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***
An advance is made: the slandered instincts attempt to re-establish
their rights (e.g. Luther's Reformation, the coarsest form of moral
falsehood under the cover of "Evangelical freedom"), they are
rechristened with holy names.
The calumniated instincts try to demonstrate that they are necessary
in order that the virtuous instincts may be possible. Il faut vivre, afin
de vivre pour autrui: egoism as a means to an end.[7]
But people go still further: they try to grant both the egoistic and
altruistic impulses the right to exist—equal rights for both—from the
utilitarian standpoint.
People go further: they see greater utility in placing the egoistic
rights before the altruistic—greater utility in the sense of more
happiness for the majority, or of the elevation of mankind, etc. etc.
Thus the rights of egoism begin to preponderate, but under the
cloak of an extremely altruistic standpoint—the collective utility of
humanity.
An attempt is made to reconcile the altruistic mode of action with
the natural order of things. Altruism is sought in the very roots of
life. Altruism and egoism are both based upon the essence of life
and nature.
The disappearance of the opposition between them is dreamt of as a
future possibility. Continued adaptation, it is hoped, will merge the
two into one.
At last it is seen that altruistic actions are merely a species of the
egoistic—and that the degree to which one loves and spends one's
self is a proof of the extent of one's individual power and personality.
In short, that the more evil man can be made, the better he is, and
that one cannot be the one without the other. At this point the
curtain rises which concealed the monstrous fraud of the psychology
that has prevailed hitherto.
***
Results.—There are only immoral intentions and actions; the so-
called moral actions must be shown to be immoral. All emotions are
traced to a single will, the will to power, and are called essentially
equal. The concept of life: in the apparent antithesis good and evil,
degrees of power in the instincts alone are expressed. A temporary
order of rank is established according to which certain instincts are
either controlled or enlisted in our service. Morality is justified:
economically, etc.
***
Against proposition two.—Determinism: the attempt to rescue the
moral world by transferring it to the unknown.
Determinism is only a manner of allowing ourselves to conjure our
valuations away, once they have lost their place in a world
interpreted mechanistically. Determinism must therefore be attacked
and undermined at all costs: just as our right to distinguish between
an absolute and phenomenal world should be disputed.
[7] Spencer's conclusion in the Data of Ethics.—Tr.

787.
It is absolutely necessary to emancipate ourselves from motives:
otherwise we should not be allowed to attempt to sacrifice ourselves
or to neglect ourselves! Only the innocence of Becoming gives us the
highest courage and the highest freedom.

788.
A clean conscience must be restored to the evil man—has this been
my involuntary endeavour all the time? for I take as the evil man
him who is strong (Dostoievsky's belief concerning the convicts in
prison should be referred to here).

789.
Our new "freedom." What a feeling of relief there is in the thought
that we emancipated spirits do not feel ourselves harnessed to any
system of teleological aims. Likewise that the concepts reward and
punishment have no roots in the essence of existence! Likewise that
good and evil actions are not good or evil in themselves, but only
from the point of view of the self-preservative tendencies of certain
species of humanity! Likewise that our speculations concerning
pleasure and pain are not of cosmic, far less then of metaphysical,
importance! (That form of pessimism associated with the name of
Hartmann, which pledges itself to put even the pain and pleasure of
existence into the balance, with its arbitrary confinement in the
prison and within the bounds of pre-Copernican thought, would be
something not only retrogressive, but degenerate, unless it be
merely a bad joke on the part of a "Berliner."[8])
[8] "Berliner"—The citizens of Berlin are renowned in Germany for
their poor jokes.—Tr.

790.
If one is clear as to the "wherefore" of one's life, then the "how" of it
can take care of itself.
It is already even a sign of disbelief in the wherefore and in the
purpose and sense of life—in fact, it is a sign of a lack of will—when
the value of pleasure and pain step into the foreground, and
hedonistic and pessimistic teaching becomes prevalent; and self-
abnegation, resignation, virtue, "objectivity," may, at the very least,
be signs that the most important factor is beginning to make its
absence felt.

