The Will to Power. Friedrich Nietzsche

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СКАЧАТЬ senseless vanity of the weak; the revengefulness of the masses elevated to the posi tion of justice (" in politics, for one hundred years, the leader has always been this invalid " ).

      101. Kant: makes the scepticism of Englishmen, in regard to the theory of knowledge, possible for Germans. (1) By enlisting in its cause the interest of the German s religious and moral needs: just as the new academicians used scepticism for the same reasons, as a preparation for Platonism (vide Augustine); just as Pascal even used moral scepticism in order to provoke (to justify) the need of belief; (2) By complicating and entangling it with scholastic flourishes in view of making it more acceptable to the German's scientific taste in form (for Locke and Hume, alone, were too illuminating, too clear that is to say, judged according to the German valuing instinct, " too superficial "). Kant: a poor psychologist and mediocre judge of human nature, made hopeless mistakes in regard to great historical values (the French Revolution); a moral fanatic a la Rousseau; with a subterranean current of Christian values; a thorough dogmatist, but bored to extinction by this tendency, to the extent of wishing to tyrannise over it, but quickly tired, even of skepticism; and not yet affected by any cosmopolitan thought or antique beauty ... a dawdler and a go-between, not at all original (like Leibnitz, something between mechanism and spiritualism; like Goethe, something between the taste of the eighteenth century and that of the " historical sense " [which is essentially a sense of exoticism]; like German music, between French and Italian music; like Charles the Great, who mediated and built bridges between the Roman Empire and Nationalism a dawdler par excellence],

      102. In what respect have the Christian centuries with their Pessimism been stronger centuries than the eighteenth and how do they correspond with the tragic age of the Greeks? The nineteenth century versus the eighteenth. How was it an heir? how was it a step backwards from the latter? (more lacking in " spirit " and in taste) how did it show an advance on the latter? (more gloomy, more realistic, stronger).

      103. How can we explain the fact that we feel something in common with the Campagna romana? And the high mountain chain? Chateaubriand in a letter to M. de Fontanes in 1803 writes his first impression of the Campagna romana. The President de Brosses says of the Campagna romana: " II fallait que Romulus fut ivre quand il songea a batir une ville dans un terrain aussi laid." Even Delacroix would have nothing to do with Rome, it frightened him. He loved Venice, just as Shakespeare, Byron, and Georges Sand did. The"ophile Gautier s and Richard Wagner s dislike of Rome must not be forgotten. Lamartine has the language for Sorrento and Posilippo. Victor Hugo raves about Spain, " parce que aucune autre nation n a moins emprunte* a 1 antiquite", parce qu elle n a subi aucune influence classique."

      104. The two great attempts that were made to overcome the eighteenth century: Napoleon, in that he called man, the soldier, and the great struggle for power, to life again, and conceived Europe as a political power. Goethe, in that he imagined a European culture which would consist of the whole heritage of what humanity had attained to up to his time. German culture in this century inspires mistrust the music of the period lacks that complete element which liberates and binds as well, to wit Goethe.

      105. The pre-eminence of music in the romanticists of 1830 and 1840. Delacroix. Ingres a passionate musician (admired Gluck, Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart), said to his pupils in Rome: "Si je pouvais vous rendre tous musiciens, vous y gagneriez comme peintres" likewise Horace Vernet, who was particularly fond of Don Juan (as Mendelssohn assures us, 1831); Stendhal, too, who says of himself: "Combien de lieues ne ferais-je pas a pied, et a combien de jours de prison ne me soumetterais-je pas pour entendre Don Juan ou le Matrimonio segreto; et je ne sais pour quelle autre chose je ferais cet effort." He was then fifty-six years old. The borrowed forms, for instance: Brahms as a typical "Epigone," likewise Mendelssohn s cultured Protestantism (a former " soul " is turned into poetry posthumously . . .) the moral and poetical substitutions in Wagner, who used one art as a stop-gap to make up for what another lacked. the " historical sense," inspiration derived from poems, sagas. That characteristic transformation of which G. Flaubert is the most striking example among Frenchmen, and Richard Wagner the most striking example among Germans, shows how the romantic belief in love and the future changes into a longing for nonentity in 1830-50. "

