Chapter 9 08 An Untimely Roaming (2)

25 To favor one person, to open the door to his heart, is generosity, but only generosity.Some souls are found adept at noble hospitality, which, with its many shaded windows and shuttered shutters, leaves its best rooms empty.why? — because they await guests whom no one "prefers"... 26 When we communicate ourselves, we stop evaluating ourselves adequately.Our real experience is not rap at all.They are unable to communicate themselves, though they would like to.Because they lack words.When we put a certain experience into words, we have lost this experience.There is a touch of contempt in all speech.Language seems to have been invented only for the average, the mean, the communicable.The speaker already banalizes himself with language. —From a morality of the deaf-mute and other philosophers.

27 "How captivating is this beautiful portrait!"... This woman of letters, discontented, agitated, desolate in heart and innards, listens every moment with painful curiosity to the order whispered from the depths of her organism: "autliberiautlibri ’” This woman of letters, educated enough to understand the natural voice, even if it were Latin, and sufficiently vain and stupid, on the other hand, to say to herself in French even in private: “jemeverrai, jimelirai, jem 'extasiera ietjedirai: Possible, quej'aieeutantd'esprit?" ②... -------- ① Latin: children or works.

②French: "I'll watch myself, I'll read myself, I'll be obsessed with myself and I'll say: Maybe I'm so smart?" 28 "The Unselfish" speaks out. ——“For us, nothing is easier than wisdom, patience, and calm. We are saturated with the ointment of tolerance and compassion, we are reasonable in an absurd way, we forgive everything. It is for this reason that we should be more Strictly insist on something, and therefore we should constantly cultivate a little bit of emotional impulse, a little bit of emotional evil. This is not pleasant to us; among us we may laugh at what we thus offer but what can be done! We have no other way of overcoming ourselves: this is our asceticism, our atonement" . . . becoming selfish—

This is the virtue of the "selfless"... 29 Out of a PhD exam. - "What is the task of all higher education?" - To turn man into a machine. -- "In what way?" -- he must learn to tire of himself. -- "How to do this?" -- through the idea of ​​duty. -- "Who is his role model in this respect?" --The rote linguist. - "Who is perfect?" - State officials. ——"What philosophy provides the highest formula of state officials?"——Kant's philosophy: State officials as things-in-itself judge state officials as phenomena. 30 The right to do stupid things. —the tired and slow-breathing worker, with friendly eyes and letting things take their course: in the present working (and "empire"!) age, such characters are encountered at all levels of society, and now demand the enjoyment of art , including books and especially newspapers,—even beautiful nature, Italy...these doldrums, with "slumbering savage instincts" (Faust), need summer, sea bathing, ice skating, Bayreuth... in such In an age when art has the right to pure folly,--as a vacation of the spirit, of wit and emotion.Wagner understood this.Pure stupidity restores...

31 Another health issue. — Julius Caesar's methods for preventing sickness and headaches: long marches, austere lifestyle, insistence on living outdoors, incessant toil--generally against the delicate, under the highest stress The extreme fragility of a working machine called Genius. 32 The words of amoralists. —Nothing is so contrary to a philosopher's taste as the wishing man... when he sees man only as he acts, when he sees the bravest, most cunning, most stoic animal lost in a labyrinth of perils How admirable he thinks people are!He also encourages them... But the philosopher is contemptuous of the wishing man and of the "wisting" man—and in general of all things of wishing, of all ideals of man.If a philosopher can be a nihilist, he is, because he finds nothingness behind all human ideals.Or not even nothingness,—but just worthless, absurd, sick, cowardly, tired things, all kinds of dregs poured out of the drained wine glass of life... Why is a real person so respectable when he wishes, Isn't it worthy of respect?Must he be punished for being so capable in reality?Must he relax his limbs in the fiction and the absurd in order to compensate for the tension of his brain and will in his action and in all action? —The history of man's will hitherto is man's partie honteuse, and one should beware of reading it too long.It is his reality that justifies man—it always justifies him.How valuable is the actual human being compared with any purely wishful thinking, dreaming, basely invented human being, compared with any ideal human being? —and only the ideal violates the taste of the philosopher.

