Are all these things not also the phenomena of decay and sickness?... And is not excessive seriousness in regard to moral values, or in regard to "other-world" fictions, or social calamities, or suffering in general, of the same order? All such exaggeration of a single and narrow standpoint is in itself a sign of sickness. The same applies to the preponderance of a negative over an affirmative attitude!
In this respect we must not confound with the above: the joy of saying and doing no, which is the result of the enormous power and tenseness of an affirmative attitude—peculiar to all rich and mighty men and ages. It is, as it were, a luxury, a form of courage too, which opposes the terrible, which has sympathy with the frightful and the questionable, because, among other things, one is terrible and questionable: the Dionysian in will, intellect, and taste.
1021.
My Five "Noes."
(1) My fight against the feeling of sin and the introduction of the notion of punishment into the physical and metaphysical world, likewise into psychology and the interpretation of history. The recognition of the fact that all philosophies and valuations hitherto have been saturated with morality.
(2) My identification and my discovery of the traditional ideal, of the Christian ideal, even where the dogmatic form of Christianity has been wrecked. The danger of the Christian ideal resides in its valuations, in that which can dispense with concrete expression: my struggle against latent Christianity (for instance, in music, in Socialism).
(3) My struggle against the eighteenth century of Rousseau, against his "Nature," against his "good man," his belief in the dominion of feeling—against the pampering, weakening, and moralising of man: an ideal born of the hatred of aristocratic culture, which in practice is the dominion of unbridled feelings of resentment, and invented as a standard for the purpose of war (the Christian morality of the feeling of sin, as well as the morality of resentment, is an attitude of the mob).
(4) My fight against Romanticism, in which the ideals of Christianity and of Rousseau converge, but which possesses at the same time a yearning for that antiquity which knew of sacerdotal and aristocratic culture, a yearning for virtù, and for the "strong man"—something extremely hybrid; a false and imitated kind of stronger humanity, which appreciates extreme conditions in general and sees the symptom of strength in them ("the cult of passion"; an imitation of the most expressive forms, furore espressivo, originating not out of plenitude, but out of want).—(In the nineteenth century there are some things which are born out of relative plenitude—i.e. out of well-being; cheerful music, etc.—among poets, for instance, Stifter and Gottfried Keller give signs of more strength and inner well-being than—. The great strides of engineering, of inventions, of the natural sciences and of history (?) are relative products of the strength and self-reliance of the nineteenth century.)
(5) My struggle against the predominance of gregarious instincts, now science makes common cause with them; against the profound hate with which every kind of order of rank and of aloofness is treated.