      106. How is it that German music reaches its culminating point in the age of German romanti cism? How is it that German music lacks Goethe? On the other hand, how much Schiller, or more exactly, how much " Thekla " * is there not in Beethoven! Schumann has Eichendorff, Uhland, Heine, Hoffman, Tieck, in him. Richard Wagner has Freischutz, Hoffmann, Grimm, the romantic Saga, the mystic Catholicism of instinct, symbolism, " the free-spiritedness of passion " (Rousseau s intention). The Flying Dutchman savors of France, where le ttntbreux (1830) was the type of the seducer. The cult of music, the revolutionary romanticism of form. Wagner synthesises German and French romanticism.

      107. From the point of view only of his value to Germany and to German culture, Richard Wagner is still a great problem, perhaps a German mis fortune: in any case, however, a fatality. But what does it matter? Is he not very much more than a German event? It also seems to me that to no country on earth is he less related than to Germany; nothing was prepared there for his advent; his whole type is simply strange amongst Germans; there he stands in their midst, wonderful, misunderstood, incomprehensible. But people carefully avoid acknowledging this: they are too kind, too square-headed too German for that. " Credo quia absurdus est ": thus did the German spirit wish it to be, in this case too hence it is content meanwhile to believe everything Richard Wagner wanted to have believed about himself. In all ages the spirit of Germany has been deficient in subtlety and divining powers concerning psychological matters. Now that it happens to be under the high pressure of patriotic nonsense and self-adoration, it is visibly growing thicker and coarser: how could it therefore be equal to the problem of Wagner!

      108. The Germans are not yet anything, but they are becoming something; that is why they have not yet any culture; that is why they cannot yet have any culture! They are not yet anything: that means they are all kinds of things. They are becoming something: that means that they will one day cease from being all kinds of things. The latter is at bottom only a wish, scarcely a hope yet. Fortunately it is a wish with which one can live, a question of will, of work, of discipline, a question of training, as also of resentment, of longing, of privation, of discomfort, yea, even of bitterness, in short, we Germans will get something out of ourselves, something that has not yet been wanted of us we want something more 91 That this " German, as he is not as yet " has a right to something better than the present German " culture "; that all who wish to become something better, must wax angry when they perceive a sort of contentment, an impudent " setting-oneself-at-ease," or " a process of self- censing," in this quarter: that is my second principle, in regard to which my opinions have not yet changed.

      (c) SIGNS OF INCREASING STRENGTH.

      109. First Principle: everything that characterises modern men savors of decay: but side by side with the prevailing sickness there are signs of a strength and powerfulness of soul which are still untried. The same causes which tend to promote the belittling of men, also force the stronger and rarer individuals upwards to greatness. no.

      110. General survey: the ambiguous character of our modern world precisely the same symptoms might at the same time be indicative of either decline or strength. And the signs of strength and of emancipation dearly bought, might in view of traditional (or hereditary] appreciations concerned with the feelings, be misunderstood as indications of weakness. In short, feeling, as a means of fixing valuations, is not on a level with the times. Generalized: Every valuation is always back ward; it is merely the expression of the conditions which favoured survival and growth in a much earlier age: it struggles against new conditions of existence out of which it did not arise, and which it therefore necessarily misunderstands: it hinders, and excites suspicion against, all that is new.

      111. The problem of the nineteenth century. To discover whether its strong and weak side belong to each other. Whether they have been cut from one and the same piece. Whether the variety of its ideals and their contradictions are conditioned by a higher purpose: whether they are something higher. For it might be the prerequisite of great СКАЧАТЬ