The Twilight of the Idols; or, How to Philosophize with...

We should never forgive Christianity for having so abused the weakness of the dying man as to do violence to his conscience, or for having used his manner of dying as a means of valuing both man and his past—In spite of all cowardly prejudices, it is our duty, in this respect, above all to reinstate the proper—that is to say, the physiological, aspect of so-called natural death, which after all is perfectly “unnatural” and nothing else than suicide. One never perishes through anybody’s fault but one’s own. The only thing is that the death which takes place in the most contemptible circumstances, the death that is not free, the death which occurs at the wrong time, is the death of a coward. Out of the very love one bears to life, one should wish death to be different from this—that is to say, free, deliberate, and neither a matter of chance nor of surprise. Finally let me whisper a word of advice to our friends the pessimists and all other decadents. We have not the power to prevent ourselves from being born: but this error—for sometimes it is an error—can be rectified if we choose. The man who does away with himself, performs the most estimable of deeds: he almost deserves to live for having done so. Society—nay, life itself, derives more profit from such a deed than from any sort of life spent in renunciation, anæmia and other virtues,—at least the suicide frees others from the sight of him, at least he removes one objection against life.

Pessimism pur et vert, can be proved only by the self-refutation of the pessimists themselves: one should go a step further in one’s consistency; one should not merely deny life with “The World as Will and Idea,” as Schopenhauer did; one should in the first place deny Schopenhauer. ... Incidentally, Pessimism, however infectious it may be, does not increase the morbidness of an age or of a whole species; it is rather the expression of that morbidness. One falls a victim to it in the same way as one falls a victim to cholera; one must already be predisposed to the disease. Pessimism in itself does not increase the number of the world’s decadents by a single unit. Let me remind you of the statistical fact that in those years in which cholera rages, the total number of deaths does not exceed that of other years.

Have we become more moral?—As might have been expected, the whole ferocity of moral stultification, which, as is well known, passes for morality itself in Germany, hurled itself against my concept “Beyond Good and Evil.” I could tell you some nice tales about this. Above all, people tried to make me see the “incontestable superiority” of our age in regard to moral sentiment, and the progress we had made in these matters. Compared with us, a Cæsar Borgia was by no means to be represented as “higher man,” the sort of Superman, which I declared him to be. The editor of the Swiss paper the Bund went so far as not only to express his admiration for the courage displayed by my enterprise, but also to pretend to “understand” that the intended purpose of my work was to abolish all decent feeling. Much obliged!—In reply, I venture to raise the following question: have we really become more moral? The fact that everybody believes that we have is already an objection to the belief. We modern men, so extremely delicate and susceptible, full of consideration one for the other, actually dare to suppose that the pampering fellow-feeling which we all display, this unanimity which we have at last acquired in sparing and helping and trusting one another marks a definite step forward, and shows us to be far ahead of the man of the Renaissance. But every age thinks the same, it is bound to think the same.

This at least, is certain, that we should not dare to stand amid the conditions which prevailed at the Renaissance, we should not even dare to imagine ourselves in those conditions: our nerves could not endure that reality, not to speak of our muscles. The inability to do this however does not denote any progress; but simply the different and more senile quality of our particular nature, its greater weakness, delicateness, and susceptibility, out of which a morality more rich in consideration was bound to arise. If we imagine our delicateness and senility, our physiological decrepitude as non-existent, our morality of “humanisation” would immediately lose all value—no morality has any value per se—it would even fill us with scorn. On the other hand, do not let us doubt that we moderns, wrapped as we are in the thick cotton wool of our humanitarianism which would shrink even from grazing a stone, would present a comedy to Cæsar Borgia’s contemporaries which would literally make them die of laughter. We are indeed, without knowing it, exceedingly ridiculous with our modern “virtues.” ... The decline of the instincts of hostility and of those instincts that arouse suspicion,—for this if anything is what constitutes our progress—is only one of the results manifested by the general decline in vitality: it requires a hundred times more trouble and caution to live such a dependent and senile existence. In such circumstances everybody gives everybody else a helping hand, and, to a certain extent, everybody is either an invalid or an invalid’s attendant.

