it the Homœopathy of Christianity! I am reminded that, to-day, there also exists a less humble sort of Protestantism; it is taught by royal chaplains and anti-Semitic speculators: but nobody has ever maintained that any "spirit" "hovers" over these waters. It is merely a less respectable form of Christian faith, not by any means a more comprehensible one.

90.

_Progress._--Let us be on our guard lest we deceive ourselves! Time flies forward apace,--we would fain believe that everything flies forward with it,--that evolution is an advancing development.... That is the appearance of things which deceives the most circumspect. But the nineteenth century shows no advance whatever on the sixteenth: and the German spirit of 1888 is an example of a backward movement when compared with that of 1788.... Mankind does not advance, it does not even exist. The aspect of the whole is much more like that of a huge experimenting workshop where some things in all ages succeed, while an incalculable number of things fail; where all order, logic, co-ordination, and responsibility is lacking. How dare we blink the fact that the rise of Christianity is a decadent movement?--that the German Reformation was a recrudescence of Christian barbarism?--that the Revolution destroyed the instinct for an organisation of society on a large scale?... Man is not an example of progress as compared with animals: the tender son of culture is an abortion compared with the Arab or the Corsican; the Chinaman is a more successful type--that is to say, richer in sustaining power than the European.

_(b)_ THE LAST CENTURIES.

91.

Gloominess and pessimistic influence necessarily follow in the wake of enlightenment. Towards 1770 a falling-off in cheerfulness was already noticeable; women, with that very feminine instinct which always defends virtue, believed that immorality was the cause of it. Galiani hit the bull's eye: he quotes Voltaire's verse:

"Un monstre gai vaut mieux Qu'un sentimental ennuyeux."

If now I maintain that I am ahead, by a century or two of enlightenment, of Voltaire and Galiani--who was much more profound, how deeply must I have sunk into gloominess! This is also true, and betimes I somewhat reluctantly manifested some caution in regard to the German and Christian narrowness and inconsistency of Schopenhauerian or, worse still, Leopardian Pessimism, and sought the most characteristic form (Asia). But, in order to endure that extreme Pessimism (which here and there peeps out of my _Birth of Tragedy),_ to live alone "without God or morality," I was compelled to invent a counter-prop for myself. Perhaps I know best why man is the only animal that laughs: he alone surfers so excruciatingly that he was _compelled_ to invent laughter. The unhappiest and most melancholy animal is, as might have been expected, the most cheerful.

92.

In regard to German culture, I have always had a feeling as of _decline._ The fact that I learned to know a declining form of culture has often made me _unfair_ towards the whole phenomenon of European culture. The Germans always follow at some distance behind: they always go to the root of things, for instance:--

Dependance upon foreigners; _Kant_--Rousseau, the sensualists, Hume, Swedenborg.

_Schopenhauer_--the Indians and Romanticism, Voltaire.

_Wagner_--the French cult of the ugly and of grand opera, _Paris,_ and the flight into _primitive barbarism_ (the marriage of brother and sister).

The law of the _laggard_ (the provinces go to Paris, Germany goes to France).

How is it that precisely _Germans discovered the Greek_ (the more an instinct is developed, the more it is _tempted_ to run for once into its opposite).

Music is the last breath of every culture.

93.

_Renaissance and Reformation._--What does the Renaissance prove? That the reign of the "individual" can be only a short one. The output is too great; there is not even the possibility of husbanding or of capitalising forces, and exhaustion sets in step by step. These are times when everything is _squandered,_ when even the strength itself with which one collects, capitalises, and heaps riches upon riches, _is squandered._ Even the opponents of such movements are driven to preposterous extremes in the dissipation of their strength: and they too are very soon exhausted, used up, and completely sapped.

In the Reformation we are face to face with a wild and plebeian counterpart of the Italian Renaissance, generated by similar impulses, except that the former, in the backward and still vulgar North, had to assume a religious form--there the concept of a higher life had not yet been divorced from that of a religious one.

Even the Reformation was a movement for individual liberty; "every one his own priest" is really no more than a formula for _libertinage._ As a matter of fact, the words "Evangelical freedom" would have sufficed--and all instincts which had reasons for remaining concealed broke out like wild hounds, the most brutal needs suddenly acquired the courage to show themselves, everything seemed justified ... men refused to specify the kind of freedom they had aimed at, they preferred to shut their eyes. But the fact that their eyes were closed and that their lips were moistened with gushing orations, did not prevent their hands from being ready to snatch at whatever there was to snatch at, that the belly became the god of the "free gospel," and that all lusts of revenge and of hatred were indulged with insatiable fury.

