The Portable Nietzsche (65 page)

 

46

Here the view is free
. It may be nobility of the soul when a philosopher is silent; it may be love when he contradicts himself; and he who has knowledge may be polite enough to lie. It has been said, not without delicacy:
Il est indigne des grand coeurs de répandre le trouble qu'ils ressentent.
³⁸
But one must add that not to be afraid of the most unworthy may also be greatness of soul. A woman who loves, sacrifices her honor; a knower who “loves” may perhaps sacrifice his humanity; a God who loved became a Jew.

 

47

Beauty no accident.
The beauty of a race or family, their grace and graciousness in all gestures, is won by work: like genius, it is the end result of the accumulated work of generations. One must have made great sacrifices to good taste, one must have done much and omitted much for its sake—seventeenth-century France is admirable in both respects—and good taste must have furnished a principle for selecting company, place, dress, sexual satisfaction; one must have preferred beauty to advantage, habit, opinion, and inertia. Supreme rule of conduct: before oneself too, one must not “let oneself go.” The good things are immeasurably costly; and the law always holds that those who
have
them are different from those who
acquire
them. All that is good is inherited: whatever is not inherited is imperfect, is a mere beginning.

In Athens, in the time of Cicero, who expresses his surprise about this, the men and youths were far superior in beauty to the women. But what work and exertion in the service of beauty had the male sex there imposed on itself for centuries! For one should make no mistake about the method in this case: a breeding of feelings and thoughts alone is almost nothing (this is the great misunderstanding underlying German education, which is wholly illusory); one must first persuade the
body
. Strict perseverance in significant and exquisite gestures together with the obligation to live only with people who do not “let themselves go”—that is quite enough for one to become significant and exquisite, and in two or three generations all this becomes inward. It is decisive for the lot of a people and of humanity that culture should begin in the right place —not in the “soul” (as was the fateful superstition of the priests and half-priests): the right place is the body, the gesture, the diet, physiology; the rest follows from that. Therefore the Creeks remain the first cultural event in history: they knew, they
did
, what was needed; and Christianity, which despised the body, has been the greatest misfortune of humanity so far.

 

48

Progress in my sense
. I too speak of a “return to nature,” although it is really not a going back but an
ascent
—up into the high, free, even terrible nature and naturalness where great tasks are something once plays with, one
may
play with. To put it metaphorically: Napoleon was a piece of “return to nature,” as I understand the phrase (for example,
in rebus tacticis
; even more, as military men know, in matters of strategy).

But Rousseau—to what did he really want to return? Rousseau, this first modern man, idealist and rabble in one person—one who needed moral “dignity” to be able to stand his own sight, sick with unbridled vanity and unbridled self-contempt. This miscarriage, couched on the threshold of modern times, also wanted a “return to nature”; to ask this once more, to what did Rousseau want to return? I still hate Rousseau in the French Revolution: it is the world-historical expression of this duality of idealist and rabble. The bloody farce which became an aspect of the Revolution, its “immorality,” are of little concern to me: what I hate is its Rousseauan
morality
—the so-called “truths” of the Revolution through which it still works and attracts everything shallow and mediocre. The doctrine of equality! There is no more poisonous poison anywhere: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, whereas it really is the termination of justice. “Equal to the equal, unequal to the unequal”—
that
would be the true slogan of justice; and also its corollary: “Never make equal what is unequal.” That this doctrine of equality was surrounded by such gruesome and bloody events, that has given this “modern idea” par excellence a kind of glory and fiery aura so that the Revolution as a
spectacle
has seduced even the noblest spirits. In the end, that is no reason for respecting it any more. I see only one man who experienced it as it must be experienced, with
nausea
—Goethe.

 

49

Goethe
—not a German event, but a European one: a magnificent attempt to overcome the eighteenth century by a return to nature, by an
ascent
to the naturalness of the Renaissance—a kind of self-overcoming on the part of that century. He bore its strongest instincts within himself: the sensibility, the idolatry of nature, the anti-historic, the idealistic, the unreal and revolutionary (the latter being merely a form of the unreal). He sought help from history, natural science, antiquity, and also Spinoza, but, above all, from practical activity; he surrounded himself with limited horizons; he did not retire from life but put himself into the midst of it; he was not fainthearted but took as much as possible upon himself, over himself, into himself. What he wanted was
totality
; he fought the mutual extraneousness of reason, senses, feeling, and will (preached with the most abhorrent scholasticism by
Kant
, the antipode of Goethe); he disciplined himself to wholeness, he
created
himself.

In the middle of an age with an unreal outlook, Goethe was a convinced realist: he said Yes to everything that was related to him in this respect—and he had no greater experience than that
ens realissimum
³⁹
called Napoleon. Goethe conceived a human being who would be strong, highly educated, skillful in all bodily matters, self-controlled, reverent toward himself, and who might dare to afford the whole range and wealth of being natural, being strong enough for such freedom; the man of tolerance, not from weakness but from strength, because he knows how to use to his advantage, even that from which the average nature would perish; the man for whom there is no longer anything that is forbidden—unless it be
weakness
, whether called vice or virtue.

Such a spirit who has
become free
stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the
faith
that only the particular is loathsome, and that all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole—
he does not negate any more
. Such a faith, however, is the highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name of
Dionysus
.