791.
Hitherto there has been no German culture. It is no refutation of this
assertion to say that there have been great anchorites in Germany
(Goethe, for instance); for these had their own culture. But it was
precisely around them, as though around mighty, defiant, and
isolated rocks, that the remaining spirit of Germany, as their
antithesis, lay that is to say, as a soft, swampy, slippery soil, upon
which every step and every footprint of the rest of Europe made an
impression and created forms. German culture was a thing devoid of
character and of almost unlimited yielding power.

792.
Germany, though very rich in clever and well-informed scholars, has
for some time been so excessively poor in great souls and in mighty
minds, that it almost seems to have forgotten what a great soul or a
mighty mind is; and to-day mediocre and even ill-constituted men
place themselves in the market square without the suggestion of a
conscience-prick or a sign of embarrassment, and declare
themselves great men, reformers, etc. Take the case of Eugen
Dühring, for instance, a really clever and well-informed scholar, but a
man who betrays with almost every word he says that he has a
miserably small soul, and that he is horribly tormented by narrow
envious feelings; moreover, that it is no mighty overflowing,
benevolent, and spendthrift spirit that drives him on, but only the
spirit of ambition! But to be ambitious in such an age as this is much
more unworthy of a philosopher than ever it was: to-day, when it is
the mob that rules, when it is the mob that dispenses the honours.

793.
My "future": a severe polytechnic education. Conscription; so that as
a rule every man of the higher classes should be an officer, whatever
else he may be besides.

IV.

THE WILL TO POWER IN ART.

794.
Our religion, morality, and philosophy are decadent human
institutions. The counter-agent. Art.

795.
The Artist-philosopher. A higher concept of art. Can man stand at so
great a distance from his fellows as to mould them? (Preliminary
exercises thereto:—
1. To become a self-former, an anchorite.
2. To do what artists have done hitherto, i.e. to reach a small degree
of perfection in a certain medium.)

796.
Art as it appears without the artist, i.e. as a body, an organisation
(the Prussian Officers' Corps, the Order of the Jesuits). To what
extent is the artist merely a preliminary stage? The world regarded
as a self-generating work of art.

797.
The phenomenon, "artist," is the easiest to see through: from it one
can look down upon the fundamental instincts of power, of nature,
etc., even of religion and morality.
"Play," uselessness—as the ideal of him who is overflowing with
power, as the ideal of the child. The childishness of God, παῑς
παίζων.

798.
Apollonian, Dionysian. There are two conditions in which art
manifests itself in man even as a force of nature, and disposes of
him whether he consent or not: it may be as a constraint to
visionary states, or it may be an orgiastic impulse. Both conditions
are to be seen in normal life, but they are then somewhat weaker: in
dreams and in moments of elation or intoxication.[9]
But the same contrast exists between the dream state and the state
of intoxication; both of these states let loose all manner of artistic
powers within us, but each unfetters powers of a different kind.
Dreamland gives us the power of vision, of association, of poetry:
intoxication gives us the power of grand attitudes, of passion, of
song, and of dance.
[9] German: "Rausch."—There is no word in English for the
German expression "Rausch." When Nietzsche uses it, he means a
sort of blend of our two words: intoxication and elation.—Tr.

799.
Sexuality and voluptuousness belong to the Dionysiac intoxication:
but neither of them is lacking in the Apollonian state. There is also a
difference of tempo between the states.... The extreme peace of
certain feelings of intoxication (or, more strictly, the slackening of the
feeling of time, and the reduction of the feeling of space) is wont to
reflect itself in the vision of the most restful attitudes and states of
the soul. The classical style essentially represents repose,
simplification, foreshortening, and concentration—the highest feeling
of power is concentrated in the classical type. To react with
difficulty: great consciousness: no feeling of strife.

