The joyous science, p.12
The Joyous Science, page 12
99
Schopenhauer’s Followers
When barbarians come into contact with civilized peoples, invariably the more primitive culture will adopt the vices, weaknesses and excesses of the more advanced culture first. From that point onwards, the former feels the attraction exerted by the latter, and eventually, by way of the vices and excesses it has appropriated, allows something of the more valuable powers of the latter to influence it as well. The opportunity to observe this sort of thing may also be had without expeditions to the lands of barbaric peoples, though in a refined, intellectualized and far less palpable form. Consider Schopenhauer’s followers in Germany. These were men who, when comparing themselves to him and his superior culture, must have felt barbaric enough to be fascinated and seduced by him from the very beginning. What, then, did they accept from their master first? Was it his tough-mindedness, his determination to be clear and rational, which often made him seem so very English, and so little German? Or was it the strength of his intellectual conscience, which endured a lifelong contradiction between what he was and what he wished to be and which compelled him constantly to contradict himself on almost every point, even in his writings? Or was it his scrupulousness in matters of the Church and of the Christian God? For here he was scrupulous as no German philosopher had ever been before; he lived and died ‘as a Voltairian’. Or was it his immortal doctrines of the intellectuality of intuition, the a priori character of the law of causality, the instrumental nature of the intellect, and the non-existence of free will? No, none of this is considered fascinating; but Schopenhauer’s mystical embarrassments and evasions in those passages where the tough-minded thinker allowed himself to be seduced and corrupted by the vain impulse to be the unriddler of the world, these were considered fascinating: the unprovable theory of the one will (‘all causes are only the occasional causes for the appearance of this will at this time, in this place’,29 ‘the will to life is present in every being, even the slightest, wholly and undivided, as completely as in all beings that ever were, and will be taken together’30); the denial of the individual (‘all lions are at bottom only one lion’,31 ‘the multiplicity of individuals is an illusion’,32 the assertion that development too is only an illusion – he calls Lamarck’s idea ‘an ingenious, absurd error’33); the ravings about genius (‘in aesthetic intuition the individual is no longer an individual; he is a pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of cognition’,34 ‘the subject, being entirely absorbed into the intuited object, becomes this object itself’35); the nonsense about pity, how it facilitates the breaching of the principii individuationis which is the source of all morality;36 additionally, such assertions as ‘dying is certainly to be seen as the true purpose of existence’,37 ‘the possibility cannot outright be denied a priori that a magical effect might not also come from somebody already dead’38 – these and similar excesses and vices of the philosopher were always accepted first and made articles of faith; for vices and excesses are always the easiest to imitate, and do not require any extensive prior training. But let us speak of the most famous of the living Schopenhauerians, Richard Wagner.
What happened to him had already happened to many an artist: he erred in the interpretation of the characters he had created, and misunderstood the implicit philosophy of his own art. For half of his life, Richard Wagner allowed himself to be misled by Hegel; he did the same thing again when he later interpreted his characters in terms of Schopenhauer’s doctrine, and began to speak in terms of ‘will’, ‘genius’ and ‘pity’. Nevertheless, the truth remains that nothing is more contrary to Schopenhauer’s spirit than the genuinely Wagnerian element in Wagner’s heroes, by which I mean the innocence of the most supreme selfishness, the belief that great passion is inherently good – in a word, the Siegfried quality in the countenances of his heroes. ‘All of this smacks more of Spinoza than of me,’ Schopenhauer might have said. Now, however advisable it may have been for Wagner to seek elsewhere than in Schopenhauer for philosophical guidance, the fascination to which he succumbed with regard to this thinker blinded him not only to all other philosophers, but even to science itself; increasingly, he wanted his entire art to be the counterpart and complement of the Schopenhauerian philosophy, while emphatically renouncing the nobler ambition of becoming the counterpart and complement of human knowledge and science. And not only was he tempted to do so by the whole mysterious pomp of this philosophy (which would have also tempted a Cagliostro); the peculiar gestures and emotions of the philosophers had also been seducing him all along! For example, Wagner’s sputtering about the corruption of the German language is Schopenhauerian; and while his imitation in this regard is commendable, it cannot be denied that Wagner’s own style suffers in no small degree from the very blemishes and turgidities, the sight of which so infuriated Schopenhauer; and that with respect to the Wagnerians writing in German, Wagnerizing is beginning to prove as dangerous as any kind of Hegelizing ever did. Wagner’s hatred of the Jews, to whom he cannot do justice even with regard to their greatest achievement – for it is the Jews who are the inventors of Christianity – is Schopenhauerian. Wagner’s attempt to regard Christianity as having sprung from a seed of Buddhism carried by the wind, and to prepare the way for a Buddhist era in Europe by a temporary rapprochement with Catholic and Christian formulae and sentiments, are both Schopenhauerian. Wagner’s preaching in favour of mercy in our dealing with animals is Schopenhauerian; Schopenhauer’s well-known predecessor here was Voltaire, who perhaps even like his successors knew how to disguise his hatred of certain things and people as mercy towards animals. At least Wagner’s hatred of science, which is manifest in this preaching, is certainly not inspired by any thoughts of tenderness and kindness – nor, it goes without saying, by anything resembling thinking at all.
