A Nietzsche Reader by Friedrich Nietzsche

Author:Friedrich Nietzsche
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141921716
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2003-06-15T16:00:00+00:00

112

Fair and foul. – Nothing is so conditional, let us say circumscribed, as our feeling for the beautiful. Anyone who tried to divorce it from man’s pleasure in man would at once find the ground give way beneath him. The ‘beautiful in itself’ is not even a concept, merely a phrase. In the beautiful man sets up himself as the standard of perfection; in select cases he worships himself in it. A species cannot do otherwise than affirm itself alone in this manner. Its deepest instinct, that of self-preservation and self-aggrandizement, is still visible in such sublimated forms. Man believes that the world itself is filled with beauty – he forgets that it is he who has created it. He alone has bestowed beauty upon the world – alas! only a very human, all too human beauty … Man really mirrors himself in things, that which gives him back his own reflection he considers beautiful: the judgement ‘beautiful’ is his conceit of his species. […]

Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naviety rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man – the domain of aesthetic judgement is therewith defined. – Reckoned physiologically, everything ugly weakens and afflicts man. It recalls decay, danger, impotence; he actually suffers a loss of energy in its presence. The effect of the ugly can be measured with a dynamometer. Whenever man feels in any way depressed, he senses the proximity of something ‘ugly’. His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride – they decline with the ugly, they increase with the beautiful … In the one case as in the other we draw a conclusion: its premises have been accumulated in the instincts in tremendous abundance. The ugly is understood as a sign and symptom of degeneration: that which recalls degeneration, however remotely, produces in us the judgement ‘ugly’. Every token of exhaustion, of heaviness, of age, of weariness, every kind of unfreedom, whether convulsive or paralytic, above all the smell, colour and shape of dissolution, of decomposition, though it be attenuated to the point of being no more than a symbol – all this calls forth the same reaction, the value judgement ‘ugly’. […]

[T Expeditions of an Untimely Man 19–20]

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