800.
The feeling of intoxication is, as a matter of fact, equivalent to a
sensation of surplus power: it is strongest in seasons of rut: new
organs, new accomplishments, new colours, new forms.
Embellishment is an outcome of increased power. Embellishment is
merely an expression of a triumphant will, of an increased state of
co-ordination, of a harmony of all the strong desires, of an infallible
and perpendicular equilibrium. Logical and geometrical simplification
is the result of an increase of power: conversely, the mere aspect of
such a simplification increases the sense of power in the beholder....
The zenith of development: the grand style.
Ugliness signifies the decadence of a type: contradiction and faulty
co-ordination among the inmost desires—this means a decline in the
organising power, or, psychologically speaking, in the will. The
condition of pleasure which is called intoxication is really an exalted
feeling of power. ... Sensations of space and time are altered;
inordinate distances are traversed by the eye, and only then become
visible; the extension of the vision over greater masses and
expanses; the refinement of the organ which apprehends the
smallest and most elusive things; divination, the power of
understanding at the slightest hint, at the smallest suggestion;
intelligent sensitiveness; strength as a feeling of dominion in the
muscles, as agility and love of movement, as dance, as levity and
quick time; strength as the love of proving strength, as bravado,
adventurousness, fearlessness, indifference in regard to life and
death.... All these elated moments of life stimulate each other; the
world of images and of imagination of the one suffices as a
suggestion for the other: in this way states finally merge into each
other, which might do better to keep apart, e.g. the feeling of
religious intoxication and sexual irritability (two very profound
feelings, always wonderfully co-ordinated. What is it that pleases
almost all pious women, old or young? Answer: a saint with beautiful
legs, still young, still innocent). Cruelty in tragedy and pity (likewise
normally correlated). Spring-time, dancing, music, —all these things
are but the display of one sex before the other,—as also that "infinite
yearning of the heart" peculiar to Faust.
Artists when they are worth anything at all are men of strong
propensities (even physically), with surplus energy, powerful
animals, sensual; without a certain overheating of the sexual system
a man like Raphael is unthinkable.... To produce music is also in a
sense to produce children; chastity is merely the economy of the
artist, and in all creative artists productiveness certainly ceases with
sexual potency.... Artists should not see things as they are; they
should see them fuller, simpler, stronger: to this end, however, a kind
of youthfulness, of vernality, a sort of perpetual elation, must be
peculiar to their lives.

801.
The states in which we transfigure things and make them fuller, and
rhapsodise about them, until they reflect our own fulness and love of
life back upon us: sexuality, intoxication, post-prandial states, spring,
triumph over our enemies, scorn, bravado, cruelty, the ecstasy of
religious feeling. But three elements above all are active: sexuality,
intoxication, cruelty; all these belong to the oldest festal joys of
mankind, they also preponderate in budding artists.
Conversely: there are things with which we meet which already
show us this transfiguration and fulness, and the animal world's
response thereto is a state of excitement in the spheres where these
states of happiness originate. A blending of these very delicate
shades of animal well-being and desires is the æsthetic state. The
latter only manifests itself in those natures which are capable of that
spendthrift and overflowing fulness of bodily vigour; the latter is
always the primum mobile. The sober-minded man, the tired man,
the exhausted and dried-up man (e.g. the scholar), can have no
feeling for art, because he does not possess the primitive force of
art, which is the tyranny of inner riches: he who cannot give
anything away cannot feel anything either.
"Perfection"—In these states (more particularly in the case of sexual
love) there is an ingenuous betrayal of what the profoundest instinct
regards as the highest, the most desirable, the most valuable, the
ascending movement of its type; also of the condition towards which
it is actually striving. Perfection: the extraordinary expansion of this
instinct's feeling of power, its riches, its necessary overflowing of all
banks.
802.
Art reminds us of states of physical vigour: it may be the overflow
and bursting forth of blooming life in the world of pictures and
desires; on the other hand, it may be an excitation of the physical
functions by means of pictures and desires of exalted life—an
enhancement of the feeling of life, the latter's stimulant.
To what extent can ugliness exercise this power? In so far as it may
communicate something of the triumphant energy of the artist who
has become master of the ugly and the repulsive; or in so far as it
gently excites our lust of cruelty (in some circumstances even the
lust of doing harm to ourselves, self-violence, and therewith the
feeling of power over ourselves).