This is then called “virtue”: among those men who knew a different life—that is to say, a fuller, more prodigal, more superabundant sort of life, it might have been called by another name,—possibly “cowardice,” or “vileness,” or “old woman’s morality.” ... Our mollification of morals—this is my cry; this it you will is my innovation—is the outcome of our decline; conversely hardness and terribleness in morals may be the result of a surplus of life. When the latter state prevails, much is dared, much is challenged, and much is also squandered. That which formerly was simply the salt of life, would now be our poison. To be indifferent—even this is a form of strength—for that, likewise, we are too senile, too decrepit: our morality of fellow-feeling, against which I was the first to raise a finger of warning, that which might be called moral impressionism, is one symptom the more of the excessive physiological irritability which is peculiar to everything decadent. That movement which attempted to introduce itself in a scientific manner on the shoulders of Schopenhauer’s morality of pity—a very sad attempt!—is in its essence the movement of decadence in morality, and as such it is intimately related to Christian morality.

Strong ages and noble cultures see something contemptible in pity, in the “love of one’s neighbour,” and in a lack of egoism and of self-esteem.—Ages should be measured according to their positive forces;—valued by this standard that prodigal and fateful age of the Renaissance, appears as the last great age, while we moderns with our anxious care of ourselves and love of our neighbours, with all our unassuming virtues of industry, equity, and scientific method—with our lust of collection, of economy and of mechanism—represent a weak age.... Our virtues are necessarily determined, and are even stimulated, by our weakness. “Equality,” a certain definite process of making everybody uniform, which only finds its expression in the theory of equal rights, is essentially bound up with a declining culture: the chasm between man and man, class and class, the multiplicity of types, the will to be one’s self, and to distinguish one’s self—that, in fact, which I call the pathos of distance is proper to all strong ages. The force of tension,—nay, the tension itself, between extremes grows slighter every day,—the extremes themselves are tending to become obliterated to the point of becoming identical. All our political theories and state constitutions, not by any means excepting “The German Empire,” are the logical consequences, the necessary consequences of decline; the unconscious effect of decadence has begun to dominate even the ideals of the various sciences.

My objection to the whole of English and French sociology still continues to be this, that it knows only the decadent form of society from experience, and with perfectly childlike innocence takes the instincts of decline as the norm, the standard, of sociological valuations. Descending life, the decay of all organising power—that is to say, of all that power which separates, cleaves gulfs, and establishes rank above and below, formulated itself in modern sociology as the ideal. Our socialists are decadents: but Herbert Spencer was also a decadent,—he saw something to be desired in the triumph of altruism!...

My Concept of Freedom.—Sometimes the value of a thing does not lie in that which it helps us to achieve, but in the amount we have to pay for it,—what it costs us. For instance, liberal institutions straightway cease from being liberal, the moment they are soundly established: once this is attained no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions! One knows, of course, what they bring about: they undermine the Will to Power, they are the levelling of mountain and valley exalted to a morality, they make people small, cowardly and pleasure-loving,—by means of them the gregarious animal invariably triumphs. Liberalism, or, in plain English, the transformation of mankind into cattle. The same institutions, so long as they are fought for, produce quite other results; then indeed they promote the cause of freedom quite powerfully. Regarded more closely, it is war which produces these results, war in favour of liberal institutions, which, as war, allows the illiberal instincts to subsist. For war trains men to be free. What in sooth is freedom? Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves. It is to preserve the distance which separates us from other men. To grow more indifferent to hardship, to severity, to privation, and even to life itself. To be ready to sacrifice men for one’s cause, one’s self included. Freedom denotes that the virile instincts which rejoice in war and in victory, prevail over other instincts; for instance, over the instincts of “happiness.”

The man who has won his freedom, and how much more so, therefore, the spirit that has won its freedom, tramples ruthlessly upon that contemptible kind of comfort which tea-grocers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats worship in their dreams. The free man is a warrior.—How is freedom measured in individuals as well as in nations? According to the resistance which has to be overcome, according to the pains which it costs to remain uppermost. The highest type of free man would have to be sought where the greatest resistance has continually to be overcome: five paces away from tyranny, on the very threshold of the danger of thraldom. This is psychologically true if, by the word “Tyrants” we mean inexorable and terrible instincts which challenge the maximum amount of authority and discipline to oppose them—the finest example of this is Julius Cæsar; it is also true politically: just examine the course of history. The nations which were worth anything, which got to be worth anything, never attained to that condition under liberal institutions: great danger made out of them something which deserves reverence, that danger which alone can make us aware of our resources, our virtues, our means of defence, our weapons, our genius,—which compels us to be strong.

First principle: a man must need to be strong, otherwise he will never attain it.—Those great forcing-houses of the strong, of the strongest kind of men that have ever existed on earth, the aristocratic communities like those of Rome and Venice, understood freedom precisely as I understand the word: as something that one has and that one has not, as something that one will have and that one seizes by force.

A Criticism of Modernity.—Our institutions are no longer any good; on this point we are all agreed. But the fault does not lie with them; but with us. Now that we have lost all the instincts out of which institutions grow, the latter on their part are beginning to disappear from our midst because we are no longer fit for them. Democracy has always been the death agony of the power of organisation: already in “Human All-too-Human,” Part I., Aph. 472, I pointed out that modern democracy, together with its half-measures, of which the “German Empire” is an example, was a decaying form of the State. For institutions to be possible there must exist a sort of will, instinct, imperative, which cannot be otherwise than antiliberal to the point of wickedness: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility for centuries to come, to solidarity in long family lines forwards and backwards in infinitum. If this will is present, something is founded which resembles the imperium Romanum; or Russia, the only great nation to-day that has some lasting power and grit in her, that can bide her time, that can still promise something.—Russia the opposite of all wretched European petty-statism and neurasthenia, which the foundation of the German Empire has brought to a crisis. The whole of the Occident no longer possesses those instincts from which institutions spring, out of which a future grows: maybe nothing is more opposed to its “modern spirit” than these things.

People live for the present, the live at top speed,—they certainly live without any sense of responsibility; and this is precisely what they call “freedom.” Everything in institutions which makes them institutions, is scorned, loathed and repudiated: everybody is in mortal fear of a new slavery, wherever the word “authority” is so much as whispered. The decadence of the valuing instinct, both in our politicians and in our political parties, goes so far, that they instinctively prefer that which acts as a solvent, that which precipitates the final catastrophe.... As an example of this behold modern marriage. All reason has obviously been divorced from modern marriage: but this is no objection to matrimony itself but to modernity. The rational basis of marriage—it lay in the exclusive legal responsibility of the man: by this means some ballast was laid in the ship of matrimony, whereas nowadays it has a list, now on this side, now on that. The rational basis of marriage—it lay in its absolute indissolubleness: in this way it was given a gravity which knew how to make its influence felt, in the face of the accident of sentiment, passion and momentary impulse: it lay also in the fact that the responsibility of choosing the parties to the contract, lay with the families. By showing ever more and more favour to love-marriages, the very foundation of matrimony, that which alone makes it an institution, has been undermined. No institution ever has been nor ever will be built upon an idiosyncrasy; as I say, marriage cannot be based upon “love.”

It can be based upon sexual desire; upon the instinct of property (wife and child as possessions); upon the instinct of dominion, which constantly organises for itself the smallest form of dominion,—the family which requires children and heirs in order to hold fast, also in the physiological sense, to a certain quantum of acquired power, influence and wealth, so as to prepare for lasting tasks, and for solidarity in the instincts from one century to another. Marriage as an institution presupposes the affirmation of the greatest and most permanent form of organisation; if society cannot as a whole stand security for itself into the remotest generations, marriage has no meaning whatsoever.—Modern marriage has lost its meaning; consequently it is being abolished.

The question of the Working-man.—The mere fact that there is such a thing as the question of the working-man is due to stupidity, or at bottom to degenerate instincts which are the cause of all the stupidity of modern times. Concerning certain things no questions ought to be put: the first imperative principle of instinct. For the life of me I cannot see what people want to do with the working-man of Europe, now that they have made a question of him. He is far too comfortable to cease from questioning ever more and more, and with ever less modesty. After all, he has the majority on his side. There is now not the slightest hope that an unassuming and contented sort of man, after the style of the Chinaman, will come into being in this quarter: and this would have been the reasonable course, it was even a dire necessity. What has been done? Everything has been done with the view of nipping the very pre-requisite of this accomplishment in the bud, —with the most frivolous thoughtlessness those selfsame instincts by means of which a working-class becomes possible, and tolerable even to its members themselves, have been destroyed root and branch. The working-man has been declared fit for military service; he has been granted the right of combination, and of voting: can it be wondered at that he already regards his condition as one of distress (expressed morally, as an injustice)? But, again I ask, what do people want? If they desire a certain end, then they should desire the means thereto. If they will have slaves, then it is madness to educate them to be masters.

“The kind of freedom I do not mean....”[6]—In an age like the present, it simply adds to one’s perils to be left to one’s instincts. The instincts contradict, disturb, and destroy each other; I have already defined modernism as physiological self-contradiction. A reasonable system of education would insist upon at least one of these instinct-systems being paralysed beneath an iron pressure, in order to allow others to assert their power, to grow strong, and to dominate. At present, the only conceivable way of making the individual possible would be to prune him:—of making him possible—that is to say, whole. The very reverse occurs. Independence, free development, and laisser aller are clamoured for most violently precisely by those for whom no restraint could be too severe—this is true in politics, it is true in Art. But this is a symptom of decadence: our modern notion of “freedom” is one proof the more of the degeneration of instinct.

Where faith is necessary.—Nothing is more rare among moralists and saints than uprightness; maybe they say the reverse is true, maybe they even believe it. For, when faith is more useful, more effective, more convincing than conscious hypocrisy, by instinct that hypocrisy forthwith becomes innocent: first principle towards the understanding of great saints. The same holds good of philosophers, that other order of saints; their whole business compels them to concede only certain truths—that is to say, those by means of which their particular trade receives the public sanction,—to speak “Kantingly”: the truths of practical reason. They know what they must prove; in this respect they are practical,—they recognise each other by the fact that they agree upon “certain truths.”—“Thou shalt not lie”—in plain English:—Beware, Mr Philosopher, of speaking the truth....

A quiet hint to Conservatives.—That which we did not know formerly, and know now, or might know if we chose,—is the fact that a retrograde formation, a reversion in any sense or degree, is absolutely impossible. We physiologists, at least, are aware of this. But all priests and moralists have believed in it,—they wished to drag and screw man back to a former standard of virtue. Morality has always been a Procrustean bed. Even the politicians have imitated the preachers of virtue in this matter. There are parties at the present day whose one aim and dream is to make all things adopt the crab-march. But not everyone can be a crab. It cannot be helped: we must go forward,—that is to say step by step further and further into decadence (—this is my definition of modern “progress”). We can hinder this development, and by so doing dam up and accumulate degeneration itself and render it more convulsive, more volcanic: we cannot do more.

My concept of Genius.—Great men, like great ages, are explosive material, in which a stupendous amount of power is accumulated; the first conditions of their existence are always historical and physiological; they are the outcome of the fact that for long ages energy has been collected, hoarded up, saved up and preserved for their use, and that no explosion has taken place. When, the tension in the bulk has become sufficiently excessive, the most fortuitous stimulus suffices in order to call “genius,” “great deeds,” and momentous fate into the world. What then is the good of all environment, historical periods, “Zeitgeist” (Spirit of the age) and “public opinion”?—Take the case of Napoleon. France of the Revolution, and still more of the period preceding the Revolution, would have brought forward a type which was the very reverse of Napoleon: it actually did produce such a type. And because Napoleon was something different, the heir of a stronger, more lasting and older civilisation than that which in France was being smashed to atoms he became master there, he was the only master there. Great men are necessary, the age in which they appear is a matter of chance; the fact that they almost invariably master their age is accounted for simply by the fact that they are stronger, that they are older, and that power has been stored longer for them. The relation of a genius to his age is that which exists between strength and weakness and between maturity and youth: the age is relatively always very much younger, thinner, less mature, less resolute and more childish.

The fact that the general opinion in France at the present day, is utterly different on this very point (in Germany too, but that is of no consequence); the fact that in that country the theory of environment—a regular neuropathic notion—has become sacrosanct and almost scientific, and finds acceptance even among the physiologists, is a very bad, and exceedingly depressing sign. In England too the same belief prevails: but nobody will be surprised at that. The Englishman knows only two ways of understanding the genius and the “great man”: either democratically in the style of Buckle, or religiously after the manner of Carlyle.—The danger which great men and great ages represent, is simply extraordinary; every kind of exhaustion and of sterility follows in their wake. The great man is an end; the great age—the Renaissance for instance,—is an end. The genius—in work and in deed,—is necessarily a squanderer: the fact that he spends himself constitutes his greatness. The instinct of self-preservation is as it were suspended in him; the overpowering pressure of out-flowing energy in him forbids any such protection and prudence. People call this “self-sacrifice,” they praise his “heroism,” his indifference to his own well-being, his utter devotion to an idea, a great cause, a father-land: All misunderstandings.... He flows out, he flows over, he consumes himself, he does not spare himself,—and does all this with fateful necessity, irrevocably, involuntarily, just as a river involuntarily bursts its dams.

But, owing to the fact that humanity has been much indebted to such explosives, it has endowed them with many things, for instance, with a kind of higher morality.... This is indeed the sort of gratitude that humanity is capable of: it misunderstands its benefactors.

The criminal and his like.—The criminal type is the type of the strong man amid unfavourable conditions, a strong man made sick. He lacks the wild and savage state, a form of nature and existence which is freer and more dangerous, in which everything that constitutes the shield and the sword in the instinct of the strong man, takes a place by right. Society puts a ban upon his virtues; the most spirited instincts inherent in him immediately become involved with the depressing passions, with suspicion, fear and dishonour. But this is almost the recipe for physiological degeneration. When a man has to do that which he is best suited to do, which he is most fond of doing, not only clandestinely, but also with long suspense, caution and ruse, he becomes anæmic; and inasmuch as he is always having to pay for his instincts in the form of danger, persecution and fatalities, even his feelings begin to turn against these instincts—he begins to regard them as fatal. It is society, our tame, mediocre, castrated society, in which an untutored son of nature who comes to us from his mountains or from his adventures at sea, must necessarily degenerate into a criminal. Or almost necessarily: for there are cases in which such a man shows himself to be stronger than society: the Corsican Napoleon is the most celebrated case of this. Concerning the problem before us, Dostoiewsky’s testimony is of importance—Dostoiewsky who, incidentally, was the only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn: he belongs to the happiest windfalls of my life, happier even than the discovery of Stendhal.

This profound man, who was right ten times over in esteeming the superficial Germans low, found the Siberian convicts among whom he lived for many years,—those thoroughly hopeless criminals for whom no road back to society stood open—very different from what even he had expected,—that is to say carved from about the best, hardest and most valuable material that grows on Russian soil.[7] Let us generalise the case of the criminal; let us imagine creatures who for some reason or other fail to meet with public approval, who know that they are regarded neither as beneficent nor useful,—the feeling of the Chandala, who are aware that they are not looked upon as equal, but as proscribed, unworthy, polluted. The thoughts and actions of all such natures are tainted with a subterranean mouldiness; everything in them is of a paler hue than in those on whose existence the sun shines. But almost all those creatures whom, nowadays, we honour and respect, formerly lived in this semi-sepulchral atmosphere: the man of science, the artist, the genius, the free spirit, the actor, the business man, and the great explorer. As long as the priest represented the highest type of man, every valuable kind of man was depreciated.... The time is coming—this I guarantee—when he will pass as the lowest type, as our Chandala, as the falsest and most disreputable kind of man....

I call your attention to the fact that even now, under the sway of the mildest customs and usages which have ever ruled on earth or at least in Europe, every form of standing aside, every kind of prolonged, excessively prolonged concealment, every unaccustomed and obscure form of existence tends to approximate to that type which the criminal exemplifies to perfection. All pioneers of the spirit have, for a while, the grey and fatalistic mark of the Chandala on their brows: not because they are regarded as Chandala, but because they themselves feel the terrible chasm which separates them from all that is traditional and honourable. Almost every genius knows the “Catilinarian life” as one of the stages in his development, a feeling of hate, revenge and revolt against everything that exists, that has ceased to evolve.... Catiline—the early stage of every Cæsar.

