The Portable Nietzsche (66 page)

To smell out “beautiful souls,” “golden means,” and other perfections in the Greeks, or to admire their calm in greatness, their ideal cast of mind, their noble simplicity—the psychologist in me protected me against such “noble simplicity,” a
niaiserie allemande
anyway. I saw their strongest instinct, the will to power; I saw them tremble before the indomitable force of this drive—I saw how all their institutions grew out of preventive measures taken to protect each other against their inner explosives. This tremendous inward tension then discharged itself in terrible and ruthless hostility to the outside world: the city-states tore each other to pieces so that the citizens of each might find peace from themselves. One needed to be strong: danger was near, it lurked everywhere. The magnificent physical suppleness, the audacious realism and immoralism which distinguished the Hellene constituted a
need
, not “nature.” It only resulted, it was not there from the start. And with festivals and the arts they also aimed at nothing other than to feel
on top
, to
show
themselves on top. These are means of glorifying oneself, and in certain cases, of inspiring fear of oneself.

How could one possibly judge the Greeks by their philosophers, as the Germans have done, and use the Philistine moralism of the Socratic schools as a clue to what was basically Hellenic! After all, the philosophers are the decadents of Greek culture, the counter-movement to the ancient, noble taste (to the agonistic instinct, to the
polis,
to the value of race, to the authority of descent). The Socratic virtues were preached because the Greeks had lost them: excitable, timid, fickle comedians, every one of them, they had a few reasons too many for having morals preached to them. Not that it did any good—but big words and attitudes suit decadents so well.

 

4

I was the first to take seriously, for the understanding of the older, the still rich and even overflowing Hellenic instinct, that wonderful phenomenon which bears the name of Dionysus: it is explicable only in terms of an
excess
of force. Whoever followed the Greeks, like that most profound student of their culture in our time, Jacob Burckhardt in Basel, knew immediately that something had been accomplished thereby; and Burckhardt added a special section on this phenomenon to his
Civilization of the Greeks
. To see the opposite, one should look at the almost amusing poverty of instinct among the German philologists when they approach the Dionysian. The famous Lobeck, above all, crawled into this world of mysterious states with all the venerable sureness of a worm dried up between books, and persuaded himself that it was scientific of him to be glib and childish to the point of nausea—and with the utmost erudition, Lobeck gave us to understand that all these curiosities really did not amount to anything. In fact, the priests could have told the participants in such orgies some not altogether worthless things; for example, that wine excites lust, that man can under certain circumstances live on fruit, that plants bloom in the spring and wilt in the fall. As regards the astonishing wealth of rites, symbols, and myths of an orgiastic origin, with which the ancient world is literally overrun, this gave Lobeck an opportunity to become still more ingenious. “The Greeks,” he said
(Aglaophamus
I, 672), “when they had nothing else to do, laughed, jumped, and ran around; or, since man sometimes feels that urge too, they sat down, cried, and lamented.
Others
came later on and sought some reason for this spectacular behavior; and thus there originated, as explanations for these customs, countless traditions conconcerning feasts and myths. On the other hand, it was believed that this
droll ado
, which took place on the feast days after all, must also form a necessary part of the festival and therefore it was maintained as an indispensable feature of the religious service.” This is contemptible prattle; a Lobeck simply cannot be taken seriously for a moment.

We have quite a different feeling when we examine the concept “Greek” which was developed by Winckelmann and Goethe, and find it incompatible with that element out of which Dionysian art grows—the orgiastic. Indeed I do not doubt that as a matter of principle Goethe excluded anything of the sort from the possibilities of the Greek soul.
Consequently Goethe did not understand the Greeks.
For it is only in the Dionysian mysteries, in the psychology of the Dionysian state, that the
basic fact
of the Hellenic instinct finds expression—its “will to life.” What was it that the Hellene guaranteed himself by means of these mysteries?
Eternal
life, the eternal return of life; the future promised and hallowed in the past; the triumphant Yes to life beyond all death and change;
true
life as the over-all continuation of life through procreation, through the mysteries of sexuality. For the Greeks the
sexual
symbol was therefore the venerable symbol par excellence, the real profundity in the whole of ancient piety. Every single element in the act of procreation, of pregnancy, and of birth aroused the highest and most solemn feelings. In the doctrine of the mysteries,
pain
is pronounced holy: the pangs of the woman giving birth hallow all pain; all becoming and growing —all that guarantees a future—involves pain. That there may be the eternal joy of creating, that the will to life may eternally affirm itself, the agony of the woman giving birth
must
also be there eternally.

All this is meant by the word Dionysus: I know no higher symbolism than this
Greek
symbolism of the Dionysian festivals. Here the most profound instinct of life, that directed toward the future of life, the eternity of life, is experienced religiously—and the way to life, procreation, as the
holy
way. It was Christianity, with its
ressentiment
against life at the bottom of its heart, which first made something unclean of sexuality: it threw
filth
on the origin, on the presupposition of our life.

 

5

The psychology of the orgiastic as an overflowing feeling of life and strength, where even pain still has the effect of a stimulus, gave me the key to the concept of
tragic
feeling, which had been misunderstood both by Aristotle and, quite especially, by our modern pessimists. Tragedy is so far from proving anything about the pessimism of the Hellenes, in Schopenhauer's sense, that it may, on the contrary, be considered its decisive repudiation and counter-instance. Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems, the will to life rejoicing over its own inexhaustibility even in the very sacrifice of its highest types—
that
is what I called Dionysian,
that
is what I guessed to be the bridge to the psychology of the
tragic
poet.
Not
in order to be liberated from terror and pity, not in order to purge oneself of a dangerous affect by its vehement discharge—Aristotle understood it that way—but in order to be
oneself
the eternal joy of becoming, beyond all terror and pity—that joy which included even joy in destroying.