803.
"Beauty" therefore is, to the artist, something which is above all
order of rank, because in beauty contrasts are overcome, the highest
sign of power thus manifesting itself in the conquest of opposites;
and achieved without a feeling of tension: violence being no longer
necessary, everything submitting and obeying so easily, and doing so
with good grace; this is what delights the powerful will of the artist.

804.
The biological value of beauty and ugliness. That which we feel
instinctively opposed to us æsthetically is, according to the longest
experience of mankind, felt to be harmful, dangerous, and worthy of
suspicion: the sudden utterance of the æsthetic instinct, e.g. in the
case of loathing, implies an act of judgment. To this extent beauty
lies within the general category of the biological values, useful,
beneficent, and life-promoting: thus, a host of stimuli which for ages
have been associated with, and remind us of, useful things and
conditions, give us the feeling of beauty, i.e. the increase of the
feeling of power (not only things, therefore, but the sensations
which are associated with such things or their symbols). In this way
beauty and ugliness are recognised as determined by our most
fundamental self-preservative values. Apart from this, it is nonsense
to postulate anything as beautiful or ugly. Absolute beauty exists just
as little as absolute goodness and truth. In a particular case it is a
matter of the self-preservative conditions of a certain type of man:
thus the gregarious man will have quite a different feeling for beauty
from the exceptional or super-man.
It is the optics of things in the foreground which only consider
immediate consequences, from which the value beauty (also
goodness and truth) arises.
All instinctive judgments are short-sighted in regard to the
concatenation of consequences: they merely advise what must be
done forthwith. Reason is essentially an obstructing apparatus
preventing the immediate response to instinctive judgments: it halts,
it calculates, it traces the chain of consequences further.
Judgments concerning beauty and ugliness are short-sighted (reason
is always opposed to them): but they are convincing in the highest
degree; they appeal to our instincts in that quarter where the latter
decide most quickly and say yes or no with least hesitation, even
before reason can interpose.
The most common affirmations of beauty stimulate each other
reciprocally; where the æsthetic impulse once begins to work, a
whole host of other and foreign perfections crystallise around the
"particular form of beauty." It is impossible to remain objective, it is
certainly impossible to dispense with the interpreting, bestowing,
transfiguring, and poetising power (the latter is a stringing together
of affirmations concerning beauty itself). The sight of a beautiful
woman....
Thus (1) judgment concerning beauty is short-sighted; it sees only
the immediate consequences.
(2) It smothers the object which gives rise to it with a charm that is
determined by the association of various judgments concerning
beauty, which, however, are quite alien to the essence of the
particular object. To regard a thing as beautiful is necessarily to
regard it falsely (that is why incidentally love marriages are from the
social point of view the most unreasonable form of matrimony).

805.
Concerning the genesis of Art. That making perfect and seeing
perfect, which is peculiar to the cerebral system overladen with
sexual energy (a lover alone with his sweetheart at eventide
transfigures the smallest details: life is a chain of sublime things,
"the misfortune of an unhappy love affair is more valuable than
anything else"); on the other hand, everything perfect and beautiful
operates like an unconscious recollection of that amorous condition
and of the point of view peculiar to it—all perfection, and the whole
of the beauty of things, through contiguity, revives aphrodisiac bliss.
(Physiologically it is the creative instinct of the artist and the
distribution of his semen in his blood.) The desire for art and beauty
is an indirect longing for the ecstasy; of sexual desire, which gets
communicated to the brain. The world become perfect through
"love."

