The Greeks, having adopted this faith in roles – an artist’s faith, if you will – progressively underwent a curious and not altogether exemplary transformation: they became genuine actors; and as such they enchanted and conquered the whole world, and in the end even conquered the conquerors (for it was the Graeculus histrio13 who conquered Rome, and not, as the innocent usually say, Greek culture). But what I fear, what is patently obvious to all who are willing to observe, is that we modern men are already on the same path; and every time a man begins to discover the way in which he plays a role, and the way in which he can be an actor, that is what he becomes …

  In this way, new human flora and fauna which cannot flourish in more solid and more circumscribed eras arise – or are consigned to ‘the bottom’, anathematized and disgraced; after which the most interesting and strange periods of history transpire in which ‘actors’, all kinds of actors, are the real masters. By this means another breed of men is always increasingly placed at a disadvantage and ultimately rendered impossible: above all the great ‘master builders’; the power to build begins to flag; the courage to make long-range plans becomes discouraged; the organizing geniuses are nowhere to be found; for who would dare to undertake works whose completion might require millennia? The fundamental faith on the basis of which one could calculate, promise and anticipate the future in one’s plan, and offer sacrifices to one’s plan, is disappearing: the faith that man has value and significance only in so far as he is a stone in a great edifice, and to that end he must first of all be solid, must first of all be ‘stone’ … and above all, not – an actor!

  Briefly – and I fear that this fact will go without mention for some time to come – from now on, what will no longer be built, what can no longer be built, is a society in the accepted sense of the term; in order to build that edifice everything is lacking, above all the material. None of us are any longer material for a society: that is a truth whose time has come! It seems to me a matter of indifference that meanwhile the most short-sighted, perhaps the most honest, and at any rate the noisiest kind of men nowadays, our friends the socialists, believe, hope, dream and above all squall and scrawl almost the exact opposite; in fact one already reads their watchword of the future, ‘free society’, on every table and wall. Free society? Yes, yes, but gentlemen, surely you know out of what material it must be built? Out of ironwood,14 the celebrated iron of wood! And it need not even be made of wood …

  357

  The Old Problem: ‘What Is German?’

  Let us review the actual achievements of philosophical thought which we owe to German thinkers; is there any admissible sense in which they should be credited to the race as a whole? May we say that they are simultaneously the work of the ‘German soul’, or at least a symptom of it in the sense in which we are accustomed to think that Plato’s ideomania, for example, his almost religious madness with regard to the Forms, is an event in and a testimony to the ‘Greek soul’? Or would the opposite be closer to the truth? Were they precisely so individual, so much exceptions to the spirit of the race, as, for example, Goethe’s paganism with a good conscience was? Or as Bismarck’s Machiavellianism with a good conscience, his so-called ‘Realpolitik’, was among Germans? Did our philosophers perhaps even contradict the needs of the ‘German soul’? In short, were the German philosophers really – philosophical Germans?

  I can think of three cases. First, Leibniz’s incomparable insight, which was proven right in opposition not only to Descartes but to everyone who had philosophized to date – that consciousness is only an accidens of representation, and not its necessary and essential attribute, so that what we call consciousness is only a state of our mental and psychological world (perhaps a morbid state) and by no means the thing itself – is there something German about this thought, the profundity of which is still far from exhausted? Is there any reason to suppose that a Latin could not just as easily have stumbled upon this reversal of appearances? For it is a reversal.

  Second, let us consider the immense question mark which Kant placed after the notion of ‘causality’ – not that he doubted its legitimacy altogether, as Hume had; rather, he began by carefully delineating the domain within which this notion had any meaning (and we are not yet finished with this demarcation of limits).

  Third, let us take the astonishing discovery of Hegel, who violated every logical habit and self-indulgence when he dared to teach that our concepts of species develop out of one another, with which proposition European thinkers were prepared for the last great scientific movement, for Darwinism – for without Hegel there would have been no Darwin. Is there something German about this Hegelian innovation which first introduced the decisive concept of ‘development’ into science?

  Yes, without a doubt: in all three cases we feel that something of ourselves has been ‘revealed’ and surmised, and we are thankful for it and at the same time surprised, for each of these three propositions is a thoughtful piece of German self-knowledge, self-experience, self-apprehension. We feel with Leibniz that ‘our inner world is far richer, more extensive, more hidden’; as Germans we doubt with Kant the ultimate validity of natural-scientific knowledge, and in general anything which allows itself be known causaliter; the knowable already appears to us to be less valuable simply by virtue of being knowable. We Germans would have been Hegelians even if there had never been a Hegel, in as much as we (unlike all Latins) instinctively attribute a deeper significance and higher value to becoming, to development, than to that which ‘is’ – we hardly believe at all in the legitimacy of the concept of ‘being’; also in so far as we are disinclined to regard our human logic as logic in itself, the only kind of logic. (We would sooner persuade ourselves that it is only a special case, and perhaps one of the most most quaint and stupid.)

