Mathematics
Metaphysics orsphysics, sometimes also called
Theology, rises one degree higher still in abstraction
and consequently also in generalization. It passes
over the reality of change by which bodies reveal
themselves to the physical scientist, and reaches
beyond the fundamental attribute of quantity, that
inseparable property of bodies, in order to grasp the substance itself of them, the very being of things.
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Techne armonica pitagorica-
kepleriana c'è la teoria matematica.
Interpretanze pitagoriche in sintonia con
l'infinito.
La scienza armonica strutturale matematica o Techne armonica della tonalità E' la musica-arte-scienza, nella musica c'è la dissonanza Mobiusiana,
la dissonanza sublime, o dissonanza nel sublime.
IL DASEIN be unveiled for the Dasein that is doing the asserting, that is, must be intra worldly.
But since, as was said of Lotze, any assertion refers to a more primary unveiling of the entity, to being true, the copula is not itself determinable or concretizable in any assertion because it refers to what is always already unveiled before any assertion.
Solo l‘essere-per-l‘arte può salvare l‘arte nel suo declino verso l‘essere per la sua morte, senza salvezza né speranza nel mito ontoteologico della simmetria della bellezza.
Solo così l‘essere ci può salvare? Ci salverà da chi e da che cosa?
Ci salverà dalle katastrofi del tempo o dalle crisi della storia o dal mito riemergente dell‘antilogos o dall‘angoscia per la morte dell‘arte o dell‘arte per la morte o dell‘essere per la morte?
O ci salverà dall‘essere-nella-temporalità-della-morte?
Ontologia dell’ontykona….c’è un’ontosonanza e un ontovisione o una onto-risonanza o un onto-previsione ontoepistemica dell’essere-arte-disarte-dell’ikona-dell’essere delle muse-dismuse abbandonate, ma mai fuggenti, dagli dei-disdei fuggitivi-disfuggitivi.
Quella ontosonanza e ontovisione-disvisione si eventua alla presenza ontoepistemica del musagete-dismusagete in estatica con-templatezza della ontorisonanza-ontoprevisione delle muse-dismuse-attanziali e seducenti, anzi ontoattanti e introducenti l’ontoducenza della destinanza dell’essere-arte-dell’essere e giammai arte dell’ente o del non-ente o del niente o del nulla:
Ontologia dell’opera d’arte mah…essere per la salvezza dell’essere significa essere per la salvezza dell’arte?
E l’opera d’arte
aiuterà l’essere a salvarsi?
Mah… solo l’opera d’arte ci può salvare?
E solo l’arte
salverà l’essere o il mito ontoteologico della salvezza della mondità?
Solo l’arte ci
potrà salvare?
Solo il mito
dell’opera d’arte può salvare il mito delle muse della poiesis o
dell’ontopoiesis?
ration, an attribution of infinity to every
thing. In the religion of love, " a fine young
man," " a beautiful woman," in some way divine ;
a bridegroom, a bride of the soul. (3) In art, as
a decorating force, e.g. just as the man sees the
woman and makes her a present of everything
that can enhance her personal charm, so the
sensuality of the artist adorns an object with
everything else that he honours and esteems,
and by this means perfects it (or idealises it).
Woman, knowing what man feels in regard to
her, tries to meet his idealising endeavours half
way by decorating herself, by walking and dancing
well, by expressing delicate thoughts : in addition,
she may practise modesty, shyness, reserve-
prompted by her instinctive feeling that the ideal
ising power of man increases with all this. (In
the extraordinary finesse of woman s instincts,
modesty must not by any means be considered as
conscious hypocrisy : she guesses that it is pre
cisely artlessness and real shame which seduces
man most and urges him to an exaggerated
THE WILL TO POWER IN ART. 249
esteem of her. On this account, woman is in
genuous, owing to the subtlety of her instincts
which reveal to her the utility of a state of
innocence. A wilful closing of one s eyes
to one s self. . . . Wherever dissembling has a
stronger influence by being unconscious it actually
becomes unconscious.)
807.
What a host of things can be accomplished by
the state of intoxication which is called by the
name of love, and which is something else besides
love ! And yet everybody has his own experience
of this matter. The muscular strength of a girl
suddenly increases as soon as a man comes into
her presence : there are instruments with which
this can be measured. In the case of a still closer
relationship of the sexes, as, for instance, in dancing
and in other amusements which society gatherings
entail, this power increases to such an extent
as to make real feats of strength possible : at
last one no longer trusts either one s eyes, or one s
watch ! Here at all events we must reckon with
the fact that dancing itself, like every form of
rapid movement, involves a kind of intoxication
of the whole nervous, muscular, and visceral
system. We must therefore reckon in this case
with the collective effects of a double intoxication.
And how clever it is to be a little off your head i
at times ! There are some realities which we -
cannot admit even to ourselves : especially when
we are women and have all sorts of feminine
7
250 THE WILL TO POWER.
" pudeurs" . . . Those young creatures dancing
over there are obviously beyond all reality : they
are dancing only with a host of tangible ideals :
what is more, they even see ideals sitting around
them, their mothers ! . . . An opportunity for
quoting Faust. They look incomparably fairer,
do tt^ese pretty creatures, when they have lost
their head a little ; and how well they know it
too, they are even more delightful because they
know it ! Lastly, it is their finery which inspires
them : their finery is their third little intoxication.
They believe in their dressmaker as in their God :
and who would destroy this faith in them? Blessed
is this faith ! And self-admiration is healthy !
Self-admiration can protect one even from cold !
Has a beautiful woman, who knew she was well-
dressed, ever caught cold ? Never yet on this
earth ! I even suppose a case in which she has
scarcely a rag on her.
808.
If one should require the most astonishing
/ proof of how far the power of transfiguring, which
I comes of intoxication, goes, this proof is at hand
V in the phenonTeTTon of love ; or what is called love
in all the languages and silences of the world.
Intoxication works to such a degree upon reality
in this passion that in the consciousness of the
lover the cause of his love is quite suppressed, and
something else seems to take its place, a vibra
tion and a glitter of all the charm-mirrors of
/ Circe. ... In this respect to be man or an
THE WILL TO POWER IN ART. 251
animal makes no difference : and still less does
spirit, goodness, or honesty. If one is astute,
one is befooled astutely ; if one is thick-headed,
one is befooled in a thick-headed way. But love,
even the love of God, saintly love, " the love that
saves the soul," are at bottom all one; they are
nothing but a fever which has reasons to trans
figure itself a state of intoxication which does
well to lie about i self. . . . And, at any rate,
when a man loves, he is a good liar about himself
and to himself: he seems to himself transfigured,
stronger, richer, more perfect ; he is more per
fect. . . . -4r/Jiere acts as an organic function :
we find it present in the most angelic instinct
" love " ; we find it as the greatest stimulus of
life thus art is sublimely utilitarian, even in the
fact that it lies. . . . But we should be wrong
In hall at its power to lie: it does more than
merely imagine; it actually transposes values. J,
And it not only transposes the feeling for values :
the lover actually has a greater value ; he is
stronger. In animals this condition gives rise to
new weapons, colours, pigments, and forms, and
above all to new movements, new rhythms, new
love-calls and seductions. In man it is just the
same. His whole economy is richer, mightier,
and more complete when he is in love than when
he is not. The lover becomes a spendthrift ; he
is rich enough for it. He now dares ; he becomes
an adventurer, and even a donkey in magnanimity
and innocence ; his belief in God and in virtue
revives, because he believes in love. Moreover,
such idiots of happiness acquire wings and new
252 THE WILL TO POWER.
capacities, and even the door to art is opened to
them.
If we cancel the suggestion of this intestinal
fever from the lyric of tones and words, what is
left to poetry and music ? . . . L art pour I art
perhaps ; the professional cant of frogs shivering
outside in the cold, and dying of despair in their
swamp. . . . Everything else was created by
love.
809.
All art works like a suggestion on the muscles
and the senses which were originally active in the
ingenuous artistic man ; its voice is only heard
by artists it speaks to this kind of man, whose
constitution is attuned to such subtlety in sensi
tiveness. The concept " layman " is a misnomer.
The deaf man is not a subdivision of the class ^
whose ears are sound. All art works as a tonic \
it increases strength, it kindles desire (i.e. the
feeling of strength), it excites all the more subtle
recollections of intoxication ; there is actually a
special kind of memory which underlies such
states a distant flitful world of sensations here
returns to being.
Ugliness is the contradiction of art. It is that
which art excludes, the negation of art : wherever
decline, impoverishment of life, impotence, de
composition, dissolution, are felt, however remotely,
the aesthetic man reacts with his No. Ugliness
depresses : it is the sign of depression. It robs
strength, it impoverishes, it weighs down, . . .
Ugliness suggests repulsive things. From one s
THE WILL TO POWER IN ART. 253
states of health one can test how an indisposition
may increase one s power of fancying ugly things.
One s selection of things, interests, and questions
becomes different. Logic provides a state which
is next of kin to ugliness : heaviness, bluntness.
In the presence of ugliness equilibrium is lacking
in a mechanical sense : ugliness limps and
stumbles the direct opposite of the godly agility
of the dancer.
The aesthetic state represents an overflow of
means of communication as well as a condition of
extreme sensibility to stimuli and signs. It is
the zenith of communion and transmission
between living creatures ; it is the source of
languages. In it, languages, whether of signs,
sounds, or glances, have their birthplace. The
richer phenomenon is always the beginning : our
abilities are subtilised forms of richer abilities.
But even to-day we still listen with our muscles,
we even read with our muscles.
Every mature art possesses a host of conventions
as a basis : in so far as it is a language. Con
vention is a condition of great art, not an obstacle
to it. ... Every elevation of life likewise elevates
the power of communication, as also the under
standing of man. The power of living in other
people s souls originally had nothing to do with
morality, but with a physiological irritability of
suggestion : " sympathy," or what is called
"altruism," is merely a product of that psycho-
motor relationship which is reckoned as spirituality
(psycho-motor induction, says Charles Fere).
People never communicate a thought to one
254 THE WILL TO POWER.
another: they communicate a movement, an
imitative sign which is then interpreted as a
thought.
810.
Compared with music, communication by means
of words is a shameless mode of procedure ; words
reduce and stultify ; words make impersonal ;
words make common that which is uncommon.
r
811.
It is exceptional states that determine the
artist such states as are all intimately related
and entwined with morbid symptoms, so that it
would seem almost impossible to be an artist
without being ill.
The physiological conditions which in the artist
become moulded into a " personality," and which,
to a certain degree, may attach themselves to any
man :
1 i ) Intoxication, the feeling of enhanced power ;
the inner compulsion to make things a mirror of
one s own fulness and perfection.
(2) The extreme sharpness of certain senses,
so that they are capable of understanding a totally
different language of signs and to create such a
language (this is a condition which manifests itself
in some nervous diseases) ; extreme susceptibility
out of which great powers of communion are
developed ; the desire to speak on the part of
everything that is capable of making -signs ; a need
of being rid of one s self by means of gestures
THE WILL TO POWER IN ART. 255
and attitudes ; the ability of speaking about one s
self in a hundred different languages in fact, a
state of explosion.
One must first imagine this condition as one in
which there is a pressing and compulsory desire of
ridding one s self of the ecstasy of a state of tension, ,
by all kinds of muscular work and movement ;
also as an involuntary co-ordination of these move
ments with inner processes (images, thoughts,
desires) as a kind of automatism of the whole
muscular system under the compulsion of strong
stimuli acting from within ; the inability to
resist reaction ; the apparatus of resistance is
also suspended. Every inner movement (feeling,
thought, emotion) is accompanied by vascular
changes, and consequently by changes in^colour;
temperature, and secretion. The suggestive power
of music, its " suggestion mentale"
(3) The compulsion to imitate-, extreme irritabil
ity, by means of which a certain example becomes
contagious a condition is guessed and represented
merely by means of a few signs. ... A complete
picture is visualised by one s inner consciousness,
and its effect soon shows itself in the movement
of the limbs, in a ceVtain suspension of the will
(Schopenhauer ! ! ! !). A sort of blindness and
deafness towards the external world, the realm
of admitted stimuli is sharply defined.
This differentiates the artist from the layman
(from the spectator of art) : the latter reaches the
height of his excitement in the mere act of appre
hending: the former in giving and in such a way
that the antagonism between these two gifts is not
2 5 6
THE WILL TO POWER.
only natural but even desirable. Each of these states
has an opposite standpoint to demand of the
artist that he should have the point of view of the
spectator (of the critic) is equivalent to asking
him to impoverish his creative power. ... In this
respect the same difference holds good as that which
exists between the sexes : one should not ask the
artist who gives to become a woman to "receive"
Our aesthetics have hitherto been women s
aesthetics, inasmuch as they have only formulated
the experiences of what is beautiful, from the point
of view of the receivers in art. In the whole of
philosophy hitherto the artist has been lacking . . .
i.e. as we have already suggested, a necessary
fault : for the artist who would begin to under
stand himself would therewith begin to mistake
himself he must not look backwards, he must
not look at all ; he must give. It is an honour
for an artist to have no critical faculty ; if he can
criticise he is mediocre, he is modern.
812.
Here I lay down a series of psychological states
as signs of flourishing and complete life, which
to-day we are in the habit of regarding as morbid.
But, by this time, we have broken ourselves of
the habit of speaking of healthy and morbid as
opposites : the question is one of degree, what
I maintain on this point is that what people call
healthy nowadays represents a lower level of that
which under favourable circumstances actually
would be healthy that we are relatively sick. . . .
THE WILL TO POWER IN ART. 257
The artist belongs to a much stronger race. That V
which in us would be harmful and sickly, is natural
in him. But people object to this that it is pre
cisely the impoverishment of the machine which
renders this extraordinary power of comprehending
every kind of suggestion possible : e.g. our hysteri
cal females.
An overflow of spunk and energy may quite as
well lead to symptoms of partial constraint, sense
hallucinations, peripheral sensitiveness, as a poor
vitality does the stimuli are differently deter
mined, the effect is the same. . . . What is not
the same is above all the ultimate result ; the
extreme torpidity of all morbid natlllg, after their
nervous eccentricities, has nothing in common with
the states of the artist, who need in no wise
repent his best moments. . . . He is rich enough
for it all : he can squander without becoming
poor.
Just as we now feel justified in judging genius j
as a form of neurosis, we may perhaps think the
same of artistic suggestive power, and our
artists are, as a matter of fact, only too closely
related to hysterical females \ \ \ This, however,
is only an argument against the present day, and
not against artists in general.
The inartistic states are: objectivity, reflection
suspension of the will . . . (Schopenhauer s scandal- ]
ous misunderstanding consisted in regarding art as <
a mere bridge to the denial of life) . . . The in
artistic states are : those which impoverish, which
subtract, which bleach, under which life suffers
the Christian.
VOL. II. R
258 THE WILL TO POWER.
8I 3 .
The modern artist who, in his physiology, is
next of kin to the hysteric, may also be classified
as a character belonging to this state of morbid
ness. The hysteric is false, he lies from the
love of lying, he is admirable in all the arts of
dissimulation, unless his morbid vanity hood
wink him. This vanity is like a perpetual fever
which is in need of stupefying drugs, and which
recoils from no self-deception and no farce that
promises it the most fleeting satisfaction. (The
incapacity for pride and the need of continual
revenge for his deep-rooted self-contempt, this is
almost the definition of this man s vanity.)
The absurd irritability of his system, which
makes a crisis out of every one of his experiences,
and sees dramatic elements in the most insignifi
cant occurrences of life, deprives him of all calm
reflection : he ceases from being a personality, at
most he is a rendezvous of personalities of which
first one and then the other asserts itself with
barefaced assurance. Precisely on this account he
is great as an actor : all these poor will-less people,
whom doctors study so profoundly, astound one
through their virtuosity in mimicking, in trans
figuration, in their assumption of almost any
character required.
814.
Artists are not men of great passion, despite all
their assertions to the contrary both to themselves
and to others. And for the following two reasons :
THE WILL TO POWER IN ART. 259
they lack all shyness towards themselves (they
watch themselves live, they spy upon themselves,
they are much too inquisitive), and they also lack
shyness in the presence of passion (as artists they
exploit it). Secondly, however, that vampire,
their talent, generally forbids them such an ex
penditure of energy as passion demands. A man
who has a talent is sacrificed to that talent ; he
lives under the vampirism of his talent.
A man does not get rid of his passion by re
producing it, but rather he is rid of it if he is able
to reproduce it. (Goethe teaches the reverse, but
it seems as though he deliberately misunderstood
himself here from a sense of delicacy.)
815.
Concerning a reasonable mode of life. -.Relative
chastity, a fundamental and shrewd caution in
regard to erotica, even in thought, may be a reason
able mode of life even in richly equipped and
perfect natures. But this principle applies more
particularly to artists ; it belongs to the best
wisdom of their lives. Wholly trustworthy voices
have already been raised in favour of this view,
e.g. Stendhal, Th. Gautier, and Flaubert. The artist
is perhaps in his way necessarily a sensual man,
generally susceptible, accessible to everything, and
capable of responding to the remotest stimulus or
suggestion of a stimulus. Nevertheless, as a rule
he is in the power of his work, of his will to
mastership, really a sober and often even a chaste
man. His dominating instinct will have him so :
260 THE WILL TO POWER.
it does not allow him to spend himself haphazardly.
It is one and the same form of strength which is
spent in artistic conception and in the sexual
act : there is only one form of strength. The
artist who yields in this respect, and who spends
himself, is betrayed : by so doing he reveals his
lack of instinct, his lack of will in general. It
may be a sign of decadence, in any case it re
duces the value of his art to an incalculable
degree.
816.
Compared with the artist, the scientific man,
regarded as a phenomenon, is indeed a sign of a
certain storing-up and levelling-down of life (but
also of an increase of strength, severity, hardness,
and will-power). To what extent can falsity and
indifference towards truth and utility be a sign of
youth, of childishness, in the artist? . . . Their
habitual manner, their unreasonableness, their
ignorance of themselves, their indifference to
" eternal values/ their seriousness in play, their
lack of dignity ; clowns and gods in one ; the
saint and the rabble. . . . Imitation as an imperi
ous instinct. t)o not artists of ascending life and
artists of degeneration belong to all phases ? . . .
Yes!
817.
Would any link be missing in the whole chain
of science and art, if woman, if woman s work, were
excluded from it ? Let us acknowledge the
THE WILL TO POWER IN ART. 26l
exception it proves the rule that woman is
capable of perfection in everything which does not
constitute a work : in letters, in memoirs, in the
most intricate handiwork in short, in everything
which is not a craft ; and just precisely because in
the things mentioned woman perfects herself, be
cause in them she obeys the only artistic impulse
in her nature, which is to captivate. . . . But
what has woman to do with the passionate indiffer
ence of the genuine artist who sees more importance
in a breath, in a sound, in the merest trifle, than in
himself? who with all his five fingers gropes for
his most secret and hidden treasures ? who attri
butes no value to anything unless it knows how to
take shape (unless it surrenders itself, unless it
visualises itself in some way). Art as it is
practised by artists do you not understand what
it is ? is it not an outrage on all our pudeurs ? . . .
Only in this century has woman dared to try her
hand at literature ( " Vers la canaille plumiere fariv-
assiere" to speak with old Mirabeau) : woman now
writes, she now paints, she is losing her instincts.
And to what purpose, if one may put such a
question ?
818
A man is an artist to the extent to which he
regards everything that inartistic people call
" form " as the actual substance, as the " prin
cipal " thing. With such ideas a man certainly
belongs to a world upside down : for hencefor
ward substance seems to him something merely
formal, his own life included.
262 THE WILL TO POWER.
819.
, A sense for, and a delight in, nuances (which is
characteristic of modernity), in that which is not
general, runs counter to the instinct which finds
its joy and its strength in grasping what is typical :
like Greek taste in its best period. In this there
is an overcoming of the plenitude of life ; restraint
dominates, the peace of the strong soul which is
slow to move and which feels a certain repug
nance towards excessive activity is defeated. The
general rule, the law, is honoured and made
prominent : conversely, the exception is laid aside,
and shades are suppressed. All that which is firm,
mighty, solid, life resting on a broad and powerful
basis, concealing its strength this " pleases " : i.e.
it corresponds with what we think of ourselves.
820.
In the main I am much more in favour of
artists than any philosopher that has appeared
hitherto : artists, at least, did not lose sight of the
great course which life pursues ; they loved the
things " of this world," they loved their senses.
v To strive after " spirituality," in cases where this
is not pure hypocrisy or self-deception, seems to
me to be either a misunderstanding, a disease, or a
cure. I wish myself, and all those who live with
out the troubles of a puritanical conscience, and
who are able to live in this way, an ever greater
spiritualisation and multiplication of the senses.
Indeed, we would fain be grateful to the senses for
X
\^x
THE WILL TO POWER IN ART. 263
their subtlety, power, and plenitude, and on that
account offer them the best we have in the way of
spirit. What do we care about priestly and meta
physical anathemas upon the senses? We no
longer require to treat them in this way : it is
a sign of well-constitutedness when a man like
Goethe clings with ever greater joy and heartiness
to the " things of this world " in this way he
holds firmly to the grand concept of mankind,
which is that man becomes the glorifying power j
of existence when he learns to glorify himself. J
821.
Pessimism in art? The artist gradually learns
to like for their own sake, those means which
bring about the condition of aesthetic elation ;
extreme delicacy and glory of colour, definite
delineation, quality of tone; distinctness where in
normal conditions distinctness is absent. All
distinct things, all nuances, in so far as they recall
extreme degrees of power which give rise to
intoxication, kindle this feeling of intoxication by
association ; the effect of works of art is the
excitation of the state which creates art, of aesthetic
intoxication.
The essential feature in art is its power of
perfecting existence, its production of perfection
and plenitude ; art is essentially the affirmation,
the blessing, and the deification of existence. . . .
What does a pessimistic art signify ? Is it not a
contradictio ? Yes. Schopenhauer is in error
when he makes certain works of art serve the
L
264 THE WILL TO POWER.
purpose of pessimism. Tragedy does not teach
" resignation." ... To represent terrible and
questionable things is, in itself, the sign of an
instinct of power and magnificence in the artist ;
1 he doesn t fear them. . . . There is no such thing
j as a pessimistic art. . . . Art affirms. Job
j ^frirms. But Zola ? and the Goncourts ? the
things they show us are ugly ; their reason, however,
for showing them to us is their love of ugliness. . .
I don t care what you say ! You simply deceive
yourselves if you think otherwise. What a relief
Dostoievsky is !
822.
If I have sufficiently initiated my readers into
the doctrine that even " goodness," in the whole
comedy of existence, represents a form of exhaus
tion, they will now credit Christianity with con
sistency for having conceived the good to be the
ugly. In this respect Christianity was right.
It is absolutely unworthy of a philosopher to
\ say that " the good and the beautiful are one " ; if
he should add " and also the true," he deserves to
; be thrashed. Truth is ugly.
Art is with us in order that we may not perish
through truth.
823.
Moralising tendencies may be combated with
art. Art is freedom from moral bigotry and
philosophy a la Little Jack Homer : or it may be
the mockery of these things. The flight to Nature,
THE WILL TO POWER IN ART. 265
where beauty and terribleness are coupled. The
concept of the great man.
Fragile, useless souls-de-luxe, which are dis
concerted by a mere breath of wind, " beautiful
souls."
Ancient ideals, in their inexorablehardnessand
brutality, ought to be awakened, as the mightiest
of monsters that they are.
We should feel a boisterous delight in the
psychological perception of how all moralised
artists become worms and actors without know
ing it.
The falsity of art, its immorality, must be
brought into the light of day.
The " fundamental idealising powers " (sensu
ality, intoxication, excessive animality) should be
brought to light.
824.
Modern counterfeit practices in the arts : regarded
as necessary that is to say, as fully in keeping
with the needs most proper to the modern soul.
The gaps in the gifts, and still more in the
education, antecedents, and schooling of modern
artists, are now filled up in this way :
First: A less artistic public is sought which is
capable of unlimited love (and is capable of
falling on its knees before a personality). The
superstition of our century, the belief in " genius,"
assists this process.
Secondly ; Artists harangue the dark instincts of
the dissatisfied, the ambitious, and the self-deceivers
of a democratic age : the importance of poses.
266 THE WILL TO POWER.
Thirdly : The procedures of one art are trans
ferred to the realm of another ; the object of art is
confounded with that of science, with that of the
Church, or with that of the interests of the race
(nationalism), or with that of philosophy a man
rings all bells at once, and awakens the vague
suspicion that he is a god.
Fourthly : Artists flatter women, sufferers, and
indignant folk. Narcotics and opiates are made to-
preponderate in art. The fancy of cultured people,
and of the readers of poetry and ancient history,
is tickled.
825.
We must distinguish between the " public " and
the " select " ; to satisfy the public a man must be
a charlatan to-day, to satisfy the select he will be
a virtuoso and nothing else. The geniuses peculiar
to our century overcame this distinction, they
, were great for both ; the great charlatanry of
Victor Hugo and Richard Wagner was coupled
with such genuine virtuosity that it even satisfied
I the most refined artistic connoisseurs. This is
! why greatness is lacking : these geniuses had a
\ double outlook ; first, they catered for the coarsest
needs, and then for the most refined.
826.
False "accentuation": (i) In romanticism;
this unremitting " exp-ressivo " is not a sign of
strength, but of a feeling of deficiency ;
(2) Picturesque music, the so-called dramatic
THE WILL TO POWER IN ART. 267
kind, is above all easier (as is also the brutal
scandalmongering and the juxtaposition of facts
and traits in realistic novels) ;
(3) "Passion" as amatter of nerves and exhausted
souls ; likewise the delight in high mountains, deserts,
storms, orgies, and disgusting details, in bulkiness
and massiveness (historians, forinstance) ; as amatter
of fact, there is actually a cult of exaggerated feel
ings (how is it that in stronger ages art desired
just the opposite a restraint of passion ?) ;
(4) The preference for exciting materials (Erotica
or Socialistic* or Pathologicd) : all these things are
the signs of the style of public that is being
catered for to-day that is to say, for overworked,
absentminded, or enfeebled people.
Such people must be tyrannised over in order
to be affected.
827.
Modern art is the art of tyrannising. A coarse
and salient definiteness in delineation ; the motive
simplified into a formula; formulae tyrannise.