806.
Sensuality in its various disguises.—(1) As idealism (Plato), common
to youth, constructing a kind of concave-mirror in which the image
of the beloved is an incrustation, an exaggeration, a transfiguration,
an attribution of infinity to everything. (2) In the religion of love, "a
fine young man," "a beautiful woman," in some way divine; a
bridegroom, a bride of the soul. (3) In art, as a decorating force,
e.g. just as the man sees the woman and makes her a present of
everything that can enhance her personal charm, so the sensuality
of the artist adorns an object with everything else that he honours
and esteems, and by this means perfects it (or idealises it). Woman,
knowing what man feels in regard to her, tries to meet his idealising
endeavours half-way by decorating herself, by walking and dancing
well, by expressing delicate thoughts: in addition, she may practise
modesty, shyness, reserve—prompted by her instinctive feeling that
the idealising power of man increases with all this, (In the
extraordinary finesse of woman's instincts, modesty must not by any
means be considered as conscious hypocrisy: she guesses that it is
precisely artlessness and real shame which seduces man most and
urges him to an exaggerated esteem of her. On this account, woman
is ingenuous, owing to the subtlety of her instincts which reveal to
her the utility of a state of innocence. A wilful closing of one's eyes
to one's self.... Wherever dissembling has a stronger influence by
being unconscious it actually becomes unconscious.)

807.
What a host of things can be accomplished by the state of
intoxication which is called by the name of love, and which is
something else besides love!—And yet everybody has his own
experience of this matter. The muscular strength of a girl suddenly
increases as soon as a man comes into her presence: there are
instruments with which this can be measured. In the case of a still
closer relationship of the sexes, as, for instance, in dancing and in
other amusements which society gatherings entail, this power
increases to such an extent as to make real feats of strength
possible: at last one no longer trusts either one's eyes, or one's
watch! Here at all events we must reckon with the fact that dancing
itself, like every form of rapid movement, involves a kind of
intoxication of the whole nervous, muscular, and visceral system. We
must therefore reckon in this case with the collective effects of a
double intoxication.—And how clever it is to be a little off your head
at times! There are some realities which we cannot admit even to
ourselves: especially when; we are women and have all sorts of
feminine, "pudeurs."...Those young creatures dancing over there are
obviously beyond all reality: they are dancing only with a host of
tangible ideals: what is more, they even see ideals sitting around
them, their mothers!... An opportunity for quoting Faust. They look
incomparably fairer, do these pretty creatures, when they have lost
their head a little; and how well they know it too, they are even
more delightful because they know it! Lastly, it is their finery which
inspires them; their finery is their third little intoxication. They
believe in their dressmaker as in their God: and who would destroy
this faith in them? Blessed is this faith! And self-admiration is
healthy! Self-admiration can protect one even from cold! Has a
beautiful woman, who knew she was well-dressed, ever caught cold?
Never yet on this earth! I even suppose a case in which she has
scarcely a rag on her.

808.
If one should require the most astonishing proof of how far the
power of transfiguring, which comes of intoxication, goes, this proof
is at hand in the phenomenon of love; or what is called love in all
the languages and silences of the world. Intoxication works to such
a degree upon reality in this passion that in the consciousness of the
lover the cause of his love is quite suppressed, and something else
seems to take its place,—a vibration and a glitter of all the charm-
mirrors of Circe.... In this respect to be man or an animal makes no
difference: and still less does spirit, goodness, or honesty. If one is
astute, one is befooled astutely; if one is thick-headed, one is
befooled in a thick-headed way. But love, even the love of God,
saintly love, "the love that saves the soul," are at bottom all one;
they are nothing but a fever which has reasons to transfigure itself—
a state of intoxication which does well to lie about itself.... And, at
any rate, when a man loves, he is a good liar about himself and to
himself: he seems to himself transfigured, stronger, richer, more
perfect; he is more perfect.... Art here acts as an organic function:
we find it present in the most angelic instinct "love"; we find it as
the greatest stimulus of life—thus art is sublimely utilitarian, even in
the fact that it lies.... But we should be wrong to halt at its power to
lie: it does more than merely imagine; it actually transposes values.
And it not only transposes the feeling for values: the lover actually
has a greater value; he is stronger. In animals this condition gives
rise to new weapons, colours, pigments, and forms, and above all to
new movements, new rhythms, new love-calls and seductions. In
man it is just the same. His whole economy is richer, mightier, and
more complete when he is in love than when he is not. The lover
becomes a spendthrift; he is rich enough for it. He now dares; he
becomes an adventurer, and even a donkey in magnanimity and
innocence; his belief in God and in virtue revives, because he
believes in love. Moreover, such idiots of happiness acquire wings
and new capacities, and even the door to art is opened to them.
If we cancel the suggestion of this intestinal fever from the lyric of
tones and words, what is left to poetry and music? ... L'art pour l'art
perhaps; the professional cant of frogs shivering outside in the cold,
and dying of despair in their swamp.... Everything else was created
by love.