  A fourth question would be whether Schopenhauer with his pessimism, that is, the problem of the value of existence, had to be a German. I do not think so. The event after which this problem was to be expected with certainty, so that an astronomer of the soul could have calculated the day and the hour for it – namely, the decline of faith in the Christian God, the victory of scientific atheism – is an entirely European event for which all races deserve some credit and respect. On the contrary, it was precisely the Germans – those same Germans who were Schopenhauer’s contemporaries – who delayed the victory of atheism the longest, and endangered it the most. Hegel in particular was its delayer par excellence, by virtue of the grandiose attempt he made to persuade us of the divinity of existence, by appealing in the last resort to our sixth sense, ‘the historical sense’. As a philosopher, Schopenhauer was the first avowed and unwavering atheist we Germans have had; this was the background to his hostility towards Hegel. The ungodliness of existence he regarded as something given, palpable, indisputable; he invariably lost his philosophical temper and became indignant whenever he saw anyone hesitate or beat about the bush here. It is at this point that his utter integrity appears; unconditional, honest atheism is just the presupposition for his posing of the problem, as a final and hard-won victory for the European conscience, as the most consequential act in two thousand years’ worth of discipline in truthfulness, which forbids itself the lie of a belief in God …

  We can see what actually triumphed over the Christian God – Christian morality itself, an ever stricter conception of truthfulness, the confessional subtlety of the Christian conscience, translated and sublimated to the scientific conscience, to intellectual scrupulousness at all costs. Looking upon nature as if it were a proof of a benevolent and protective deity; interpreting history as a tribute to divine reason, as a constant testimony to the existence of a moral world order and moral teleology; interpreting personal experiences as pious men have long interpreted them, as if everything were a dispensation or intimation of Providence, as if everything had been contrived and ordained for the sake of the salvation of the soul: all that is over now, it has the conscience against it, it is regarded by all the subtler consciences as indecent and dishonest, as chicanery, femininity, weakness and cowardice – by virtue of this rigour, if by nothing else, we are good Europeans, the heirs of Europe’s longest and bravest self-conquest. When we thus reject the Christian interpretation and condemn its ‘meaning’ as counterfeit, we are immediately confronted in a formidable manner with the Schopenhauerian question: does existence have any meaning at all? This is a question which will take a few centuries to be fully understood in all its profundity. Schopenhauer’s own answer to this question was – forgive me – something premature and juvenile, a mere half-measure, a way of remaining stuck in the very same Christian and ascetic perspectives of morality, faith in which had been annulled along with the faith in God … But he raised the question – as a good European, as I said, and not as a German.

  Or did the Germans at least demonstrate their inner affiliation and kinship with Schopenhauer by the way in which they appropriated his question? Did they seem to be prepared for his problem or feel the need to address it? It does not sufficiently establish a close affinity to note that there has been some thought given and some ink spilled even in Germany since Schopenhauer first raised the problem – after all, it took long enough! We could just as easily emphasize the strange ineptitude displayed by this post-Schopenhauerian pessimism – Germans obviously feel out of their element here. I am not at all alluding here to Eduard von Hartmann;15 on the contrary, I have long suspected that he is too clever by half for us, and am tempted to add that he was an arrant knave from the very beginning. Not only might he have been having fun at the expense of German pessimism, but he might even have ‘bequeathed’ us the legacy of a full understanding of the extent to which we can be played for fools, even during the era of financial speculation in the early 1870s.16 But, I ask, are we to credit to the Germans that old spinning top Bahnsen, who all his life spun with the greatest of pleasure around the fixed point of his real-dialectical misery and ‘personal bad luck’ – would you call that German? (I recommend herewith his writings for the purpose for which I have used them myself, as anti-pessimistic fare, especially for their elegantiae psychologicae, which, it seems to me, could alleviate even the most constipated body and soul.) Or should we count such dilettantes and spinsters as Mainländer,17 that mawkish apostle of virginity, among the proper Germans? After all, he was probably a Jew (and all Jews become mawkish when they moralize). Neither Bahnsen, nor Mainländer, nor even Eduard von Hartmann give us a good handle on the question of whether the pessimism of Schopenhauer, with his horrified gaze into an undeified, stupid, blind, crazy and questionable world, his honest horror … was not only an exceptional case among Germans but a German event; while everything else which stands in the foreground – such as our plucky politics and our joyous jingoism (which resolutely regards everything with reference to the rather slight philosophical principle, ‘Deutschland, Deutschland, über Alles’,18 thus sub specie speciei,19 namely, the German species) – with great clarity attests to the contrary. No! The Germans of today are not pessimists! And Schopenhauer was a pessimist, again, as a good European and not as a German.