-------- ①French: shameful part (pubic area) 33 The natural value of egoism. —The value of selfishness depends on the biological value of the selfish person: it may be of great value, or it may be worthless and contemptible.Everyone can be evaluated according to whether he embodies life's upward or downward line.Having established this, there is a standard for the question of what his self-worth is.If he embodies the line of ascent, then in fact his value is extraordinary—and the maintenance and creation of his best conditions can be extremely concerned for the benefit of the general life that goes on through him.The individual, the "individual," as the populace and philosophers have hitherto understood it, must be a mistake.The individual is never for himself, not an atom, not "a link in the chain," never merely the inheritance of the past, -- he is himself a complete line of man up to him... If he embodies the descent, Decline, chronic degeneration, disease (disease is already mostly the result rather than the cause of decline), then he is of little value, and the highest justice requires that he appropriate as little as possible from the well-developed.He is purely a parasite of the latter...

34 Christians and anarchists. —The anarchists are the mouthpieces of declining social classes, and when they demand "rights," "fairness," "equality" with outrage, they are governed only by their ignorance, not knowing exactly why they suffer, —they lack something, they lack life.... The urge to find out is very strong in them: someone must be responsible for their bad situation... Even "righteous indignation" itself pleases them. A satisfaction,--it offers a small intoxication of power.Even complaining and lamenting can give life a charm and make it bearable.There is an exquisite revenge in every complaint, and men blame others who are different from them for their own bad situation, and sometimes even for their own bad qualities, as if to blame an injustice, an impermissible privilege. "If I'm an asshole, then you should be an asshole": People make revolutions based on this logic. ——A heartfelt sigh is useless in any situation, it comes from weakness.It makes no real difference whether one laments to others or to oneself (the former as a socialist, the latter as a Christian).What both have in common, and what seems to us worthless, is that someone is responsible for his suffering—in short, that the sufferer offers himself a nectar of vengeance.This need for vengeance is a need for pleasure, and its object is possible causes: the sufferer looks everywhere for causes to vent his petty vengeance,—again, if he is a Christian, he looks for it in himself. It's... Christians and anarchists - both are decadents. —But when a Christian condemns, slanders, and slanders "the world," he does so from the same instinct that the socialist worker condemns, slanders, and slanders society: "The Day of Judgment "Still the sweet consolation of vengeance—revolution, like the revolution expected by the socialist workers, only conceived more distantly..."The other side"—if it is not a means, why does the other side always slander the other side? Woolen cloth?

35 decadent moral critique. —A ethic of "altruism," a ethic that atrophies selfishness, is always a bad sign in any case.This applies to individuals, and this absolutely applies to nations.Once there is no selfishness, there is no best thing.Instinctively choosing what is harmful to oneself, attracted by "disinterested" motives, almost provides the formula for decadence. "Self-serving" - this is purely a moral fig leaf to cover up an entirely different fact, the biological fact that "I no longer know how to find my own interests"... Instinctive collapse! —When a man becomes altruistic, he is lost. —The moral lie of the decadent is not the naive saying: "I am no longer worth anything"; A great danger, which is contagious,--soon grows, on the sick soil of the whole society, a flourishing tropical plant of ideas, now as religion (Christianity), now as philosophy (Schopenhauerism).Sometimes the gas that grows from the poisonous plants in decay poisons life long ago, thousands of years...