Ultimately the philosophy an artist espouses is of little consequence, as long as it is only a retrospective philosophy, and does no harm to his art itself. We really should resist the temptation to begrudge an artist the occasional, perhaps very unfortunate and presumptuous masquerade; we mustn’t forget that inevitably there is something of the actor in all of our beloved artists, and that they would hardly have lasted very long without acting. Let us stay faithful to Wagner in that which is true and original in him – and especially in this, that we, his disciples, remain faithful to ourselves in that which is true and original in us. Let him have his intellectual moods and spasms, let us rather consider in all fairness what peculiar nutriments and excrements an art like his requires in order to be able to live and grow at all! It makes no difference that as a thinker he is so often wrong; justice and patience are of no importance to him. It is sufficient that his life is justified in his own eyes, and remains so – the life which calls to each of us, ‘Be a man, and do not follow me – but yourself, but yourself!’39 Our lives should also be justified in our own eyes! We too should grow and flourish in accordance with our own natures, freely and fearlessly, in innocent selfishness! And so, in contemplation of such a man, these words still ring in my ears now as they did before: ‘That passion is better than Stoicism and hypocrisy; that to be honest even in evil is better than to lose oneself in traditional morality; that the free man can be good as well as evil, but that the unfree man is an affront to nature, and has no share in either heavenly or earthly comfort; finally, that anyone who wishes to be free must become so through their own efforts, and that freedom does not fall into anyone’s lap of its own accord like some kind of miraculous gift’ (Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,40 p. 94).
100
Learning to Pay Homage
Men must learn to pay homage, just as they must learn to show contempt. Whoever ventures on new paths and has led the way for many others, discovers to his amazement how awkward and deficient people are in expressing their gratitude, and indeed how very rarely they are able to express any gratitude at all. It is as if every time they wish to express their gratitude it sticks in their craw, so that all they can do is a great deal of throat-clearing, after which they fall silent. The way in which a thinker becomes aware of the effects his thoughts have on others, of their unsettling and transformative power, borders on comedy: at times it seems as if those on whom this power has been exercised actually feel offended by it, and only know how to express what they fear is a threat to their independence by all sorts of bad behaviour. It takes generations for people to come up with even just a polite convention for expressing gratitude; and it is only very late in the day that gratitude acquires some wit and geniality. By then there is usually someone who becomes a great object of gratitude, if not for the good he himself has done, then for the treasure of what is highest and best that his predecessors have gradually accumulated.
101
Voltaire
Wherever there has been a court, it has furnished the standard of appropriate speech, and with this also the standard of style for writers. Courtly language, however, is the language of the courtier who has no speciality and who even in discussion of scientific subjects forbids himself all convenient, technical expressions, because they smack of the speciality; for that reason the technical expression, and everything which betrays the specialist, is a fault of style in countries with a courtly culture. Now that all courts have become caricatures of themselves, we are astonished to find even Voltaire unspeakably prim and proper in this regard (for example, in his judgements concerning such stylists as Fontenelle and Montesquieu) – now, we are all emancipated from courtly taste, whereas Voltaire perfected it!
102
A Word for the Philologists
There are books so valuable and royal that whole generations of scholars are well employed in keeping the texts of these books accurate and readable; that is the faith of philology, and to strengthen this faith again and again is its reason for being. This faith presupposes that there are rare men (though one may not see them) who actually know how to use such valuable books – no doubt, those who write or could write such books themselves. I mean to say that philology presupposes a noble faith – that for the benefit of a few who are always ‘to come’, and are not yet here, a very great deal of painstaking, and even exhausting, labour has to be done beforehand; it is all labour in usum Delphinorum.41
103
Of German Music
German music, more than any other, has now become the music of Europe, because the changes which Europe has undergone during the Revolution have found expression only through it: only German music knows how to express the agitation of the popular masses, that tremendous artificial noise which does not even need to be very loud – while Italian opera, for example, knows only choruses of servants and soldiers, but no ‘People’. Furthermore, in all German music one can catch the sound of a profound bourgeois jealousy of the noblesse, especially of esprit and élégance, as the expressions of a society which was courtly, chivalrous, old and sure of itself. It is not the music of Goethe’s minstrel at the gate, which was also pleasing ‘in the hall’, that is to say, to the king; it does not mean: ‘The knights looked on boldly, and the fair ladies into their laps.’42 Even the Graces do not appear in German music without pangs of conscience; it is only with Charm, the rural sister of the Graces, that the German begins to feel entirely moral – and from there he feels increasingly so, until he reaches what is for him the pinnacle of moral sentiment: enthusiastic, learned and often gloomy ‘sublimity’, Beethovenian sublimity. If we wish to imagine the man for this music – well, let us just imagine Beethoven as he appeared next to Goethe at their meeting in Teplitz:43 as semi-barbarism next to culture; as the People next to the nobility; as the good-natured next to the good-intentioned and far more than ‘good-intentioned’; as the visionary next to the artist; as the man in need of comfort next to the man who has been comforted; as the man prone to exaggeration and suspicion next to the man imbued with the spirit of reasonableness; a man filled with sorrow and self-torment, foolishly ecstatic, blissfully unhappy, ingenuous and intemperate, pretentious and inelegant: in short, an ‘untamed’ man. This was how Goethe felt about him and characterized him, Goethe, the exception among Germans, for whom a corresponding music has yet to be found!