Wild arabesques within the lines ; overwhelming
masses, before which the senses are confused ;
brutality in coloration, in subject-matter, in the
desires. Examples : Zola, Wagner, and, in a
more spiritualised degree, Taine. Hence logic,
massiveness, and brutality.
828.
In regard to the painter : Tous ces modernes sont
des poetes qui ont voulu etre peintres. Lun a
268 THE WILL TO POWER.
chercJit des drames dans l histoire t I autre des scenes
de moeurs, celui ci traduit des religions, celui la une
philosophie. One imitates Raphael, another the
early Italian masters. The landscapists employ
trees and clouds in order to make odes and
elegies. Not one is simply a painter ; they are
ajl archaeologists, psychologists, and impresarios
of one or another kind of event or theory. They
enjoy our erudition and our philosophy. Like us,
they are full, and too full, of general ideas. They
like a form, not because it is what it is, but
because of what it expresses. They are the scions
of a learned, tormented, and reflecting generation,
a thousand miles away from the Old Masters who
never read, and only concerned themselves with
feasting their eyes.
829.
At bottom, even Wagner s music, in so far as it
stands for the whole of French romanticism, is
literature : the charm of exoticism (strange times,
customs, passions), exercised upon sensitive cosy-
corner people. The delight of entering into ex
tremely distant and prehistoric lands to which
books lead one, and by which means the whole
horizon is painted with new colours and new
possibilities. . . . Dreams of still more distant
and unexploited worlds ; disdain of the boulevards.
. . . For Nationalism, let us not deceive ourselves,
is also only a form of exoticism. . . . Romantic
musicians merely relate what exotic books have
made of them : people would fain experience
exotic sensations and passions according to
THE WILL TO POWER IN ART. 269
Florentine and Venetian taste ; finally they are
satisfied to look for them in an image. . . . The
essential factor is the kind of novel desire, the
desire to imitate, the desire to live as people have
lived once before in the past, and the disguise and
dissimulation of the soul. . . . Romantic art is
only an emergency exit from defective " reality."
The attempt to perform new things : revolution, \
Napoleon. Napoleon represents the passion of
new spiritual possibilities, of an extension of the I
soul s domain.
The greater the debility of the will, the greater
the extravagances in the desire to feel, to repre
sent, and to dream new things. The result of j
the excesses which have been indulged in : an
insatiable thirst for unrestrained feelings. . . .
Foreign literatures afford the strongest spices.
830.
Winckelmann s and Goethe s Greeks, Victor 1
Hugo s Orientals, Wagner s Edda characters,
Walter Scott s Englishmen of the thirteenth
century some day the whole comedy will be
exposed ! All of it was disproportionately
historical and false, but modern.
Concerning the characteristics of national
genius in regard to the strange and to the
borrowed
English genius vulgarises and makes realistic
everything it sees ;
2/0 THE WILL TO POWER.
The French whittles down, simplifies, rational
ises, embellishes ;
The German muddles, compromises, involves,
and infects everything with morality ;
The Italian has made by far the freest and
most subtle use of borrowed material, and has
enriched it with a hundred times more beauty
than it ever drew out of it : it is the richest
genius, it had the most to bestow.
832.
The Jews, with Heinrich Heine and Offenbach,
approached genius in the sphere of art. The
latter was the most intellectual and most high-
spirited satyr, who as a musician abided by great
tradition, and who, for him who has something
more than ears, is a real relief after the senti
mental and, at bottom, degenerate musicians of
German romanticism.
833.
Offenbach: French music imbued with Voltaire s
intellect, free, wanton, with a slight sardonic grin,
but clear and intellectual almost to the point of
banality (Offenbach never titivates), and free
from the mignardise of morbid or blond-Viennese
sensuality.
834.
If by artistic genius we understand the most
consummate freedom within the law, divine
,ease, and facility in overcoming the greatest
THE WILL TO POWER IN ART. 271
difficulties, then Offenbach has even more right to
the title genius than Wagner has. Wagner is
heavy and clumsy : nothing is more foreign to
him than the moments of wanton perfection
which this clown Offenbach achieves as many as
five times, six times, in nearly every one of his
buffooneries. But by genius we ought perhaps
to understand something else.
835.
Concerning " music French, German, and
Italian music. (Our most debased periods in a
political sense are our most productive. The
Slavs ?) The ballet, which is the outcome of
excessive study of the history of strange civilisa
tions, has become master of opera. Stage music
and musicians music. It is an error to suppose
that what Wagner composed was a form : it was
rather formlessness. The possibilities of dramatic
construction have yet to be discovered. Rhythm.
" Expression " at all costs. Harlotry in instru
mentation. All honour to Heinrich Schiitz ; all
honour to Mendelssohn : in them we find an
element of Goethe, but nowhere else ! (We also
find another element of Goethe coming to blossom
in Rahel ; a third element in Heinrich Heine.)
836.
Descriptive music leaves reality to work its
effects alone. ... All these kinds of art are
easier, and more easy to imitate ; poorly gifted
272 THE WILL TO POWER.
people have recourse to them. The appeal to
the instincts ; suggestive art.
837.
Concerning our modern music. The decay of
melody, like the decay of " ideas," and of the
freedom of intellectual activity, is a piece of
clumsiness and obtuseness, which is developing
itself into new feats of daring and even into
principles ; in the end man has only the prin
ciples of his gifts, or of his lack of gifts.
" Dramatic music " nonsense ! It is simply
bad music. ..." Feeling " and " passion " are
merely substitutes when lofty intellectuality and
the joy of it (e.g. Voltaire s) can no longer be
attained. Expressed technically, " feeling " and
" passion " are easier ; they presuppose a much
poorer kind of artist. The recourse to drama be
trays that an artist is much more a master in tricky
means than in genuine ones. To-day we have
both dramatic painting and dramatic poetry, etc.
838.
What we lack in music is an aesthetic which
would impose laws upon musicians and give them
a conscience ; and as a result of this we lack a
real contest concerning " principles." For as
musicians we laugh at Herbart s velleities in this
department just as heartily as we laugh at
Schopenhauer s. As a matter of fact, tremendous
difficulties present themselves here. We no
THE WILL TO POWER IN ART.
longer know on what basis to found our concepts
of what is " exemplary," " masterly," " perfect."
With the instincts of old loves and old admiration
we grope about in a realm of values, and we almost
believe, " that is good which pleases us." ... I
am always suspicious when I hear people every
where speak innocently of Beethoven as a "classic ":
what I would maintain, and with some severity, is
that, in other arts, a classic is the very reverse of
Beethoven. But when the complete and glaring
dissolution of style, Wagner s so-called dramatic
style, is taught and honoured as exemplary, as
masterly, as progressive, then my impatience
exceeds all bounds. Dramatic style in music, as
Wagner understood it, is simply renunciation
of all style whatever ; it is the assumption that
something else, namely, drama, is a hundred times
more important than music. Wagner can paint ;
he does not use music for the sake of music, with"
it he accentuates attitudes ; he is a poet. Finally
he made an appeal to beautiful feelings and
heaving breasts, just as all other theatrical artists
have done, and with it all he converted women
and even those whose souls thirst for culture to
him. But what do women and the uncultured
care about music ? All these people have no
conscience for art : none of them suffer when the
first and fundamental virtues of an art are scorned
and trodden upon in favour of that which is merely
secondary (as ancilla dramaturgicd}. What good
can come of all extension in the means of expression,
when that which is expressed, art itself, has lost all
its law and order? The picturesque pomp and power
VOL. II. S
274 THE WILL TO POWER.
of tones, the symbolism of sound, rhythm, the colour
effects of harmony and discord, the suggestive
significance of music, the whole sensuality of this
art which Wagner made prevail- it is all this that
Wagner derived, developed, and drew out of music.
Victor Hugo did something very similar for
language : but already people in France are
asking themselves, in regard to the case of Victor
Hugo, whether language was not corrupted by
him ; whether reason, intellectuality, and thorough
conformity to law in language are not suppressed
when the sensuality of expression is elevated to
a high place ? Is it not a sign of decadence that
the poets in Fraace have become plastic artists,
and that the musicians of Germany have become
actors and culturemongers ?
839.
To-day there exists a sort of musical pes
simism even among people who are not musi
cians. Who has not met and cursed the
confounded youthlet who torments his piano
until it shrieks with despair, and who single-
handed heaves the slime of the most lugubrious
and drabby harmonies before him ? By so
doing a man betrays himself as a pessimist. . . .
It is open to question, though, whether he also
proves himself a musician by this means. I
for my part could never be made to believe it.
A Wagnerite pur sang is unmusical; he submits
to the elementary forces of music very much
as a woman submits to the will of the man
who hypnotises her and in order to be able to
THE WILL TO POWER IN ART. 275
do this he must not be made suspicious in rebus
musicis et musicantibus by a too severe or too
delicate conscience. I said " very much as "
but in this respect I spoke perhaps more than
a parable. Let any one consider the means
which Wagner uses by preference, when he wishes
to make an effect (means which for the greater
part he first had to invent) ; they are appallingly
similar to the means by which a hypnotist
exercises his power (the choice of his movements,
the general colour of his orchestration ; the
excruciating evasion of consistency, and fairness
and squareness, in rhythm ; the creepiness, the
soothing touch, the mystery, the hysteria of his
" unending melody "). And is the condition to
which the overture to Lohengrin, for instance,
reduces the men, and still more the women, in
the audience, so essentially different from the
somnambulistic trance? On one occasion after
the overture in question had been played, I heard
an Italian lady say, with her eyes half closed,
in a way in which female Wagnerites are adepts :
" Come si dorme con questa musica ! " *
840.
Religion in music. What a large amount of
satisfaction all religious needs get out of Wag-
nerian music, though this is never acknowledged
or even understood ! How much prayer, virtue,
unction, " virginity," " salvation," speaks through
this music ! ... Oh what capital this cunning
* " How the music makes one sleep ! " TR.
THE WILL TO POWER.
saint, who leads and seduces us back to every
thing that was once believed in, makes out of
the fact that he may dispense with words and
concepts ! . . . Our intellectual conscience has no
need to feel ashamed it stands apart if any old
instinct puts its trembling lips to the rim of forbid
den philtres. . . . This is shrewd and healthy, and,
in so far as it betrays a certain shame in regard to
the satisfaction of the religious instinct, it is even
a good sign. . . . Cunning Christianity : the type
of the music which came from the " last Wagner."
841.
I distinguish between courage before persons,
courage before things, and courage on paper.
The latter was the courage of David Strauss,
for instance. I distinguish again between the
courage before witnesses and the courage without
witnesses: the courage of a Christian, or of be
lievers in God in general, can never be the cour
age without witnesses but on this score alone
Christian courage stands condemned. Finally, I
distinguish between the courage which is tempera
mental and the courage which is the fear of fear ; a
single instance of the latter kind is moral courage.
To this list the courage of despair should be added.
This is the courage which Wagner possessed.
His attitude in regard to music was at bottom a
desperate one. He lacked two things which go
to make up a good musician : nature and nurture,
the predisposition for music and the discipline and
schooling which music requires. He had courage :
out of this deficiency he established a principle ;
THE WILL TO POWER IN ART. 277
he invented a kind of music for himself. The
dramatic music which he invented was the music
which he was able to compose, its limitations are
Wagner s limitations.
And he was misunderstood ! Was he really
misunderstood ? . . . Such is the case with five-
sixths of the artists of to-day. Wagner is their
Saviour : five-sixths, moreover, is the " lowest pro
portion." In any case where Nature has shown
herself without reserve, and wherever culture is an
accident, a mere attempt, a piece of dilettantism,
the artist turns instinctively what do I say ?
I mean enthusiastically, to Wagner ; as the poet
says : " Half drew he him, and half sank he." *
842.
" Music " and the grand style. The greatness
of an artist is not to be measured by the beautiful
feelings which he evokes : let this belief be left to
the girls. It should be measured according to
the extent to which he approaches the grand style,
according to the extent to which he is capable of
the grand style. This style and great passion
have this in common that they scorn to please ;
that they forget to persuade ; that they command :
that they will. . . . To become master of the
chaos which is in one ; to compel one s inner chaos
to assume form ; to become consistent, simple, un
equivocal, mathematical, law this is the great
ambition here. By means of it one repels ; nothing
*This is an adapted quotation from Goethe s poem, "The
Fisherman." The translation is E. A. Bowring s. TR.
2/8 THE WILL TO POWER.
so much endears people to such powerful men as
this, a desert seems to lie around them, they
impose silence upon all, and awe every one with
the greatness of their sacrilege. . . . All arts
know this kind of aspirant to the grand style :
why are they absent in music ? Never yet has a
musician built as that architect did who erected the
Palazzo Pitti. . . . This is a problem. Does music
perhaps belong to that culture in which the reign
of powerful men of various types is already at an
end ? Is the concept " grand style " in fact a con
tradiction of the soul of music, of " the woman "
in our music ? . . .
With this I touch upon the cardinal question :
how should all our music be classified ? The age
of classical taste knows nothing that can be com
pared with it : it bloomed when the world of the
Renaissance reached its evening, when " freedom "
had already bidden farewell to both men and
their customs is it characteristic of music to be
Counter- Renaissance ? Is music, perchance, the
sister of the baroque style, seeing that in any case
they were contemporaries ? Is not music, modern
music, already decadence? . . .
I have put my finger before on this question :
whether music is not an example of Counter-
Renaissance art? whether it is not the next of
kin to the baroque style? whether it has not
grown in opposition to all classic taste, so that any
aspiration to classicism is forbidden by the very
nature of music ?
The answer to this most important of all
questions of values would not be a very doubtful
THE WILL TO POWER IN ART. 279
one, if people thoroughly understood the fact that
music attains to its highest maturity and plenitude
as romanticism likewise as a reactionary move
ment against classicism.
Mozart, a delicate and lovable soul, but quite
eighteenth century, even in his serious lapses . . .
Beethoven, the first great romanticist according to
the French conception of romanticism, just as
Wagner is the last great romanticist . . . both
of them are instinctive opponents of classical
taste, of severe style not to speak of " grand "
in this regard.
843-
Romanticism : an ambiguous question, like all
modern questions.
The aesthetic conditions are twofold :
The abundant and generous, as opposed to the
seeking and the desiring.
844-
A romanticist is an artist whose great dis-
\ satisfaction with himself makes him productive /-
who looks away from himself and his fellows, and i
sometimes, therefore, looks backwards.
845-
Is art the result of dissatisfaction with reality ? "L
or is it the expression of gratitude for happiness
experienced ? In the first case, it is romanticism ;
in the second, it is glorification and dithyramb (in
short, apotheosis art) : even Raphael belongs to
this, except for the fact that he was guilty of the
280 THE WILL TO POWER.
duplicity of having defied the appearance of the
Christian view of the world. He was thankful for
life precisely where it was not exactly Christian.
With a moral interpretation the world is in
sufferable ; Christianity was the attempt to over
come the world with morality : t.e. to deny it. In
praxi such a mad experiment an imbecile eleva
tion of man above the world could only end in
the beglooming, the dwarfing, and the impoverish
ment of mankind : the only kind of man who
gained anything by it, who was promoted by it,
was the most mediocre, the most harmless and
gregarious type.
Homer as an apotheosis artist ; Rubens also.
Music has not yet had such an artist.
The idealisation of the great criminal (the
feeling for his greatness) is Greek ; the deprecia
tion, the slander, the contempt of the sinner, is
Judaeo-Christian.
846.
Romanticism and its opposite. In regard to
all aesthetic values I now avail myself of this
fundamental distinction : in every individual case
I ask myself has hunger or has superabundance
been creative here? At first another distinction
might perhaps seem preferable, it is far more
obvious, e.g. the distinction which decides whether
a desire for stability, for eternity, for Being, or
whether a desire for destruction, for change, for
Becoming, has been the cause of creation. But
both kinds of desire, when examined more closely,
prove to be ambiguous, and really susceptible of
THE WILL TO POWER IN ART. 281
interpretation only according to that scheme already
mentioned and which I think is rightly preferred.
The desire for destruction, for change, for Be
coming, may be the expression of an overflowing
power pregnant with promises for the future (my
term for this, as is well known, is Dionysian) ;
it may, however, also be the hate of the ill-con
stituted, of the needy and of the physiologically
botched, that destroys, and must destroy, because
such creatures are indignant at, and annoyed by
everything lasting and stable.
The act of immortalising can, on the other hand,
be the outcome of gratitude and love : an art
which has this origin is always an apotheosis art ;
dithyrambic, as perhaps with Rubens ; happy, as
perhaps with Hafiz ; bright and gracious, and shed
ding a ray of glory over all things, as in Goethe.
But it may also, however, be the outcome of the
tyrannical will of the great sufferer who would
make the most personal, individual, and narrow trait
about him, the actual idiosyncrasy of his pain in
fact, into a binding law and imposition, and who
thus wreaks his revenge upon all things by stamp
ing, branding, and violating them with the image of
his torment. The latter case is romantic pessim
ism in its highest form, whether this be Schopen-
hauerian voluntarism or Wagnerian music.
847-
It is a question whether the antithesis, classic and
romantic, does not conceal that other antithesis, the
active and the reactive.
282 THE WILL TO POWER.
848.
In order to be a classic, one must be possessed
of all the strong and apparently contradictory gifts
and passions : but in such a way that they run in
harness together, and culminate simultaneously in
elevating a certain species of literature or art or
politics to its height and zenith (they must not do
this after that elevation has taken place . . .). They
must reflect the complete state (either of a people
or of a culture), and express its most profound and
most secret nature, at a time when it is still stable
and not yet discoloured by the imitation of foreign
things (or when it is still dependent . . .) ; not
a reactive but a deliberate and progressive spirit,
saying Yea in all circumstances, even in its
hate.
" And does not the highest personal value belong
thereto ? "... It is worth considering whether
moral prejudices do not perhaps exercise their in
fluence here, and whether great moral loftiness is
not perhaps a contradiction of the classical ? . . .
Whether the moral monsters must not necessarily
I be romantic in word and deed? Any such pre
ponderance of one virtue over others (as in the
case of the moral monster) is precisely what with
most hostility counteracts the classical power in
equilibrium ; supposing a people manifested this
moral loftiness and were classical notwithstanding,
we should have to conclude boldly that they were
also on the same high level in immorality ! this
was perhaps the case with Shakespeare (provided
that he was really Lord Bacon).
THE WILL TO POWER IN ART. 28j
849-
Concerning the future. Against the romanticism
of great passion. We must understand how a
certain modicum of coldness, lucidity, and hard
ness "is inseparable from all classical taste : above
all consistency, happy intellectuality, " the three
unities," concentration, hatred of all feeling, of all
sentimentality, of all esprit, hatred of all multi
formity, of all uncertainty, evasiveness, and of all
nebulosity, as also of all brevity, finicking, pretti-
ness and good nature. Artistic formulae must not
be played with: life must be remodelled so that
it should be forced to formulate itself accordingly.
It is really an exhilarating spectacle which we
have only learned to laugh at quite recently, be
cause we have only seen through it quite recently :
this spectacle of Herder s, Winckelmann s, Goethe s, /
and Hegel s contemporaries claiming that they had I
rediscovered the classical ideal . . . and at the same
time, Shakespeare ! And this same crew of men
had scurvily repudiated all relationship with the
classical school of France ! As if the essential
principle could not have been learnt as well here
as elsewhere ! . . . But what people wanted was
" nature," and " naturalness " : Oh, the stupidity of
it ! It was thought that classicism was a kind of
naturalness !
Without either prejudice or indulgence we should
try and investigate upon what soil a classical taste
can be evolved. The hardening, the simplification,
the strengthening, and the bedevilling of man are
inseparable from classical taste. Logical and
284 THE WILL TO POWER.
psychological simplification. A contempt of de
tail, of complexity, of obscurity.
The romanticists of Germany do not protest
against classicism, but against reason, against
illumination, against taste, against the eighteenth
century.
The essence of romantico-Wagnerian music is
the opposite of the classical spirit.
The will to unity (because unity tyrannises : e.g.
the listener and the spectator), but the artist s in
ability to tyrannise over himself where it is most
needed that is to say, in regard to the work it
self (in regard to knowing what to leave out, what
to shorten, what to clarify, what to simplify). The
overwhelming by means of masses (Wagner, Victor
Hugo, Zola, Taine).
850.
The Nihilism of artists. Nature is cruel in
her cheerfulness ; cynical in her sunrises. We are
hostile to emotions. We flee thither where Nature
moves our senses and our imagination, where we
have nothing to love, where we are not reminded
of the moral semblances and delicacies of this
northern nature ; and the same applies to the arts.
We prefer that which no longer reminds us of
good and evil. Our moral sensibility and tender
ness seem to be relieved in the heart of terrible
and happy Nature, in the fatalism of the senses and
forces. Life without goodness.
Great well-being arises from contemplating
Nature s indifference to good and evil.
No justice in history, no goodness in Nature.
THE WILL TO POWER IN ART. 285
That is why the pessimist when he is an artist
prefers those historical subjects where the absence
of justice reveals itself with magnificent simplicity,
where perfection actually comes to expression
and likewise he prefers that in Nature, where her
callous evil character is not hypocritically concealed,
where that character is seen in perfection. . . .
The Nihilistic artist betrays himself in willing and
preferring cynical history and cynical Nature.
8 5 i.
What is tragic? Again and again I have
pointed to the great misunderstanding of Aristotle
in maintaining that the tragic emotions were the
two depressing emotions fear and pity. Had he
been right, tragedy would be an art unfriendly to
life : it would have been necessary to caution people
against it as against something generally harmful
and suspicious. Art, otherwise the great stimulus
of life, the great intoxicant of life, the great will
to life, here became a tool of decadence, the hand
maiden of pessimism and ill-health (for to sup
pose, as Aristotle supposed, that by exciting these
emotions we thereby purged people of them, is
simply an error). Something which habitually
excites fear or pity, disorganises, weakens, and dis
courages : and supposing Schopenhauer were
right in thinking that tragedy taught resignation
(i.e. a meek renunciation of happiness, hope, and
of the will to live), this would presuppose an art
in which art itself was denied. Tragedy would
then constitute a process of dissolution ; the in
stinct of life would destroy itself in the instinct of
286 THE WILL TO POWER.
art. Christianity, Nihilism, tragic art, physiological
decadence ; these things would then be linked,
they would then preponderate together and assist
each other onwards downwards. . . . Tragedy
would thus be a symptom of decline.
This theory may be refuted in the most cold
blooded way, namely, by measuring the effect of
a tragic emotion by means of a dynamometer
The result would be a fact which only the bottom
less falsity of a doctrinaire could misunderstand :
that tragedy is a tonic. If Schopenhauer refuses
to see the truth here, if he regards general depres
sion as a tragic condition, if he would have informed
the Greeks (who to his disgust were not " re
signed ") that they did not firmly possess the
highest principles of life : it is only owing to
his parti pris, to the need of consistency in his
system, to the dishonesty of the doctrinaire that
dreadful dishonesty which step for step corrupted
the whole psychology of Schopenhauer (he who
had arbitrarily and almost violently misunderstood
genius, art itself, morality, pagan religion, beauty,
knowledge, and almost everything).
852.
The tragic artist. Whether, and in regard to
what, the judgment^ beautiful " is established is a
question of an individual s or of a people s strength
The feeling of plenitude, of overflowing strength
(which gaily and courageously meets many an
obstacle before which the weakling shudders) the
feeling of power utters the judgment " beautiful "
concerning things and conditions which the in
stinct of impotence can only value as hateful and
THE WILL TO POWER IN ART. 287
ugly. The flair which enables us to decide whether
the objects we encounter are dangerous, problem
atic, or alluring, likewise determines our aesthetic
Yea. (" This is beautiful," is an affirmation).
From this we see that, generally speaking, a
preference for questionable and terrible things is a
symptom of strength ; whereas the taste for pretty
and charming trifles is characteristic of the weak
and the delicate. The love of tragedy is typical
of strong ages and characters : its non plus ultra
is perhaps the Divina Commedia. It is the heroic
spirits which in tragic cruelty say Yea unto them
selves : they are hard enough to feel pain as a
pleasure.
On the other hand, supposing weaklings desire
to get pleasure from an art which was not designed
for them, what interpretation must we suppose they
would like to give tragedy in order to make it suit
their taste ? They would interpret their own feel
ings of value into it : e.g. the " triumph of -the
moral order of things," or the teaching of the
" uselessness of existence," or the incitement to
" resignation " (or also half-medicinal and half-
moral outpourings, a la Aristotle). Finally, the
art of terrible natures, in so far as it may excite
the nerves, may be regarded by the weak and ex
hausted as a stimulus : this is now taking place,
for instance, in the case of the admiration meted
out to Wagner s art. A test of man s well-being
and consciousness of power is the extent to which
he can acknowledge the terrible and questionable
character of things, and whether he is in any need
of a faith at the end.
288 THE WILL TO POWER.
This kind of artistic pessimism is precisely the
reverse of that religio-moral pessimism which
suffers from the corruption of man and the
enigmatic character of existence : the latter in
sists upon deliverance, or at least upon the hope
of deliverance. Those who suffer, doubt, and dis
trust themselves, the sick, in other words, have
in all ages required the transporting influence of
visions in order to be able to exist at all (the
notion " blessedness " arose in this way). A
similar case would be that of the artists of
decadence, who at bottom maintain a Nihilistic
attitude to life, and take refuge in the beauty of
form, in those select cases in which Nature is
perfect, in which she is indifferently great and in
differently beautiful. (The " love of the beautiful "
may thus be something very different from the
ability to see or create the beautiful : it may be
the expressionof impotence in this respect.VfThe
most convincing artists are those who make
harmony ring out of every discord, and who
benefit all things by the gift ol their power and
inner harmony : in every work ol art the)*- merely
reveal the symbol of their inmost experiences
their creation Is gratiti^e for thqjy life. \
The depth of the tragic artist consists in the
fact that his aesthetic instinct surveys the more
remote results, that he does not halt shortsightedly
at the thing that is nearest, that he says Yea to
the whole cosmic economy, which justifies the
terrible, the evil, and the questionable ; which
more than justifies it.
THE WILL TO POWER IN ART. 289
853-
Art in the "Birth of Tragedy?
I.