36 Physician ethics. —Patients are parasites of society.Under certain circumstances, it would be unseemly to live longer.The cowardly reliance on physicians and medical skills to live after the meaning of life and the right to life has been lost deserves deep contempt in society.And the doctor is supposed to be the medium of this contempt, - prescribing his patient not a prescription, but a daily dose of a new aversion... A new responsibility is given to the doctor, where the highest good of life, of ascending life, demands ruthless exclusion and He is responsible for killing decaying lives—for example, deciding on reproductive rights, birth rights, and survival rights... When you can no longer live proudly, you die proudly.A voluntary death, a well-timed death, clear and joyful, carried out in the child and in the witness, so that a real farewell can be made in the presence of the fareweller, and at the same time a real valuation of the achievement and the will, A summary of life—all this is the exact opposite of the pathetic and horrible comedy that Christianity plays on the dying hour.Never forget that Christianity is abusing the weakness of the dying to rape the conscience, abusing death to judge the value of a person and his life! —Here, above all, it is necessary to oppose all cowardly prejudices and to establish the real value of the so-called natural death, that is, its biological value: it is in the final analysis only an "unnatural" death, a kind of suicide.A person never dies by the hands of others, but by his own hands.Only it is a death under the most contemptible conditions, a death not free, an untimely death, a cowardly death.One should desire another death out of love of life.Free, sober, not accidental, not caught off guard...Finally, a word to gentlemen pessimists and other decadents: We cannot prevent our birth, but we can correct the mistake—because sometimes it is a mistake.When a man gets rid of himself, he has done the most respectable thing in the world, and he has lived his life almost in vain for it...Society (what am I saying!), life itself, gains more benefits from this than by casual Which "life" of resignation, anemia, or other virtues gains more, because he frees others from his spectacle, he frees life from a dissent... Pure, strict pessimism is only through the pessimist The self-refutation of the gentlemen is justified: one must push his logic a step further, and not deny life, as Schopenhauer does, by mere "will and representation"—he must deny Schopenhauer.... By the way, although Pessimism is so contagious that it does not, after all, increase the disease of whole ages, of whole generations, it is only a manifestation of that disease.A man succumbs to it as he succumbs to cholera, and he is already too sick not to succumb.Pessimism itself did not add a decadent; I was reminded of statistics: the total number of deaths in cholera-endemic years is no different from other years.

37 Have we become more moral. — As might be expected, the whole brutality of moral foolishness (which, as we all know, is considered morality itself in Germany) has fought desperately against my views on Beyond Good and Evil, and I will say something about being educated in this respect History.I have been asked to contemplate the "undeniable superiority" of our age in moral judgment, the progress we have actually made in this respect: a Cesare Borgia is certainly not to be regarded as a "nobler man" than ourselves. ", a kind of what I call a "Superman"... a Swiss, the "Union"

-------- ① A cardinal in the fifteenth century. The editor, having gone so far, after paying a little respect for the courage to undertake such an adventure, "understands" the point of my book that I would use it to abolish all decent sentiments.Thank you very much! — In reply, allow me to ask the question, have we become more moral?The whole world believes this, and it is itself disputed... We moderns, so fragile, so sensitive, so caring, so thoughtful, have in fact been delusional that we embody This fragility of human nature, this unity of love, help, and mutual trust, seems to be a positive progress, and by this we seem to be far beyond the people of the Renaissance.Yet every age thinks so, and must think so.Indeed, we cannot place ourselves in, or even contemplate deeply, the Renaissance state: our nerves cannot bear that reality, let alone our muscles.But what this incapacity proves is not progress, but a different, a late condition, a weaker, more vulnerable, more sensitive condition, out of which necessarily arises a scrupled morality.If we imagine our physical aging without our frailty and old age, then our "human" morality immediately loses its value (no morality has value in itself), and we ourselves scorn it.On the other hand, we should not doubt this: the human nature of our modern people, wrapped in thick quilts and unable to withstand a little collision, must be a deadly comedy in the eyes of Cesare Borgia's contemporaries.In fact, our modern "virtue" makes us involuntarily look ridiculous... The weakening of the instincts of hostility and suspicion (which is what we call "progress") is only one of the results of a general weakening of life force: to linger on a body so attached Conditional, so late life, must pay a hundredfold effort