The Portable Nietzsche (54 page)

Nizza, February 23, 1887

. . . I did not even know the name of Dostoevski just a few weeks ago-uneducated person that I am, not reading any journals. An accidental reach of the arm in a bookstore brought to my attention
L'esprit souterrain,
a work just translated into French. (It was a similar accident with Schopenhauer in my 21st year and with Stendhal in my 35th.) The instinct of kinship (or how should I name it?) spoke up immediately; my joy was extraordinary: I must go back all the way to my first acquaintance with Stendhal's
Rouge et Noir
to remember an equal joy. (It is two novellas, the first really a piece of music,
very
strange, very
un
-German music; the second, a stroke of genius in psychology, a kind of self-derision of the Υνѽϑɩ σαʋτόν.
¹⁰
) Incidentally, these
Greeks
have a lot on their conscience—falsification was their true trade; the whole of European psychology is sick with Greek
superficiality
; and without that little bit of Judaism—etc., etc., etc. . . .

[484]

“There is thinking; consequently there is that which thinks”—that is what Descartes' argument comes to. Yet this means positing our faith in the concept of
substance as “a priori
true.” When there is thinking, something must be there which thinks—that is merely a formulation of our grammatical habit, which posits a doer for what is done. . . .

 

[522]

. . . Rational thought is interpretation according to a scheme which we cannot escape.

 

[776]

Concerning the
“
Machiavellism
”
of power
. The will to power manifests itself

(a) among the suppressed, among slaves of all kinds, as a will to “freedom”: merely to get away appears as the goal (morally and religiously: “responsible only to one's own conscience,” “evangelical freedom,” etc.);

(b) among a stronger type which is growing up to reach for power, as a will to overpower; if unsuccessful at first, it may then limit itself to a will to “justice,” that is, to equal rights with the ruling type;

(c) among the strongest, richest, most independent, and most courageous as “love of humanity,” of the “people,” of the Gospel, of truth, of God; as pity, “self-sacrifice,” etc. . . .

 

[893]

Hatred of mediocrity is unworthy of a philosopher: it is almost a question mark against his “
right
to philosophy.” Just because he is the exception, he must protect the rule, and he must encourage self-confidence in all the mediocre.

 

[910]

Type of my disciples
. To those human beings in whom I have a stake I wish suffering, being forsaken, sickness, maltreatment, humiliation—I wish that that profound self-contempt, the torture of mistrust of oneself, and the misery of him who is overcome, not remain unknown to them: I have no pity for them because I wish them the only thing which can prove today whether one has worth or not—that one holds out.

Christmas 1887

. . . You have committed one of the greatest stupidities—for yourself and for me! Your association with an anti-Semitic chief expresses a foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me again and again with ire or melancholy. . . . It is a matter of honor with me to be absolutely clean and unequivocal in relation to anti-Semitism, namely,
opposed
to it, as I am in my writings. I have recently been persecuted with letters and
Anti-Semitic Correspondence Sheets
. My disgust with this party (which would like the benefit of my name only too well!) is as pronounced as possible, but the relation to Förster,
¹²
as well as the afteraffects of my former publisher, the anti-Semitic Schmeitzner, always brings the adherents of this disagreeable party back to the idea that I must belong to them after all. . . . It arouses mistrust against my character, as if publicly I condemned something which I favored secretly—and that I am unable to do anything against it, that the name of Zarathustra is used in every
Anti-Semitic Correspondence Sheet
, has almost made me sick several times. . . .

[291]

That the value of an act should depend on what preceded it in
consciousness
—how false that is! And yet morality has been measured that way, even criminality.

The value of an act must be measured by its consequences, the utilitarians say: measuring it by its origin implies an impossibility, namely,
knowing
the origin.

But does one know the consequences? Perhaps as far as five steps. Who could say what an act stimulates, excites, provokes against itself? As a stimulus? Perhaps as the ignition spark for an explosive? The utilitarians are naive. And in the end we would first have to know what is useful: here too their vision extends for only five steps. They have no conception of any great economy which does not know how to dispense with evil. . . .

 

[481]

Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying “there are only
facts
,” I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only
interpretations
. . . .

 

[814]

Artists are
not
the men of
great
passion, whatever they may try to tell us and themselves. And that for two reasons: they have no shame before themselves (they observe themselves
while they live
; they lie in wait for themselves, they are too curious), and they also have no shame before great passion (they exploit it artistically). Secondly, their vampire—their talent—generally begrudges them any such squandering of energy as is involved in passion. With a talent, one is also the victim of that talent: one lives under the vampirism of one's talent.

One is not finished with one's passion because one represents it: rather, one is finished with it
when
one represents it. (Goethe teaches it differently; but it seems that here he wished to misunderstand himself—out of
delicatezza
.)

 

[882]

One recognizes the superiority of the Greek man, of the man of the Renaissance—but one would like to have it without its causes and conditions.

 

[1052]

. . . Dionysus versus “the Crucified One”: there you have the contrast. It is not martyrdom that constitutes the difference—only here it has two different senses. Life itself, its eternal fruitfulness and recurrence, involves agony, destruction, the will to annihilation. In the other case, suffering—“the Crucified One as the Innocent One”—is considered an objection to this life, as the formula of its condemnation. Clearly, the problem is that of the meaning of suffering: whether a Christian meaning or a tragic meaning. In the first case, it is supposed to be the path to a sacred existence; in the second case,
existence is considered sacred enough
to justify even a tremendous amount of suffering. The tragic man affirms even the harshest suffering: he is sufficiently strong, rich, and deifying for this; the Christian negates even the happiest life on earth: he is sufficiently weak, poor, and disinherited to suffer from life in any form. The God on the cross is a curse on life, a pointer to seek redemption from it; Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life: it is eternally reborn and comes back from destruction.