The conception of the work which lies
right in the background of this book, is extra
ordinarily gloomy and unpleasant : among all the
types of pessimism which have ever been known
hitherto, none seems to have attained to this degree
of malice. The contrast of a true and of an ap
parent world is entirely absent here : there is but
one world, and it is false, cruel, contradictory,
seductive, and without sense. ... A world thus
constituted is the true world. We are in need of
lies in order to rise superior to this reality, to this
truth that is to say, in order to live. . . . That
lies should be necessary to life is part and parcel of
the terrible and questionable character of existence.
Metaphysics, morality, religion, science, in this
book, all these things are regarded merely as
different forms of falsehood : by means of them we
are led to believe in life. " Life must inspire con
fidence " : the task which this imposes upon us is
enormous. In order to .solve this problem -msM,.
must already be a liar in his heart, but he must
above all else be an artist. And he is that.
Metaphysics, religion, morality, science, all these
things are but the offshoot of his will to art, to
falsehood, to a flight from " truth," to a denial of
" truth." This ability, this artistic capacity par
excellence of man thanks to which he overcomes
reality with lies, is a quality which he has in
VOL. II. T
2pO THE WILL TO POWER.
common with all other forms of existence. He
himself is indeed a piece of reality, of truth, of
nature : how could he help being also a piece
of genius in prevarication !
The fact that the character of existence is
misunderstood, is the profoundest and the highest
secret motive behind everything relating to virtue,
science, piety, and art. To be blind to many
things, to see many things falsely, to fancy
many things : Oh, how clever man has been
in those circumstances in which he believed
/ he was anything but clever ! Love, enthusiasm,
" God " are but subtle forms of ultimate
gelf-deception ; they are but seductions to life
r and to the belief in Jife ! In those moments
when man was deceived, when he had befooled
himself and when he believed in life : Oh, how
his spirit swelled within him ! Oh, what ecstasies
he had ! What power he felt ! And what artistic
triumphs in the feeling of power ! . . . Man had
once more become master of " matter," master of
truth ! . . . And whenever man rejoices it is always
in the same way : he rejoices as an artist, his power
is his joy, he enjoys falsehood as his power. . . .
II.
> Art and nothing else ! Art is the great means
of making life possible, the great seducer to life,
the great stimulus of life.
Art is the only superior counteragent to all will
to the denial oTTHeT "It "is "Jar excellence the anti-
Christian, the anti-Buddhistic, the anti-Nihilistic
force.
THE WILL TO POWER IN ART.
Art is the alleviation of the seeker after know
ledge, of him who recognises the terrible and
questionable character of existence, and who will
recognise it, of the tragic seeker after know-
ledge.
Art is the alleviation of the man of action, of
him who not only sees the terrible and questionable
character of existence, but also lives it, will live it,
of the tragic and warlike man, the hero.
Art is the alleviation of the sufferer, as the
way to states in which pain is willed, is trans
figured, is deified, where suffering is a form of
great ecstasy.
III.
It is clear that in this book pessimism, or,
better still, Nihilism, stands for " truth." But truth
is not postulated as the highest measure of value,
and still less as the highest power. The will to .
appearance, to illusion, to deception, to becoming,
and to change r (lo objective" deception), is here re
garded as more profound, as more primeval, as"
more metaphysical than the will to truth, to reality,
to appearance : the latter is merely a form of the
will to illusion. Happiness is likewise conceived
as more primeval than pain : and pain is considered
as conditioned, as a consequence of the will to
happiness (of the will to Becoming, to growth, to
forming, i.e. to creating; in creating, however, de- (/
struction is included). The highest state of Yea-
saying to existence is conceived as one from which
the greatest pain may not be excluded : the tragico-
Dionysian state.
292 THE WILL TO POWER.
IV.
In this way this book is even anti-pessimistic,
namely, in the sense that it teaches something which
is stronger than pessimism and which is more
" divine " than truth : Art. Nobody, it would seem,
would be more ready seriously to utter a radical
denial of life, an actual denial of action even more
than a denial of life, than the author of this book.
Except that he knows for he has experienced it,
and perhaps experienced little else ! that art is of
\/ more value than truth.
Even in the preface, in which Richard Wagner
is, as it were, invited to join with him in conversa
tion, the author expresses this article of faith, this
gospel for artists : " Art is the only task of life, art
is the metaphysical activity of life. . . ,"~
FOURTH BOOK.
DISCIPLINE AND BREEDING.
I,
THE ORDER OF RANK,
i. THE DOCTRINE OF THE ORDER OF RANK.
854.
IN this age of universal suffrage, in which every
body is allowed to sit in judgment upon everything
and everybody, I feel compelled to re-establish the
order of rank.
855-
Quanta of power alone determine rank and dis
tinguish rank : nothing else does.
856.
The will to power. How must those men be
constituted who would undertake this transvalua-
tion ? The order of rank as the order of power :
war and danger are the prerequisites which allow
of a rank maintaining its conditions. The pro
digious example : man in Nature the weakest
and shrewdest creature making himself master, and
putting a yoke upon all less intelligent forces.
295
296 THE WILL TO POWER.
857-
I distinguish between the type which represents
ascending life and that which represents decay,
decomposition and weakness. Ought one to
suppose that the question of rank between these
two types can be at all doubtful ? . .
858.
The modicum of power which you represent
decides your rank ; all the rest is cowardice.
859.
The advantages of standing detached from one s
age. Detached from the two movements, that of
individualism and that of collectivist morality ; for
even the first does not recognise the order of rank,
and would give one individual the same freedom
as another. My thoughts are not concerned with
the degree of freedom which should be granted to
the one or to the other or to all, but with the
degree of power which the one or the other should
exercise over his neighbour or over all ; and more
especially with the question to what extent a
sacrifice of freedom, or even enslavement, may
afford the basis for the cultivation of a superior
type. In plain words : how could one sacrifice the
development of mankind in order to assist a higher
species than man to come into being.
THE ORDER OF RANK. 297
860.
Concerning rank. The terrible consequences
of " equality " in the end everybody thinks he has
the right to every problem. All order of rank
has vanished.
861.
It is necessary for higher men to declare war |
upon the masses ! In all directions mediocre
people are joining hands in order to make them
selves masters. Everything that pampers, that
softens, and that brings the " people " or " woman "
to the front, operates in favour of universal suffrage
that is to say, the dominion of inferior men.
But we must make reprisals, and draw the
whole state of affairs (which commenced in
Europe with Christianity) to the light of day
and to judgment.
862.
A teaching is needed which is strong enough
to work in a disciplinary manner ; it should
operate in such a way as to strengthen the strong
and to paralyse and smash up the world-weary.
The annihilation of declining races. The
decay of Europe. The annihilation of slave-
tainted valuations. The dominion of the world
as a means to the rearing of a higher type. The
annihilation of the humbug which is called
morality (Christianity as a hysterical kind of
honesty in this regard : Augustine, Bunyan)
298 THE WILL TO POWER.
) The annihilation of universal suffrage that is
to say, that system by means of which the
lowest natures prescribe themselves as a law for
, higher natures. The annihilation of mediocrity
\ and its prevalence. (The one-sided, the indivi
duals peoples ; constitutional plenitude should
be aimed at by means of the coupling of opposites ;
to this end race-combinations should be tried.)
The new kind of courage no a priori truths
(those who were accustomed to believe in some
thing sought such truths !), but free submission to
a ruling thought, which has its time ; for instance,
time conceived as the quality of space, etc.
2. THE STRONG AND THE WEAK.
863.
The notion, " strong and weak man" resolves itself
into this, that in the first place much strength is
inherited the man is a total sum : in the other,
not yet enough (inadequate inheritance, subdivision
of the inherited qualities). Weakness may be a
starting phenomenon : not yet enough ; or a final
phenomenon : " no more."
The determining point is there where great
strength is present, or where a great amount of
i strength can be discharged. The mass, as the
j sum-total of the weak, reacts slowly ; it defends
. itself against much for which it is too weak,
against that for which it has no use ; it never
creates, it never takes a step forward. This is
THE ORDER OF RANK. 299
opposed to the theory which denies the strong
individual and would maintain that the " masses
do everything." The difference is similar to that
which obtains between separated generations :
four or even five generations may lie between the
masses and him who is the moving spirit it is a
chronological difference.
The values of the weak are in the van, because
the strong have adopted them in order to lead
with them.
864.
Why the weak triumph. On the whole, the sick
and the weak have more sympathy and are more
"humane"; the sick and the weak have more
intellect, and are more changeable, more variegated,
more entertaining more malicious ; the sick alone
invented malice. *\A morbid precocity is often to be
observed among rickety, scrofulitic, and tuberculous
people.) Esprit : the property of older races ;
Jews, Frenchmen, Chinese. (The anti-Semites
do not forgive the Jews for having both intellect
and money. Anti-Semites another name for
" bungled and botched.")
The sick and the weak have always had fascina
tion on their side ; they are more interesting than
the healthy : the fool and the saint the two most
interesting kinds of men. . . . Closely related
thereto is the " genius." The " great adventurers
and criminals " and all great men, the most healthy
in particular, have always been sick at certain
periods of their lives great disturbances of the
3OO THE WILL TO POWER.
emotions, the passion for power, love, revenge, are
all accompanied by very profound perturbations.
And, as for decadence, every man who does not
die prematurely manifests it in almost every
respect he therefore knows from experience the
instincts which belong to it : for half his life
nearly every man is decadent.
And finally, woman ! One-half of mankind is
weak, chronically sick, changeable, shifty woman
requires strength in order to cleave to it ; she also
requires a religion of the weak which glorifies
weakness, love, and modesty as divine : or, better
still, she makes the strong weak she rules when
she succeeds in overcoming the strong. xV Woman
has always conspired with decadent types, the
priests, for instance, against the " mighty," against
! the " strong," against men. Women avail them
selves of children for the cult of piety, pity, and
love : the mother stands as the symbol of con-
1 vincing altruism. l
Finally, the increase of civilisation with its
necessary correlatives, the increase of morbid
elements, v of the neurotic and psychiatric and of
the criminal. f A sort of intermediary species arises,
the artist. He is distinct from those who are
.criminals as the result of weak wills and of the
fear of society, although they may not yet be ripe
for the asylum ; but he has antennae which grope
inquisitively into both spheres : this specific plant
of culture, the modern artist, painter, musician, and,
above all, novelist, who designates his particular
kind of attitude with the very indefinite word
" naturalism." . . . Lunatics, criminals, and
THE ORDER OF RANK. 3OI
realists * are on the increase : this is the sign of
a growing culture plunging forward at headlong
speed that is to say, its excrement, its refuse, the
rubbish that is shot from it every day, is beginning
to acquire more importance, the retrogressive
movement keeps pace with the advance.
Finally! the social mishmash, which is the result
of revolution, of the establishment of equal rights,
and of the superstition, the " equality of men."
Thus the possessors of the instincts of decline (of
resentment, of discontent, of the lust of destruction,
of anarchy and Nihilism), as also the instincts of
slavery, of cowardice, of craftiness, and of rascality,
which are inherent among those classes of society
which have long been suppressed, are beginning to
get infused into the blood of all ranks. Two or
three generations later, the race can no longer be
recognised everything has become mob. And
thus there results a collective instinct against
selection, against every kind of privilege ; and
this instinct operates with such power, certainty,
hardness, and cruelty that, as a matter of fact, in
the end, even the privileged classes have to
submit : all those who still wish to hold on to
power flatter the mob, work with the mob, and
must have the mob on their side the " geniuses "
above all The latter become the heralds of those
feelings with which the mob can be inspired, the
expression of pity, of honour, even for all that
suffers, all that is low and despised, and has lived
* The German word is " Naturalist," and really means
" realist " in a bad sense. TR.
302 THE WILL TO POWER.
under persecution, becomes predominant (types :
Victor Hugo, Richard Wagner). The rise of the
mob signifies once more the rise of old values.
In the case of such an extreme movement, both
in tempo and in means, as characterises our civil
isation, man s ballast is shifted. Those men whose
worth is greatest, and whose mission, as it were, is
to compensate for the very great danger of such
a morbid movement, such men become dawdlers
par excellence ; they are slow to accept anything,
and are tenacious ; they are creatures that are
relatively lasting in the midst of this vast mingling
and changing of elements. In such circumstances
power is necessarily relegated to the mediocre-,
mediocrity , as the trustee and bearer of the future,
consolidates itself against the rule of the mob and
of eccentricities (both of which are, in most cases,
united). In this way a new antagonist is evolved
for exceptional men or in certain cases a new
temptation. Provided that they do not adapt
themselves to the mob, and stand up for what
satisfies the instincts of the disinherited, they will
find it necessary to be " mediocre " and sound.
They know : mediocritas is also aurea, it alone
has command of money and gold (of all that
glitters ...).... And, once more, old virtue and
the whole superannuated world of ideals in general
secures a gifted host of special-pleaders. . . . Result :
mediocrity acquires intellect, wit, and genius, it
becomes entertaining, and even seductive.
\ *
Result. -A high culture can only stand upon a
broad basis, upon a strongly and soundly consoli-
THE ORDER OF RANK. 303
dated mediocrity. In its service and assisted by
it, science and even art do their work. Science
could not wish for a better state of affairs : in its
essence it belongs to a middle-class type of man,
among exceptions it is out of place, there is not
anything aristocratic and still less anything
anarchic in its instincts. The power of the middle
classes is then upheld by means of commerce, but,
above all, by means of money-dealing : the instinct
of great financiers is opposed to everything extreme
on this account the Jews are, for the present,
the most conservative power in the threatening
and insecure conditions of modern Europe. They
can have no use either for revolutions, for social
ism, or for militarism : if they would have power,
and if they should need it, even over the revolu
tionary party, this is only the result of what I
have already said, and it in no way contradicts
it. Against other extreme movements they may
occasionally require to excite terror by showing
how much power is in their hands. But their
instinct itself is inveterately conservative and
" mediocre." . . . Wherever power exists, they
know how to become mighty ; but the application
of their power always takes the same direction.
The polite term for mediocre, as is well known,
is the word" ^Liberal" \
*
Reflection. It is all nonsense to suppose that
this general conquest of values is anti- biological.
In order to explain it, we ought to try and show
that it is the result of a certain interest of life to
maintain the type " man," even by means of this
304 THE WILL TO POWER.
method which leads to the prevalence of the weak
and the physiologically botched if things were
otherwise, might man not cease to exist ? Problem. . .
The enhancement of the type may prove fatal
to the maintenance of the species. Why ? The
experience of history shows that strong races
decimate each other mutually, by means of war,
lust for power, and venturousness ; the strong
emotions ; wastefulness (strength is no longer
capitalised, disturbed mental systems arise from
excessive tension) ; their existence is a costly
affair in short, they persistently give rise to
friction between themselves ; periods of profound
slackness and torpidity intervene : all great ages
have to be paid for. . . . The strong are, after all,
weaker, less wilful, and more absurd than the
average weak ones.
They are squandering races. " Permanence?
in itself, can have no value : that which ought to
be preferred thereto would be a shorter life for
the species, but a life richer in creations. It would
remain to be proved that, even as things are, a
richer sum of creations is attained than in the
case of the shorter existence ; i.e. that man, as a
storehouse of power, attains to a much higher
degree of dominion over things under the con
ditions which have existed hitherto. . . . We are
here face to face with a problem of economics.
865.
The state of mind which calls itself " idealism,"
and which will neither allow mediocrity to be
THE ORDER OF RANK. 305
mediocre nor woman to be woman ! Do not
make everything uniform ! We should have a
clear idea of how dearly we have to pay for the
establishment of a virtue ; and that virtue is
nothing generally desirable, but a noble piece of
madness^ a beautiful exception, which gives us the
privilege of feeling elated. . . .
866.
It is necessary to show that a counter-movement
is inevitably associated with any increasingly
economical consumption of men and mankind, and
with an ever more closely involved " machinery "
of interests and services. I call this counter-
movement the separation of the luxurious surplus
of mankind-, by means of it a stronger kind, a
higher type, must come to light, which has other
conditions for its origin and for its maintenance than
the average man. My concept, my metaphor for
this type is, as you know, the word " Superman."
Along the first road, which can now be completely
surveyed, arose adaptation, stultification, higher
Chinese culture, modesty in^lKe^^nstincts, and
satisfaction at the sight of the belittlement of
man a kind of stationary level of mankind. If J
ever we get that inevitable and imminent, general
control of the economy of the earth, then man
kind can be used as machinery and find its best
purpose in the service of this economy as an
enormous piece of clock-work consisting of ever
smaller and ever more subtly adapted wheels ;
then all the dominating and commanding elements
VOL. II. U
306 THE WILL TO POWER.
will become ever more superfluous ; and the
whole gains enormous energy, while the individual
factors which compose it represent but small
modicums of strength and of value. To oppose
this dwarfing and adaptation of man to a special
ised kind of utility, a reverse movement is needed
(_ ,;,i the procreation of the synthetic man who em-
J bodies everything and justifies it ; that man for
whom the turning of mankind into a machine is
a first condition of existence, for whom the rest of
mankind is but soil on which he can devise his
higher mode of existence.
He is in need of the opposition of the masses,
of those who are " levelled down " ; he requires
that feeling of distance from them ; he stands
upon them, he lives on them. This higher form
of aristocracy is the form of the future. From
the moral point of view, the collective machinery
above described, that solidarity of all wheels,
represents the most extreme example in the
exploitation of mankind: but it presupposes the
\ existence of those for whom such an exploitation
^ would have some meaning* Otherwise it would
signify, as a matter of fact, merely the general
depreciation of the type man, a. retrograde
phenomenon on a grand scale.
\ Readers are beginning to see what I am
\combating namely, economic optimism: as if
* This sentence for ever distinguishes Nietzsche s aristoc
racy from our present plutocratic and industrial one, for
which, at the present moment at any rate, it would be
difficult to discover some meaning. TR.
THE ORDER OF RANK. 307
the general welfare of everybody must necessarily
increase with the growing self-sacrifice of every
body. The very reverse seems to me to be the
case, the self-sacrifice of everybody amounts to a
collective loss ; man becomes inferior so that
nobody knows what end this monstrous purpose
has served. A wherefore ? a new wherefore ?
this is what mankind requires.
867
The recognition of the increase of collective
power-, we should calculate to what extent the
ruin of individuals, of castes, of ages, and of
peoples, is included in this general increase.
The transposition of the ballast of a culture.
The cost of every vast growth : who bears it ?
Why must it be enormous at the present time f
868.
General aspect of the future European : the
latter regarded as the most intelligent servile
animal, very industrious, at bottom very modest,
inquisitive to excess, multifarious, pampered,
weak of will, a chaos of cosmopolitan pas
sions and intelligences.// How would it be
possible for a stronger race to be bred from
him ? Such a race as would have a classical
taste ? The classical taste : this is the will to
simplicity, to accentuation, and to happiness made
visible, the will to the terrible, and the courage
for psychological nakedness (simplification is the
308 THE WILL TO POWER.
outcome of the will to accentuate ; allowing
happiness as well as nakedness to become visible
is a consequence of the will to the terrible . . .).
In order to fight one s way out of that chaos, and
up to this form, a certain disciplinary constraint is
necessary : a man should have to choose between
either going to the dogs <yc prevailing. A ruling
race can only arise amid terrible and violent
conditions. Problem : where are the barbarians
of the twentieth century? Obviously they will
only show themselves and consolidate themselves
after enormous socialistic crises. They will con
sist of those elements which are capable of the
greatest hardness towards themselves, and which
can guarantee the most enduring will-power.
869.
The mightiest and most dangerous passions of
man, by means of which he most easily goes to
rack and ruin, have been so fundamentally banned
that mighty men themselves have either become
impossible or else must regard themselves as evil,
" harmful and prohibited." The losses are heavy,
but up to the present they have been necessary.
Now, however, that a whole host of counter-forces
has been reared, by means of the temporary
suppression of these passions (the passion for
dominion, the love of change and deception), their
liberation has once more become possible : they
will no longer possess their old savagery. We
can now allow ourselves this tame sort of bar
barism : look at our artists and our statesmen !
THE ORDER OF RANK. 309
870.
v
The root of all evil : that the slave morality
of modesty, chastity, selflessness, and absolute
obedience should have triumphed. Dominating
natures were thu* condemned (i) to hypocrisy,
(2) to qualms of conscience, creative natures
regarded themselves as rebels against frod, un
certain and hemmed in by eternal values.
The barbarians showed that the ability of
keeping within the bounds of moderation was not
in the scope of their powers : they feared and
slandered the passions and instincts of nature
likewise the aspect of the ruling Caesars and
castes. On the other hand, there arose the sus
picion that all restraint is a form of weakness or
of incipient old age and fatigue (thus La Rochefou
cauld suspects that " virtue " is only a euphemism
in the mouths of those to whom vice no longer
affords any pleasure). The capacity for restraint
was represented as a matter of hardness, self-
control, asceticism, as a fight with the devil, etc.
etc. The natural delight of aesthetic natures, in
measure ; the pleasure derived from the beauty of
measure, was overlooked and denied, because that
which was desired was an anti-eudaemonistic
morality. The belief in Jhe pleasure which comes
of restraint has been lacking hitherto this
pleasure of a rider on a fiery steed ! The modera- /
tion of weak natures was confounded with the 1
restraint of the strong ! J\
In short, the best things have been blasphemed
because weak or immoderate swine have thrown a
310 THE WILL TO POWER.
I bad light upon them the best men have remained
concealed and have often misunderstood them
selves.
871.
Vicious and unbridled people : their depressing
influence upon the value of the passions. It was
the appalling barbarity of morality which was
principally responsible in the Middle Ages for
the compulsory recourse to a veritable " league
of virtue " and this was coupled with an equally
appalling exaggeration of all that which consti
tutes the value of man. Militant " civilisation "
(taming) is in need of all kinds of irons and
tortures in order to maintain itself against terrible
and beast-of-prey natures.
In this case, confusion, although it may have
the most nefarious influences, is quite natural :
that which ^men of power and will are able to
demand of themselves gives them the standard for
what they may also allow themselves. Such natures
are the very opposite of the vicious and the un
bridled , although under certain circumstances they
may perpetrate deeds for which an inferior man
would be convicted of vice and intemperance.
In this respect the concept, " all men are equal
before God! does an extraordinary amount of
harm ; actions and attitudes of mind were for
bidden which belonged to the prerogative of the
strong alone, just as if they were in themselves
unworthy of man. All the tendencies of strong
men were brought into disrepute by the fact that
the defensive weapons of the most weak (even of
THE ORDER OF RANK.
those who were weakest towards themselves) were
established as a standard of valuation.
The confusion went so far that precisely the
great virtuosos of life (whose self-control presents
the sharpest contrast to the vicious and the un
bridled) were branded with the most opprobrious^
names. Even to this day people feel themselves 1
compelled to disarage a Caesar Borgia : it is i
simply ludicrous. The "Church has anathematised J
German Kaisers owing to their vices : as if a monk
or a priest had the right to say a word as to what
a Frederick II. should allow himself. Don Juan
is sent to hell : this is very naif. Has anybody
ever noticed that all interesting men are lacking
in heaven ? . . . This is only a hint to the girls,
as to where they may best find salvation. If one ,
think at all logically, and also have a profound
insight into that which makes a great man, there
can be no doubt at all that the Church has dis- J
patched all " great men " to Hades its fight is J
against all " greatness in man."
872.
The rights which a man arrogates to himself
are relative to the duties which he sets himself,
and to the tasks which he feels capable of per
forming. The great majority of men have no
right to life, and are only a misfortune to their
higher fellows.
873-
The misunderstanding of egoism: on the part
of ignoble natures who know nothing of the lust of
3-
12 THE WILL TO POWER.
conquest and the insatiability of great love, and who
likewise know nothing of the overflowing feelings
of power which make a man wish to overcome things,
to force them over to himself, and to lay them on
his heart, the power which impels an artist to
his material. It often happens also that the
active spirit looks for a field for its activity. In
ordinary " egoism " it is precisely the " non-ego,"
the profoundly mediocre ^ creature^ the member _pf
the herd^ who wishes to maintain himself and
when this is perceived by the rarer, more subtle,
and less mediocre natures, it revolts them. For
the judgment of the latter is this : " We are the
noble \ It is much more important to maintain us
than that cattle ! "
874.
The degeneration of the ruler and of the ruling
classes has been the cause of all the great dis
orders in history ! Without the Roman Caesars
and Roman society, Christianity would never have
prevailed.
When it occurs to inferior men to doubt
whether higher men exist, then the danger is
great ! It is then that men finally discover that
there are virtues even among inferior, suppressed,
and poor-spirited men, and that everybody is
equal before God : which is the non plus ultra of
all confounded nonsense that has ever appeared
on earth ! For in the end higher men begin to
measure themselves according to the standard of
virtues upheld by the slaves and discover that
THE ORDER OF RANK.
they are " proud," etc., and that all their higher
qualities should be condemned.
When Nero and Caracalla stood at the helm,
it was then that the paradox arose : " The lowest
man is of more value than that one on the throne ! "
And thus the path was prepared for an image of
God which was as remote as possible from the
image of the mightiest, God on the Cross !
875-
Higher man and gregarious man. When great
! men are ivanting, the great of the past are con
verted into demigods or whole gods : the rise of
religions proves that mankind no longer has any
pleasure in man (" nor in woman neither," as in
Hamlet s case). Or a host of men are brought
together in a heap, and it is hoped that as a
Parliament they will operate just as tyrannically.
Tyrannising is the distinctive quality of great
meq : they make inferior men stupid.
876.
Buckle affords the best example of the extent
to which a plebeian agitator of the mob is in
capable of arriving at a clear idea of the concept,
" higher nature." The opinion which he combats
so passionately that " great men," individuals,
princes, statesmen, geniuses, warriors, are the
levers and causes of all great movements, is in
stinctively misunderstood by him, as if it meant
that all that was essential and valuable in such
314 THE WILL TO POWER.
a " higher man," was the fact that he was capable
of setting masses in motion ; in short, that his
sole merit was the effect he produced. . . . But
the " higher nature " of the great man resides
precisely in being different, in being unable to
communicate with others, in the loftiness of his
rank not in any sort of effect he may produce
even though this be the shattering of both hemi
spheres.
8/7.
The Revolution made Napoleon possible : that
is its justification. We ought to desire the
anarchical collapse of the whole of our civilisation
if such a reward were to be its result. Napoleon
made nationalism possible : that is the latter s
excuse.
The value of a man (apart, of course, from
morality and immorality : because with these
concepts a man s worth is not even skimmed)
does not lie in his utility ; because he would
continue to exist even if there were nobody to
whom he could be useful. And why could not
that man be the very pinnacle of manhood who
was the source of the worst possible effects for
his race : so high and so superior, that in his
presence everything would go to rack and ruin
from envy ?
878.
To appraise the value of a man according to
his utility to mankind, or according to what he
costs it, or the damage he is able to inflict upon it,
THE ORDER OF RANK. 315
is just as good and just as bad as to appraise the
value of a work of art according to its effects.
But in this way the value of one man compared
with another is not even touched upon. The
" moral valuation," in so far as it is social, measures
men altogether according to their effects. But
what about the man who has his own taste on
his tongue, who is surrounded and concealed
by his isolation, uncommunicative and not to be
communicated with ; a man whom no one has
fathomed yet that is to say, a creature of a
higher, and, at any rate, different species : how
would ye appraise his worth, seeing that ye
cannot know him and can compare him with
nothing?
Moral valuation was the cause of the most
enormous obtuseness of judgment: the value of
a man in himself is underrated , well-nigh over
looked, practically denied. This is the remains
of simple-minded teleology : the value of man
can only be measured with regard to other men.
879.
To be obsessed by moral considerations pre
supposes a very low grade of intellect : it shows
that the instinct for special rights, for standing
apart, the feeling of freedom in creative natures,
in " children of God " (or of the devil), is lacking.
And irrespective of whether he preaches a ruling
morality or criticises the prevailing ethical code
from the point of view of his own ideal : by
doing these things a man shows that he belongs
316 THE WILL TO POWER.
to the herd even though he may be what it is
most in need of that is to say, a " shepherd."
880.
We should substitute, morality by the will to our
own ends, and consequently to the means to them.
881.
Concerning tlie order of rank. What is it that
constitutes the mediocrity of the typical man ?
That he does not understand that things neces
sarily have their other side ; that he combats evil
conditions as if they could be dispensed with ;
that he will not take the one with the other ; that
he would fain obliterate and erase the specific
character of a thing, of a circumstance, of an age,
and of a person, by calling only a portion of their
qualities good, and suppressing the remainder.
The " desirability " of the mediocre is that which
we others combat : their ideal is something which
shall no longer contain anything harmful, evil,
dangerous, questionable, and destructive. We
recognise the reverse of this : that with every
growth of man his other side must grow as well ;
that the highest man, if such a concept be allowed,
would be that man who would represent the antag
onistic character of existence most strikingly, and
would be its glory and its only justification. . . .
Ordinary men may only represent a small corner
and nook of this natural character ; they perish
the moment the multifariousness of the elements
composing them, and the tension between their
THE ORDER OF RANK. 317
antagonistic traits, increases : but this is the pre
requisite for greatness in man. That man should \
become better and at the same time more evil, is |
my formula for this inevitable fact.
The majority of people are only piecemeal and
fragmentary examples of man : only when all
these creatures are jumbled together does one
whole man arise. Whole ages and whole peoples
in this sense, have a fragmentary character about
them ; it may perhaps be part of the economy of
human development that man should develop
himself only piecemeal. But, for this reason, one
should not forget that the only important con
sideration is the rise of the synthetic man ; that
inferior men, and by far the great majority of
people, are but rehearsals and exercises out of v
which here and there a whole man may arise ; a
man who is a human milestone, and who indicates
how far mankind has advanced up to a certain
point. Mankind does not advance in a straight
line ; often a type is attained which is again lost
(for instance, with all the efforts of three hundred
years, we have not reached the men of the Renais
sance again, and in addition to this we must not
forget that the man of the Renaissance was already
behind his brother of classical antiquity).
882.
The superiority of the Greek and the man of
the Renaissance is recognised, but people would
like to produce them without the conditions and
causes of which they were the result.
3l8 THE WILL TO POWER.
883.
" Purification of taste " can only be the result
of the strengthening of the type. Our society
to-day represents only the cultivating systems ;
the cultivated man is lacking. The great synthetic
man, in whom the various forces for attaining a-
purpose are correctly harnessed together, is alto
gether wanting. The specimen we possess is the
multifarious man, the most interesting form of
chaos that has ever existed : but not the chaos
preceding the creation of the world, but that fol
lowing it : Goethe as the most beautiful expression
of the type (completely and utterly un- Olympian !)*
884.
Handel, Leibniz, Goethe, and Bismarck, are
characteristic of the strong German type. They
lived with equanimity, surrounded by contrasts.
They were full of that agile kind of strength
which cautiously avoids convictions and doctrines,
by using the one as a weapon against the other,
and reserving absolute freedom for themselves.
885.
Of this I am convinced, that if the rise of great
and rare men had been made dependent upon the
voices of the multitude (taking for granted, of
*Tbe Germans always call Goethe the Olympian. TR.
THE ORDER OF RANK. 319
course, that the latter knew the qualities which
belong to greatness, and also the price that all
greatness pays for its self-development), then there
would never have been any such thing as a great
man !
The fact that things pursue their course inde-
pendently of the voice of the many, is the reason why
a few astonishing things have taken place on earth.
886.
The Order of Rank in Human Values.
(a] A man should not be valued according to
isolated acts. Epidermal actions. Nothing is more
rare than a personal act. Class, rank, race, environ
ment, accident all these things are much more
likely to be expressed in an action or deed than
the " personality " of the doer.
(b] We should on no account jump to the con
clusion that there are many people who are per
sonalities. Some men are but conglomerations of
personalities, whilst the majority are not even one.
In all cases in which those average qualities pre
ponderate, which ensure the maintenance of the
species, to be a personality would involve un
necessary expense, it would be a luxury in fact,
it would be foolish to demand of anybody that he
should be a personality. In such circumstances
everybody is a channel or a transmitting vessel.
(c] A " personality " is a relatively isolated phen
omenon ; in view of the superior importance of- 7
the continuation of the race at an average level, a
320 THE WILL TO POWER.
personality might even be regarded as something
hostile to nature. For a personality to be possible,
timely isolation and the necessity for an existence
of offence and defence, are prerequisites ; something
in the nature of a walled enclosure, a capacity for
, shutting out the world ; but above all, a much lower
\ degree of sensitiveness than the average man has,
who is too easily infected with the views of others.
The first question concerning the order of rank :
how far is a man disposed to be solitary or gre-
garioust (in the latter case, his valueconsists in those
qualities which secure the survival of his tribe or
his type ; in the former case, his qualities are those
which distinguish him from others, which isolate
and defend him, and make his solitude possible).
Consequence : the solitary type should not be
valued from the standpoint of the gregarious type,
or vice versa.
Viewed from above, both types are necessary ;
as is likewise their antagonism, and nothing is
more thoroughly reprehensible than the " desire "
which would develop a third thing out of the two
(" virtue " as hermaphroditism). This is as little
worthy of desire as the equalisation and reconcilia
tion of the sexes. The distinguishing qualities must
be developed ever more and more, the gulf must be
made ever wider. . . .
The concept of degeneration in both cases : the
approximation of the qualities of the herd to those
of solitary creatures: and vice versa in short, when
they begin to resemble each other. This concept
of degeneration is beyond the sphere of moral
judgments.
THE ORDER OF RANK. 321
887.
Where the strongest natures are to be sought.
The ruin and degeneration of the solitary species is
much greater and more terrible : they have the in
stincts of the herd, and the tradition of values,
against them ; their weapons of defence, their in
stincts of self-preservation, are from the beginning
insufficiently strong and reliable fortune must be
peculiarly favourable to them if they are to prosper
(they prosper best in the lowest ranks and dregs
of society ; if ye are seeking personalities it is there
that ye will find them with much greater certainty
than in the middle classes !)
When the dispute between ranks and classes,
which aims at equality of rights, is almost settled,
the fight will begin against the solitary person. (In
a certain sense the latter can maintain and develop
himself most easily in a democratic society \ there
where the coarser means of defence are no longer
necessary, and a certain habit of order, honesty,
justice, trust, is already a general condition.) t The
strongest must be most tightly bound, most strictly
watched, laid in chains and supervised : this is the
instinct of the herd. To them belongs a regime of
self-mastery, of ascetic detachment, of " duties "
consisting in exhausting work, in which one can no
longer call one s soul one s own.
888.
I am attempting an economic justification of
virtue. The object is to make man as useful as
VOL. II. X
322 THE WILL TO POWER,
possible, and to make him approximate as nearly
as one can to an infallible machine : to this end he
must be equipped with machine- like virtues (he
must learn to value those states in which he works
in a most mechanically useful way, as the highest
of all : to this end it is necessary to make him as
disgusted as possible with the other states, and to
represent them as very dangerous and despicable).
Here is the first stumbling-block : the tedious-
ness and monotony which all mechanical activity
brings with it. To learn to endure this and not
only to endure it, but to see tedium enveloped in
a ray of exceeding charm : this hitherto has been
the task of all higher schools. To learn something
which you don t care a fig about, and to find pre
cisely your " duty " in this " objective " activity ;
to learn to value happiness and duty as things
apart ; this is the invaluable task and performance
of higher schools. It is on this account that the
philologist has, hitherto, been the educator per se :
because his activity, in itself, affords the best
pattern of magnificent monotony in action ; under
his banner youths learn to " swat " : first pre
requisite for the thorough fulfilment of mechanical
duties in the future (as State officials, husbands,
slaves of the desk, newspaper readers, and soldiers).
Such an existence may perhaps require a philosoph
ical glorification and justification more than any
other : pleasurable feelings must be valued by some
sort of infallible tribunal, as altogether of inferior
rank ; " duty per se" perhaps even the pathos of re
verence in regard to everything unpleasant, must
be demanded imperatively as that which is above all
THE ORDER OF RANK. 323
useful, delightful, and practical things. ... A
mechanical form of existence regarded as the
highest and most respectable form of existence,
worshipping itself (type : Kant as the fanatic of the
formal concept " Thou shalt ").
889.
The economic valuation of all the ideals that
have existed hitherto that is to say, the selection
and rearing of definite passions and states at the
cost of other passions and states. The law-giver
(or the instinct of the community) selects a number
of states and passions the existence of which
guarantees the performance of regular actions
(mechanical actions would thus be the result of
the regular requirements of those passions and
states).
In the event of these states and passions con
taining ingredients which were painful, a means
would have to be found for overcoming this pain-
fulness by means of a valuation ; pain would have
to be interpreted as something valuable, as some
thing pleasurable in a higher sense. Conceived in
a formula : " How does something unpleasant become
pleasant ? " For instance, when our obedience and
our submission to the law become honoured, thanks
to the energy, power, and self-control they entail.
The same holds good of our public spirit, of our
neighbourliness, of our patriotism, our " humanisa-
tion," our " altruism," and our " heroism." The
object of all idealism should be to induce people To
do unpleasant things cheerfully.
324 THE WILL TO POWER.
890.
The belittlement of man must be held as the
chief aim for a long while : because what is needed
in the first place is a broad basis from which a
stronger species of man may arise (to what extent
hitherto has every stronger species of man arisen
from a substratum of inferior people ?).
891.
The absurd and contemptible form of idealism
which would not have mediocrity mediocre, and
which instead of feeling triumphant at being ex
ceptional, becomes indignant at cowardice, false
ness, pettiness, and wretchedness. We should not
wish things to be any different, we should make the
gulfs even wider \ The higher types among men
should be compelled to distinguish themselves by
means ot the sacrifices which they make to their
own existence.
Principal point of view : distances must be es
tablished, but no contrasts must be created. The
middle classes must be dissolved, and their influence
decreased : this is the principal means of main
taining distances.
892.
Who would dare to disgust the mediocre of their
mediocrity ! As you observe, I do precisely the
reverse : every step away from mediocrity thus
do I teach leads to immorality.
THE ORDER OF RANK. 325
893.
To hate mediocrity is unworthy of a philo
sopher : it is almost a note of interrogation to his
" right to philosophy." It is precisely because he is
the exception that he must protect the rule and
ingratiate all mediocre people.
894-
What I combat : that an exceptional form should
make war upon the rule instead of understanding
that the continued existence of the rule is the first
condition of the value of the exception. For in
stance, there are women who, instead of consider
ing their abnormal thirst for knowledge as a dis
tinction, would fain dislocate the whole status of
womanhood.
895-
The increase of strength despite the temporary
ruin of the individual :
A new level must be established ;
We must have a method of storing up forces
for the maintenance of small performances,
in opposition to economic waste ;
Destructive nature must for once be reduced
to an instrument of this economy of the
future ;
The weak must be maintained, because there
is an enormous mass of finicking work to
be done ;
326 THE WILL TO POWER.
The weak and the suffering must be upheld
in their belief that existence is still possible ;
Solidarity must be implanted as an instinct
opposed to the instinct of fear and servility ;
War must be made upon accident, even upon
the accident of " the great man."
896.
War upon great men justified on economic
grounds. Great men are dangerous ; they are
accidents, exceptions, tempests, which are strong
enough to question things which it has taken time
to build and establish. Explosive material must
not only be discharged harmlessly, but, if possible,
its discharge must be prevented altogether ; this is
the fundamental instinct of all civilised society.
897-
I He who thinks over the question of how the type
/man may be elevated to its highest glory and
, /power, will realise from the start that he must
/place himself beyond morality; for morality was
/ directed in its essentials at the opposite goal that
/ is to say, its aim was to arrest and to annihilate
i that glorious development wherever it was in pro-
* cess of accomplishment. For, as a matter of fact,
development of that sort implies that such an
enormous number of men must be subservient to it,
that a counter-movement is only too natural : the
weaker, more delicate, more mediocre existences,
find it necessary to take up sides against that glory
THE ORDER OF RANK. 327
of life and power ; and for that purpose they must
get a new valuation of themselves by means of
which they are able to condemn, and if possible to
destroy, life in this high degree of plenitude.
Morality is therefore essentially the expression of (
hostility to life, in so far as it would overcome
vital types.
898.
The strong of the future. To what extent neces
sity on the one hand and accident on the other
have attained to conditions from which a stronger
species may be reared : this we are now able to
understand and to bring about consciously ; we
can now create those conditions under which such
an elevation is possible.
Hitherto education has always aimed at the
utility of society : not the greatest possible utility
for the future, but the utility of the society actually
extant. What people required were " instruments"
for this purpose. Provided the wealth of forces
were greater^ it would be possible to think of a
draft being made upon them, the aim of which
would not be the utility of society, but some future
utility.
The more people grasped to what extent the
present form of society was in such a state of tran
sition as sooner or later to be no longer able to exist
for its own sake, but only as a means in the hands
of a stronger race, the more this task would have to
be brought forward.
The increasing belittlement of man is precisely
the impelling power which leads one to think of
328 THE WILL TO POWER.
the cultivation of a stronger race-, a race which
would have a surplus precisely there where the
dwarfed species was weak and growing weaker
(will, responsibility, self-reliance, the ability to
postulate aims for one s self).
The means would be those which history teaches:
isolation by means of preservative interests which
would be the reverse of those generally accepted ;
exercise in transvalued valuations ; distance as
pathos ; a clean conscience in what to-day is most
despised and most prohibited.
The levelling of the mankind of Europe is the
great process which should not be arrested ; it
should even be accelerated. The necessity of
cleaving gulfs, of distance, of the order of rank, is
therefore imperative ; but not the necessity of re
tarding the process above mentioned.
This levelled- down species requires justification
as soon as it is attained : its justification is that
it exists for the service of a higher and sovereign
race which stands upon it and can only be elevated
upon its shoulders to the task which it is destined
to perform. Not only a ruling race whose task
would be consummated in ruling alone : but a race
with vital spheres of its own, with an overflow of
energy for beauty, bravery, culture, and manners,
even for the most abstract thought ; a yea-saying
race which would be able to allow itself every kind
of great luxury strong enough to be able to dis
pense with the tyranny of the imperatives of virtue,
rich enough to be in no need of economy or
pedantry ; beyond good and evil ; a forcing-house
for rare and exceptional plants.
THE ORDER OF RANK.
899-
329
Our psychologists, whose glance dwells in
voluntarily upon the symptoms of decadence, lead
us to mistrust intellect ever more and more.
People persist in seeing only the weakening, pam
pering, and sickening effects of intellect, but there
are now going to appear :
The union of
Cynics
intellectual
New
Experi ment-
superiority
barbarians
alists
with well-be
*
Conquerors
ing and an
overflow of
strength.
900.
I point to something new : certainly for such a
democratic community there is a danger of bar
barians ; but these are sought only down below.
There is also another kind of barbarians who come
from the heights : a kind of conquering and ruling
natures, which are in search of material that they
can mould. Prometheus was a barbarian of this
stamp.
901.
Principal standpoint: one should not suppose
the mission of a higher species to be the leading
of inferior men (as Comte does, for instance) ; but
the inferior should be regarded as the foundation
upon which a higher species may live their higher
life upon which alone they can stand.
330 THE WILL TO POWER.
The conditions under which a strong, noble
species maintains itself (in the matter of intellectual
discipline) are precisely the reverse of those under
which the industrial masses the tea-grocers a la
Spencer subsist. Those qualities which are
within the grasp only of the strongest and most
terrible natures, and which make their existence
possible leisure, adventure, disbelief, and even4isb.
station would necessarily ruin mediocre natures
and does do so when they possess them. In
the case of the latter industry, regularity, modera
tion, and strong " conviction " are in their proper
place in short, all " gregarious virtues " : under
their influence these mediocre men become perfect.
902.
Concerning the ruling types. The shepherd as
opposed to the " lord " (the former is only a means
to the maintenance of the herd ; the latter, the
purpose for which the herd exists).
903.
The temporary preponderance of social valua
tions is both comprehensible and useful ; it is a
matter of building a foundation upon which a
stronger species will ultimately be made possible.
The standard of strength : to be able to live under
the transvalued valuations, and to desire them for
\ all eternity. State and society regarded as a sub
structure : economic point of view, education con-
ceived as breeding.
,
THE ORDER OF RANK. 33!
904.
A consideration which " free spirits lack : that
the same discipline which makes a strong nature
still stronger, and enables it to go in for big under
takings, breaks up and withers the mediocre : doubt
la largeur de cceur experiment independence.
905.
The hammer. How should men who must value
in the opposite way be constituted ? Men who
possess all the qualities of the modern soul, but are
strong enough to convert them into real health ?
The means to their task.
906.
The strong man, who is mighty in the instincts
of a strong and healthy organisation, digests his
deeds just as well as he digests his meals ; he even
gets over the effects of heavy fare : in the main, iB|
however, he is led by an inviolable and severe
instinct which prevents his doing anything which
goes against his grain, just as he never does any
thing against his taste.
907.
Can we foresee the favourable circumstances
under which creatures of the highest value might
arise ? It is a thousand times too complicated, and
the probabilities of failure are very great : on that
account we cannot be inspired by the thought of
332 THE WILL TO POWER.
striving after them ! Scepticism. To oppose this
we can enhance courage, insight, hardness, inde
pendence, and the feeling of responsibility ; we can
also subtilise and learn to forestall the delicacy of
the scales, so that favourable accidents may be
enlisted on our side.
908.
Before we can even think of acting, an enormous
amount of work requires to be done. In the main,
however, a cautious exploitation of the present con
ditions would be our best and most advisable
course of action. The actual creation of conditions
such as those which occur by accident, presupposes
the existence of iron men such as have not yet
lived. Our first task must be to make the personal
ideal prevail and become realised \ He who has
understood the nature of man and the origin of
mankind s greatest specimens, shudders before man
and takes flight from all action \ this is the result
of inherited valuations ! !
My consolation is, that the nature of man is evil,
and this guarantees his strength \
909.
The typical forms of self-development, or the
eight principal questions :
1. Do we want to be more multifarious or more
simple than we are ?
2. Do we want to be happier than we are, or
more indifferent to both happiness and un-
happiness ?
THE ORDER OF RANK. 333
3. Do we want to be more satisfied with our-
selves,ormoreexactingand more inexorable?
4. Do we want to be softer, more yielding, and
more human than we are, or more in
human ?
5. Do we want to be more prudent than we are,
or more daring?
6. Do we want to attain a goal, or do we want /
to avoid all goals (like the philosopher, for t
instance, who scents a boundary, a cul-de-
sac, a prison, a piece of foolishness in every
goal) ?
7. Do we want to become more respected, or
more feared, or more despised ?
8. Do we want to become tyrants, and seducers,
or do we want to become shepherds and
gregarious animals ?
910.
The type of my disciples. To such men as con
cern me in any way I wish suffering, desolation,
sickness, ill-treatment, indignities of all kinds. I
wish them to be acquainted with profound self-
contempt, with the martyrdom of self-distrust, with
the misery of the defeated : I have no pity for
them ; because I wish them to have the only thing
which to-day proves whether a man has any value
or not, namely, the capacity of sticking to his guns.
911.
The happiness and self-contentedness of the
lazzaroni, or the blessedness of " beautiful souls,"
334 THE WILL TO POWER.
or the consumptive love of Puritan pietists,
proves nothing in regard to the order of rank
I among men. As a great educator one ought in-
i exorably to thrash a race of such blissful creatures
into unhappiness. The danger of belittlement and
of a slackening of powers follows immediately
I am opposed to happiness a la Spinoza or a la
Epicurus, and to all the relaxation of contemplative
states. But when virtue is the means to such
happiness, well then, one must master even virtue.
912.
\ I cannot see how any one can make up for
having missed going to a good school at the proper
( time. Such a person does not know himself; he
walks through life without ever having learned to
walk. His soft muscles betray themselves at every
step. Occasionally life itself is merciful enough to
make a man recover this lost and severe schooling :
by means of periods of sickness, perhaps, which
exact the utmost will-power and self-control ; or
j by means of a sudden state of poverty, which
threatens his wife and child, and which may force
a man to such activity as will restore energy to his
slackened tendons, and a tough spirit to his will to
life. The most desirable thing of all, however, is,
under all circumstances to have severe discipline at
the right time, i.e. at that age when it makes us
proud that people should expect great things from
us. For this is what distinguishes hard schooling,
as good schooling, from every other schooling,
namely, that a good deal is demanded, that a good
THE ORDER OF RANK. 335
deal is severely exacted ; that goodness, nay even
excellence itself, is required as if it were normal ;
that praise is scanty, that leniency is non-existent ;
that blame is sharp, practical, and without reprieve,
and has no regard to talent and antecedents. We
are in every way in need of such a school : and
this holds good of corporeal as well as of spiritual
things ; it would be fatal to draw distinctions here ! *
The same discipline makes the soldier and the
scholar efficient ; and, looked at more closely, there
is no true scholar who has not the instincts of a
true soldier in his veins. To be able to command
and to be able to obey in a proud fashion ; to keep
one s place in rank and file, and yet to be ready
at any moment to lead ; to prefer danger to
comfort ; not to weigh what is permitted and
what is forbidden in a tradesman s balance ; to be
more hostile to pettiness, slyness, and parasitism
than to wickedness. What is it that one learns in /
a hard school ? to obey and to command.
9I3-
We should repudiate merit and do only that
which stands above all praise and above all under-;
standing.
914-
The new forms of morality :
Faithful vows concerning that which one
wishes to do or to leave undone ; complete and
definite abstention from many things. Tests as
to whether one is ripe for such discipline.
336 THE WILL TO POWER.
915.
It is my desire to naturalise asceticism : I would
substitute the old intention of asceticism, " self-
denial," by my own intention, " self -strengthening " :
a gymnastic of the will ; a period of abstinence
and occasional fasting of every kind, even in things
intellectual ; a casuistry in deeds, in regard to the
opinions which we derive from our powers ; we
should try our hand at adventure and at deliberate
dangers. (Diners chez Magny : all intellectual
gourmets with spoilt stomachs.) Tests ought also
to be devised for discovering a man s power in
keeping his word.
916.
The things which have become spoilt through
having been abused by the Church :
(i) Asceticism. People have scarcely got the
courage yet to bring to light the natural utility
and necessity of asceticism for the purpose of the
. education of the will. Our ridiculous world of
education, before whose eyes the useful State
official hovers as an ideal to be striven for, believes
that it has completed its duty when it has in
structed or trained the brain ; it never even
suspects that something else is first of all necessary
i the education of will-power ; tests are devised for
everything except for the most important thing
of all : whether a man can will, whether he can
promise , the young man completes his education
without a question or an inquiry having been
THE ORDER OF RANK. 337
made concerning the problem of the highest value
of his nature.
(2) Fasting. In every sense even as a means
of maintaining the capacity for taking pleasure in
all good things (for instance, to give up reading
for a while, to hear no music for a while, to cease
from being amiable for a while : one ought also
to have fast days for one s virtues).
(3) The monastery. Temporary isolation with
severe seclusion from all letters, for instance ; a
kind of profound introspection and self-recovery,
which does not go out of the way of " temptations,"
but out of the way of " duties " ; a stepping out
of the daily round of one s environment ; a detach
ment from the tyranny of stimuli and external
influences, which condemns us to expend our
power only in reactions, and does not allow it to
gather volume until it bursts into spontaneous
activity (let anybody examine our scholars closely :
they only think reflexively, i.e. they must first
read before they can think).
(4) Feasts. A man must be very coarse in order
not to feel the presence of Christians and Christian
values as oppressive, so oppressive as to send all
festive moods to the devil. By feasts we under
stand : pride, high-spirits, exuberance ; scorn of
all kinds of seriousness and Philistinism ; a divine
saying of Yea to one s self, as the result of physical
plenitude and perfection all states to which the
Christian cannot honestly say Yea. A feast is a\
pagan thing par excellence.
(5) The courage of one s own nature : dressing-
up in morality. To be able to call one s passions
VOL. II. Y
338 THE WILL TO POWER.
good without the help of a moral formula : this is
the standard which measures the extent to which
a man is able to say Yea to his own nature,
namely, how much or how little he has to have
recourse to morality.
(6) Death. The foolish physiological fact must
be converted into a moral necessity. One should
\> , live in such a way that one may have the will to
die at the right time \
917.
To feel one s self stronger or, expressed other
wise : happiness always presupposes a comparison
(not necessarily with others, but with one s self, in
the midst of a state of growth, and without being
conscious that one is comparing).
Artificial accentuation : whether by means of
exciting chemicals or exciting errors (" halluci
nations.")