and prudence. Here, people help each other, everyone is a patient in some way, but also a nurse. This is called "virtue"; Among different peoples, among those whose life is fuller, more profligate, more exuberant, it is called differently, it may be called "weakness", "pitiful", "old woman morality"... The softening of our customs is decay The austerity and dread of customs, on the contrary, may be a result of the vigor of life, which allows for many adventures, many challenges, Much waste. What was once the ingredients of life is poison to us... Apathy is also a form of strength, and we are too old, too late, to be equally incapable of it; our virtue of compassion (I am the first One who wants people to be wary of it), one might as well call it 1'impressionisme morale,1 which is an expression of the physiological hypersensitivity inherent in all decadents. The man who tries to give himself a scientific form by means of Schopenhauer's sympathetic morality ( A very unsuccessful attempt!) is a genuinely decadent movement in the moral sphere, and as such it is deeply connected with Christian morality. A strong age, a noble culture, put sympathy, "love of neighbor" ’, lack of self, and self-love as despicable qualities.—ages are valued according to their own positive strengths—so that the Renaissance, so profligate and so troubled, is regarded as the last great age and we, we moderns, are a debilitated age because of our timid self-care and neighborliness, our industry, modesty, justice, scientific virtues (collection, frugality, rigidity) ...our virtues are made of moral impressionism. -------- ① French: moral impressionism. What is determined and required by our weakness..."Equality" is a de facto similarization. The so-called "equal rights" theory is only its expression, which is essentially a decline.The chasm between people and classes, the variety of types, the will to self-actualization, self-improvement, I call these solemn distances, are inherent in every strong age.Today, the tension and the span between the extremes are increasingly narrowed—the extremes themselves have finally disappeared and become the same... All our political theories and national constitutions, the "German Reich" is by no means an exception, are the inevitable conclusion and consequence of decline; The unconscious influence of decadence goes so far as to dominate the ideals of individual branches of science.I have always had a problem with the whole of the English and French sociology schools, which know only from experience the decaying patterns of associations, and who have no shame in using their own decaying instincts as a criterion of social value.Decaying life, the loss of all organizing power, that is, the power to separate, to dig gaps, to obey and to command, is formulated as an ideal by sociology today...Our socialists are decadents, but Herbert Spencer Monsieur, too, is a decadent—he sees something to be desired in the triumph of altruism! ... 38 my view of freedom.The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in what it gets, but in what it pays for——what it costs us.I will give an example.Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are established, and nothing has ever damaged liberty more severely and thoroughly than liberal institutions.One knows what they do, of course: they undermine the will to power, they level mountains and ravines, and exalt them as virtues, they act small, cowardly, and complacently,—herd animals always rely on them Play the triumphant song.Liberalism, to put it bluntly, is the animalization of the human herd... The same institutions do very different things so long as they still fight for something; they actually promote liberty in a powerful way.On closer inspection, it is war that does this, war for liberal institutions that, as war, perpetuates illiberal instincts.And war leads to freedom.Because, what is freedom?It is the will to take responsibility for yourself.It is a person who sticks to the distance that separates us.It means that a person becomes less concerned about hardship, toil, lack and even life.It is a person who is ready to sacrifice people including himself for his cause.Freedom means that the masculine instinct, the belligerent instinct, dominates other instincts, such as the "happiness" instinct.What a free spirit the free man has, trampling the poor comforts of which the peddler, the Christian, the cow, the woman, the Englishman, and other democrats dream.Free men are fighters. —In individuals or in nations, by what is liberty measured?In terms of the resistance that had to be overcome, in terms of the effort it took to stay on top.The highest type of free man must be sought where the greatest resistance is permanently overcome: within a short distance from tyranny, immediately before the danger of enslavement.This is psychologically true, for a ruthless, fearsome instinct which, under the rule of a "tyrant", demands the utmost authority and self-discipline (Julius Caesar is the shining example) ; this is also true politically, just look back in history.Peoples who were and became worthless never became so under liberal institutions, great dangers made them awesome things, dangers taught us to come to know our means of salvation, our Virtue, our shield and spear, our spirit, -- danger compels us to be strong... First principle: a man must be strong, or never be strong, -- the greatness of those who produce the strong, hardest type The conservatory, the aristocratic societies of the Roman and Venetian type, knew very well what I mean by liberty: it is what one has and does not have, what one desires, what one earns...   