This short book is a mismatch of aphorisms, blurbs, and short essays that Nietzsche wrote towards the end of his sanity. He begins, “This little book is a grand declaration of war.” From that bold start, he gives a taste of some choice maxims, “Even the bravest of us rarely has the courage for what he really knows…. To live alone one must be an animal or a god—says Aristotle. There is yet a third case: one must be both—a philosopher…. Which is it? Is man only God’s mistake or God only man’s mistake?—…. Let us not be cowardly in the face of our actions! Let us not afterwards leave them in a lurch!—Remorse of conscience is indecent.”
In an essay disparaging Socrates, Nietzsche begins by commenting on the value of life, “In every age the wisest have passed the identical judgement on life: it is worthless…. Everywhere and always their mouths have uttered the same sound—a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness with life, full of opposition to life.” In another essay he discusses morality and nature, “All naturalism in morality, that is all healthy morality, is dominated by an instinct of life—some commandment of life is fulfilled through a certain canon of ‘shall’ and ‘shall not’, some hinderance and hostile element on life’s road is thereby removed. Anti-natural morality, that is virtually every morality that has hitherto been taught, reverenced and preached, turns on the contrary precisely against the instincts of life…. It denies the deepest and the highest desires of life and takes God for the enemy of life…. Life is at an end where the ‘kingdom of God’ begins.” On determinism, he opines, “No one is accountable for existing at all, or for being constituted as he is, or for living in the circumstances and surroundings in which he lives…. One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is the whole…. Nothing exits apart from the whole!… We deny God; in denying God, we deny accountability: only by doing that do we redeem the world.”
In an essay on German deficiencies, Nietzsche contrasts culture with the nation-state. “Culture and the state—one should not deceive oneself over this—are antagonists: the ‘cultural state’ is merely a modern idea…. All great cultural epochs are epochs of political decline…. Great and fine things can never be common property: pulchrum est paucorum hominum [beauty is for the few].” On a short paragraph on Thomas Carlyle, Nietzsche sneaks in his opinion on faith, “The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of scepticism: one is secure enough, firm enough, fixed enough for it.”
Nietzsche bemoans modern customs and takes shots at Schopenhauer and Christ all in one go, “Our softening of customs—this is my thesis, my innovation if you like—is a consequence of decline; stern and frightful customs can, conversely, be a consequence of a superabundance of life…. That movement which with Schopenhauer’s morality of pity attempted to present itself as scientific—a very unsuccessful attempt!—is the actual decadence movement of morality; as such it is profoundly related to Christian morality. Strong ages, noble cultures, see in pity, in ‘love for one’s neighbor’, in a lack of self and self-reliance, something contemptible…. ‘Equality’, a certain actual rendering similar of which the theory of ‘equal rights’ is only the expression, belongs essentially to decline: the chasm between man and man, class and class, the multiplicity of types, the will to be oneself, to stand out—that which I call pathos of distance—characterizes every strong age.” He transitions to thoughts on institutional development, “Liberal institutions immediately cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained…. They undermine the will to power, they are the leveling of mountain and valley exalted to a moral principle, they make small, cowardly and smug—it is the herd animal which triumphs with them every time…. The man who has become free—and how much more the mind that has become free—spurns the contemptible sort of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats. The free man is a warrior…. For institutions to exist there must exist the kind of will, instinct, imperative which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to centuries-ling responsibility, to solidarity between the succeeding generations backwards and forwards in infinitum.”
Nietzsche next discusses aesthetics and the concept of beauty, “Even the beauty of a race or a family, the charm and benevolence of their whole demeanour, is earned by labour: like genius, it is the final result of the accumulatory labour of generations. One must have made great sacrifices to good taste…. One must have possessed in it a selective principle in respect of one’s society, residence, dress, sexual gratification, one must have preferred beauty to advantage, habit, opinion, indolence…. Good things are costly beyond measure: and the law still holds that he who has them is different from him who obtains them. Everything good is inheritance: what is not inherited is imperfect, is a beginning.”
Finally, in an essay on the ancients and his love for tradition, Nietzsche finds time for a digression ripping Plato. “One does not learn from the Greeks…. Plato mixes together all forms of style; he is therewith in the matter of style a first decadent…. I find him deviated so far from all the fundamental instincts of the Hellenes, so morally infected, so much an antecedent Christian—he already has the concept ‘good’ as the supreme concept…. Plato is that ambiguity and fascination called the ‘ideal’ which made it possible for the nobler natures of antiquity to misunderstand themselves and to step on to the bridge which led to the ‘Cross’…. Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems, the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types—that is what I called Dionysian…. I again plant myself in the soil out of which I draw all that I will and can—I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysos—I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence.”
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