Take, for instance, the Christian s feeling of
security ; he feels himself strong in his confidence,
in his patience, and his resignation : this artificial
accentuation he owes to the fancy that he is pro
tected by a God. Take the feeling of superiority,
for instance : as when the Caliph of Morocco sees
only globes on which his three united kingdoms
cover four-fifths of the space. Take the feeling
of uniqueness, for instance : as when the European
imagines that culture belongs to Europe alone,
and when he regards himself as a sort of abridged
cosmic process ; or, as when the Christian makes
all existence revolve round the " Salvation of man."
The question is, where does one begin to feel the
THE ORDER OF RANK. 339
pressure of constraint : it is thus that different
degrees are ascertained. A philosopher, for instance,
in the midst of the coolest and most transmontane
feats of abstraction feels like a fish that enters its
element : while colours and tones oppress him ;
not to speak of those dumb desires of that which
others call " the ideal."
918.
A healthy and vigorous little boy will look up
sarcastically if he be asked : " Wilt thou become
virtuous? "-but he immediately becomes eager if
he be asked : " Wilt thou become stronger than
thy comrades ? "
*
How does one become stronger? By deciding
slowly ; and by holding firmly to the decision
once it is made. Everything else follows of itself.
Spontaneous and changeable natures : both species
of the weak. We must not confound ourselves
with them ; we must feel distance betimes !
Beware of good-natured people ! Dealings with
them make one torpid. All environment is good
which makes one~~exercise those defensive and
aggressive powers which are instinctive in man.
All one s inventiveness should apply itself to
putting one s power of will to the test. . . . Here
the determining factor must be recognised as
something which is not knowledge, astuteness, or
wit.
One must learn to command betimes, likewise
to obey. A man must learn modesty and tact in
340 THE WILL TO POWER.
modesty : he must learn to distinguish and to
honour where modesty is displayed ; he must like
wise distinguish and honour wherever he bestows
his confidence.
*
What does one repent most ? One s modesty ;
the fact that one has not lent an ear to one s most
individual needs ; the fact that one has mistaken
one s self; the fact that one has esteemed one s self
low ; the fact that one has lost all delicacy of
hearing in regard to one s instincts. This want of
reverence in regard to one s self is avenged by all
sorts of losses : in health, friendship, well-being,
pride, cheerfulness, freedom, determination, cour
age. A man never forgives himself, later on, for
this want of genuine egoism : he regards it as an
objection and as a cause of doubt concerning his
real ego.
919.
/ I should like man to begin by respecting himself : \
everything else follows of itself. Naturally a man
ceases from being anything to others in this way :
for this is precisely what they are least likely to
forgive. " What ? a man who respects himself? " *
This is something quite different from the blind
instinct to love one s self. Nothing is more common
in the love of the sexes or in that duality which is
* Cf. Disraeli in Tancred : " Self-respect, too, is a super
stition of past ages. ... It is not suited to these times ; it is
much too arrogant, too self-conceited, too egoistical. No
one is important enough to have self-respect nowadays "
(book iii. chap. v.). TR.
THE ORDER OF RANK. 341
called ego, than_.a. certain contempt for that which
is loved : the fatalism of love.
920.
" I will have this or that " ; u I would that this
or that were so " ; "I know that this or that is
so" the degrees of power: the man of will, the
man of desire, the man of fate.
921.
The means by which a strong species maintains
itself :
It grants itself the right of exceptional actions,
as a test of the power of self-control and
of freedom.
It abandons itself to states in which a man is
not allowed to be anything else than a
barbarian.
It tries to acquire strength of will by every
\J kind of asceticism.
It is not expansive ; it practises silence ; it
is cautious in regard to all charms.
It learns to obey in such a way that obedi
ence provides a test of self-maintenance.
Casujstry^is carried to its highest pitch in
regard to points of honour.
It never argues, " What is sauce for the goose
is sauce for the gander," but conversely !
it regards reward, and the ability to repay,
as a privilege, as a distinction.
It does not covet other people s virtues.
34 2 THE WILL TO POWER
922.
The way in which one has to treat raw savages
and the impossibility of dispensing with barbarous
methods, becomes obvious, in practice, when one
is transplanted, with all one s European pampering,
to a spot such as the Congo, or anywhere else
where it is necessary to maintain one s mastery
over barbarians.
923-
Warlike and peaceful people. Art thou a man
who has the instincts of a warrior in thy blood ?
If this be so, another question must be put. Do
thy instincts impel thee to attack or to defend ?
The rest of mankind, all those whose instincts are
not warlike, desire peace, concord, " freedom,"
" equal rights " : these things are but names and
steps for one and the same thing. Such men only
wish to go where it is not necessary for them to
defend themselves, such men become discon
tented with themselves when they are obliged to
offer resistance : they would fain create circum
stances in which war is no longer necessary. If
the worst came to the worst, they would resign
themselves, obey, and submit : all these things are
better than waging war thus does the Christian s
instinct, for instance, whisper to him. In the born
warrior s character there is something of armour,
likewise in the choice of his circumstances and in
the development of every one of his qualities :
weapons are best evolved by the latter type, shields
are best devised by the former.
THE ORDER OF RANK. 343
What expedients and what virtues do the un
armed and the undefended require in order to
survive and even to conquer?
924.
What will become of a man who no longer has
any reasons for either defence or attack ? What
will remain of his passions when he has lost those
which form his defence and his weapons ?
925.
A marginal note to a niaiserie anglaise : " Do V
not to others that which you would not that they
should do unto you." This stands for wisdom ;
this stands for prudence ; this stands as the very
basis of morality as " a golden maxim." John
Stuart Mill believes in it (and what Englishman
does not?). . . . But the maxim does not bear
investigation. The argument, " Do not as you
would not be done by," forbids action which pro
duce harmful results ; the thought behind always
is that an action is invariably requited. What if
some one came forward with the " Principe " in his
hands, and said : " We must do those actions alone
which enable us to steal a march on others,
and which deprive others of the power of doing
the same to us " ? On the other hand, let us re
member the Corsican who pledges his honour to
vendetta. He too does not desire to have a bullet
through him ; but the prospect of one, the proba
bility of getting one, does not deter him from
344 TIIE WILL TO POWER,
vindicating his honour. . . . And in all really de
cent actions are we not intentionally indifferent as
to what result they will bring ? To avoid an action
which might have harmful results, that would be
tantamount to forbidding all decent actions in
general.
Apart from this, the above maxim is valuable
because it betrays a certain type of man : it is the
instinct of the herd which formulates itself through
him, we are equal, we regard each other as equal :
as I am to thee so art thou to me. In this com
munity equivalence of actions is really believed in
an equivalence which never under any circum
stances manifests itself in real conditions. It is
impossible to requite every action : among real
individuals equal actions do not exist, consequently
there can be no such thing as " requital." . . .
When I do anything^ I am very far from thinking
that any" man is able to do anything at all tike
it: the action belongs to me . . . . Nobody can
pay me back for anything I do ; the most that can
be done is to make me the victim of another
action.
926.
Against John Stuart Mill. I abhor the man s
vulgarity when he says : " What is right for one
man is right for another " ; " Do not to others that
which you would not that they should do unto
you." Such principles would fain establish the
whole of human traffic upon mutual services^ so
that every action would appear to be a cash pay
ment for something done to us. The hypothesis
THE ORDER OF RANK. 345
here is ignoble to the last degree: it_is_ taken- for
granted. that there is some sort of cqttivalence in
value ^between my actions and thine ; the most per
sonal value of an action is simply cancelled in this
manner (that part of an action which has no
equivalent and which cannot be remunerated).
" Reciprocity " is a piece of egregious vulgarity ;
the mere fact that what I do cannot and may not
be done by another, that there is no such thing as
equivalence (except in those very select circles
where one actually has one s equal, inter pares],
that in a really profound sense a man never re
quites because he is something unique in himself
and can only do unique things, this fundamental /
conviction contains the cause of aristocratic aloof
ness from the mob, because the latter believes in
equality,and consequently in the feasibility of equiva
lence and " reciprocity."
927.
The suburban Philistinism of moral valuations
and of its concepts " useful " and " harmful " is well
founded ; it is the necessary point of view of a
community which is only able to see and survey
immediate and proximate consequences.
The State and the political man are already in
need of a more super-moral attitude of mind :
because they have to calculate concerning a much *
/ more complicated tissue of consequences. An eco- ^
/ nomic policy for the whole world should be possible
/ which could look at things in such broad perspec-
l tive that all its isolated demands would seem for
\J:he moment not only unjust, but arbitrary.
346 THE WILL TO POWER.
928.
" Should one follow one s feelings ? " To set
one s life at stake on the impulse of the moment,
and actuated by a generous feeling, has little worth,
and does not even distinguish one. Everybody is
alike in being capable of this and in behaving in
this way with determination, the criminal, the
bandit, and the Corsican certainly outstrip thej
honest man.
A higher degree of excellence would be to over
come this impulse, and to refrain from performing
an heroic deed at its bidding, and to remain cold,
raisonnable, free from the tempestuous surging of
concomitant sensations of delight. . . . The same
-. holds good of pity : it must first be sifted through
I reason ; without this it becomes just as dangerous
1 as any other passion.
i The blind yielding to a passion, whether it be
j generosity, pity, or hostility, is the cause of the
I greatest evil. Greatness of character does not
consist in not possessing these passions on the
contrary, a man should possess them to a terrible
degree : but he should lead them by the bridle . . .
and even this he should not do out of love of con
trol, but merely because. . . .
929.
" To give up one s life for a cause " very effec
tive. But there are many things for which one
gives up one s life : the passions, one and all, will
be gratified. Whether one s life be pledged to
pity, to anger, or to revenge it matters not from
THE ORDER OF RANK. 347
the point of view of value. How many have not
sacrificed their lives for pretty girls and even
what is worse, their health ! When one has
temperament, one instinctively chooses the most
dangerous things : if one is a philosopher, for in
stance, one chooses the adventures of speculation ; /
if one is virtuous, one chooses immorality. One \/
kind of man will risk nothing, another kind will
risk everything. Are we despisers of life? On
the contrary, what we seek is life raised to a
higher power, life in danger. . . . But, let me re- \
peat, we do not, on that account, wish to be more
virtuous than others. Pascal, for instance, wished
to risk nothing, and remained a Christian. That
perhaps was virtuous. A man always sacrifices
something.
930-
How many advantages does not a man sacrifice !
To how small an extent does he seek his own
profit ! All his emotions and passions wish to
assert their rights, and how remote a passion is
irom that cautious utility which consists in ^^^
personal profit !
A man does not strive after " happiness " ; one \ /
must be an Englishman to be able to believe that
a man is always seeking his own advantage.
Our desires long to violate things with passion
their overflowing strength seeks obstacles.
931-
All passions are generally useful, some directly,
others indirectly ; in regard to utility it is abso-
348 THE WILL TO POWER.
lutely impossible to fix upon any gradation of
values, however certainly the forces of nature in
general may be regarded as good (i.e. useful),
from an economic point of view, they are still
the sources of much that is terrible and much
that is fatally irrevocable. The most one might
say would be, that the mightiest passions are the
most valuable : seeing that no stronger sources
of power exist.
932.
All well-meaning, helpful, good-natured attitudes
of mind have not come to be honoured on account
, of their usefulness : but because they are the
conditions peculiar to rich souls who are able to
4 bestow and whose value consists in their vital
exuberance. Look into the eyes of the benevolent
man ! In them you will see the exact reverse
of self-denial, of hatred of self, of " Pascalism."
933-
In short) what we require is to dominate the
passions and not to weaken or to extirpate
them ! The greater the dominating power of the
^M will, the greater the freedom that may be given to
t the passions.
The " great man " is so, owing to the free scope
which he gives to his desires, and to the still
greater power which knows how to enlist these
\ magnificent monsters into its service.
The " good man " in every stage of civilisation
is at one and the same time the least dangerous
THE ORDER OF RANK 349
and the most useful: a sort of medium ; the idea
formed of such a man by the common mind is
that he is some one whom one has no reason to fear >
but whom one must not therefore despise.
Education : essentially a means of ruining ex
ceptions in favour of the rule. Culture : essenti- I
ally the means of directing taste against the
exceptions in favour of the mediocre.
Only when a culture can dispose of an overflow
of force, is it capable of being a hothouse for the
luxurious culture of the exception, of the experi
ment, of the danger, of the nuance : this is the
tendency of every aristocratic culture.
934-
All questions of strength : to what extent ought
one to try and prevail against the preservative
measures of society and the latter s prejudices ?
to what extent ought one to unfetter one s terrible
qualities^ through which so many go to the dogs ?
to what extent ought one to run counter to truth^
and take up sides with its most questionable
aspects ? to what extent ought one to oppose
suffering, self-contempt, pity, disease, vice, when
it is always open to question whether one can
ever master them (what does not kill us makes
us stronger . . .) ? and, finally, to what extent
ought one to acknowledge the rights of the rule,
of the common-place, of the petty, of the good, of
the upright, in fact of the average man, without
thereby allowing one s self to become vulgar ? . . .
The strongest test of character is to resist being
35O THE WILL TO POWER.
ruined by the seductiveness of goodness. Good
ness must be regarded as a luxury, as a refine
ment, as a vice.
3. THE NOBLE MAN.
935-
Type : real goodness, nobility, greatness of soul,
as the result of vital wealth : which does not give
in order to receive and which has no desire to
elevate itself by being good ; squandering is
typical of genuine goodness ; vital personal wealth
is its prerequisite.
93"-
Aristocracy. Gregarious ideals at present
culminating in the highest standard of value for
society. It has been attempted to give them a
cosmic, yea, and even a metaphysical, value. I
defend aristocracy against them.
Any society which would of itself preserve a
feeling of respect and dtticatesse in regard to
freedom, must consider itself as an exception, and
have a force against it from which it distinguishes
itself, and upon which it looks down with hostility.
The more rights I surrender and the more I
level myself down to others, the more deeply do
I sink into the average and ultimately into the
greatest number. The first condition which an
aristocratic society must have in order to maintain
a high degree of freedom among its members, is
that extreme tension which arises from the pres-
THE ORDER OF RANK. 351
ence of the most antagonistic instincts in all its
units : from their will to dominate. . . .
If ye would fain do away with strong contrasts
and differences of rank, ye will also abolish
strong love, lofty attitudes of mind, and the feeling
of individuality. \
*
Concerning the actual psychology of societies
based upon freedom and equality. What is it that
tends to diminish in such a society?
The will to be responsible for one s self (the loss
of this is a sign of the decline of autonomy) ; the
ability to defend and to attack, even in spiritual
matters ; the power of command ; the sense of
reverence, of subservience, the ability to be silent ;
great passion, great achievements, tragedy and
cheerfulness.
937-
In 1814 Augustin Thierry read what Mont-
losier had said in his work, De la Monarchic fran-
$aise : he answered with a cry of indignation, and
set himself to his task. That emigrant had said :
" Race d affranchis, race d esclaves arrache s de nos
mains, peuple tributaire, peuple nouveau, licence vous
fut octroyce d etre libres, et non pas a nous d etre
nobles ; pour nous tout est de droit, pour vous tout
est de grace, nous ne sommes point de votre com-
munautt ; nous sommes un tout par nous memes"
938.
How constantly the aristocratic world shears
and weakens itself ever more and more ! By
352 THE WILL TO POWER.
means of its noble instincts it abandons its
privileges, and owing to its refined and excessive
culture, it takes an interest in the people, the
weak, the poor, and the poetry of the lowly, etc.
939-
There is such a thing as a noble and dangerous
form of carelessness, which allows of profound
conclusions and insight : the carelessness of the
self-reliant and over-rich soul, which has never
troubled itself about friends, but which knows only
hospitality and knows how to practise it ; whose
heart and house are open to all who will enter
beggar, cripple, or king. This is genuine sociability :
he who is capable of it has hundreds of " friends,"
but probably not one friend.
940.
The teaching fjuySev ayav applies to men with
^overflowing strength, not to the mediocre. 67-
Kpdreia and do-fcyo-is are only steps to higher
things. Above them stands " golden Nature."
" Thou shalt" unconditional obedience in
\ Stoics, in Christian and Arabian Orders, in Kant s
philosophy (it is immaterial whether this obedience
is shown to a superior or to a concept).
Higher than " Thou shalt " stands " I will "
(the heroes) ; higher than " I will " stands " I am "
(the gods of the Greeks).
Barbarian gods express nothing of the pleasure
of restraint, they are neither simple, nor light-
hearted, nor moderate.
THE ORDER OF RANK. 353
941.
The essence of our gardens and palaces (and to
the same extent the essence of all yearning after
riches) is the desire to rid the eye of disorder ana
vulgarity, and to build a home for our soul s nobility.
The majority of people certainly believe that
they will develop higher natures when those
beautiful and peaceful things have operated upon
them : hence the exodus to Italy, hence all travel- .
ling, etc., and all reading and visits to theatres. ^5
People want to be formed that is the kernel of
their labours for culture ! But the strong, the
mighty, would themselves have a hand in the form
ing, and would fain have nothing strange about them \
It is for this reason, too, that men go to open
Nature, not to find themselves, but to lose them- \
selves and to forget themselves. The desire " to get
away from one s self " is proper to all weaklings, and I
to all those who are discontented with themselves. /
942.
The only nobility is that of birth and blood.
(I do not refer here to the prefix " Lord " and
L almanac de Gotha : this is a parenthesis for
donkeys.) Wherever people speak of the " aristo
cracy of intellect," reasons are generally not
lacking for concealing something ; it is known to
be a password among ambitious Jews. Intellect
alone does not ennoble ; on the contrary, some
thing is always needed to ennoble intellect. What
then is needed ? Blood.
VOL. II. Z
354 THE WILL TO TOWER.
943-
" T1 iat is noble ?
External punctiliousness ; because this punc
tiliousness hedges a man about, keeps him at a
distance, saves him from being confounded with
somebody else.
A frivolous appearance in word, clothing, and
bearing, with which stoical hardness and self-
control protect themselves from all prying inquisi-
tiveness or curiosity.
A slow step and a slow glance. There are
not too many valuable things on earth : and these
come and wish to come of themselves to him who
has value. We are not quick to admire.
We know how to bear poverty, want, and
even illness.
We avoid small honours owing to our mis
trust of all who are over-ready to praise : for the
man who praises believes he understands what he
praises : but to understand Balzac, that typical
man of ambition, betrayed the fact comprendre
Jest /galer.
Our doubt concerning the communicativeness
of our hearts goes very deep ; to us, loneliness is
not a matter of choice, it is imposed upon us.
We are convinced that we only have duties to
our equals, to others we do as we think best : we
know that justice is only to be expected among
equals (alas ! this will not be realised for some
time to come).
We are ironical towards the " gifted " ; we
hold the belief that no morality is possible with
out good birth.
THE ORDER OF RANK. 355
We always feel as if we were those who had
to dispense honours : while he is not found too
frequently who would be worthy of honouring us.
We are always disguised : the higher a man s
nature the more is he in need of remaining incog
nito. If there be a God, then out of sheer decency
He ought only to show Himself on earth in the
form of a man.
We are capable of otium, of the uncondi
tional conviction that although a handicraft does
not shame one in any sense, it certainly reduces
one s rank. However much we may respect " in
dustry," and know how to give it its due, we do
not appreciate it in a bourgeois sense, or after the
manner of those insatiable and cackling artists who,
like hens, cackle and lay eggs, and cackle again.
We protect artists and poets and any one
who happens to be a master in something ; but as
creatures of a higher order than those, who only
know how to do something, who are only " pro
ductive men," we do not confound ourselves with
them.
We find joy in all forms and ceremonies ;
we would fain foster everything formal, and we
are convinced that courtesy is one of the greatest
virtues ; we feel suspicious of every kind of laisser
alter, including the freedom of the press and of
thought ; because, under such conditions, the intel
lect grows easy-going and coarse, and stretches
its limbs.
We take pleasure in women as in a perhaps
daintier, more delicate, and more ethereal kind of
creature. What a treat it is to meet creatures
356 THE WILL TO POWER.
who have only dancing and nonsense and finery
in their minds ! They have always been the de
light of every tense and profound male soul, whose
life is burdened with heavy responsibilities.
We take pleasure in princes and in priests,
because in big things, as in small, they actually up
hold the belief in the difference of human values,
even in the estimation of the past, and at least
symbolically.
We are able to keep silence : but we do not
breathe a word of this in the presence of listeners.
We are able to endure long enmities : we
lack the power of easy reconciliations.
We have a loathing of demagogism, of en
lightenment, of amiability, and plebeian familiarity.
We collect precious things, the needs of
higher and fastidious souls ; we wish to possess
nothing in common. We want to have our own
books, our own landscapes.
We protest against evil and fine experiences,
and take care not to generalise too quickly. The
individual case : how ironically we regard it when
it has the bad taste to put on the airs of a rule !
We love that which is natf, and naif people,
but as spectators and higher creatures ; we think
Faust is just as simple as his Margaret.
We have a low estimation of good people,
^ because they are gregarious animals : we know
how often an invaluable golden drop of goodness
lies concealed beneath the most evil, the most
malicious, and the hardest exterior, and that this
single grain outweighs all the mere goody-goodi-
ness of milk-and-watery souls.
THE ORDER OF RANK. 357
We don t regard a man of our kind as refuted
by his vices, nor by his tomfooleries. We are well
aware that we are not recognised with ease, and
that we have every reason to make our foreground
very prominent.
944.
What is noble ? The fact that one is constantly
forced to be playing a part. That one is constantly
searching for situations in which one is forced
to put on airs. That one leaves happiness to the
greatest number : the happiness which consists of
inner peacefulness, of virtue, of comfort, and of
Anglo-angelic-back-parlour-smugness,tf la Spencer.
That one instinctively seeks for heavy responsi
bilities. That one knows how to create enemies
everywhere, at a pinch even in one s self. That one
contradicts the greatest number^ not in words at
all, but by continually behaving differently from
them.
945-
Virtue (for instance, truthfulness) is our most
noble and most dangerous luxury. We must not
decline the disadvantages which it brings in its
train.
946.
We refuse to be praised : we do what serves our
purpose, what gives us pleasure, or what we are
obliged to do.
947-
What is chastity in a man ? It means that his
taste in sex has remained noble ; that in erotlcis
358 THE WILL TO POWER
he likes neither the brutal, the morbid, nor the
clever.
948.
The concept of honour is founded upon the
belief in select society, in knightly excellences, in
the obligation of having continually to play a part.
In essentials it means that one does not take one s
life too seriously, that one adheres unconditionally
to the most dignified manners in one s dealings
with everybody (at least in so far as they do not
belong to " us ") ; that one is neither familiar, nor
good-natured, nor hearty, nor modest, except inter
pares ; that one is always playing a part.
949.
The fact that one sets one s life, one s health,
and one s honour at stake, is the result of high
spirits and of an overflowing and spendthrift will :
it is not the result of philanthropy, but of the fact
that every danger kindles our curiosity concern
ing the measure of our strength, and provokes our
courage.
950.
" Eagles swoop down straight " nobility of
soul is best revealed by the magnificent and proud
foolishness with which it makes its attacks.
951-
War should be made against all namby-pamby
ideas of nobility \ A certain modicum of brutality
THE ORDER OF RANK. 359
cannot be dispensed with : no more than we can do
without a certain approximation to criminality.
" Self-satisfaction " must not be allowed ; a man
should look upon himself with an adventurous
spirit ; he should experiment with himself and
run risks with himself no beautiful soul-quackery
should be tolerated. I want to give a more robust
ideal a chance of prevailing.
952.
" Paradise is under the shadow of a swordsman "
this is also a symbol and a test-word by which
souls with noble and warrior-like origin betray and
discover themselves.
953-
The two paths. There comes a period when
man has a surplus amount of power at his dis
posal. Science aims at establishing the slavery of
nature.
Then man acquires the leisure in which to
develop himself into something new and more
lofty. A new aristocracy. It is then that a large
number of virtues which are now conditions of
existence are superseded. Qualities which are no
longer needed are on that account lost. We no
longer need virtues : consequently we are losing
them (likewise the morality of "one thing is
needful," of the salvation of the soul, and of im
mortality : these were means wherewith to make
man capable of enormous self-tyranny, through the
emotion of great fear ! ! !).
The different kinds of needs by means of whose
360 THE WILL TO POWER.
discipline man is formed : need teaches work,
thought, and self-control.
*
Physiological purification and strengthening. The
new aristocracy is in need of an opposing body
which it may combat : it must be driven to ex
tremities in order to maintain itself.
The two futures of mankind: (i) the conse
quence of a levelling-down to mediocrity ; (2)
conscious aloofness and self-development.
A doctrine which would cleave &gulf: it main
tains the highest and the lowest species (it destroys
the intermediate).
The aristocracies, both spiritual and temporal,
which have existed hitherto prove nothing against
the necessity of a new aristocracy.
4. THE LORDS OF THE EARTH.
954-
A certain question constantly recurs to us ; it is
perhaps a seductive and evil question ; may it be
whispered into the ears of those who have a right
to such doubtful problems those strong souls of
to-day whose dominion over themselves is un
swerving : is it not high time, now that the type
" gregarious animal " is developing ever more and
more in Europe, to set about rearing, thoroughly,
artificially, and consciously, an opposite type, and
to attempt to establish the latter s virtues ? And
would not the democratic movement itself find for
THE ORDER OF RANK. 361
the first time a sort of goal, salvation, and justifi
cation, if some one appeared who availed himself
of it so that at last, beside its new and sublime
product, slavery (for this must be the end of
European democracy), that higher species of ruling
and Caesarian spirits might also be produced,
which would stand upon it, hold to it, and would
elevate themselves through it ? This new race
would climb aloft to new and hitherto impossible
things, to a broader vision, and to its task on
earth.
955-
The aspect of the European of to-day makes
me very hopeful. A daring and ruling race is
here building itself up upon the foundation of an
extremely intelligent, gregarious mass. It is
obvious that the educational movements for the
latter are not alone prominent nowadays.
956.
The same conditions which go to develop the
gregarious animal also force the development of
the leaders.
957-
The question, and at the same time the task, is
approaching with hesitation, terrible as Fate, but
nevertheless inevitable : how shall the earth as a
whole be ruled ? And to what end shall man as
a whole no longer as a people or as a race be
reared and trained ?
Legislative moralities are the principal means
362 THE WILL TO POWER.
by which one can form mankind, according to the
fancy oi a creative and profound will : provided,
of course, that such an artistic will of the first
order gets the power into its own hands, and can
make its creative will prevail over long periods in
the form of legislation, religions, and morals. At
present, and probably for some time to come, one
will seek such colossally creative men, such really
great men, as I understand them, in vain : they
will be lacking, until, after many disappointments,
we are forced to begin to understand why it is
they are lacking, and that nothing bars with
greater hostility their rise and development, at
present and for some time to come, than that
which is now called the morality in Europe. Just
as if there were no other kind of morality, and
could be no other kind, than the one we have
already characterised as herd-morality. It is this
morality which is now striving with all its power
, to attain to that green-meadow happiness on earth,
which consists in security, absence of danger, ease,
I facilities for livelihood, and, last but not least, " if
! all goes well," even hopes to dispense with all
; kinds of shepherds and bell-wethers. The two
doctrines which it preaches most universally are
~" equality of rights " and " pity for all sufferers "
and it even regards suffering itself as something
which must be got rid of absolutely. That such
ideas may be modern leads one to think very
poorly of modernity. He, however, who has re
flected deeply concerning the question, how and
where the plant man has hitherto grown most
vigorously, is forced to believe that this has
THE ORDER OF RANK. 363
always taken place under the opposite conditions ;
that to this end the danger of the situation has to
increase enormously, his inventive faculty and
dissembling powers have to fight their way up
under long oppression and compulsion, and his
will to life has to be increased to the uncon
ditioned will to power, to over-power : he believes
that danger, severity, violence, peril in the street
and in the heart, inequality of rights, secrecy,
stoicism, seductive art, and devilry of every kind
in short, the opposite of all gregarious desiderata
are necessary for the elevation of man. Such a
morality with opposite designs, which would rear
man upwards instead of to comfort and mediocrity ;
such a morality, with the intention of producing a
ruling caste the future lords of the earth must,
in order to be taught at all, introduce itself as if
it were in some way correlated to the prevailing
moral law, and must come forward under the
cover of the latter s words and forms. But seeing
that, to this end, a host of transitionary and de
ceptive measures must be discovered, and that the
life of a single individual stands for almost nothing
in view of the accomplishment of such lengthy
tasks and aims, the first thing that must be done
is- to rear a new kind of man in whom the duration
of the necessary will and the necessary instincts
is guaranteed for many generations. This must
be a new kind of ruling species and caste this
ought to be quite as clear as the somewhat lengthy
and not easily expressed consequences of this
thought. The aim should be to prepare a trans-
valuation of values for a particularly strong kind of
364 THE WILL TO POWER.
man, most highly gifted in intellect and will, and,
to this end, slowly and cautiously to liberate in
him a whole host of slandered instincts hitherto
held in check : whoever meditates about this
problem belongs to us, the free spirits certainly
not to that kind of " free spirit " which has existed
hitherto : for these desired practically the reverse.
To this order, it seems to me, belong, above all,
the pessimists of Europe, the poets and thinkers
of a revolted idealism, in so far as their discontent
with existence in general must consistently at least
have led them to be dissatisfied with the man of
the present ; the same applies to certain insati
ably ambitious artists who courageously and un
conditionally fight against the gregarious animal
for the special rights of higher men, and subdue
all herd-instincts and precautions of more ex
ceptional minds by their seductive art. Thirdly
and lastly, we should include in this group all
those critics and historians by whom the dis
covery of the Old World, which has begun so
happily this was the work of the new Columbus,
of German intellect will be courageously con
tinued (for we still stand in the very first stages
of this conquest). For in the Old World, as a
matter of fact, a different and more lordly morality
ruled than that of to-day ; and the man of antiquity,
under the educational ban of his morality, was
a stronger and deeper man than the man of
to-day up to the present he has been the ,
only well - constituted man. The temptation,
however, which from antiquity to the present
day has always exercised its power on such lucky
THE ORDER OF RANK. 365
strokes of Nature, i.e. on strong and enterprising
souls, is, even at the present day, the most subtle
and most effective of anti-democratic and anti-
Christian powers, just as it was in the time of the
Renaissance.
958.
I am writing for a race of men which does not
yet exist : for " the lords of the earth."
In Plato s Theages the following passage will
be found : " Every one of us would like if possible
to be master of mankind ; if possible, a God." This
attitude of mind must be reinstated in our midst.
Englishmen, Americans, and Russians.
959-
That primeval forest-plant " Man " always
appears where the struggle for power has been
waged longest. Great men.
Primeval forest creatures, the Romans.
960.
From now henceforward there will be such
favourable first conditions for greater ruling powers
as have never yet been found on earth. And
this is by no means the most important point.
The establishment has been made possible of in
ternational race unions which will set themselves
the task of rearing a ruling race, the future " lords
of the earth " a new, vast aristocracy based upon
the most severe self-discipline, in which the will of
philosophical men of power and artist-tyrants will
366 THE WILL TO POWER.
be stamped upon thousands of years : a higher
species of men which, thanks to their preponder
ance of will, knowledge, riches, and influence, will
avail themselves of democratic Europe as the
most suitable and supple instrument they can
have for taking the fate of the earth into their
own hands, and working as artists upon man him
self. Enough! The- time is coming for us to
transform all our views on politics. f
5. THE GREAT MAN.
961.
I will endeavour to see at which periods in
history great men arise. The significance of
despotic moralities that have lasted a long time :
they strain the bow, provided they do not break it.
962.
A great man, a man whom Nature has built up
an 5 inverTtetTin a grand style, What is sii^h a
man ? First t in his general course of action his
consistency is so broad that owinLJtCL_its very
breadtn it can be surveyed only with difficulty,
and consequently misleads ; ? he possesses the
^capacity of extending his will over great stretches
of his life, and of despising and rejecting all small
things, whatever most beautiful and " divine "
things of the world there may be among them.
, he is colder, harder, less cautious and more
reejrom the fear of " public opinioft " ; he does n t
econ
/ \freej
THE ORDER OF RANK. 367
possess the VI H-IMHI whuph ^TC ^nrnpaHKIf* with
nnr nny
of those things whidy. .are rr>linf f^
" virtues ot" the hurJ.",. If he is unable to /tw7, he
walks alone; (he
he asks for no ^compassionate" heart, but servants/
instruments ; in his dealings with men his one
aim is to make something out of them. He knows
that he cannot reveal himself to anybody : he
thinks it bad taste to become familiar ; and as a
rule he is not familiar when people think he is.
When he is not talking to his soul, he wears a
mask. He would rather lie than tell the truth,
because lying requires morejpirit and will. Jbere
is1a_ loneliness, wifhin his heart i which neither \\
praise nor blame can reach, because he js his own
ju dge from whomjs no appeal.
963-
The great man is necessarily a sceptic (I do
not mean to say by this that he must appear to
be one), provided that greatness consists in this :
to will something great, together with the means
thereto. Freedom from any kind of conviction is j
a factor in his strength of will. And thus it is
in keeping with that " enlightened form of des
potism " which every great passion exercises.
Such a passion enlists intellect in its service ;
it even has the courage for unholy means ; it
creates without hesitation ; it allows itself con
victions, it even uses them, but it never submits
368 THE WILL TO POWER.
to them. The need of faith and of anything un
conditionally negative or affirmative is a proof of
weakness ; all weakness is weakness of will. The
man of faith, the believer, is necessarily an inferior
species of man. From this it follows that " all
freedom of spirit," i.e. instinctive scepticism, is the
prerequisite of greatness.
964.
The great man is conscious of his power over a
people, and of the fact that he coincides temporarily
with a people or with a century this magnifying
of his self-consciousness as causa and voluntas is
misunderstood as " altruism " : he feels driven to
means of communication : all great men are in
ventive in such means. They want to form great
communities in their own image ; they would fain
give multiformity and disorder definite shape ; it
stimulates them to behold chaos.
The misunderstanding of love. There is a
slavish love which subordinates itself and gives itself
away which idealises and deceives itself; there
is a divine species of love which despises and loves
at the same time, and which remodels and elevates
the thing it loves.
\ The object is to attain that enormous energy of
\greatness which can model the man of the future
by means of discipline and also by means of the
annihilation of millions of the bungled and botched,
and which can yet avoid going to ruin at the sight
of the suffering created thereby, the like of which
has never been seen before.
THE ORDER OF RANK. 369
965.
The revolution, confusion, and distress of whole
peoples is in my opinion of less importance than
the misfortunes which attend great individuals in
their development. We must not allow ourselves
to be deceived : the many misfortunes of all these
small folk do not together constitute a sum-total,
except in the feelings of mighty men. To think of
one s self in moments of great danger, and to draw
one s own advantage from the calamities of thou
sands in the case of the man who differs very much
from the common ruck may be a sign of a great
character which is able to master its feelings of
pity and justice.
966.
In contradistinction to the animal, man has
developed such a host of antagonistic instincts and
impulses in himself, that he has become master of
the earth by means of this synthesis. Moralities
are only the expression of local and limited orders
of rank in this multifarious world of instincts which
prevent man from perishing through their antag
onism. Thus a masterful instinct so weakens
and subtilises the instinct which opposes it that it
becomes an impulse which provides the stimulus
for the activity of the principal instinct.
The highest man would have the greatest
multifariousness in his instincts, and he would
possess these in the relatively strongest degree in
which he is able to endure them. As a matter of
fact, wherever the plant, man, is found strong,
VOL. II. 2 A
370 THE WILL TO POWER.
mighty instincts are to be found opposing each
other (e.g. Shakespeare), but they are subdued.
967.
Would one not be justified in reckoning all
i great men among the wickedl This is not so
easy to demonstrate in the case of individuals.
They are so frequently capable of masterly dis
simulation that they very often assume the airs and
forms of great virtues. Often, too, they seriously
reverence virtues, and in such a way as to be
passionately hard towards themselves ; but as the
result of cruelty. Seen from a distance such things
are liable to deceive. Many, on the other hand,
misunderstand themselves ; not infrequently, too,
a great mission will call forth great qualities, eg.
justice. The essential fact is : the greatest men
may also perhaps have great virtues, but then
they also have the opposites of these virtues. I
believe that it is precisely out of the presence
of these opposites and of the feelings they suscitate,
that the great man arises, for the great man is the
broad arch which spans two banks lying far apart.
968.
In great men we find the specific qualities ol
life in their highest manifestation : injustice, false
hood, exploitation. But inasmuch as their effect
has always been overwhelming, their essential
nature has been most thoroughly misunderstood,
THE ORDER OF RANK. 371
and interpreted as goodness. The type of such
an interpreter would be Carlyle.*
969.
Generally speaking, everything is worth no more
and no less than one has paid for it. This of
course does not hold good in the case of an isolated
individual ; the great capacities of the individual
have no relation whatsoever to that which he has
done, sacrificed, and suffered for them. But if
one should examine the previous history of his
race one would be sure to find the record of an
extraordinary storing up and capitalising of power
by means of all kinds of abstinence, struggle, in
dustry, and determination. It is because the great
man has cost so much, and not because he stands
there as a miracle, as a gift from heaven, or as
an accident, that he became great : " Heredity "
is a false notion. A man s ancestors have always
paid the price of what he is.
970.
The danger of modesty. To adapt ourselves
too early to duties, societies, and daily schemes of
work in which accident may have placed us, at a
time when neither our powers nor our aim in life
has stepped peremptorily into our consciousness ;
* This not only refers to Heroes and Hero- Worship, but
doubtless to Carlyle s prodigious misunderstanding of Goethe
a misunderstanding which still requires to be put right by
a critic untainted by Puritanism. TR.
372 THE WILL TO POWER.
the premature certainty of conscience and feeling
of relief and of sociability which is acquired by
this precocious, modest attitude, and which appears
to our minds as a deliverance from those inner and
outer disturbances of our feelings all this pampers
and keeps a man down in the most dangerous
fashion imaginable, To learn to respect things
which people about us respect, as if we had no
standard or right of our own to determine values ;
the strain of appraising things as others appraise
them, counter to the whisperings of our inner taste,
which also has a conscience of its own, becomes
a terribly subtle kind of constraint : and if in the
end no explosion takes place which bursts all the
bonds of love and morality at once, then such a
spirit becomes withered, dwarfed, feminine, and
objective. The reverse of this is bad enough, but
still it is better than the foregoing : to suffer from
one s environment, from its praise just as much as
from its blame ; to be wounded by it and to fester
inwardly without betraying the fact; to defend
one s self involuntarily and suspiciously against its
love ; to learn to be silent, and perchance to conceal
this by talking ; to create nooks and safe, lonely
hiding-places where one can go and take breath
for a moment, or shed tears of sublime comfort
until at last one has grown strong enough to say :
" What on earth have I to do with you ? " and to
go one s way alone.
971-
Those men who are in themselves destinies, and
whose advent is the advent of fate, the whole race of
THE ORDER OF RANK. 373
heroic bearers of burdens : oh ! how heartily and
gladly would they have respite from themselves for
once in a while ! how they crave after stout hearts
and shoulders, that they might free themselves, were
it bwt for an hour or two, from that which oppresses
them ! And how fruitlessly they crave ! . .
They wait i_they.. observe all that passes before
their eyes: no man even cometh nigh to them with a
trjJusancItfh part of their suffering and passion ; no"
manguesseth to wnat end they have waited. . . .""
ATTa^t,"^Ta^t7THey"^arn the first lesson oTlheir
life : to wait no longer ; and forthwith they learn
their second lesson : to be affable, to be modest ;
and from that time onwards to endure everybody
and every kind of thing in short, to endure still
a little more than they had endured theretofore.
6. THE HIGHEST MAN AS LAWGIVER OF
THE FUTURE.
972.
The lawgivers of the future. After having tried
for a long time in vain to attach a particular
meaning to the word " philosopher," for I found
many antagonistic traits, I recognised that we can
distinguish between two kinds of philosophers :
(1) Those who desire to establish any large
system of values (logical or moral) ;
(2) Those who are the lawgivers of such valua
tions.
The former try to seize upon the world of the
present or the past, by embodying or abbreviating
374 THE WILL TO POWER.
the multifarious phenomena by means of signs :
their object is to make it possible for us to survey,
to reflect upon, to comprehend, and to utilise
everything that has happened hitherto they serve
the purpose of man by using all past things to
the benefit of his future.
The second class, however, are commanders ; they
say : " Thus shall it be ! " They alone determine
\ the " whither " and the " wherefore," and that
which will be useful and beneficial to man ; they
have command over the previous work of scientific
men, and all knowledge is to them only a means
to their creations. This second kind of philosopher
seldom appears ; and as a matter of fact their
situation and their danger is appalling. How often
have they not intentionally blindfolded their eyes
in order to shut out the sight of the small strip of
ground which separates them from the abyss and
from utter destruction. Plato, for instance, when
he persuaded himself that " the good," as he wanted
it, was not Plato s good, but " the good in itself,"
the eternal treasure which a certain man of the
name of Plato had chanced to find on his way !
This same will to blindness prevails in a much
coarser form in the case of the founders of religion ;
their " Thou shalt " must on no account sound to
their ears like " I will," they only dare to pursue
their task as if under the command of God ; their
legislation of values can only be a burden they can
bear if they regard it as " revelation," in this way
their conscience is not crushed by the responsi
bility.
As soon as those two comforting expedients
THE ORDER OF RANK. 375
that of Plato and that of Muhammed have been
overthrown, and no thinker can any longer relieve
his conscience with the hypothesis " God " or
" eternal values," the claim of the lawgiver to de
termine new values rises to an awfulness which has j
not yet been experienced. Now those elect, on J
whom the faint light of such a duty is beginning
to dawn, try and see whether they cannot escape
it as their greatest danger by means of a
timely side-spring : for instance, they try to persuade
themselves that their task is already accomplished,
or that it defies accomplishment, or that their
shoulders are not broad enough for such burdens,
or that they are already taken up with burdens
closer to hand, or even that this new and remote
duty is a temptation and a seduction, drawing
them away from all other duties ; a disease, a kind of
madness. Many, as a matter of fact, do succeed in
evading the path appointed to them: throughout the
whole of history we can see the traces of such de
serters and their guilty consciences. In most cases,
however, there comes to such men of destiny that
hour of delivery, that autumnal season of maturity,!
in which they are forced to do that which they didj
not even "wish to do": and that deed before \
which in the past they have trembled most, falls
easily and unsought from the tree, as an involun-j
tary deed, almost as a present.
973-
The human horizon. Philosophers may be con
ceived as men who make the greatest efforts to
376 THE WILL TO POWER.
discover to what extent man can elevate himself
this holds good more particularly of Plato : how
far man s poiver can extend. But they do this as
individuals ; perhaps the instinct of Caesars and
of all founders of states, etc., was greater, for it pre
occupied itself with the question how far man could
be urged forward in development under " favourable
circumstances." What they did not sufficiently
understand, however, was the nature of favourable
circumstances. The great question : "Where has the
plant man grown most magnificently heretofore?"
In order to answer this, a comparative study of
history is necessary.
974-
Every fact and every work exercises a fresh
persuasion over every age and every new species
of man. History always enunciates new truths.
975-
To remain objective, severe, firm, and hard
while making a thought prevail is perhaps the best
forte of artists ; but if for this purpose any one have
to work upon human material (as teachers, states
men, have to do, etc.), then the repose, the coldness,
and the hardness soon vanish. In natures like Caesar
and Napoleon we are able to divine something of
the nature of " disinterestedness " in their work on
their marble, whatever be the number of men that
are sacrificed in the process. In this direction the
future of higher men lies : to bear the greatest re
sponsibilities and not to go to rack and ruin
THE ORDER OF RANK. 377
through them. Hitherto the deceptions of inspira
tion have almost always been necessary for a man
not to lose faith in his own hand, and in his right
to his task.
976.
The reason why philosophers are mostly failures.
Because among the conditions which determine
them there are qualities which generally ruin other
men :
(1) A philosopher must have an enormous
multiplicity of qualities ; he must be a sort of ab
breviation of man and have all man s high and
base desires : the danger of the contrast within
him, and of the possibility of his loathing him
self;
(2) He must be inquisitive in an extraordinary
number of ways : the danger of versatility ;
(3) He must be just and honest in the highest
sense, but profound both in love and hate (and in
injustice) ;
(4) He must not only be a spectator but a law
giver : a judge and defendant (in so far as he is an
abbreviation of the world) ;
(5) He must be extremely multiform and yet
firm and hard. He must be supple.
977-
The really regal calling of the philosopher
(according to the expression of Alcuin the Anglo-
Saxon) : " Prava corrigere, et recta corroborare^ et
sancta sublimare"
THE WILL TO POWER.
978.
The new philosopher can only arise in conjunc
tion with a ruling class, as the highest spiritualisa-
tion of the latter. Great politics, the rule of the
, earth, as a proximate contingency ; the total lack of
I principles necessary thereto.
979-
Fundamental concept : the new values must first
be created this remains our duty\ The philoso
pher must be our lawgiver. New species. (How
the greatest species hitherto [for instance, the
Greeks] were reared : this kind of accident must
now be consciously striven for.)
980.
Nj Supposing one thinks of the philosopher as an
educator who, looking down from his lonely eleva
tion, is powerful enough to draw long chains of
generations up to him : then he must be granted
the most terrible privileges of a great educator.
An educator never says what he himself thinks ;
\but only that which he thinks it is good for those
(whom he is educating to hear upon any subject.
This dissimulation on his part must not be found
out ; it is part of his masterliness that people should
believe in his honesty, he must be capable of all
the means of discipline and education : there are
some natures which he will only be able to raise
by means of lashing them with his scorn ; others
who are lazy, irresolute, cowardly, and vain, he will
THE ORDER OF RANK. 379
be able to affect only with exaggerated praise.
Such a teacher stands beyond good and evil, but
nobody must know that he does.
981.
We must not make men " better," we must not
talk to them about morality in any form as if
" morality in itself," or an ideal kind of man in
general, could be taken for granted ; but we must
create circumstances in which stronger men are
necessary, such as for their part will require a
morality (or, better still : a bodily and spiritual
discipline) which makes men strong, and upon
which they will consequently insist ! As they will f
need one so badly, they will have it.
We must not let ourselves be seduced by blue V
eyes and heaving breasts : greatness of soul has
absolutely nothing romantic about it. And unfortu- I
nately nothing ivhatever amiable either.
982.
From warriors we must learn: (i) to associate
death with those interests for which we are fighting
that makes us venerable; (2) we must learn to
sacrifice numbers, and to take our cause sufficiently
seriously not to spare men ; (3) we must practise
inexorable discipline, and allow ourselves violence
and cunning in war.
983-
The education which rears those ruling virtues
that allow a man to become master of his benevo-
soul.
V
380 THE WILL TO POWER.
lence and his pity : the great disciplinary virtues
("Forgive thine enemies " is mere child s play beside
them), and the passions of the creator, must be ele
vated to the heights we must cease from carving
marble ! The exceptional and powerful position
of those creatures (compared with that of all
princes hitherto) : the Roman Caesar with Christ s
984.
We must not separate greatness of soul from
intellectual greatness. For the former involves
independence-, but without intellectual greatness
independence should not be allowed ; all it does is
to create disasters even in its lust of well-doing
and of practising "justice." Inferior spirits must
obey, consequently they cannot be possessed of
greatness.
985.
The more lofty philosophical man who is sur
rounded by loneliness, not because he wishes to be
alone, but because he is what he is, and cannot find
his equal : what a number of dangers and torments
are reserved for him, precisely at the present time,
when we have lost our belief in the order of rank,
and consequently no longer know how to under
stand or honour this isolation ! Formerly the sage
almost sanctified himself in the consciences of the
mob by going aside in this way ; to-day the anchor
ite sees himself as though enveloped in a cloud of
gloomy doubt and suspicions. And not alone by the
THE ORDER OF RANK. 381
envious and the wretched : in every well-meant act
that he experiences he is bound to discover mis
understanding, neglect, and superficiality. He
knows the crafty tricks of foolish pity which makes
these people feel so good and holy when they
attempt to save him from his own destiny, by
giving him more comfortable situations and more
decent and reliable society. Yes, he will even get
to admire the unconscious lust of destruction with
which all mediocre spirits stand up and oppose him,
believing all the while that they have a holy right
to do so ! For men of such incomprehensible
loneliness it is necessary to put a good stretch ol
country between them and the officiousness of their
fellows : this is part of their prudence. For such
a man to maintain himself uppermost to-day amid
the dangerous maelstroms of the age which threaten
to draw him under, even cunning and disguise will
be necessary. Every attempt he makes to order
his life in the present and with the present every
time he draws near to these men and their modern
desires, he will have to expiate as if it were an
actual sin : and withal he may look with wonder
at the concealed wisdom of his nature, which after
every one of these attempts immediately leads him
back to himself by means of illnesses and painful
accidents.
986.
" Maledetto colui
che contrista un spirto immortal ! "
MANZONI (Conte di Carmagnola, Act II.)
382 THE WILL TO POWER.
987
The most difficult and the highest form which
man can attain is the most seldom successful :
thus the history of philosophy reveals a super
abundance of bungled and unhappy cases of man
hood, and its march is an extremely slow one ;
whole centuries intervene and suppress what has
been achieved : and in this way the connecting-
link is always made to fail. It is an appalling
history, this history of the highest men, of the
sages. What is most often damaged is precisely
the recollection of great men, for the semi-successful
and botched cases of mankind misunderstand
them and overcome them by their " successes."
Whenever an " effect " is noticeable, the masses
gather in a crowd round it ; to hear the inferior
and the poor in spirit having their say is a terrible
ear-splitting torment for him who knows and
trembles at the thought, that the fate of man
depends upon the success of its highest types.
From the days of my childhood I have reflected
upon the sage s conditions of existence, and I will
not conceal my happy conviction that in Europe
he has once more become possible perhaps only
for a short time.
988.
These new philosophers begin with a description
of a systematic order of rank and difference of
value among men, what they desire is, alas
precisely the reverse of an assimilation and
equalisation of man : they teach estrangement
THE ORDER OF RANK. 383
in every sense, they cleave gulfs such as have
never yet existed, and they would fain have man
become more evil than he ever was. For the
present they live concealed and estranged even
from each other. For many reasons they will find
it necessary to be anchorites and to wear masks
they will therefore be of little use in the matter of
seeking for their equals. They will live alone, and
probably know the torments of all the loneliest
forms of loneliness. Should they, however, thanks to
any accident, meet each other on the road, I wager
that they would not know each other, or that they
would deceive each other in a number of ways.
989.
" Les philosophies ne sont pas faits pour s aimer. i
Les aigles ne volent point en compagnie. II faut
laisser cela aux perdrix, aux etourneaux. . .
Planer au-dessus et avoir des griffes, voila le lot
des grands ge"nies." GALIANI.
990.
I forgot to say that such philosophers are
cheerful, and that they like to sit in the abyss
of a perfectly clear sky : they are in need of
different means for enduring life than other men ;
for they suffer in a different way (that is to say,
just as much from the depth of their contempt of
man as from their love of man). The animal L
which suffered most on earth discovered for itself \
^-laughter.
384 THE WILL TO POWER.
991.
Concerning the misunderstanding of " cheerful
ness" It is a temporary relief from long tension ;
it is the wantonness, the Saturnalia of a spirit,
which is consecrating and preparing itself for long
and terrible resolutions. The " fool " in the form
of " science."
992.
The new order of rank among spirits ; tragic
natures no longer in the van.
993-
It is a comfort to me to know that over the
smoke and filth of human baseness there is a higher
and brighter mankind, which, judging from their
number, must be a small race (for everything that is
in any way distinguished is ipso facto rare). A man
does not belong to this race because he happens to
be more gifted, more virtuous, more heroic, or more
loving than the men below, but because he is
colder, brighter , more far-sighted, and more lonely ;
because he endures, prefers, and even insists upon,
loneliness as the joy, the privilege, yea, even the
condition of existence ; because he lives amid
clouds and lightnings as among his equals, and
likewise among sunrays, dewdrops, snowflakes, and
all that which must needs come from the heights,
^and which in its course moves ever from heaven to
earth. The desire to look aloft is not our desire.
Heroes, martyrs, geniuses, and enthusiasts of all
THE ORDER OF RANK. 385
kinds, are not quiet, patient, subtle, cold, or
slow enough for us.
994.
The absolute conviction that valuations above
and below are different ; that innumerable ex
periences are wanting to the latter : that when
looking upwards from below misunderstandings
are necessary.
995-
How do men attain to great power and to great
tasks ? All the virtues and proficiences of the
body and the soul are little by little laboriously
acquired, through great industry, self-control, and
keeping one s self within narrow bounds, through a
frequent, energetic, and genuine repetition of the
same work and of the same hardships ; but there
are men who are the heirs and masters of this
slowly acquired and manifold treasure of virtues
and proficiences because, owing to happy and
reasonable marriages and also to lucky accidents,
the acquired and accumulated forces of many
generations, instead of being squandered and
subdivided, have been assembled together by
means of steadfast struggling and willing. And
thus, in the end, a man appears who is such
a monster of strength, that he craves for a
monstrous task. For it is our power which has
command of us : and the wretched intellectual
play of aims and intentions and motivations lies
only in the foreground however much weak eyes
may recognise the principal factors in these things.
VOL. II. 2B
386 THE WILL TO POWER.
996.
The sublime man has the highest value, even
when he is most delicate and fragile, because an
abundance of very difficult and rare things have
been reared through many generations and united
in him.
997-
I teach that there are higher and lower men,
and that a single individual may under certain cir
cumstances justify whole millenniums of existence
that is to say, a wealthier, more gifted, greater,
and more complete man, as compared with in
numerable imperfect and fragmentary men.
1 .
998.
Away from rulers and rid of all bonds, live the
highest men : and in the rulers they have their
instruments.
999.
The order of rank : he who determines values and
leads the will of millenniums, and does this by
-i leading the highest natures he is the highest
man.
1000.
I fancy I have divined some of the things that
lie hidden in the soul of the highest man ; perhaps
every man who has divined so much must go to
ruin : but he who has seen the highest man must
do all he can to make him possible,
i
THE ORDER OF RANK. 387
Fundamental thought : we must make the future
the standard of all our valuations and not seek
the laws for our conduct behind us.
IOOI.
Not ".mankind," but Superman is the goal !
1002.
" Come 1 uom s eterna. . . ." Inf. xv. 85.
II.
DIONYSUS.
1003.
To him who is one of Nature s lucky strokes, to
him unto whom my heart goes out, to him who
is carved from one integral block, which is hard,
sweet, and fragrant to him from whom even my
nose can derive some pleasure let this book be
dedicated.
He enjoys that which is beneficial to him.
His pleasure in anything ceases when the limits
of what is beneficial to him are overstepped.
He divines the remedies for partial injuries ;
his illnesses are the great stimulants of his
existence.
He understands how to exploit his serious
\ accidents.
He grows stronger under the misfortunes which
threaten to annihilate him.
He instinctively gathers from all he sees, hears,
and experiences, the materials for what concerns
him most, he pursues a selective principle, he
rejects a good deal.
He reacts with that tardiness which long caution
DIONYSUS. 389
and deliberate pride have bred in him, he tests
the stimulus : whence does it come ? whither does
it lead ? He does not submit.
He is always in his own company, whether his
intercourse be with books, with men, or with
Nature.
He honours anything by choosing it, by
conceding to it, by trusting it.
1004.
We should attain to such a height, to such
a lofty eagle s ledge, in our observation, as to
be able to understand that everything happens,
just as it ought to happen : and that all " imperfec
tion," and the pain it brings, belong to all that
which is most eminently desirable.
1005.
Towards 1876 I experienced a fright; for I
saw that everything I had most wished for up to
that time was being compromised. I realised this
when I perceived what Wagner was actually
driving at : and I was bound very fast to nim
by all the bonds of a profound similarity of needs,
by gratitude, by the thought that he could not be
replaced, and by the absolute void which I saw
facing me.
Just about this time I believed myself to be
inextricably entangled in my _P_hilojogy and my
professorship in the accident and last shift of my
life : I did not know how to get out of it, and
was tired, used up, and on my last legs.
390 THE WILL TO POWER.
f At about the same time I realised that what my
instincts most desired to attain was precisely the
reverse of what Schopenhauer s instincts wanted
that is to say, a justification of life, even where
it was most terrible, most equivocal, and most
false : to this end, I had the formula " Dionysian "
in my hand.
Schopenhauer s interpretation of the " absolute "
as will was certainly a step towards that concept
of the " absolute " which supposed it to be
necessarily good, blessed, true, and integral ; but
Schopenhauer did not understand how to deify this
will : he remained suspended in the moral-
Christian ideal. Indeed, he was still so very
much under the dominion of Christian values,
that, once he could no longer regard the absolute
as God, he had to conceive it as evil, foolish,
utterly reprehensible. He did not realise that
there is an infinite number of ways of being
different, and even of being God.
1006. *
Hitherto, moral values have been the highest
values : does anybody doubt this ? ... If we
bring down the values from their pedestal, we
thereby alter all values : the principle of their order
of rank which has prevailed hitherto is thus over
thrown.
1007.
Transvalue values what does this mean ? It
implies that all spontaneous motives, all new,
DIONYSUS. 3QI
future, and stronger motives, are still extant ; but
that they now appear under false names and false
valuations, and have not yet become conscious of
themselves.
We ought to have the courage to become,
conscious, and to affirm all that which has been
attained to get rid of the humdrum character of
old valuations, which makes us unworthy of the
best and strongest things that we have achieved.
1008.
Any doctrine would be superfluous for which
everything is not already prepared in the way of
accumulated forces and explosive material. A
transvaluation of values can only be accomplished
when there is a tension of new needs, and a new
set of needy people who feel all old values as
painful, although they are not conscious of what
is wrong.
1009.
The standpoint from which my values are
determined : is abundance or desire active ? . . .
Is one a mere spectator, or is one s own shoulder at
the wheel is one looking away or is one turning
aside? ... Is one acting spontaneously, as the j
result of accumulated strength, or is one merely
reacting to a goad or to a stimulus ? ... Is one
simply acting as the result of a paucity of elements,
or of such an overwhelming dominion over a host
of elements that this power enlists the latter into
its service if it requires them ? ... Is one a
392 THE WILL TO POWER.
problem one s self or is one a solution already ? . . .
Is one perfect through the smallness of the task, or
imperfect owing to the extraordinary character of
the aim ? ... Is one genuine or only an actor ; is
one genuine as an actor, or only the bad copy of
an actor ? is one a representative or the creature
represented ? Is one a personality or merely a
rendezvous of personalities? ... Is one ill from a
disease or from surplus health ? Does one lead as
a shepherd, or as an " exception " (third alternative :
as a fugitive) ? Is one in need of dignity, or can
one play the clown ? Is one in search of resistance,
or is one evading it ? Is one imperfect owing to
one s precocity or to one s tardiness ? Is it one s
nature to say yea, or no, or is one a peacock s tail
of garish parts ? Is one proud enough not to feel
ashamed even of one s vanity ? Is one still able to
feel a bite of conscience (this species is becoming
rare ; formerly conscience had to bite too often : it
is as if it now no longer had enough teeth to do
so) ? Is one still capable of a " duty " ? (there
are some people who would lose the whole joy of
their lives if they were deprived of their duty this
holds good especially of feminine creatures, who
are born subjects).
1010.
Supposing our common comprehension of the
universe were a misunderstanding, would it be
possible to conceive of a form of perfection, within
the limits of which even such a misunderstanding
as this could be sanctioned ?
The concept of a new form of perfection : that
DIONYSUS. 393
which does not correspond to our logic, to our
" beauty," to our " good," to our " truth," might be
perfect in a higher sense even than our ideal is.
101 1.
Our most important limitation : we must not
deify the unknown ; we are just beginning to know
so little. The false and wasted endeavours.
Our " new world " : we must ascertain to what
extent we are the creators of our valuations we
will thus be able to put " sense " into history.
This belief in truth is reaching its final logical
conclusion in us ye know how it reads : that if
there is anything at all that must be worshipped
it is appearance ; that falsehood and not truth is
divine.
101 2.
He who urges rational thought forward, thereby
also drives its antagonistic power mysticism and
foolery of every kind to new feats of strength.
We should recognise that every movement is
(i) partly the manifestation of fatigue resulting from
a previous movement (satiety after it, the malice of
weakness towards it, and disease) ; and (2) partly a
newly awakened accumulation of long slumbering
forces, and therefore wanton, violent, healthy.
101 3.
Health and morbidness : let us be careful ! The
standard is the bloom of the body, the agility,
courage, and cheerfulness of the mind but also, of
394 THE WILL TO POWER.
course, how much morbidness a man can bear and
overcome, and convert into health. That which
would send more delicate natures to the dogs,
belongs to the stimulating means of great health.
1014.
It is only a question of power : to have all the
morbid traits of the century, but to balance them
;by means of overflowing, plastic, and rejuvenating
power. The strong man.
1015.
Concerning the strength of the nineteenth century.
We are more mediaeval than the eighteenth century ;
not only more inquisitive or more susceptible to the
strange and to the rare. We have revolted against
the Revolution. . . . We have freed ourselves from
the fear of reason, which was the spectre of the
eighteenth century: we once more dare to be
childish, lyrical, absurd, in a word, " we are
musicians." And we are just as little frightened
of the ridiculous as of the absurd. The devil finds
that he is tolerated even by God : * better still, he
has become interesting as one who has been mis
understood and slandered for ages, -we are the
^saviours of the devil s honour.
We no longer separate trieTgreat from the terrible.
We reconcile good things, in all their complexity,
* This is reminiscent of Goethe s Faust. See " Prologue in
Heaven." TR.
DIONYSUS. 395
with the very worst things ; we have overcome the
desideratum of the past (which wanted goodness to
grow without the increase of evil). The cowardice
towards the ideal, peculiar to the Renaissance, has
diminished we even dare to aspire to the latter s
morality. Intolerance towards priests and the
Church has at the same time come to an end ; " It
is immoral to believe in God " but this is pre
cisely what we regard as the best possible justifica
tion of this belief.
On all these things we have conferred the civic
rights of our minds. We do not tremble before
the back side of " good things " (we even look
for it, we are brave and inquisitive enough for that),
of Greek antiquity, of morality, of reason, of good
taste, for instance (we reckon up the losses which
we incur with all this treasure : we almost reduce
ourselves to poverty with such a treasure).
Neither do we conceal the back side of " evil things"
from ourselves.
1016.
That which does us honour. If anything does us
honour, it is this : we have transferred our serious
ness to other things ; all those things which have
been despised and laid aside as base by all ages,
we regard as important on the other hand, we
surrender " fine feelings " at a cheap rate.
Could any aberration be more dangerous than the
contempt of the body? As if all intellectuality
were not thereby condemned to become morbid,
and to take refuge in the vapeurs of " idealism " !
Nothing that has been thought out by Christians
39 6 THE WILL TO POWER.
and idealists holds water : we are more radical.
We have discovered the " smallest world " every
where as the most decisive.
The paving-stones in the streets, good air in our
rooms, food understood according to its worth : we
value all the necessaries of life seriously, and despise
all " beautiful soulfulness " as a form of " levity and
frivolity." That which has been most despised
hitherto, is now pressed into the front rank.
1017
\J In the place of Rousseau s " man of Nature," the
nineteenth century has discovered a much more
genuine image of " Man," it had the courage to
do this. . . . On the whole, the Christian concept
of man has in a way been reinstalled. What we
have not had the courage to do, was to call precisely
this " man par excellence" good, and to see the
future of mankind guaranteed in him. In the
same way, we did not dare to regard the growth
in the terrible side of man s character as an ac
companying feature of every advance in culture ;
in this sense we are still under the influence of the
Christian ideal, and side with it against paganism,
and likewise against the Renaissance concept of
virtu. But the key of culture is not to be
found in this way : and in praxi we still have
the forgeries of history in favour of the " good
man " (as if he alone constituted the progress
of humanity) and the socialistic ideal (i.e. the
residue of Christianity and of Rousseau in the de-
Christianised world).
DIONYSUS. 397
The fight against the eighteenth century : it meets ,
with its greatest conquerors in Goethe and Napoleon. \
Schopenhauer, too, fights against the eighteenth?
century ; but he returns involuntarily to the!;
seventeenth he is a modern Pascal, with Pascalianl
valuations, without Christianity. Schopenhauer was!
not strong enough to invent a new yea.
Napoleon : we see the necessary relationship
between the higher and the terrible man. " Man "
reinstalled, and her due of contempt and fear re
stored to woman. Highest activity and health are
the signs of the great man ; the straight line and
grand style rediscovered in action ; the mightiest
of all instincts, that of life itself, the lust of
dominion, heartily welcomed
1018.
(Revue des deux mondes, I5th February 1887.
Taine concerning Napoleon) " Suddenly the
master faculty reveals itself: the artist, which was
latent in the politician, comes forth from his
scabbard ; he creates dans I ideal et I impossible. He
is once more recognised as that which he is : the
posthumous brother of Dante and of Michelangelo;
and verily, in view of the definite contours of his
vision, the intensity, the coherence, and inner con
sistency of his dream, the depth of his meditations,
the superhuman greatness of his conception, he is
their equal : son ghiie a la meme faille et la meme
structure ; il est un des trois esprits souverains de
la renaissance italienne."
Nota bene. Dante, Michelangelo, Napoleon.
398 THE WILL TO POWER.
IOI9.
Concerning the pessimism of strength. In the
internal economy of fat primitive man s soul, the
fear of evil preponderates. What is evill Three
kinds of things : accident, uncertainty, the unex
pected. How does primitive man combat evil ?
He conceives it as a thing of reason, of power, even
as a person. By this means he is enabled to make
treaties with it, and generally to operate upon it in
advance to forestall it.
Another expedient is to declare its evil and
harmful character to be but apparent : the conse
quences of accidental occurrences, and of uncer
tainty and the unexpected, are interpreted as well-
meant, as reasonable.
A third means is to interpret evil, above all,
as merited : evil is thus justified as a punishment.
In short, man submits to it\ all religious
and moral interpretations are but forms of sub
mission to evil. The belief that a good purpose
lies behind all evil, implies the renunciation of any
desire to combat it.
Now, the history of every culture shows a
diminution of this fear of the accidental, of the
uncertain, and of the unexpected. Culture means
precisely, to learn to reckon, to discover causes, to
acquire the power of forestalling events, to acquire a
belief in necessity. With the growth of culture,
man is able to dispense with that primitive form of
submission to evil (called religion or morality), and
that "justification of evil." Now he wages war
against " evil," he gets rid of it. Yes, a state of
DIONYSUS. 399
security, of belief in law and the possibility of cal
culation, is possible, in which consciousness regards
these things with tedium, in which the joy of the
accidental, of the uncertain, and of the unexpected,
actually becomes a spur.
Let us halt a moment before this symptom of
highest culture, I call it \he pessimism of strength.
Man now no longer requires a "justification of
evil " ; justification is precisely what he abhors :
he enjoys evil, pur, cru ; he regards purposeless
evil as the most interesting kind of evil. If he
had required a God in the past, he now delights in
cosmic disorder without a God, a world of accident,
to the essence of which terror, ambiguity, and
seductiveness belong.
In a state of this sort, it is precisely goodness
which requires to be justified that is to say, it
must either have an evil and a dangerous basis, or
else it must contain a vast amount of stupidity :
in which case it still pleases. Animality no longer
awakens terror now ; a very intellectual and happy
wanton spirit in favour of the animal in man, is, in
such periods, the most triumphant form of spirit
uality. Mart 4s-jiow -strong enough to be able to
feel ashamed of a belief in God: he may now
play the part of the devil s advocate afresh. If in
practice he pretends to uphold virtue, it will be for
those reasons which lead virtue to be associated
with subtlety, cunning, lust of gain, and a form of
the lust of power.
This pessimism of strength also ends in a theo
dicy , i.e. in an absolute saying of yea to the world
but the same arguments will be raised in favour of
4OO THE WILL TO POWER.
life which formerly were raised against it : and in
this way, in a conception of this world as the highest
ideal possible, which has been effectively attained.
1020.
Y The principal kinds of pessimism :
The pessimism of sensitiveness (excessive irrit
ability with a preponderance of the feelings of pain).
The pessimism of the will that is not free (other
wise expressed : the lack of resisting power a-
gainst stimuli).
The pessimism of doubt (shyness in regard to
everything fixed, in regard to all grasping and
touching).
The psychological conditions which belong to
these different kinds of pessimism, may all be ob
served in a lunatic asylum, even though they are
there found in a slightly exaggerated form. The
same applies to " Nihilism " (the penetrating feeling
of " nonentity ").
What, however, is the nature of Pascal s moral
pessimism, and the metaphysical pessimism of the
Vedanta-Philosophy ? What is the nature of the
social pessimism of anarchists (as of Shelley), and of
the pessimism of compassion (like that of Leo
Tolstoy and of Alfred de Vigny) ?
Are all these things not also the phenomena of
decay and sickness? . . . And is not excessive
seriousness in regard to moral values, or in regard
to " other-world " fictions, or social calamities, or
suffering in general, of the same order ? All such
exaggeration of a single and narrow standpoint is
DIONYSUS. 401
in itself a sign of sickness. The same applies to
the preponderance of a negative over an affirma
tive attitude !
In this respect we must not confound with the
above : the joy of saying and doing no, which is
the result of the enormous power and tenseness of
an affirmative attitude peculiar to all rich and
mighty men and ages. It is, as it were, a luxury,
a form of courage too, which opposes the terrible,
which has sympathy with the frightful and the
questionable ; because, among other things, one is
terrible and questionable: the Dionysian in will,
intellect, and taste.
IO2I.
My Five " Noes"
(1) My fight against the feeling of sin and the
introduction of the notion of punishment into the
physical and metaphysical world, likewise into
psychology and the interpretation of history. The
recognition of the fact that all philosophies and val
uations hitherto have been saturated with morality.
(2) My identification and my discovery of the
traditional ideal, of the Christian ideal, even
where the dogmatic form of Christianity has been
wrecked. The danger of the Christian ideal resides
in its valuations, in that which can dispense with
concrete expression : my struggle against latent
Christianity (for instance, in music, in Socialism).
(3) My struggle against the eighteenth century
of Rousseau, against his" Nature," against his "good
VOL. II. 2C
402 THE WILL TO POWER.
man," his belief in the dominion of feeling against
the pampering, weakening, and moralising of rn_an :
an ideal born of the hatred of aristocratic culture,
which in practice is the dominion of unbridled
feelings of resentment, and invented as a standard
for the purpose of war (the Christian morality of
the feeling of sin, as well as the morality of resent
ment, is an attitude of the mob).
(4) My fight against Romanticism, in which the
ideals of Christianity and of Rousseau converge,
but which possesses at the same time a yearning
for that antiquity which knew of sacerdotal and
aristocratic culture, a yearning for virtu, and for
the " strong man " something extremely hybrid ;
a false and imitated kind of stronger humanity,
which appreciates extreme conditions in general
and sees the symptom of strength in them (" the
cult of passion"; an imitation of the most expressive
forms, furore espressivo, originating not out of pleni
tude, but out otwanf). (In the nineteenth century
there are some things which are born out of re
lative plenitude i.e. out of well-being , cheerful
music, etc. among poets, for instance, Stifter and
Gottfried Keller give signs of more strength and
inner well-being than . The great strides of en
gineering, of inventions, of the natural sciences and
of history (?) are relative products of the strength
and self-reliance of the nineteenth century.)
(5) My struggle against the predominance of
gregarious instincts, now science makes common
cause with them ; against the profound hate with
which every kind of order of rank and of aloofness
is treated.
DIONYSUS. 403
1022.
From the pressure of plenitude, from the tension
of forces that are continually increasing within us
and which cannot yet discharge themselves, a con
dition is produced which is very similar to that
which precedes a storm : we like Nature s sky-
become overcast. That, too, is " pessimism." . .
A teaching which puts an end to such a condition
by the fact that it commands something : a trans-
valuation of values by means of which the accumu
lated forces are given a channel, a direction, so
that they explode into deeds and flashes of light
ning does not in the least require to be a
hedonistic teaching : in so far as it releases strength
which was compressed to an agonising degree, it
brings happiness.
1023.
Pleasure appears with the feeling of power.
Happiness means that the consciousness of
power and triumph has begun to prevail.
Progress is the strengthening of the type, the
ability to exercise great will-power : everything
else is a misunderstanding and a danger.
1024.
There comes a time when the old masquerade
and moral togging-up of the passions provokes
repugnance : naked Nature ; when the quanta of
power are recognised as decidedly simple (as deter
mining rank) ; when grand style appears again as
the result of great passion.
404 THE WILL TO POWER.
1025.
The purpose of culture would have us enlist every
thing terrible, step by step and experimentally, into
its service ; but before it is strong enough for this it
must combat, moderate, mask, and even curse every
thing terrible.
Wherever a culture points to anything as evil, it
betrays its fear and therefore weakness.
Thesis : everything good is the evil of yore
which has been rendered serviceable. Standard :
the more terrible and the greater the passions may
be which an age, a people, and an individual are at
liberty to possess, because they are able to use
them as a means, the higher is their culture-, the
more mediocre, weak, submissive, and cowardly a
man may be, the more things he will regard as evil:
according to him the kingdom of evil is the largest.
The lowest man will see the kingdom of evil (i.e.
that which is forbidden him and which is hostile
to him) everywhere.
1026.
/ It is not a fact that "happiness follows virtue
but it is the mighty man who first declares his
happy state to be virtue.
f Evil actions belong to the mighty and the
virtuous : bad and base actions belong to the
. subjected.
The mightiest man, the creator, would have to
be the most evil, inasmuch as he makes his ideal
prevail over all men in opposition to their ideals,
and remoulds them according to his own image.
DIONYSUS. 405
Evil, in this respect, means hard, painful, .en
forced.
Such men as Napoleon must always return and
always settle our belief in the self-glory of the in
dividual afresh : he himself, however, was corrupted
by the means he had to stoop to, and had lost
noblesse of character. If he had had to prevail
among another kind of men, he could have availed
himself of other means ; and thus it would not
seem necessary that a Caesar must become bad.
1027
Man is a combination of the beast and the super- ,
beast \ higher man a combination of the monster/
and the superman : * these opposites belong to|
each other. With every degree of a man s growth j
towards greatness and loftiness,he also grows down-i
wards into the depths and into the terrible: we
should not desire the one without the other ; or,$.
better still: the more fundamentally we desire thej
one, the more completely we shall achieve the ;
other.
1028.
Terribleness belongs to greatness : let us not
deceive ourselves.
1029.
I have taught the knowledge of such terrible
things, that all " Epicurean contentment " is im-
* The play on the German words: "Unthier" and
" Uberthier," " Unmensch " and " Ubermensch," is unfortu
nately not translatable. TR.
406 THE WILL TO POWER.
possible concerning them. Dionysian pleasure is
the only adequate kind here : / was the first to dis
cover the tragic. Thanks to their superficiality in
ethics, the Greeks misunderstood it. Resignation
is not the lesson of tragedy, but only the mis
understanding of it ! The yearning for nonentity
-is the denial of tragic wisdom, its opposite !
1030.
A rich and powerful soul not only gets over
painful and even terrible losses, deprivations, rob
beries, and insults : it actually leaves such dark
infernos in possession of still greater plenitude and
power ; and, what is most important of all, in pos
session of an increased blissfulness in love. I
believe that he who has divined something of the
most fundamental conditions of love, will under
stand Dante for having written over the door of
his Inferno : " I also am the creation of eternal
love."
1031.
To have travelled over the whole circumference
of the modern soul, and to have sat in all its corners
my ambition, my torment, and my happiness.
Veritably to have overcome pessimism, and, as
I the result thereof, to have acquired the eyes of a
|\ Goethe full of love and goodwill.
1032.
The first question is by no means whether we
are satisfied with ourselves : but whether we are
DIONYSUS. 407
satisfied with anything at all. Granting that we
should say yea to any single moment, we have then
affirmed not only ourselves, but the whole of ex
istence. For nothing stands by itself, either in us
or in other things : and if our soul has vibrated anc
rung with happiness, like a chord, once only anc
only once, then all eternity was necessary in order
to bring about that one event, and all eternity, ii
this single moment of our affirmation, was callec
good, was saved, justified, and blessed.
1033-
The passions which say yea. Pride, happiness,
health, the love of the sexes, hostility and war,
reverence, beautiful attitudes, manners, strong will,
the discipline of lofty spirituality, the will to power,
and gratitude to the Earth and to Life : all that
is rich, that would fain bestow, and that refreshes,
gilds, immortalises, and deifies Life the whole
power of the virtues that glorify all declaring
things good, saying yea, and doing yea.
1034.
We, many or few, who once more dare to live in
a world purged of morality, we pagans in faith, we
are probably also the first who understand what a
pagan faith is : to be obliged to imagine higher
creatures than man, but to imagine them beyond
good and evil ; to be compelled to value all higher
existence as immoral existence. We believe in
Olympus, and not in the " man on the cross."
408 THE WILL TO POWER.
1035-
The more modern man has exercised his ideal
ising power in regard to a God mostly by moralis
ing the latter ever more and more what does that
mean ? nothing good, a diminution in man s
strength.
As a matter of fact, the reverse would be possible:
and indications of this are not wanting. God im
agined as emancipation from morality, comprising
the whole of the abundant assembly of Life s con
trasts, and saving and justifying them in a divine
agony. God as the beyond, the superior elevation,
to the wretched cul-de-sac morality of " Good and
Evil."
1036.
A humanitarian God cannot be demonstrated
from the world that is known to us : so much are
ye driven and forced to conclude to-day. But
what conclusion do ye draw from this ? " He can
not be demonstrated to us " : the scepticism of
knowledge. You all fear the conclusion : " From
the world that is known to us quite a different
God would be demonstrable, such a one as would
certainly not be humanitarian " and, in a word,
you cling fast to your God, and invent a world for
Him which is unknown to us.
1037.
Let us banish the highest good from our con
cept of God : it is unworthy of a God. Let us
DIONYSUS. 409
likewise banish the highest wisdom : it is the
vanity of philosophers who have perpetrated the
absurdity of a God who is a monster of wisdom :!.j
the idea was to make Him as like them as possible, "t
No ! God as the highest power that is sufficient ! I
- Everything follows from that, even " the
world " !
1038
And how many new Gods are not still pos
sible ! I, myself, in whom the religious that is
to say, the god-creating instinct occasionally be
comes active at the most inappropriate moments :
how very differently the divine has revealed itself
every time to me ! ... So many strange things
have passed before me in those timeless moments,
which fall into a man s life as if they came from
the moon, and in which he absolutely no longer
knows how old he is or how young he still may
be ! ... I would not doubt that there are several
kinds of gods. . . . Some are not wanting which
one could not possibly imagine without a certain
halcyonic calm and levity. . . . Light feet perhaps
belong to the concept " God." Is it necessary to
explain that a God knows how to hold Himself
preferably outside all Philistine and rationalist
circles ? also (between ourselves) beyond good and
evil? His outlook is a free one as Goethe
would say. And to invoke the authority of Zara-
thustra, which cannot be too highly appreciated in
this regard : Zarathustra goes as far as to confess,
" I would only believe in a God who knew how to
dance. , ."