39 The critique of modernity, that our institutions are useless, is shared by all.But the responsibility is not theirs, but ours.When we have lost all the instincts from which institutions grew, we also lose these institutions, because we are no longer fit for them.Democracy is at all times a form of organizational decay, and I have already judged modern democracy and its semi-finished products, like the "German Reich", in the 318th section of the first volume of "Human, All-too-human" For the decline of the state.Wherever there is institution, there must be a will, an instinct, an imperative, illiberal to the point of virulence; there must be a will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility beyond centuries, to the solidarity of generations that last forever.If there is such a will, then something like the Roman Empire has its foundation; or like Russia, which is the only power today that is physically alive, can wait, can still promise a little thing,-Russia is the pitiful smallness of Europe. Opposite concepts of politics and neuroticism, which with the establishment of the German Reich have entered into a critical state ... The whole of the West no longer has that instinct from which institutions grow, from which the future grows, and perhaps there is nothing so incompatible with it "modern spirit".People muddle along, live extremely hastily,—live extremely irresponsibly: but it is called "freedom".That which makes an institution an institution is scorned, hated, ostracized, and at the mere hearing of the word "authority" one feels himself in danger of a new enslavement.The decadence in the value instincts of our politicians, of our parties, has reached such a point that they have an instinctive preference for that which causes disintegration and hastens the end... The proof is modern marriage.Modern marriage has clearly lost all rationality, but this is not against marriage, but against modernity.The rationality of marriage is based on the legal responsibility of men, and marriage has a center because of it. Today it has a limp on its legs.The rationality of marriage rests on the indissoluble nature of its principle, whereby it acquires a tone which knows how to create an ear for itself in the face of the contingencies of emotion, passion, and chance.The rationality of marriage is also based on the responsibility of seed selection undertaken by Jiadan.The growing tolerance of love-marriage proclivity has created a fundamental condition of marriage in which that which made marriage an institution in the first place has disappeared.One never builds an institution on the basis of an allergic reaction, as stated above, one does not build marriage on the basis of 'love' - but on the basis of sexual impulses, property impulses (women and children are property) rule On the basis of an impulse, this last impulse continually organizes for itself the smallest unit of dominion, the familial, which requires children and heirs, in order also to maintain psychologically an attained measure of power, influence, wealth, for long-term missions , to prepare for the instinctive solidarity between the centuries. Marriage as an institution already contains the affirmation of the greatest and most enduring form of organization, and if society itself cannot as a whole vouch for itself to the most remote generations Meaningless.—Modern marriage has lost its meaning,—so it is abolished. 40 worker problem. —Idiocy, to put it bluntly, the degeneration of instinct that is the cause of all ignorance today, lies in the existence of a worker's problem.Do not ask questions about certain things, the first command of instinct. —I can't see at all what people want to do with European workers since they've been brought up as a problem.They are doing quite well, and don't need to ask more and more questions, more and more presumptuously.They are the majority after all.Here, the hope that a class of simple and contented people, a Chinese type, would have formed into a class, was justified, almost inevitable, had completely vanished.what are people doing —In trying to destroy conditions in this direction in the bud—with irresponsible sloppiness, people basically destroy the instinct by which the workers can be stratified and become independent.People empowered workers to fight, gave them the right to form associations and to vote politically.Is it any wonder that workers now feel that their life is a predicament (and, in moral terms, an injustice)?Yet again, what do people want?If one wants an end one must also think of means, and one who wants slaves and then educates them to be masters is a fool. 41 "I don't mean freedom..." - in times like today.Letting go of instinct is even more of a disaster.These instincts contradict each other, interfere, destroy; I have defined modernity as biologically contradictory.Educational reason requires that at least one of these instinctive systems should be paralyzed under the pressure of iron in order to allow the other to become powerful and dominant.Today, perhaps only the pruning of the individual can make the individual possible, and the so-called possible is the whole... The fact is the opposite: it is those who have loosened all the reins who most strongly demand independence, free development, Laisser aller—as in politics, so in art.But this is a symptom of decadence, and our present conception of "freedom" is even more evidence of a degenerate instinct. -------- ① French: Laissez-faire. 