The Will to Power. Friedrich Nietzsche
almost joyous and confiding, which neither revolts nor weakens, which strives to make a totality out of itself, in the belief that only in totality does every thing seem good and justified, and find itself resolved.
96. The period of rationalism followed by a period of sentimentality. To what extent does Schopenhauer come under "sentimentality"? (Hegel under intellectuality?)
97. The seventeenth century suffers from humanity as from a host of contradictions (" Famas de con tradictions " that we are ); it endeavours to discover man, to co-ordinate him, to excavate him: whereas the eighteenth century tries to forget what is known of man s nature, in order to adapt him to its Utopia. " Superficial, soft, humane " gushes over " humanity." The seventeenth century tries to banish all traces of the individual in order that the artist s work may resemble life as much as possible. The eighteenth century strives to create interest in the author by means of the work. The seventeenth century seeks art in art, a piece of culture; the eighteenth uses art in its propaganda for political and social reforms. " Utopia," the " ideal man," the deification of Nature, the vanity of making one s own personality the centre of interest, subordination to the propa ganda of social ideas, charlatanism all this we derive from the eighteenth century. The style of the seventeenth century: propre exact et libre. The strong individual who is self-sufficient, or who appeals ardently to God and that obtrusive- ness and indiscretion of modern authors these things are opposites. u Showing-oneself-ofif" what a contrast to the Scholars of Port- Royal! Alfieri had a sense for the grand style. The hate of the burlesque (that which lacks dignity), the lack of a sense of Nature belongs to the seventeenth century.
98. Against Rousseau. Alas! man is no longer sufficiently evil; Rousseau s opponents, who say that " man is a beast of prey," are unfortunately wrong. Not the corruption of man, but the softening and moralising of him is the curse. In the sphere which Rousseau attacked most violently, the relatively strongest and most successful type of man was still to be found (the type which still possessed the great passions intact: Will to Power, Will to Pleasure, the Will and Ability to Com mand). The man of the eighteenth century must be compared with the man of the Renaissance (also with the man of the seventeenth century in France) if the matter is to be understood at all: Rousseau is a symptom of self-contempt and of inflamed vanity both signs that the dominating will is lacking: he moralises and seeks the cause of his own misery after the style of a revengeful man in the ruling classes.
99. Voltaire Rousseau. A state of nature is terrible; man is a beast of prey: our civilisation is an extraordinary triumph over this beast of prey in nature this was Voltaire s conclusion. He was conscious of the mildness, the refinements, the intellectual joys of the civilized state; he despised obtuseness, even in the form of virtue, and the lack of delicacy even in ascetics and monks. The moral depravity of man seemed to pre occupy Rousseau; the words " unjust," " cruel," are the best possible for the purpose of exciting the instincts of the oppressed, who otherwise find themselves under the ban of the vetitum and of disgrace; so that their conscience is opposed to their indulging any insurrectional desires. These emancipators seek one thing above all: to give their party the great accents and attitudes of higher Nature.