  358

  The Peasant Revolt of the Spirit

  We Europeans behold an immense world of wreckage in which some things still tower above us, many others stand deserted and dilapidated, but most things have already fallen to the ground and become overgrown with large and small weeds. It all looks picturesque enough (was there ever anything so fine-looking?), but it is a city in ruins. What am I describing? The Church. The Church is this city in ruins: we behold the religious society of Christendom shaken to its very foundations – belief in God is overthrown, belief in the ascetic ideal of Christianity is now in its death throes. Such an old and well-constructed edifice as Christianity – it was the last construction of the Romans – could not of course be destroyed all at once; all kinds of earthquakes had to shake it, all kinds of spirits which bore, dig, gnaw and moulder have had to help. However, what is most remarkable is the fact that those who have been the most anxious to conserve and preserve Christianity are the very ones who did most to destroy it – I mean the Germans. Apparently, the Germans do not understand the essence of a church. Are they not spiritual enough? Not suspicious enough? In any event, the edifice of the Church rests upon a Southern freedom and liberality of the spirit, and also upon a Southern suspicion of nature, man and spirit – it rests upon a very different understanding of man, a very different experience of man, than one finds in the North. From top to bottom, the Lutheran Reformation was the simple folk’s indignation against something ‘complicated’. To express myself more circumspectly, it was an honest mistake, a crude misunderstanding in which much should be forgiven – they failed to grasp that what they beheld was the expression of a victorious Church and not merely corruption; they misunderstood the noble scepticism, the luxury of scepticism and tolerance which every victorious, self-confident power permits itself …

  Nowadays it is obvious enough that in every cardinal question of power, Luther was dangerously superficial, short-sighted and improvident, above all, as a man who came from the common people, in whom everything one inherits from a ruling caste, any instinctive understanding of how to exercise power was completely absent; so that his work, his determination to restore what the Romans had constructed, involuntarily and unconsciously became nothing but the beginning of a work of destruction. With honest indignation, he unravelled and tore asunder what the old spider had woven for such a long time and with such care. He made the Scriptures available to everyone – with the result that, in the end, they fell into the hands of the philologists, that is, the annihilators of every faith based upon books. He destroyed the conception of ‘the Church’ by repudiating faith in the inspiration of the Councils;20 for only on the presupposition that the inspiring spirit which had founded the Church yet lives, yet builds, yet continues building its house, can the conception ‘the Church’ retain its power. He gave back to the priest sexual intercourse with women; but three-quarters of the common people’s capacity for reverence (above all among women) rests on the belief that a man who is exceptional in this respect will also be exceptional in other respects – it is precisely here that the popular belief in something superhuman in man, in a miracle, in the redeeming God in man, has its most subtle and delicate advocate. After Luther had given the priest a wife, he had to take from him the confessional – that was psychologically appropriate; but in so doing he practically abolished the Christian priest himself, whose profound usefulness had always consisted in his being a sacred ear, a silent well and a grave for secrets. ‘Every man his own priest’ – behind such formulae and their peasant cunning there lay concealed in Luther the deepest hatred of ‘superior men’ and of the rule of ‘superior men’ as the Church had conceived them; Luther shattered an ideal which he was unable to attain, while seeming to combat and abhor its degeneration. As a matter of fact, this impossible monk overthrew the domination of the homines religiosi; he thus brought about precisely the same thing within the ecclesiastical order which he had so intolerantly opposed in the bourgeois order – a ‘peasant revolt’.

  All the things which subsequently emerged from his Reformation, both good and bad, which nowadays can be tallied with almost mathematical precision – who would be naive enough simply to praise or blame Luther for these consequences? He was blameless in all of this; he knew not what he did. There can be no doubt that Europeans’ diminishing sense of hierarchy (or increasing sense of benevolence, if one prefers a moral expression), especially in the North, took a remarkable step forwards with the Lutheran Reformation; and likewise there grew out of it a suppleness and restlessness of the spirit, a thirst for independence, a belief in the right to freedom, and a certain ‘naturalness’. If we are willing to concede to the Reformation the merit of having fostered and prepared the way for what we nowadays revere as ‘modern science’, we must of course add that it is also responsible for the degeneration of the modern scholar, with his lack of reverence, shame or profundity; for the entirely naive innocence and petty-bourgeois manner with which one pursues knowledge, in short, for the plebeianism of the spirit which is peculiar to the last two centuries, and from which even pessimism has not yet delivered us – even ‘modern ideas’ are a part of this peasant revolt of the North against the more dispassionate, more ambiguous, more suspicious spirit of the South, which built its greatest monument in the Christian Church. Let us not forget what a church ultimately is, as opposed to every ‘state’: a church is above all a form of domination which secures for the most spiritual men the highest position, and believes so much in the power of spirituality as to forbid itself all cruder means of violence – for this reason alone, the Church is under all circumstances a nobler institution than the State.

  359

  Revenge on the Spirit, and Other Ulterior Motives of Morality

  Morality – where do you think it has its most dangerous and treacherous advocates?

  Here is an ill-constituted man, who does not have enough spirit to rejoice, but just enough culture to know it; bored, weary, filled with self-contempt; unfortunately cheated by some inherited fortune out of the last consolation, the ‘blessings of labour’, the self-forgetfulness in the ‘daily toil’; a man who is thoroughly ashamed of his existence – perhaps he harbours a few small vices – but who cannot help indulging his taste for books he has no business reading or more intellectual companionship than he is able to assimilate, making himself vain and irritable in the process: such a thoroughly poisoned man – because for such ill-constituted men, spirit becomes poison, culture becomes poison, possessions become poison, solitude becomes poison – ultimately finds himself in a habitual condition of vengefulness, determined to avenge himself on everything …