Twilight of Idols and Anti-Christ by Friedrich Nietzsche

Author:Friedrich Nietzsche
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2003-12-23T05:00:00+00:00

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From scenting out ‘beautiful souls’,* ‘golden means’ and other perfections in the Greeks, from admiring in them such things as their repose in grandeur, their ideal disposition, their sublime simplicity – from this ‘sublime simplicity’, a niaiserie allemande† when all is said and done, I was preserved by the psychologist in me. I saw their strongest instinct, the will to power, I saw them trembling at the intractable force of this drive – I saw all their institutions evolve out of protective measures designed for mutual security against the explosive material within them. The tremendous internal tension then discharged itself in fearful and ruthless external hostility: the city states tore one another to pieces so that the citizens of each of them might find peace within himself. One needed to be strong: danger was close at hand – it lurked everywhere. The splendid supple physique, the reckless realism and immoralism which pertains to the Hellene was a necessity, not a ‘natural quality’. It was produced, it was not there from the beginning. And one employed festivals and arts for no other purpose than to feel oneself dominant, to show oneself dominant: they are means for making oneself feared…. To judge the Greeks by their philosophers, in the German manner, perchance to employ the philistinism of the Socratic schools as a clue to what is fundamentally Hellenic!… But the philosophers are the décadents of Hellenism, the counter-movement against the old, the noble taste (– against the agonal instinct, against the polis, against the value of the race, against the authority of tradition). The Socratic virtues were preached because the Greeks had lost them: excitable, timid, fickle, comedians every one, they had more than enough reason to let morality be preached to them. Not that it would have done any good: but big words and fine attitudes are so suited to décadents…

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