EDITOR'S NOTE

An often very funny polemic of about fifty pages. The following excerpt is from section 3.

 

There is nothing on which Wagner has reflected so much as on redemption: his opera is the opera of, redemption. Somebody or other always wants to be redeemed: now a little man, now a little woman—that is his problem. And how richly he varies his leitmotif! What rare, what deeply thoughtful modulations! Who, if not Wagner, would have taught us that innocence prefers to redeem interesting sinners? (The case in
Tannhäuser
.) Or that even the Wandering Jew is redeemed and settles down when he marries? (The case in
The Flying Dutchman
.) Or that old corrupted females prefer to be redeemed by chaste young men? (The case of Kundry.) Or that beautiful girls like best to be redeemed by a knight, who is a Wagnerian! (The case in
Die Meistersinger
.) Or that even married women like being redeemed by a knight? (The case of Isolde.) Or that “the old god,” after having compromised himself morally in every way, is finally redeemed by a free spirit and immoralist? (The case in
The Ring
.) Admire this last profundity in particular! Do you understand it? I—beware of understanding it.

That there are also other teachings to be derived from the works enumerated I would sooner prove than contest. That a Wagnerian ballet can drive one to despair—and to virtue! (Again the case in
Tannhäuser
.) That the worst consequences may ensue if one does not go to bed at the right time. (Again the case in
Lohengrin
.) That one should never know too precisely whom one has really married. (For the third time, the case in
Lohengrin.
)

Tristan and Isolde
glorifies the perfect spouse who, in a certain situation, has but one question: “But why didn't you tell me that before? Nothing simpler than that!” The answer:

Lohengrin
contains a solemn excommunication of inquiry and questioning. Wagner here advocates the Christian concept: “You shall and must have
faith
.” It is a crime against the highest, the holiest, to be scientific.

The Flying Dutchman
preaches the sublime doctrine that woman settles even the most unsettled man—in Wagnerian terms, she “redeems him.” Here we permit ourselves a question: Suppose this were true—does that also make it desirable? What becomes of the eternal “Wandering Jew” whom a wife adores and settles? He merely ceases to be eternal; he gets married and does not concern us any more. . . .

Nietzsche's last productive year, 1888, was also his most productive. He began with
The Wagner Case
and ended with
Nietzsche contra Wagner,
and in between he dashed off
Twilight of the idols, The Antichrist,
and
Ecce Homo.
These books are sometimes dismissed as mere products of insanity, and they certainly manifest a rapid breakdown of the author's inhibitions. In some passages of
The Antichrist,
Nietzsche's fury breaks all dams; and the madness of his conceit in
Ecce Homo
is harnessed only by his matchless irony, though much of this is lost on readers who do not know Nietzsche's earlier works. Compared to such fireworks,
Twilight of the Idols
is relatively calm and sane, except for its title; and none of his other works contains an equally comprehensive summary of his later philosophy and psychology. With its roughly one hundred pages, the book furnishes a fine epitome of Nietzsche.

The spectacular title was an afterthought. Nietzsche had become interested in Francis Bacon, and his own discussion of “Four Great Errors” probably reminded him of Bacon's “Four Idols.” Hence the thought of varying Wagner's title,
Götterdämmerung,
by coining
Götzen-Dämmerung,
‟Twilight of the Idols.” When he wrote the preface, however, the title was still to be A
Psychologist's Idleness.
But on September 20 his worshipful admirer Peter Cast wrote him a fateful letter. Gast's real name was Heinrich Köselitz, He was a composer, and he assisted Nietzsche by copying manuscripts and reading proofs. Having completed his first reading of this manuscript, he wrote: “The title, A
Psychologist's Idleness
, sounds too unassuming to me when I think how it might impress other people: you have driven your artillery on the highest mountains, you have such guns as have never yet existed, and you need only shoot blindly to inspire terror all around. The stride [
Gang
] of a giant, which makes the mountains shake to their foundations, is no longer idleness [
Müssiggang
]
. . . .
So I beg you, if an incompetent person may beg: a more sumptuous, more resplendent title!” Such adulatory flattery was surely what Nietzsche needed least just then. He changed the title and added as a subtitle: “How One Philosophizes With a Hammer.” It is usually assumed that he means a sledge hammer. The preface, however, from which the image is derived as an afterthought, explains: idols “are here touched with a hammer as with a tuning fork.”

This was the last work Nietzsche himself published: when it came out in January 1889, he was insane and no longer aware of any of his works.
The Antichrist
and
Nietzsche contra Wagner
were not published until 1895;
Ecce Homo
only in 1908.

Maintaining cheerfulness in the midst of a gloomy affair, fraught with immeasurable responsibility, is no small feat; and yet what is needed more than cheerfulness? Nothing succeeds if prankishness has no part in it. Excess of strength alone is the proof of strength.

A
revaluation of all values,
this question mark, so black, so tremendous that it casts shadows upon the man who puts it down—such a destiny of a task compels one to run into the sun every moment to shake off a heavy, all-too-heavy seriousness. Every means is proper for this; every “case”
¹⁴
a case of luck. Especially,
war.
War has always been the great wisdom of all spirits who have become too inward, too profound; even in a wound there is the power to heal. A maxim, the origin of which I withhold from scholarly curiosity, has long been my motto: