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The spirit’s power to appropriate the foreign stands revealed in its inclination to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the manifold, and to overlook or repulse whatever is totally contradictory—just
we find certain solutions of problems that inspire strong faith in us; some call them henceforth their “convictions.” Later—we see them only as steps to self-knowledge, signposts to the problem we are—rather, to the great stupidity we are, to our spiritual fatum, to what is unteachable very “deep down.”
Woman wants to become self-reliant—and for that reason she is beginning to enlighten men about “woman as such”: this is one of the worst developments of the general uglification of Europe.
perhaps she seeks mastery. But she does not want truth: what is truth to woman? From the beginning, nothing has been more alien, repugnant, and hostile to woman than truth—her great art is the lie, her highest concern is mere appearance and beauty.
taceat de mulierel
That woman ventures forth when the aspect of man that inspires fear—let us say more precisely, when the man in man is no longer desired and cultivated—that is fair enough, also comprehensible enough.
in modern day the fear of lost.
influential women of the world (most recently Napoleon’s mother) owed their power and ascendancy over men to the force of their will—and not to schoolmasters!
This kind of music expresses best what I think of the Germans: they belong to the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow—as yet they have no today.
germans wanting its greatness back. whatever that was.
considered how soon one stronger will become master over the strong; also that for the spiritual flattening3 of a people there is a compensation, namely the deepening of another people.
The Europeans are becoming more similar to each other; they become more and more detached from the conditions under which races originate that are tied to some climate or class; they become increasingly independent of any determinate milieu that would like to inscribe itself for centuries in body and soul with the same demands.
this process will probably lead to results which would seem to be least expected by those who naively promote and praise it, the apostles of “modern ideas.”
same today
the democratization of Europe is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for the cultivation of tyrants—taking that word in every sense, including the most spiritual.
sun is swiftly moving toward the constellation of Hercules— and I hope that man on this earth will in this respect follow the sun’s example?
call to action.
Let us make the attempt to relearn about German profundity: nothing more is needed for this than a little vivisection of the German soul
with some profundity
the Germans are more incomprehensible, comprehensive, contradictory, unknown, incalculable, surprising, even frightening than other people are to themselves: they elude definition and would be on that account alone the despair of the French.
the event on whose account he rethought his Faust, indeed the whole problem of man, was the appearance of Napoleon.
“Development” is therefore the truly German find and hit in the great realm of philosophical formulas—a governing concept that, united with German beer and German music, is at work trying to Germanize the whole of Europe.
lol
Whoever wants a demonstration of the “German soul” ad oculos9 should merely look into German taste, into German arts and customs: What boorish indifference to “taste”! How the noblest stands right next to the meanest! How disorderly and rich this whole psychic household is!
Beethoven was after all merely the final chord of transition in style, a style break, and not, like Mozart, the last chord of a centuries-old great European taste.
Schumann was already a merely German event in music, no longer a European one, as Beethoven was and, to a still greater extent, Mozart With him German music was threatened by its greatest danger: losing the voice for the soul of Europe and descending to mere fatherlandishness.
How many Germans know, and demand of themselves that they should know, that there is art in every good sentence—art that must be figured out if the sentence is to be understood! A misunderstanding about its tempo, for example—and the sentence itself is misunderstood.
The masterpiece of German prose is therefore, fairly enough, the masterpiece of its greatest preacher: the Bible has so far been the best German book. Compared with Luther’s Bible, almost everything else is mere “literature”—something that did not grow in Germany and therefore also did not grow and does not grow into German hearts—as the Bible did.
These two types of genius seek each other, like man and woman; but they also misunderstand each other—like man and woman.
hence precisely the most attractive, captious, and choicest part of those plays of color and seductions to life in whose afterglow the sky of our European culture, its evening sky, is burning now—perhaps burning itself out We artists among the spectators and philosophers are—grateful for this to the Jews.
The Jews, however, are beyond any doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race now living in Europe; they know how to prevail even under the worst conditions (even better than under favorable conditions),
And for those brutes of sots and rakes who formerly learned how to grunt morally under the sway of Methodism and more recently again as a “Salvation Army,” a penitential spasm may really be the relatively highest achievement of “humanity” to which they can be raised: that much may be conceded in all fairness.
European noblesse—of feeling, of taste, of manners, taking the word, in short, in every higher sense—is the work and invention of France; European vulgarity, the plebeianism of modern ideas, that of England.—
the most unequivocal portents are now being overlooked, or arbitrarily and mendaciously reinterpreted—that Europe wants to become one.
thanks to the fact that we Germans are still closer to barbarism than the French, Perhaps Wagner’s strangest creation is inaccessible, inimitable, and beyond the feelings of the whole, so mature,
Every enhancement of the type “man” has so far been the work of an aristocratic society—and it will be so again and again—
Human beings whose nature was still natural, barbarians in every terrible sense of the word, men of prey who were still in possession of unbroken strength of will and lust for power, hurled themselves upon weaker, more civilized, more peaceful races, perhaps traders or cattle raisers, or upon mellow old cultures whose last vitality was even then 2 flaring up in splendid fireworks of spirit and corruption. In the be-ginning, the noble caste was always the barbarian caste: their predominance did not lie mainly in physical strength but in strength of the soul—they were more whole human beings
Corruption as the expression of a threatening anarchy among the instincts and of the fact that the foundation of the affects, which is called “life,” has been shaken: corruption is something totally different depending on the organism in which it appears.
so often enclasp an oak tree with their tendrils until eventually, high above it but supported by it, they can unfold their crowns in the open light and display their happiness.
Refraining mutually from injury, violence, and exploitation and placing one’s will on a par with that of someone else—this may become, in a certain rough sense,
as this principle is extended, and possibly even accepted as the fundamental principle of society, it immediately proves to be what it really is—a will to the denial of life, a principle of disintegration and decay.
if it is a living and not a dying body, has to do to other bodies what the individuals within it refrain from doing to each other: it will have to be an incarnate will to power,
ordinary consciousness of Europeans resists instruction as on this: every-where people are now raving, even under scientific disguises, about coming conditions of society in which “the exploitative aspect” will be removed—which
as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power,
two basic types and one basic difference. There are master morality and slave morality4—I add immediately that in all the higher and more mixed cultures there also appear attempts at mediation between these two moralities,
The moral discrimination of values has originated either among a ruling group whose consciousness of its difference from the ruled group was accompanied by delight—or among the ruled, the slaves and dependents of every degree.
when the ruling group determines what is “good,” the exalted, proud states of the soul are experienced as conferring distinction and determining the order of rank. The noble human being separates from himself those in whom the opposite of such exalted, proud states finds expression: he despises them.
The noble human being honors himself as one who is powerful, also as one who has power over himself, who knows how to speak and be silent, who delights in being severe and hard with himself and respects all severity and hardness.
The profound reverence for age and tradition—all law rests on this double reverence—the faith and prejudice in favor of ancestors
when the men of “modern ideas,” conversely, believe almost instinctively in “progress” and “the future” and more and more lack respect for age,
principle that one has duties only to one’s peers; that against beings of a lower rank, against everything alien,
The capacity for, and the duty of, long gratitude and long revenge—both only among one’s peers—refinement in repaying, the sophisticated concept of friendship, a certain necessity for having enemies
The slave’s eye is not favorable to the virtues of the powerful: he is skeptical and suspicious, subtly suspicious, of all the “good” that is honored there—he
Slave morality is essentially a morality of utility.
the longing for freedom, the instinct for happiness and the subtleties of the feeling of freedom belong just as necessarily to slave morality and morals as artful and enthusiastic reverence and devotion are the regular symptom of an aristocratic way of thinking and evaluating.
The problem for him is to imagine people who seek to create a good opinion of themselves which they do not have of themselves—and thus also do not “deserve”—and who nevertheless end up believing this good opinion themselves.