And herewith I again touch that point from which I once went forth:
The Birth of Tragedy
was my first revaluation of all values. Herewith I again stand on the soil out of which my intention, my
ability
grows—I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus—I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence.

“Why so hard?” the kitchen coal once said to the diamond. “After all, are we not close kin?”

Why so soft? O my brothers, thus I ask you: are you not after all my brothers?

Why so soft, so pliant and yielding? Why is there so much denial, self-denial, in your hearts? So little destiny in your eyes?

And if you do not want to be destinies and inexorable ones, how can you one day triumph with me?

And if your hardness does not wish to flash and cut and cut through, how can you one day create with me?

For all creators are hard. And it must seem blessedness to you to impress your hand on millennia as on wax,

Blessedness to write on the will of millennia as on bronze—harder than bronze, nobler than bronze. Only the noblest is altogether hard.

This new tablet, O my brothers, I place over you: become hard!

Zarathustra
, III, p. 326

After completing
Twilight of the Idols,
Nietzsche abandoned his previous plans for writing a work to be called
The Will to Power
. Instead, he decided to write a fourpart
Revaluation of All Values
: not a collection of notes or aphorisms, but four essays; and he succeeded in completing the preface and the first essay:
Der Antichrist
.

The title is ambiguous. It first calls to mind the apocalyptic Antichrist, and this more sensational meaning is in keeping with the author's intention to be as provocative as possible. But the title could also mean “The Anti-Christian,” and this interpretation is much more in keeping with the contents of the book, and in sections 38 and 47 the word is used in a context in which this is the only possible meaning.

It is also likely that a parallel to “anti-Semite” is intended. Nietzsche's attitude toward anti-Semitism in this work is, at first glance, puzzling; it has even been suggested that his anti-Christianity might have been motivated by anti-Semitism. But he is as opposed to anti-Semitism as ever. This is plain in all the other works of 1888, including the two books he composed after
The Antichrist
:
Ecce Homo
and
Nietzsche contra Wagner.
The latter consists of passages from his earlier works, edited slightly; and the relatively few additions include several aimed at anti-Semitism. And in his last letters he would even like to shoot all anti-Semites. Nietzsche's sharply divergent attitudes toward the Old and the New Testaments furnish another clue. For the Old Testament was one of his great loves. “The dignity of death and a kind of
consecration
of passion have perhaps never yet been represented more beautifully . . . than by certain Jews of the Old Testament: to these even the Greek could have gone to school!” he writes in a late note; and the same theme is developed more fully, together with his dislike for the New Testament, in
Beyond Good and Evil
(aphorism 52, included in this volume) and in the last part of the
Genealogy
(aphorism 22); and still later it is condensed into a mere eight words in an addition to a passage cited in
Nietzsche contra Wagner.
⁴²
In
The Antichrist
itself, Nietzsche cites Luke 6:23, “for in the like manner did their fathers unto the prophets,” and comments: “Impertinent rabble! They compare themselves with the prophets, no less.”

The Antichrist
is Part One of the
Revaluation
, and one of its main themes is the reversal of the traditional appraisal of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism—an appraisal that had reached an extreme form in the self-styled “Christian” anti-Semitism of those days. One may think of Hofprediger Stocker, of Richard Wagner and his son-in-law Chamberlain, whose tracts made such a tremendous impression on Hitler and Rosenberg, and also of the man whom Nietzsche's sister married, Bernhard Förster. (Of Nietzsche's many bitter letters about this marriage, only one has been included in this volume, dated Christmas 1887.) In Förster's representative formulation, Christ had appeared among the Jews because “on the dark background of the most depraved of all nations, the bright figure of the Savior of the world would stand out the more impressively.” Even before he knew Forster, Nietzsche had noted down: “Jesus and Saul: the two most Jewish Jews perhaps who ever lived”; and in
The Antichrist
this point is elaborated. The New Testament, far from representing any progress over the Old, confronts us with “the people at the bottom, the outcasts and ‘sinners,' the chandalas within Judaism.” Where—Nietzsche is saying to the Christian anti-Semites of his day, whose dragon seed Hitler reaped—where do you find all the qualities which you denounce as typically Jewish if not in the New Testament? Not Moses and the prophets, but Paul and the early Christians are “little superlative Jews.” This irony at the expense of Christian anti-Semitism (compare also section 55: “An anti-Semite certainly is not any more decent because he lies as a matter of principle”) so delights Nietzsche that he reverts again and again to
ad hominem
arguments and digs which involve him in the adoption of his opponents' cant.

The two main types of the book, apart from the individual personalities of Jesus and Paul, are the priest and the chandala. Two sentences in section 51 are central for an understanding of the book: Christianity was “not a function of race—it turned to every kind of man who was disinherited by life, it had its allies everywhere. At the bottom of Christianity is the rancor of the sick, instinct directed
against
the healthy,
against
health itself.” The motif here suggested, of Christianity as the religion of vengefulness par excellence—this complete revaluation of the accepted point of view—is the main point of the essay. In what other religion, Nietzsche asks, are the great figures so consistently and so characteristically imbued with the spirit of revenge? Nietzsche excepts Jesus, against whom he advances different objections; and he dismisses St. Francis as “neurotic, epileptic, a visionary, like Jesus” (
The Will to Power
, 221).

Stylistically, the work is, like most of Nietzsche's books, very uneven. The often clipped cadences offer a refreshing contrast to
Zarathustra
; but frequently the rhetoric gets out of hand. Nietzsche is at his best when he manages to restrain himself; for example, in sections 45 and 48. Voltaire and Shaw might well have envied him such passages.