42 Where there must be faith. —There is nothing so rare among moralists and saints as honesty; perhaps they say, and even believe, the opposite.For instinctive hypocrisy is at once innocent when a belief is more beneficial, valid, and convincing than conscious hypocrisy: understand the first principles of the Great Saint.There is also a whole craft among the other kind of saints, the philosophers, who admit only certain truths, that is, the kind of truths which give their craft public sanction--in Kantian terms, the truths of practical reason.They know what they have to prove, and in this they are practical—they have a mutual understanding, they agree on "truth." -- "You should not lie" -- put it bluntly: you, my Mr. Philosopher, beware of telling the truth...   43 Tell the Conservatives. —what one did not know in the past, and what one knows and can know now—regression, regression in any sense and degree is absolutely impossible, at least we physiologists know this.All priests and moralists, however, believe that it is possible—they want to bring humanity back, to screw it back, to a past moral code.Morality is always a bed of Proclustes.Even politicians imitate moral preachers in this respect: there are political parties today that dream of everything going backwards like crabs, and make this their goal.However, nothing can turn into a crab at will.There is no other way, one has to go forward, that is to say, step by step (this is my definition of modern "progress"...).One can hinder this process, making it come more violently and abruptly by blocking, blocking and accumulating the final metamorphosis, and they cannot do more. -------- ①The robber in Greek mythology had an iron bed in his inn. When travelers stayed, he shortened the tall ones and lengthened the short ones to make them as long as the bed. 44 My idea of ​​genius. ——Greatness, like a great age, is an explosive that accumulates huge energy; its historical and physiological premise is always that energy is collected, accumulated, saved, and preserved in them for a long time——for a long time, no explosion will occur.If the tension is too high, then the most casual stimulus is enough to call into the world "genius", "career", great destiny.What has it to do with the environment, the times, the "spirit of the times," "public opinion"!Take Napoleon, for example.Revolutionary France, as well as pre-revolutionary France, could have produced the opposite type of Napoleon, but it also produced Napoleon.And because Napoleon was a different kind of man.A descendant of a civilization stronger, longer, and older than that of France, which developed in steam and theatre, so in France he was master, and in France he alone was master.Greatness is necessary, and the age in which they appear is accidental; they are almost always masters of the age only because they are stronger, older, and accumulated in them longer.The relationship between a genius and his age is like the relationship between strong and weak, old and young. In comparison, the age is always young, weak, immature, unreliable, and immature. —A completely different view is taken on this question today in France (and also, to a lesser degree, in Germany) where there is a real theory of the neurotic, the milieu theory.To become sacrosanct, almost scientific, even to the point of view of physiologists, is "stinking" and pathetic - in England there are only two paths to conform to genius and "great man" : Buckle's democratic way or Carlyle's religious way. —The perils of great men and great ages are extraordinary; exhaustions and barrennesses follow them.Great men are an end; great ages such as the Renaissance are an end.Genius (genius of creation and genius of action) is necessarily a spendthrift.It was his greatness to expend himself... the instinct of self-preservation seemed to be put on hold; the overwrought oppression of the raging forces forbade him any such care and prudence.People call this "sacrifice"; people praise his "heroism", his indifference to self-interest, his devotion to an ideal, a cause, a country: it is all a misunderstanding... He rushes, he floods, he Consuming himself, he does not spare himself,—fatal, doomed, involuntary, just as a river bursts its banks involuntarily.But as men have benefited so much from such explosives, they also give back, for example, a high moral... This is indeed the way of human gratitude: they misunderstand their benefactors. -------- ① French: environment. 