809.
All art works like a suggestion on the muscles and the senses which
were originally active in the ingenuous artistic man; its voice is only
heard by artists—it speaks to this kind of man, whose constitution is
attuned to such subtlety in sensitiveness. The concept "layman" is a
misnomer. The deaf man is not a subdivision of the class, whose
ears are sound. All art works as a tonic; it increases strength, it
kindles desire (i.e. the feeling of strength), it excites all the more
subtle recollections of intoxication; there is actually a special kind of
memory which underlies such states—a distant flitful world of
sensations here returns to being.
Ugliness is the contradiction of art. It is that which art excludes, the
negation of art: wherever decline, impoverishment of life,
impotence, decomposition, dissolution, are felt, however remotely,
the æsthetic man reacts with his No. Ugliness depresses: it is the
sign of depression. It robs strength, it impoverishes, it weighs down,
... Ugliness suggests repulsive things. From one's states of health
one can test how an indisposition may increase one's power of
fancying ugly things. One's selection of things, interests, and
questions becomes different. Logic provides a state which is next of
kin to ugliness: heaviness, bluntness. In the presence of ugliness
equilibrium is lacking in a mechanical sense: ugliness limps and
stumbles—the direct opposite of the godly agility of the dancer.
The æsthetic state represents an overflow of means of
communication as well as a condition of extreme sensibility to stimuli
and signs. It is the zenith of communion and transmission between
living creatures; it is the source of languages. In it, languages,
whether of signs, sounds, or glances, have their birthplace. The
richer phenomenon is always the beginning: our abilities are
subtilised forms of richer abilities. But even to-day we still listen with
our muscles, we even read with our muscles.
Every mature art possesses a host of conventions as a basis: in so
far as it is a language. Convention is a condition of great art, not an
obstacle to it.... Every elevation of life likewise elevates the power of
communication, as also the understanding of man. The power of
living in other people's souls originally had nothing to do with
morality, but with a physiological irritability of suggestion:
"sympathy," or what is called "altruism," is merely a product of that
psycho-motor relationship which is reckoned as spirituality (psycho-
motor induction, says Charles Féré). People never communicate a
thought to one another: they communicate a movement, an
imitative sign which is then interpreted as a thought.

810.
Compared with music, communication by means of words is a
shameless mode of procedure; words reduce and stultify; words
make impersonal; words make common that which is uncommon.