 

50

One might say that in a certain sense the nineteenth century
also
strove for all that which Goethe as a person had striven for: universality in understanding and in welcoming, letting everything come close to oneself, an audacious realism, a reverence for everything factual. How is it that the over-all result is no Goethe, but chaos, a nihilistic sigh, an utter bewilderment, an instinct of weariness which in practice continually drives toward a recourse to the eighteenth century? (For example, as a romanticism of feeling, as altruism and hypersentimentality, as feminism in taste, as socialism in politics.) Is not the nineteenth century, especially at its close, merely an intensified,
brutalized
eighteenth century, that is, a century of
decadence?
So that Goethe would have been—not merely for Germany, but for all of Europe—a mere interlude, a beautiful “in vain”? But one misunderstands great human beings if one views them from the miserable perspective of some public use. That one cannot put them to any use, that in itself may belong to greatness.

 

51

Goethe is the last German for whom I feel any reverence : he would have felt three things which I feel—and we also understand each other about the “cross.”

I am often asked why, after all, I write in German: nowhere am I read worse than in the fatherland. But who knows in the end whether I even
wish
to be read today? To create things on which time tests its teeth in vain; in form, in
substance
, to strive for a little immortality—I have never yet been modest enough to demand less of myself. The aphorism, the apothegm, in which I am the first among the Germans to be a master, are the forms of “eternity”; it is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book—what everyone else does not say in a book.

I have given mankind the most profound book it possesses, my
Zarathustra;
shortly I shall give it the most independent.

1

In conclusion, a word about that world to which I sought approaches, to which I have perhaps found a new approach—the ancient world. My taste, which may be the opposite of a tolerant taste, is in this case too far from saying Yes indiscriminately: it does not like to say Yes; rather even No; but best of all, nothing. That applies to whole cultures, it applies to books—also to places and landscapes. At bottom it is a very small number of ancient books that counts in my life; the most famous are not among them. My sense of style, for the epigram as a style, was awakened almost instantly when I came into contact with Sallust. I have not forgotten the surprise of my honored teacher, Corssen, when he had to give his worst Latin pupil the best grade: I had finished with one stroke. Compact, severe, with as much substance as possible, a cold sarcasm against “beautiful words” and “beautiful sentiments”—here I found myself. And even in my
Zarathustra
one will recognize a very serious ambition for a
Roman
style, for the
aere perennius
⁴⁰
in style.

Nor was my experience any different in my first contact with Horace. To this day, no other poet has given me the same artistic delight that a Horatian ode gave me from the first. In certain languages that which has been achieved here could not even be attempted. This mosaic of words, in which every word—as sound, as place, as concept—pours out its strength right and left and over the whole, this
minimum
in the extent and number of the signs, and the maximum thereby attained in the energy of the signs—all that is Roman and, if one will believe me,
noble
par excellence. All the rest of poetry becomes, in contrast, something too popular —a mere garrulity of feelings.

 

2

To the Greeks I do not by any means owe similarly strong impressions; and—to come right out with it—they
cannot
mean as much to us as the Romans. One does not
learn
from the Greeks—their manner is too foreign, and too fluid, to have an imperative, a “classical” effect. Who could ever have learned to write from a Greek? Who could ever have learned it
without
the Romans?

For heaven's sake, do not throw Plato at me. I am a complete skeptic about Plato, and I have never been able to join in the admiration for the
artist
Plato which is customary among scholars. In the end, the subtlest judges of taste among the ancients themselves are here on my side. Plato, it seems to me, throws all stylistic forms together and is thus a first-rate decadent in style: his responsibility is thus comparable to that of the Cynics, who invented the
satura Menippea.
⁴¹
To be attracted by the Platonic dialogue, this horribly self-satisfied and childish kind of dialectic, one must never have read good French writers—Fontenelle, for example. Plato is boring. In the end, my mistrust of Plato goes deep: he represents such an aberration from all the basic instincts of the Hellene, is so moralistic, so pre-existently Christian—he already takes the concept “good” for the highest concept—that for the whole phenomenon Plato I would sooner use the harsh phrase “higher swindle,” or, if it sounds better, “idealism,” than any other. We have paid dearly for the fact that this Athenian got his schooling from the Egyptians (or from the Jews in Egypt?). In that great calamity, Christianity, Plato represents that ambiguity and fascination, called an “ideal,” which made it possible for the nobler spirits of antiquity to misunderstand themselves and to set foot on the bridge leading to the cross. And how much Plato there still is in the concept “church,” in the construction, system, and practice of the church!

My recreation, my preference, my cure from all Platonism has always been
Thucydides
. Thucydides and, perhaps, Machiavelli's
Principe
are most closely related to myself by the unconditional will not to gull oneself and to see reason in
reality
—not in “reason,” still less in “morality.” For the wretched embellishment of the Greeks into an ideal, which the “classically educated” youth carries into life as a prize for his classroom drill, there is no more complete cure than Thucydides. One must follow him line by line and read no less clearly between the lines: there are few thinkers who say so much between the lines. With him the culture of the Sophists, by which I mean the culture of the realists, reaches its perfect expression—this inestimable movement amid the moralistic and idealistic swindle set loose on all sides by the Socratic schools. Greek philosophy: the decadence of the Greek instinct. Thucydides: the great sum, the last revelation of that strong, severe, hard factuality which was instinctive with the older Hellenes. In the end, it is
courage
in the face of reality that distinguishes a man like Thucydides from Plato: Plato is a coward before reality, consequently he flees into the ideal; Thucydides has control of
himself
, consequently he also maintains control of things.

 

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