45 Offenders and their next of kin. —The criminal type is the type of the disadvantaged strong man, a pathologically strong man.He lacks the wilderness, lacks a freer and more dangerous mode of nature and existence in which all the offensive and defensive qualities that belong to the instinct of the strong can legitimately exist.His virtues are shut out from society; his liveliest impulses, as soon as they arise in him, are at once mingled with repressed emotions, suspicions, fears, shames.But that's pretty much a recipe for physiological degeneration.Whoever has to do in secret what he does best and loves best, with long tension, prudence, and treachery, becomes anemic; His emotions turned against these instincts too—he felt them fatally.This is society, our tame, moderate, castrated society, in which a natural born man from adventures in mountains or seas must degenerate into a criminal.Or almost certainly.For there are occasions when such a man proves himself stronger than society, Napoleon the Corsican being the most famous example.The testimony of Dostoevsky is of great significance to the question raised here—and, by the way, Dostoevsky is the only psychologist from whom I have learned One of the most wonderful encounters in my life, even more than my discovery of Stendhal.This profound man has ten times the right to despise shallow Germans, and he has lived among Siberian prisoners for a long time, and found that these honest felons, cut off from their return to society, were very different from what he expected-they were almost Carved from the best, hardest, and most valuable wood that grows on Russian soil.Let us extend the example of criminals, and imagine that nature, for whatever reason, they do not enjoy public approval, knowing that they are not regarded as useful,--with a feeling of pariah: People do not treat them as equals, but as outcasts, worthless, polluting things.All these natures have in thought and action the color of subterraneans; everything about them is paler than those who live in the sun, but almost all the modes of existence we praise today were once lived in half In the atmosphere of the grave: scientists, artists, geniuses, free thinkers, actors, businessmen, great inventors... As long as the priest is regarded as the highest type, every worthy person will be devalued... I predict that this The time is coming when priests are regarded as the lowest type, as our pariahs, as the most unreal and undignified class of men... I notice, even now, that the regulation of customs is the highest on earth , at least the mildest that Europe has ever seen, under which conditions every eccentricity, every long, too long privacy (Q1nterhalb), every unconventional, opaque way of being, brings one close to what the criminal has accomplished of that type.All spiritual innovators have at one time stamped upon their brows the mark of the pale fate of the untouchables, not because they were so regarded, but because they themselves felt a terrible gulf separating them from all traditions, in eternal glory.Almost every genius knows that "Catiline's existence," the sense of hatred, of revenge, of rebellion against all that is and cannot be regenerated, is a stage of his development....Catiline is Ex-survival way of every Caesar. -------- ①Catilina: Ancient Roman aristocrat, whose riot plot was discovered and thwarted by Cicero. 46 Here is a view of freedom and unobstructed. —If a philosopher is silent, it may be a spiritual orgasm; if he contradicts himself, it may be love; to lie may be a courtesy of the knower.It is not without elegance that people say: i1est indigne des grandscoeurs dere'pandre le trouble, q u'ils essentent; but it must be added that it is equally possible to be great of mind not to be afraid of worthless things.A loving woman offers her homage; a "loving" knower may offer his humanity; a loving God becomes Jew... -------- ①French: It is not worth great minds to spread the throbbing they feel. 47 Beauty is not accidental. —Even the beauty of a race or family, the grace and kindness of all their manners, is artificial, the result of the accumulation of generations of effort.Man must make great sacrifices to beauty, many things must be done and many things must be given up (seventeenth-century France is admirable in both), there must be a principle of choice in society, place of residence, clothing, sexual gratification , must love beauty more than interests, habits, opinions, and indolence.Supreme Principle: One cannot be "so-so" when one is alone - fine things are too expensive, and the following law is always valid: the one who owns it is not the same as the one who seeks it. All property is an inheritance, and What is inherited is imperfect, it is just the beginning... In Cicero's time in Athens, Cicero was amazed that men and youths were far more beautiful than women, but for hundreds of years, men at that time were so beautiful What painstaking effort has been made!—Do not mistake the method here, it is useless to merely train the feelings and the mind (this is the great misunderstanding of German education, it is all fantasy), one must first educate the body, strictly Maintaining a meaningful, selective posture, a discipline of being only with people who do not treat themselves "so-so", is quite enough to become significant and selective: for two or three generations, everything has been internalized. What determines nations and men is that culture begins in the right place - not in the "soul" (which is a deadly superstition of priests and semi-clergy): the right place is the body, posture, diet, physiology, from which Produced the rest... So the Greeks are always the first cultural event in history—they understood that they were doing what had to be done; flesh-defying Christianity is the greatest misfortune that mankind has ever known. 