811.
It is exceptional states that determine the artist—such states as are
all intimately related and entwined with morbid symptoms, so that it
would seem almost impossible to be an artist without being ill.
The physiological conditions which in the artist become moulded into
a "personality," and which, to a certain degree, may attach
themselves to any man:—
(1) Intoxication, the feeling of enhanced power; the inner
compulsion to make things a mirror of one's own fulness and
perfection.
(2) The extreme sharpness of certain senses, so that they are
capable of understanding a totally different language of signs—and
to create such a language (this is a condition which manifests itself
in some nervous diseases); extreme susceptibility out of which great
powers of communion are developed; the desire to speak on the
part of everything that is capable of making-signs; a need of being
rid of one's self by means of gestures and attitudes; the ability of
speaking about one's self in a hundred different languages—in fact,
a state of explosion.
One must first imagine this condition as one in which there is a
pressing and compulsory desire of ridding one's self of the ecstasy of
a state of tension, by all kinds of muscular work and movement; also
as an involuntary co-ordination of these movements with inner
processes (images, thoughts, desires)—as a kind of automatism of
the whole muscular system under the compulsion of strong stimuli
acting from within; the inability to resist reaction; the apparatus of
resistance is also suspended. Every inner movement (feeling,
thought, emotion) is accompanied by vascular changes, and
consequently by changes in colour, temperature, and secretion. The
suggestive power of music, its "suggestion mentale."
(3) The compulsion to imitate: extreme irritability, by means of
which a certain example becomes contagious—a condition is
guessed and represented merely by means of a few signs.... A
complete picture is visualised by one's inner consciousness, and its
effect soon shows itself in the movement of the limbs,—in a certain
suspension of the will (Schopenhauer!!!!). A sort of blindness and
deafness towards the external world,—the realm of admitted stimuli
is sharply defined.
This differentiates the artist from the layman (from the spectator of
art): the latter reaches the height of his excitement in the mere act
of apprehending: the former in giving—and in such a way that the
antagonism between these two gifts is not only natural but even
desirable. Each of these states has an opposite standpoint—to
demand of the artist that he should have the point of view of the
spectator (of the critic) is equivalent to asking him to impoverish his
creative power.... In this respect the same difference holds good as
that which exists between the sexes: one should not ask the artist
who gives to become a woman—to "receive."
Our æsthetics have hitherto been women's æsthetics, inasmuch as
they have only formulated the experiences of what is beautiful, from
the point of view of the receivers in art. In the whole of philosophy
hitherto the artist has been lacking ... i.e. as we have already
suggested, a necessary fault: for the artist who would begin to
understand himself would therewith begin to mistake himself—he
must not look backwards, he must not look at all; he must give.—It
is an honour for an artist to have no critical faculty; if he can criticise
he is mediocre, he is modern.

812.
Here I lay down a series of psychological states as signs of
flourishing and complete life, which to-day we are in the habit of
regarding as morbid. But, by this time, we have broken ourselves of
the habit of speaking of healthy and morbid as opposites: the
question is one of degree, what I maintain on this point is that what
people call healthy nowadays represents a lower level of that which
under favourable circumstances actually would be healthy—that we
are relatively sick....
The artist belongs to a much stronger race. That which in us would
be harmful and sickly, is natural in him. But people object to this that
it is precisely the impoverishment of the machine which renders this
extraordinary power of comprehending every kind of suggestion
possible: e.g. our hysterical females.
An overflow of spunk and energy may quite as well lead to
symptoms of partial constraint, sense hallucinations, peripheral
sensitiveness, as a poor vitality does—the stimuli are differently
determined, the effect is the same.... What is not the same is above
all the ultimate result; the extreme torpidity of all morbid natures,
after their nervous eccentricities, has nothing in common with the
states of the artist, who need in no wise repent his best moments....
He is rich enough for it all: he can squander without becoming poor.
Just as we now feel justified in judging genius as a form of neurosis,
we may perhaps think the same of artistic suggestive power,—and
our artists are, as a matter of fact, only too closely related to
hysterical females!!! This, however, is only an argument against the
present day, and not against artists in general.
The inartistic states are: objectivity, reflection suspension of the will
... (Schopenhauer's scandalous misunderstanding consisted in
regarding art as a mere bridge to the denial of life)... The inartistic
states are: those which impoverish, which subtract, which bleach,
under which life suffers—the Christian.

813.
The modern artist who, in his physiology, is next of kin to the
hysteric, may also be classified as a character belonging to this state
of morbidness. The hysteric is false,—he lies from the love of lying,
he is admirable in all the arts of dissimulation,—unless his morbid
vanity hood-wink him. This vanity is like a perpetual fever which is in
need of stupefying drugs, and which recoils from no self-deception
and no farce that promises it the most fleeting satisfaction. (The
incapacity for pride and the need of continual revenge for his deep-
rooted self-contempt, this is almost the definition of this man's
vanity.)
The absurd irritability of his system, which makes a crisis out of
every one of his experiences, and sees dramatic elements in the
most insignificant occurrences of life, deprives him of all calm
reflection; he ceases from being a personality, at most he is a
rendezvous of personalities of which first one and then the other
asserts itself with barefaced assurance. Precisely on this account he
is great as an actor i all these poor will-less people, whom doctors
study so profoundly, astound one through their virtuosity in
mimicking, in transfiguration, in their assumption of almost any
character required.