This lasted for a while: then exhaustion supervened, just as it had done in Southern Europe; and again here, it was a low form of exhaustion, a sort of general _ruere in servitium_.... Then the _disreputable_ century of Germany dawned.

94.

_Chivalry_--the position won by power: its gradual break-up (and partial transference to broader and more bourgeois spheres). In the case of Larochefoucauld we find a knowledge of the actual impulses of a noble temperament--together with the gloomy Christian estimate of these impulses.

The _protraction of Christianity_ through the _French Revolution._ The seducer is Rousseau; he once again liberates woman, who thenceforward is always represented as ever more interesting--_suffering._ Then come the slaves and Mrs. Beecher-Stowe. Then the poor and the workmen. Then the vicious and the sick--all this is drawn into the foreground (even for the purpose of disposing people in favour of the genius, it has been customary for five hundred years to press him forward as the great sufferer!). Then comes the cursing of all voluptuousness (Baudelaire and Schopenhauer), the most decided conviction that the lust of power is the greatest vice; absolute certainty that morality and disinterestedness are identical things; that the "happiness of all" is a goal worth striving after (_i.e.,_ Christ's Kingdom of Heaven). We are on the best road to it: the Kingdom of Heaven of the poor in spirit has begun.--Intermediate stages: the bourgeois (as a result of the _nouveau riche_) and the workman (as a result of the machine).

Greek and French culture of the time of Louis XIV. compared. A decided belief in oneself. A leisure-class which makes things hard for itself and exercises a great deal of self-control. The power of form, the will to form _oneself._ "Happiness" acknowledged as a purpose. Much strength and energy _behind_ all formality of manners. Pleasure at the sight of a life that is _seemingly so easy._ The _Greeks_ seemed like _children_ to the French.

95.

_The Three Centuries._

Their different kinds of _sensitiveness_ may perhaps be best expressed as follows:--

_Aristocracy_: Descartes, the reign of _reason,_ evidence showing the sovereignty of the _will_.

_Feminism_: Rousseau, the reign of _feeling,_ evidence showing the sovereignty of the senses; all lies.

_Animalism_: Schopenhauer, the reign of _passion,_ evidence showing the sovereignty of animality, more honest, but gloomy.

The seventeenth century is _aristocratic,_ all for order, haughty towards everything animal, severe in regard to the heart, "austere," and even free from sentiment, "non-German," averse to all that is burlesque and natural, generalising and maintaining an attitude of sovereignty towards the past for it believes in itself. At bottom it partakes very much of the beast of prey, and practises asceticism in order to remain master. It is the century of strength of will, as also that of strong passion.

The eighteenth century is dominated by _woman,_ it is gushing, spiritual, and flat; but with intellect at the service of aspirations and of the heart, it is a libertine in the pleasures of intellect, undermining all authorities; emotionally intoxicated, cheerful, clear, humane, and sociable, false to itself and at bottom very rascally....

The nineteenth century is more _animal,_ more subterranean, hateful, realistic, plebeian, and on that very account "better," "more honest," more submissive to "reality" of what kind soever, and _truer_; but weak of will, sad, obscurely exacting and fatalistic. It has no feeling of timidity or reverence, either in the presence of "reason" or the "heart"; thoroughly convinced of the dominion of the desires (Schopenhauer said "Will," but nothing is more characteristic of his philosophy than that it entirely lacks all actual _willing_). Even morality is reduced to an instinct ("Pity").

Auguste Comte is _the continuation of the_ eighteenth _century_ (the dominion of the heart over the head, sensuality in the theory of knowledge, altruistic exaltation).

The fact that _science_ has become as sovereign as it is to-day, proves how the nineteenth century has _emancipated itself_ from the dominion of _ideals._ A certain absence of "needs" and wishes makes our scientific curiosity and rigour possible--this is our kind of virtue.

Romanticism is the _counterstroke_ of the eighteenth century; a sort of accumulated longing for its grand style of exaltation (as a matter of fact, largely mingled with mummery and self-deception: the desire was to represent _strong nature_ and _strong passion_).

The nineteenth century instinctively goes in search of _theories_ by means of which it may feel its _fatalistic, submission to the empire of facts_ justified. Hegel's success against sentimentality and romantic idealism was already a sign of its fatalistic trend of thought, in its belief that superior reason belongs to the triumphant side, and in its justification of the actual "state" (in the place of "humanity," etc.).--Schopenhauer: we are something foolish, and at the best self-suppressive. The success of determinism, the genealogical derivation of _obligations_ which were formerly held to be absolute, the teaching of environment and adaptation, the reduction of will to a process of reflex movement, the denial of the will as a "working cause"; finally--a real process of re-christening: so little will is observed that the word itself becomes _available_ for another purpose. Further theories: the teaching of _objectivity,_ "will-less" contemplation, as the only road to truth, _as also_ to _beauty_ (also the belief in "genius," in order to have _the right to be submissive_); mechanism, the determinable rigidity of the mechanical process; so-called "Naturalism," the elimination of the choosing, directing, interpreting subject, on principle.

Kant, with his "practical reason," with his _moral fanaticism,_ is quite eighteenth century style; still completely outside the historical movement, without any notion whatsoever of the reality of his time, for instance, revolution; he is not affected by Greek philosophy; he is a phantasist of the notion of duty, a sensualist with a hidden leaning to dogmatic pampering.

_The return to Kant_ in our century means a _return to the eighteenth century,_ people desire to create themselves a right to the _old ideas_ and to the old exaltation--hence a theory of knowledge which "describes limits," that is to say, which admits _of the option of fixing a Beyond to the domain of reason._

_Hegel's_ way of thinking is not so very far removed from that of Goethe: see the latter on the subject of Spinoza, for instance. The will to deify the All and Life, in order to find both _peace_ and _happiness_ in contemplating them: Hegel looks for reason everywhere--in the presence of reason man may be _submissive_ and resigned. In Goethe we find a kind of _fatalism_ which is almost _joyous_ and _confiding,_ which neither revolts nor weakens, which strives to make a totality out of itself, in the belief that only in totality does everything seem good and justified, and find itself resolved.

96.

The period of _rationalism_--followed by a period of _sentimentality._ To what extent does Schopenhauer come under "sentimentality"? (Hegel under intellectuality?)

97.

The seventeenth century _suffers_ from _humanity_ as from a _host of contradictions_ ("_l'amas de contradictions_" that we are); it endeavours to discover man, to _co-ordinate him,_ to excavate him: whereas the eighteenth century tries to forget what is known of man's nature, in order to adapt him to its Utopia. "Superficial, soft, humane"--gushes over "humanity."

The seventeenth century tries to banish all traces of the individual in order that the artist's work may resemble life as much as possible. The eighteenth century strives _to create interest in the author_ by means of the work. The seventeenth century seeks art in art, a piece of culture; the eighteenth uses art in its propaganda for political and social reforms.

"Utopia," the "ideal man," the deification of Nature, the vanity of making one's own personality the centre of interest, subordination to the propaganda of _social ideas,_ charlatanism--all this we derive from the eighteenth century.

The style of the seventeenth century: _propre exact et libre._

The strong individual who is self-sufficient, or who appeals ardently to God--and that obtrusiveness and indiscretion of modern authors--these things are _opposites._ "Showing-oneself-off"--what a contrast to the Scholars of Port-Royal!

Alfieri had a sense for the _grand style._

The hate of the _burlesque_ (that which lacks dignity), _the lack of a sense of Nature_ belongs to the seventeenth century.

98.

_Against Rousseau.--Alas!_ man is no longer sufficiently evil; Rousseau's opponents, who say that "man is a beast of prey," are unfortunately wrong. Not the corruption of man, but the softening and moralising of him is the curse. In the sphere which Rousseau attacked most violently, the _relatively_ strongest and most successful type of man was still to be found (the type which still possessed the great passions intact: Will to Power, Will to Pleasure, the Will and Ability to Command). The man of the eighteenth century must be compared with the man of the Renaissance (also with the man of the seventeenth century in France) if the matter is to be understood at all: Rousseau is a symptom of self-contempt and of inflamed vanity--both signs that the dominating will is lacking: he moralises and seeks the _cause_ of his own misery after the style of a revengeful man in the _ruling_ classes.

99.