48 Progress as I understand it. —I also speak of a "return to nature," though it is really not a regression, but an ascent—to a sublime, free, and even terrible nature and nature, which teases and has the right to tease great missions ... Napoleon, to use an analogy, was a period of what I understand as a "return to nature" (for example in terms of rebuilding, especially in strategy, as military men know it). —But Rousseau—where did he want to go back?Rousseau, the first modern man, the idealist, and the canaile; he must have moral "dignity" in order to be able to bear his own views; sick with infinite vanity and infinite inferiority complex.Even this deformity lying on the threshold of the new era wants to "return to nature"—ask again, where does Rousseau want to go back? —I also hate Rousseau for the Revolution, the world-historical expression of this idealist and canaille double.I have nothing to do with the bloody farce played out by the Revolution, its "immorality", what I hate is its Rousseauian "morality" - the so-called "truth" of the Revolution, by which it is still happening function, and coax over all that is mediocre.The doctrine of equality! . . . But there can never be a more poisonous poison, for this doctrine, which seems to be preached from justice itself, is in fact the end of justice... "Equality to the equal, inequality to the unequal"— This is the true cry of justice, from which it follows: "Never equalize the unequal."—the terror and bloodshed surrounding this doctrine of equality cast a veil on this eminent "modern idea." Glory and fire, so that revolutions, like spectacle, attract the noblest souls.In the final analysis, there is no reason to continue to honor it. —I only see one person loathe it, as he must—Goethe . . . -------- ① French: maze tactics. ②French: Bastard 49 Goethe - not a German event, but a European event: a gigantic attempt to overcome the eighteenth century, a self-overcoming of the century, by a return to nature, by rising to the simplicity of the Renaissance. —He himself has the strongest instincts of the century: sentimental, nature-worshipping, anti-historical, idealistic, unreality, and revolution (revolution is only a form of unreality).He has recourse to history, natural science, antiquity, and Spinoza, and above all to practical activity; he surrounds himself with a completely enclosed horizon; , absorb, possess.What he wants is the whole; he opposes the isolation of reason, sensibility, emotion, will (which Kant, contrary to Goethe, advocated with a most frighteningly cumbersome philosophy); Self-creation... Goethe was a staunch realist in an age of the unreal: he affirmed everything that resembled him in this respect—he had no greater experience than the so-called Napoleonic realism .Goethe created a strong, highly cultured, dexterous, self-controlled, self-respecting man who dared to give to himself the whole domain and wealth of nature, and who was strong enough to bear this freedom; A man who endures, not from weakness, but from strength, because they know how to take his advantage where common nature perishes; Virtue... Such a liberated spirit stands among all things with a joyful and trusting fatalism, in a belief that only the individual is cast aside, and in the whole all things are saved and affirmed—he no longer denies... ...yet one such belief is the highest of all possible beliefs: I name it after Dionysus. 50 It can be said that, in a sense, the nineteenth century also pursued everything that Goethe had pursued as an individual: understanding and affirming everything, accepting everything, bold realism, and admiring all facts.Why is the general result not Goethe, but confusion, a nihilistic lament, not knowing where to go, a weary instinct that in practice constantly drives man back to the eighteenth century? (e.g. emotional romanticism, philanthropy and sentimentality, feminism in taste, socialism in politics.) Could it be that the nineteenth century, and especially its end, was only an eighteenth century of intensified barbarism, that is, a century of decadence ?Is it then that Goethe was only an accident, a beautiful futility, not only for Germany but also for Europe? —However, great men are misunderstood if they are viewed from the standpoint of the public good.A person who knows not to ask for benefits from a great man may belong to a great man in itself... 51 Goethe was the last German who made me stand in awe. He felt about three things I felt—we also agreed on the "cross"... I am often asked why I write in German , because I am not read so badly anywhere as in my own country.But after all, who knows if I still want to be read today? —to create things of which time is irrelevant, to devote myself to form and matter for the sake of a small immortality—I have never been humble enough to demand less from myself.Aphorisms and aphorisms are forms of eternity, and I am the foremost master in Germany; my vanity is: to say in ten sentences what others say in a book,—to say in a book unspoken things... (Translated by Zhou Guoping)