1016.
That which does us honour.—If anything does us honour, it is this: we have transferred our seriousness 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 and idealists holds water: we are more radical. We have discovered the "smallest world" everywhere 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
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 accompanying 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 virtù. 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).
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 Pascalian 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 restored 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.