100. Rousseau: the rule founded on sentiment; Nature as the source of justice; man perfects himself in proportion as he approaches Nature (according to Voltaire, in proportion as he leaves Nature behind}. The very same periods seem to the one to demonstrate the progress of humanity and, to the other, the increase of injustice and inequality. Voltaire, who still understood umanita in the sense of the Renaissance, as also virtu (as " higher culture "), fights for the cause of the " honnetes gens" " la bonne compagnie" taste, science, arts, and even for the cause of progress and civilisation. The flare-up occurred towards 1760: On the one hand the citizen of Geneva, on the other le seigneur de Ferney. It is only from that moment and henceforward that Voltaire was the man of his age, the philosopher, the representative of Toleration and of Disbelief (theretofore he had been merely un bel esprit}. His envy and hatred of Rousseau s success forced him upwards. " Pour la canaille un dieu re mune rateur el vengeur " Voltaire. The criticism of both standpoints in regard to the value of civilisation. To Voltaire nothing seems finer than the social invention: there is no higher goal than to uphold and perfect it. L honnetete consists precisely in respecting social usage; virtue in a certain obedience towards various necessary " prejudices " which favour the maintenance of society. Missionary of Culture, aristocrat, representative of the triumphant and ruling classes and their values. But Rousseau remained a plebeian, even as hommes de lettres, this was preposterous] his shameless contempt for everything that was not himself. The morbid feature in Rousseau is the one which happens to have been most admired and imitated. (Lord Byron resembled him somewhat, he too screwed himself up to sublime attitudes and to revengeful rage a sign of vulgarity; later on, when Venice restored his equilibrium, he under stood what alleviates most and does the most good . . . F insouciance?) In spite of his antecedents, Rousseau is proud of himself; but he is incensed if he is reminded of his origin. . . . In Rousseau there was undoubtedly some brain trouble; in Voltaire rare health and lightsome- ness. The revengefulness of the sick; his periods of insanity as also those of his contempt of man, and of his mistrust. Rousseau s defence of Providence (against Vol taire s Pessimism): he had need of God in order to be able to curse society and civilisation; every thing must be good per se, because God had created it; man alone has corrupted man. The " good man " as a man of Nature was pure fantasy; but with the dogma of God s authorship he became something probable and even not devoid of found ation. Romanticism & la Rousseau: passion (" the sovereign right of passion "); " naturalness "; the fascination of madness (foolishness reckoned as greatness); the senseless vanity of the weak; the revengefulness of the masses elevated to the posi tion of justice (" in politics, for one hundred years, the leader has always been this invalid " ).
101. Kant: makes the scepticism of Englishmen, in regard to the theory of knowledge, possible for Germans. (1) By enlisting in its cause the interest of the German s religious and moral needs: just as the new academicians used scepticism for the same reasons, as a preparation for Platonism (vide Augustine); just as Pascal even used moral scepticism in order to provoke (to justify) the need of belief; (2) By complicating and entangling it with scholastic flourishes in view of making it more acceptable to the German's scientific taste in form (for Locke and Hume, alone, were too illuminating, too clear that is to say, judged according to the German valuing instinct, " too superficial "). Kant: a poor psychologist and mediocre judge of human nature, made hopeless mistakes in regard to great historical values (the French Revolution); a moral fanatic a la Rousseau; with a subterranean current of Christian values; a thorough dogmatist, but bored to extinction by this tendency, to the extent of wishing to tyrannise over it, but quickly tired, even of skepticism; and not yet affected by any cosmopolitan thought or antique beauty ... a dawdler and a go-between, not at all original (like Leibnitz, something between mechanism and spiritualism; like Goethe, something between the taste of the eighteenth century and that of the " historical sense " [which is essentially a sense of exoticism]; like German music, between French and Italian music; like Charles the Great, who mediated and built bridges between the Roman Empire and Nationalism a dawdler par excellence],
102. In what respect have the Christian centuries with their Pessimism been stronger centuries than the eighteenth and how do they correspond with the tragic age of the Greeks? The nineteenth century versus the eighteenth. How was it an heir? how was it a step backwards from the latter? (more lacking in " spirit " and in taste) how did it show an advance on the latter? (more gloomy, more realistic, stronger).
103. How can we explain the fact that we feel something in common with the Campagna romana? And the high mountain chain? Chateaubriand in a letter to M. de Fontanes in 1803 writes his first impression of the Campagna romana. The President de Brosses says of the Campagna romana: " II fallait que Romulus fut ivre quand il songea a batir une ville dans un terrain aussi laid." Even Delacroix would have nothing to do with Rome, it frightened him. He loved Venice, just as Shakespeare, Byron, and Georges Sand did. The"ophile Gautier s and Richard Wagner s dislike of Rome must not be forgotten. Lamartine has the language for Sorrento and Posilippo. Victor Hugo raves about Spain, " parce que aucune autre nation n a moins emprunte* a 1 antiquite", parce qu elle n a subi aucune influence classique."
104. The two great attempts that were made to overcome the eighteenth century: Napoleon, in that he called man, the soldier, and the great struggle for power, to life again, and conceived Europe