The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All...

The Period of Light: men see that old and new are fundamental contraries; that the old values are born of descending life, and that the new ones are born of ascending life—that all old ideals are unfriendly to life (born of decadence and determining it, however much they may be decked out in the Sunday finery of morality). We understand the old, but are far from being sufficiently strong for the new.

My friends, we had a hard time as youths; we even suffered from youth itself as though it were a serious disease. This is owing to the age in which we were born—an age of enormous internal decay and disintegration which, with all its weakness and even with the best of its strength, is opposed to the spirit of youth. Disintegration—that is to say, uncertainty—is peculiar to this age: nothing stands on solid ground or on a sound faith. People live for the morrow, because the day-after-to-morrow is doubtful. All our road is slippery and dangerous, while the ice which still bears us has grown unconscionably thin: we all feel the mild and gruesome breath of the thaw-wind—soon, where we are walking, no one will any longer be able to stand!

If this is not an age of decay and of diminishing vitality, it is at least one of indiscriminate and arbitrary experimentalising—and it is probable that out of an excess of abortive experiments there has grown this general impression, as of decay: and perhaps decay itself.

The slow advance and rise of the middle and lower classes (including the lower kind of spirit and body), which was already well under way before the French Revolution, and would have made the same progress forward without the latter,—in short, then, the preponderance of the herd over all herdsmen and bell-wethers,—brings in its train:—

(2) Moral hypocrisy (a way of distinguishing oneself through morality, but by means of the values of the herd: pity, solicitude, moderation; and not by means of those virtues which are recognised and honoured outside the herd's sphere of power);

(3) A really large amount of sympathy with both pain and joy (a feeling of pleasure resulting from being herded together, which is peculiar to all gregarious animals—"public spirit," "patriotism," everything, in fact, which is apart from the individual).

Our age, with its indiscriminate endeavours to mitigate distress, to honour it, and to wage war in advance with unpleasant possibilities, is an age of the poor. Our "rich people"—they are the poorest! The real purpose of all wealth has been forgotten.

Criticism of modern man:—"the good man," but corrupted and misled by bad institutions (tyrants and priests);—reason elevated to a position of authority;—history is regarded as the surmounting of errors;—the future is regarded as progress;—the Christian state ("God of the armies");—Christian sexual intercourse (as marriage);—the realm of "justice" (the cult of "mankind");—"freedom."

The romantic attitudes of the modern man;—the noble man (Byron, Victor Hugo, George Sand);—taking the part of the oppressed and the bungled and the botched: motto for historians and romancers;—the Stoics of duty;—disinterestedness regarded as art and as knowledge;—altruism as the most mendacious form of egoism (utilitarianism), the most sentimental form of egoism.

All this savours of the eighteenth century. But it had other qualities which were not inherited, namely, a certain insouciance, cheerfulness, elegance, spiritual clearness. The spiritual tempo has altered; the pleasure which was begotten by spiritual refinement and clearness has given room to the pleasure of colour, harmony, mass, reality, etc. etc. Sensuality in spiritual things. In short, it is the eighteenth century of Rousseau.

Taken all in all, a considerable amount of humanity has been attained by our men of to-day. That we feel this is in itself a proof of the fact that we have become so sensitive in regard to small cases of distress, that we somewhat unjustly overlook what has been achieved.