814.
Artists are not men of great passion, despite all their assertions to
the contrary both to themselves and to others. And for the following
two reasons: they lack all shyness towards themselves (they watch
themselves live, they spy upon themselves, they are much too
inquisitive), and they also lack shyness in the presence of passion
(as artists they exploit it). Secondly, however, that vampire, their
talent, generally forbids them such an expenditure of energy as
passion demands.—A man, who has a talent is sacrificed to that
talent; he lives under the vampirism of his talent.
A man does not get rid of his passion by reproducing it, but rather
he is rid of it if he is able to reproduce it. (Goethe teaches the
reverse, but it seems as though he deliberately misunderstood
himself here—from a sense of delicacy.)

815.
Concerning a reasonable mode of life.—.Relative, chastity, a
fundamental and shrewd caution in regard to erotica, even in
thought, may be a reasonable mode of life even in richly equipped
and perfect natures. But this principle applies more particularly to
artists; it belongs to the best wisdom of their lives. Wholly
trustworthy voices have already been raised in favour of this view,
e.g. Stendhal, Th. Gautier, and Flaubert. The artist is perhaps in his
way necessarily a sensual man, generally susceptible, accessible to
everything, and capable of responding to the remotest stimulus or
suggestion of a stimulus. Nevertheless, as a rule he is in the power
of his work, of his will to mastership, really a sober and often even a
chaste man. His dominating instinct will have him so: it does not
allow him to spend himself haphazardly. It is one and the same form
of strength which is spent in artistic conception and in the sexual
act: there is only one form of strength. The artist who yields in this
respect, and who spends himself, is betrayed: by so doing he reveals
his lack of instinct, his lack of will in general. It may be a sign of
decadence,—in any case it reduces the value of his art to an
incalculable degree.

816.
Compared with the artist, the scientific man, regarded as a
phenomenon, is indeed a sign of a certain storing-up and levelling-
down of life (but also of an increase of strength, severity, hardness,
and will-power). To what extent can falsity and indifference towards
truth and utility be a sign of youth, of childishness, in the artist? ...
Their habitual manner, their unreasonableness, their ignorance of
themselves, their indifference to "eternal values," their seriousness
in play, their lack of dignity; clowns and gods in one; the saint and
the rabble.... Imitation as an imperious instinct.—Do not artists of
ascending life and artists of degeneration belong to all phases? ...
Yes!

817.
Would any link be missing in the whole chain of science and art, if
woman, if woman's work, were excluded from it? Let us
acknowledge the exception—it proves the rule—that woman is
capable of perfection in everything which does not constitute a
work: in letters, in memoirs, in the most intricate handiwork—in
short, in everything which is not a craft; and just precisely because
in the things mentioned woman perfects herself, because in them
she obeys the only artistic impulse in her nature,—which is to
captivate.... But what has woman to do with the passionate
indifference of the genuine artist who sees more importance in a
breath, in a sound, in the merest trifle, than in himself?—who with
all his five fingers gropes for his most secret and hidden treasures?—
who attributes no value to anything unless it knows how to take
shape (unless it surrenders itself, unless it visualises itself in some
way). Art as it is practised by artists—do you not understand what it
is? is it not an outrage on all our pudeurs? ... Only in this century
has woman dared to try her hand at literature ("Vers la canaille
plumière écrivassière," to speak with old Mirabeau): woman now
writes, she now paints, she is losing her instincts. And to what
purpose, if one may put such a question?

818.
A man is an artist to the extent to which he regards everything that
inartistic people call "form" as the actual substance, as the
"principal" thing. With such ideas a man certainly belongs to a world
upside down: for henceforward substance seems to him something
merely formal,—his own life included.

819.
A sense for, and a delight in, nuances (which is characteristic of
modernity), in that which is not general, runs counter to the instinct
which finds its joy and its strength in grasping what is typical: like
Greek taste in its best period. In this there is an overcoming of the
plenitude of life; restraint dominates, the peace of the strong soul
which is slow to move and which feels a certain repugnance towards
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