Here the outlook is free.—When a philosopher holds his tongue it may be the sign of the loftiness of his soul: when he contradicts himself it may be love; and the very courtesy of a knight of knowledge may force him to lie. It has been said, and not without subtlety:—il est indigne des grands cœurs de répandre le trouble qu’ils ressentent[8]: but it is necessary to add that there may also be grandeur de cœur in not shrinking from the most undignified proceeding. A woman who loves sacrifices her honour; a knight of knowledge who “loves,” sacrifices perhaps his humanity; a God who loved, became a Jew....

Beauty no accident—Even the beauty of a race or of a family, the charm and perfection of all its movements, is attained with pains: like genius it is the final result of the accumulated work of generations. Great sacrifices must have been made on the altar ol good taste, for its sake many things must have been done, and much must have been left undone—the seventeenth century in France is admirable for both of these things,—in this century there must have been a principle of selection in respect to company, locality, clothing, the gratification of the instinct of sex; beauty must have been preferred to profit, to habit, to opinion and to indolence. The first rule of all:—nobody must “let himself go,” not even when he is alone.—Good things are exceedingly costly:; and in all cases the law obtains that he who possesses them is a different person from him who is acquiring them. Everything good is an inheritance: that which is not inherited is imperfect, it is simply a beginning. In Athens at the time of Cicero—who expresses his surprise at the fact—the men and youths were by far superior in beauty to the women: but what hard work and exertions the male sex had for centuries imposed upon itself in the service of beauty! We must not be mistaken in regard to the method employed here: the mere discipline of feelings and thoughts is little better than nil (—it is in this that the great error of German culture, which is quite illusory, lies): the body must be persuaded first.

The strict maintenance of a distinguished and tasteful demeanour, the obligation of frequenting only those who do not “let themselves go,” is amply sufficient to render one distinguished and tasteful: in two or three generations everything has already taken deep root. The fate of a people and of humanity is decided according to whether they begin culture at the right place—not at the “soul” (as the fatal superstition of the priests and half-priests would have it): the right place is the body, demeanour, diet, physiology—the rest follows as the night the day.... That is why the Greeks remain the first event in culture—they knew and they did what was needful. Christianity with its contempt of the body is the greatest mishap that has ever befallen mankind.

Progress in my sense.—I also speak of a “return to nature,” although it is not a process of going back but of going up—up into lofty, free and even terrible nature and naturalness; such a nature as can play with great tasks and may play with them.... To speak in a parable. Napoleon was an example of a “return to nature,” as I understand it (for instance in rebus tacticis, and still more, as military experts know, in strategy). But Rousseau—whither did he want to return? Rousseau this first modern man, idealist and canaille in one person; who was in need of moral “dignity,” in order even to endure the sight of his own person,—ill with unbridled vanity and wanton self-contempt; this abortion, who planted his tent on the threshold of modernity, also wanted a “return to nature”; but, I ask once more, whither did he wish to return? I hate Rousseau, even in the Revolution itself: the latter was the historical expression of this hybrid of idealist and canaille. The bloody farce which this Revolution ultimately became, its “immorality,” concerns me but slightly; what I loathe however is its Rousseauesque morality—the so-called “truths” of the Revolution, by means of which it still exercises power and draws all flat and mediocre things over to its side. The doctrine of equality! ...

But there is no more deadly poison than this; for it seems to proceed from the very lips of justice, whereas in reality it draws the curtain down on all justice.... “To equals equality, to unequals inequality”—that would be the real speech of justice and that which follows from it “Never make unequal things equal.” The fact that so much horror and blood are associated with this doctrine of equality, has lent this “modern idea” par excellence such a halo of fire and glory, that the Revolution as a drama has misled even the most noble minds.—That after all is no reason for honouring it the more.—I can see only one who regarded it as it should be regarded—that is to say, with loathing; I speak of Goethe.