Finally, let us consider whether the growing and rampant contempt for melody and the atrophy of the sense for melody among Germans is to be understood not in terms of democratic bad behaviour, but as one portion of the aftermath of the Revolution? For melody takes such an obvious delight in orderliness, and such an aversion to everything developing, unformed and arbitrary, that it sounds like a note from the old European order of things, and as a seduction to it, as a return to it.
104
Of the Tone of the German Language
We know the origin of the German which for the past few centuries has been accepted as the standard literary German. Germans, with their reverence for everything which came from the court, deliberately adopted the style of the chancery as the model for all that they had to write, especially their letters, documents, wills, and so on. Writing in the chancery style, which was writing in the style of the court and government – that was something distinguished, as opposed to the language of the town in which one lived. Gradually people came to this conclusion, and spoke even as they wrote – thus they became even more distinguished in their inflections, in their choice of words and phrases, and eventually even in their tone: they affected a courtly tone when they spoke, and this affectation became second nature. It may well be that nothing quite like this has ever happened before – the ascendancy of literary over spoken style, the affectation and ostentation of an entire people becoming the basis of a common language that was no longer a mere multitude of dialects. I believe that the sound of the German language in the Middle Ages, and especially after the Middle Ages, was profoundly rustic and vulgar; it has ennobled itself somewhat in the last few centuries, principally because it became necessary to imitate so many French, Italian and Spanish tones, and particularly so for the German (and Austrian) nobility, who were not altogether satisfied with their mother tongue. But despite this practice, German must have sounded unbearably vulgar to Montaigne, to say nothing of Racine; even now, in the mouths of travellers among Italian rabble, it still sounds very rude, woodsy and guttural, as if it had come from smoke-filled rooms and ill-mannered regions.
I have lately noticed that a similar desire for a distinguished tone is spreading among the former admirers of the chanceries, and that Germans are beginning to yield to an altogether peculiar ‘tonal magic’, which in the long run could become a real danger to the German language – for one seeks in vain for a more abominable tone in Europe. Something scornful, cold, indifferent and impassive in the voice is what now sounds ‘distinguished’ to Germans – and I hear the willingness to emulate this tone in the voices of young officials, teachers, women and merchants; indeed, even little girls are emulating this officer’s German. For it is the officer, and specifically the Prussian officer, who is the inventor of this tone: this same officer, who as a soldier and a professional possesses that admirable tact and self-effacement which all Germans might do well to imitate (German professors and musicians included!). But as soon as he speaks and moves he is the most intrusive and tasteless figure in old Europe – doubtless without being aware of the fact! These good Germans are similarly unaware in their admiration for him as the man of the best and most distinguished society, and are happy to let him ‘set the tone’. And set it he does! In the first instance it is the sergeant-majors and non-commissioned officers who mimic and coarsen his tone. Hear the shouts of command where soldiers drill outside the gate of every German city: what arrogance, what high-handedness, what icy scorn can be heard in all this shouting! Could the Germans really be a musical people?
It is certain that they are now militarizing themselves in the tone of their language; it is probable that, being trained to speak in a military manner, they will eventually come to write in a military manner as well. For habituation to specific tones profoundly affects one’s character – people soon have the words and phrases, and eventually even the thoughts which match these tones! Perhaps they already write like officers; perhaps I read too little of what is now written in Germany. But one thing I know for certain: the German public declarations which are also heard abroad are not inspired by German music, but by this new tone of tasteless arrogance. In almost every speech of the pre-eminent German statesman, even when he lets himself be heard through his imperial mouthpiece,44 there is an accent which foreigners’ ears reject with disgust; but the Germans endure it, for the Germans endure – themselves.
105
The Germans as Artists
When for once a German actually works himself into a passion (and not, as is usual, into the mere willingness to be passionate), he then comports himself as he must, and gives no further thought to his comportment. The truth, however, is that he then comports himself rather awkwardly and unattractively, and as if without rhythm or melody; so that spectators are embarrassed or disturbed as a result, and nothing more – unless he rises to the sublime and the enraptured state of which many passions are capable. Then even the German becomes beautiful! The presentiment of the height at which beauty begins to pour its magic even over Germans impels German artists to the heights and beyond, and to excesses of passion: they consequently have a truly profound longing to get beyond, or at least to look beyond this unattractiveness and awkwardness – towards a better, lighter, sunnier, more Southern world. And thus their spasms are often merely indications that they would like to dance: these poor bears in whom hidden nymphs and satyrs – and sometimes even higher divinities – live and move and have their being!