4IO THE WILL TO POWER.
Again I say : how many new Gods are not still
possible! Certainly Zarathustrahimself is merely an
old atheist: he believes neither inoldnorinnewgods.
Zarathustra says, " he would"- but Zarathustra
will not. . . . Take care to understand him well.
The type God conceived according to the type
of creative spirits, of " great men."
1039.
And how many new ideals are not, at bottom,
still possible ? Here is a little ideal that I seize
upon every five weeks, while upon a wild and lonely
walk, in the azure moment of a blasphemous joy.
To spend one s life amid delicate and absurd things;
a stranger to reality ; half-artist, half-bird, half-
metaphysician ; without a yea or a nay for reality,
save that from time to time one acknowledges it,
after the manner of a good dancer, with the tips of
one s toes ; always tickled by some happy ray of
sunlight ; relieved and encouraged even by sorrow
for sorrow preserves the happy man ; fixing a
little tail of jokes even to the most holy thing :
this, as is clear, is the ideal of a heavy spirit, a ton
in weight of the spirit of gravity.
1040.
From the military -school of the soul. (Dedicated
to the brave, the good-humoured, and the abstinent.)
I should not like to undervalue the amiable vir
tues ; but greatness of soul is not compatible with
DIONYSUS. 411
them. Even in the arts, grand style excludes all
merely pleasing qualities.
*
In times of painful tension and vulnerability,
choose war. War hardens and develops muscle.
*
Those who have been deeply wounded have the
Olympian laughter ; a man only has what he needs.
*
It has now already lasted ten years : no sound
any longer reaches me a land without rain. A
man must have a vast amount of humanity at his
disposal in order not to pine away in such drought.*
1041.
My new road to an affirmative attitude. Philo
sophy, as I have understood it and lived it up to the
present, is the voluntary quest of the repulsive and
atrocious aspects of existence. From the long ex
perience derived from such wandering over ice and
desert, I learnt to regard quite differently everything
that had been philosophised hitherto : the con
cealed history of philosophy, the psychology of its
great names came into the light for me. " How
much truth can a spirit endure ; for how much truth
is it daring enough ? " this for me was the real
* For the benefit of those readers who are not acquainted
with the circumstances of Nietzsche s life, it would be as well
to point out that this is a purely personal plaint, comprehen
sible enough in the mouth of one who, like Nietzsche, was
for years a lonely anchorite. TR.
412 THE WILL TO POWER.
measure of value. Error is a piece of cowardice
. . . every victory on the part of knowledge,is the re
sults! courage,of hardness towards one s self, of clean
liness towards one s self. . . . ^\&\?i\T\& si experimental
philosophy which I am living, even anticipates the
possibility of the most fundamental Nihilism, on
principle : but by this I do not mean that it re
mains standing at a negation, at a no, or at a will
to negation. It would rather attain to the very
reverse to a Dionysian affirmation of the world, as
it is, without subtraction, exception, or choice
it would have eternal circular motion : the same
things, the same reasoning, and the same illogical
concatenation. The highest state to which a philo
sopher can attain : to maintain a Dionysian attitude
to Life my formula for this is amor fati.
To this end we must not only consider those
aspects of life which have been denied hitherto, as
necessary, but as desirable, and not only desirable
to those aspects which have been affirmed hitherto
(as complements or first prerequisites, so to speak),
but for their own sake, as the more powerful, more
terrible, and more veritable aspects of life, in which
the latter s will expresses itself most clearly.
To this end, we must also value that aspect of
existence which alone has been affirmed until now ;
we must understand whence this valuation arises,
and to how slight an extent it has to do with a
Dionysian valuation of Life : I selected and under
stood that which in this respect says " yea " (on the
one hand, the instinct of the sufferer ; on the other,
the gregarious instinct ; and thirdly, the instinct of
the greater number against the exceptions).
DIONYSUS. 413
Thus I divined to what extent a stronger kind
of man must necessarily imagine the elevation and
enhancement of man in another direction : higher
creatures , beyond good and evil, beyond those values
which bear the stamp of their origin in the sphere
of suffering, of the herd, and of the greater number
I searched for the data of this topsy-turvy forma
tion of ideals in history (the concepts " pagan,"
" classical," " noble," have been discovered afresh
and brought forward).
1042.
We should demonstrate to what extent the
religion of the Greeks was higher than Judaeo-
Christianity. The latter triumphed because the
Greek religion was degenerate (and decadent).
1043.
It is not surprising that a couple 01 centuries
have been necessary in order to link up again a
couple of centuries are very little indeed.
1044.
There must be some people who sanctify func
tions, not only eating and drinking: and not only
in memory of them, or in harmony with them ; but
this world must be for ever glorified anew, and in
a novel fashion.
1045.
The most intellectual men feel the ecstasy and
charm of sensual things in a way which other men
414 THE WILL TO POWER.
those with " fleshy hearts " cannot possibly
imagine, and ought not to be able to imagine :
they are sensualists with the best possible faith,
because they grant the senses a more fundamental
value than that fine sieve, that thinning and mincing
machine, or whatever it is called, which in the
language of the people is termed " spirit . The
strength and power of the senses this is the most
essential thing in a sound man who is one of
Nature s lucky strokes : the splendid beast must
first be there otherwise what is the value of all
" humanisation " ?
1046.
(1) We want to hold fast to our senses, and to
the belief in them and accept their logical con
clusions ! The hostility to the senses in the philo
sophy that has been written up to the present, has
been man s greatest feat of nonsense.
(2) The world now extant, on which all earthly
and living things have so built themselves, that it
now appears as it does (enduring and proceeding
slowly), we would fain continue building not
criticise it away as false !
(3) Our valuations help in the process of build
ing ; they emphasise and accentuate. What does
it mean when whole religions say : " Everything is
bad and false and evil " ? This condemnation of
the whole process can only be the judgment of the
failures !
(4) True, the failures might be the greatest
sufferers and therefore the most subtle ! The con
tented might be worth little !
DIONYSUS. 415
(5) We must understand the fundamental artistic
phenomenon which is called "Life," the formative
spirit, which constructs under the most unfavourable
circumstances : and in the slowest manner pos
sible The proof of all its combinations must
first be given afresh : it maintains itself.
1047.
Sexuality, lust of dominion, the pleasure derived
from appearance and deception, great and joyful
gratitude to Life and its typical conditions these
things are essential to all paganism, and it has a
good conscience on its side. That which is hostile
to Nature (already in Greek antiquity) combats
paganism in the form of morality and dialectics.
1048.
An anti- metaphysical view of the world yes,
but an artistic one.
1049.
Apollo s misapprehension : the eternity of beauti-1
ful forms, the aristocratic prescription, " Thus sJiall\
it ever be ! " I
Dionysus : Sensuality and cruelty. The perish- ;
able nature of existence might be interpreted as j
the joy of procreative and destructive force, as un- \
remitting creation.
1050.
The word " Dionysian " expresses : a constraint
to unity, a soaring above personality, the common-
41 6 THE WILL TO POWER.
place, society, reality, and above the abyss of the
ephemeral ; the passionately painful sensation of
superabundance, in darker, fuller, and more fluctu
ating conditions ; an ecstatic saying of yea to the
collective character of existence, as that which
remains the same, and equally mighty and blissful
throughout all change ; the great pantheistic
sympathy with pleasure and pain, which declares
even the most terrible and most questionable qualities
of existence good, and sanctifies them ; the eternal
will to procreation, to fruitfulness, and to recurrence ;
the feeling of unity in regard to the necessity of
creating and annihilating.
The word <{ Apollonian " expresses : the con
straint to be absolutely isolated, to the typical " in
dividual," to everything that simplifies, distinguishes,
and makes strong, salient, definite, and typical : to
freedom within the law.
The further development of art is just as neces
sarily bound up with the antagonism of these two
natural art-forces, as the further development of
mankind is bound up with the antagonism of the
sexes. The plenitude of power and restraint, the
highest form of self-affirmation in a cool, noble, and
reserved kind of beauty : the Apollonianism of the
Hellenic will.
This antagonism of the Dionysian and of the
Apollonian in the Greek soul, is one of the great
riddles which made me feel drawn to the essence
of Hellenism. At bottom, I troubled about nothing
save the solution of the question, why precisely
Greek Apollonianism should have been forced to
grow out of a Dionysian soil : the Dionysian Greek
DIONYSUS. 417
had need of being Apollonian ; that is to say,in
order to break his will to the titanic, to the com
plex, to the uncertain, to the horrible by a will
to measure, to simplicity, and to submission to
rule and concept. Extravagance, wildness, and
Asiatic tendencies lie at the root of the Greeks.
Their courage consists in their struggle with their
Asiatic nature : they were not given beauty, any
more than they were given Logic and moral
naturalness: in them these things are victories,
they are willed and fought forthey constitute
the triumph of the Greeks.
105 i
It is clear that only the rarest and most lucky
cases of humanity can attain to the highest and
most sublime human joys in which Life celebrates
its own glorification ; and this only happens when
these rare creatures themselves and their forbears
have lived a long preparatory life leading to this
goal, without, however, having done so consciously.
It is then that an overflowing wealth of multi
farious forces and the most agile power of " free
will " and lordly command exist together in per
fect concord in one man ; then the intellect is just
as much at ease, or at home, in the senses as the
senses are at ease or at home in it ; and everything
that takes place in the latter must give rise to ex
traordinarily subtle joys in the former. And vice
versd : just think of this vice versd for a moment
in a man like Hafiz ; even Goethe, though to a
lesser degree, gives some idea of this process. It
VOL. II. 2D
41 8 THE WILL TO POWER.
is probable that, in such perfect and well-constituted
men, the most sensual functions are finally trans
figured by a symbolic elatedness of the highest
intellectuality ; in themselves they feel a kind of
deification of the body and are most remote from the
ascetic philosophy of the principle "God is a Spirit":
from this principle it is clear that the ascetic is the
" botched man " who declares only that to be good
and " God " which is absolute, and which judges and
condemns.
From that height of joy in which man feels him
self completely and utterly a deified form and self-
justification of nature, down to the joy of healthy
peasants and healthy semi-human beasts, the whole
of this long and enormous gradation of the light
and colour of happiness was called by the Greek
not without that grateful quivering of one who is
initiated into secret, not without much caution and
pious silence by the godlike name : Dionysus.
What then do all modern men the children of a
crumbling, multifarious, sick and strange age
know of the compass of Greek happiness, how could
they know anything about it ! Whence would the
slaves of " modern ideas " derive their right to
Dionysian feasts !
When the Greek body and soul were in full
" bloom," and not, as it were, in states of morbid
exaltation and madness, there arose the secret
symbol of the loftiest affirmation and transfigura
tion of life and the world that has ever existed.
There we have a standard beside which everything
that has grown since must seem too short, too
poor, too narrow : if we but pronounce the word
DIONYSUS. 419
" Dionysus " in the presence of the best of more
recent names and things, in the presence of Goethe,
for instance, or Beethoven, or Shakespeare, or
Raphael, in a trice we realise that our best things
and moments are condemned. Dionysus is a judge \
Am I understood ? There can be no doubt that
the Greeks sought to interpret, by means of their
Dionysian experiences, the final mysteries of the
" destiny of the soul " and everything they knew
concerning the education and the purification of
man, and above all concerning the absolute hier
archy and inequality of value between man and man.
There is the deepest experience of all Greeks, which
they conceal beneath great silence, we do not
know the Greeks so long as this hidden and sub
terranean access to them remains obstructed. The
indiscreet eyes of scholars will never perceive any
thing in these things, however much learned energy
may still have to be expended in the service of this
excavation ; even the noble zeal of such friends
of antiquity as Goethe and Winckelmann, seems to
savour somewhat of bad form and of arrogance,
precisely in this respect. To wait and to prepare
oneself; to await the appearance of new sources of
knowledge ; to prepare oneself in solitude for the
sight of new faces and the sound of new voices ; to
cleanse one s soul ever more and more of the dust
and noise, as of a country fair, which is peculiar to
this age ; to overcome everything Christian by some
thing super-Christian, and not only to rid oneself
of it, for the Christian doctrine is the counter-
doctrine to the Dionysian ; to rediscover the South
in oneself, and to stretch a clear, glittering, and
42O THE WILL TO POWER.
mysterious southern sky above one ; to reconquer
the southern healthiness and concealed power of the
soul, once more for oneself; to increase the com
pass of one s soul step by step, and to become more
supernational, more European, more super-
European, more Oriental, and finally more Hellenic
for Hellenism was, as a matter of fact, the first
great union and synthesis of everything Oriental,
and precisely on that account, the beginning of the
European soul, the discovery of our " new world " :
he who lives under such imperatives, who knows
what he may not encounter some day ? Possibly
a new dawn \
1052.
The two types : Dionysus and Christ on the Cross.
We should ascertain whether the typically religious
man is a decadent phenomenon (the great inno
vators are one and all morbid and epileptic) ; but
do not let us forget to include that type of the
religious man who is pagan. Is the pagan cult
not a form of gratitude for, and affirmation of, Life ?
Ought not its most representative type to be an
apology and deification of Life ? The type of a
well-constituted and ecstatically overflowing spirit !
The type of a spirit which absorbs the contradic
tions and problems of existence, and which solves
them!
At this point I set up the Dionysus of the Greeks :
the religious affirmation of Life, of the whole of
Life, not of denied and partial Life (it is typical
that in this cult the sexual act awakens ideas of
depth, mystery, and reverence).
DIONYSUS. 421
I Dionysus versus " Christ " ; here you have the
contrast. It is not a difference in regard to the
martyrdom, but the latter has a different mean-
ing. Life itself Life s eternal fruitful ness and re-
currence caused anguish, destruction, and the will
to annihilation. In the other case, the suffering of
the " Christ as the Innocent One " stands as an ob
jection against Life, it is the formula of Life s
condemnation. Readers will guess that the prob
lem concerns the meaning of suffering ; whether
a Christian or a tragic meaning be given to it. In
the first case it is the road to a holy mode of
existence ; in the second case existence itself
is regarded as sufficiently holy to justify an
enormous amount of suffering. The tragic man
says yea even to the most excruciating suffering:
he is sufficiently strong, rich, and capable of deify
ing, to be able to do this ; the Christian denies
even the happy lots on earth : he is weak, poor,
and disinherited enough to suffer from life in any
form. God on the Cross is a curse upon Life, a
signpost directing people to deliver themselves from
it ; Dionysus cut into pieces is a promise of Life :
it will be for ever born anew, and rise afresh from
destruction.
III.
ETERNAL RECURRENCE.
1053-
\ MY philosophy reveals the triumphant thought
j through which all other systems of thought must
1 ultimately perish. It is the great disciplinary
(thought : those races that cannot bear it are
doomed ; those which regard it as the greatest
blessing are destined to rule.
1054.
The greatest of all fights : for this purpose a
new weapon is required.
A hammer : a terrible alternative must be
created. Europe must be brought face to face
with the logic of facts, and confronted with the
question whether its will for ruin is really earnest.
General levelling down to mediocrity must be
avoided. Rather than this it would be preferable
to perish.
1055.
A pessimistic attitude of mind and a pessi
mistic doctrine and ecstatic Nihilism, may in
ETERNAL RECURRENCE. 423
certain circumstances even prove indispensable tp^
the philosopher that is to say, as a mighty j
form of pressure, or hammer, with which he can
smash up degenerate, perishing races and put
them out of existence ; with which he can beat a
track to a new order of life, or instil a longing for
nonentity in those who are degenerate and who.
desire to perish.
1056.
I wish to teach the thought which gives unto "A
many the right to cancel their existences the J>
great disciplinary thought.
1057.
Eternal Recurrence. A prophecy.
1. The exposition of the doctrine and its theo
retical first principles and results.
2. The proof of the doctrine.
3. Probable results which will follow from its
being believed. (It makes everything break open.)
(a) The means of enduring it.
(8) The means of ignoring it.
4. Its place in history is a means.
The period ot greatest danger.
The foundation of an oligarchy above peoples
and their interests : education directed at
establishing a political policy for humanity
in general.
A counterpart of Jesuitism.
424 THE WILL TO POWER.
1058.
The two greatest philosophical points of view
(both discovered by Germans).
(a) That of becoming and that of evolution.
(b) That based upon the values of existence
(but the wretched form of German
pessimism must first be overcome !)
Both points of view reconciled by me in a
decisive manner.
Everything becomes and returns for ever,
escape is impossible \
Granted that we could appraise the value of
existence, what would be the result of it? The
thought of recurrence is a principle of selection in
the service of power (and barbarity !).
The ripeness of man for this thought.
1059.
I. The thought of eternal recurrence: its first U
principles^hich must necessarily be true if it were jj\
true. Wha its result is.
. 2. It is the most oppressive thought : its prob
able results, provided it be not prevented, that is
. to say, provided all values be not transvalued.
3. The means of enduring it: the transvalua-
| tion of all values. Pleasure no longer to be found
in certainty, but in uncertainty ; no longer " cause
and effect," but continual creativeness ; no longer
\ the will to self-preservation, but to power; no
longer the modest expression " it is all only sub
jective," but " it is all our work ! let us be
proud of it,"
ETERNAL RECURRENCE. 425
I06o.
In order to endure the thought of recurrence,
freedom from morality is necessary ; new means
against the fact fain (pain regarded as the instru
ment, as the father of pleasure ; there is no accre
tive consciousness of pain) ; pleasure derived from
all kinds of uncertainty and tentativeness, as a
counterpoise to extreme fatalism ; suppression of
the concept "necessity" ; suppression of the " will " ;
suppression of " absolute knowledge."
Greatest elevation of man s consciousness of
strength, as that which creates superman.
1061.
The two extremes of thought the materialistic
and the platonic are reconciled in eternal recur
rence: both are regarded as ideals.
1062.
If the universe had a goal, that goal would
have~ Been reached by now.___ ij^ajny, jsort : o un
foreseen final state existed, that state also would
haveHBeen reached. I? it were capable of any
Halting or stability of any " being," it would only
have possessed this capability of becoming stable
for one instant in its development ; and again
becoming would have been at an end for ages,
and with it all thinking and all " spirit." The
fact of " intellects " being in a state of development
proves that tjhe, .universe can have no goal, no
426 THE WILL TO POWER.
final state, and is incapable of being. But the old
habit of thinking of some purpose in regard to all
phenomena, and of thinking of a directing and
creating deity in regard to the universe, is so
powerful, that the thinker has to go to great pains
in order to avoid thinking of the very aimlessness
of the world as intended. The idea that the
universe intentionally evades a goal, and even
knows artificial means wherewith it prevents itself
from falling into a circular movement, must occur
to all those who would fain attribute to the uni
verse the capacity of eternally regenerating itself
that is to say, they would fain impose upon a
finite, definite force which is invariable in quantity,
like the universe, the miraculous gift of renewing
its forms and its conditions for all eternity.
Although the universe is no longer a God, it must
still be capable of the divine power of creating
and transforming; it must forbid itself to
relapse into any one of its previous forms ; it
must not only have the intention, but also the
means, of avoiding any sort of repetition ; every
second of its existence, even, it must control every
single one of its movements, with the view of
avoiding goals, final states, and repetitions and
all the other results of such an unpardonable and
insane method of thought and desire. All this is
nothing more than the old religious mode of
thought and desire, which, in spite of all, longs to
believe that in some way or other the universe
resembles the old, beloved, infinite, and infinitely-
creative God that in some way or other " the
old God still lives" that longing of Spinoza s
ETERNAL RECURRENCE. 427
which is expressed in the words " deus sive natura "
(what he really felt was " natura sive deus ").
Which, then, is the proposition and belief in which
the decisive change, the present preponderance of
the scientific spirit over the religious and god-
fancying spirit, is best formulated ? Ought it not
to be : the universe, as force, must not be thought
of as unlimited, because it cannot be thought of
in this way, we forbid ourselves the concept in
finite force, because it is incompatible with the idea
of force? Whence it follows that the universe
lacks the power of eternal renewal.
1063. , 1
The principle of the conservation of energy
inevitably involves eternal recurrence.
1064.
That a state of equilibrium has never been
reached, proves that it is impossible. But in
infinite space it must have been reached. Like
wise in spherical space. Inform of space must
be the cause of the eternal movement, and ulti
mately of all " imperfection."
That "energy" and "stability" and "immut
ability " are contradictory. The measure of energy
(dimensionally) is fixed,though it is essentially fluid.
" That which is timeless " must be refuted. At
any given moment of energy, the absolute condi
tions for a new distribution of all forces are present ;
it cannot remain stationary. Change is part of
428 THE WILL TO POWER.
its essence, therefore time is as well : by this
means, however, the necessity of change has only
been established once more in theory.
1065.
A certain emperor always bore the fleeting
nature of all things in his mind, in order not to
value them too seriously, and to be able to live
quietly in their midst. Conversely, everything
seems to me much too important for it to be so
fleeting ; I seek an eternity for everything : ought
one to pour the most precious salves and wines
into the sea ? My consolation is that everything
that has been is eternal : the sea will wash it up
again.
1066.
The neiv concept of the universe. The universe
exists ; it is nothing that grows into existence and
that passes out of existence. Or, better still, it
develops, it passes away, but it never began to
develop, and has never ceased from passing away ;
it maintains itself in both states. ... It lives on
itself, its excrements are its nourishment.
We need not concern ourselves for one instant
with the hypothesis of a created world. The con
cept "create" is to-day utterly indefinable and
unrealisable ; it is but a word which hails from
superstitious ages ; nothing can be explained with
a word. The last attempt that was made to con
ceive of a world that began occurred quite recently,
ETERNAL RECURRENCE. 429
in many cases with the help of logical reasoning,
generally, too, as you will guess, with an
ulterior theological motive.
Several attempts have been made lately to show
that the concept that " the universe has an infinite
past " (regressus in infinituvi) is contradictory :
it was even demonstrated, it is true, at the price
of confounding the head with the tail. Nothing
can prevent me from calculating backwards from
this moment of time, and of saying : " I shall
never reach the end " ; just as I can calculate
without end in a forward direction, from the same
moment. It is only when I wish to commit the
error I shall be careful to avoid it of reconcil
ing this correct concept of a regressus in infinitum
with the absolutely unrealisable concept of a finite
progressus up to the present ; only when I con
sider the direction (forwards or backwards) as
logically indifferent, that I take hold of the head ;
this very moment and think I hold the tail : 1
this pleasure I leave to you, Mr. Diihring ! . . . j
I have come across this thought in other
thinkers before me, and every time I found that
it was determined by other ulterior motives
(chiefly theological, in favour of a creator spiritus).
If the universe were in any way able to congeal,
to dry up, to perish ; or if it were capable of
attaining to a state of equilibrium ; or if it had
any kind of goal at all which a long lapse
of time, immutability, and finality reserved for it
(in short, to speak metaphysically, if becoming
could resolve itself into being or into nonentity),
this state ought already to have been reached.
43O THE WILL TO POWER.
But it has not been reached : it therefore
follows. . . . This is the only certainty we can
grasp, which can serve as a corrective to a host
of cosmic hypotheses possible in themselves. If,
for instance, materialism cannot consistently escape
the conclusion of a finite state, which William
Thomson has traced out for it, then materialism
is thereby refuted.
If the universe may be conceived as a definite
quantity of energy, as a definite number of centres
of energy, and every other concept remains
indefinite and therefore useless, it follows there
from that the universe must go through a calcul
able number of combinations in the great game of
chance which constitutes its existence. In infinity^
at some moment or other, every possible combina- i
tion must once have been realised ; not only this, ,
but it mustjiave been realised an infinite number j
of times. And inasmuch as between every onef
of these combinations and its next recurrence
every other possible combination would neces
sarily have been undergone^ and since every one
of these combinations would determine the whole
series in the same order, a circular movement of
absolutely identical series is thus demonstrated :
the universe is thus shown to be a circular
movement which has already repeated itself an
infinite number of times, and which plays its
game for all eternity. This conception is not
simply materialistic ;Tor if it were this, it would
not involve an infinite recurrence of identical cases,
but a finite state. Owing to the fact that the uni
verse has not reached this finite state, materialism
ETERl iAL KECUHREfcCE 431
shows itself to be but an imperfect and pro
visional hyoothesis.
1067.
And do ye know what "the universe" is to my
mind? Shall i show it to you in my mirror?
This universe is a monster of energy, without
beginning or end; a fixed and brazen quantity oj
energy which grows neither bigger nor smaller,
which does not consume itself, but only alters
its face; as a whole its bulk is immutable, it
is a household without either losses or gains,
but likewise without increase and without
sources of revenue, surrounded by nonentity as
by a frontier, it is nothing vague or waste
ful, it does not stretch into infinity; but it
is a definite quantum of energy located in
lirdted space, and not in space which would be
anyv here empty. It is rather energy every
where, the play of forces and force -waves, at
the same time one and many, agglomerating here
and diminishing there, a sea of forces storm
ing and raging in itself, for ever changing,
for ever rolling back over incalculable ages
to recurrence, with an ebb and flow of its
forms, producing the most complicated things
out of the most simple structures; producing
the most ardent, most savage, and nost contra
dictory things out of the quietest, nost rigid,
and most frozen material, and then returning
from multifariousness to uniformity, from the
play of contradictions back into the delight
of consonance, saying yea unto itself, even
this homogeneity of its courses and ages; for
ever blessing itseir as so:-.:et;.ing which reci
for all eternity,- a becoming which knows no
satiety, or disgust, or weariness:- ^is, my
Dionysien world of eternal self -creation, of
432 THE WILL TO PCTEP.
eternal self-destruction, this mysterious
world of twofold voluptuousness; this, my
"Beyond Good and Evil" without aim, , unless
there. is an aim in the bliss of the circle,
without will, unless a ring must by nature
keep good?;ill to itself,- would you have a
name for my world? A solution of all your
riddles? Do ye also want a light, ye most
concealed, strongest and raost undaunted men
of the blackest midnight?- This world is
the Will to Pov/er- and nothing else! And
even ye yourselves are this will to power -
and nothing besides!
