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

expression “at any cost”⁠—I specially mention Delacroix, the nearest related to Wagner; all of them great discoverers in the realm of the sublime, also of the loathsome and dreadful, still greater discoverers in effect, in display, in the art of the show-shop; all of them talented far beyond their genius, out and out virtuosi, with mysterious accesses to all that seduces, allures, constrains, and upsets; born enemies of logic and of the straight line, hankering after the strange, the exotic, the monstrous, the crooked, and the self-contradictory; as men, Tantaluses of the will, plebeian parvenus, who knew themselves to be incapable of a noble tempo or of a lento in life and action⁠—think of Balzac, for instance⁠—unrestrained workers, almost destroying themselves by work; antinomians and rebels in manners, ambitious and insatiable, without equilibrium and enjoyment; all of them finally shattering and sinking down at the Christian cross (and with right and reason, for who of them would have been sufficiently profound and sufficiently original for an antiChristian philosophy?);⁠—on the whole, a boldly daring, splendidly overbearing, high-flying, and aloft-up-dragging class of higher men, who had first to teach their century⁠—and it is the century of the masses⁠—the conception “higher man.”⁠ ⁠… Let the German friends of Richard Wagner advise together as to whether there is anything purely German in the Wagnerian art, or whether its distinction does not consist precisely in coming from super-German sources and impulses: in which connection it may not be underrated how indispensable Paris was to the development of his type, which the strength of his instincts made him long to visit at the most decisive time⁠—and how the whole style of his proceedings, of his self-apostolate, could only perfect itself in sight of the French socialistic original. On a more subtle comparison it will perhaps be found, to the honour of Richard Wagner’s German nature, that he has acted in everything with more strength, daring, severity, and elevation than a nineteenth-century Frenchman could have done⁠—owing to the circumstance that we Germans are as yet nearer to barbarism than the French;⁠—perhaps even the most remarkable creation of Richard Wagner is not only at present, but forever inaccessible, incomprehensible, and inimitable to the whole latter-day Latin race: the figure of Siegfried, that very free man, who is probably far too free, too hard, too cheerful, too healthy, too anti-Catholic for the taste of old and mellow civilized nations. He may even have been a sin against Romanticism, this anti-Latin Siegfried: well, Wagner atoned amply for this sin in his old sad days, when⁠—anticipating a taste which has meanwhile passed into politics⁠—he began, with the religious vehemence peculiar to him, to preach, at least, the way to Rome, if not to walk therein.⁠—That these last words may not be misunderstood, I will call to my aid a few powerful rhymes, which will even betray to less delicate ears what I mean⁠—what I mean counter to the “last Wagner” and his Parsifal music:⁠—

—Is this our mode?⁠—From German heart came this vexed ululating? From German body, this self-lacerating? Is ours this priestly hand-dilation, This incense-fuming exaltation? Is ours this faltering, falling, shambling, This quite uncertain dingdong-dangling? This sly nun-ogling, Ave-hour-bell ringing, This wholly false enraptured heaven-o’erspringing?⁠—Is this our mode?⁠—Think well!⁠—ye still wait for admission⁠—For what ye hear is Rome⁠—Rome’s faith by intuition!

IX What Is Noble? 257

Every elevation of the type “man,” has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society and so it will always be⁠—a society believing in a long scale of gradations of rank and differences of worth among human beings, and requiring slavery in some form or other. Without the pathos of distance, such as grows out of the incarnated difference of classes, out of the constant out-looking and down-looking of the ruling caste on subordinates and instruments, and out of their equally constant practice of obeying and commanding, of keeping down and keeping at a distance⁠—that other more mysterious pathos could never have arisen, the longing for an ever new widening of distance within the soul itself, the formation of ever higher, rarer, further, more extended, more comprehensive states, in short, just the elevation of the type “man,” the continued “self-surmounting of man,” to use a moral formula in a supermoral sense. To be sure, one must not resign oneself to any humanitarian illusions about the history of the origin of an aristocratic society (that is to say, of the preliminary condition for the elevation of the type “man”): the truth is hard. Let us acknowledge unprejudicedly how every higher civilization hitherto has originated! Men with a still natural nature, barbarians in every terrible sense of the word, men of prey, still in possession of unbroken strength of will and desire for power, threw themselves upon weaker, more moral, more peaceful races (perhaps trading or cattle-rearing communities), or upon old mellow civilizations in which the final vital force was flickering out in brilliant fireworks of wit and depravity. At the commencement, the noble caste was always the barbarian caste: their superiority did not consist first of all in their physical, but in their psychical power⁠—they were more complete men (which at every point also implies the same as “more complete beasts”).

258

Corruption⁠—as the indication that anarchy threatens to break out among the instincts, and that the foundation of the emotions, called “life,” is convulsed⁠—is something radically different according to the organization in which it manifests itself. When, for instance, an aristocracy like that of France at the beginning of the Revolution, flung away its privileges with sublime disgust and sacrificed itself to an excess of its moral sentiments, it was corruption:⁠—it was really only the closing act of the corruption which had existed for centuries, by virtue of which that aristocracy had abdicated step by step its lordly prerogatives and lowered itself to a function of royalty (in the end even to its decoration and parade-dress). The essential thing, however, in a good and