Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche (most life changing books txt) 📕

gap that opens between cause and effect, an oppression that makes us dream, almost a nightmare; but already it broadens and widens anew, the old stream of delight⁠—the most manifold delight⁠—of old and new happiness; including especially the joy of the artist in himself, which he refuses to conceal, his astonished, happy cognizance of his mastery of the expedients here employed, the new, newly acquired, imperfectly tested expedients of art which he apparently betrays to us. All in all, however, no beauty, no South, nothing of the delicate southern clearness of the sky, nothing of grace, no dance, hardly a will to logic; a certain clumsiness even, which is also emphasized, as though the artist wished to say to us: “It is part of my intention”; a cumbersome drapery, something arbitrarily barbaric and ceremonious, a flirring of learned and venerable conceits and witticisms; something German in the best and worst sense of the word, something in the German style, manifold, formless, and inexhaustible; a certain German potency and super-plenitude of soul, which is not afraid to hide itself under the raffinements of decadence⁠—which, perhaps, feels itself most at ease there; a real, genuine token of the German soul, which is at the same time young and aged, too ripe and yet still too rich in futurity. This kind of music expresses best what I think of the Germans: they belong to the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow⁠—they have as yet no today. 241

We “good Europeans,” we also have hours when we allow ourselves a warmhearted patriotism, a plunge and relapse into old loves and narrow views⁠—I have just given an example of it⁠—hours of national excitement, of patriotic anguish, and all other sorts of old-fashioned floods of sentiment. Duller spirits may perhaps only get done with what confines its operations in us to hours and plays itself out in hours⁠—in a considerable time: some in half a year, others in half a lifetime, according to the speed and strength with which they digest and “change their material.” Indeed, I could think of sluggish, hesitating races, which even in our rapidly moving Europe, would require half a century ere they could surmount such atavistic attacks of patriotism and soil-attachment, and return once more to reason, that is to say, to “good Europeanism.” And while digressing on this possibility, I happen to become an earwitness of a conversation between two old patriots⁠—they were evidently both hard of hearing and consequently spoke all the louder. “He has as much, and knows as much, philosophy as a peasant or a corps-student,” said the one⁠—“he is still innocent. But what does that matter nowadays! It is the age of the masses: they lie on their belly before everything that is massive. And so also in politicis. A statesman who rears up for them a new Tower of Babel, some monstrosity of empire and power, they call ‘great’⁠—what does it matter that we more prudent and conservative ones do not meanwhile give up the old belief that it is only the great thought that gives greatness to an action or affair. Supposing a statesman were to bring his people into the position of being obliged henceforth to practise ‘high politics,’ for which they were by nature badly endowed and prepared, so that they would have to sacrifice their old and reliable virtues, out of love to a new and doubtful mediocrity;⁠—supposing a statesman were to condemn his people generally to ‘practise politics,’ when they have hitherto had something better to do and think about, and when in the depths of their souls they have been unable to free themselves from a prudent loathing of the restlessness, emptiness, and noisy wranglings of the essentially politics-practising nations;⁠—supposing such a statesman were to stimulate the slumbering passions and avidities of his people, were to make a stigma out of their former diffidence and delight in aloofness, an offence out of their exoticism and hidden permanency, were to depreciate their most radical proclivities, subvert their consciences, make their minds narrow, and their tastes ‘national’⁠—what! a statesman who should do all this, which his people would have to do penance for throughout their whole future, if they had a future, such a statesman would be great, would he?”⁠—“Undoubtedly!” replied the other old patriot vehemently, “otherwise he could not have done it! It was mad perhaps to wish such a thing! But perhaps everything great has been just as mad at its commencement!”⁠—“Misuse of words!” cried his interlocutor, contradictorily⁠—“strong! strong! Strong and mad! not great!”⁠—The old men had obviously become heated as they thus shouted their “truths” in each other’s faces, but I, in my happiness and apartness, considered how soon a stronger one may become master of the strong, and also that there is a compensation for the intellectual superficialising of a nation⁠—namely, in the deepening of another.

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Whether we call it “civilization,” or “humanising,” or “progress,” which now distinguishes the European, whether we call it simply, without praise or blame, by the political formula the democratic movement in Europe⁠—behind all the moral and political foregrounds pointed to by such formulas, an immense physiological process goes on, which is ever extending the process of the assimilation of Europeans, their increasing detachment from the conditions under which, climatically and hereditarily, united races originate, their increasing independence of every definite milieu, that for centuries would fain inscribe itself with equal demands on soul and body⁠—that is to say, the slow emergence of an essentially supernational and nomadic species of man, who possesses, physiologically speaking, a maximum of the art and power of adaptation as his typical distinction. This process of the evolving European, which can be retarded in its tempo by great relapses, but will perhaps just gain and grow thereby in vehemence and depth⁠—the still-raging storm and stress of “national sentiment” pertains to it, and also the anarchism which is appearing at present⁠—this process will probably arrive at results on which its naive