The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values. Book I and II

by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

My innovations. The Development of Pessimism: intellectual pessimism; moral criticism, the dissolution of the last comfort. Knowledge, a sign of decay, veils by means of an illusion all strong action; isolated culture is unfair and therefore strong.

(1) My fight against decay and the increasing weakness of personality. I sought a new centrum.

(2) The impossibility of this endeavour is recognised.

(3) I therefore travelled farther along the road of dissolution—and along it I found new sources of strength for individuals. We must be destroyers!—I perceived that the state of dissolution is one in which individual beings are able to arrive at a kind of perfection not possible hitherto, it is an image and isolated example of life in general. To the paralysing feeling of general dissolution and imperfection, I opposed the Eternal Recurrence.

418.

People naturally seek the picture of life in that philosophy which makes them most cheerful—that is to say, in that philosophy which gives the highest sense of freedom to their strongest instinct. This is probably the case with me.

419.

German philosophy, as a whole,—Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, to mention the greatest,—is the most out-and-out form of romanticism and home-sickness that has ever yet existed: it is a yearning for the best that has ever been known on earth. One is at home nowhere; that which is ultimately yearned after is a place where one can somehow feel at home; because one has been at home there before, and that place is the Greek world! But it is precisely in that direction that airbridges are broken down—save, of course, the rainbow of concepts! And the latter lead everywhere, to all the homes and "fatherlands" that ever existed for Greek souls! Certainly, one must be very light and thin in order to cross these bridges! But what happiness lies even in this desire for spirituality, almost for ghostliness! With it, how far one is from the "press and bustle" and the mechanical boorishness of the natural sciences, how far from the vulgar din of "modern ideas"! One wants to get back to the Greeks via the Fathers of the Church, from North to South, from formulæ to forms; the passage out of antiquity—Christianity—is still a source of joy as a means of access to antiquity, as a portion of the old world itself, as a glistening mosaic of ancient concepts and ancient valuations. Arabesques, scroll-work, rococo of scholastic abstractions—always better, that is to say, finer and more slender, than the peasant and plebeian reality of Northern Europe, and still a protest on the part of higher intellectuality against the peasant war and insurrection of the mob which have become master of the intellectual taste of Northern Europe, and which had its leader in a man as great and unintellectual as Luther:—in this respect German philosophy belongs to the Counter-Reformation, it might even be looked upon as related to the Renaissance, or at least to the will to Renaissance, the will to get ahead with the discovery of antiquity, with the excavation of ancient philosophy, and above all of pre-Socratic philosophy—the most thoroughly dilapidated of all Greek temples! Possibly, in à few hundred years, people will be of the opinion that all German philosophy derived its dignity from this fact, that step by step it attempted to reclaim the soil of antiquity, and that therefore all demands for "originality" must appear both petty and foolish when compared with Germany's higher claim to having refastened the bonds which seemed for ever rent—the bonds which bound us to the Greeks, the highest type of "men" ever evolved hitherto. To-day we are once more approaching all the fundamental principles of the cosmogony which the Greek mind in Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Democritus, and Anaxagoras, was responsible for. Day by day we are growing more Greek; at first, as is only natural, the change remains confined to concepts and valuations, and we hover around like Greasing spirits: but it is to be hoped that some day our body will also be involved! Here lies (and has always lain) my hope for the German nation.

420.

I do not wish to convert anybody to philosophy: it is both necessary and perhaps desirable that the philosopher should be a rare plant. Nothing is more repugnant to me than the scholarly praise of philosophy which is to be found in Seneca and Cicero. Philosophy has not much in common with virtue. I trust I may be allowed to say that even the scientific man is a fundamentally different person from the philosopher. What I most desire is, that the genuine notion "philosopher" should not completely perish in Germany. There are so many incomplete creatures in Germany already who would fain conceal their ineptitude beneath such noble names.